The crane is my neighbour

The bird is my neighbour, a whimsical fellow and dim:
There is in the lake a nobility falling on him.

The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme,
And ripples are thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream.

He bleats no instruction, he is not an arrogant drummer:
His gown is simplicity � blue as the smoke of the Summer.

The bird is both ancient and excellent, sober and wise,
But he never could spend all the love that is sent for his eyes.

How patient he is as he puts out his wings for the blue:
He is an old guest of the sunlight � a child of the dew.

I always liked John Shaw Neilson. There's a furious textual argument over whther Line 3 reads this way or:

And waves are as thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream

Old People May Hold Key to Human Success

'What we looked at is differences in the proportion of people who were living to be older,' Caspari said. Some individuals may have lived to great age, but at some point humans as a species began living longer on average than other primates and Caspari and Lee wanted to find out when and why.

They divided the fossils into two groups -- adults of reproductive age, which they settled on as 15 years, and adults that lived to be twice as old, 30, based on tooth wear.

In primitive societies, people are often grandparents at 30, Caspari pointed out.

'We found this proportion of older to young adults in the fossil record increased over time,' Caspari said.
'In the Upper Paleolithic that proportion just skyrocketed. It was just unbelievable. It increased five-fold. We didn't expect that.'

Caspari and Lee rechecked their numbers and analysis.

'But then we started to think about it and thought we really shouldn't be surprised, because there is a behavioral change that took place over time at the same time,' Caspari said.

'You start to see a change in symbolic behavior. You see art. You see a large number of people being buried with jewelry, with body ornaments.'

Perhaps around this time people started to value and take care of the weak and the old, and in turn benefited from their help and experience, Caspari sad.

This could be when the uniquely human condition of menopause evolved and started to have an effect, Caspari said. Women not burdened by childbearing could focus on their grandchildren and other kin.

'We live in a society that is so geared toward younger people. It is nice to realize that it might be older people that make us human after all,' Caspari said.

Now if only the economic rationalists had a decent grip on politics in the Upper Paleocene we could have avoided centuires of economic inefficiency in caring about the weak and the old. Damn!

Speed of light may have changed recently

The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.

The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants.

A varying speed of light contradicts Einstein's theory of relativity, and would undermine much of traditional physics. But some physicists believe it would elegantly explain puzzling cosmological phenomena such as the nearly uniform temperature of the universe. It might also support string theories that predict extra spatial dimensions.

The threat to the idea of an invariable speed of light comes from measurements of another parameter called the fine structure constant, or alpha, which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and though alpha also depends on two other constants (see graphic), many physicists tend to interpret a change in alpha as a change in the speed of light. It is a valid simplification, says Victor Flambaum of the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

It was Flambaum, along with John Webb and colleagues, who first seriously challenged alpha's status as a constant in 1998. Then, after exhaustively analysing how the light from distant quasars was absorbed by intervening gas clouds, they claimed in 2001 that alpha had increased by a few parts in 105 in the past 12 billion years.

Yikes (if you're a traditional physicist) or wow (if you're anyone else or a traditional physicist with lots of imagination).

Big spender: Howard's $29m ad bill

With the Prime Minister, John Howard, still playing bluff on calling an election as early as tomorrow, new figures reveal the Federal Government is accelerating bumper taxpayer-financed advertising of its policies.

Latest industry figures show the Government spent $29 million in the past six months, up nearly 60 per cent on the same period last year.

More than $4 million was spent in just one week last month on promoting measures including the Medicare changes and the $600 child payment.

Spending by the Department of Health, largely on the Strengthening Medicare campaign, topped $10.5 million in the six months, according to Nielsen Media Research AdEx.

The Department of Family and Community Services spent $1.1 million and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet $3.2 million.

There is much more to come according to information released to the Opposition, which has estimated the advertising bills will total $122 million this year. The Government says the figure is about $90 million.

Mr Howard, who insisted yesterday he would rely on 'gut instinct' on when to go to the country, would not rule out calling the contest tomorrow, for an August 7 poll.

While most insiders say a move tomorrow is unlikely, government departments in recent weeks have rushed to clear any policy initiatives before the election campaign puts the Government into caretaker mode.

