Are we seeing the beginning of the end of the Bashar Assad Baath regime in Syria? A large rebel force had advanced on the capital from three directions and loyalist troops are battling rebel forces in Damascus in an attempt to seize control of ground they had lost in the capital. Will the overthrow of this dictator allow the emergence of rising Islamist political power in Syria as has happened elsewhere in the Middle East with the so called "Arab Spring"?

Assad is the last representative of a political form that has dominated the Middle East for half a century. This form is that of the secular strongman, the dictator backed by a merciless intelligence apparatus that ruthlessly suppresses any revolts.

The Syrian regime violently represses the popular uprising, increasing sectarian tensions and radicalism, while sanctions erode the economy and weaken the middle class. The regime--a police state held together by fear and corruption ---- will stop at nothing to remain in power. There will be more massacres to come even though Assad is finished.

Let's hope that the voters of Melbourne decide that the Greens deserve the Victorian seat of Melbourne in the by-election held today.

The by-election has been sucked into the vortex of national politics with the Canberra press gallery journalists indulging in their h overheated rhetoric with its federal implications.The shock waves will be felt in Canberra, Gillard will be further weakened, and the ALP will face an existential crisis.

The end of Gillard Labor is written into the basic structure of the world is the Gallery's basic narrative, and every event that happens is fitted into this frame as they act to fan the flames. So what happens if the ALP narrowly wins the Melbourne by-election?

The Canberra media gallery appears to have forgotten that the Greens came within 2.0% in both 2002 and 2006 before being shot down by Liberal preferences in 2010. So the suggestion that a Green win this time should in and of itself cause “shock waves” is pure media spin. Is this the hand of the NSW Right being played?

Ford Australia's recent firing of 440 staff from its manufacturing operations in Melbourne and Geelong primarily comes from its bad corporate governance. It is a failure to adapt to a changing market--rising fuel costs, the shift in consumer preferences for smaller, more fuel efficient cars, and the emergence of electric cars. Unsurprisingly, the Ford Falcon has had poor sales.

Why would you provide protection and subsidies for such a company? The shift noted above has been coming for many years and Ford Australia has been a dumping ground for second-hand technology by Detroit, which has not allowed its local subsidiary to be innovative. So Ford Australia continue to produce large, fuel inefficient motor vehicles, and they sell fewer and fewer vehicles.

Australian governments have compounded the problem because they have refused to introduce emission standards on Australian cars that have been in place for five to ten years in other developed countries. Secondly, the Australian car industry persists only because of industry protection and government subsidies designed to prevent industry collapse.

We are used to the vested interests of the fossil fuel electricity generators acting to protect their stranded assets----the coal fired power stations --and the coal export boom with its big coal infrastructure development in the Galilee Basin in central Queensland.

But we hear very little about who is buying Australia's coal exports in the media. One such customer is India which has a shortage of coal to produce the energy needed to develop its economy. India is facing an energy crisis and it has natural constraints in increasing the supply of fossil fuels (gas, oil and coal) to keep up with the increasing demand for more energy and electricity from economic development, a growing population and massive urbanization.

In Melbourne we have a Victorian state ALP, which is still recovering from an unexpected election defeat, fighting to retain a once-safe, Labor seat where the rise of the Greens has changed the game in the inner city seats of the capital cities. The NSW Labor Right have decided to attack The Greens just before an important by-election for the Melbourne seat in the Victorian state parliament.

The over the top attack has been calculated to offend progressive or centre-left voters (ie., the inner city, middle class trendies) to keep them out of the ALP and to shore up the NSW Right's power base amongst the socially conservative, blue collar, white working class vote.

The NSW Right go on and on about preferences when the real problem lies in the ALP's low primary vote. That vote is so low it is highly doubtful if the ALP will ever govern in its own right again. The ALP needs an alliance with the Greens to be able to govern, and the party is going to have to swallow its pride and deal with its resentment.

If Labor is a cause and not a brand, then why not accentuate the policy differences with The Greens and with the Coalition. Wouldn't that help to articulate what Labor stands for?

