Oh, nice.

That treacherous Liberal Party has turned Glen Waverley into a suburb of Beijing and instigated the genocide destruction of our white Australian identity.
Vote 1 Neil Henry Smith One Nation to enforce a 100 years moratorium on coloured immigration.
– One Nation candidate for Bruce’s pamphlet, as quoted in The Monash Journal. (via Polly Morgan)

The Journal also notes that Family First chose to preference this piece of excrement above The Greens, Labor and the Democrats, using the excuse that the One Nation have no chance of winning the seat, whereas the latter do. Pathetic: frankly in that position, I’d rather hold onto whatever scruples and morals I could muster and put him last.

I wonder what my local FF candidate, Joyce Khoo, thinks of it.

It underscores for me the concerns over Family First. Despite the name, they’re really just ultra-conservatives, claiming they’re “for families” (as if the other parties are anti-family). No wonder some call them Fundies First.

Funnily enough, today’s online Dilbert dips into this territory:

Once again, we all have to decide who to put last. No One Nation option for me, but if FF are elsewhere preferencing them above most others, they might get the gong. CEC would have to be in the running again, too.

But I’m in Goldstein, and nominally safe Liberal, so it may not make a lot of difference. What will be more interesting is how the senate vote goes.

Oh, and for those pondering if they should use their primary vote on a minor party they like better than the big two: Yes, you should. As Beth Spencer in The Age explains, it makes a big difference to the funding of those smaller parties, it helps send the message of what and who you really support, and of course your vote isn’t wasted; it will go to the biggies as the preferences get distributed.

Anybody else spot this long column advert on page 8 of The Age today? I wonder who wrote it, and if things went to plan and Madeleine read it this morning over breakfast?

Intriguing.

So after pondering how heat-efficient my house is (at least for summer), and my water consumption, I was thinking about the rest of my energy use.

Since I don’t have air con, I’m hoping the house is fairly efficient, despite heavy use of two computers. Recent bills show usage at around 8-10 kilowatt hours per day, throughout the year, with a peak of 11 kWh per day in July 2006.

That makes around 3300 kWh a year. Apparently the national average is around 6000 kWh, but 3500 kWh in cities like Perth which aren’t super-hot and have natural gas available for hot water (which is what really burns up the watts for those who have to use electricity for it).

Most of my lights are now CFLs, but there’s probably more I can do on this front, such as setting things up to be able to easily turn off most appliances at the wall instead of leaving them on standby power. Solar electricity is an option, though quite expensive, even with the current subsidies.

Cooking, hot water and central heating for me is by natural gas. Recent bills show usage at about 21 megajoules per day during summer, but a whopping 230 MJ per day in the coldest part of winter. Not sure how that compares with other homes.

Solar hot water (gas-boosted) is reasonably affordable with the rebates, so I’m seriously looking at the options there. But given the bulk of the gas is probably central heating, better insulation may be more effective in the short term.

What I’d like to see from the federal government is commitment to help people reduce their energy needs. Better public transport will help a lot. (See the PTUA’s evaluation of policies). And for buildings, more money for household and commercial solar installations could be the way to go.

For all the talk about nuclear and the myth of clean coal, both of these will cost years and billions and billions to develop (if they work at all). And in the mean time, solar technology is available now, and mass production for Australia’s sunny cities should see the price drop. So how about the right mix of subsidies and rebates to get solar panels up on more roofs?

Get the states mandating better building designs (hint: if you must have huge windows, don’t have them facing the summer sun), and we’ll be going a fair way towards reducing our energy use, and generating more of it sustainably.

Summer is coming. You can tell because it’s baking hot in the sun, the flies are much more plentiful, and outside in the evening when all should be still, instead you can hear the hum or household air-conditioners echoing across the ‘burbs.

Yesterday I spent most of the day at home, as one of the kids wasn’t feeling well. I’m pleased to say that while outside it peaked at around 36 degrees, inside it got only up to about 26 — not brilliant, but quite bearable. So while I do plan to get a ceiling fan fitted in the livingroom, the expense and pollution of air-conditioning seems unnecessary.

