However I don’t think he will win. Too many in his caucus hate him, and going back to Rudd will just lead to more infighting.

Gillard though seems to be a walking corpse. Many Australians regard her a a liar and backstabber, and don’t even regard her Government as legitimate. Personally I think it is a pity, because as Labor PMs go I think she is better than Rudd and Keating.

Hence I think that Rudd will challenge Gillard, but the caucus will turn to a third choice to become Leader and Prime Minister.

One is a hapless inventor from Wigan whose hare-brained schemes and anthropomorphic dog, Gromit, have made him one of the most cherished figures in British film.

The other is the leader of the British Labour Party. And unkind talk about their similarity has prompted complaints that one is tarnishing the other’s public image.

Senior figures at Aardman Animations will voice concern, at a status meeting this week, over the frequency with which their Oscar-winning, cheese-loving, animated hero is compared to Ed Miliband.

Oh dear, it is bad enough to be compared to Wallace, but to then have the creators of Wallace concerned that the comparisons damages Wallace is very damning.

In the latest YouGov poll 68% of respondents say Miliband is doing badly as Opposition Leader, and only 20% say he is doing well. Even amongst Labour voters, 49% say he is doing poorly.

An Australian Prime Ministerial staffer has been linked to yesterday’s ugly protest incident in Canberra, forcing his resignation and acutely embarrassing PM Julia Gillard.

In an early evening statement, the Prime Minister dismissed as ‘false’ claims that one of her staff had spoken to people at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy prior to yesterday’s angry protest that temporarily trapped her and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

But Ms Gillard acknowledges that a member of her media unit ‘did call another individual yesterday and disclose the presence of the Opposition Leader at the Lobby restaurant. This information was subsequently passed on to a member of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.’ …

He is Tony Hodges, one of four press secretaries working in Julia Gillard’s media unit.

The link is deeply embarrassing for the Prime Minister and leaves her shouldering some of the blame for an incident where many had pinned responsibility on Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

This is typical Australian Labor tactics.  The press secretary would have leaked the info, hoping it would lead to anti-Abbott protests.

Instead it led to his own boss having to be dragged out by Police. And now they can’t blame anyone else for it.

Samoans who claim they are poor are lazy, Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele says.

In a comment on the government website Savali, Tuilaepa says having no food, water, clothes, a home or access to medical treatment was poverty.

There was no poverty in Samoa. 

“Every Samoan has claim to land. There are plenty of mangoes, pawpaws, bananas and breadfruit falling off and rotting on the ground, plenty of fish in the sea,” he said.

“The problem is too many people are coming into town and loathing around. They are lazy and do not want to go back to their village to work the land. They should stay in their village where their lands are and develop it.”

Tuilaepa says that some Samoans think that not having car, a TV or a European house is poverty.

“Those are luxuries. Having none of those is certainly not poverty.”

Maybe the PM of Samoa should have been appointed to the Welfare Working Group!

Syria has rebuffed an Arab League call for President Bashar al-Assad step down in favour of a unity government as interference in its affairs, underlining its determination to defeat a 10-month-old uprising seeking Assad’s overthrow.

It was not immediately clear whether Syria would accept the League’s decision to keep Arab observers in the country for another month despite their failure to stem bloodshed in which hundreds of people have died since they deployed on December 26.

But any credibility the mission might retain was undermined when Saudi Arabia, a foe of Syria’s closest ally Iran, announced it would withdraw its own monitors because of the Syrian authorities’ failure to cooperate with its mandate. It was unclear if other Gulf states would follow suit. …

Rami Khouri, a Beirut-based commentator, said the unusually bold Arab plan announced at the Arab League’s Cairo headquarters on Sunday was clearly “bad news” for Assad.

“The fact that Arab countries would propose such a clear intervention and essentially order him to step aside and give him a mechanism to do so is quite a dramatic sign of how much credibility and legitimacy he has lost in the region,” he said.

It’s good to see the Arab League putting the pressure on Syria to stop killing its people, and to have elections. It makes it much harder for the regime to say the opposition is a tool of the United States etc.

