The Honourable Member's position becomes untenable

The Hon. Karen Paluzanno, Member for Penrith is gone.

She was installed into the state seat of Penrith by the NUW's mad NSW secretary Derek Belan in 2001, replacing Fay Lupo of the Ross Free do-nothing generation of suburban right wingers in NSW.

Belan's range wars in the NSW ALP are part of his ambitious strategy to take over the TWU members in the logistics industry (what used to be known as the trucking industry, but now includes warehousing and some rail).  They did it at the Pura Milk factory in Penrith, and god knows, the Transport Industry sure is disorganised outside of Concrete, Armoured Vans and private bus companies.

Belan's other good mate is The Hon. Paul Gibson, MLA for Blacktown. The tip is that Gibbo will give way for John Robertson MLC, Mr Your Rights At Work. Robbo then descends from the skies in 2013 and saves us from the unravelling mess that is the Baird government, or so the story goes.

A byelection in Penrith now would make Bass look like a mild murmur (all you psephologists out there can Google "1975 Bass Byelection", it will keep you amused for hours).

My tip? She gets kicked out of the ALP [In breaking news since this was written, that's precisely what Walt Secor...err, Kristina Keneally has done.] and sits as an Independent before quietly shuffling off to be a radiologist, as she has claimed before. 

Paluzanno actually used to be a teacher of children with difficulties, something that is well needed in this community. She was a Member of the Teachers Federation when she attended the 2004 ALP National Conference. She won preselection for Penrith in a deal that saw the intellectual colossus that is the Hon Dianne Beamer, Member for Mulgoa, selected for the adjacent seat.

Two stories about Paluzanno:

My mate Lee, a blackfella from Penrith, texts me in the weeks before the March 2007 Iemma state election, the last one. Paluzanno not keen 4 my vote. Lee had walked past her outside Penrith train station three times trying to get the flyer she is handing out to commuters. She ignored him each time.

Later in 2007 Iemma and Costa are trying to force electricity privatisation through at the behest of the NSW Treasury and ratings agency Standard and Poors (the ones that rated CDOs as AAA). Campaigners are encouraging people opposed to the privatisation to make an appointment with their local MP to press the issue. Paluzanno told a lovely old couple from Leonay that she "would have to check with the union" before she could say how she would vote on the matter.

She meant the NUW, but either way it's not a good look.

I wouldn't want to be the bloke who tipped the bucket, Tim Horan. He certainly isn't inside the tent pissing out. I wouldn't be surprised if he shows up again. He has admitted that revenge was at least "in the back of mind" - as pure as the driven snow. The office juniors caught up in this are desperately trying to lump it all on "Honest Tim" Horan.

What a useless situation.

It's bloody sad that an area that is so desperately in need of good representation because of the many problems that afflict it will probably end up with Stuart Ayres, Liberal candidate for Penrith

Barry O breathed out when he got onto 2UE. "My office was audited last year and the good news is we got a clean bill of health," he said. Which sounds alarmingly like "they didn't catch us this time".

Certainly, Paluzanno is unloved and won't be missed (read comments).  but there is one way out for the ALP in Penrith: Greg Alexander. lA good Catholic boy from St Dominic's Kingswood (Before he was poached from the Christian Brothers). He grew up in Cranebrook when it was still bush. At least then Penrith's next do-nothing MP will be well known.

Kristina should get onto Georgie Boy Pell and put the squeeze on Bucky Alexander's eternal testicles.

The Micks are good at that sort of thing. I know. I used to be one.

The idiots have won

Signs that these are surely the last days are not new.

People have been predicting apocalypse being upon us since, well, St John wrote Revelations.

Not being someone to believe in imaginary friends - I've never traded in that guff - I've never placed much faith (pun intended) in religion.

But whether you believe Christ is god and saviour, or Muhammad is the true prophet, or in the Giant Spaghetti Monster, Australians are hell bent on making life harder for themselves; mainly because we valorize gross stupidity to the point where much public discourse has become a carnival of ignorance.

