Kevin ‘Nostradamus’ Rudd
February 18, 2010
Who says politicians think short-term? Kevin Rudd talks about Australia’s population in 2050 and the climate change in 2100. Here’s some other government predictions we’ve found:
- By 2020 – homelessness will be halved
- By 2025 – 40% of people between 25 and 34 will have university degrees
- By 2040 – school retention will be 90%
- By 2055 – Australia will have 78,000 100-year-old people
- By 2060 – Canberra will be carbon-neutral
- By 2070 – there’ll be more droughts
- By 2080 – Melbourne’s Yarra River will be 80% less dirty
- By 2100 – there almost won’t be any beaches in Queensland.
And Kevin Rudd is going to be around how long? Remember how in 1892 they were pretty sure Australia would have 60 million people by 2000?
On Monday in the Daily Telegraph Boris Johnson said Greece was stuffed (it’s funny) and Paul Krugman in the New York Times said the EU was stuffed (it’s interesting). And here’s Peter Swan in The Australian on why Obama’s bank policy is stuffed (it’s informative).
Did you see education unions oppose an $8000 pay rise for teachers in disadvantaged schools? (You can go to the same union’s website to see some University of Wollongong academic arguing the IPA’s idea to give parents school choice is like invading Iraq. Gee… thank goodness for Australia’s public universities… Oh – and the Communist Party of Australia didn’t like our idea either.)
Here’s three new Nanny State stories from the UK. We started our now-famous Nanny State files in ‘Hey’ a year ago as a bit of a joke. This first story will have you shaking your head:
- a 5 year-old girl was left in a car in a river for 2 hours because police weren’t allowed to rescue her
- a fireman gets disciplined for saving a dog in a frozen lake
- running in a pancake race was banned.
Here’s what IPA staff have been talking about this week: in the Australian Financial Review on Friday, I compared Barnaby Joyce to Lindsay Tanner. In Wednesdays Australian, Tim Wilson feared the rise of the Nanny State, and in Fridays Canberra Times, Julie Novak revealed the failure of the stimulus package. In The Australian today, Alan Moran said cutting carbon emissions was a waste of time and in the SMH on Saturday, he blamed the government for high house prices.
PS: The video of my foreign aid debate on Tuesday with Peter Singer and Tim Costello is here – and on Monday night I’m on the ABC’s Q&A with Malcolm Turnbull and Tanya Plibersek.
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