2013/12/21

Can We Eject Tasmania Soon?

Please?

Here's a really interesting link about Tasmania sent in by Skarp. It's a really interesting read. The basic gist of it is that basically Tasmania doesn't get better because it doesn't perceive the need to get better and has developed enough cultural inertia to the point where it will resist forming strong positions to change the status quo, which is basically having and keeping Tasmania as a state of freeloaders on the mainland.
The underlying problem is simple but intractable: Tasmania has developed a way of life, a mode of doing things, a demographic, a culture and associated economy, that reproduces underachievement generation after generation.

Everyone knows the problems; they are manifest, reported day after day. The reality is that Tasmania has bred a dominant social coalition that blocks most proposals to improve. Problems and challenges are debated endlessly, with no resolution. Most discussion avoids mention of the uncomfortable truths at the source of underperformance.

Ultimately, Tasmania doesn’t change because its people don’t really want to. They don’t need to change because their way of life is mainly financed by the mainland. Far from helping overcome this pattern, the nation’s resource-boom prosperity is enabling and cementing Tasmania’s under-achievement. It’s allowing the government to pay an ever-expanding proportion of the population not to work; it’s driving up wages, materials, transport, regulation, exchange rates, and other costs that make Tasmania’s traditional industries uncompetitive; and it’s allowing government to subsidise non-performing industries.

The result is that Tasmanians face little incentive or pressure to change. Unlike New Zealand, which has no rich big brother and must find ways to earn its own living, Tasmania enjoys a permanent and ongoing transfer from mainland cousins that reinforces failure.

The disgust is palpable. :) Heck, I would admit to sharing in that disgust. The scary thing is that Tasmania stills sends Senators who have a disproportionate amount of power relative to population base. If Tasmanian Senators don't want something, they can really veto stuff even if it's necessary. Yes, I'm thinking of Brain Harradine, but to a similar extent Bob Brown. Now, Bob Brown is a hero to many people but when you do the sums, he did not represent any where near the same sort of population as a  Senator in NSW or Victoria would have represented. Yes, as Paul Keating use to call them, 'unrepresentative swill'. To make matters worse, they're representing people who eschew higher eduction and knowledge:
For the middle class — in Tasmania a much smaller group than elsewhere — education was seen as desirable, but only to a point. Valued above most other concerns was a modest, comfortable lifestyle, the kind that steady government employment guarantees. The ease with which it had become possible in Tasmania to reach this income level and enjoy material security meant that there was little incentive for more education. The introduction of the goods and services tax and the wave of new tax finance provided to Tasmania had facilitated this culture by driving a mini-boom in the early 2000s as the state government added thousands of new public servants and sharply increased their wages, to reach “parity” with the mainland. Flow-on effects raised housing values and precipitated a retail-consumption spurt.

The final source of blockage and failure to take advantage of opportunity is internal division. With prosperity seen to stem largely from government largesse, development in Tasmania is often regarded as a zero-sum game. If one sector or geographic region gains something, it is seen to come at the expense of someone (or somewhere) else. Hence, all opportunities are greeted with an outbreak of conflict over who should get what, usually between the northern and southern halves of the island. The mayor of Launceston famously stated it was more important to him that rival Hobart not be the site of any AFL games, for example, than that more were played in his own city.

Challenging this self-reproducing pattern of failure has not proven easy. Because its origins lie so deep in the culture and population mix, change can probably come only from outside. Either the national taxpayer and federal government will declare “enough” — though there’s little sign of this — or Tasmania will be altered by new arrivals seeking opportunity and a better lifestyle.

Somehow I doubt it. Which is why I want to plant the seed of change; Maybe they'll change if they feared we would cut them off if they didn't change their uncompetitive ways.
Some voices within Tasmania do argue that a government-dependent way of life is not sustainable. They believe we can’t go on and will be forced to change. But abundant government finance fuelled by the resources boom and a local demographic and culture that blocks change has rendered that untrue. The ultimate problem is not that Tasmania cannot afford its pattern of failure, but increasingly that it can.

I guess that's where it leaves us.

2013/12/17

After The Parity Party

Who Benefits More From The Devalued Dollar?

Late last week, RBA boss talked the AUD down, and then quite spectacularly, the Aussie dollar fell through the 90cents barrier.
A new round of jawboning on the need for a lower exchange rate by the Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens pushed the currency below US90¢ on Friday, and the dollar could face further headwinds when the central bank releases its December meeting minutes on Tuesday.

The RBA’s assistant governor Guy Debelle is set to speak at a banking and finance conference in Sydney on the same day, while Mr Stevens fronts the House of Representatives’ Standing Committee on Economics in Canberra on Wednesday.

Both central bank officials have talked down the local currency in recent weeks, stressing that a lower dollar is needed to support growth in export-facing sectors of the economy as mining investment peaks.

“It’s a market that seems to be responsive to jawboning,” Westpac senior currency strategist Sean Callow said about the recent declines in the Australian dollar.“If it was a couple of years ago, I think the market would have brushed off such talk, but it seems there are still investors who will sell it on jawboning, even though the domestic story really isn’t presenting a very compelling case to sell the [Australian dollar].”

The currency could face further headwinds in the form of the federal government’s Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. It will be released on Tuesday and is expected to reveal increased budget deficits.

Which goes to show the markets are jittery ahead of the possible taper from the QE3. The valuation of the Aussie dollar has been one of those interesting concerns for the past few months because we keep hearing that Australian manufacturing can't continue withe the Australian Dollar so high. Well, it's lost close to 15% since the days it was trading at US$1.08, so you have to figure that 90cents was a reasonable level for the AUD to sit. It's not like the RBA is willing to cut interest rates further from historic lows, so it figures that there would still be enough in the carry trade to make it worth while holding Australian Dollars - not that I'm any expert.

Anyway, in that context, this interesting article floated into view.
“I don’t see why the RBA wants to see the global purchasing power of Australians reduced by 20 per cent in exchange for one percentage point of extra growth,” Mr White told The Australian Financial Review.

Mr White says “targeted deprecation policy” amounts to “a transfer from households through imported inflation to firms through higher profitability,” pointing to rising food and fuel costs as a result of the weaker currency.

“The bottom 50 per cent of income earners have the highest proportion of imported products in their spend,” says White.

“The data would suggest at least 80 per cent of that 50 per cent work in domestic services so they won’t benefit from the increased competitiveness but they will suffer from [things like] higher petrol prices.

“I think moving away from mining investment is a good thing but the weak $A isn’t going to get us there, it will just make Australian mining more competitive,” he says.

Mr White believes there have been fundamental changes in the composition of the economy that should force a rethink in conventional application of policy.

“The structure of the economy has changed. If we were a manufacturing economy, a weak currency would help us but we are not we are a service economy. We don’t have the substitution industries to take advantage of the falling dollar,” he says.

Now, that's interesting because it has been something of an axiom that the Australian Dollar had to come down, and that it would be good for everybody. I've always wondered what the fuel costs would be like under an AUD that fell 20% in value would mean a 25% increase in the same thing.

As in, if the AUD went from 1.00 to 0.80, then  you would need 1.25 times the currency to get the same purchasing power as before. That's a 25% inflation on imported goods being slapped on right there. Any drop in percentage will have to be reflected in a larger number in inflation. So if the RBA really was looking for say,a maximum 3% inflation, it couldn't be asking for more than a 2.9% drop.

Now, of course there are things that would and should go down as a result of the Australian Dollar dropping in value, but if you're already trading in Australian Dollars, it's not going to help. So from the consumer's point of view, this James White is correct, the fall in AUD is in fact robbing us of our purchasing power, while the benefits of the fall are likely to go right by us. Like this James White fellow I'm yet to figure out how the 20% drop for the sake of 1% growth is really all that a great trade off, especially if it's courting a 20% inflation of imported products.

2013/12/14

Grim Tales

Living The Orwellian Dream

Like most news coming out of North Korea, this business of Kim Jong-Un purging his uncle is more than a little grotesque. I guess it's one thing to remove somebody you find threatening, it's entirely another thing to execute them and make them an object lesson. Fortunately most of us don't have to make such choices, but all the same, one is confronted by the very blood-thirsty nature of power plays in dictatorships.
Before his arrest Mr Jang sought foreign investment for a country that lacks hard currency, overseeing special economic zones near the border with China. Mr Jang represented a "China wing" of the leadership that was very close to Beijing, Professor Armstrong said.

Mr Jang's crimes included "overtly and covertly standing in the way of settling the issue of succession" when Mr Kim was readying to take over from his father, longtime ruler Kim Jong-il, KCNA said, describing him as a traitor with a "dirty political ambition''.

"Despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him," KCNA said.

There have been other news of people getting purged and executed by the new tyrant. None of this terribly comforting to read because in all honesty, this kind of institutionally violent human being is at the helm of a nation that wants to have nuclear weapons. A man ready and willing to be a kin-slayer in order to hold power is a very frightening man. The news sticks out because whatever you might think of the disputes between Japan, China and South Korea, North Korea remains the biggest joker in the pack. The speculation is that more purges are likely to follow.

