auspol | scott ludlam

spook #estimates

Senate Estimates committees are my favourite parliamentary obscurity, a thrice-yearly ritual of tense cross-examination and hideous boredom that runs a ragged cross-section through the state of the Australian Government in all its banal and ominous glory. Nearly every part of these hearings can be of interest, but for a number of reasons I have always got the most out of exploring the poorly mapped intersection of communications, surveillance, censorship and national security policy.

7 June 2013

loss

It’s the end of an era for the Greens (WA), and also a harsh reminder that talent and hard work alone are no guarantee of a seat in Parliament when the conservative tide turns.

5 June 2013

the filter, reloaded

Another chapter has opened on the internet filtering debate in Australia. You might recall a scrappy and quite effective campaign that raged from 2007 to 2010 against a Government proposal to force ISPs to block the somewhat arbitrary ‘Refused Classification’ list in Australia. On the eve of the last election, the campaign had become strong enough that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy dodged sideways and announced the issue would instead be studied by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), effectively taking it off the table for the 2010 election.

17 May 2013

energy 2029

This report is more than a year in the making, and is written with a very simple intent. It canvasses technology options for the rapid decarbonisation of the electricity grid that lights up the South West of Western Australia. The scenarios drawn here describe our state in the year 2029, a year in which the final legacy fossil fuel generators are decommissioned, forever eliminating our reliance on depleting coal, oil and gas. Instead, we set our course by the colossal abundance of the sun and the wind, the swells of the ocean, the regenerative potential of our wheatbelt and

9 February 2013

victims of prosperity

Something has gone badly wrong in the housing affordability debate in Australia, even as our cities continue to break new records for extreme housing stress. The conventional wisdom has the definition of ‘affordable’ resting on cheap land at the far periphery of our great cities. Even if this wasn’t wiping out extensive tracts of urban bushland and peri-urban farming country at an accelerating rate, the fact that sandlots far over the horizon are the only places that even vaguely fit the definition of ‘affordable’ show how dysfunctional the Australian housing market has become.

25 October 2012

with friends like these…

By now, anyone following the extraordinary twists in the WikiLeaks story will have heard the Government, from the Prime Minister on down, insisting that they have provided full consular assistance for Julian Assange, and don’t know anything about US plans to prosecute him. These statements tend to be delivered in a tone of wounded innocence, as though the Government can’t believe that people don’t appreciate the strenuous efforts they’re making to support this Australian citizen. It is a peculiar form of consular assistance that is being delivered here. It extends to the Prime Minister pre-emptively judging the work of

21 June 2012

over and out

The Prime Minister’s speech on Afghanistan at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) included some surprising and welcome concessions to the two thirds of Australians who believe it is time for our military forces to leave the country.

18 April 2012

on an agreement

The 2010 election delivered up a ‘plague on both your houses’ outcome that is still kicking out the occasional aftershock. To a visitor from Europe there would be nothing particularly remarkable about the idea of a multi-hued Parliament in which political parties and independents are forced to sit down and negotiate on the passage of laws. That, after all, is what Parliaments were designed to do. But there’s something in the Australian political culture, from the press gallery to the opposition benches, that refuses to understand or assimilate the reality of a minority government.

1 April 2012

I rise to speak…

I rise to speak on the Mining Tax bills with mixed feelings. This comes partly from being a Western Australian Senator. Dealing with these bills has exposed the degree to which Canberra views my state as little more than a lucrative and ever expanding hole in the ground. I want to set one myth to rest at the outset: the idea that the support of the Greens for fair taxation of this industry means we are anti-mining. Of course we are no such thing – a big wind turbine, perhaps for many people the symbol of the transition that

19 March 2012