We really need better rules on government advertising and we need a fixed date for federal elections.

The constitution says:

Duration of House of Representatives.
28. Every House of Representatives shall continue for three years from the first meeting of the House, and no longer, but may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General.

That's just not good enough. Note that the term is not 3 years and there's no provision for when a new House must meet after the election. The last federal election was 10 November 2001. The last day for the next federal election, because of the gap between election day and the first meeting of the House, is 16 April 2005. That is too long and too flaky.

The government does not go into caretaker mode until the House is actually dissolved by the governor-general on the prime minister's advice. Politicised ads, paid for by public funds, are entirely legal until the dissolution. The government not only determines the date but is in a position to run a massive advertising campaign immediately before announcing the date. The Herald report merely confirms what we already guessed.

Harradine set to quit after 29 years

A Catholic conservative and former right-wing member of the Labor Party, he was first elected as a senator for Tasmania in 1975. He has been a key player in the Senate's balance of power, particularly during the Howard Government's first term, when he often found himself with the deciding vote.

Told of Senator Harradine's retirement plans by a reporter while campaigning in the Tasmanian electorate of Bass yesterday, Prime Minister John Howard said he had great admiration and respect for the senator.

'I have found him to be an immensely decent, committed person, a very fine Australian and someone who's worked very hard for the people of Tasmania,' Mr Howard said.

Senator Harradine was widely recognised for winning $150 million of concessions for Tasmania when he cast the deciding vote for a 30 per cent sale of Telstra in July 1998.

But he nearly sank the GST in 1999 when he voted against it, forcing the Government to make a deal with the Democrats. Other important votes on the Wik Native Title legislation, the private health insurance rebate and the second part sale of Telstra went the Government's way.

Election analyst Antony Green said a decision by Senator Harradine not to contest the election would open the way for the Greens and Labor to benefit in Tasmania. 'It will probably make the Senate contest easier to pick: three Labor, two Liberals and a Green,' he said.

This should drive the last nail into the Magic 38 thesis.

2002-03 Redistribution of Commonwealth Electoral Boundaries

The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 provides three triggers for a redistribution of Commonwealth electoral boundaries. Under section 59 of the Act a redistribution shall occur:

• when there is a change in the representational entitlements of a state or territory
  
• when more than one third of the divisions in a state or territory vary from the average divisional enrolment for the state or territory by more than ten per cent for three consecutive months, or
  
• if seven years ('seven year rule') have elapsed since the last redistribution in the state or territory.
  

A redistribution of Commonwealth electoral boundaries occurred during 2002 and 2003 in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. The redistribution in Victoria was occasioned by the 'seven year rule', while the redistributions in Queensland and South Australia were triggered by a change in the representational entitlements of the two jurisdictions.

The second trigger, malapportionment of electoral divisions, has not occasioned a redistribution since the three triggers were incorporated in the Act in 1984.

Worth reading for the impact of boundary changes, especially in Queensland and South Australia.

The Northern Territory missed a second seat by 295 voters. This was fixed by the House of Representatives (Northern Territory Representation) Act 2004 which restores the territory's second seat.

Into the Abyss

Around Iraq, the States that have most to fear from an American collapse are Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Each in its own way, all three depend on American support. All suffer under severe social strain, whether against an ethnic background%u2014as in Jordan where Bedouin and Palestinians clash%u2014or a religious one as is mainly the case in the other two. As unrest spreads from Iraq probably not all three will see their regimes overthrown, but one or two might well undergo this fate. Jordan being a small and weak country, its fate will be of concern mainly to its immediate neighbors such as Syria%u2014which, if it tries to intervene, will have Israel to reckon with%u2014Israel, and Saudi Arabia. By contrast, the collapse of Saudi Arabia, or a situation whereby Egypt turns into an Islamic republic and abrogates its peace treaty with Israel, would have world-wide economic and strategic implications that are hard to foresee.

In the short run, the greatest beneficiary of the war is Israel. The destruction of Iraq has created a situation where, for the first time since the State was founded in 1948, it has no real conventional enemy left within about 600 miles of its borders. If Sharon had any sense he would use this window of opportunity to come to some kind of arrangement with the Palestinians. Whether he will do so, though, remains to be seen.