The truly horrible thing about North Korean politics as it stands is that it exists not as an example of an Orwellian Dystopia, but it has gone beyond it to being a kind of parody of an Orwellian Dystopia. There, you would dare not bat an eyelid without it somehow being support of the regime, and Doublethink would be the only way to think. There is no rhyme or reason why the people in the countryside are starved to death while an army that never goes to war exploits the masses so vigorously. Despite sanctions and shaming and international pressure, the Kim regime keeps on going by selling arms and illicit drugs. It's like n entire nation that has "broken bad". Perhaps the best way to understand Kim Jong-Un is that he's a kind of Jesse Pinkman, and he has finally killed his Walter White.

2013/12/13

Government Of Crises

...Government By Crises, For The Sake Of Crises

The Abbotts Family


With each passing day we re-discover this is a pretty awful government. Unfortunately it is also joyless and lacking in efficacy so there's only ridicule and contempt that can be salvaged from their daily misdeeds. Most days I run into Pleiades, he starts off by telling me how awful the Federal Government is, and how unbelievably incompetent they are followed by a description of the latest cock-up. Lately the cock-ups have been getting worse and taken as a whole, starts to deliver a picture of government that is largely without an agenda worth calling an agenda, and a Prime Minister who so believes in his own rhetorical flourishes, he believes it harder than most people would dare to believe in anything.

Here's Robert Gottliebsen offering up advice to Tony Abbott in the wake of the Holden-closing-announcement. No.1 reads:
1. At the election Tony Abbott did not seek a mandate from the Australian people to close the automotive industry so he has given Bill Shorten a carbon tax-style issue, which will be particularly effective in South Australia and Victoria. If Shorten follows the Abbott popular appeal formula that the Coalition leader used with such devastation against Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Shorten will achieve similar opinion poll results. Don’t be surprised if those poor Coalition opinion polls cause leadership change speculation in a year or two.

I'm not sure how forcing GM's hand into closing Holden's manufacturing in Australia counts under the "no surprises" thing Mr. Abbott promised Australia. I'd be mightily surprised by the turn of events if I were one of Holden's assembly line workers. I'm sure they were delighted when Tony Abbott offered up the Olympic Dam mine project as a place to seek their next employment, seeing that BHP shelved that one in August 2012.

Pleiades sent me an article from behind the Pay Wall at Crikey where Paddy Manning runs through the inherent contradictions of the Abbott position (if it could even be called that).
The cargo cult mentality surrounding BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine is ridiculous.

Now Prime Minister Tony Abbott seems to be hoping a BHP expansion of the copper/gold/uranium mine will help clean up the damage caused by the government’s bizarre mis-handling of Holden. Abbott told Parliament on Wednesday:
“There is much that we can be hopeful and optimistic about in the resilience of the South Australian economy, particularly if government can do all that is necessary to ensure that the Olympic Dam mine expansion goes ahead.”

If that’s seriously Abbott’s back-up plan, to retrain and redeploy ex-Holden workers in Adelaide at BHP, then nothing could illustrate better that this government is absolutely winging it on the car industry and did not anticipate Holden’s decision yesterday.

It is verging on insulting to Holden’s workers at the doomed Elizabeth plant to tell them they may have a future at a mining project that was shelved in August 2012 after literally years of debate and speculation.

BHP already faced a significant over-expectation problem: in South Australia at least, the $30 billion expansion — which would have converted the underground mine to open-cut, eventually creating the world’s largest hole — was almost expected to cure poverty.

It would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.  The worst part is that the Coalition brought it on themselves by pushing for an answer so hard.
For Holden management, which had been in commercial-in-confidence discussions with the government for months, it was a clear signal that the federal cabinet had turned on the company, and wanted a swift end.

Holden staff members were not the only ones listening in to the ''extraordinary'' events unfold in Canberra. So was GMH managing director Mike Devereux.

For weeks Holden management had been fighting a battle over the timing of the announcement regarding the company's manufacturing operations in Australia.

The facts were simple to Mr Devereux's masters in Detroit. To them, Australia was suffering a severe case of ''Dutch disease'' - an economic malaise by which a mining boom had pushed up the local currency and wages for industrial workers.

Without government assistance, head office in Detroit had decided that making cars in Australia no longer added up - to the tune of $3750 a car per year.

Mike Devereaux is putting out the line that the Government isn't to blame but what are we to make of this debacle but to sheet home the blame to a pugnacious ideologically laden and pragmatically bereft Federal Government. John Birmingham thinks it's symptomatic of a government that has no sense for working but delicate issues that demand carefully crafted and nuanced answers. He might be right even, but it doesn't bode well for the years ahead. The best thing would be for a Double Dissolution to rid ourselves of this mob.

Oh, and they can't even meet their own pledges on the NBN. Surprise!

2013/12/12

Literary Types Only

And The Book Show Is Not Literary Enough!

I just wanted to share this lovely little open letter with you from David Musgrave to the ABC:
Dear Producer

I'm writing in my capacity as board member of Australian Poetry Limited (a not-for-profit national arts organisation), as Publisher at Puncher & Wattmann Pty Ltd (the foremost independent publisher of poetry in Australia) and as one of this country's leading poets to request that you change the name of your program to the "Non-Poetry Multinational Publisher Product Show" to accurately reflect the content of your program. I am sure that the several thousand like-minded people in Australia who are my colleagues, peers or customers would agree that the rigorous exclusion of poetry from your program, as well as the extreme difficulty an independent publisher has in having their books discussed on your program, means that the current program title "The Book Show" is misleading, implying as it does that all books are given equal consideration.

Poetry is a vital part of our literary culture, yet your program, as with most of the mainstream media, does not even pay lip-service to this important literary art-form. If changing the name of your program is more difficult than merely changing the content to include poetry, I'd be happy to talk to you about how you might go about this.

Yours sincerely,

David Musgrave

Publisher

Puncher & Wattmann

P.S. You may want to read my blog about this subject.

And if that wasn't tart enough, here's his Blog entry. The middle bit reads thusly:
Poetry is an important part of the press, but not the only part - we're publishing more literary fiction than ever, and in early 2014 we will be releasing the novels Out of Print by Julian Croft and Slush-Pile by Ian Shadwell. A small but growing press like Puncher & Wattmann has to be prepared for the long haul, and to build its readership slowly but steadily. I'm always amazed at how popular poetry readings at the Sydney Writers festival are: every one that I have been involved in has been full to capacity, and I am sure that this is not because I happen to be part of it. The thing about poetry, and interesting writing in general, is that if you present it to a captive audience, they will find it very interesting and engage with it. It's just that in this day and age it is very difficult for the average reader to seek out new and interesting work apart from the small number of titles which are pushed through the mainstream press, largely by multinational publishers. Even people with a lot of time on their hands, retirees who are interested in reading literature, often don't know what is worth reading because reviews don't necessarily help them (even if they do appear in the newspapers) when there might be, say ten books of poetry or literary fiction to choose from in any given month, and they might only really want to read one or two. That's why small presses, those that hang around for decades, are extremely important for literary culture in this country.

So, take that, boring old establishment!

On another note, it's interesting that after years of sneering at this blog for being a blog ("what the hells is a blog anyway?") David has taken to writing his own. :) So, I've added a link to it on the right.

Now. If only I could get him to return my calls...

Holden Quits On Australia

Hits To The Id

I don't know how the average Aussie rev head deals with this. Not only has Ford pulled up stumps on manufacturing in Australia, but today we find that General Motors is going to stop manufacturing automobiles in Australia. The first thing that popped into my mind was how will the standard white Aussie bloke deal with this blow to his masculinity? Personally, I don't really care if cars are made here or not. If not, then there's a personal argument in favour of cutting all the damn tariffs and having cheaper cars in Australia - much as they do in New Zealand. Yet, I think o all that testosterone and petrol-fumed love of things like V8 Supercar and utes and Mount Panorama and Peter Brock and Dick Johnson and Mark Skaife and Craig Lowndes and all that macho posturing, and all of that stuff (frankly, stuff that I find a bit parochial and tinged with Xenophobia) and how the Aussie male self-image is going to handle Holden and Ford selling what are essentially 'Yank Tanks".

Jut how will they cope? For once I feel sorry for them. This can't be fun. It's a betrayal of the cultural psyche. I'm sort of interested in where they will turn to bolster their cultural faith. Or will they continue to cheer the badges? How will this affect the self-image of the standard rev head? Of course this is all minor in comparison to what it means to the economy.

Scanning the headlines, Peter Hartcher as usual has some sanguine truth up and running.
One of the few things that Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott used to agree on was that, if you wanted a prosperous modern economy, you had to have a car industry.

This was news to Switzerland. And Singapore. And Norway. And Denmark. None of these has any car manufacturing, yet all are among the top 10 richest countries in income per person.

Today, the political parties are consumed by furious recriminations over who killed Holden. This is entertaining but irrelevant.

A car industry is neither necessary nor sufficient for national prosperity. So what is necessary? The task of leading debate and setting policy falls to the treasurer and the prime minister.

Rather than relying on Holden, Australia's economic future depends on Hockey. Is he up to it? We are about to find out.

If you thought that was brutal, try this one from Elizabeth Knight:
GM is teaching Australia a very clear lesson: they are closing up shop because it is in their commercial interests. Our future lies in innovation – not propping up an industry that serves no purpose other than an antiquated sovereign status symbol.

The future of Australian manufacturing has been written off too quickly. Productivity in many areas has been progressing at an improving clip. And while recent studies from the Grattan Institute show that manufacturing’s share of the economy has been shrinking it has also been moving up the technology scale.

But more importantly, if the tax and regulatory frameworks that foster innovation were developed, the natural commercial advantages that we possess as a highly educated society could be capitalised.

Maybe if the focus was shifted to the opportunities squandered by ignoring innovation, rather than the sometimes dubious calculations of the multiplier effect on the economy of building assembly line cars, Australia could get an edge on all those other OECD countries that also prop up ailing car manufacturers.

It wont be popular, but it hits the nail on the head. The future form of the NBN is a much bigger issue than whether we keep this dinosaur industry which isn't even selling to Australians. Need we say more?

2013/12/11

News That's Fit To Punt - 10/Dec/2013

I've had an abominamble month with computers and mobile phones and cars. Retired is my trusty 2009 Quadcore Mac Tower, replaced by a Mac Mini that runs 50% faster and is much more quiet. While it was inevitable, and the Mac Mini is a place-holder until I sort myself out for the new Mac Pro, the phone thing and the transferring data and account thing and the car thing has made it nearly impossible to blog.

So... I'm back. And I don't have a whole lot to say except nyah-nyah to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Their Bed Of Roses

One of the weirder spectacles of the last federal election of course was the endorsement handed out to Tony Abbot by the Fairfax group (excepting the Age in Melbourne who rightly saw the NBN as the deal breaker), led by the Sydney Morning Herald. It was as if the editor of the paper hadn't bothered reading their own paper and proceeded to hand undeserved accolades to Tony Abbott on the grounds of stability. Well, we know how that went, and in less than 100days since taking office Tony Abbott and his Coalition government has squandered its electoral goodwill, and not for once has the editor of the SMH complained about his government's performance.

In that light the joy that keeps giving is the sight of the SMH editorial that lambasts the Abbott Government for their shortfalls, pitfalls and pratfalls.
The Herald believes Abbott has a mandate to scrap the tax but doing so will have virtually no impact on Australia's economic future and leave it with an untested alternative. It is a symptom of a larger problem.

Abbott was a successful opposition leader, adept at knocking down but not rebuilding; criticising but not explaining. Now he is struggling to find - let alone create - a core vision for the nation beyond dispensing with Labor's legacy.

Making matters worse, Abbott's strategy before the election was to defuse contentious policy challenges by promising them away or pledging to seek a mandate first.

I don't know about you, but I have to tell you it's quite unseemly that the editor of the SMH has to write an editorial like this, having vigorously endorsed the said purpose-less Prime Minister on the way in. The truth of it, as it was on election day and before, Tony Abbott was always going to bring in a duplicitous, mendacious, largely ideological, backward looking pack of cultural dinosaurs into office. To that end he exercised immense duplicity, mendacity, ideological gobbledegook, and retrograde sloganeering to get into office. All of us with any power of observation (and reading - for we learned this from news sites) could have told the editor this was the case, and this load of duplicity, mendacity, ideological obtuseness and obscurantist fascism would not translate well into being a fit and proper government. If there is any thing to be gleaned from all this, I will say this: that this Abbott government will one day be thrown out with equal parts bad faith and bad science, and their names destroyed by this duplicity, mendacity and fascism. As Abraham Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people, all of the time. And fool you once, shame on them, but fool you twice... you probably voted for John Howard in '98.

It's only been 3months but it's already getting old beating up on the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald who *foolishly* - yes ever so retarded-ly - backed Tony Abbott on election day. Yes, you sir, remain a fool.

Speaking Of Which, That NBN Thingy!

In case you missed it, the NBN is going to be able to deliver world class speed of up to 1GBps by the end of this year. We're talking 3 weeks.
Australians linked to the national broadband network will be able to get world-leading internet download speeds of one gigabit per second by the end of this year, the company building the network will announce on Friday.

While some countries such as Japan are moving even further ahead with 2Gbps connections, Australia's coming 1Gbps capability is the same speed as Google's cutting edge fibre network in several US cities.

An entire movie could be pulled down in several seconds using the service, which is about 100 times faster than the average speeds offered by ADSL connections. But most people would not see the true benefit of 1Gbps for another 10 years, when households would have multiple rooms streaming super high definition video from the internet, according to Professor Rod Tucker, director of the institute for a broadband-enabled society at the University of Melbourne.

"The average person who does regular internet activities is probably not going to notice much difference today,'' Professor Tucker said. ''Where I think it will make a difference is in small businesses.''

Independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said right now only about 5 per cent of people, mainly small businesses, would be able to make use of the increased speed.

The wholesale price for the 1Gbps service will be $150 a month, though retailers will add a margin to this. NBN Co will also launch two other high speed services - 250Mbps and 500 Mbps - by December.

The scary thing is that Coalition Government still want to hobble this great infrastructure project because it's allegedly a waste. The single biggest beneficiaries will be the tech sector followed by other assorted small businesses, but no, Tony Abbott wants to slow this down and saddle it with the truly pathetic Telstra copper network.
Telstra has never revealed how much it spends maintaining the network each year and its own descriptions of the life span range from three to 100 years.

The state of the customer access network, as it is known, directly affects the cost and speed of implementing the proposed fibre-to-the-node network because unusable sections of copper must be repaired or replaced with fibre.

Fault rates have increased in the past seven years from about 13 per cent in 2006-07 to 18 per cent, or 1 million faults, in 2011-12, according to figures published by the communications regulator.

However, a spokesman for the expected incoming communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said copper maintenance costs were not cited by any telco in the world as a reason to replace wires with a full fibre network, and the most common cause of faults was accidental digging through phone lines.

''In areas where the [network] is deployed using fibre to the node, the most error-prone parts of the copper - the large bundles running between nodes and exchanges - will be replaced by fibre,'' he said.

Which does not really give you a whole lot of encouragement about where the Coalition sees this as going. It's like we have a government that is hell bent on fucking up the most important infrastructure project going. Of course this bunch want to be known as Infrastructure mavens but they mean concrete-pouring for more roads. It's worse than pathetic, it's totally misguided.

Whither Double Dissolution?

Pleiades sent in this interesting entry. Actually he's been sending me lots of interesting things but this one is probably most relevant.
So why is this all a problem for Tony Abbott?

Today’s Newspoll, published in The Australian, shows a rapid cooling of the relationship between voters and the Coalition government. Newspoll shows that based on 2013 preference flows (in the House of Representatives), an election today would return a Bill Shorten Labor government, 52 per cent to 48 per cent in two-party-preferred terms.

Most commentators believe the Tony Abbott/Christopher Pyne mishandling of the Gonski reforms is to blame, but the flare-ups with Indonesia and China can’t have helped.

There is also a strong whiff of cooked-books coming from Treasurer Hockey’s office – the $8.8 billion he shovelled into the Reserve Bank of Australia’s capital reserves was widely criticised as a way to blow out the budget now, to look good later.

So if a Western Australian election is held before the new Senate sits on July 1, there could be some very large swings, and major re-routing of preferences.

That translates into a scenario where the Carbon Tax repeal gets rejected before the new Senate comes in; followed by a new election for the Senate in WA, resulting in another Senate that the Coalition does not control; which would knock out the Carbon Tax repeal and give Tony Abbott his card for a double dissolution except it's likely Abbott's electoral support would be less than ideal to contest an election. At that point it would be a choice between going to the polls to try and get that mandate or giving up on the biggest thing they promised when they went in.

Goes to show that the brand of crash-or-crash-through brand of politics deployed by Abbott has the interesting side effect that it destroys the institutional support that might have come to you had you not behaved like a bull in a china shop. Life is, if nothing else, interesting.

2013/12/03

Fifty Years On

How Long The Memory

The 50th Anniversary of the JFK assassination came and went recently and I found myself in a lot of strange conversations. It got me thinking about where and how I got where I stand on the JFK assassination thing - and where I stand is at supreme agnosticism on the topic. You simply can't know what the hell happened. However I will confess  to one thing - I am big fan of all the weird and wonderful theories that sprung up around the topic, mostly because the Warren Commission explanation remains to this day, contentious.

Although how does one get to agnosticism on this topic? When I was about 5 I said to my mother that it would be cool if my father bought an open top sports car. My mother immediately shot down the idea. She said that's how President Kennedy got shot. And that's how I found out about a President called John F. Kennedy who died in a open top car. Being 5, I sort of imagined this man leisurely driving an open top sports coupe and out of some forest some guy with a rifle blew his head out. I pictured it in some random bush road somewhere - it probably had red sand like the expansive ares outside Perth.

Of course my mother also told me some actor called James Dean died in a crash driving an open top sports car, so open top sports cars were obviously a no-go zone. My father never bought anything like that - He bought a Chrysler sedan.

Being Gen-X, (we're born after the fateful event in Dallas) the JFK Assassination is all a bit fairytale-like for this reason. It's all bedtime stories told by our parents who experience the event. My mother can recall where she was when she found out Kennedy was killed. She was in Hong Kong and the cleaning lady came rushing to tell her. She's got a description of the cleaning lady so the moment must have stuck with her. My father was in transit, he says he only found out when the plane landed. he too has a vivid description of the airport scene as people found out upon landing, what had happened halfway around the globe.  If it was a heavily veiled story to begin with, then the mists of time have made the explication even more beset with un-reason and speculation.

Anyway, this is all just to explain how I came to be interested in the Kennedy Assassination thing. When my generation were growing up, it was a given that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone. We grew up with the joke in 'Annie Hall' where Alvy's second wife Allison Portchnik protests that Alvy is using the Kennedy Assassination as his excuse to avoid physical intimacy. The point is, the shadow of an imagined conspiracy loomed large over our generation simply because the banal explanation lacked closure or meaning. The conventional explanation as per the Warren Commission was that 3 round were fired from the sixth floor of the Book Depository- 1 missed, 1 went through Kennedy and Connally, and the third bullet was the kill shot that blew open his head.

Of course this account came to be hotly contested by the Jim Garrison investigation which claimed that the second bullet was somehow a magic bullet that made no sense. you can pretty much boil down the litmus test of those who see a conspiracy and those who don't, down to whether they think the second bullet really did all the damage with which it is credited, or not. the Oliver Stone movie 'JFK' remains the sine qua non of the cinema when it comes to this topic with the impassioned (for Kevin Costner who is always so understated, that is) explanation of the magic bullet.

There have been some expert reconstructions that allegedly show that the bullet was not magic, it makes perfect sense. A lot of these arguments seem to want to slam the door shut and bolt it down with the explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the shooter and there was no conspiracy. Except of course they didn't exactly catch Lee Harvey Oswald at site. So at best you could say whoever did the shooting did a great job with the second shot.

In any case, he whole Kennedy Assassination thing has become a parlour game of who can mention the most cognitively dissonant things against those who steadfastly hold to the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald fired 3 shots on his Manlicher Carcano rifle, killing John F . Kennedy - and that Jack Ruby really was a Patriot and a Kennedy fan and that is why he went and killed Oswald. The going joke about the Kennedy Assassination is that it is the third rail of Conspiracy theorists - touch it and your credibility dies a humiliating death. And even then I still keep going back to the Kennedy Assassination as a moment of fissure where the facade of normalcy fractures and reveals something; it's just that we can't recognise the true form of what it reveals.

If the Warren Commission was correct and it really was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, then we're left with a monster that looks like the one that still stalks America, from Columbine to Sandy Hook, the awful blight on the American cultural landscape that dare not raise its name: The Gun Culture. What's interesting is that the kinds of people who want no gun control in America are the most likely to support the 'Lone Gunman Theory'. It is as if there is the subtext, "hey *I* could have made that shot too!"

But if it wasn't Oswald and he really was the patsy - like he told us - then there is no choice but to conclude there was a conspiracy, in which case then there is no telling what exactly we are looking at when we pore over the anecdotes and contradictory accounts. What we see in the fissure then, is a lot more troublesome, and even a resonable person can see quite a lot of things through the fissure.

Thus, the recent argument that it was a Secret Service agent's AR-15 that went off accidentally that delivered the shot to the head can be seen as a retroactive move to acknowledge two things: 'Lee Harvey Oswald' as we know him couldn't have made the third shot in time given the limitations of this weapon, and that there must have been a second shooter of some description given the evidence of the different bullets found. One, the magic-like bullet that pierced JFK, then mayor Connally twice, lodging in his thigh almost unchanged in shape, and the exploded round that took off the top of JFK's head.

The "Secret Service agent's fuck-up" theory is meant to be backed by ballistics, but even this is actually quite suspect. For this to be true, the Secret Service end up being patsies three times: once, for losing the president, twice for being the accidental shooter, and the third time for being the agency for the cover up. Yet it yields the second shooter without having to assign motive because if there were a second shooter with the same motive as the first shooter, then there is clearly a conspiracy ("duh").

If this theory were true, then why does Lee Harvey Oswald even have to say "I'm a patsy?" In fact when you look at what remained of JFK's skull, it's hard to figure anybody can actually determine anything given how dramatic the wound.  Quite a number of people have been writing articles about how unreasonable the conspiracy theorists are but if reasonableness is the yardstick, it ignores how unreasonable it is to staple down the blame on Lee Harvey Oswald.

While I do not wish to be a conspiracy theorist, I am part of the crowd that feels an immense cognitive dissonance when people try to pat down the whole thing. Sure, it was an accidental bulls eye from a misfired gun. There is no deeper meaning in any of this. If you can accept that, you can accept any bit of propaganda. The truth is, there are so many strange things that just don't fit the Warren Commission narrative. And some of those files from the commission are still going to be locked away until 2039. That's such a long way off, it's enough t make you wonder what it is they're hiding.

All the same, the most overwhelming feeling about the Kennedy Assassination on the 50th anniversary was just how distant that 50 years has turned out to be.

2013/11/26

Where Were These People On Election Day?!

ALP's Early Comeback

Polls are an awful thing really, because they measure results of what people allegedly think when given thoughts they wouldn't ordinarily have by themselves on choices they didn't formulate. If somebody told you the options for managing emissions was a 'carbon tax', an Emissions Trading Scheme', 'Direct Action' and nothing at all, you would be led to thinking this was the be-all and end all of all solutions and answer something out of this bunch of bad choices. Not to mention the inherent hostility of the polled person who can then bag out the incumbent for their incumbency and berate the Opposition for their opposition and so on and so forth.

In that light, I can only shrug at the newest poll showing the ALP have surged ahead of the Coalition.



The graphic says it all - less than 3months since the fateful election, the current Government finds itself in a position it would lose the two-party preferred vote. It didn't take long, and it didn't take much for the dissatisfaction to set in. If these people had exercise a bit of forethought, they might have  avoided the Abbott government altogether. Doesn't it make you sick?

The truly interesting thing might be this bit here:
But in a blow to the Prime Minister's plans, more people like the supposedly ''toxic'' carbon tax than his proposed replacement policy.


An Age-Nielsen poll shows little support for Tony Abbott's proposed carbon tax replacement policy.


Just 12 per cent of voters believe Mr Abbott's ''direct action'' policy of using taxpayer funds to purchase emissions reductions from polluters, and planting trees, is the answer. That amounts to a virtual vote of no-confidence in direct action, which has support 4 percentage points lower than the 16 per cent in favour of keeping a fixed carbon price.

The Age-Nielsen poll of 1400 voters found that Australians overwhelmingly wanted to see Australia meet the nation's commitment to cut emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 based on year 2000 levels.

While both sides of politics have committed to the minimum target, the poll shows voters prefer the policy Labor took to the last election - a switch to an internationally linked emissions trading scheme.

Fully 29 per cent nominated an ETS as the preferred mechanism to combat global warming - well ahead of ''some other policy'' on 24 per cent and 11 per cent who favoured ''no policy at all''.

In other words, the only reason people want the Carbon Tax removed is so they can go to an ETS. That's right, the only tangible reason people want the Carbon Tax gone is because they want the ETS So much for that mandate Tony Abbott's been going on about. Listening to his coded dog-whistling you would have thought Australia's electorate wants to go the way of the Ostrich in any discussion on trying to mitigate Climate Change.

The Drum on ABC 24 featured some Liberal Party apparatchik last Friday who wanted to tell us that the future lie in adapting to climate change, and not mitigating it. If I were a man in possession of inclinations like Elvis Presley I would have shot my TV set. instead I screamed and turned it off. It's like some bad joke from the Easter Bloc of old that Tony Abbott got elected.

Delaying The Carbon Repeal

In another one of those election promises that is being broken by the Coalition, we have the Carbon Tax repeal. They've got it through the Lower House but there's enough resistance in the Senate to shoot down the repeal. The Coalition solution is  therefore to hold off taking it to the Senate until the new Senate sits in July.
The Abbott government has scheduled two weeks of sittings, two for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives.

Usually Parliament stops for the winter break at the end of June, returning for the spring session in mid-August.

In the last 15 years federal Parliament has only sat once during July - for a single week in 2011 - which lends weight to the theory that the Abbott government has deliberately arranged this voting period for the carbon tax repeal.

Leader of the House Christopher Pyne released a schedule of sitting dates on Monday, showing the Senate sitting for a fortnight from Monday, July 7.

Mr Pyne said more sittings provided an opportunity for debate and consideration of the important bills that will come before the Parliament in 2014.

The lower house will sit for a week from Monday, July 14.

It seems the Coalition has twigged to possibility they would lose a Double Dissolution election - which is to say they had no mandate at all like they have claimed. The fact that the new poll has blunted their resolve points to the inherently opportunistic, populist and largely spineless nature of this government. Have they no shame? It appears not. Have they no dignity? No. Clearly, that's why they need the Monarchy to drape them with some (imagined) dignity.

Christopher Pyne has been rather disruptive in other ways.
Mr Pyne told Sky News on Sunday evening that two of the states that had agreed to the Gonski reforms, Victoria and Tasmania, had never signed "final agreements" with the federal Labor government, and neither had the National Catholic Education Commission.

"That isn't a national model, and it's very difficult for us to implement the complicated, confused, very dense model that they came up with because of Labor's predilection for prescription and regulation," he said."We want less regulation, less prescription from Canberra, and that's what I'll set about trying to put in place when we can do that."

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten accused the Coalition of breaking the promise it made before the election that it was on a "unity ticket" with Labor on school funding.

"The weasel words of the government saying before an election they will look after schools and properly fund our children in the future, and ... they now dial forward and say all deals are off, there were no deals."

Well, Bill, the answer is that these people really will do and say anything to get into power, hold power and abuse power. No surprises whatsoever there.

2013/11/20

Breaking Bad, The Aussie Way

It's Only Been Two Months, Phoney Rabid!

I don't exactly know what you can chalk this up to, but Tony Abbott has managed to drive the delicate Australian diplomatic relationship with Indonesia into a ditch at full throttle. Who gave him the bloody keys? Oh we did. There are a few interesting things about this turn of events.

Tony Abbott essentially came to power believing that his election win validated all of his  tightly-held views. He is interpreting his election win as a massive endorsement of his various policy foibles. Considering he is the least popular Opposition leader to win a Federal election, it might behoove him to consider that he might have the least endorsement by the people as far as election winners go. In deliberately ignoring such nuances to the election result, he has tried turning back to boats to mixed results. he has not managed to buy a single boat (which is probably a good thing given how stupid is the very idea) and went to Jakarta to talk to the Indonesian leadership but ended up getting no sizable deal worthy of calling a deal.

In fact, if anything, the Indonesians have been pretty blunt in expressing their distrust of Tony Abbott, and have repeatedly contradicted Abbott, Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison at various points. The point - so to speak - is that Abbot has failed to score any exchange with the Indonesian government and by extension the Indonesian polity, and has expended what little good will we had with them all for the sake of the asylum seeker issue.

Compounding the issue has been this business of leaked documents by Edward Snowden which essentially fingered Australia as espionage aficionados of the South Pacific, and that our spy agencies had attempted to bug the phone calls of the Indonesian leadership. naturally, this has poured gasoline on to the fire that was already burning and so, Indonesia has resorted to calling its ambassador back. It's like they're playing a cheap replica of Cold War politics with us, with Australia as the potential enemy. If both sides  keep talking this way, it may end up being that way. You'd think wiser heads will prevail but unfortunately the outgoing Susilo Yudhoyono Bambang is a lame duck going into the election next year, and wisdom and the current Coalition government are like matter and anti-matter. They just don't seem to coexist.

The shocking thing about all this is that the negotiations with Indonesia was the first real diplomatic challenge for the incoming Abbott government and not only have they failed to do a good job, they've sort of set it alight as a monument to their failure. If the relationship is going to take years to repair, well, we can point at Tony Abbott for decades to come as the idiot who flushed the relationship down the drain. It's rather ironic given that these guys came in promising to be steady and sure handed.

The Peter Hartcher Post-Mortem

Peter Hartcher is writing his elaborate account of how the ALP blew itself up over 5 episodes. As of this writing, it's up to episode 4. It's the same old story with not many new information, but it does offer some tidbits. I'm not sure the union movement comes across as being a positive influence in the events and Paul Howes is definitely answerable for how things turned out the way it did. The bit about Kevin Rudd being like paralysed after climate talks in Copenhagen fell apart is revealing. In fact it says in passing that Mark Arbib wasn't the same after Copenhagen. When you consider how much our commitment was riding on an agreement at Copenhagen, you ca understand the policy paralysis. There are no good ways to sell an ETS without that agreement in Copenhagen. There was no alternative path, no other option; which explains why Gillard and Swan opted to just postpone it for expediency.

The other revealing thing about the Rudd coup is that Gillard did have ambitions for the top job and essentially jumped the gun. She has been putting out a narrative that she hadn't made up her mind until that day and it was Bill Shorten and others who conscripted her into the top job - to which I only have the playground retort "as if!" It is very obvious that dating back to 2006 when the two of them deposed Kim Beazley, that the partnership was out of expedience and that deep down she had contempt for Kevin Rudd. Now, that's fine except that she can't very well go around telling the world how treacherous Kevin Rudd was when she pretty much did to him what ended up being done to her. The outrage really is a bit rich.

Now that the historic moment has passed and Kevin Rudd too has declared he's leaving Parliament, I have to confess I'm quite glad it's over. I did warm to Kevin Rudd in the end but only because his replacement drove me to that appreciation.

The problem of Julia Gillard as Prime Minster was compounded by the fact that she was exactly the kind of person who combats rhetoric with rhetoric and therefore hypocrisy with hypocrisy. Even her much-lauded "Misogyny Speech" comes with the caveat that she said that in response to Tony Abbott questioning Peter Slipper's character when everybody knew that Slipper was a Liberal at heart as well as the linchpin holding together the slightest of margins for Julia Gillard. Maybe they teach this stuff as a virtue in law school, but the more you look at context, the more the "misogyny speech" loses its power; and it happens because even in her angriest rhetorical flourish, Julia Gillard was the kind of hypocrite who would take Slipper as speaker to shore up her numbers.

And there's *nothing* wrong with that in my humble opinion, but I just want to be spared this notion that a great injustice was righted by that speech. If you believe that, then you probably believe that a pumpkin patch doll is a radical new form of soft sculpture. It was possibly her biggest nonsequitur moment as Prime Minister.

Which is to say, this was the worst aspect of the Rudd-Gillard ALP government. They were more often than not, people who believed that symbolic gestures changed the world and that the right kind of hypocrisy was better than bad solutions. We can't complain because they got us through the GFC at its crescendo. At the same time they deserve the political wilderness they cast themselves into as a result of events this year. For all the good they allegedly did, it was a pretty sorry ALP government when compared to the Hawke Keating ALP government. The ghastliness of the Coalition during their time in Opposition merely adds to the misery of this time.

2013/11/19

Quick Shots - 18/Nov/2013

Work Ate My Brain Last Week

I'm back to being stupid-busy at the moment so I don't have time to write proper crits for things I've watched. But I don't want to let them go without any remarks so I thought I'd quickly post some impressions.

'The Lone Ranger'

It's not as bad as the reviews would suggest. Just highly idiosyncratic. The most interesting thing about it is that it draws the framework from Arthur Penn's 'Little Big Man' which was a classic anti-hero text. Echoes of that film are all over this one, which is great. Johnny Depp's makeup is totally memorable.

'Man Of Steel'

A pretty good rendition of the Superman story. Surprisingly good bits were the Russell Crowe as Jor-El and Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as the elderly Kents. It's incredibly sentimental but it's filled with the kind of yearning that Tarkovsky would have approved. How much emotional depth can there be in a comic book movie being done for the n-th time, but there it is, the most properly filmic Superman movie I've ever seen. I was honestly surprised by how involved it was.

'Parklands'

Another movie about the JFK assassination. As movies go, it's ordinary fare, and doesn't give much for the conspiracy theorists in the audience ("where was George Bush snr. that day?"). Not really sure if the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald being shocked by what his brother allegedly did, is a great story. Nor is the story of how the  Zapruder film became public knowledge, terribly compelling. One wonders if the good doctors who worked on the dying body of JFK were also the same doctors who worked on the dying body of Leee Harvey Oswald. It's a moderately interesting film as a companion piece to the truly in-depth 'JFK' by Oliver Stone.

'This Is The End'

Look, I'd understand it if the Illuminati secretly want to kill all smug celebrities and actors. No, really I do. This is a sorry excuse for a self-referential movie. It's really daft, and then it devolves into something really stupid. The only thing that should end as a result of this movie is their careers. I mean really, what the hell is James Franco doing in movies like this? The best shot in the film might have been the three-shot that reunites the threesome from 'Superbad'. Emma Watson's naff cameo is sort of amusing. The rest of the film is hard up for laughs. Jonah Hill's Exorcist-homage gag is just plain dumb.

'Mud'

Surprisingly good. This one works off the template of 'Stand By Me' but with less humour and more pathos. I thought it would suck but it didn't suck at all. The premise is rather peculiar, but the film just powers along with the off-beat narrative of the kids.  It has some great performances from the kid actors. Worth checking out.

 

2013/11/08

World War Z

Another Zombie Apocalypse

They keep making iterations of this idea. It comes out of 'Omega Man' which became 'I Am Legend'; there's also been '28days'; and now we have Brad Pitt braving the waters doing a movie about the rise of the zombies. Some have praised this film as being pretty good as Zombie movies go. Others have complained that it justifies Israel putting up a wall to separate out the Palestinians. It's hardly 'Moneyball' and it's certainly not that thought-provoking.

What's Good About It

Not really sure. Pass.

What's Bad About It

It looks tired. Brad Pitt looks tired. The whole thing looks worn out and boring. The kid actors playing Pitts daughters look tired and bored.

About the most novel idea of the film was the attempt to match the pandemic panic film with the zombie movie, except '28 Days' sort of beat them to that punch well and good and was a lot more compelling.

What's Interesting About It

It's not like it's a dead write-off but there's really not a whole lot that's interesting about this film. It's perhaps quite remarkable that way. I found none of it compelling or challenging or interesting. It's not allegorical, it's not metaphorical, it's pretty much a big budget Zombie movie starring Brad Pitt. It's about as sophisticated as 'Iron Man' without the witty quips.

It's not bad as such; there's craftsmanship in there aplenty but somehow it adds up to a largely innocuous zombie movie. In someways this is the dead opposite of something like 'Movie 43' which is clearly a bad film, but it has lots of interesting things to watch and talk about. One shouldn't set out to make bad films, but one also should not set out to make boring films either and this one is pretty tedious.

 

2013/11/07

News That's Fit ToPunt - 06/Nov/2013

Laurie Oakes' Body Slam... Okay, Just Slam.

The doyen of Australian political journalism, Laurie Oakes thinks Tony Abbott's government sucks so far when it comes to transparency.
"They’re busily trying to avoid the media as much as possible and to control the media and so far they’re getting away with it but I don’t think they will get away with it for too long," he said ahead of the release of his new book Remarkable Times: Australian Politics 2010-13.

"You can see the way the story of the expenses rorts is gathering speed, and that horse bolted because Tony Abbott and his Special Minister of State Michael Ronaldson didn’t move to nip it in the bud."They could have killed it off but they’ve got this attitude of not feeding the news cycle so it got away from them."

Other journos have voiced their concerns on the same point.
Since winning office, Abbott has fronted the nation's media just eight times. Calls to his office, and to his ministers, frequently go unanswered or unreturned.

During the week, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop was a star speaker at the Australian Council for International Development conference in Canberra. The two-day event was open to the public, including the media - except for Bishop's speech. It's understood the media was barred at the request of the minister, who is tasked with enforcing the government's $4.5 billion cut to foreign aid over the next four years.

Announcing the government would respond to Australia's ballooning credit card bill by almost doubling the borrowing limit to half a trillion dollars, Treasurer Joe Hockey held a 10-minute press conference and took few questions.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has radically overhauled the approach of his department and others to information about asylum seekers. No longer does Customs issue advice about boats in distress en route to Australia. No longer is information on boats arriving in Australian territorial waters released to the public as soon as it comes to hand. Nor is the rebadged Department of Immigration and Border Protection authorised to provide previously innocuous information about asylum seekers.

So there's a pattern emerging already and it seems that not only are they not willing to defend their decisions or thinking, they'd rather not talk about it; which of course underlines the inherently undemocratic instincts shown by the Coalition in the years since they won in 1996. Thee simple fact is that they don't want to talk about the areas that made much noise about while in opposition because it would show that it was all rhetoric and the Coalition have no better solution for the said problems.  Nobody's really surprised by this any more than we are impressed - we're not!

It's just a little funny watching journalists of the various newspapers complaining about it having supported Tony Abbott's cause on election eve with their stupid editorials. Yes, I'm looking at you Sydney Morning Herald.

It's enough to make you cry if it weren't so ironic.

Whatever It Is He Is Doing, He's Making A Hash Of It!
Then there's this thing here.
The making of effective foreign policy always looks easier than it is. As a result, new governments tend to underestimate the task. The Howard and Rudd/Gillard governments each made tentative starts on the international stage. The current government's diplomatic initiation has been worse. Even allowing for inexperience, the Abbott government appears to be setting a new standard for diplomatic ineptitude. The Prime Minister in particular has lurched from one mistake to another, with each episode more ham-fisted than the last.

Indonesia's sure as heck not happy with the Coalition duo of Abbott and Bishop. Julie Bishop's been doing the denying which strongly suggests that she's been doing the supplying, so to speak. On some level, you expect all embassies to be a hotbed of spying activity. So this emerging all of a sudden as an issue between Australia and Indonesia seems a little contrived.

Bruce Haigh at Crikey recently observed thus:
According to sources close to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) is less than impressed with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. It is said this view was formed before the election, when Abbott, Bishop and now Immigration Minister Scott Morrison talked loud and long about turning around refugee boats and sending them back to Indonesia.
The rumour was confirmed when Abbott turned up late for two important gatherings at APEC where SBY was in the chair, and in case there are some who would to contest this, when the egos of heads of state are on the line the attendance at all meetings of conferences such as APEC are important.

Politicians and other public figures do not live in a vacuum; whatever is said domestically about another government will be reported, with comment, to that government by its embassy, and additionally its foreign ministry will pick up the remarks from wire service reports.

It is a measure of the lack of sophistication and parochial outlook of Abbott and the government he leads that there is an apparent failure to understand the way the world works. Infamously, South African minister of police Jimmy Kruger told a laughing crowd at a 1977 a ruling National Party conference that the death in detention of black activist Steve Biko “left him cold”. That remark haunted his government for years to come.
Some years ago Abbott told an ABC journalist that he sometimes said things he did not mean in order to meet the political imperatives of the moment. This was a rare confession from a politician. It is a pattern of behaviour by Abbott that has been confirmed over the past year, the most recent being the about-turn on his boats policy in Jakarta this month.

“A number of Indonesian specialists were adamant that Indonesia does not believe Abbott’s statements about respecting Indonesian sovereignty.”
According to a long-term Canberra insider, the Indonesians are well aware of Abbott’s propensity for saying whatever he thinks will solve an immediate political problem. They are aware of his bombast, his superficiality and his lack of understanding around the complexities of Indonesian culture and politics. A number of Indonesian specialists were adamant that Indonesia does not believe Abbott’s statements about respecting Indonesian sovereignty. They are also aware of his boasts, in the past, that it was the Howard government that liberated the people of East Timor. They remain concerned that an Abbott-led Coalition government would seek to do the same in West Papua.

The Indonesian elite are not blind to the policies employed in West Papua to keep the province within the republic. They may not like it, but as with Abbott’s approach to refugee policy they see it as necessary, with the use of force the only means to put down the separatist movement. DFAT sources say Abbott’s assertion to the Indonesian President that he admired and respected Indonesia’s policies in West Papua would have been received with scepticism and regarded as patronising.

In sending that stuff to me, Pleiades made the observation that this business of Indonesia could open the floodgates for stuff Indonesia's been holding on to for a rainy day; like say a paedophilia ring run out of DFAT personnel say. This might be just the beginning of where Indonesia unleashes the shit file on us just to humiliate the Abbott Government. I mean, at this point, why wouldn't you? It's not like there's any prospect for proper respect coming from Tony Abbott and his morally-flexible rhetoric.

Denial Is A River That Runs Through Conservativism

We haven't heard much from little Johnny lately, which has been great. when he pops up, he tends to make our days worse. Here, it seems he's been out spruiking the cause of climate change denialism.
London: Former prime minister John Howard has poured scorn on the "alarmist" scientific consensus on global warming in a speech to a gathering of British climate sceptics, comparing those calling for action on climate change to religious zealots.

Mr Howard said he was an "agnostic" on climate science and he preferred to rely on his instinct, which told him that predictions of doom were exaggerated.

He also relied on a book written by a prominent climate sceptic, which scientists have attacked as ignorant and misleading.

And he called on politicians not to be browbeaten into surrendering their role in determining economic policy.Nuclear power – a "very clean source of energy" - shale oil and fracking were solutions to the world's energy needs, Mr Howard said.

Mr Howard's speech in London on Tuesday night was to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank established by Nigel Lawson, one of Britain's most prominent climate change sceptics, former chancellor in the Thatcher government and father of TV chef Nigella.

Mr Howard revealed before the speech that the only book he had read on climate change was Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming, published in 2008.

Mr Howard said he read it twice, once when he was writing his autobiography, when he used it to counter advice for stronger action on climate change given to him by government departments when he had been prime minister.

But the book has been attacked by climate experts.

So, the former Prime Minster of Australia - in his time in office - decided to look into the topic of Global Warming and chose to read one book, and one book alone, written by a climate change denialist. He read it twice to crib notes and mount his own denialist rhetoric, probably because he saw the political problem of climate change as something that needed to be couched in the traditional Left-Right framework regardless of actual facts and figures and projected ramifications. It's a miracle his government got to the point of proposing an ETS! This would be the one Tony Abbott is trying to tear down in the name of repealing the Carbon Tax.

Today, we can understand that both John Howard and Tony Abbott are ferocious, committed climate change deniers with the latter set to wreak havoc on whatever paltry steps we've taken to control the problem. It's hard to fathom how deep this river runs between these two men, but it brims with anti-scientific bullshit. One of the worst things to have happened to the debate is that the deniers keep getting a more than generous equal airtime hearing of their stupid position.

At this moment in time, it is completely accurate to quote Tenacious D: "The Government Totally Sucks".

Oh great.

2013/10/29

News That's Fit To Punt - 28/Oct/2013

Foreign Misadventures

The worst aspect of Tony Abbott might not be his stupidity but his inability to represent all of Australia. You expect the Prime Minister of Australia to front for the whole nation when he speaks to foreign media, but not Tony Abbott. He can't resist the urge to put the boot in to his domestic opposition. Here's the offending bit in the Washington Post:

Labor wanted a national broadband network?

It’s a government-owned telecommunications infrastructure monopoly, which was proceeding at a scandalous rate without producing any commensurate outcomes. We are changing the objective from fiber to every premise in the country to fiber to distribution points, and then we will use the existing infrastructure to take the broadband to individual premises.

Is that cheaper and more efficient?

Vastly.

But Labor wanted to extend fiber to every household?

Welcome to the wonderful, wacko world of the former government.

So you believe the former government was doing a lot of things that were bad for the country?

I thought it was the most incompetent and untrustworthy government in modern Australian history.

Be more specific.

They made a whole lot of commitments, which they scandalously failed to honor. They did a lot of things that were scandalously wasteful and the actual conduct of government was a circus. They were untrustworthy in terms of the carbon tax. They were incompetent in terms of the national broadband network. They were a scandal when it came to their own internal disunity. They made a whole lot of grubby deals in order to try and perpetuate themselves in power.  It was an embarrassing spectacle, and I think Australians are relieved they are gone.

Where does one begin with how this interview exchange is so wrong-headed. You all know how I feel about the NBN, so it surprises me none that Tony Abbott is trying to paint the NBN as evidence of how the ALP were "wacko". No evidence, just a straight up assertion as if its some kind of self-evident thing when the opposite is clearly true. This is followed up with this sloganeering assertion that the former ALP government were somehow lying incompetents. No evidence. So when he gets pressed on the points, he makes a whole bunch of blank assertions - none of which are factual - and finishes off with another crappy assertion that I'd like to see tested at the ballot soon.

I don't know about you, but I don't think this "throw the other party under the bus at every opportunity" style of conduct really is becoming of a Prime Minister. It's the dead opposite of what he's supposed to be doing when he is representing our polity. Regardless of our differences in our nation, when he's talking representing Australia, he's supposed to have the common decency to be speaking for the whole nation. Not just for the people that voted for him.

That Tony Abbott was given to talking out of his hat was a known quotient. What was not really understood was how he would use such an interview to keep playing these domestic politics. This has surprised quite a number of people.

Norman Ornstein, an author and political scientist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he ''winced'' when he read the interview in which Mr Abbott put the boot into the Rudd-Gillard government in unusually strong language for a foreign interview.

''It really does violate a basic principle of diplomacy to drag in your domestic politics when you go abroad,'' Dr Ornstein said. ''It certainly can't help in building a bond of any sort with President Obama to rip into a party, government and - at least implicitly - leader, with whom Obama has worked so closely.

''Perhaps you can chalk it up to a rookie mistake. But it is a pretty big one.''

Politicians around the world typically refrain from engaging in fierce domestic political argument when they are speaking to an overseas audience.

It's a worry he's gallavanting around the globe like this. Which reminds me of something I learnt way back when: The number one rule after a bad shoot is that you never bad mouth your own production. It might have been hell to work with so-and-so, but if you ever find yourself in front of a camera or a ape recorder, you're supposed to say, "It was great. It was fantastic working with So-and-so."

Grin and bear it for the production so that it has some shot of surviving the market place.That's the golden rule.

Tony Abbott should have grinned and beared it and said, "Hey, the NBN was an adventurous idea in its time but we're trying to be more pragmatic."  Instead he threw the ALP under the bus and made Australia look foolish. I guess you send an idiot to to do a job, you get idiotic results.

While I'm on this one, Pleiades sent me an article, presumably from Crikey which went through the ways in which Tony Abbott flubbed Australia's position with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Indonesia:

According to sources close to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) is less than impressed with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. It is said this view was formed before the election, when Abbott, Bishop and now Immigration Minister Scott Morrison talked loud and long about turning around refugee boats and sending them back to Indonesia.

The rumour was confirmed when Abbott turned up late for two important gatherings at APEC where SBY was in the chair, and in case there are some who would to contest this, when the egos of heads of state are on the line the attendance at all meetings of conferences such as APEC are important.

Politicians and other public figures do not live in a vacuum; whatever is said domestically about another government will be reported, with comment, to that government by its embassy, and additionally its foreign ministry will pick up the remarks from wire service reports.

It is a measure of the lack of sophistication and parochial outlook of Abbott and the government he leads that there is an apparent failure to understand the way the world works.

So far, he's been quite adept at making an ass out of himself on the international stage. In that way he is exactly like his mentor John Howard, a man you'd be embarrassed to show anywhere on the planet.

Screen Australia Still Sucks

This one comes from Monologan.

I must confess, I’ve been feeling uneasy about Screen Australia for some time now.

I’ve never been able to shake the impression that the whole thing is something of a club. When announcements come through of the latest beneficiaries of the millions of taxpayer dollars that go into feature and television production, the same names tend to pop up again and again. Even if their films lose money at the box office again and again.

And in part, I’m uneasy because I feel conflicted about whether those millions of dollars should be spent at all, when they as often as not appear to be used to prop up a local film industry incapable of standing on its own feet, rather than in primarily funding the telling Australian stories. The decision to pour millions of dollars into the quintessentially American story The Great Gatsby is a good recent example. If the car industry no longer needs propping up, why should the production sector? But that’s a debate for another day.

The reason for writing this now though is the fact that it emerged last week that Screen Australia had ponied up $50k to get The Conversation writing about the screen industry more regularly.

I say emerged, because normally, Screen Australia holds a board meeting, then issues press releases about the projects it intends to fund.

The trick is that the guy writing this runs Encore magazine:

I’m heartened that Screen Australia now recognises that “arts journalism is under pressure”. Based on our previous experience, Screen Australia doesn’t spend its “sponsorship” money easily. In the four years or so we’ve owned Encore – which is the oldest title of its type with a three decade heritage in the production sector – our sales team have never been successful in persuading them to spend a single dollar on sponsorship or marketing – and indeed they never once put out a brief. A cynic might say that they don’t like some of the things we’ve written so it was never going to happen anyway. But there again, perhaps our sales director, otherwise excellent at his job, just had a series of off days on the five or six occasions he went in to see them. Either way, having closed the loss making print edition last year, I can’t help ruminate on what a difference $50k would have made to the title.

But I can’t help thinking that the explanation is more likely to be that Screen Australia took a liking to the cut of The Conversation’s jib, and decided to find a way of helping it out. If you’re wealthy like Global Mail’s funder Graeme Woods or are a business with a budget for this sort of thing like CommBank, that’s fair enough. But if you’re a public body, you have a duty to do these things in a fair and above board way, no matter how worthy the recipient.

I think The Conversation deserves the money. I just don’t think that Screen Australia can justify how it made the decision.

If you don’t want people to think you’re a club, then don’t act like one.

So, yes. It does look like a club, and it's pretty friggin' awful.

2013/10/26

Russell Brand's Revolution

His Take On The Infeasibility Of our Civilisation

This is worth a read.

While I don't agree with all of it, it's still good to know somebody is writing something fundamentally questioning the value of our current social systems in a big publication.

 

2013/10/25

A Pack Of Liars

No, Really, Won't They Stick To Their Lousy Script?

The worst thing about the 2013 Federal election - apart from the obvious that the idiots won - might be that the Coalition ran on statements that really have no bearing to what they are actually doing, now that they are in government. It's hard to say who the worst offender is because they're all doing dodgy things on the public purse and Tony Abbott is the leader amongst this group of perk partiers. I'm sure when they called their party the Liberal Party, they didn't mean their attitude to the public purse for private concerns.

Tony Abbott in fact has been amazingly incapable of living out his own script where he would rush off to Jakarta in his first week (he didn't) and he sure as hell isn't going to reel in the deficit any faster than the ALP would have. Now we find Joe Hockey has gone and given a pile of money to the RBA - because they asked nicely - but this money is going to blowout the deficit this year.
The Hockey of ''budget crisis'' fame, the government debt warrior, the dry who never met a deficit he didn't hate, has turned into the half-trillion dollar man, spent all the $7.1 billion in policy savings he was trumpeting just five days ago and blown out this year's deficit by $7 billion beyond Labor's best efforts. And the financial year is young.

Overshadowed by the commission of audit announcement and boosting the debt ceiling from $300 billion to the magic half-trillion is the former fiscal Scrooge playing Santa Claus down at the Reserve Bank. Will Joe Hockey raid the RBA for a dividend with which to shave the deficit? What a foolish and wrong-headed question I posed here on Monday - Joe is giving the RBA $8.8 billion, which, obviously, blows out the deficit by the same amount.

Not content with that Joe Hockey is scrapping the Mining Tax
‘‘The minerals resource rent tax (MRRT) is a complex and unnecessary tax which struggled to raise the substantial revenue predicted by the former government,’’ Treasurer Joe Hockey said in a statement. ‘‘This failed tax imposed significant compliance costs on one of our most important industries, while damaging business confidence which is critical to future investment and jobs.’’

While many of the measures linked to the tax will also be scrapped, the coalition government will keep the increase in compulsory superannuation from 9 per cent to 12 per cent, currently paused for two years.

Mr Hockey said the government was still considering the issue of the ‘‘onshore administration’’ of the petroleum resource rent tax.

The draft laws repeal a range of Labor policies including the SchoolKids Bonus, the business loss carry-back, accelerated depreciation for motor vehicles, geothermal exploration provisions, the low income superannuation contribution and the income support bonus.

The bill also gets rid of the reduction in the small business instant asset write-off threshold.

So if you're a small business owner and voted Liberal (because you're a self-interest-driven knob), this is the bit where you should be complaining that the Liberal Party is looking after the big end of town again, and selling you down the river all the while claiming to represent you in government.

Walk-off HBP sent in this link where Penny Wong explains just how mendacious this Coalition lot have been.
Details about asylum seeker arrivals are being withheld – apparently the entire nation imagined the Coalition’s announced tow back the boats policy. Despite promising severe regulation of foreign investment, the government is now proposing to rush through free trade agreements. Now Joe Hockey has announced the details of their commission of audit, a well-used Liberal tactic to make drastic and punitive cuts to services, kept secret before the election.

Not only is this a government that isn’t doing what it said it would do; it doesn’t want to tell Australians what it’s really doing.

Over the last few years, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey were unrelenting in their scaremongering over the state of the nation’s finances; Australians were told that “there is now a budget emergency”, and, worse, that Labor was “drowning the nation in debt”.

But, now in government, the Liberals tout some debt as “good” and the “budget emergency” appears to have disappeared. So much so, under the Coalition, the nation can now apparently afford a $500bn debt ceiling. So much for the “budget emergency”.

Just pause for a moment and imagine the extent of Hockey’s hyperventilation had a Labor treasurer proposed such an increase.

The new treasurer has flagged higher infrastructure spending funded by government borrowing – that is, by debt – and the assistant infrastructure minister, Jamie Briggs, blithely suggests thinking “more broadly” about using the Commonwealth balance sheet.

Of course, when Labor borrowed to invest, Abbott and Hockey declared a “debt crisis”, but now they are finally being honest that some borrowing can be smart.

Well, yes Ms Wong, they lied. And they still won. It makes for much misery.

How Does Greg Hunt Live With Himself?

It's a mystery how party politics can change a man's convictions so he is willing to argue white is black for the sake of party unity. As we all know by now, Greg Hunt is entirely willing to do or say anything for the sake of holding power.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt has hosed down suggestions of a link between climate change and increased bushfire intensity, saying he had ''looked up what Wikipedia'' said and it was clear that bushfires in Australia were frequent events that had occurred during hotter months since before European settlement.

Yes, the Minster for the Environment gets his facts from Wikipedia, and not from the scientists in his own department. Of course, given that this is an administration without a Minister for Science, it is entirely believable that he had nowhere to go but Wikipedia given his lack of faith in such things as facts.

The epistemological problems of quoting Wikipedia seems to have escaped the minister as his own entry descended into a farce.
"He [Hunt] is notorious for using Wikipedia to conduct research on environmental issues on Wikipedia despite having access to a vast bureaucracy staffed by some of the finest and most dedicated minds in the nation, like some total turd. Critics concede that his 1990 Honours thesis on the necessity of a carbon tax was probably more academically rigorous than the manner in which he comports himself as one of the most powerful people in the country, but others defend their characterisation of the Environment Minister as an utter weiner."

I know I quote Machiavelli a lot here but it has to be said that Niccolo Machiavelli made the important point that contempt is the greatest enemy of the Prince, and here we have a politician held deeply in contempt. At this point you wonder if the Coalition has anything positive to enact or do to help the environment. It looks pretty unlikely based on the last 6 weeks since the election.

The Abbott Government has been a bus crash and they haven't even sat in Parliament properly yet.

2013/10/24

A Poem For A Lost Soul

It's An Ode, So To Speak...

I don't write poetry normally. As writing/scribbling/doodling goes, it's not my strong suit.  I've written all of 2 poems in my life, ...and this is my second.

 

Farewell to thee, the blossom of youth,
Errant of soul, fragrant of flowers,
Sheveled, feckful, innocuous, couth,
gainly and gaumy; righteous upon the hour.
Thy kingdom cleansed of signs of hell
thine yacht has sailed to the Isle of Id
Look not back to thy towering success
'tis but a dream of deeds gone unbid
When ultimately thine remembrance comes,
Recall then thou were'st once young, dumb,
and full of cum.

2013/10/21

Unrepresentative Swill

While I'm On A Roll Ranting About The Coalition Government...

Here's something interesting.
She's offered it only within the confines of the government, but word is Peta Credlin has some world-weary advice for rookie Labor leader Bill Shorten: if you're serious about making Labor competitive again in 2016, you best swallow hard, take a deep breath, and turn your back on carbon pricing. And you best do it now.

It's that simple. Or is it?

That Credlin is Tony Abbott's chief of staff, is enough to provoke suspicion. Indeed, coming from the respected but highly partisan Credlin, such unsolicited advice is just as likely to make the ALP cling ever more determinedly to its carbon pricing commitments like the proverbial … to a blanket.
But some in Labor are beginning to question the longer-term implications of an automatic assumption of staying the course. Ever so quietly, they are whispering ''hold on, let's just think about this''.

One of those is thought to be Shorten himself - the man Abbott described this week as ''nothing if not pragmatic''.

Abbott's super-focused Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, agrees the term ''pragmatic'' was a coded appeal to Shorten's personal exceptionalism - his sense that, more so than his colleagues, he is a realist and will do the political maths pretty dispassionately when needed.

Credlin, of course, knows first hand about the wilderness Shorten has just entered.
As an adviser in the Howard government and then as chief of staff to a succession of leaders - Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, and finally Abbott - she has seen her share of political failure.

Just for the record, Peta Credlin isn't anywhere near being an elected representative of Australia's constituency. Yet there she is offering unsolicited advice to the new Opposition Leader in the most patronising of ways. But basically she's saying, roll over and play dead or you won't have any shot at winning government. And she says this from her authority of having been chief of staff to Nelson, Turnbull, and Abbott - but hey is that a position you get voted in. Uh, didn't think so.

It says she thinks the Coalition won government on its policy platform when in all likelihood the electorate rejected the riven and fractured ALP government. What's worse is that the ALP allowed it self to be so riven and fractured just by having Tony Abbott saying a bunch of ridiculous things over and over again. But the main point is, if Peta Credlin thinks they won on the back of policies, she is so wrong it's not funny. But this is a good thing because it means they're willing to go to a Double Dissolution, because they really believe in their own bullshit. This is going to be really interesting if it gets to that point.

The Honorable Clive Palmer, Mouthbreather Patrician

It's really difficult to watch Clive Palmer giving speeches because he's such a mouth breather. He sounds like his nose is perpetually blocked, and you start to feel like you're running out of breath, just listening to him.

Anyway, Clive is saying he won't pass anything until he and his ragtag bunch of Climate Change Deniers gets treated like a major party. I guess he doesn't have a problem being described as 'entitled'. He's playing brinkmanship with Tony Abbott knowing full well Tony Abbott needs the balancing block to repeal the "Carbon tax". What's even stranger is that he wants to be reimbursed the Carbon tax already paid by his company. Otherwise, Abbott won't get to repeal the Carbon Tax after his Senators take up their positions in the Senate after June next year.

Now, I don't know about you but this strikes me as a massive conflict of interest. You never saw the Australian democrats make this kind of demand when they had the balance of power - not in the most fey and feckless moments of Cheryl Kernot, or the closet-Liberal moments of Meg Lees, or for that matter the petulant and idiotic moments of Natasha the Stoat-Destrpoyer. Not even Bob Brown made demands like that. Cheryl or Meg or Natasha or Bob never said "I won't pass this legislation unless I get a tax refund on a previously-legitimate tax that I paid."

How is this not a massive conflict of interest? Forget for the moment Clive is saying he's effectively going to block Tony Abbot from governing unless he gets what he wants which is Tea-bagging enough. Forget all those weird-ass expenses MPs have been racking up at the tax payers expense. Clive won't say yes to anything unless he gets a refund for the Carbon Tax.  He wants a freaking ransom!

Paul Keating was sure right about the Senate being unrepresentative swill. I sure as hell can't believe how Australia saddled itself with such a crazy Senate.

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