Even in a country as 'free' as Australia, far too many areas of our existence are now observed and regulated to the point of obeisance against evidence. From abseiling to zines we are told what we can and can't do. We are micromanaged to within an inch of our lives.

I never thought I would find myself evangelizing a libertarian position, but things are getting beyond a joke. We live in a censorious age. And much of this censoriousness is fed by the zeitgeist, that impressions are more potent than fact.

Although bike helmets protect the skull but not the face or limbs, where more biking injuries occur, they are compulsory. Australia being, along with New Zealand, one of the few Western countries that actually impose the ineffective nuisance of helmets on the bike riding public.

Marijuana is banned and, as regular as the passing seasons, someone pops up in the media claiming that marijuana makes crazy people crazier. Well, derr! So the rest of us that are merely exasperated are not allowed to play. Its just grim faced Calvinism pushing a barrow that never works; prohibition.

And so on and so forth until having a fire when your camping, sleeping on the beach, traveling in the back of ute on an empty country road are all verboten in the name of keeping us all safe from ourselves. Paternalism rampant.

Yes, these things cause trouble and can be lethal. Life is, by its very nature, deadly. The solution is to censure idiots and crazy people, but this is not fashionable. Our post-modernist equivocation of values, which is passed of as equality, is in actuality a matter of making life easy for the dumb and the mad. Somehow this has led to being dumb and mad as being all the fashion.

Take smoking. More people smoke than go to church, Going to and working in hotels is an inherently unhealthy act. The best argument proffered by the proponents of blanket bans on smoking in licensed premises is that people who work in hotels should not have to ingest second hand smoke. I agree. Non-smokers should get another line of employment. Who in their right mind wants to work in a bar? Staying sober around drunken people has to be one of the more depressing visages of humanity. Smoke and be damned.

Two discreet problems exist: First, regulation of public life has fallen into the hands of obsessive control freaks; secondly, this overarching need to control human behaviour reinforces and rewards a mixture of stupidity and madness.

I fully accept that there is a role for health and safety in employment. Commonsense would dictate that in other areas prudence and caution should take precedence over individual standards for the general good. The accent here is on general good, not how you'd like others to live - but how others living impacts on you. Then there is the problem of how commonsense evaporates amongst the stupid and the mad.

This is about risk management. It is also about power, but more on that later.

I am not risk averse, but most people are. As a result I am subject to the same risk assessment as all others, including the stupid and the mad. Effectively the state is treating me as if I'm stupid and mad.

What if I want to measure the value of existence by living my life as I see fit? Surely that is my prerogative? After all, it is me that is in the box at the end of the day.

But this is no longer the case.

How did all this start?

Modern government was well summed up in a speech by Kelvin Thompson to Sustainable Population Australia:

"In the modern era, with its twenty-four/seven media cycle, it is possible to get elected without solving problems provided you can use the media to get across three messages - first, that your heart is in the right place, second, that you're working as hard as you can, and third and most importantly, that the other mob would be worse."

Which is why having to fix things takes second place to pretending the problems aren't there and creating this parallel universe where reality is created by ministerial announcement, press release and stage managed media event by governments, corporates and the usual roll-call of NGOs.

Unfortunately, once the cameras roll on messy reality takes hold once more.

A lot of this spin is underpinned by useless scholasticism designed to impress funding bodies with polysyllabic tinkering at the edges. This rolls out sound bites peddled as authoritative voices and 'take-home' messages for a public that has been plunged into a cloud of ignorance. The prescription then becomes a simplistic sloganeering that is even at times at odds or at least antipathetic to evidence gleaned from serious research.

This is the nut of the problem; the one-size-fits-all approach to regulation that looks good on a tabloid front page, but doesn't work or is prescriptively onerous in reality.

Which brings us to the question of power. In this entire regulatory milieu, who benefits?