In the longer run, the greatest beneficiary is likely to be Iran which, without having to lift a finger, has seen its most dangerous enemy ground into the dust. Even before President Bush launched his war against Iraq, the Iranians, feeling surrounded by nuclear-capable American forces on three sides (Afghanistan, the Central Asian Republics, the Persian Gulf), were working as hard as they could to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to match. Now that the U.S. has proved it is prepared to fight anybody for no reason at all, they should be forgiven if they redouble their efforts.

Even if the Islamic Republic is overthrown, as some hope, the new government in Tehran will surely follow the same nationalist line as its predecessor did. A nuclear Iran is likely to be followed by a nuclear Turkey. Next will come a nuclear Greece, a nuclear Saudi Arabia (assuming the country can survive as a single political unit), and a nuclear Egypt. Welcome to the Brave New World, Mr. Bush.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you confuse a throwaway line in a speech to Congress with the grounds for making war and peace.

Inquiry into the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill 2004

On 23 June 2004, the Senate referred the above Bill to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee for inquiry and report by 7 October 2004.

The Bill seeks to:

• amend the Marriage Act 1961 to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life; and to confirm that unions solemnised overseas between same sex couples will not be recognised as marriages in Australia; and
  
  
• amend the Family Law Act 1975 to prevent intercountry adoptions by same sex couples under multilateral or bilateral agreements or arrangements.

Latham has mucked this issue up completely. Labor voted in favour of the bill in the House. They did not need to. A Senate inquiry was always the best way to deal with this issue. Dorothy Mcrae-McMahon asked legitimate questions today, of Latham as well as Howard:

"Why on earth would heterosexual people be so nervous about us threatening their relationships?" she said.

"If families are in trouble at the moment, it's none of our doing.

"It's related to all sorts of complex situations and issues which lie with heterosexual relationships today and, to some extent, with ours as well."

Bush's Mistaken View of US Democracy

If, in the president's view, the goodness of Americans and the nobility of our mission are self-evident, then the failure of peoples around the world to see the struggle in Iraq the same way we do means that they are 'enemies of freedom.' Fighters opposing American power, even if they are residents of occupied countries, do not merit the protections of international law. Institutional restraints on the exercise of power by Americans in detention centers and prisons can, in this view, safely be relaxed. Moreover, constitutional protections can be denied even to American citizens, arrested in the United States, when they are suspected of being 'enemy combatants.'

From James Madison's point of view, on the other hand, the abuses of Abu Ghraib would have been entirely explicable. The founding fathers, and great American leaders ever since, understood that without institutional restraints, voluntarily followed and supported by the top leadership, such abuses are virtually inevitable. This doesn't mean that Americans are 'bad' people, just that they are human - like Iraqis, Afghans, Germans, Japanese, and every other nationality and race.

If the struggle against terrorism were to be carried out consistently with the institutional theory embedded in the U.S. Constitution, America's leaders would be well aware of the potential for abuse - even by decent patriots. They would have ensured not only that the Constitution was upheld at home, but that the more limited protections embodied in international law would have been conscientiously applied to people living under American occupation, or otherwise within U.S. control.

Behind the debate about the conduct of the war in Iraq, and the occupation, is a larger divide - between those Americans who believe that their unique virtues should permit them to act above the law, and those who believe that people in authority, necessarily imperfect, must be constrained by institutions and by law. Those who understand and believe in the theory of the American Constitution should reject the Bush administration's political theory of personal good and evil. We must continue to insist that the United States is a 'government of laws and not of men.'

Australia does not have the same tradition of checks and balances, even through our constitution is an adaptation of the US constitution. Some of us do have the Manichaean view of the world.

As Howard told parliament on 23 October 2003:

The President of the United States and I first met face-to-face on 10 September 2001. As we celebrated at the naval dockyard in Washington the shared partnership of the ANZUS alliance neither of us knew what lay ahead. The next day the world did change, and we saw arising out of those events the character and the strength and the leadership of the man we welcome today. George Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, rallied his own people and the people of the world in the fight against terrorism. He reminded us then, as we should be reminded today, that terrorists oppose nations such as the United States and Australia not because of what we have done but because of who we are and because of the values that we hold in common, and that terrorism-and we should remind ourselves of this again and again-is as much the enemy of Islam as it is the enemy of Judaism or Christianity.

