Last night was the last dinner in my 12 month reign as food master for the Ararat Wine & Food Society. It was a great experience to put together a series of meals for the society around different themes and with a great bunch of local chefs.

Last night we were at The Vines in Ararat where chef Sandy O’Malley excelled again with a very French influenced menu designed around a poultry/bird theme. We started with appetisers of foie gras, caramelised apple and walnut crostini and also smoked duck breast with pink grapefruit on witlof. The foie gras on caramelised apple, served on a sliced of toasted baguette was outstanding.

Entrée was the most flavoursome yet exquisitely sparkling quail consomme, with quail and pheasant pasties.

By the time we got to main the assembled crowd was fully in the swing of the evening and looking for another stand out. I served chicken casserole! But what a casserole, coq au vin, made the long way around with the sauce reduced separately (and for days) before the chicken and vegetables were cooked. The chicken was entirely infused with the favour of the wine soaked stock. For the first time in memory, when I stood up to tell everyone about the dish, the room exploded in spontaneous applause for the dish before I had said a word. A better dish, better executed could not have been found for a cold and rainy night in Ararat. The humble chicken outdid itself.

That only left dessert and it didn’t disappoint either. Sauternes baked custard with olive oil and Sauternes cake with Sauternes syrup and baked pears. This was served with a Chateau Roumieu – Lacoste Sauternes, utterly delicious.

I am now looking forward to what delights our new Food Master Peter Thomson and new Wine Master Chandra Ball will bring to the society in the next 12 months. Yum.

As a board member of the East Grampians Health Service today I was privileged to attend two award ceremonies for Lowe Street and Willaura aged care facilities. After an incredibly rigorous accreditation process both facilities passed all 44 standards. A great achievement on the back of very hard work by many staff.

The Hon. David Hawker, Member for Wannon officiated at both ceremonies and presented certificates of achievement. At both centres board members paid tribute to the long and personal interest David has taken in the Ararat and Willaura health services and communities.

NSW is following Victoria’s lead and mandating minimum skills training for firefighters. It seems NSW has learned nothing from Victoria’s experience and will have no recognition of prior learning, forcing highly experienced firefighters to do the course and sit the test.

A NSW firefighter has written to the Land newspaper about these new regs and has managed to encapsulate in a couple of sentences exactly what is wrong with all these regulations.

“Something has subtly shifted. Instead of “our” brigade, it has begun to feel like “their” brigade. Bureaucracy is toxic to the volunteer spirit that has shaped bushfire brigades around Australia.”

The same can be said of food handling requirements for CWA and Red Cross ladies, much of the Working with Children regulation and the never-ending growth in police checks. No wonder more and more volunteers won’t take on leadership roles, get burnt out or just quietly retreat.

In the latest edition of the  Journal of Economic Perspectives (gated version here) Professor Richard Tol, Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam has an important survey article on the published output so far on the economic effects of climate change. I was very surprised to learn only 14 global estimates of the likely economic effects of climate change have appeared in the academic literature. Given climate change is by definition a global phenomenon, and there is significant (if fatally flawed and largely ineffectual) effort going into global response to climate change via Kyoto and the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, I had previously assumed there were large numbers of peer reviewed studies on the global economic impacts of climate change.

As Professor Tol notes:

“Only 14 estimates of the total damage cost of climate change have been published, a research effort that is in sharp contrast to the urgency of the public debate and the proposed expenditure on greenhouse gas emission reduction. These estimates show that climate change initially improves economic welfare. However, these benefits are sunk. Impacts would be predominantly negative later in the century. Global average impacts would be comparable to the welfare loss of a few percent of income, but substantially higher in poor countries. Still, the impact of climate change over a century is comparable to economic growth over a few years.”

From the work that has been done, the impact of climate change, across the whole planet, “is comparable to economic growth over a few years.” Two days ago, the UN revised down its global growth forecast for this year to -2.6 percent so in one year we are experiencing about a third of the entire predicted impact of a century of climate change. The GFC is bad but it certainly doesn’t seem nearly as bad as the catastrophic predictions from climate change regularly appearing in the media. Or to put it another way, if we could all just avoid another GFC for the next century that will ameliorate 1/3 of the claimed affects of climate change.

Another really fascinating part of Prfessor Tol’s paper is his observation that all studies published since 1995 show regions with gains and regions with losses. Some show overall gains at low increases in temperature as well. Winners appear to be Western and Eastern Europe while the losers are Africa and some parts of Asia (although not China apparently).