However it is ironic that you have a league made up of so many countries that themselves do not have democratic elections, pushing for elections in Syria. I guess the difference is their monarchies are  relatively benign, and are not killing their citizens. However even the House of Saud may feel the winds of change one day.

Indonesian police say a civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on Facebook faces a maximum penalty of five years behind bars for blasphemy. …

Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim nation of 240 million, recognises the right to practice five other religions. But atheism is illegal.

Atheism is illegal?

Do they also prosecute people for talking about evolution? Or gravity?

What sort of a supreme being needs laws to force people to believe in him? If there is a supreme being, I suspect he is very ashamed of Indonesia.

• Capitalism is the greatest tool of wealth creation, social advance and economic development ever known.
• We are living through a period of crony capitalism, of which the Goldman Sachs flotation and Lloyds-HBOS merger are just two examples.
• Conservatives must make the moral case for real capitalism, and take action against crony capitalism — and the culture that created it.

He notes the track record of capitalism vs the alternative:

In fact capitalism is the greatest tool of economic development, wealth creation and social advance ever known. In capitalism, owners of intellectual, financial or human capital have property rights that enable them to earn a profit as a reward for putting that capital at risk in some form of free market economic activity.

Korea used to be one country. Thirty years after the Korean war, GDP per capita in capitalist South Korea was five times that of communist North Korea; in 2009 it was sixteen times greater.

But says capitalism has to also be defended on moral grounds, not just economic:

But the case for capitalism is not just economic and social; it is also moral. For many decades, capitalism has come under attack on moral grounds. It is said to be intrinsically immoral, and driven by greed; to be founded on theft, with the greatest capitalists mere “robber barons”; to create and perpetuate exploitation and inequality; even to be morally vacant.

Something we hear in NZ a lot.

Of course abuses of capitalism often occur. But the bigger truth is that capitalism is at root a moral force for good. It relies on, and so demands:

a. Personal freedom and individual autonomy, the foundation stones of personal morality;
b. The virtues of hard work, creativity and thrift;
c. Social exchange: traditions and practices by which intellectual, financial and human capital can be shared to best effect;
d. Institutions such as the rule of law and the family that preserve property over time;
e. Effective government to create and enforce the law, to share social costs and, I would argue, to help the disadvantaged;
f. A wider culture and a stable but fluid social order in which its virtues are respected and opportunity exists for all of energy and talent, that is for all.

He then turns to crony capitalism:

What is crony capitalism? One can identify different varieties, such as monopoly, franchise, khaki and narco-capitalism:
• Monopoly capitalism flourished in the USA at the end of the 19th century. At that time individuals such as Cooke, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller were able to amass enormous wealth by agglomerating new industries into “trusts”, which exercised monopoly or oligopoly market power within markets.
• Franchise capitalism developed in Russia during the 1990s. A generation of “oligarchs” emerged, alongside the official apparatus of the state, whose wealth derived from winning lucrative natural resources franchises in oil and gas.
• Khaki capitalism has taken root in countries such as Egypt and Pakistan, where the armed forces have become large economic actors in their own right. In Egypt, for example, the army runs roughly 10 per cent of the economy.
• Narco-capitalism has been seen in recent decades in Mexico and Colombia, among other countries. The drugs trade created enormous illicit profits for its chiefs. As the trade became a substantial part of a regional or national economy, it was further entrenched through corruption.

These varieties can and do often co-exist in a given country or society. They all exploit the absence of law or law enforcement, market mechanisms or culture which act elsewhere as constraints on individual self-enrichment.

More generally, one might say crony capitalism has two key features:
a. Business activity loses any relation to the wider public interest
b. Business merit is separated from business reward.

By contrast, real capitalism is a system where real people take real risk, invest real time in real work and reap real rewards for their efforts. A day’s work for a day’s pay. Markets are used, but not venerated. Competition is welcomed, but made subject to proper regulation and supervision. People are rewarded and respected for their aspiration, energy and innovation, not for who they are.

