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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

Sleep Driving

Really? The Politicising Only Started Now?

What is a sane person to do when confronted with this?

Environment Minister Greg Hunt has condemned attempts to link the bushfires to the need for greater climate action as politicising a ''human tragedy''.

Amid concern among scientists and environment groups that the ferocious fires before the start of summer were part of a pattern of increasing extreme weather events, Mr Hunt's office dismissed questions about the need for a more ambitious climate policy.

After Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt provoked controversy by linking the risk of bushfires to Mr Abbott's plan to scrap the carbon tax, Mr Hunt said that nobody should politicise a tragedy. ''There has been a terrible tragedy in NSW and no one anywhere should seek to politicise any human tragedy, let alone a bushfire of this scale,'' he said.

Wasn't this the Environment Minster for the Party that just spent the last 3 years politicising Global Warming in the face of mounting evidence? I know that we have freedom of speech but sure that doesn't mean unlimited access to hypocrisy and stupidity, does it? Or are we so tolerant now of head-in-the-sand-Climate-Change-Denialism, that we just accept this kind of rhetorical positioning? It's clearly at odds with the narrative of the coalition that Global Warming and Climate Change are somehow in the category of maybe but when the evidence is glaring in your face, and not for the first time but on a daily basis for about a 5weeks since the election - and election day that happened on the warmest September day on record to boot - isn't it disingenuous to try and hose down the obvious debate to be had by saying we shouldn't politicise it? Weren't they the party that politicised it first in this term of government by shutting down the Climate Change Commission?

And that's being delicate about it. The fact is, they politicised it when they decided they didn't agree with the science, as if there were any rational ground for an argument about the nature of global warming.

There's a view going around that the Coaltion have no intention whatsoever of making any kind of serious dent in emission because they don't believe in the science; that the whole point of the Direct Action plan is that it's really not going to do much, and that should be the way business like things. It kinds of ignores that fact that agribusiness operates in the context of the environment and the last time we had a drought, it brought the Nationals to their senses briefly in endorsing an ETS under John Howard. What's worse, Greg Hunt devised it. Which is the same ETS the ALP set up because it was a market-based solution as opposed to a big tax on the emitting businesses like the Direct Action plan being proposed by Greg Hunt. You really have to wonder about a man who wrote  a perfectly fine bit f policy, then didn't get to implement it; who then had to write a worse policy just to get elected and now must sell it against his better idea. As in, how does he sleep at nights?

You sort of wonder what you'd get if you interrogated him with truth serum and polygraph. What the hell can this man be thinking? Forget Howard who was by temperament a disbeliever, or Tony Abbott who is by ideological bent, a disbeliever. What sorry ass ground has Greg Hunto got to be standing on to be even saying we shouldn't be politicising this now. If not now, then when did we stop politicising the science of Global Warming, Mr Hunt? Did we conveniently decide upon this on the day your party won office?

Let's put things into to perspective. After the hottest September on record, we're having the kind of October that wouldn't be out of place as being a January when we normally have these big bushfires. We may have record breaking sequence of November through to February this year with a drought thrown in. All of it presumably from Global Warming caused by human activity, but at what point do we get to talk about it as apolitical issue without offending the fine, delicate, vulnerable sensibilities of Greg Hunt?

The truth is, Global Warming is the elephant in the room you are furiously trying to ignore, except the more you ignore it, the more it grows and the more it throws the weight around in the room. So, as environment minister it must be asked of Mr. Hunt: what the hell are you going to do about all this? Are you really going to dismantle the system you designed to incentivise the cutting of emissions? Are you really going to replace that system with a system that has far less scope of working? Is your choice really, doggedly to choose sleeping at the wheel?

Generation Change

The ALP's Gen-X Crew

The Herald was making the point today that the ALP have gone Gen-X with their choice of frontbench. When you think about it, Bill Shorten is 46 going on 47 so that puts him at the older range of Gen-X, and Tanya Plibersek at 44, it's true that the ALP have indeed gone Gen-X. I have a late Boomer friend who tells me that all this demographic stuff is just a construct not worthy of analysis, except I've been writing here under the banner of 'Gen-X View Of The Universe' for a good 5 years now. It obviously means something.

What could it mean?

The Generation X politician in Australia would have arrived at Tertiary education after the AUS was disintegrated by the likes of Peter Costello and Tony Abbott in 1983, Interestingly enough, Julia Gillard was the last President of the AUS when it collapsed in 1983. If you anted a model to the fractious politics of the Julia Gillard Prime Mininster-ship, you would have found it in the demise of the Australian Union of Students, with the same cast of late Baby Boomers thrashing and trashing institutions to make their political mark. What's scary is that they're still around aplenty in the Liberal and National party ranks, and they probably still don't think much of indulging in that sort of ratbag behaviour. This explains the histrionic opposition style Tony Abbott chose to work with - because it is the method he used in his youth to destroy the AUS , headed up by Julia Gillard. Worse still, it worked again, so that may be why he's so convinced he has some kind of mandate.

The demise of the AUS and the years where there was no student lobby until the NUS got up in the late 1980s allowed HECS to be brought in. Unlike the Baby Boomers, most of the Gen-X politician would have had to pay HECS. When they say education and the opportunities it affords are important, they know what they are saying. All these things are intimately entwined.