(Coincidentally at work yesterday there were aircon faults, so for a while it was warmer there than at home.)

I put it down to home designers of the past being clever about low-tech methods of making houses resistant to heat — even weatherboard houses like mine. Eaves and blinds are in place. Double-glazing and external shutters/blinds aren’t, and I don’t off-hand know if the orientation of the house and windows meets current thinking on the optimum use of shade, but we seem to get by.

In contrast, some of the newer houses you see have enormously big windows, no eaves, no shade, and enormously big air conditioners to match.

Similarly, when my sister got back from Britain a couple of years ago, she mentioned that many of the Brits don’t know how to handle the heat. Some were just unaware of simple things like parking the car in the shade on sunny days, or keeping the blinds down on hot days.

Heat retention in my house may be an issue though. With several hours of windows and doors left open last night, and the temperature outside having dropped to about 18 degrees, inside it was still hovering around 24. I guess that’s where air con really would come in handy.

Eh? From last Monday’s Herald Sun:

Melbourne restaurant manager Monique Moussi rented out her home in Seddon, on the city’s edge, in favour of a fast-paced and closely networked lifestyle in the fashionable Docklands precinct near the city’s heart.

She’s far too busy running the family restaurant, Medici’s, to maintain a house and garden, and loves the sense of community inner-city living offers.

Seddon? “City’s edge”? This would be the Seddon that’s just a couple of kilometres from the city centre — and even closer to Docklands — in the heart of the inner-western suburbs real estate explosion? To most people, Seddon is inner-city.

Mind you, if she’s working in Docklands, it must be a bonus to live there too. That’s one way to make the commute easier.

Speaking of suburbs and houses and trying to segue awkwardly into something else, I was about to get cranky with the bank, as internet banking was telling me my home loan interest rate was still at the variable rate — now 7.89% after the recent rise, above the 7.85% fixed rate agreed to just before the rise. But they seem to have fixed it now, so I’m happy again.

So if and when the next rise hits, I’ll be ready.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the short Doctor Who charity scene just released…

You can also watch it and find out more detail at the BBC’s web site.

And don’t forget to donate here to Children In Need.

My response (after you’ve watched it — spoilers!)
(more…)

The No Junk Mail sticker is very effective. I rarely get anything — notable recent exceptions being an ALP brochure about the local candidate, and Coalition brochures with lots of red ink slagging off the ALP. I wonder if electoral material is exempt?

(Local sitting member Andrew Robb looks a bit like an older Kevin Rudd, doesn’t he.)

But these aren’t as objectionable as a personally addressed letter from the Coalition which included an Australian Government Coat of Arms and text that implied it was about my electoral enrolment. Oh, of course some junk mail sneaks in with the local papers, but even the local papers are sporadic now; perhaps half the distributors think they’re Junk Mail.

Admittedly I miss some of the catalogues a little bit, and so end up reading them when I go over to my mum’s place. But I just discovered the Catalogue Central web site where you can browse a wide range of catalogues online — and those they don’t have on their own site, they link to official sites if they exist. Very cool.

(Note to the Americans: in Australia we don’t have a big issue with catalogue mailing lists, which Buzz Bruggeman recently noted can be stopped via CatalogChoice.org… though some claim it doesn’t really work. Junk mail AU means unaddressed brochures.)

Speaking of junk mail, Hummer UK spammed me. Seriously, apart from the fact that I’m on the wrong continent, is there anybody less likely to want to buy a Hummer than me? So not only do they they make those hulking great Enviro-Bastard tanks (No, a Hummer is NOT greener than a Prius), burning up the planet’s resources… they also spam people. Evil gits.

Next they’ll be sending me junk mail.

OMG, the teenagers really do say “random”. I heard it twice on the train yesterday.

They didn’t seem to be referencing Summer Heights High, either.