I don’t agree with everything he advocates, but he makes some good points. He finishes with nine lessons:

1. Conservatives need to turn up the volume on crony capitalism.
2. Culture matters.
3. Excessive pay is a serious issue.
4. Corporate governance isn’t sexy. But it is vital.
5. The banks should temporarily restrain, and perhaps cease, dividend and large bonus distributions.
6. We need a fundamental rethink about competition.
7. Key public institutions require better governance.
8. The new Financial Policy Committee must have a range of tools to control asset bubbles.
9. We need to love our savers.

Good food for thought.

If Jimmy Carter had Alzheimer’s, would they be making films of him as an old confused man, babbling about the SALT treaty. No chance at all.

Don’t get me wrong, once someone is dead, any portrayal of their life should be warts and all, and include their twilight years when their mental facilities were not what they once were. But my views were that such a film should not be made when the subject is still alive. And I still believe the film was premature.

But something wonderful happened with this film, despite the suspect motives of those behind it. Meryl Streep brought Margaret Thatcher to life, in a way I would not have thought possible. She made her strong, she made her powerful, she made her sad, she made her obstinate, she made her defiant, she made her out of touch, she made her lonely and most of all she made her human – not just a caricature.

If Streep does not win an Oscar for her performance, then there is something seriously wrong. It was a stunning performance by her. She looked and sounded absolutely convincing. Alexandra Roach as the younger Margaret also performed wonderfully.

The film is an emotional one. Yes, I got wet eyes at times. It was a very sad story, but also a very uplifting one at times. It is effectively a series of flashbacks of the present day Lady Thatcher thinking through her life from working in her father’s grocery store, to getting involved in politics, standing for Parliament, becoming Leader and then Prime Minister plus the highs and lows of her time in office with her eventual resignation 11 and a half years on.

The present day Lady Thatcher is obviously suffering from Alzheimer’s. In the main, they capture this remarkably accurately and with sensitivity. A good example is how she slips out of the house to buy some milk as she needs some for breakfast, and this sparks a major panic amongst her staff and Police. From her point of view of course she is capable of going to the dairy. But from their point of view they are worried that if she has a forgetful spell when out, she’ll get confused and may wonder anywhere.

They accurately showed that she was still somewhat active – signing books, the odd public outing – but also obviously frail. The big plot element was that her dead husband Denis always appeared to her as a ghost, and she was often seen talking to him to the dismay of her minders.

They over-played the ghost of Denis angle, but it was still quite endearing. They captured his charm very well, and there is no doubt she terribly misses him. Anyone who has lost a partner of 50+ years would understand.

On the political side, they got it absolutely right. People forget what a massive achievement it was for her to become leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. This was a time when few few women were in politics, and she battled to be accepted every step of the way. You just wanted to punch some of those patronising old men.

They showed her at her best when talking about doing what is right, not what is popular. Absolutely inspiring. And the scene where she verbally lashes the US Secretary of State for suggesting they negotiate (she called it surrender) to the Argentinians was superb – especially how then suddenly she goes all lovely and asks if she should play mother and pour the tea. The Americans are all pale white at this stage.

The film though is definitely not a sycophantic account. They show the hatred, and the protests. They show her unwillingness to bend on the poll tax and they show the humiliating way she treated some of her cabinet colleagues such as Lord Howe – which led to her downfall. They subtly made Heseltine out to be a type of rodent, which was excellent.

Finally the ending was spot on. In her hallucinations she has finally let Denis move on and he is seen walking down the corridor away from her with his bags packed. She cries out for him not to leave her alone, and he replies that he isn’t – that she has always been alone.

And that gets to the crux of Thatcher – she fought battles all her life – and generally she did fight alone. It was a lonely life, and in her end years an even lonelier existence. You feel both sorry for her and (if not a hater of her) inspired by her.

As I said, I was prejudiced against the film before I saw it. But as I saw reviews come out from the likes of Boris Johnson describing how well it captured Thatcher, I started to look forward more to the film. And Boris was right – it did capture her so well, warts and all. I still don’t like the timing of the film, but Meryl Streep especially made the film a magnificent portrayal of her life.

