To paraphrase a popular international ad campaign - Buying that dress on special: $150; new digital TV: $1000; supporting free speech and the protection of whistle-blowers: priceless!

Australians have been taking part in the post-Christmas sales, and credit card companies have been doing a roaring trade; as usual facilitating the purchase of bargains at various stores around the country.

Thankfully, the only reason customers are denied the opportunity of buying those bargains is if their budgeting is a bit off and they have overshot their credit limit. For people who want to use their credit cards to donate money to WikiLeaks, however, it is a very different story.

The recent resignation of Mike Taylor, the chairman of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, has sent a clear warning signal to the federal government about the threat to water reform in the Basin.

Whether that signal is heeded will only be answered by the government's actions in the months to come.

Since the release of the guide to the draft Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the government has taken a hands-off approach, thinking it can be all things to all people and avoid the tough decisions. The Coalition has done what it does best, which is oppose vital change simply to score points.

In the early hours of Monday 8th November the Moroccan army and security forces attacked an estimated 20,000 Saharawi civilian protesters from the makeshift protest camp at Gadaym Izik near Laayoune. The forces killed unarmed men, women, the elderly and young children – reports suggest that about 30 people were killed. 

The Saharawi people were protesting about their living conditions in the territory, occupied by Morocco since 1975.  Morocco has denied access to the area not only to the UN, but also humanitarian agencies and the international press.

It was both sad and inspiring this week to look back on the life and achievements of Professor Frank Fenner, who passed away at the age of 95.

The Howard government's response in 2001 to the arrival of the MV Tampa by cynically cutting parts of Australia out of our legal framework to deny asylum seekers legal rights was the catalyst that led me to enter politics through the Greens.

Nine years on, I, like many others, gave a sigh of relief as the High Court ruled that asylum seekers detained on Christmas Island must have the same right to legal review of decisions relating to their cases as asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by plane.

The decision was a rare, unanimous signal from the highest court in the land telling governments of different political persuasions that they had got it terribly wrong on detention for close to a decade.

Aid groups have told us that donations from the public to the Pakistan flood crisis are well down on past disaster relief efforts. Bob is encouraging all Australians to make a small donation this weekend to help save Pakistan from hunger and disease.

The scale of crisis in Pakistan is unbelievable - more than 20 million people are affected. That's more than the Boxing Day Tsunami, the Kashmir Earthquake and the Haiti crisis combined. People are stranded across a vast area and now disease is a real threat as people are forced to drink dirty water to survive. Pakistan desperately needs clean water, emergency food supplies and sanitation for more than 1 million children and their families.

Bob is urging everyone to give to the Australian organisations providing relief in Pakistan. A full list of organisations and their contact details is available here:
www.acfid.asn.au/what-we-do/humanitarian-emergencies/appeals-pakistan-floods

Following my comments about reform of the national electricity market, we've been asked to similarly outline our thoughts on the Government's policies to improve the energy efficiency of the buildings they occupy.

According to the Energy Efficiency Council, governments in Australia occupy 32 per cent of the commercial office market, and as highly sought-after tenants they have an even greater impact on the property market than their size alone would suggest. The ability of governments to make bulk purchases also means that they can bring down the cost of energy efficiency products for both agencies and the wider community, transforming the market for energy efficiency services and products.

The Pitch section on ABC TV's Gruen Nation was about the Greens last night. The Republic of Everyone advertising agency was tasked with making a positive advertisement about the Greens, and this was the result:

Many people have been asking about the Greens position on reform of the National Electricity Market - the NEM.

While this is not a topic that is of much interest to mainstream media, it is hugely important because the design and regulation of NEM fails to create any incentive to improve energy efficiency - in fact it creates barriers to energy efficiency and peak demand reductions, as well as both large renewable energy generators and small distributed co-generation systems.

This is a problem because electricity prices, which have already jumped significantly in recent years, are expected to rise by up to 42 per cent over the next few years (even before the imposition of carbon pricing). This is because the monopolies that manage the electricity grid are planning to spend more than $40 billion on expanding and augmenting the network.

Rather than spending billions on more generators and expanding the electricity grid to meet increasing demand, what we should be doing is investing in energy efficiency to avoid the need for new generators and grid augmentation in the first place. From the broader economy point of view, this is the much cheaper option.