The usual suspects; the state, which finds a cheap and easy solution that makes it look good; insurance companies, who are by nature risk averse; the rich, who can afford to ignore regulation and buy their way out of it; and dickheads, people that have an anally retentive view of life and don't like the 'messy bits' that are innate to human existence.

Unfortunately the dickhead's obsessiveness drives an eagerness and zealotry to impose their worldview on the largely apathetic rest of us.

Regulation happens by default. Makes good copy. Takes fun out of life. Bring on the apocalypse.

The Emperor Has No Lights On

Damn hippies all warning about global warming but I ain’t going nowhere
Cause I believe what I’m told, that the levees’ll hold and that the President really cares

“Deep Deep River” – Fred Smith (From the CD Texas)

Earth Hour drifted past last night, all candle lit and quaffing champagne.

As far as tokenism goes, it is hard to beat.

Folk will be familiar with the concept. For those who came in late, the idea is that lights are turned off for an hour to symbolise reducing our energy use, with the idea that it will encourage businesses and households to use less electricity.

Despite the onanistic self-congratulation that surrounds this spectacle - especially from the major sponsor, the Fairfax news group – it has a miniscule impact on consumption and an even more tenuous educational benefit.

Its primary function seems to be to provide absolution from guilt for shiny middle class types and a platform for self-absorbed public figures to make unctuous statements about the importance of ‘battling’ climate change.

The defence flung out by the event’s marketing arm (what am I writing, it is all marketing) is that Earth Hour ‘raises consciousness’ about energy use.

Well that has been a miserable failure. The Australian Energy Market Operator in its latest Statement of Opportunities is forecasting a steady increase in energy consumption across all Australian states for the next decade.

No government is taking demand management, which was used so successfully with water consumption in capital cities, seriously.

NSW is spending $17,000,000,000.00 on locking in the electricity network to existing coal-fired power stations, with electricity users being left to foot the bill. If that dosh was spent on creating publicly owned community based renewable energy infrastructure we just may have a chance of getting out of this mess with most of the furniture intact.

The problem is that there was no Earth Hour at Wallerawang Power Station. There was no earth Hour at the Tomago Aluminium Smelter, which chews up about ten percent of NSW’s electricity and pays a peppercorn tariff for the pleasure. Earth Hour hasn’t made an impression on the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics who, along with Federal Energy Minister and serial idiot Martin Ferguson, have predicted that coal will continue to be our dominant source of electricity generation for the foreseeable future, regardless of what it will do to the climate.

They are almost certainly right.

Despite these rather salient issues the event has been a hit worldwide with scores of cities and jurisdictions jumping on board. Why is this?

The bottom line, which runs everything in these halcyon days, means people across the western world will demand reliable electricity supply to their houses

Australian society revolves around 240-volt electricity and the motorcar. These two functions are sacrosanct. Only losers catch the bus and, well, we “need” air conditioning and, somehow, a plasma screen TV the size of a small African country is important to have.

Consumption is about status; people acquire things to impress other people. People define themselves by the car they drive, the house they live in, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to; you are what you eat.

At its most extreme, status is marked by conspicuous consumption. Now that is a defining point of status, the ability to throw things away. It shows how rich and ergo, how powerful a person is.

With status wrapped up in the symbolism of what we consume (or don’t consume) it is going to be a hard shit to shift.

Symbolism can be powerful: the guy in front of the tank in Beijing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, burning draft papers. Earth Hour is not one of them.

In the end Earth Hour will go the way of solariums and Second Life. Status trumps Change. People just want to get on with the important stuff, like watching Australia’s Biggest Loser on a wide screen plasma TV, upgrading to this year’s Prada or getting a mortgage on a McMansion in the newest estate.

You can turn off all the lights you like, catch the bus forever or live in a solar powered shack in the bush, like I am, but the rest of the world is going to keep on chewing up fossil fuels and spewing out carbon dioxide like there is, literally, no tomorrow.