Shouts from the desert

Well, after much consideration, I have taken a bold new step.

For those of you who don't know, I live in the Bennelong electorate. John Howard's seat.

Over the past three years, the Prime Minister has been making decisions like we, the electors, just don't matter. In particular, he took us into a war which, having spent more time on the relevant issues of international law, I am now 100% certain was illegal. And he did it despite the vocal dissent of huge sections of the community, and polling that shows that most people were opposed to the war at the time.

The Coalition of the Willing claimed the war was justified based on United Nations Security Council resolutions relating to weapons of mass destruction. Even if there were weapons of mass destruction there, the support of those resolutions for this war was debatable. Buteven if those resolutions were capable of supporting the war, the legality of the war depended not on a belief in those weapons, but on the actual existence of the weapons. Without the weapons, the war was illegal.

There is to be a forum held by the Bennelong Friends of Refugees to discuss (what else) the refugee and border protection issues. This will be on Friday the 14th of May, at 7:30pm, at St Ann's Hall, Church Street, Top Ryde. Speakers will include Carmen Lawrence (ALP), Andrew Wilkie (Greens), and John Valder (former national president of the Liberal Party).

The Herald is reporting that Peter Newman, of Murdoch University in Perth, has labelled NSW government spending on new motorways, including the Lane Cove Tunnel and the proposed M4 East link, as a short term political move that will not solve Sydney's transportation problems. He says that the money would be better spent on sustainable measures like public transport and bicycle networks.

This is clearly correct. When you improve the roads, all you do is encourage more people to use them until they get to the point where the congestion is as bad as it was before. Building better roads makes private automobiles a more attractive form of transport, and so shifts load from public transport to the roads.

The next Bennelong Institute event is on Tuesday, 4^th May at Riverside Girls' High in Gladesville. The presenter will be Brian Iselin, a former officer of the Australian Federal Police, and formerly a United Nations adviser on combating human trafficking in South-East Asia. The presentation will talk about people trafficking - not of the "boat people" kind, but of slaves forced to work as prostitutes. Reportedly there are hundreds or even thousands of women brought into Australia for this purpose every year

The Herald is reporting that Latham has had his first slip in the polls on the issue of recalling Australian troops from Iraq. At first glance some might thing this is strange given that when Latham makes negative comments about the Iraq war, his popularity goes up.

What Latham failed to realise is that there are really three significant camps on the withdrawal of troops issue. First there are those who supported the war - they are not likely to support withdrawal of troops at this stage. Then there are those who opposed to the use of armed force for anything at all. Finally - and this is the group Latham did not take into account - there are those who were opposed to this war rather than force in general. The latter group (unlike the "no armed force, ever" group) is likely to weigh a variety of factors in evaluating the merits of a particular decision.

I have just finished going through Chapter 17 of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. I knew from the earlier announcements that this was not going to be good, but nothing prepared me for the extent of the disaster that this part of the agreement represents.

The chapter covers 29 pages of the agreement. While treaties normally specify things at a high level, leaving the details to each nation involved, this particular chapter approaches being a detailed code for the scrapping of Australia's intellectual property regime to replace it with that of the United States.

The second Bennelong Institute event is on Tuesday 30 March, at 7pm. There topic is the Free Trade Agreement, and there will be two speakers: Michael Baume, and journalist Stephen Long.

The event will be at the Epping Boys High School Library, Vimera Rd, Epping.

This week has seen a return of media discussion about whether Costello should or will replace Howard as leader of the Liberal Party. This comes off the back of Latham's rise in the polls, and Costello's refusal to rule out a challenge.

This is of course a side-show. Of course Latham's doing well in the polls - he's new, and new leaders always do well in the polls, unless they were appointed following an election defeat, in which case they don't get the "new leader" honeymoon because they already suffer from the "defeated party" image. Latham gained the leadership in the middle of the Parliamentary term, and so was inevitably going to do well in the polls - at least for a while.

The Prime Minister has indicated that he will be making a major announcement later this week about the "aging population" issue.

This is a serious problem that none of the political parties have managed to seriously examine yet. The ALP introduced the superannuation guarantee early in the 90s as one method of dealing with the aging population, but the fact of the matter is that if we don't have enough people in the workforce to support the aged pension, and we have all the aged living off their savings (which is what superannuation is), what we will end up with is limited supply of goods and services, with high demand. That means inflation - rampant, uncontrollable inflation. This will reduce the value of the superannuation savings to almost nothing.

The Bennelong Institute is a newly formed organisation dedicated to improving opportunities for people to get involved in the political issues that affect people in the electorate of Bennelong. The federal seat of Bennelong is currently held by the Prime Minister, John Howard. The first Bennelong Institute event is tonight.

The speaker at tonight's meeting is Father Frank Brennan, an outspoken critic of the Government's policy on refugees.

I am personally excited by this concept. Opportunities for political participation have previously been limited to joining a political party or a pressure group, which requires to some extent that you support all that the party or group does. An organisation like the Bennelong Institute, where there is a non-partisan effort to bring information to the electors, has the potential to radically improve the power of the electorate to effect change.