In his speech to the Australian Conference of Economists at Victoria University, Melbourne on 12 July 2012 Ken Henry argued that Australian businesses outside the booming resources sector will continue to face falling international competitiveness and options such as “offshoring” will need to be considered.The implication is that Australia is in for some potentially turbulent times despite our strong resource-led economy.

He also argued that the debate around lifting Australia’s productivity and our international competitiveness has become confused, with a common but incorrect belief that growth in the resources sector can off-set weakness in the non-resources sector:

there is simply no feasible set of such adjustments that would reverse all, or even a large proportion, of the loss of international competitiveness that is presently being experienced by Australia’s trade exposed non-resources industries. The shock to resources prices has simply been so large that a considerable structural adjustment, including a reallocation of labour, is required. It will happen.

The foot-stamping from the representatives of Sydney in particular – over the decision to choose Brisbane for the G20 indicates that Sydney thinks that it should be the only global city and that Sydney is Australia.

The superiority and condescension that was on display in such a naked fashion took the form of Brisbane being a mediocre alternative to Sydney and that mediocrity signifies the mediocrity of the rest of Australia.

Sydney has become a dysfunctional city with respect to its airport, public transport and traffic jams and little has been done by its state governments to make it a more functional city.The system of governance in NSW is both dysfunctional and corrupt.

Abbott's political style is one of endlessly repeated slogans, such as "turning the boats back" or the "great big tax on everything." He avoids going on those programs where the slogans are analyzed and he is forced to spell out the details of what turning the boats back means. He simply links turning the boats back to strong border security, another slogan.

What is surprising is that the Canberra Press Gallery has let him get away with this kind of rhetoric. They give him an easy ride. No better example is the way they talk about the carbon tax instead of carbon pricing, thereby accepting Abbott's central claim.

So the Labor Right has decided that their best strategy is to attack The Greens through caricature (the Greens are the bogey man). Apparently, it is The Greens that are the cause of Labor's current woes, not the actions of the right wing of the ALP. The Greens, apparently, are the most dangerous fringe group in Australian politics.

The tactic is to designed to appeal Labor’s traditional blue-collar base and suburban voters, who are now prepared to vote for a conservative government led by  Abbott, by dumping on the left. In that way---eg., saying that the arrival of a few thousand asylum seekers would amount to a breach of Australia’s border security and threaten Australia---- the ALP will regain the momentum to become a majority party in their own right. This indicates that if Labor governs then the Green Senators are needed by Labor to pass its legislation.

In Why Women Still Cannot Have it All in The Atlantic Anne Marie Slaughter argues that under current work arrangements it is not possible for highly educated, well-off women to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family. The 16 hour days at work that are required are too long if they want to raise children and lead a balanced life. It leads to a one dimensional life.

The reason is the system of work, which is one of inflexible schedules, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office. Given this kind of work culture--- arrive early, stay late, and always be available---it is possible women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) that means they have put work ahead of family to achieve their work-life balance.

But why not change the work culture to allow easier integration of work and family life? More working at home, greater use of video-conferencing,and changing the assumptions about adapting the work culture to allow for the routines of family life through family -friendly policies offer ways to begin to challenge the assumptions underpinning this male culture and the view that women can have it all.

Companies have already started started to make misleading price claims about the impact of the carbon price. The impact of the carbon tax on small businesses will be modest--around $4 or $5 a week for a very small business.

The Australian Trade and Industry Alliance is an anti-carbon tax group that has claimed that the price of electricity would rise 20 per cent immediately and up to 400 per cent by 2019 because of the carbon price. The group is made up of the Minerals Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Australian Coal Association, the Australian Retailers Association, the Housing Industry Association and Manufacturing Australia.

They have been part of the sustained campaign of fear and disinformation around climate change and the carbon pricing that has resulted in the whole field of climate policy in Australia becoming so polarised.

Geoff Gallop draws a distinction between pragmatic politicians with an eye to the future, and pragmatic politicians with an eye to the next headline. He adds that it is possible for the idea of reform to stay alive and produce results – even in our current system with all its emphasis on publicity, events and personalities.

