politics – dangermouse.net

Cooler after hot weekend

Not much to talk about today. Thankfully that cool change came through after midnight and dropped the temperature a lot. Today was much more pleasant and comfortable.

I did some ethics classes online in the morning, then headed into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was about data presentation, including tables and graphs.

While there I saw posters up on noticeboards about an anti-Donald-Trump protest rally to be held at the university on Thursday. I don’t know how many people in the USA are aware of this, but people in other countries are organising anti-Trump protests – that’s how awful him and his actions as US President are. And I’ve got to say, a lot of us are wondering where are the protests in the USA? Why aren’t there millions of people cramming the streets? Why haven’t New York and Washington and Los Angeles ground to a halt? Because from here it looks like Americans are okay with the destruction of democracy and society there.

I know a lot of Americans aren’t okay with it. In fact probably all of you who might be reading this. But, like, why isn’t anything happening about it? We’re over here in Australia boycotting US goods and organising protests, and the USA is just radio silence.

More photos from Tokyo: Shibuya

Friday night was online games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning. I order non-perishable stuff online for pick-up since it’s quicker, but I select fruit and vegetables by hand when I’m doing the pickup after some bad experiences with the produce that the supermarket picked for me the first few times.

Anyway, I normally buy an orange every week to go into a fruit salad that I use to top my breakfast muesli. But oranges are seasonal and when they’re not in season here in the southern hemisphere, like now, Australia imports oranges from the USA. But with all of the recent stupid/evil things that the Trump administration is doing over there, I decided it would be a good idea not to buy anything from the USA where I can avoid it. I’ve been keeping up with the news especially about Canada, how Trump threatened to annex Canada, and the resulting widespread disaffection with the US and boycotting of US goods by Canadians.

Trump hasn’t threatened Australia as directly, but he did in the past week initiate high tariffs on Australian imports. Which in economic terms makes no sense whatsoever, since Australia has a fairly large trade deficit with the USA, so any reduction in trade is only going to hurt the USA more than it hurts us. Probably exacerbated by the fact that politically savvy Australians like me will boycott American products, and because of the imbalance in trade even a small percentage reduction in Australian imports will have a much larger relative effect on the US than the relatively small amount of exports we make to the US. Most of our exports are to Asia, so Trump’s tariffs aren’t even really going to hurt us very much. It’s just crazy that he’s bullying a much smaller economy in a way that actually hurts the US more than us.

But hey, the more countries that stand up to this monster, hopefully the faster we’ll get to whatever action it will be that eventually stops this freight train to madness and starts returning the USA to a normal country.

At lunch on Friday I took Scully for a walk and got some fish & chips. It was a warm day, but thankfully my favourite lunch spot overlooking the harbour now has new tree growth near the seating to provide some shade.

After some ethics classes I had dinner with my wife up at the local Greek restaurant. It was a sultry evening, and dining al fresco is kind of nice, though honestly it would have been nice if it was a little cooler. We’re having a mini-heatwave covering Friday and the weekend. Overnight minimum temperatures are around 24°C, with high humidity around 90%. Today we had 32°C maximum, and tomorrow is forecast to be 37°C.

This meant my 5k run this morning was pretty awful. It was 25°C and 82% humidity at 9am, and my running was really sluggish. I recorded the slowest time I’ve run since 2021! I fear tomorrow morning will be even worse.

Today I stayed inside as much as possible, working on Darths & Droids, and some more photos from my trip to Japan. For dinner I made fusilli alla norma, with roasted eggplant cubes and a tomato sauce.

Today I processed photos from Shibuya on Tokyo. The famous Shibuya scramble corssing:

Shibuya Scramble Square, the building on the top of which is the Shibuya Sky observation platform:

A view of Tokyo from the top:

Looking north to the centre of Tokyo with the sun going down:

Major urban redevelopment plans

I said yesterday nothing could prevent Australia from losing the first cricket Test to India, and that was borne out today. India won by 295 runs, a massive victory. So India take a 1-0 lead in the series, with four games to play. It’s very hard to see Australia coming back in any way, so comprehensive was the thrashing.

Today, the New South Wales government released plans for redevelopment of several zones around Sydney, including an area close to where I live. There’s already some major construction work going on very close to us, which I’ve mentioned before. Several blocks of single detached houses have been demolished and construction is underway on apartment blocks up to 15 or so storeys tall.

Here’s a render of the full development proposal. (© State of New South Wales, released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.)

