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Howard’s latest lie: state budget “deficits”
Are two posts about John Howard in one day too many? Maybe. But he is Prime Minister and we are in the lead-up to a federal election — and he is “playing the game” for all it’s worth.
And besides, what I’m about to explain is such a classic example of Howard spin — though I must thank Christian Kerr at Crikey for this one — though it’s subscriber-only content.
Here’s the deal. It’s likely that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will raise interest rates on 8 August, and John Howard reckons the state governments are to blame.
“These are Labor government deficits, they’re not Liberal Government deficits,” Mr Howard told Sky News. “The Federal Government is not out there borrowing money… and putting upward pressure on interest rates, but state governments are.”
Alas, the RBA’s own graphs (shown right) tell a different story.
As Christian Kerr explains, “[the graphs] show that state governments have been increasing their surpluses for seven straight years [and] the surpluses have been increasing in recent times, rather than deteriorating.”
Using further graphs, which I won’t bother with here, he also shows that in every year since 1991-92, the state government sector has had lower debt and then moved to accumulate assets earlier than the Commonwealth government.
But, you know, John Howard and truth… they don’t go well in the same sentence.
Costello: “I’d go Amanda any day”
Given a choice between dating Bronwyn Bishop or Amanda Vanstone, who would you choose? Apparently federal treasurer Peter Costello would go Amanda any day. Thanks to Crikey for the tip.
Black is the new black
Further to my post about Blackle and the current wave of fashionable shiny black website design, Janet Hawtin made the observation (in private email) that black is the new black. Well, indeed!
John Howard, grindingly inadequate
I was busy yesterday, so I didn’t have time to write something appropriate for the Prime Minister’s 68th birthday. After all, a birthday deserves something significant — in this case something which properly expresses why I think this man, John Winston Howard, has to go. Not necessarily his party, you must understand, but him. Personally.
However, thanks to Andrew Mathas, I’ve discovered that my very own federal MP Anthony Albanese said it all for me — and he said it more than 9 years ago. I couldn’t possibly match this invective! Read on…
Blackle: a “green computing” furphy
On the surface it sounds great. “A given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen,” says About Blackle. So if everyone turns Google black we’ll save heaps of energy, because it’s such a widely-used website. At least that’s the theory.
And Sydney-based Heap Media is getting attention because they’ve created Blackle (pictured right), a website which provides that black version of Google.
But as always the devil is in the detail…
- It’s only old-style CRT monitors which use less energy when displaying darker images. Modern LCD flat-panels use the same power no matter what.
- Blackle is a front-end onto Google, serving out the adverts and all. So using Blackie adds to the total power consumption. As well as whatever Google uses, you’re also adding in the overhead of routing your requests via Blackle.
- Currently the Blackle home page claims “115,486.374 Watt hours saved”, up from 113,834.304 Watt hours around this time yesterday. That’s not a lot of electricity. 2kWh is enough to run a small server computer for maybe 4 hours — perhaps 6 if it’s not fully loaded. In other words, Blackle uses 4 or 5 times more energy than it saves.
Still, it’s a great way of getting attention for your business under the banner of “saving the planet”, eh? Plus, having a black background means your site can have that oh-so-current style of having everything look like it’s reflected in some shiny black surface.