What has been pushed into the background in contemporary political discourse is citizenship. We rarely here about this even though Liberalism once placed a great emphasis on the ideas of both rights and civic obligation.

Geoff Gallop, for instance, says that a good deal of his thinking in his book Politics, Society, Self: Occasional Writings has been on the subjects of democratic reform, co-operative federalism, multiculturalism, and public sector effectiveness. Nothing on citizenship even though he highlights the importance of well-being for public policy and the person.

Peter Newton in Unlocking the greyfields to inhibit urban sprawl at The Conversation that the NSW and Victorian state governments (and I would add the SA one) continue to encourage the development of new housing on the fringes of their cities.

In theses growth areas, the pace of development continues to outstrip the ability to provide public transport to employment, and the capacity of social infrastructure to meet the needs of the growing population. Households on our cities' fringes are most vulnerable to projected increases in mortgage and petrol prices.

The conservative populists are on the march. They are angry, bitter and resentful.They want blood in the form of sacrifice.

They will probably not shift their position on carbon pricing despite the compensation and the lack of evidence for the doom and gloom rhetoric: the carbon tax is wreaking devastation on the economy, laying waste to industries and destroying jobs.

They can sense victory---its 60:40 against the Gillard Government on everything. They know that Labor has its back to the wall. So every price rise will be attributed to the carbon tax so as to confirm their deeply held belief that the increase in the price of carbon is a bad tax put in place by a bad government.

Jonathan Green highlights the tabloid's cynicism over asylum seekers to foster fear and loathing. What he doesn't mention is the cynicism of the Coalition defending human rights in the debate in parliament over the same issue.by saying that the Malaysia solution was beyond the pale because it did not respect human rights of asylum seekers.

In doing so they were appealing to a liberalism, which asserts that there are general but substantial moral truths, universally applicable, on which liberalism’s claim to deliver the human good is founded. The guiding idea behind fat-face liberalism is that there is a single life, best for everyone, on which everyone can rationally agree, at least in principle. This has given rise to legalistic liberalism, which seeks to referee conflicts about values and lifestyles by constitutional law and legal procedures.

It looks as if members of the eurozone are starting to move closer to a full fiscal and political union in response to the crisis of a Spanish bailout engulfing the single currency. It was a small step---at the summit EU leaders agreed to use the permanent bailout fund to support ailing European banks.

The European leaders at the summit agreed that a supervisory system for eurozone banks that will form the first step towards full banking union, scrapped the requirement that governments get preferential status over private investors in the event of a default, and eased the stiff terms for future bailouts. However, a banking union cannot work without a eurozone fiscal union.

What surprises me about the Gillard Government is that it hasn't done very much to work towards a regional solution to the flow of refugees through South East Asia. It appears to be locked into the frame of border security and deterrence and stuck in its Malaysian solution, and unwilling to put money into helping the UNHCR process asylum seekers or increase the refugee and migrant intake.

So we remain stuck in the parliamentary impasse over the means to ensure order security and deterrence without a regional solution; an impasse in which the debates in Parliament have become circular and cliched with little awareness of the role that Australia's border control policy has played in stranding large numbers of people in transit countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

Jessica Irvine reminds us:

The evidence shows, after all, that most people who arrive unlawfully by boat are eventually settled in Australia on protection visas - 83.3 per cent of the ''irregular maritime arrivals'' in 2009-10, according to the latest figures from the Department of Immigration.

News Corp is to be split into its entertainment (film and television businesses) and publishing businesses (ie., the papers in the US, UK and Australia together with Harper Collins, News Corp's book publishing company). These will become two separately listed companies both controlled by the Murdoch family.

The papers consume far more resources than any returns they can ever hope to offer and they are declining assets. The print division made a small profit last year. According to Amy Chozick in the New York Times:

In the year that ended June 2011, the publishing unit contributed $864 million in operating profit, compared with $4.6 billion in operating profit from entertainment units including the cable channels, the 20th Century Fox studio and Fox Broadcasting

We are familiar with how the Matthew Warren and other environment editors of The Australian have run a shabby war of misinformation and deception against climate science across the news and opinion pages from Robert Manne's Quarterly Essay “Bad News: Rupert Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation”.