If you substituted 'the West' or 'the coalition' for 'United States' you would describe exactly the way the Man of Steel views the world. I think it is a deeply flawed view. It is as though we took the form, without the content, of the Madisonian tradition and shaped it into something much less impressive. Just as Bush does.

Parliament passes changes to voting laws

Australians enrolling to vote will need to produce identification under changes to electoral laws which passed Parliament today.

Members of the House of Representatives today took part in a rare Saturday morning sitting. The Senate sat until 2am.

The Parliament dealt with a backlog of business ahead of its winter recess and a possible early election.

The changes to electoral laws passed today will require people enrolling to vote to produce a driver's licence or two witnesses to serve as enrolment identification.

The Senate knocked back a Government proposal which would have given Australians who were not enrolled to vote only until 6pm on the day writs were issued for an election to get their name on the electoral roll.

Currently, Australians have seven days in which to enrol from the time writs are issued.

The Senate also rejected a proposal to reduce to three working days after election writs were issued the time allowed to change address details with the electoral commission.

The Senate knocked back a Government amendment to ban all full-time prisoners from voting.

I am very glad the prisoner disfranchisement and the close of enrolment were rejected.

Internationally, the trend is to recognise that voting is a human right and that prisoners are human beings. The Prisoner vote is also some slight guarantee against the kind of incarceration society the US has grown where they have 6.19 per 1000 people. Australia has 1.1 prisoners per 1000. Disfranchising all prisoners would also fall heaviest on indigenous Australians, a group that does not have a strong record of electoral support for the present government.

Equally there is nothing sacred about the day the writs are issued. In fact it would be better to allow people to enrol at any time, including election day itself. With new technology and the new checks on identity that should not be a problem.

The joint committee on electoral matters had unanimously rejected both ideas. The electoral act should not be about keeping the government of the day in power.

Federal government advertising

Sally Young, a Melbourne political scientist, has argued that these arrangements have placed incumbents at a �massive advantage� and challengers at a �massive disadvantage�.(21) She argues that governments have the capacity to run a �permanent campaign� using the highly effective electoral tool of direct mail-outs. In the absence of restrictions on the format of these advertisements, Young sees modern government advertising as blatantly self-promoting.

and:

Tables 1 and 2 support this claim of pre-election spikes in expenditure on government advertising. The 1993, 1996, 1998 and 2001 federal elections were preceded by sharp increases in government advertising outlays:

• the bulk of the Keating Government's $3 million advertising campaign on Medicare Hospital Entitlements was spent the month before the 1993 poll(14)
  
• the Keating Government spent $9 million in the three months prior to the 1996 Federal election campaign(15)
  
• the Howard Government spent $29.5 million in the three months before the 1998 election campaign.(16) Half this expenditure ($14.9 million) was on the GST campaign. Still, pre-election spending on GST advertising accounted for only 13 per cent of total expenditure on the GST campaign, and
  
• in the four months before the 2001 election, the government spent roughly $78 million.(17)
  

This trend of pre-election spikes in government advertising seems likely to continue. A May 2004 Senate Estimates Committee heard evidence of various plans for commencing new and continuing existing government advertising campaigns (see Table 2, shaded).

Both sides abuse government advertising. Neither side follows principles advocated by the auditor-general in Victoria. The obvious reform is either bipartisan membership of the Ministerial Committee on Government Communications or requiring opposition approval for advertising more than 30 months into the parliamentary term.

Antony Green Election Guide

In 2004, the fate of the Howard government will largely be determined by two states, New South Wales and Queensland.

Of the 78 seats north of the Murray, the Coalition holds 48, the Labor Party's 26, with 3 Independents and a Green. Of the 72 seats in the rest of the country, Labor already holds a majority of 37 seats to the Coalition's 35. In effect, the Howard government's majority is built in New South Wales and Queensland.

On current polling it looks likely the election will be decided in the Coalition's marginal seats. Apart some Marginal Labor seats in Perth, it is hard to see a Labor seat at risk of being lost to the Coalition.

