The Australian currency has been stuck above parity for some time and not even the lowering of interest rates has provided any 'relief' for the export industries of Australia.Except there's no relief in sight.
Pleiades sent in this link today as a kind of heads-up.
According to (ANZ boss Mike) Smith, the Reserve Bank criteria for interest rate decisions should be dominated by the dollar. I pointed out yesterday that the currency wars and the money printing taking place in Europe and the US could send the Australian dollar much higher. Smith says that the huge liquidity in the system is going to start speculation on commodities and with the consequent higher prices will come an Australian dollar that goes even higher.
Interest rates become the only weapon the Reserve Bank has to prevent the further damage that is in store for our employment creating industries like tourism, education and manufacturing.
Mike Smith adds that central bankers are far wiser than he on these matters. I think Smith is absolutely right about everything except that last point. Smith is mixing in global markets every day and he is hearing concern around the regions about the repercussions of the US and European money printing and the currency war.
The contention there is that the Reserve Bank should probably cut interest rates in order not to attract foreign interest in our currency. Forget the housing bubble, just go to near zero interest rates.
I've been pondering that on this afternoon, and I think this is a crock. The cost of living in Australia is so far out of line with the CPI that nobody believes the inflation figures any more - they think it's much higher. This suggests that the interest rates should be sitting much higher than where they've been for at least a good decade. Mike Smith asking for the interest rates to be lowered is effective asking for there to be so much cheap money, it should inflate the value of property once again. In other words, the ANZ Bank chief is asking for a Price Keeping Operation to be staged out of the RBA.
One imagines the hope there is that if there's so much cheap money around, surely it will get sucked into the property market and reignite those big gains in the banks' balance sheets. You have to wonder if this isn't just another vested interest mouthing off, because it sure sounds like it.
Hewson Slams Vested Interests
There's one thing about John Hewson we can all be certain about - he was Australia' Mitt Romney without the Mormonism but with Economic Rationalism as his religion instead. If nothing else he gave the Liberal Party some kind of ideological frame work from which to work, and some of it has worked out well for Australia.
It's interesting then when he pipes up and lobs a verbal grenade in the direction of the NSW government and its approval of Jamie Packer building a second casino for Sydney.
Dr Hewson said he wasn’t opposed to a hotel or a second casino license for Sydney.
However, the process had to be seen to be clean and above board, and the government shouldn’t give rise to concerns it was being compromised by vested interests.
‘‘This is sort of chipping away at the whole integrity of government process,’’ he said.
So, there's that phrase again: vested interest.
Small Arts Companies Get The Squeeze
Pleiades sent in this one as well, about how small arts companies are getting less money now that everybody is having to look for some austerity.
Exactly why these companies are called “small-to-medium”, by the way, is one of the mysteries of the sector. Most turn over less than $2 million a year, the threshold the Australian Taxation Office considers a “micro-business”. Organisations that the arts calls “medium-sized” are in fact small in any objective sense of the word. Nearly all of them are run on the proverbial smell of the oily rag, with perhaps three or four full-time administrative staff.
This diminutive scale makes many small arts companies vulnerable to the slings and arrows of artistic fortune. They have few assets and little in the way of cash reserves. If the funding disappears, most can’t survive in the long term. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Fremantle-based Deckhair Theatre wind up after 30 years of independent production, and Adelaide choreographer Leigh Warren “go freelance” to keep his dance studio afloat. Both companies have been defunded in recent years.
The problem for the small-to-medium sector is that the funding appears to be drying up. With the Australia Council getting squeezed by the federal government’s efficiency dividend, Commonwealth funding is actually falling in real terms. Nor is any extra pot of gold awaiting beneath an unexpected rainbow. Arts Minister Simon Crean appears to have conceded that he can’t get the National Cultural Policy up this year.
You feel for these arts companies. They have a tougher proposition than film producers for a start.
One of the things that the Liberal Party embraced gingerly toward the end of their time before the Ruddslide was the fact that a lot of people in the arts were small business as well; and that the conservatives' general disregard for the arts and arts funding had created a massive gulf between it and the arts community in Australia. Certainly, under most of John Howard's tenure as PM, the prevailing mood was that all arts participants were left-voting scumbag and deserved not one iota from the public purse. When you realise how many of these small arts companies are around, you wonder why and how a party in favour of small businesses could have treated them with neglect for so long.
In turn, you'd have to say that the ALP for its money has taken for granted that people in the arts are generally more socially progressive and have bred a variety of arts bureaucrats that form a crazy subculture of their own, and choke off the promise of the arts itself. You get the feeling that the ALP is a latter day Stalinist apparatus that seeks to ideologically constrain discourse through the arts by funding particular kinds of things that never makes any money.
So I guess it's not surprising they get slammed by the likes of John Roskam in the AFR:
The health of Australian democracy should not be measured by the number of students enrolled in gender studies.
In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding published in 1748, David Hume described the work of a certain species of philosopher. What he said could apply to the academics in the humanities in Australia in 2012.
“Though their speculations seem abstract, and even unintelligible to common readers, they aim at the approbation of the learned and the wise; and think themselves sufficiently compensated for the labour of their whole lives, if they can discover some hidden truths, which may contribute to the instruction of posterity.”
The pity is that the majority who teach humanities at Australian universities are a long way from discovering any hidden truths or making a contribution to the instruction of posterity.
That's a bit mean. earlier in the column is a castigation about French critics who forged a path to an unbridled kind of relativism in the late 20th Century that continues to appall moralists the world over; but that's not surprising that a conservative think tank would take offense to Derrida and Foucault. Derrida, of course being that 'Obscurantist Terror' - and there's a war going against terror to this day.
Jokes aside, the two articles give you the distinct feeling that the arts really are not valued or are important in our cultural life in Australia. More to the point, we're a nation of hardened, committed, willful, fully ideological, philistines. It's a shame the arts as a vested interest holds absolutely no sway over the conscience of this nation.
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