Saturday 9 June 2007 at 2:12 pm
- Yesterday’s announcement from the G8 meeting sounds awesome: US$60 billion! For the Global Fund! Tackling the worst diseases facing Africa! Yet although this is good news, it actually represents only a little bit of new funding, and it’s being directed to programmes that have an annoying tendency to draw the focus away from other public health concerns (i.e. yay your town is HIV-free! but no we won’t fix your crumbling hospital).
- Among the other announcements from the G8 summit (including a very American-sounding statement about intellectual property) is an even greater non-event: on climate change, they’ve promised to enter discussions about what to do when the Kyoto Protocol expires, seeking “substantial global emission reductions” (which is as strong as the document gets). By normal standards of diplomacy I’d call this a success — but problem is, by the time normal diplomacy is finished, the battle may have already been lost.
- Unrelatedly, here I was thinking Paul Murray’s column on Thursday was bad. Today he highlights that newspaper’s endemic lack of clue towards the Internet: whilst pretending he knows what he’s on about, he waffles about “credibility” before selectively quoting The Assault on Reason (taking an entire sentence to dismiss why Al Gore thinks the Web is good for democracy), and froths at the mouth about celebrity gossip without noticing that the Internet is a wee bit bigger than the home pages of Australia’s commercial news services.
- Murray’s page was taken up yesterday by an infinitely more sensible article from former MP Phillip Pendal (who’s no saint, having once been anti-railway). He points out that the State Government ought to stop sitting on its hands with the Old Treasury Buildings and restore them to government offices, their original use. This really does make a lot of sense, particularly given how much office space the State rents and how horribly expensive that is in the current market. But its sensibility is exactly why I fear his proposal will be ignored.
- From today’s report about the not-yet-released masterplan for the Amarillo site, I observe that there’s basically nothing new. It’s a huge area of sprawled housing in a region with more new housing estates than you can poke a stick at, there’s suggestion of a dense centre that might be kinda cool (maybe), and there’s the mention of “possible light rail” that has accompanied every development south of Fremantle for as long as I can remember.
Update 14/6: I’d not noticed that the master plan has been buried on the DHW site for some days now.
Friday 1 December 2006 at 9:05 pm
![[New building at 140 William Street; Creative Commons licence does not apply to this image]](http://hourann.com/photos/2006/140william-1.jpg "They're making use of the roof space! Creative Commons licence does not apply to this image")
![[140 William Street from street level; Creative Commons licence does not apply to this image]](http://hourann.com/photos/2006/140william-2.jpg "The glass box will be a bar -- and a cool one at that. Creative Commons licence does not apply to this image")
- First up: the proposed new building for 140 William Street (above the new train station) is awesome. Not as pretty as the Raine Square development across the road (which, BTW, is definitely going ahead), but very functional and very bold in its design — and we need more buildings in Perth with architecture that triggers strong reactions (as long as they’re not all bad …).
- Glenn Milne’s little scuffle at the Walkley Awards nicely epitomises, I think, the way that old media stalwarts simply don’t get this new-fangled Internet thang. (Though admittedly, Crikey has hardly been angelic in its treatment of Milne. The sneaky buggers have also, by my guess, bought AdWords that link to news.com.au rather than their own site …)
- There’s another leadership spat in the Labor Party. Yawn. Although I think it’d be cool if Big Kim were to win the next election, Howard-style, it’s not exactly something I’d bet on. Problem is, I’m far from convinced that anyone else on Federal Labor’s frontbench could do any better.
- The continuing debate about daylight saving on newspaper letters pages annoys me for its pointlessness, but I notice that among the pro camp there’s a strong sense of the old mindset that says Perth is still some sort of country town, and can’t function without the assistance of our older & better-established bretheren o’er east. I keep reading things about how farmers and other businesses desperately need close-timezone contact with Sydney, as if the west coast is devoid of warehousing or financial services or something.
- Speaking of daylight saving, it amuses me that the Lotteries Commission had its “you can take an extra hour with your Lotto ticket!” ad out days before the State Government launched its (lame!) attempt to inform the public about the time change yesterday — an entire four days before the change happens!
- Today is World AIDS day, meaning the world’s been reminded of how bad the situation is, and a former American president is out pointing to the next problem area. Sadly, the Pope was also in today’s headlines, and while it’s good that he’s healing rifts within Christianity, it would be far better if he actually tried doing something to address the problem of AIDS among poorer people, many of whom are Catholic. Oh sorry, my mistake, that’d be against his principles.
- Finally, sense has prevailed in the question of Federal funding for an HPV vaccine (the one that’s reported in the media as a “cervical cancer vaccine”). But it’s actually only partly prevailed — a basic concept in public health is that mass vaccinations are all about stopping the spread of a disease, which means that boys should be vaccinated as well as girls, and the age range should probably be wider too. The current funding arrangement is likely to just paint HPV and cervical cancer as a “women’s issue”, rather than as a real sexually-transmitted disease about which everyone should care.
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