If there is one thing that I do think is encouraging about the Gen X ALP politicos is that they are of the generation that had to put back together the NUS and have the experience of rebuilding institutions. If the ALP under Rudd-Gillard looked positively fractured, then I think the current group might be able to start from scratch and build a proper agenda that suits the time. As I wrote the other day, I'm feeling fairly optimistic about the Shorten-Plibersek team, much more so than I felt about the Rudd-Gillard team when they first rose to the level of Opposition leader and deputy back in 2006. They're not perfect human beings and they will make their mistakes. I just don't think they're as fractious and crazy as the generation of politicians who were forged in the dying days of the AUS.

Right now, the Coalition are the party of the Baby Boomers much more than Gen-X or Gen-Y by dint of the ageing population and makeup of the Liberal and National Party demographic. The fissure hasn't been more stark than any other time since Mark Latham as late Baby Boomer was taking on John Howard who was born before the Boomers. That fissure sort of leaves the current ALP firmly in the Gen-X camp with the hope of picking up a big portion of support from Gen-Y.  The question then is whether Gen-X+Gen-Y interest is a big enough voting constituency to overcome the Baby Boomers' interests in their twilight years.

Demographically speaking, Gen-X is small and shorter than either the Boomers before or the Gen-Y that follows. That being the case the duo may never make it. And if they did, they may be seen off by a Gen-Y politician. Consider the American experience. Bill Clinton was the first Boomer President, who was followed by George W. Bush who was followed by Barack Obama, all of whom are Boomers. All three Presidents won two terms, so the Baby Boomer reign will last 24years. If a Gen-X candidate won 2 terms after Obama, the next election after that will likely see a pair of Gen-Y candidates. It's entirely possible there will never be a Gen X President of the United States.

Similarly, I don't see any Gen-Xers knocking on the door in the Coalition ranks. If Abbott is replaced for some reason, it's possible the leadership reverts to Malcolm Turnbull or goes to Joe Hockey - both of whom are Boomers. The longer the Coalition stay in power, the less chance there will be of a government of Gen-Xers in Australia.

So when you look at it through the demographic filter, that's what we have with Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek: The one and only shot at Gen-X forming Government in Australia.

News That's Fit To Punt - 15/Oct/2013

Tony Says He's Got A Man Date

It's a bit gay isn't it Tony?

Alrighty, so Tony Abbott is saying that he has a mandate to repeal the Carbon Tax. He's been banging on with this since winning the election and as far as we can tell, he's put the topic at pole position of his agenda in Parliament. I guess if you say you're going to do it and win an election it might look like you have a mandate but most people polled seem to think this is a terrible idea; and that the reason they voted for Abbott was because they reviled the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd ALP so much but hadn't really given much thought on the ramification of ousting the ALP government.

So much for the wisdom of crowds. Our electorate is stupid.

You can basically see that not too deeply down, Tony Abbott is still a Climate Change Denialist who has hijacked the agenda so he's in a hurry to sort this out in favour of his denialist position as quickly as he can. This then turns into the absurd spectacle of Tony Abbott trying to apply pressure on to the new Opposition Leader Bill Shorten like so:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott says he believes Bill Shorten will be forced to back the Coalition's plan to repeal the carbon tax, saying Labor's new leader is “nothing if not a political pragmatist”.

Mr Abbott dismissed the new Labor leader's repeated statements in support of pricing carbon, saying his government was “giving the Labor Party a chance to repent” on the issue.

It's interesting how he uses that word "repent", as if introducing the Carbon Pricing mechanism was somehow a sin. You imagine that in Tony Abbott's mind, any market driven mechanism to push down carbon emissions is somehow 'evil' (like 'adultery' or 'murder' - the mind boggles). Is it the tax part that bothers him? Or is it simply that he just disagrees with the mountain of scientific data?

Whatever little faith you had in his Direct Action policy to replace the Carbon Emission Trading Scheme evaporates like so much morning dew in the rising heat when you consider that word "repent".

I Voted For Him But He's A Terrible Pundit

Mark 'Arm-Breaker' Latham said that the ALP faithful shouldn't vote for Anthony Abanese because 'Albo' had terrible political instincts and was basically too wishy washy for Mark Latham's Liking. Whilst ranting on against union power and factional deals within the ALP, Latham said he was voting "ABA. Anybody-But Albo". Which is to say he voted for Bill Shorten but didn't really want to endorse Bill Shorten in any positive manner, no.

I guess Bill Shorten is a tough character to take given the Rudd Gillard years and the role he played in both PM swaps. As 'faceless men' go, he's been the very public face of the faceless men, and so, on some level probably deserves to be given the shot in the same spirit that led to John "I don't take bribes But I don't report Them' Robertson leading the ALP in NSW. I guess we could be heading for a travesty with Bill Shorten as Opposition Leader but I doubt Albo was a better choice.

While I am no member of the ALP - so this is completely an outsider's view - I think Albo was and still is a potential liability. One shouldn't cast aspersions but one has to ask how close Albo is to Eddie Obeid and whether he will get linked to those wonderful ICAC hearings slated to deal with the morbid Obeidity in NSW. Oh, and that Ron Medich guy who put out a hit on that McGurk guy. In that sense 'Deputy Prime Minister Albo' might have been the high point of Anthony Albanese.

