KEVIN Rudd says he was alerted to potential safety problems with the government’s home insulation program as early as August 2009 and will be subjected to Opposition questioning on the matter next week.
The Prime Minister was forced to give a detailed run down of his knowledge of problems with the scheme in parliament today, conceding he received notification about compliance issues on August 14 last year.
Archive for March 11th, 2010
What did Rudd know, when did he know it?
Sounds good
While I often read book reviews I don’t usually buy books on the basis of published reviews. When I do I often find that the review was better than the book. That was certainly the case when I bought Paul Cartledge’s Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World – it was good, but just not up the review I had read. So I’m wondering about a review of A.W. Montford‘s The hockey stick illusion. It is a glowing review.
Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.
This line is simply fantastic.
I never thought I would find myself unable to put a book down because—sad, but true—I wanted to know what happened next in an r-squared calculation.
That is very sad; but if anyone is confident enough to write that they wanted to find out more about an R2 calculation, then perhaps the book is well worth reading.
Selgin on central banks
Although the advent of fiat money has not rendered central banks any less capable of generating booms and busts, it has considerably complicated the possibility of fundamental reform because a fiat standard, unlike a gold or silver standard, must be monopolistically administered if it is to retain any value, and because allowing commercial banks the right to issue notes that are themselves redeemable in fiat money, whatever advantages such a policy may have, will not by itself deprive the fiat-money-issuing authority of its crisis-making capacity.
It is important that people recognize the route by which we came to the present impasse so that they might shed their essentially romantic notion of central banking and instead approach it, as Walter Bagehot once did, as a fundamentally dangerous institution—one still more in need of confinement and taming than it was in Bagehot’s own day.
George Selgin in the latest The Independent Review.
Doing the right thing
The home insulation scheme is clearly a shemozzle. Greg Combet, however, has started off on a good note.
I have spoken with a member of each of the families, and on behalf of the Government and myself as Minister, expressed my deepest regret and sympathy.
Well said.
