How to insure maximum panic at the least cost is generated from natural disasters

RE-INSURERS don't seem to think that climate change is causing an escalating number of catastrophes

Ross Gittins in The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday:

SCIENTISTS have long predicted one effect of global warming would be for extreme events to become more extreme, which is just what seems to be happening. And, certainly, the insurance industry, which keeps careful records of these events, is in no doubt that climate change is making things worse.

ABC1's Lateline on Wednesday:

REPORTER Margot O'Neill : Australia's climate seemed to flip into overdrive this summer. So, are these extremes the new normal? It's what climate change models have been predicting, after all. Big international insurers are mopping up after more than 850 global weather catastrophes in 2010, and they say there's no doubt: global warming is destabilising the climate.

Peer-reviewed paper by Eric Neumayer and Fabian Barthe of London School of Economics and funded by re-insurers Munich Re in Global Environmental Change, November 18, 2010:

APPLYING both [conventional and alternative] methods to the most comprehensive existing global dataset of natural disaster loss [provided by Munich Re], in general we find no significant upward trends in normalised disaster damage over the period 1980-2009 globally, regionally, for specific disasters or for specific disasters in specific regions.

And all you got (or didn't get) was a cheque for $900. Back page of The Australian Financial Review on Monday:

THE last rabbit Macquarie managed to pull out seems to have been its savvy use of the $16 billion of government guaranteed funds it was able to obtain during the financial crisis. The government guarantee meant it could borrow money more cheaply than most others and enjoyed as much as a 350 basis points spread on its lending investments. It's estimated the group may have earned almost $1 billion from these strategies since the guarantee came in during the emergency days of October 2008. The government withdrew the guarantee on new debt funding last March but Macquarie still has the benefit of cheap money carrying the guarantee for some years.

Everybody else gets it. Barrie Cassidy on ABC1's Insiders on Sunday:

I'M none the wiser what Tony Abbott really meant when he said [Gillard's] performance was wooden.

ABC1's Q&A on Monday:

AUDIENCE question: According to David Williamson, Labor's biggest problem is that Julia Gillard can't act.

Williamson: All I was saying is that when the camera is on her, a very self-conscious performance emanates that doesn't allow us to read confidence.

Jones: You wrote that she's a profoundly bad actor, stiff and wooden, who gives us no sense of what she's feeling, and you said at the height of national emotion, she displayed no emotion at all.

David Williamson on Crikey, Feb 1:

WHAT we see in Julia is a stiff and wooden performance that gives us no idea of what she's really feeling, if anything at all.

Comments on Williamson's article:

MARILYN Miller: I cringe when I see our PM so wooden in so many interview situations.

Sue Arnold: Everything about her is fake, her dyed hair, the wooden expressions, the constant repetition of the same words in that terrible voice, her insistence that SHE is the person making the decisions -- as though there is no government; her constant use of I, I, I, yuk.

Not wooden. Bearded. In parliament yesterday:

PM: I thank [Rob Oakeshott] for his question. I do think I should take this opportunity to record my objection to the beard too, it is something I have said to him face to face. I do not know what has happened over the summer season, but we have Rob Oakeshott here and Dennis Shanahan up there, and they are both very poor judgment calls, Mr Speaker!