Take up Bradfield's plan to re-create an inland sea in Australia ... an enormous evaporative plain that will drought-proof the Eastern States and make a few thousand miles of new beachfront property. This is positive climate change and environmental engineering in a Snowy Mountain scale. Drive a 300km canal north from Whyalla ... nice and wide with locks ... make a nice cruise ... and then let nature take its course again.

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Stop all the kerfuffle about Internet access ... just bring in BPL!

Broadband through Power Lines ... aka Powerband ... is an extension of Power Line Communications (PLC). This uses everyday electricity systems to carry massive amounts of high speed communications along the same cables as the power.

Probably 90% of Australia is on some sort of mains power. All you need is a kind of set top box decoder ... just plugged in the wall ... and you can receive telephone, broadband, fax, cable tv ... anything, two ways, instantly. The system would require major transmitters at power junctions, but not as complex as telephone exchanges.

This is real and has already been tested in Tassie. It's just there are a lot of very big interests standing in the way. To bring in BPL and PLC into Australia ... the ideal market ... would take a government with real steel to face up to the communications giants.

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The current structure of ministerial portfolios is an impediment to good governance as well as to effective, efficient, ethical and easy to deliver (transparent) government and leads to increasing ‘red tape’.

The current structure (see http://www.aph.gov.au/library/parl/42/ministry/ministry.htm) shows that some ministers are overloaded with portfolios and that the portfolios they hold cut across multiple disciplines. This could explain why a number of department heads burn out staff at such a high rate Which is a waste of taxpayers money.

A sound hierarchical structure is required to overcome this problem. The opposition and public service should also have the same structure in order to: reduce misunderstandings brought about by not knowing who to speak to about what policy; Burning out staff by overloading the elected representative and their staff. One of my concerns is the 3 hours sleep the Prime Minister seems to ‘boast’ about. I do not believe that it is in the best interest of the Australian public to have a PM (or indeed any elected representative) who is afflicted by sleep deprivation (even if it is self inflicted).

A better portfolio structure will reduce stress and burn out (by enabling more efficient delegation of duties), save millions of dollars (by reducing redundant activities caused by cross portfolio disciplines, that often lead to ‘red tape’) and improve all our standard of living.

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This idea presents a fair mechanism for determining a politician's salary.

At election time, a politician offers to supply their skills to perform the job of representing an electorate in parliament and the electorate accepts or rejects the offer by voting. However, the crucial difference between how a politician's renumeration is determined and how ours is, is that they set their own pay at will without having to bargain with their employers-- their employers being us, the voting public.

A solution to this discrepancy is to print on the election ballot-papers, right next to their name, the total amount that they offer to do the job for. Each politician sets their own individual bid. This binding bid is the TOTAL remuneration they receive- it includes their salary, super and any other monetary entitlements. In this way the politicians within an electorate are now competitively bidding against each other. This solution determines a politician’s salary according to a pricing mechanism common to almost all transactions of goods and services in our economy. This is the simplest, cheapest and easiest system to implement that provides a mechanism of negotiation between the politicians and the public.

Since as a society we support the principal of a minimum wage to maintain living standards the proposal is modified to embrace this by imposing a minimum allowed bid. It is set to the average Australian income to provide extra incentive for politicians to increase the financial well being of the public.

It should be pointed that by this system it is possible for politicians to be paid a lot more than current. This is expected to happen, because if the voters think they're worth it they should be paid more.
Its also likely that some are paid less. However, since their salary has been determined by a mechanism common to almost all other wages and salaries in society they have no grounds to complain.

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Salary Sacrificing is just another middle class welfare fraud that the Howard government put in place to keep poor people and low income wage earners poor at their expense. Why should higher income saleried income earners and public servants have tax deductions that poorer people can't access? there isn't any reason to justify this now the economy is in recession. Ban Salary Sacrificing agreements and make people pay full weight on their taxable incomes like everybody else.

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Australia has a free immigration agreement with New Zealand where by any New Zealander can fly into Australia and reside as a permanent resident and Australians can fly to New Zealand and do the same. The Australian government should work to strike similar agreements with other nations that have similar political institutions (rule of law) and similar economic circumstances. Examples might include Ireland, Singapore or Canada.

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Remove the $4,000 baby bonus given for the birth of a child.

Give the $4,000 to males who have an irreversable vasectomy, or to females of birthing age who have a tubal ligation.

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Most fundamental to our society is information - the ABC and SBS need proper funding, to restore our access to authoritative, unbiased sources which provide a proper spread of ideas and opinion - unlike commercial media.
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Provide greatly increased funding for pure research in our universities - so that research can again operate in topics that have no commercial gain. Also restore the research and development, and investment tax subsidies for Australian companies, so they are assisted to establish themselves - and to be independent of overseas companies for information and techniques.
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Restore the rights (and even the responsibilities) of CSIRO and other scientists to again speak out on issues freely, and establish this as an essential source of information in a democratic society, even when contrary to government opinion.

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All the great deserts of the world are the same distance from the equator. Will this change with Global Warming?

Recently in Australia it appears that the droughts are prolonged now when getting down around the Murray River. This indicates to me that the "no rain latitude" has moved south.

Does anybody have information on the northern hemisphere that also fits in with this? Possibly the dry band is on a wobble and will dissapear completely.

Any thoughts please??

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Open up rail as an alternative to aircraft travel between this route... of course we'd have to make sure to aviod potential railway crossing disasters.

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