Shorten has his failings. People have been writing about those in spades. In amongst reading all the bad press, one thing I did like about Bill Shorten was that after he switched back to supporting Rudd, he came out fighting. He wasn't fighting for his reputation, but for deeply core ALP values. You know, the stuff we always ascribe to Gough and Bob and Paul. On that level he appears to be a politician who speaks on behalf of a greater portion of Australia than Julia Gillard, while possibly not having the insane charisma of Kevin Rudd. You'd have to say the guy has a fighting chance; especially against a willful, dogmatic, Tory ideologue like Tony Abbott.

The other net benefit of the Shorten leadership over an Albo leadership is that you get Tanya Plibersek as Deputy Opposition Leader.I'll be honest with you, I think Tanya Plibersek has been great through the election campaign and into this post-election period. Any time I've seen her on Q&A, she's been setting the record straight and has countered the attempts by the Coalition to paint the Rudd-Gillard government as somehow a failed government. She's been logical, persuasive and very circumspect.

If you had to come up with a credible one-two punch, it's hard to do better than this duo, given the ALP's current state. Anna Burke might feel bitter and twisted about the shadow cabinet selection, but the Shorten-Plibersek team up gives you a lot of hope that the ALP can get their mojo back. When I think back to how negatively I felt about the original Rudd-Gillard team up back in 2006, I think this is a lot more promising. And I never thought I'd be saying that so early after an election loss. They haven't even gone back to Parliament yet.

Housing Bubbles Are Harder To Observe Than The Higgs Boson

Look, if a Nobel Prize winning economist says you're in a housing bubble, you probably are in a housing bubble.

Robert Shiller, the joint winner of the Nobel prize for economics, is worried about bubbles. The Yale University professor expressed alarm at the rapid rise in global house prices soon after the award was announced.

"There are so many countries that are looking bubbly," he said.

If he's right, and bubble trouble besets Australia, it's bad news for growth and jobs.

The Reserve Bank has cut interest rates to record lows to encourage businesses and consumers to spend and invest as the effects of the mining boom fade. The aim is to boost non-mining sectors like home building, retail and tourism so they can take over from mining as drivers of national economic growth.

But low interest rates have also stoked demand for established houses. Sydney has led the way – the city's median dwelling price (comprising houses and units) rose by a frothy 13.1 per cent in the year to September.

If house price growth becomes unsustainable the Reserve might decide to take some heat out of the property market by lifting interest rates. It would be unlikely to tolerate the longer-term risk of a devastating house price collapse.

But under that scenario, interest rates would be set at a higher level than required by the broader economy. The cost of containing house prices could be subdued growth and fewer jobs.

The really odd thing about all this is that the RBA has been insisting we don't have a Housing Bubble in face of the same evidence being presented to the Nobel Laureate Economist. I mean, we take the existence of the Higgs Boson on about the same level of scrutiny - and they gave Dr. Higgs his Nobel earlier in the month - so I'm sitting here wondering what exactly the RBA thinks is going on that makes it not a bubble; but here it goes...:

But AMP capital chief economist Shane Oliver believes many of them don't fully understand Australian property markets.

"The basic problem here is a lack of supply caused by chronic under-building," he said. "There is a shortage of housing in Australia and that partly explains why it is so unaffordable."

Given the blend of very low interest rates, a stable economy and pent up demand, it is no surprise property markets are showing signs of life. While Sydney property prices have grown strongly in the past year, this follows nearly a decade of weak growth. Data published by the Housing Industry Association this month shows the average annual growth in Sydney house prices over the past 10 years has been just 3.4 per cent – a rate that has hardly kept up with wages.

At this stage, the Reserve Bank isn't convinced by talk of housing bubbles in Australia. Last month the bank's assistant governor, Malcolm Edey, said those predictions were "unrealistically alarmist".

Dr Edey cautioned against reaching for "the bubble terminology" whenever house price increases were higher than average, because by definition that's half the time.

AMP Capital's Shane Oliver offers an explanation why Australian real estate is so expensive and unaffordable, but it's really not an answer as to why or how this is not a Housing Bubble. The RBA says if you take the average growth of property in Australia, it's only 3.4% p.a. which sits behind wage growth over that time, so it can't really be considered a bubble. I'm more interested in how that 'average' was derived, because the mathematician inside me smells a rat.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how things play out.

Movie Doubles - 'The Great Gatsby' (1974) & 'The Great Gatsby' (2013)

"Gatsby? What Gatsby?"

Just so you know, that line has to be the cheesiest line in both versions. Neither Mia Farrow nor Carey Mulligan pull off the mixed sentiment of excitement and feigned indifference. I can't think of a single actress who could do that, so it's no knock on Farrow or Mulligan; just saying. Though one can say, "what Gatsby indeed?" because never has there been a remake that was so redundant as the Baz Luhrman film. It's true, the old one has dated considerably in its shooting technique; but it's not like the new version really substantially added any insight into the book. If anything, it looks more like a forgery than a remake.

Watching both versions, you come to realise that F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn't a great dramaturg when it came to the characters in his novel. He's so preoccupied with the particulars of the characters that he seems to forget that there is some kind of reason for those character  other than for the display of his characterisation. In may ways the book doesn't have a lot of dramatic turning points so both versions of the film lurch from one loose moment to the next with only the most vague of causation. The end arrives as abruptly as the action starts to get a little interesting.

The Plaza Hotel Scene

The most conflict-ridden scene is the Plaza Hotel scene where things come to a head when Gatsby forces Daisy to tell Tom she doesn't love him. But of course she breaks and says that she loves both men. In both versions this results in a closeup of shock on Gatsby played by Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio respectively. The shock on DiCaprio's version is actually priceless.