I’ve always wondered why all the effects of climate change are supposed to be negative. At the very least that seemed to assume a complete lack of adaptability but also as someone who lives in a temperate climate and sees the lush vegetation and speed of plant growth in warmer climes I wondered whether being a bit warmer where I live wouldn’t be a good thing?

Completely apart from whether the climate models are accurate in predicting global warming, and separate to the argument that Australia is only less than 2 percent of global emissions so can’t actually affect the climate outcome by acting alone, there seems this other problem that we aren’t discussing why don’t we just adapt? Surely we should understand our (and the planet’s) capacity to adapt our economy (and society) as an alternative to concluding the only solution to climate change is to reduce CO2 emissions?

Hat tip to Pedro Albuquerque who reckons all this is another example that “the debate on the subject until now has been mostly driven by dogma and not by science.”

Already stretched rural and regional health services in Victoria are poised to face lower funding levels and find it even more difficult to attract doctors and other health professionals because of ill-advised “reforms” to what counts as rural and remote.

The Rudd Government spruiked regional and rural health services as a big winner in Tuesday night’s budget. The centrepiece of the announcement was $134.4m package designed to alleviate the significant doctor and other health professional shortages in rural and regional areas. Under the new policy the more remote a health professional moves, the more extra money they get. So a doctor moving from Melbourne to the back of Bourke would receive $120,000. In theory this could be a useful way to attract doctors to very remote areas. However for Victorian rural health services there are already a number of programs, introduced by the Howard Government, including remote area payments of up to $30,000, that are now  under threat.

Buried in the detail of the announcement is reiteration of a previous announcement that “from 1 July 2009, the outdated and flawed Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas (RRMA) system will be replaced by the Australian Standard Geographical Classification – Remoteness Areas (ASGC-RA) system. ” It all sounds innocuous, perhaps even logical to replace a classification system based on 1991 population figures with one now based on the 2006 census. And if that was all the change meant then few could object. But the differences between the old RRMA system and the new ASGC-RA mean almost all of the rural and regional Victorian population is now classified as Inner Regional.

And this has profound implications for health funding for Victorian GPs and hospitals. It is already extremely difficult to attract medical staff to country Victoria. Despite large overseas recruitment drives so that over 60 percent of rural GPs are overseas trained there are still severe shortages. With most of rural Victoria now being treated the same way as Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo, why would a doctor move to a small country town, with far fewer potential clients, and little chance of professional interaction, when they can move to a bigger regional city with the same incentives?

The Government has apparently  mollified some industry interest groups by promising a “grandfathering” of existing arrangements for Victorian GPs. Yet all that means is rural Victoria is locked into current practice arrangements with no chance of merging with hospitals or other arrangements on pain of severe funding losses. As Dr Bertuch, partner at the Ararat Medical Centre said in yesterday’s Ararat Advertiser the additional funding “will mean nothing if Ararat is reclassified as ‘inner regional’.” The week before in the same newspaper Dr Norman Castle, Director of Mediacl Services at Stawell Regional Health “warned it he Federal Government’s proposal to change rural classifications for health funding is allowed to go through it will be disastrous.”

Like many others I never thought the original national broadband network (NBN) proposal would work. When Telstra said they wouldn’t bid because it couldn’t be done within the bidding parameters I took notice. And I thought in this case that the criticism of Sol Trujillo and Donald Mcgauchie as unreasonable and aggressive was misplaced. The argument seemed to be that because Telstra didn’t agree with either Liberal or Labor governments then Telstra must be in the wrong. Couldn’t it possibly be that government, of whatever hue was the one in the wrong?

As both a farm dweller and a former telecommunications analyst I just couldn’t see how $9.4bn could deliver fast broadband to 98% of the population. My scepticism proved correct when Minister Conroy announced the original plan had been scrapped and instead Labor would spend $43bn in an attempt to deliver super fast broadband to 90% of the population. Some analysts think it will only get to 85%. A huge increase in cost for less coverage and as Malcolm Colless pointed out in today’s Australian that “instead of uniting the community by ending the tyranny of distance, it will divide the population into haves and have-nots.”

I wasn’t that irritated by the previous plan, yes it was $9.4bn and yes Telstra has already indicated further upgrades to the Next G wireless network are in the pipeline making much of the rural part of the plan redundant anyway. (In fact Telstra has already demonstrated the network can achieve 21Mbps up from the current 8Mbps). So it seemed to me that the market was working to deliver me fast broadband  the government was duplicating this effort apparently just to spite Telstra.