Incidentally I saw the film at the Shoreline Cinema in Waikanae. It’s a lovely little cinema with two rooms. Room 1 which we were in seats 40, but on two seater couches which were very cool. They also have room for wine or food in the spaces between each couch.

Losing Scotland would be great for the Conservative Party. The House of Commons is currently:

• Conservative 305
• Labour 255
• Lib Dems 57
• Others 33
• Total 650

You need 326 to govern.

59 seats are in Scotland. Remove them and you need 296 to govern. And the House of Commons would be:

• Conservative 304
• Labour 214
• Lib Dems 46
• Others 27
• Total 591

So the Conservatives would then have an absolute majority in England, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Scotland as an independent country would presumably not be able to keep the pound, and would adopt the Euro instead. Can’t see that being too popular.

That is why I suspect the SNP don’t want full independence anymore – it would cost too much. They want all the powers of independence, but none of the responsibility.

Cameron should stay firm and insist on a straight up and down vote.

For the second time in as many weeks, the U.S. military has rescued distressed Iranian sailors, despite the extremely high tensions between the two nations.

According to the Navy’s account, at about 3 a.m. local time an American Coast Guard patrol boat in the north Persian Gulf was hailed by flares and flashlights from an Iranian cargo ship whose engine room was flooding. Six Iranians were rescued from the ship, fed halal meals in accordance with Islamic law, and later taken to shore.

I suspect if the situation was reverse the rescued sailors would be accused of being spies, put in jail, given a mock trial, and sentenced to die.

Last week, the U.S. Navy rescued more than a dozen Iranian sailors who had been held hostage by pirates in the Arabian Sea for weeks. American sailors on a “visit, board, search and seizure team” were able to free the sailors and take 15 suspected pirates into custody without incident on Jan. 5, the Navy said.

Not bad for the Great Satan.

Both rescues come in the midst of an especially tense time between the U.S. and Iran. Most recently, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Monday Iran has been enriching uranium in a highly-protected underground bunker as part of the nation’s nuclear program — a move the U.S. State Department said was a “further escalation of their ongoing violations with regard to their nuclear obligations.”

Over the weekend, an Iranian court handed down a death sentence to an American former Marine accused of spying for the CIA in Tehran. Both the U.S. government and the 28-year-old’s family have repeatedly called the Iranian allegations “fabrications.”

One day Iran will be free.

In that context, it was a very useful thing. It started at seven minutes to midnight in 1947 as the cold war got underway. In 1963 and 1972 it got back to 12 minutes to midnight, while in 1953 it set a record of two minutes to midnight.

Radio NZ report:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which created the clock in 1947 as a barometer of how close the world is to an apocalyptic end, says it is now five minutes to midnight.

The last time the clock was changed, in 2010, the scientists moved it back a minute on hopes of global nuclear cooperation and the election of United States president Barack Obama, AFP reports.

Moving it purely on the basis of whom got elected was a pretty stupid thing to do. But even stupider is saying it is now five minutes to midnight – closer to midnight than in 1988 before the Soviet empire crumbles.

Realistically there is now almost no tangible chance of global nuclear war. The clock should probably be set at 11.30 pm or even 11 pm. But I guess they needed to find a way to remain relevant, rather than just celebrate the end of the cold war.

However, the latest decision – based on global uncertainty over how to deal with the threats of nuclear weapons, climate change, and a growing tendency to reject science when it comes to major world concerns – pushes it back to where it was in 2007.

Climate change? Look I have no problems if a group of climate change scientists want to have their own climate doomsday clock, but to have the atomic scientists now using the doomsday clock to include climate change is just rather pathetic.

I recall seeing the movie The Day After in 1983. Polls at the time showed over 50% of people my age expected the world to end in our lifetimes. The threat of global nuclear war was very real. Today, it is absolutely a different atmosphere. Sure there are possibility of nuclear terrorism etc, but not the scenario where hundreds of cities are wiped out and a nuclear winter.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists should celebrate that the cold war is over, that the good guys won, and that global nuclear war is no longer a significant threat, and bury the doomsday clock in history.

Although the world did warm by about 0.7C between 1975 and 1988, there has been no significant warming since then. All the major temperature records show that global warming has flattened off.