The ABC has it's election guide up. I think Anthony Green is an analyst worth following, because I happen to agree with most of his conclusions. I'd point to the Northern Territory and Queensland as the place where Labor is likely to find most of the 11 seats. I doubt they are places where the free trade agreement with the US will prove all that popular.

U.S. Immunity In Iraq Will Go Beyond June 30

In Iraq, Washington had originally hoped to achieve a formal Status of Forces Agreement to grant immunity, but that was effectively vetoed when Sistani and other Iraqi politicians said no unelected Iraqi government could enter into a treaty with other countries. The United States now hopes to negotiate a status agreement next year, after a government is elected.

In the current negotiations over Order 17, a senior Iraqi official said, the basic concept is to cover 'soldiers and foreign nationals working in operations conducted by mutual consent or understanding with the Iraqi interim government and the command of the multinational force. But what that means remains to be seen.'

The United States hopes to include some foreign contractors, many of whom are engaged in security operations, the Iraqi official added, while Iraq is pressing to retain sovereignty.

'It's going to be a political hot potato, and we're worried it'll be used as a hot potato in a way that is not good for either the interim government or the multinational force,' the official said.

As a legal basis, Iraq's transitional law, which was worked out between Bremer and the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, may be considered too weak a foundation for granting immunity. Sistani argued against it because it was not the work of elected officials.

The U.N. resolution also has no direct reference to immunity for foreign troops. The only reference is in a letter from Powell to the Security Council attached to the resolution, which says contributing states in the multinational force must 'have responsibility for exercising jurisdiction over their personnel' but does not mention prosecution or other specific activity.

The Transitional Administrative Law continues all CPA orders and regulations until such time as the elected Transitional National Assembly can amend or revoke them. Between 30 June and the election the Iraqi Transitional Government has no legislative power at all.

Sovereignty, apparently, does not extend to the dangerous idea of an Iraqi judge issue a writ of habeas corpus to the prison at Abu Ghraib.

US war crimes immunity bid fails

The US has given up trying to win its soldiers immunity from prosecution at the new International Criminal Court.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan had warned the Security Council not to renew the measure, partly because of the prisoner abuse scandal.

Washington withdrew its resolution after it became clear it would not get the required support.

For the last two years it had secured special status for US troops, arguing they could face malicious prosecutions.

The BBC's Susannah Price at the United Nations says the latest move is a major climb-down for the Americans, who rarely face such united opposition on the Council.

Good news for the rule of law and good news for cutting back impunity. Impunity is central to the practice of torture, whether it's an outgoing dictatorship 'decreeing itself amnesty, the White House decreeing itself above the law, or any government decreeing that despite the Torture Convention's ban on exceptional circumstances there are exceptional circumstances.

Australia has signed an Article 98 impunity accord which exempts US forces from the ICC's jurisdiction. We should abrogate that accord, especially as it grants legal protections to US troops which are not available to ADF troops.

Druid demands return of Stonehenge

The Archdruid of Wales is calling for Stonehenge to be pulled down and carted back to the principality where it belongs.

Dr Robyn Lewis wants the stones at the centre of the world heritage site returned after 4,300 years.

Experts have long known that the ancient bluestones used to form the site came from Pembrokeshire, in west Wales. But the discovery this week that remains found near the site appeared to be those of prehistoric workmen, almost certainly from Wales, has prompted his call.

But how does he fell about Elgin marbles?

What causes some people to be left-handed, and why are fewer people left-handed than right-handed?

These theories of hand preference causation are intriguing because they can account for the fact that the side of hand preference of individuals with the C gene (most left-handers and some right-handers) can be influenced by external cultural and societal pressures, a phenomenon that researchers have documented. These theories can also explain the presence of right-handed children in families with left-handed parents and the presence of left-handed children in families with right-handed parents. If the familial genetic pool contains C genes, then hand preference becomes amenable to chance influences, including the pressures of familial training and other environmental interventions that favor the use of one hand over the other. The proposed genetic locus that determines hand preference contains an allele from each parent, and the various possible genetic combinations are DD individuals who are strongly right-handed, DC individuals who are also mostly right-handed, and CC individuals who are either right-handed or left-handed. These genetic combinations leave us with an overwhelming majority of human right-handers and a small, but persistently occurring, minority of left-handers.