But $43billion is really serious money.  And now the speed has been increased to 100Mbps for the lucky urbanites who will be able to get it (and who can afford it), I am very annoyed. Yes I understand I live in a sparsely populated area where the costs of delivering fibre are prohibitive and I am also willing to accept the argument that once we get to 100Mbps then applications become possible that aren’t even imagined now and could drive economic growth. But surely the government’s role, if it must build telecommunications, is to correct for market failure. Instead this government will role out very fast broadband past Australia’s wealthiest suburbs and the biggest beneficiaries will be the already infrastructure privileged inner city wealthy. In its rush to make the big announcement, Labor has completely ignored both geographic equity and income inequality.

The 4th of May marks the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s first day as PM and the start of the deeply unfashionable “neoliberal” revolution. Yet it seems in Australia this fact is not worth reflecting upon, a Google search currently brings up no news hits from Australia. By contrast both the UK and US have devoted serious column inches (or should that be serious screen real estate?) to her legacy.

It is so easy to forget (or for anyone under 40 to have never known) what Britain was like before Thatcher. The country was literally broke; the IMF had been called in. Much of industry was state owned, not just the utilities like water, telecoms and power, there were car companies, steel companies, the mines of course, British Airways, and banks. Over thirty percent of the population lived in government housing. It was a different world.

Yet, “almost 20 years after she left Downing Street, the British economy is once again in deep trouble. Almost everything that Mrs Thatcher opposed – nationalisation, raising taxes, Keynesian economics – is back in fashion. One by one, the signature policies and achievements of the Thatcher years are being dismantled in Britain.” So mused Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times as he pondered the lasting and not so lasting effects of Thatcherism.

Given the clear reversals in the Thatcherism project, is it all over for neoliberalism? Thatcher is famous for her declaration “there is no alternative”. Despite the current fashion for pointing at the excesses of financial markets and blaming it all on the supposed evils of neoliberalism she is still right, there is no alternative. There is no coherent alternative to sound finance, encouraging entrepreneurship, regulating not directing markets and most of all, low taxes. For all the Blairite third way rhetoric or the newer rhetoric of Rudd & Obama, there is no integrated and coherent articulation of a different path to that of Thatcherism. The conversation is still centred on the neoliberal project with merely sniping (and nudging) from the sides.

Take the UK nationalisation of banks, there is no expectation that this is anything more than temporary. Similarly, the massive pump priming and phenomenal budget deficits being run up around the industrialised world are still a short term response. The very fact that the magnitude of this new debt will take years, if not decades, to repay is a legitimate and well-understood counterattack. Despite the hopes and aspirations of the left and greens, nobody has discovered a rebuttal to the laws of supply and demand or the evidence people really do behave in the way public choice theory suggests they will.

A most interesting a thoughtful reflection on the Thatcher years appeared in UK Prospect by David Willetts. The whole piece is very well worth reading but I just want to reflect on one aspect of it. Willetts worked for Thatcher in the PM’s policy unit. In his article, he traces the ideological underpinnings of Thatcher as she herself saw them. Two key influences were Hayek & Bastiat. Thatcher apparently discussed the works of both and mentioned Bastiat in particular as a key influence.

Another influence was much more banal. Thatcher, perhaps more than any other politician of her era understood the practical effects of wartime controls. Not only did she grow up with grocers for parents she is, obviously, a woman. As such, she saw the daily annoyances and petty humiliations of wartime rationing and post-war price and volume controls. This combination of actually reading, discussing and thinking about great liberal thinkers with the day-to-day drudgery of shopping and keeping house provided a deep understanding of the practical effects of the loftiness of The Road to Serfdom.

Thatcher was right, there is no alternative, but to properly protect and enhance her legacy we need the intellectual as well as the practical learning to rebut the soft appeal of nanny statism and ever-increasing regulation that Rudd and co. are so successfully exploiting.

Last night was my first Ararat Wine & Food dinner as foodmaster. The occasion of the much anticipated pig’s trotters filled with pork, shallot and mushroom and served on lentils with a red cabbage and apple salad. Delicious.
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This afternoon I was a guest on the Counterpoint program on Radio National.
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It is always difficult to decide what to blog on when starting up again, should it be something momentous or something of the moment? A story caught my eye in The Age online today by Jason Dowling on the growing cosiness between the Nationals and Labor.

Perhaps inadvertently (these passages are out of order from the original article) Jason has laid out for all to see the innate corruption of the National Party. It is completely clear that their  primary goal is getting more pay for Nat MPs. It has nothing to do with better representation for the long suffering National Party voters.
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