In doing so The Australian has aligned itself against the Enlightenment's defence of reason in opposition to ignorance, myth and superstition. Parts of the Fairfax media--namely the Australian Financial Review--- also have dirty hands. Their hostility to the carbon tax has morphed into a hostility to renewable energy and as part of a defence of nuclear power that is not based on facts.

It is true that some proponents of nuclear energy industry, such as Michael Angwin the chief executive of the Australian Uranium Association, do advocate starting with the facts and make sure those engaged in the public debate around climate change and energy policies they at least get the facts right. So Angwin, in contrast to The Australian, sides with the Enlightenment tradition.

The events of the last few days highlight how the shakeup of the media industry from the digital revolution continues to reduce newspaper's circulations and newsrooms. This shakeup is due to the internet destroying the traditional newspapers model because the industry is left with high level printing cots as advertising revenue plunges. The advertisers have shifted to the cheaper internet platforms that charge a 10th of the rate, and they can be more targeted and effective.

If Fairfax is seen as having it back to the wall, then News Ltd was seen as strategically visionary for increasing its control of Fox Sport and Foxtel by buying out James Packers Consolidated Media holdings.

The internet revolution is not just destroying newspapers. The internet revolution is also starting to affect traditional TV, as improved broadband services are developed and the infrastructure is built to handle the soaring bandwidth needs of their customers. Secondly, new TV sets now include an internet connectivity, which changes the way people view films and videos (it does away with the computer) and also provides an incentive for the TV manufacturers to join with IPTV service providers (ISP's) and film on demand services (Fetchtv and Quickflix).

Paul Kelly in The Australian spells out The Coalition's blueprint to decisively change Australia's national policy that goes beyond the attempt to destroy Labor and establish conservative hegemony.

He says that Abbott and the Coalition now stand, above all, for three core ideas.

The first is a deep commitment to the prudent state typified by surplus budgets, debt reductions, dismantling "Labor values" spending and an attack of sorts on the entitlement culture, an idea pushed by economic spokesman Joe Hockey, long seized by the fiscal task he faces.
Second, the Coalition seeks a rebalancing between enterprise and the environment with a sweeping agenda to dismantle Labor "green and red tape", purge regulatory complexity, facilitate development, promote northern Australia as an export food bowl and run environmental policies that are more direct and practical ...
Third, as a social fabric conservative Abbott wants to curb the idea that "government knows best", limit interference in people's lives, cut social engineering and, as a perpetual volunteer in his personal life, promote Edmund Burke's concept of "little platoons"-Abbott's notion of social communities based on individual initiative and much greater personal responsibility.

The economic reality, as opposed to the negative rhetoric over carbon pollution pricing---those overblown forecasts of imminent ruin--- is that even with putting a carbon price on the current wholesale price still has it is lower than the wholesale price in 2009. Moreover, the wholesale price of electricity is declining due to reduced demand for electricity, and that the reduced demand for electricity is partly due to growth in solar PV and energy efficiency.

The negative rhetoric from The Australian is that Australia’s solar and clean energy industries are the cause for rising power prices. However, clean, green solar power, wind farms, or the one-off increase of the carbon tax, are not the main causes of rising electricity prices. The Australian Government’s draft Energy White Paper forecasts that governments will need to invest $100 billion (twice the cost of the National Broadband Network) to upgrade our electricity grid. It is this cost that is driving up power prices.

According to the Australian Energy Market Commission, electricity prices are likely to rise by over 30 per cent in the next couple of years. Network costs – the building of new power poles and wires – are expected to contribute more than 55 per cent of these costs. Increased distribution costs will mean a further 30% rise. Renewable energy schemes, including the Renewable Energy Target and State solar feed-in tariffs, are only expected to contribute 3 per cent to the cost increases, and the carbon pollution price around 10%.