Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Into the final straight the polls still give it to labor, but only by a short  nose. The latest polls show 51/49 and 52/48, respectively and too many marginals so close no one dares call them.

A hung parliament?

In many politicians' cases, if only...

From the population policy of the Brownish Greens:

6. population policy should not be driven by economic goals or to counter the effects of an ageing population.
7. an Australian population policy must consider the geographical distribution of human settlements rather than just concentrate upon population size at the national level.
8. Australia has an obligation to accept humanitarian migration including that resulting from climate change.

Point 6: sanity at last.  7: scary---will I need a visa to drive out of Adelaide?  8: don't like, but recognise its moral superiority to my own inclinations (We should never have got here).

Meanwhile, that paragon of Liberal ex-leaders, Andrew Peacock, exhibited his kinder, gentler side (at the launch of Josh Frydenberg's campaign for Kooyong) to great effect:

A blind Labor candidate says he is “stunned and insulted” by a jibe about disabled people made by former Liberal leader Andrew Peacock in his former electorate today.

“You’d need to be pretty handicapped not to appreciate that this [Labor] government is dissolving before your eyes daily,” Mr Peacock told ABC 24 after joining the campaign in his old electorate of Kooyong in Victoria this morning.

The comments were jumped on by Labor, whose candidate for Kooyong is Steve Hurd, a local barrister who was born with a severe visual impairment and is legally blind.

This excerpt – written, apparently, by one of your rellies, Claude – is from one of the best analyses of the behaviour of the media in this election that I have yet read:

Can anyone tell me what this appalling crap is all about? Has journalism become a matter of goading someone until they lose their temper or burst into tears? Exactly when did loss of control or bodily containment become the stuff that “news” is made of? Did any of them even realise that there were policy announcements being made? Is this the kind of scrum that produces the kind of rubbish we’re getting in the papers and on the news? Do journalists really think that public life is a soap opera in which the only thing that matters is emotion, personalities and gossip? How much of this is being driven by the Rupert Murdochs of the world? Can you really blame the obviously extreme youth and inexperience of some of these journalists when Kerry O’Brien is doing more or less the same thing every night on The 7.30 Report? Now that journalism is something you need a university degree for, what on earth are they spending those four years teaching them? And is the Australian public really only getting the media it deserves?

Read the rest here.

PS: How is Malcolm B Duncan's campaign, going, Claude. Or would that be telling?

Chris Pyne is quick to state the program has been a "massive rip off" yet it's clear he didn’t bother to read the report because if he had he would know that the opposite is what Mr Chris Pyne is quick to state the program has been a "massive rip off" yet it's clear he didn’t bother to read the report because if he had he would know that the opposite is what Mr Orgill actually said.

Mr Orgill debunked the myth that pre-fab buildings were not value for money in NSW because both catholic and state used them, they are often used in schools and distance often requires them.

He did not say that fees and charges were wildly blown out, he said a maximum of 5-6% premium in NSW was charged but NSW schools were 95% complete or on the way compared to Queensland and Victoria where only about 60% of projects were on schedule.

In South Australia the program is 95% with costings coming in on average for projects at $1.16 million for state government schools, $1.81 million for catholic schools ( remember the stories that the catholic schools were doing things much cheaper), $1.67 million for independent schools and only three complaints throughout the entire state.

In Queensland the story is Independent schools - $1.57 million, Catholic - $1.4 million, State - $1.14 million.

NSW - Independent $1.48 million, state and catholic about the same.

In WA catholic much more expensive.

Of course Pyne knows nothing about capital works programs because during his 12 years in government John Howard did not build anything other than refugee prisons at vast cost and waste - like the Xmas Island monstrosity that blew out from $120 million to $400 million in one year.

If Pyne wants to get serious about waste he could explain away the $3 billion wasted by Howard on locking up innocent people all over the Pacific, the billions wasted on two illegal invasions, the tanks and helicopters we did not need and cannot use, the $25 billion on "anti-terrorism" that has resulted on a few imprisonments for thought crimes and not one person so much as scratched by any "terrorist".

Pyne is a dill if he thinks he can make his claims fly when only 1.5% of all schools were worried about value for money, I suggest he actually reads the report and then gets back to us about the massive waste in the private schools sector.

Alan Curran: "... things that worry people more than the pink batts debacle ..."

Here's an interesting analysis for you from Possum Comitatus back in February:

Did the insulation program actually reduce fire risk?

Has the Garrett insulation scheme actually reduced the rate of installation caused fires? It’s a strange thing to say – well, it’s strange if you don’t think about it too hard. What we often forget is that Garrett’s insulation program dramatically increased standards in an industry where there were previously very few.

First off, some raw numbers. If we go fossicking over on the ABS site, we find some data about the numbers of buildings with insulation in Australia in 2008 – the year before the Garrett insulation program. We’ll use these numbers as our “before” data set.

61% of 5,218,000 dwellings – or 3,183,265 – had insulation in 2008 according to our favourite Bureau. According to Garrett’s department, there were also between 65,000 and 70,000 new installations done per year before the insulation program. Let’s split the difference and call it 67,500 installations.

We also know from Garrett’s department in the same letter than between 80 and 85 fires occurred every year because of insulation. That’s the numbers we need for the pre-Garrett program.

Moving on to the Garret program numbers, we know that during the program, 1.1 million installations were undertaken. So that’s our yearly installation rate and it pushes the number of houses currently with insulation up to 4.28 million homes.

We also know that 93 fires have been linked to the program.

There’s our “after numbers” we need to do the comparison.

With the 2008 figures on the numbers of fires, we don’t know how many of them were as a result of new installations and how many of them were caused by insulation that was already in the ceiling and may have been there for years. So what we need to do is differentiate between the fires caused by the insulation stock (the pre-existing insulation) and new installations.

To do this we’ll create three scenarios:

Scenario 1: 10% of fires were caused by existing insulation and 90% caused by new installations

Scenario 2: 50% of fires were caused by existing insulation and 50% caused by new installations

Senario 3: 90% of fires were caused by existing insulation and 10% caused by new installations

This gives us a range of all possible likely outcomes. If we measure the number of fires caused by new installs using these three scenarios for 2008, and for our known number of 93 for Garrett’s program, this is what we get.

From here, we can figure out how many fires there were per new installation in both 2008 (where there were 67,500 new installs) under it’s three scenarios, and with the Garrett program (where there was 1.1 million installs) – simply by dividing the number of installations undertaken by the number of fires attributable to new installations.

Under Scenario 1 where 90% of fires are attributable to new installations, 1 in 909 installs lead to fire. Under Scenario 2 it’s 1 in 1636 installs lead to fire while under Scenario 3 it’s 1 in 8182 installs.

Under the Garrett insulation program, the rate is 1 in 11,828 – a much smaller rate of fires than what existed before the program.

The Insulation Program Safety Multiple is simply the Garrett program rate divided by the 2008 rate – it shows how many times safer the Garrett program is compared to each of the three scenarios for 2008.

Interesting – that’s what the data says.

But I was forgetting: the connexion between the truth and what appears in the Murdoch Limited News blatts is often obscure, to put it mildly.

Just remind me, Alan: where did the Big Lie propaganda ploy come from?