It's interesting that the identical scene is written 40years apart and remains mostly the same and true to the book. Yet, when seen back to back it is clear that there is some attempt by the characters of the 1974 version to settle things as adults, while the 2013 version seems to be more of a petulant outburst by an emotionally juvenile Gatsby. Yet this is the interesting crux of comparing the two versions. The earlier film seems populated by adults, with only Nick Carraway being the innocent. The latter film seems to be populated by overgrown adolescents who have tremendous difficulty behaving with proper civil decorum. Redford was 38 when he played the role. DiCaprio is 39. They're both a bit too old to be playing Gatsby, but interestingly enough DiCaprio's Gatsby comes across as being much younger in spirit as well as behaviour than Redford's Gatsby.

Even Mulligan's Daisy seems so much younger than Farrow's Daisy. Carey Mulligan is listed as 28 according to Wikipedia, while Farrow was 29 at the time. You would still pick Farrow's Daisy to be a much older woman than Mulligan's Daisy.

It is as if cinema and its stars have gone through neoteny.

Robert Redford comes across as a adult with a strange fixation on this one woman. Leonardo DiCaprio comes across as a man-child trapped in a world he refuses to understand and is somehow latched onto the idea of Daisy much more than the real Daisy can sustain. You sort of wonder what has happened to our civilisation in the intervening years. Where have all the adults gone?

What The Distance of Time Tells Us

When you watch both versions back to back and have a little think about the character of Jay Gatsby, you're forced to confront the fact that he's a stalker. The whole getup with the mansion across the bay and the parties in spite of his retiring nature just so she would turn up, is one big stalky move. Nick Carraway on the other hand is a voyeur. He disguises his observations as a narrator in a sort of feigned indifference, but ultimately Nick makes the observations he does because he likes to watch. So the two main male characters in a story about a dynamic, masculine romanticism, are actually passive and recessive. This probably explains why the romance between Gatsby and Daisy feels incredibly turgid and dull in both versions. Gatsby might be great at getting to the girl, but he doesn't know how to get the girl. Carraway's sense of impotence in the narrative then is a reflection of Gatsby's inability to close the deal he thinks he's closing in upon. The rest of it seems to be a frivolous infatuation with the trappings of wealth.

Well, wealth is nice, so it's not like there's a great revelation there in either film. If anything the Luhrman version seems to be fixated on the lavishness of the parties and the manse, while the Clayton version seems to be fixated on class. These takes on the book are not bad in of themselves, but both movies seem to expose the hollowness at the core of the book itself. The Toby Maguire version of Nick Carraway makes a strong denunciation of Tom and Daisy and the inherited wealth set, while Sam Waterston's Nick Carraway makes more of a commentary on the shallowness of people inhabit the class, neither film really lends itself to a deeper analysis of the central 'tragedy'.

Rich Girls Don't Marry Poor Boys

For a line that's not in the book, the line casts a long shadow over both films. The line is credited to the father of F. Scott Fiztgerald's first love Ginevra.King, Charles G. King. In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote down the quote when he first met the man, and the man allegedly said, "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."

The line got rearranged into the line we know today by Francis Ford Coppola, and has made it into both versions of the film. It's a strange way to find posterity, but there you have it Charles G. King, you're an important footnote in cinema! The re-arranging of the line tells you a lot - that Charles G. King might have been trying to fend off a poor boy from his rich daughter, but in the eyes of Francis Ford Coppola the writer, "Rich Girls" know better and actively seek not to marry Poor Boys (presumably, if they had any goddamn sense).

Both films stage the line differently. In the Clayton version, it is as an outburst by Daisy in order to explain why she did not wait for Jay Gatsby to return from the war. In some ways the Clayton version is more classically sexist in that it ascribes the condition to the woman who would not marry below her class. The Luhrman version seems to attempt to subvert this line as being said by a man to another man as commentary on the condition of women and men in the 1920s - but in that sense it is more honest to the spirit of Charles G. King's utterance.

I don't know how uncomfortable people are when they watch either of the Gatsby movies and when the line gets flung. When Daisy says it in the earlier film, it is like an admission of her shallowness and awfulness of character that she would embrace wealth over any personal attribute Gatsby might have had to offer before he became wealthy. Naturally, it is more memorable than the passing comment version of the Luhrman version because it is the crux of the argument for Daisy's actions in the story in the earlier film, when she refuses to say she never loved Tom Buchanan.

What is interesting in the Luhrman version is that upon hearing it, Nick dismisses the notion, and this seems to mean that Luhrman does not hold to it as an important part of Daisy's calculations (or Jordan's for that matter); rather, the line is a commentary that is aimed at the audience as somehow malicious without significance. Nonetheless the Nick Carraway in the latter version ends up in psychiatric care with Jack Thompson(!) over his abreaction to the shallowness of Daisy. It's possible that Luhrman's relationship with the line is a lot more complicated than first appearance.

Shooting Technique

The advent of the zoom lens must have been extraordinary in its day. Suddenly there was the freedom to re-frame without having to change lenses. The 1970s is the age of the zoom lens in cinema as resizing the shot with the zoom while the shot is running, became part of the package. There are a lot of zoom lens flourishes and re-sized frames in the earlier film, which makes it a typical film of its time. We just don't see that style any more. Watching it requires one to readjust to the aesthetic of the era. After the aesthetically severe 1980s there was a concerted, almost puritanical shift away from the zoom lens, while other devices such as the Steadicam an the Louma crane came in to vogue.

Baz Luhrman seems hell bent on moving the camera no matter what, so his films are populated with gratuitous crane shots, stomach-turning tracking shots, and liberal doses of the Steadicam. For all the time that has elapsed between the two films, it seems the Great Gatsby can only be captured on film with the most gauche camera moves available.

Maybe in 40years time, somebody will come up with an even more radical way to move the camera, and then we will be in for an even more radical Gatsby. Maybe it will only be in 20years. It probably won't be worth it.

What The Distance of Time Tells Us Part II

Meyer Wolfsheim in the book is clearly based on Arnold Rothstein who famously fixed the 1919 World Series. We've seen the characterisation of Rothstein in 'Eight Men out' as well as more recently in 'Boardwalk Empire'. So that would make Jay Gatsby somebody a bit like Jimmy Darmody in Boardwalk Empire. Or Meyer Lansky or Lucky Luciano or even Al Capone. In any case, to have been a bootlegger with such success would imply Gatsby must have been high up in these kinds of outfits. You wonder how Arnold Rothstein in 'Boardwalk Empire' would react if he found out one of his associates was holding randomly lavish parties in a big mansion on Long Island.

One wonders how well Fitzgerald might have known such figures. Or maybe he didn't and that is why he only obliquely refers to Wolfsheim as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series and leaves it at that. While we see the phone calls about Philadelphia in both films, neither film really brings an outline to the bootlegging that was going on under the Prohibition, even though this is the source of Gatsby's great wealth. It appears that even though Fitzgerald was living the reality of the Prohibition era, he had very little idea as to how things were and how they worked. This is reflected in the scarcity of detail in the book as well as both films. The limits of the book circumscribe the limits for both films and in many ways this is disappointing because frankly, inquiring minds would want to know.

It is clear that over time, the 'Gatsby' fiction has been far superseded by the detailed fiction of such things as 'Boardwalk Empire'.

Spotting Names

The 1974 version actually is a bit of a revelation because it features some interesting names. Lois Chiles - who plays my favourite Bond Girl in 'Moonraker' - appears as Jordan Baker. That was a bit of a  surprise-reminder. Also surprising is the girl playing Daisy's daughter Pammy, was Patsy Kensit. yes, that Patsy Kensit. Scott Wilson plays George Wilson, and that's pretty interesting  I'd totally forgotten about that performance.

End Of Sprocket Holes

Going Out Backwards

Film labs used to be a bit bullying in the market place. If you have a film shooting and there's only one lab, the lab gets name its price and you cough up your cash hard to shoot anything. Making any film from 16mm, Super16mm, up to 35mm, all had the cost hurdle of the lab which often turned out to be far more inflexible than the price of the film itself. You could get deals here and there so I don't want this to be like a blanket bash of labs, but when you had a budget, the portion that went to the lab for any film was pretty big. Pretty much during the 90's you could get the 400' of film for about $120-140 but lab costs for processing and work print could send everything north of $400 for the roll of shot stock.

I don't know how I feel in hindsight about this, but even making a 3minute film was a haphazard venture. A 10minute film was a major financial commitment, just on lab costs. All the while, anything and everything shot on video - for better or worse - didn't count.  Now we're finding labs are closing everywhere. With the number of productions dwindling in Australia, it's not surprising labs are calling it quits.

Tracks, the opening film of the Adelaide Film Festival, was the last film to go through the lab at Deluxe Studios to be shot on actual film.

In a session at the Adelaide festival today, producer Emile Sherman from See Saw films revealed that the project, funded with the assistance of the festival, Screen Australia, Screen NSW and Screenwest, was shot on 35mm anamorphic film at the insistence of the film’s cinematographer Mandy Walker.

While director John Curran said the production team was “all striving for the same film”, Sherman joked: “When John says we were all making the same version of the film, his version cost a lot more than mine.”
Sherman said: “John and Mandy sat me down and said ‘I really think we need to shoot on film’. So we priced it up. That was an early decision that would prove to have some strong consequences financially.”

The bottom line is that labs couldn't cut costs and so the fixed costs that always hogged a portion of the budget remained. The advent of digital technologies has punctured that cost structure so in some ways the demise of the labs was inevitable in this country. When you consider the fact that even Kodak went bankrupt, the era of the sprocketted stuff is coming to a close, even in Hollywood. It's only a matter of time. You sort of wonder what's going to happen to the preservation of films when the expertise dies out.

I've long been of the opinion that you have to jump ahead to where the technology is going, but even I feel sorry that film itself has to go the way of the dodo.

All that being said, the future is... bright and high-resolutioned. We're on the verge of an era when domestic households are about to get 4k resolution UltraHD TVs. These things are stunning. If the move from Standard definition to HD 1080p was substantial, then this is twice the quantum leap in terms of resolution The picture quality of the Sony 4k Bravia TV set is gobsmacking. Now, some traditional film people would argue that this 4k is not as god as film or that it's not offering some analogue intangible that film possesses in spades. However from what I've seen 4k delivers more detail than film.

Way back when in the days of Flaming Horses I went to see a 4k projection of 'Blade Runner'.

The Sony 4k projection system was astounding. I have seen this film so often with scratches and missing frames I'm used to seeing it through a green-scratch glaze. When the DVD came out I was delighted to see the thing without scratches, but then it was beset by the compression artefacts instead and I was never a great fan of the Director's Cut. I think I've watched my DVD through thrice at the most.

By contrast, the 4k projection was pristine as any film could ever be projected as well as being absolutely free of blemishes. It was a surreal experience in of itself to be able to discern so much detail in the dark shadows that were obscured in other versions, both film and video. It's a blast to see such a perfect representation of any film. This 4k system will signal the death-knell of projected films. There may never be a technical specification reason to print another projection print - from now on, people will do so "for the look" i.e. artistic reasons. Print is dead, and last night's screening of 'Blade Runner' was there to announce it - It's that good.

Yep, print really is dead, and that was 2007. There are now pro-sumer cameras allowing people to shoot varieties of 4k. Once 4k becomes the domestic standard, nobody is going to really think that highly of film and its quaint analogue limitations.

The Hangover Part III

We All Grow Up Sometime

The posters declared 'It Ends Here'. The sense of finality invested in the last installment of the Hangover trilogy was overwhelming. What started off as a kind of denial of time and age, stretched out into an improbable caper in Bangkok in the last film. Now, the filmmakers seemed to want to tell us, these characters were going to find the end of their winding road.

If there ever were characters that refused to grow up and worse still wanted to regress to juvenile mayhem, the threesome of Handsome Phil, Stu the dentists and Alan the Hebephrenic were crystalline figures conceived in Hollywood, as some kind of gift to fiction. Bradley Cooper's career has taken off as a result of his turn as Phil, while Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis have forged solid careers as comic actors since the first film. Justin Bartha who played the 4th wheel of this tricycle probably got the worst draw of the straw.Instead, the films have also catapulted the unlikely Ken Jeong as a specialist actor in playing deeply inappropriate Asian men, into a crazy kind of stardom.

If the first film was a celebration of regressing to irresponsibility, then the second film was a strained attempt to stretch out the joy. With this final film, the story comes to an unlikely denouement. Tolkien and Peter Jackson can eat their hearts out.

What's Good About It

It's the same old mayhem of warped causation and inappropriate pay offs. The film is relatively free of the need to relive the first film - which was a problem that plagued the second film - and instead develop some of the things that came out of the original Vegas exploit they managed to forget.

The laughs are callow and black. This is good. They haven't exactly stepped back from the edginess that was established in the first film and they have made no attempt to be toned down in order to reach a wider audience. From the giraffe death gag through to the murder of Black Doug and ultimately the end, there is a very nasty streak in the laughs that leave you uncomfortable. What holds it together a a comedy is the Hebephrenic laughs from Zach Galifianakis and the insane characterisation of Leslie Chow by Ken Jeong.

The third film is also a lot more stylish in its shot selection as well as lighting and effects. The budgets certainly get bigger with success.

What's Bad About It

It's always hard to reprise things and find new things about the characters and their relationships. Sequels labour under the burden of developing things that are maybe not as interesting as the first film. The exception to this problem are the comic book adaptations we see so many of today, for they all labour to go through the 'Origin' story in the first movie and the interesting action only gets under way in the second films.

We don't really learn anything new about the guys and we don't see much of a development save for Alan finding love with Cassie. The romance itself isn't bad; it's just that we don't really get to find out what kind of people Phil and Stu are, when they're not finding themselves in these adventures with Alan. Maybe it's redundant and we don't need to know. the absence allows us to fill in the blank with our own lives, perhaps. But after 3 movies, I'm a little dissatisfied with how little I understand how these characters live with themselves, largely unchanged by these terrible comic events.

What's Interesting About It

The overwhelming feeling in the film is the desire to get it over and done with. The desperation of Stu, the determination of Phil, and even the odd outbursts by Alan display a sense in which these characters are finding these adventures incredibly tiresome and undesirable. If the first movie was the 'Wolf pack' as accidental picaresque figures, the third film places them as indentured servants of their own legacy. The going is tough and for a comedy, the laughs don't come as often as you'd expect.

The pain seems to be the growing pains of these men having to rediscover some kind of sense of responsibility. There's a big difference in not knowing where Doug is and knowing Doug s being held by a criminal kingpin. The shadow cast by this setup makes for some tough scenes. The only character that seems to move freely through this narrative is the genuine bad guy Leslie Chow.

In fact, it's conceivable to say the third film is all about Chow and that the Wolf pack has been reduced to functionaries - and more like a hunting dog pack - in the story of Chow's escape and robbery of gold. It is also the story of how the renegade Gen-Xers are forced to be tamed by circumstance and life. We all have to grow up some time how we do it is different, but in this film it is imposed upon the Wolfpack mercilessly. Only Chow survives as the true renegade. Across three films, The Hangover movies have turned into the story of Leslie Chow, criminal mastermind.

He's Great But He'll Always Be...

I never knew who Bradley Cooper was until the first Hangover film. Since then I've seen him in a variety of films. In each of them he drags the shadow of Handsome Phil. The on-screen persona of all his characters are tainted with the possibility that they are a wild party animal on the side. What strikes me is that Phil may be the defining role of his life. This isn't a crowning achievement like Bryan Cranston doing Walter White here. It's a solid actor being trapped by a role that is almost a throwaway. Not that it's a big deal, but it's something that popped into my head as I was watching. Mind you, did Harrison Ford ever overcome having played Han Solo and Indiana Jones? No. Did it stop him from working? Absolutely not. Cooper's going to be okay.

Paternity Thy Name Is Carlos

One of the most notable, poignant and peculiar moments in the film happens when Alan meets the young son of Jade. Yes, that was the baby boy Alan had strapped to his chest for the better part of the first film. Alan lies to the kid and declares to him he is the true father of the child, and that at one point his name was Carlos. Yes, it is true that Alan referred to the baby as Carlos for a couple of days, but it stretches the truth to breaking point. Between the outright lie and the hopelessly stretched truth, Alan offers the boy an assurance of his place in the world and thus an affirmation of the boy's life. In that moment, Alan realises an aiffirmation from his own father. It is a profound moment in the otherwise callow film, and Galifianakis' performance in that scene is amazing.

Didn't See It Coming?

I Told You They're Dumb

I love mentioning the fact the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised in favour of Tony Abbott's Coalition on the eve of the last election. In fact, the upper end of Fairfax management seemed fairly determined to see the ALP government get kicked out, so the actual editorial at the time seemed like Fairfax 'policy'. In that sense they were no better than Rupert Murdoch who was openly campaigning for Tony Abbott. I don't know which bit is the most galling - that the editorial argued for the Coalition or that they argued that line based on some imagined principle that political stability - no matter what the ideological framework in practice - was a better government than one riven with internal stress.

One month in we find the same editors bleating about the Tony Abbott-led Coalition government. Good god.

Then there is the ultimate excuse: ''It's a grey area.'' That is a surprise to voters who thought this problem had been settled and acceptable standards made clear. When there is doubt, surely taxpayer interest beats the personal one.

The Prime Minister's advice to MPs on Monday to ''err on the side of caution'' comes far too late. The only way to remove surprises and the need for excuses is to have an independent oversight of rewritten expenses rules that are not based on an honour system.

The Herald has put forward the Greens' national integrity commission proposal of last year as a template to clean up sports and racing; now is the time to revisit its aims to detect and investigate rorts among federal agencies, ministers and MPs.

Remember that the Coalition came to power because voters were sick of Labor governments betraying their trust through corruption, faceless men and broken promises. Abbott even promised to lead ''a government that accepts that it will be judged more by its deeds than by its mere words''.

Does this strike you as a bit much? It strains incredulity that somehow the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald did not exercise the same sort of parsing acumen in dissecting Tony Abbott's position, and so did not see that an Abbott-led Coalition government would in fact be a worse government than the ALP. If it wasn't stupid enough that they thought stability was a good enough reason to change, it appears they were too stupid to see that there was no way on God's earth that Tony Abbott was going to be able to do anything resembling what he promised. It's taken less than a month for us to find out that no, he didn't quite mean what he said about towing back boats, and no, the Federal Government won't be back in surplus any time sooner than the ALP government had projected a return to surplus.

Broken promises anybody? Do I hear a resounding chorus of complaint that used to greet every Gillard announcement? No. Quite simply, the Coalition were promising bullshit right through their run up to the election and clearly the newspapers did not stick it back in their faces, taking them to task. Couldn't they see that the Tony Abbott-led Coalition was a thought-free zone? An Anti-intellectual's party? A gathering of tiny minds fixed in aspic?

We knew that out here in voter land; and so would the editor of the SMH had he been reading the news - his own freaking newspaper - but somehow the editor seems to have not read their own bloody newspaper, or somehow managed to draw all the wrong conclusions. This is staggering when you stop to think about it, because I don't think I can ever remember a time when the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald  got it so laughably wrong as they have with their endorsement of Tony Abbott. It's positively comical that they're now complaining about the very government they endorsed after only one month!

It truly is pathetic what you read in the papers these days. :)

A Farewell To Good Sense

Deterring Democracy At Home

Amazingly, and I do thank you all, people have been on my case to write more about politics. As you know I do it from time to time and then live in embarrassment for days afterwards because I feel I should know better than to put any faith in any politician. Nonetheless we are all political animals and as some auteur said "all films are political. Some are intentional and other are not, but they're all political", which is to say even if I assiduously avoided writing about politics here, well, even that is politics.

The other discouraging thing is that Australia voted in a clearly intellectually inferior, intellectually dishonest, and dare I say flat out wrong party into Government. I've written a few times why a Tony Abbott government would be disaster while he was in opposition, but now that it has come to pass I feel great difficulty in summoning up the urge to cover the old terrain. Still, I figure I must because if I shut up, then nobody will speak up for me. It was bad enough when a an ALP Prime Minister like Julia Gillard would not speak for me and decidedly, pointed say she was not a social democrat; it's much worse living under a Liberal-National coalition government where it is clear they only speak for those with money (and not necessarily class).

The news that Tony Abbott is trying to control the media as much as possible and has turned into a control freak is not surprising. Some have pointed out Kevin Rudd was struck by this impulse and this is true. The so-called 'discipline' that political leadership demands means that they want to control the message as much as possible, but in a classic case of Marshall McLuhan, the message becomes the medium where we can read all sorts of things into Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin's attempt to stem the flow of information. They're clearly thinking like the North Korean Leadership that thinks if the population don't hear about it, there won't be trouble. This has resulted in the contention that the boats won't be towed back as suggested by Tony Abbott prior to the election - that he was merely suggesting that this might be an option.