The white additions are buildings already approved and/or under construction (including the ones I mentioned above). The blue buildings are the newly proposed developments, including the semi-transparent tower in the foreground. Almost all of these sites currently are one or two storey buildings, so it’s a huge increase in the height of buildings in the area. The plan says this will add 5900 new homes (all apartments, I think) to the area. I guess that’s about 15,000 extra people living in the immediate area.

Oh, and some of our favourite places are slated for demolition and redevelopment under this plan. Our favourite pizza place. A slew of other restaurants we’ve frequented over the years. I don’t think there’s any chance this won’t go ahead. Government plans at this stage tend to be inevitable.

I guess we just have to live through it and see how it turns out.

New content today:

Yeah, that happened

Much of the day I had the TV on with updates from the US election. Enough said.

I spent time composing Irregular Webcomic! strips with the photos I took yesterday. I took Scully for a walk at lunch and had some fish & chips, sitting in my favourite lookout spot overlooking the harbour.

The day was hot and the air was a bit grey with pollution unfortunately. We’re supposed to have two more hot days, around 30°C or a bit over, before a cool change for the weekend.

I also started the marking work for the university image processing final assessment reports. I need to get those done in the next week or so.

New content today:

Local council election day

Today was election day in the New South Wales local council elections. We have three levels of government in Australia:

Federal: Covering all of Australia. At this level we elect the Parliament of Australia and (indirectly) the Prime Minister.
State: Each state elects a state government, generally a Parliament similar to the Federal one, led by a Premier. The contiguous territories also elect their own territorial governments. I live in New South Wales, so vote in the NSW state elections.
Council: The states are divided into Local Government Areas (LGAs), usually called “councils”. For example, the state of New South Wales currently has 128 Local Government Areas, 33 of which are within metropolitan Sydney. The smallest covers less than 6 square kilometres, and the largest over 53,000 square kilometres. Voters elect a small group of councillors, who elect the Mayor of the LGA from among them.

I’m in the North Sydney Council area, so today I was voting for councillors for this LGA. My wife went to a yoga class first thing in the morning, and after that we met up at a local high school which was set up as a polling place. It wasn’t very busy, the queue in front of us was literally only two people, so we were in and out after voting in just a couple of minutes. While I was waiting there for my wife to arrive, two men approached and one went in to vote, while the other waited outside. A polling place worker came over and asked the waiting man if he was here to vote, and he said no, he didn’t live here, he was visiting from the USA. This sparked a conversation between the poll worker and the man about the differences between our electoral systems.

After voting, we walked home a long way, via the shops at Waverton to pick up a loaf of bread and so my wife could see the new Bay Brew cafe that has opened up in the premises of the old Waterview Cafe.

At home I worked on a couple of new Darths & Droids strips. I also played a game of Root with my wife. We haven’t played this game for several weeks, so it was good to pull it out again. This time I played the Eyrie (birds) while my wife played the Alliance again, and we used the bot players for the Marquise (cats) and Vagabond. It’s the first time we’ve used the Vagabot, and it was surprisingly effective, racing to the lead mid-game. But my wife managed to haul it in and overtake to win, with everyone else just a few points behind.

For dinner tonight we drove over to Four Frogs crêperie and had galettes. They had a special with Swiss cheese, gorgonzola, bacon, walnuts, and fresh figs, which I tried. It was pretty good! Rather than have a dessert crêpe, I had a second savoury one, with chorizo and mushrooms, which was also nice.

I didn’t do a 5k run today, since I did one yesterday evening, before the board games night started.

New content today:

Referendum and D&D

A quick one tonight because I’m home late after running Dungeons & Dragons up at the local science toy shop this evening. I ran a one-shot adventure using a puzzle dungeon themed around eyesight, and had a total of four players, with a teenage brother and sister and their mother playing, along with the guy who was in the game last time I DMed there. They had a blast figuring out the clues and working out clever ways to defeat the monsters and avoid the dangers.

The other main thing today was gong to vote in the referendum on the proposal to amend the Australian Constitution to establish an indigenous committee to advise Parliament on matters of importance to indigenous Australians. Unfortunately the proposal has been soundly defeated. But at least voting was east – we walked up to the nearest polling station and there was literally no queue at all. We were in and out in about 3 minutes. But alas that polling station had no democracy sausage barbecue going, so I didn’t get my sausage for voting.

New content today:

Too busy to make comics, again

I had hoped to have time to make new Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week, but I’ve been so busy I just couldn’t squeeze it in. So I’ve declared this a hiatus week and will hopefully get back to making some more for next week.

