Perhaps he had been contemplating the National Commission of Audit Report recommendations on Medicare and Health. The GP I saw in his stead was a very jolly chap and of sound mind: he referred to the current government as “evil people” when, after the GOOD NEWS he had for me on my heart scan, I suggested that maybe I should apologise for having wasted as an age pensioner so much Commonwealth money since Anzac Day…

And here. for the record, is that front page from yesterday’s Illawarra Mercury, taken at Diggers where I had rather delicious roast lamb.

Jim Belshaw yesterday posted some thoughts: Social housing and Aboriginal affairs – brief reflections on the Commission of Audit report.

…I happen to agree with some of its analysis. For example, I believe that power should be shifted back to the states, subject to to the creation of new states. Others such as the implicit assumptions about the maximum size of government or some of the simplistic modelling I disagree with. However, it’s when you get to the very specific detail of individual proposals that I think that they have gone plain crazy. Perhaps that’s harsh, but let me illustrate.

Take Aboriginal affairs. There are elements in their analysis that I strongly agree with, but the idea that the Feds should stop spending on things like housing and instead put all the cash into a voucher scheme for Aboriginal education borders on the plain crazy.

Or housing…

Jennifer Wilson is even less impressed: Abbott uses society’s vulnerable as means to an ideological end.

None of these measures will affect anyone as disastrously as they will affect the poor, and while middle class journalists  on a good wage, some of whom are Abbott’s most vocal supporters,  scream like stuck pigs about the flagged “debt levy” on incomes over $80,000, nobody much is pointing out the ideologically-based, systematic crippling of the lives of those who struggle hardest to keep poverty from their doors.

While I have ranted about The Pyne in relation to school education – see the end of my post yesterday – I have had little to say about his thought bubbles on higher education. I commend Paul McGeough’s US college system is no model for students.

… Cuttingly, The Economist observed: “University spending is driven by the need to compete in university league tables that tend to rank almost everything about a university except the [hard to measure] quality of the graduates it produces.”

This then, is a brutal snapshot of the system that Education Minister Christopher Pyne believes is what Australia needs.

Speaking at a London think tank on Monday, on reforms in the wake of the Kemp-Norton review of Australia higher education, Mr Pyne told his audience: “We have much to learn about universities competing for students and focusing on our students. Not least, we have much to learn about this from our friends in the United States.” Alluding to college as an American rite of passage, the minister added: “And it is a gift that keeps on giving.”

Mr Pyne would not elaborate on the detail of reforms to be included in the coming Federal Budget – nor did he articulate a particular need for Australia to cherry-pick the best of the American system without suffering any of its pitfalls…

Finally, given the almost total lack of sense, vision or substance in the Hancock/Murdoch government’s approach to climate change and alternative energy – sorry, ABBOTT government: what WAS I thinking? – it is worth reposting from Martin Lack Geoscientists get all ethical about climate change.

The Geoscientist is the Fellowship magazine of the Geological Society of London.  With the Permission of the Editor of the magazine, I hereby republish extracts from three items in the most recent issue … of the magazine:

(1) The Soapbox item (i.e. guest op-ed) by Roger Dunshea;
plus Book Reviews of:
(2) William Hay’s Experimenting on a Small Planet; and
(3) Jermemy Leggett’s The Energy of Nations.

There will, no doubt, be howls of protest from all the ‘climate ostriches’ within the Geological Society – those who dispute the problematic nature of the reality that:

(a) the Earth’s fossil fuel resources are non-renewable and finite;
(b) burning them is the primary cause of ongoing climate disruption; and
(c) feeding 10 billion humans will be very hard without fossil fuels.

Sadly, however, reality is not altered by our refusal to face it!…