Schools once went through a phase of forcing lefthanded kids to write with the wrong (right) hand. The history is ancient:

Most animals are fifty/fifty right handers/left handers. Two million years ago all humans became right handed - that's one hundred percent of them and that had its advantages. And then about a hundred thousand years or so ago another mutation occurred which meant that left handedness could come into being and it must have had some advantage to it and left handers have stayed around since then. So they�re there not because they're an evolutionary throw back to a primitive state, but because they're a recent mutation with additional advantages. Now what they are is anybody guess.

I don't remember anything at school, but family pressure can work just as well. there is also a considerable religious pressure:

Moreover, the Scriptures themselves amply attest to the preeminence of the right hand and the depravity of the left. Thus the right hand confers blessing and signifies strength, while the left hand is treacherous and deadly (Gen. 48:13-20; Exod. 15:6; Eze. 21:22; Rev. 1:16-17; Judg. 3:15, 20:16; 2 Sam. 20:9-10). A place at one's right hand is the seat of honor and dignity (1 Kings 2:19; Ps. 45:9, 110:1). Sagely does Qoheleth teach that "a wise man's heart inclines him toward the right, but a fool's heart toward the left" (Eccles. 10:2). In like manner, both the passivity and the inferiority of the left hand are apparent in the solemn injunction forbidding us to let our left hands know what our right hands are doing (Luke 22:50). And it is by no accident that the elect are to stand like innocent sheep at the right hand of the Eternal Judge, while the reprobates cower and whimper like noisome and tick-infested goats on His left, awaiting their dizzying descent into sulfurous fumes and unfathomable miseries in the mind-bending agonies of eternal damnation (Matt�25:31-46).

I think I'll stick to the recent mutation with evolutionary advantages. It sounds about right left to me.

It's neck and neck, but on paper they're still polls apart

Thirteen million Australians are eligible to vote. Therefore, any opinion poll that claims, in a period of just two weeks, the Government went from 390,000 votes behind Labor in primary votes (ALP 44 per cent, Coalition 41 per cent) to 1.3 million votes ahead (Coalition 47, ALP 37), and then, a further three weeks later, to lose 520,000 votes while Labor magically regains 780,000 votes (Coalition 43, ALP 43), is massively kidding.

In other words, the Newspoll of three weeks ago couldn't possibly have been anything but a cock-up somewhere. You don't get huge voting shifts like that, back and forth, in just a matter of a few weeks. Newspapers, though, aren't going to admit it. Thus we get silly stories that get overexcited in the first place and then, when the next poll comes along and voting trends regain credibility, we get equally silly stories that pretend there has suddenly been a huge turnaround in public sentiment.

It is just the most grievous twaddle.

Far more reliable is the long-term trend. And this shows that in each of the past four elections (1993, 1996, 1998 and 2001), newspaper polls invariably, in their research in the months before election day, underestimated the Labor vote and overestimated the Coalition vote, sometimes quite markedly. The political parties know this and so do those analysts who know what they're talking about.

And if you take a line from the last election, then understand Labor's primary vote, say both public polls, has gained between four and five percentage points (between 520,000 and 650,000 votes) since the last election, while the Government has gained nothing.

Think hard about that. You can bet the Prime Minister does.

Ramsey says the election must be between 31 July 2004 and 16 April 2005. That is what the constitution says. I doubt the Man of Steel will want to face waking up one morning and discovering that George Bush is a lame duck. I'd place the chances of the election being held after the first Tuesday in November at zero.

There are a number of election furphies we can expect in the next few weeks:

1. The Senate does not have the most complex system of election in the world

2. The Man of Steel is not putting off the election. Howard is doing what every other prime minister of Australia does and trying to set the election date to his own advantage.

3. Polls are a wholly owned- and -operated device for increasing newspaper sales. Sometimes they're outright wrong. The trend line and the pattern are all that really tell us anything.

4. No matter who wins here and in Washington the US alliance will continue after the election.

Rain tanks, recycling in water pipeline

The report, by the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, precedes a meeting on Friday to decide on a national approach to water-rights reform.

Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson was reluctant to say yesterday whether he would commit to a plan where farmers, the states and the Commonwealth would each pay one-third of any water-rights buyback dictated by future scientific discoveries.

His spokesman later welcomed the report calling for mandatory rainwater tanks and said the Government was still considering the idea of water bonds. Controversially, the report renews the committee's call to hold back a plan to put another 500 gigalitres into the ailing Murray River until more research on the environmental impacts of extra flows is complete.

'The committee is not swayed by commentators who portray the river as dead or dying,' wrote chairwoman Kay Elson. But South Australian Liberal MP Patrick Secker, representing the Goolwa electorate, said: 'I believe the science in many areas of the Murray-Darling basin is adequate.'

Wow, a newspaper that actually identifies what a parliamentary committee is doing. Water reform is not a sexy issue ad does not often make the floor of the House but a mountain of work is done in the back rooms. I've read the committee's chapter on the Murray-Darling. It's not quite a snow job, but it comes very close. The precautionary principle alone suggests the 500 megalitres cannot harm the river.

Hill won't release abuse dossier for risk of offending US

The Federal Government has refused to make public a detailed 61-page dossier outlining what Australians knew about prisoner abuse in Iraq, with the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill, claiming some details would offend the US.

Senator Hill was yesterday censured in the Senate for his role in misleading Parliament and his failure to take responsibility for the false statements made by him, the Prime Minister and senior Defence officials.

Senator Hill had been asked why he chose to make a 5 page correcting statement when Defence had given him the comprehensive report plus nine large folders of supporting documents.

'The so-called [61-page] report ... was a brief to me,' he said. 'It is not the practice of this Government or previous governments to table its briefs,' he said, adding that Parliament had been 'fully informed'.

Among the material was a scathing assessment of US detention practices, in the form of a situation report, written by Australian military lawyer Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Muggleton, who was stationed with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Senator Hill said Colonel Muggleton's situation report was not released 'because I did not think it was in the best interests of our relationship with the US'.

A government that is basing its claim for re-election (among other things) on White House support is declining to embarrass its political ally. Diplomatic manoeuvres are not n exception to Australia's obligations under international humanitarian law. The depth of Hill's ingenuousness emerged last week in the Senate estimates hearings.

Moreover no-one in government will say why the Australian government did not make any representaitons to Washington to end the abuses the government knew about. More later.

Torture Didn't Work for the French in Algeria Either:

France won key battles by torturing suspects for intelligence. But the bigger lesson is that it lost the war. The fact that French military leaders resorted to the extensive use of torture shows that they had lost the support of the populace at large. It is a lesson that seems to have been ignored by American leaders as they prosecute a war in Iraq.

The French use of torture in Algeria didn't happen overnight. It was a reaction to a deepening crisis in which the French military, originally looking for suspect Algerians, came to see all Algerians as suspects. A signatory to the Geneva Conventions on war, the French government nonetheless insisted that these conventions weren't applicable to the Algerian situation. Its rejection of Geneva protections, and the consequent acceptance of harsher methods of interrogation of prisoners, proved to be fertile breeding ground for torturers.

Since late 2001, because the attacks against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has, like the French in Algeria, displayed a clear ambivalence toward the Geneva Conventions. At times it has professed adherence; at others, it has scoffed. Even the reasoning for rejecting these conventions is identical to earlier French arguments: like the United States today, the French military argued that countering terror required harsh methods.

In Algeria, concerned about countering a 'revolutionary war,' French generals increasingly seized authority from civilian leaders. They ran roughshod over legal protections for the population. The main opposition to French rule, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), seized the initiative. But the FLN was not simply the virtuous revolutionary force beloved of the left; like many weak revolutionary forces (for example, the Vietnamese Viet Minh at the beginning of its war against the French), it too resorted to terror to achieve its aims.

It's probably trite to say also that the French in Algeria insited that their interrogation methods did not amount to torture because of fine distinctions advanced by the French military. The difference in the US case is that it is the civilian leaders in the White House and the Pentagon who are advocating fine distinctions to exclude themselves from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention.