I feel the need to write something about the ouster before I get breakfast.

1. The faceless men of the ALP

"The faceless men of the ALP, desperate to scramble onto any floating device believe if they execute the prime minister politically, they may save themselves and the little bit of power they hold in the Labor caucus,"--Christopher Pyne, June 2013

"Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard must bear the responsibility for Labor's mining tax and deal with the consequences its near non-existent revenue"--Kevin Rudd, February 2013

I'm of the opinion that Kevin Rudd's statement--that responsibility for the failure of the RSPT to benefit the Australian people should lie with Gillard--evidences an unwillingness to oversee any increase to the 40% tax in the event of a return to power. There was a time and a place for a high RSPT, and it was in 2010, when the mining boom was at it's peak. 

The investment pipeline for mining operations has narrowed considerably over the last year as demand in China has cooled, as I discussed here. The last two years has also seen an explosion in the natural gas sector, largely due to pervasive hydraulic fracturing in the American mid-west. This means increased competition with Australian energy commodities. 

What does this have to do with the Gillard ouster? The reason Rudd was ousted was because the "faceless men of the ALP"'s interests were:

a. keeping the RSPT low (and their investment portfolios high) and; 
b. keeping the ALP in power

The reason they're permitting Rudd back into the lodge is because his wings have since been clipped by macroeconomic factors. Gone are the days where it was viable to establish a Norweigan style sovereign fund for the Australian people with our mineral revenues. Where it was possible to generate massive royalties from mining in 2010, attempting the same policy in 2013 would result in massive capital outflows, something of which Rudd is all too aware.  In other words, a Rudd government is the only way to ensure that the interests of the ALP technocrats are guaranteed, whereas this was not the case in 2010. 

2. Rudd and Julian Assange 

Kevin Rudd found himself in the minority when he defended Assange's human rights, calling Australia a ""nation of laws" where in the case of an Australian citizen leaking confidential information,  "the normal procedures which apply to any such matter would be first of all obtain a report and recommendations from the AFP and other Australian judicial and regulatory authorities," he said.

I sincerely hope that as PM, Rudd will take the reins from Foreign Minister Carr and negotiate an extradition deal for Julian Assange, who just marked his one year anniversary of seeing the sun. 

What to take away from the PRISM leak

There are two key revelations that have come out of Edward Snowden's leak. First, that the FISA foreign intelligence court makes requests to the NSA to monitor domestic terrorism suspects without warrants. Second, the PRISM initiative whereby private tech companies agree to make their remotely stored data accessible to the NSA.

 Of the two revelations, the second is clearly more significant.

Edward Snowden in his Glenward interview makes specific reference to the retrieval of conversations with friends. If you become a target of state or federal investigation, they will look back on all of your records from early life to try to prove that you were always a bad seed, that your actions were the lifetime in the making.

The fact is that most people do not spend their whole lives planning subversive plots against the government, and so the value of retrospective information about suspects from the age of twelve presents limited value to the security community in preventing attacks and as evidence of conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks.

The way I see it, retrospective information, for lack of a better term, is valuable to the intelligence community for two reasons. First, it can be used to make ad hominem attacks on individuals whose motivation for committing terrorist offences would seem to be in response to conditions specific to the period in which they took place. That is to say that it would divert the focus of the controversy from the conditions that caused them to protest to the personalities themselves.

Second, it can be used as a recruitment tool, to screen members of the intelligence community who might harbor radical leftist sympathies.