I think Bryan means 1998. In 1975 the average temperature was 0.17c below the norm. In 1988 it was 0.18c above the norm and in 1998 it was 0.55c above the norm – the highest year on record.

I wouldn’t quite say there has been no significant warming since then. 1998 was an exceptional high. A significant warming trend did continue until the early 2000s. However as one can see it has tapered off in recent years.

There is a divergence of views about the leveling off. Many factors affect the global temperature. I think it is premature to conclude it disproves global warming, but certainly the longer the “flat” period continues the more the prediction models will come under scrutiny.

Regarding sea levels, the highly accurate sea-level gauges installed around Australia and on the Pacific Islands (including Tuvalu) in the early 1990s showed that sea level rise is small – less than 3mm a year – and that, in recent years, it has levelled off. The 3mm a year is consistent with the sea-level rise that we have experienced since the end of the Little Ice Age. So the only strange thing that is happening is that we cannot explain why the sea level is no longer rising.

The increase is only around 3 mm a year, but this is up from 1.8 mm a year for the previous century. It is not dramatic end of the world Al Gore type hysteria rises, but it is an increase. The graph shows:

On the basis of that data, I wouldn’t say the sea level is no longer rising. It is. An increase of 3 mm a year is not the end of the world, but if it acclerates, then it does post significant challenges.

The climate models predict that an increase in carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming purely because they have been programmed to do just that. The science tells us that if we double carbon dioxide from the present level it might cause a warming of about 1C. The climate modellers escalate this 1-to-3C, with little supporting evidence, and then, quite predictably, the models show a much higher rate of warming. But if you talk to the modellers, they will tell you that the big unknown is the effect of clouds because they cannot model them with any accuracy. There is more and more evidence that an increase in temperature brings an increase in clouds and this has a cooling effect.

This is the area of most uncertainty, as I see it. As Bryan says there is no dispute about the direct impact of increased greenhouses gases being around 1 to 1.5 degrees (off memory). What is disputed is whether the indirect effects will magnify that warming, reduce it, or not affect it. Most climate scientists say it will magnify it, but this is based on models. I bow towards the majority view, but with the caution that if the data does not fit the models, then the models need to be re-evaluated.

One good thing about the decision to try and have a post-Kyoto agreement be completed by 2015, to start in 2020, is that several more years of data should help us understand how significant a problem the level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere is. It definitely is a problem, but the magnitude of the problem will ultimately depend on the data of the next few years, and beyond.

A very good compilation. Lots of old footage. Hat Tip: Stuff

Fiji’s Prime Minister has announced an end to regulations that imposed martial law on the country in 2009.

In his New Year’s address to the nation this evening, Commodore Frank Bainimarama said Public Emergency Regulations would end from Saturday January 7. …

Martial law gave the military and police the right to use lethal force without being subject to judicial review, and also includes media censorship.

This gives some hope or cautious optimism for Fiji. I am not sure if Fiji will be able to transition back to a democratic state, and if the Commodore will surrender substantial power in 2014. But this is definitely a good step in the right direction towards a democratic Fiji.

The media censorship regulations especially were quite repugnant, and it will be good to see them gone.

A shy 8-year-old schoolgirl has unwittingly found herself on the front line of Israel’s latest religious war.

Naama Margolese is a ponytailed, bespectacled second-grader who is afraid of walking to her religious Jewish girls school for fear of ultra-Orthodox extremists who have spat on her and called her a whore for dressing “immodestly.”

Anyone who calls an eight year old girl a whore should be ashamed of themselves, because their God most definitely will be.

The girls school that Naama attends in the city of Beit Shemesh, to the west of Jerusalem, is on the border between an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood and a community of modern Orthodox Jewish residents, many of them American immigrants.

The ultra-Orthodox consider the school, which moved to its present site at the beginning of the school year, an encroachment on their territory. Dozens of black-hatted men jeer and physically accost the girls almost daily, claiming their very presence is a provocation.

No, firing guns is a provocation. Yelling whore at eight year olds is provocation. Going to school is not.