Excuse me but, please explain how this isn't fraudulent? I don't want the boats towed back, but if I were a voter who wanted Tony to order the navy to tow back the boats ("damn the difficulty, damn the consequences!"), I'd be mightily miffed that he's backed down this quickly. The Coalition have even stopped telling us when boats arrived, and instead will give us a tally once a week, hoping to hose it down as an issue. And as I watch the news media (because I'm still a news junkie) the press are doing a terrible job of holding Tony Abbott to account on any of these kinds of stupid promises he made in the run up to the election. It really is the pits, and that's just the boats issue.

Readers may recall that I pointed out prior to the election that the most important issue for Australia's future industry was the NBN, and sure enough the LNP Coalition have marched in and started gutting it. Now, I don't know about you but the future industry is digital, future industrial growth is digital, and to that end the ALP government went about building the NBN.

Just to jog your brain, get a load of this:

Whoah that's fast.

Right now Google is running this experimental network in Kansas that is running at roughly 8.5times the speed of the best case scenario of the NBN. In this context, Kansas - the city in the state that wants to teach Creationism in science classes - has spawned a tech industry of startups trying to capitalise on this speed. This is clearly the future of cutting edge industry instead of the idiotic business of digging commodities out of the ground be they iron ore coal or agricultural produce. And even on the best day, the best bits of the NBN won't match what Google has put in Kansas.

Meanwhile in Australia the Coalition Government has proceeded to gut the board, install Ziggy Sitkowski, and has said that those places which haven't got fibre to the house will get copper to the node. The problem is that our copper has not been maintained since about 2008 (thanks to Sol Trujillo's cost-cutting), and it's falling apart in some areas. But we'd have to pay extra for the fibre to the house and at the moment Telstra charges $500-$800 to put any cable from the node to your house, while some places with NBN already installed had it done free. This has got to be constitutionally wrong!! Somebody work up a test case here please!! And why is this happening? Because Tony Abbott and his government don't believe that there could be a digital industry future for Australia. That's it. The Australia he and his mentally challenged colleagues envisages is essentially the 1950s where they don't even have Television. And this explains why they went to the polls without even an Arts policy.

Worse still, all the newspapers bar The Age in Melbourne supported these luddites in their editorials, and The Age to their credit supported the ALP on the back of their broadband policy. The LNP are so backward looking, when they talk about infrastructure, they're talking about roads!

Thus it is that the LNP are handing over money to the NSW Government to build WestConnex, the big tollway linkup proposed by Infrastructure NSW, headed up by Nick Greiner (who has since resigned). Now, roads are infrastructure true enough but Tollways are terrible things to be building. Tolls, as imposed in the Medieval era did plenty to stifle trade and development so the thing that most renaissance princes did was to abolish them. It's quite amazing that we've allowed ourselves at this point in history back into thinking that paying tolls for roads is somehow okay. But these idiotic notions arise because idiotic MBA types have run for office saying that the government is somehow like a business and should be making money from its infrastructure. And let's not forget that most of these idiotic MBA types from the Harvard Business School and their derivative copiers; vote LNP; and work on boards for companies that build and administer these toll roads. But hey, let's build more roads even though as infrastructure goes, roads do not directly contribute to the productivity of the economy. And Pay a private company to build it. And let them collect medieval tolls. Reward the conglomerate rent-seekers all the while claiming to be on the side of Small Business.

The scary thing is that none of these contradictions matter to the cognitively dissonant LNP. Which just goes to show just how stupid these people are. It's like that old 'Sixth Sense' joke: "I see stupid all the time and they just don't know that they're stupid,"; it certainly applies to the LNP government, one month in.

News That's Fit To Punt - 01/Oct/2013

My Disgust Runs Too Deep

Try as I might, I can't shake my profound disgust at the current Liberal-National Coalition government. There seems to be a new reason to take ever dimmer views for what passes as policy each and every day. The summit of the amassed lying and stupidity might actually be summed up in their economic statements and what they think actually went on under the ALP watch, what the situation is now, and where it is likely to go.

So try this link I've been sitting on a for a few days.

In simple terms, the 2012-13 budget outcome for the Gillard government reveals record spending cuts, a low tax take and a wafer-thin budget deficit. It is easy to see why the economy recorded less than robust growth during the year. It was not simply the high Australian dollar or the fall in the terms of trade that chipped away at GDP, but the significant fiscal contraction was also a dampener on growth.

The level of net government debt rose by just 0.1% of GDP in 2012-13, to reach 10.1% of GDP. This remains one of the lowest levels of government net debt in the world, with the aggregative change in the debt level from 2007-08 amounting to less than 14% of GDP, which is again one of the smallest increases in debt in the world over that timeframe.

It is easy to see why the credit ratings agencies have no hesitation assigning a triple-A rating to Australia’s government finances and why global investors remain enthusiastic about holding Australian assets.

When releasing the budget outcome last week, Hockey made the outlandish claim that the 2013-14 budget would be a legacy of the Labor Party. The Abbott government is obviously making decisions right now that are impacting on the budget bottom line and, what’s more, Hockey as Treasurer is in control of budget policy right now, today, with nine full months of the financial year remaining, whether he likes it or not.

...and there you have it. The Doublethink and lies needed to gloss over what was essentially a misleading exaggeration of Australia's fiscal position is staggering. If they didn't know then they were stupid. If they knew and still claimed it as loudly as they did, they were liars. But either way, if they're persisting with the incorrect portrayal, trying to push for more political advantage, they are stupid liars. But then, we knew that from the way they treat climate change as an issue.