I had a full raft of ethics classes today, three in the morning plus an individual extension class in the afternoon. That ends the Buying and Selling topic. Tomorrow I need to write the new topic on Language, in time for three classes in a row in the evening. (So tomorrow is going to pretty busy too.) Also today I did outlines for the next three weeks of classes after that. I’m supposed to have outlines ready 4 weeks in advance, but I’ve neglected to keep up to date for three weeks!

In interesting news following Saturday’s election, today Anthony Albanese was sworn in as the new Prime Minister of Australia. This was despite the election results not being finalised and—technically—it not being certain yet that he will actually win. It seems highly likely that he will be able to form government and become Prime Minister, but it is not guaranteed at this point. With vote counting still underway, it’s possible that the Labor Party will not win enough seats to command a majority in Parliament. If so, they will need to negotiate with the minor parties and independent MPs in order to secure enough supportive votes to form government. It’s possible (although as I said unlikely) that they will withhold their votes and that Albanese will not have been elected Prime Minister.

So why was he sworn in today?? I’m glad you asked!

Normally, the new Prime Minister would indeed not be sworn in until the election results are final and, in the case of a minority government, they had succeeded in negotiating support from the minor parties/independents. The previous government goes into “caretaker” mode at the calling of the election, and the previous Prime Minister remains in office as “caretaker PM” until the newly elected one is sworn in—after the election results have been finalised. The caretaker government retains full powers, but by convention doesn’t actually do anything except in cases of emergency*.

However, in this election there was a special case. The Quad Summit is an international leaders’ meeting held between Australia, the USA, Japan, and India, and this year’s meeting was scheduled to begin on 24 May – tomorrow. With election counting still underway and the result not yet finalised, but a defeat of the previous Prime Minister Scott Morrison looking almost inevitable, it would have been very bad for Morrison to actually go to the meeting as a caretaker Prime Minister with potentially only hours left in office. By convention, he would have been unable to commit Australia to any decisions there.

So, on Sunday (yesterday, the day after the election), Morrison officially resigned as Prime Minister. This forced the Governor-General to—according to the Australian Constitution—either appoint a new government or call a new election. Calling a new election while the results of the one held on Saturday are still being counted is obviously ludicrous, so the Governor-General chose to appoint the likely winner, Anthony Albanese, as an interim Prime Minister, until the election result is finalised and it is known if he will actually be able to form government and claim the role of Prime Minister. And so Anthony Albanese is now Prime Minister and flew to Tokyo today to join the Quad Summit tomorrow and negotiate with Joe Biden, Fumio Kishida, and Narendra Modi.

* Such as in 1914, when Britain declared war on Germany in the middle of an Australian election campaign, thus forcing the caretaker government to immediately begin making war plans.

New content today:

Election results and more rain

Yesterday’s election has resulted in a change of government here in Australia. The conservative Liberal Party government has been replaced by a progressive Labor Party government. It’s not fully clear yet if they’ll have a majority of seats in Parliament or will need to rely on support from the crossbench, but it’s pretty much settled that Labor will form either a majority or minority government and Anthony Albanese will be the incoming Prime Minister.

The result in my own electorate of North Sydney is very interesting, and reflects a sea change of voter opinion across many inner city electorates across the country. North Sydney has been a very safe Liberal seat, but the sitting member was ousted by an independent candidate. This is a pattern repeated in several other electorates in Sydney and other cities – female independents running on a platform of addressing climate change, unseating sitting members of a government that has been lagging badly behind the rest of the world on climate change policies. We will have a record number of independents in the new Parliament, with at least five newly elected ones joining the six who were previously there. Labor plans to address climate change, but if they need the support of these new independents to pass legislation, then they will be able to hold out for stronger action.

This is a significant change in the direction Australia has been heading. We’ve been a global laggard for the past decade due to the entrenched conservative government. Hopefully this turns a corner and we’ll start to see more responsible climate policies in the near future.

Speaking of climate, today was again miserably wet. The rainfall is forecast to last all week, in yet another bout of depressing wet weather. You can see the effects of this prolonged rainy weather in various minor news stories that keep popping up. There are so many stories about people battling mould in their homes, simply unable to to get the humidity low enough to prevent it. And today on the evening news there was a story about sports clubs facing pressure to change their membership fee rules, because of so many repeated cancellations of sporting events due to bad weather. Normally you pay a fee and there’s no refund if an event is cancelled due to weather. But many players and parents are getting increasingly annoyed at having paid fees while getting no sport at all for weeks and weeks on end.

The Bureau of Meteorology issued another mid-range forecast today, stating that we can expect higher than average rainfall to continue throughout winter (i.e. the next three months). Everyone you talk to here is is just sick of the rain and will tell you repeatedly how awful it is. There are ridiculous numbers of slugs crawling all over everything – you need to pay careful attention whenever you go out for a walk, to avoid stepping on the slugs that litter all of the footpaths.