The televised images of Naama sobbing as she walked to school shocked many Israelis, elicited statements of outrage from the country’s leadership, sparked a Facebook page with nearly 10,000 followers dedicated to “protecting little Naama” and a demonstration was held in her honour. As the case has attracted attention, extremists have heckled and thrown eggs and rocks at journalists descending on town.

“Who’s afraid of an 8-year-old student?” said Sunday’s main headline in the leading Yediot Ahronot daily.

Beit Shemesh’s growing ultra-Orthodox population has erected street signs calling for the separation of sexes on the pavements, dispatched “modesty patrols” to enforce a chaste female appearance and hurled stones at offenders and outsiders.

Great to read of the response from most normal Israelis. The fanatics sound like they would be happy living with the Taliban.

Naama’s case has been especially shocking because of her young age and because she attends a religious school and dresses with long sleeves and a skirt. Extremists, however, consider even that outfit, standard in mainstream Jewish religious schools, to be immodest.

Maybe a hajib?

Protesters held signs reading, “Free Israel from religious coercion,” and “Stop Israel from becoming Iran.”

The abuse and segregation of women in Israel in ultra-Orthodox areas is nothing new, and critics accuse the government of turning a blind eye.

The ultra-Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics – two such parties serve as key members of the ruling coalition. They receive generous government subsidies, and police have traditionally been reluctant to enter their communities.

Worth remembering this story, when our own extremists advocate getting rid of a threshold for MMP, so we would end up like Israel (which has been increasing their threshold).

A marathon UN climate conference yesterday approved a roadmap towards an accord that for the first time will bring all major greenhouse-gas emitters under a single legal roof.

If approved as scheduled in 2015, the pact will be operational from 2020 and become the prime weapon in the fight against climate change.

This is the first useful step forward in some time. Any agreement that does not include the major emitters has next to no environmental value. It is significant that China, US and India have all agreed in principle.

Actually gaining agreement on the details of post 2020 reductions will be incredibly challenging. As there is  an economic cost to reducing emissions, there will be resistance from vested interests.

Havel died aged 75.  He was one of the most inspiring freedom fighters of our generation. He fought communist rule of his country for 20 years and then in 1989 became the last President of Czechoslovakia, later serving as President of the Czech Republic and seeing it enter the EU.

When one thinks of the term that the pen is mightier than the sword, I often think of Havel.

Kim Jong Il, the mercurial and enigmatic North Korean leader whose iron rule and nuclear ambitions dominated world security fears for more than a decade, has died. He was 69.

Kim’s death 17 years after he inherited power from his father was announced today by the state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The country’s “Dear Leader” reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.

I always felt a bit sorry for him. His father was the truly evil despotic one who imposed his barbaric rule on North Korea. The son never had any chance being raised by such a father, to be any different.

North Korea has been grooming Kim’s third son to take over power from his father in the impoverished nation that celebrates the ruling family with an intense cult of personality.

That would be Kim Jong-un. He spent a few years attending school in Switzerland so may turn out to be slightly more benign that his father and grandfather.

1. electoral process and pluralism
2. civil liberties
3. functioning of government
4. political participation
5. political culture

Countries are then ranked into one of four groups:

1. full democracies – 25 countries (11% of world pop)
2. flawed democracies – 53 countries (37% of world pop)
3. hybrid regimes – 37 countries (13% of world pop)
4. authoritarian regimes – 52 countries (38% of world pop)

The top 10 countries are:

1. Norway 9.80
2. Iceland 9.65
3. Denmark 9.52
4. Sweden 9.50
5. New Zealand 9.26
6. Australia 9.22
7. Switzerland 9.09
8. Canada 9.08
9. Finland 9.06
10. Netherlands 8.99

The bottom countries are:

1. North Korea 1.08
2. Chad 1.62
3. Turkmenistan 1.72
4. Uzbekistan 1.74
5. Myanmar 1.77
6. Equatorial Guinea 1.77
7. Saudi Arabia 1.77
8. Central African Republic 1.82
9. Iran 1.98
10. Syria 1.99

NZ’s score and ranking is the same as in 2010.