Today I spent time doing another academic paper proofreading job. I wanted to try and finish it today, because I have lots of other work to go on with this week. Fortunately it was a conference paper and not a journal paper, so it was shorter than the previous ones I’ve done, and I managed to complete it today. I had time to take Scully for a walk, and to cook a miso-glazed baked cauliflower for dinner – one of our favourite recipes, though it takes a bit of effort.

New content today:

Gaming and Voting

Friday was wet and cold and miserable, weather-wise. After enjoying a huge 4 days without rain, we’re now in for a solid week of forecast rain. I’m pretty sure we’ve now reached the point where there’s been more rainfall in 2022 (so far!) than in any (full) year since 1996. And we’re still less than 5 months into the year. I know I keep going on about it, but it’s truly a ridiculous amount of rain we’ve had in the past few months.

And it was also freezing cold all day. The temperature never reached as high as 15°C, making it the coldest day of the year so far. Definitely an early taste of winter.

Friday evening I went to a friend’s place for board games night. My wife took Scully and the car to go visit her mother for the evening, so I took a train over.

We played a case from MicroMacro: Crime City while waiting for the sixth person to arrive. This is a very cool game that plays like a Where’s Wally? crime investigation. There’s a huge poster with an isometric drawing of dozens of city blocks, populated with thousands of tiny people. You take a set of clue cards and have to spot various things in the drawing to advance the investigation, eventually building up a sequence of events that explains a crime, implicates a suspect, and provides motive and means. It took us about 20 minutes working together peering across the map, and was a lot of fun.

After this we played a six-player round of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. Then we split into two groups of three, to play Dune Imperium and Azul: Queen’s Garden (the one I played). This is somewhat like its three predecessor games in the Azul series, but more different than any of the previous iterations, and considerably more complex. It’s the game I tried to buy last week. Now I’ve played it, I definitely want to get a copy. Following this, our subgroup of three played a game of Draftosaurus while the others finished Dune. To finish up we played a six-player game of Skull.

One of the guys gave me a lift home, so that was good – I didn’t have to catch a train around 11pm.

Today was election day, with Australia voting for the next federal government. We got up early and went to the nearest polling station, arriving soon after it opened at 8am. There was hardly any queue, maybe ten people ahead of us when we arrived.

As we waited, a guy in the queue right in front of us was hassling the staff about masks. They were handing out masks and asking everyone to wear one, but not forcing them to. And this guy was putting on a rant about how if it wasn’t compulsory he wasn’t going to do it, how he was here to “exercise his democratic right” and if the democratically elected government didn’t have a law requiring him to wear a mask then he wouldn’t.

He asked the polling booth volunteer if he had to and she started saying, “I’ve been told…” and he interrupted her with, “So you just do whatever someone tells you? Is that what you think democracy is?” I got so annoyed that I actually told him to shut up and stop hassling the staff. There should have been a security bouncer there to back her up, but this poor woman was all alone. And it probably didn’t help that she looked Indian/Sri Lankan. I bet the guy wouldn’t have been so vocal if it was a white male.

Voting done, we returned home to huddle inside out of the cold and rain all day. We only ventured out again at dinner time to go get some French galettes and crepes for dinner from a French restaurant. It’s a good place to go in cold and rainy weather, because their “outdoor” tables where we can sit with Scully are actually inside an arcade, so very well sheltered.

And now it’s time to settle in for the vote counting and watch the unfolding of how we’ll be governed fr the next three years…

New content today:

Bath day for Scully

Scully got a bath today. It was a nice day for it, being mostly sunny, and only a brief sprinkle of rain in the morning. (I counted it up – we’ve only had 18 days without rain since the start of February.)

Before bath time, my wife took Scully down to the Kirribilli Markets to check them out and get some gifts for her sister. And for me – she got me some nice chocolates.

News-wise, the main thing today was the Prime Minister has called the federal election, which will take place on Saturday 21 May. This was pretty much expected, but not confirmed until today. The incumbent Liberal-National Coalition (a conservative alignment) is way behind in the polls, so maybe this time the Labor Party (a more progressive party) can take power, unlike the unexpected come-from-in-front loss they managed three years ago.

Besides two online ethics classes today, I mostly worked on my current secret project, so there’s not too much more I can say. For dinner I made pasta with the bunya nut pesto I made the other day. I also helped my wife by taking photos of a whole bunch of hand-made bangles so that she can put them up on her Etsy shop.

New content today: