More On That New Work-For-The-Dole Plan

"Dealing With Centrelink IS A Full-Time Job"

So sayeth a graffiti down in Victoria somewhere where everybody driving can see. It's most likely true. The dole being what it is - money for not working- the government sort of has to have scary gate-keepers to make the experience miserable enough so more people don't want to be come dole recipients. The Centrelink experience is the big stick, to the tiny carrot of disincentive to work that is the unemployment benefit payment. Gone are the days of the "non-specific arts grant".

What's even scarier is that under the ALP government, the ranks of people who had some kind of Centrelink payments swelled to 6million, which is roughly a quarter of the population. You can see why the Coalition government wants to do something about Centrelink payments to people except it also means kicking a lot of dust into a lot of faces. It's not going to win them votes. It's all very nutty and you wonder exactly how the numbers are stacked. Fortunately Guy Rundle over at Crikey has done some maths (thanks to Pleiades for the heads up):

Australia currently has around 830,000 people currently receiving unemployment benefit, which would suggest a raw figure of 33.2 million job applications being made per month under the new scheme.
However, a yet-to-be specified number of people will be exempt from this requirement because they are undergoing training and there will be a certain amount of non-fulfilment -- so let’s bang this down to a mere 25 million applications. Let’s now assume that people send these far and wide -- full letter and CV applications as required by the new conditions -- to all employers.

There are around 2 million registered businesses in Australia, but many of these are sole proprietors billing as companies or multiple shell companies around a single real business. Let’s assume 1 million employment entities. By this absurdly abstract raw count, every business would receive 25 extra applications per month.
If we assume that every application will be taken seriously -- and that is surely part of the social contract the government is proposing -- then every application will take, say, 20 minutes to process, or 8.3 hours a month, a full working day. Assuming these are being handled by an HR staffer on $50,000, that would be $200/month, or $50/week in extra business costs.

But of course, these things won’t fall equally. Many of these applications from minimally qualified applicants with little work experience will go to the entry-level service sector, dominated by small (under 19 employees) and micro (under four employees) businesses.

Let’s look at Tasmania, with the highest unemployment rate. The state has 18,500 unemployed looking for full-time work, who would generate 740,000 applications per month. It has around 25,000 businesses in the service sector -- but assuming sole traders and shells, we can bust that down to 15,000 companies. Since small businesses employ 45% of the overall workforce, let’s say they’ll receive 300,000 of these applications (in reality, it will likely be more).
Thus by this reckoning, every operating small business in Tasmania -- whether it has advertised or not -- will receive an average of 20 job applications per month, generating, by the implied social contract, 400 minutes, or 6.67 hours of extra work per month. That is less than the nationwide business average, but we’re talking about companies with one or two employees. Even if they don’t spend a great deal of time on these applications -- and many, being decent people, will give them a read -- the actual task of processing them will chew up time in a business day.

But the position gets terrifying when you limit this process to companies that are actually advertising vacancies. Seek.com.au currently has 78 vacancies in various service and unskilled sectors for the whole of Tasmania. Let’s multiply that by three for other sources -- local papers, word of mouth, milk bar windows -- and assume that those 234 vacancies receive two-thirds, 67%, of the applications. That is half a million applications per month for 234 jobs, or 2136 applications per job.

That's pretty scary. Being somebody who has to read job applications, I am just dreading seeing a load of job applications where I can't tell if they are keen or not at all. Just as night follows day, if the Coalition get their way on this idiotic idea, I will be reading a lot more resumes than I need to or want to - and that's just my own selfish take.

The somewhat bigger picture is this: If you are in a small industry, there won't be more than 40 companies in your sector of work. Once you're applied to all of them, you're done. It's one thing to imagine an infinitely interchangeable unemployed person going into a workforce with unlimited flexibility in how it handles skilled positions in the workplace but the reality is nothing like this.  Certainly if it was a small sector with only 40 or so companies, you would be sending in a resume every month to the same companies knowing full well they won't even read them because they know you're only doing it to get unemployment benefits.

As policies go it's pretty crappy because it cynically assumes that people won't get jobs, but they have to keep trying. And if everybody did do as assumed by the government says, the numbers say it can't work. The scheme also floods the HR departments of various companies with garbage data they didn't ask for, but must be processed anyway - which is costly as well as time-consuming and aggravating. And it also ignores how jobs are distributed across the country. I'm actually scared of how this one is going to turn out.

We Need To Reconsider Education, Work, And Pay

This isn't a popular notion but it bears mentioning anyway. Our society runs a kind of Darwinian race for our kids as they grow up. The rules don't stay the same and fads come and go, but in general, the 12 years of junior school and high school is to pick out the best students and send them to university. It also selects the group who are not as good academically, but kids with aptitude towards various trades. It really isn't interested in kids who are neither academically brilliant or have little sensate skill they can parlay into a trade. Unsurprisingly the dregs of this process end up as adults without a future of any kind. And it's this population that ends up on the long-term unemployed list, or ends up in a life of crime.

You know those kids. You know those people. You know they exist.

The point is, schooling spends a good deal of time picking winners and losers, and some of the losers lose big, and lose early.  Some of them get a second chance and find some kind of career, but more often than not, the pure abject losers end up as the long term unemployed. It's a brave employer that gives those people a chance by hiring them. Living at home with one's parents into one's forties is not a dignified way to be; living like a homeless person or actually becoming a homeless person is even worse. Doing it on welfare payments likely isn't exactly the lap of luxury.

Having created winners, the winners go into medicine and law, and some even become politicians and make laws; and this is where it gets really unfair. The people who never lost in their lives get to tell the losers who lost early and lost big that somehow their own fault for not having the right dedication when likely it has a great deal to do with circumstance and environment. Arguably, the winners get to corner the market for high-paying work and the benefits that accrue from such work over the less successful, and then press home the advantage at every turn.

Thus inequality in our society necessarily starts with our concept of education, work and payment. Inequality can only be addressed by governments that are willing to admit that part of its job is wealth re-distribution from the overly successful to those in need - that is to say, the successful lawyer or doctor or banker can afford to pay a little extra to help the people they left behind. To turn around and scorn the losers and cut the benefits seems like an incredibly ungracious thing to do. It's really not that difficult to understand. Hence a Coalition government that seeks to cut the welfare payments and cut taxes is a government that seeks to increase inequality in our society. There's really no two ways about it, and it's pretty deplorable.

 

View From The Couch - 29/Jul/2014

Who Asked You, Peter Reith?

It's interesting Peter Reith has taken this moment to tell us he thinks the future Liberal Party leader has to be Julie Bishop. Peter Reith, an awful character at the best of times, did have a big mouth so it's not surprising he's chosen to speak out of turn; and yet he's basically sending up a weather balloon to see what happens when he nominates Julie Bishop. It's weird because it's hard to think of an equivalent happening right now where maybe a retired former minster like say Lindsay Tanner randomly nominating Tanya Plibersek to be the next Labor leader. Its hard to get my head around. basically, he's answering a question that hasn't been asked with an answer that probably isn't wanted by anybody. It might be true that Joe Hockey isn't the next best candidate after Tony Abbott - but why are we even talking about this now, when Tony is making his best impression as an international statesman?

I am not saying there is likely to be any leadership change in Tony Abbott's first term or even his second term. Gillard's knifing of Rudd with the support of Bill Shorten and others is not about to be replicated by the Coalition. However, of Australia's 28 prime ministers, only seven have been in office for more than four years so it's not unreasonable to suggest that after Abbott has had the job for at least four years or more, anything could happen.

Really now, Mr. Reith? Do tell!

We're Not Talking About The Band Severed Heads Here

The headline reads: Sydney man pictured with severed heads. It sounds like the guy is having a whale of a time.

However, a friend of the pair told Fairfax Media they have no intention of ever returning.
"They say they've never lived a better life than what they’re living now and 'you don't know what youse are missing out on, especially with the turn of events happening now [with the establishment of a caliphate in Iraq]," said the friend, who didn't want to be identified.

"People say they're worried these guys will come back but they understand that if they leave the country to go to Syria or Iraq they're not coming back. They're after two things - victory for Islam or martyrdom."

But the Attorney-General emphasised that home-grown terrorism remains a significant domestic threat.

He will seek to introduce legislation to parliament to make it an offence to encourage terrorism.

"One thing no one should think is that this is a problem on the other side of the world," said Brandis. "This is a problem that exists and germinates within our suburbs."

Argh. It's hard to tell who has the lower IQ - the guy who uses the plural of you as 'youse', or the Attorney General of this land - "Champion of Bigots" George Brandis - who thinks he can write a law to prohibit encouraging terrorism; especially when you consider the reason he wants to champion bigots is in the name of free speech and freedom of expression. The contradiction of his position had me in stitches of laughter until I realised he's going to try it anyway and waste everybody's time and money.

It's not good that there's some angry Arab-Australian running around chopping heads in Syria, but it seems the horse has bolted. The guy doesn't want to come back anyway. Meanwhile the rest of ISIS/ISIL is busy getting medieval on people's asses. They're placing decapitated heads on spikes. I mean, that's Vlad-Tepes-Krazy.

Work For The Dole Is A Kind Of Employment, No?

I don't get the conservative mental fixation about the imagined dole-bludgers. It's like they don't understand that at a certain point some people are not employable. That could be a point in time, or a point in the person's life, but being employable in the broadest sense, narrows so much that people cannot make the grade. They might be too old to do what is necessary; they might just be too inexperienced; or dare I say too stupid to do anything of value; and then there are some who are a combination of all sort of elements that make a person unemployable.

And at a certain point, society is better off just paying these people off in some way so they don't turn to a life of petty crime or become destitute and turn to a life of violent crime. It's not a difficult concept to understand but you keep meeting people who say, "but it's our tax money being wasted" as if how that money was spent was their decision to make (it's not, it's the government's) and ignores the fact that the money spent staves off enough desperation it probably is doing a lot of social good. This is why our society came up with a safety net in the first place. it really isn't a whole lot of money, and anybody living on it, isn't having a wonderful life unless of course they live at home with wealthy parents.  And yes, such people exist - I know a couple myself - but you still wouldn't want to be them. It seems stupidly ungenerous to want to begrudge them the pittance and punish the long-term unemployed or the young unemployed with "work for the dole schemes".

A burning question that ought to be raised is "do they work?" According to people who have made a study, they don't.

But Professor Jeff Borland from the University of Melbourne - who conducted the only empirical study of the Howard government's work for the dole scheme - says years of research show such schemes are unlikely to help people find jobs.

''The international evidence is overwhelming,'' he said. ''It's hard to believe that the government couldn't understand that this isn't the best way to improve people's employability.

''I guess you have to conclude that there are other reasons for wanting to expand the program, and the title of the scheme [work for the dole] suggests it's being done for political reasons.''

Labor has warned businesses will face a deluge of fake job applications under the government's measures.

Employment Minister Eric Abetz said that could be a fair criticism.

''We as a government do not want box-ticking to take place,'' he told ABC TV. ''We don't want red tape and inconvenience to employers, but what we do want is a genuine attempt by the job seeker to obtain employment."

No box ticking! It's going to be hell from next year when all these companies are going to get their inboxes of their emails stuffed with resumes from people who don't really want a job but are forced to put on a very good show of pretending to want a job. You wouldn't want to employ any of them, and they don't really want to be employed. The charade is going to be unbearable. And what good does the government think it's going to achieve? Especially when we know it doesn't do anything tangibly beneficial.

It's just bullying by the government. If this business of having to apply for 40jobs per month for 6 months before they get the dole comes into play, it's going to be unwanted-resume-hell for every company out there. It totally ignores the reality of the marketplace.

News That's Fit To Punt - 27/Jul/2014

An Interesting Take On Putin's Russia

To my thinking Russia under Putin has been a shit sandwich wrapped in a Crony-Capitalist Kleptocracy wrapped in an Oligarchy of former KGB people with connections. But that's just me. Others may tell me of their beautiful literature or cinema or poetry or whatever, but in most part Russia since Putin has been a contemporary art project of how awful petty nationalism can be in the 21st century. It's like a country taken over by a man with an inferiority complex who wants to boast of his secret inner greatness. As such the country displays strange impulses in all its affairs, from its handling of the Chechens in Georgia to the land grab of Crimea to funding extremist nutjobs in Ukraine just to stop Ukraine joining the West to hosting bad looking Olympics and wining unlikely World Cup bids.

So, here's an interesting article explaining how these impulses play out inside Russia.

Some Western pundits, including foreign policy realists and anti-interventionists who see US support for Ukraine’s pro-Maidan leadership as a textbook example of meddling and dubious alliance-making, contend that the Russian point of view in the Ukraine crisis has been insufficiently considered and unfairly maligned. Russia has legitimate reasons, they say, in not having hostile neighbours, not being surrounded by NATO members, and for feeling general resentment at being kicked around by the West after the end of the Cold War.

There is certainly much to debate about various US and NATO actions in Eastern Europe after 1991, and the extent to which the United States should be involved today in counteracting Russia’s coercion toward its neighbours. That said, it is hard to see by what moral or geopolitical principle an authoritarian crony capitalist regime in Moscow is entitled to bite off chunks of a non-consenting Ukraine.

A few years ago, retired Russian general and former arms negotiator Vladimir Dvorkin wrote in a column for ej.ru that the real cause of the Kremlin’s anxiety about NATO expansion was not fear of invasion - an absurd idea given Russia’s nuclear arsenal - but fear of ‘‘encirclement’’ by more liberal and modernised societies, which would then exert pressure on Russia to follow the same path.

I guess I would be one of those people saying the West ought not to be meddling in Ukraine. But as you know I base that observation of never being able to win the Eastern Front in computer games as Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II or Hitler. I just don't see much meat on the bone that makes it worthwhile, although I will say that resources in Ukraine are underdeveloped. It's entirely another debate whether more petrochemical resources development - i.e. mining for gas and oil - is a good way forward for what was once the breadbasket of Eastern Europe. I would contend it wasn't.

Was Nuts Yesterday, Is Nuts-er Today

It's an interesting thing that the world leader on a collision course with Vladimir Putin is Tony Abbott, who while he may not have the military might to scare Russia for a moment, has the ample opportunity to dis-invite Putin from the G-20 meeting in Brisbane later this year. Of course, Tony Abbott is jumping at the opportunity to be any kind of international statesman because his own domestic politics aren't working out well. One would imagine it is similar in nature to Vladimir Putin's desire to go invading neighbouring states that were once part of the USSR, just not as violent.

The advice he got yesterday from the international community about sending troops to Ukraine to help 'secure the site' of the MH17, was that it was nuts. This sentiment has been echoed by the ADF itself, through unofficial channels otherwise known as "figures who" do "not wish to be named".

The senior defence figure, who did not wish to be named, said it was a poor idea for Australia.
''They can't secure the site,'' he said. ''It's kilometres long and wide. They could escort Australian officials and provide close protection, but this is a civil task rather than a military task and it's a terribly volatile area.

''We don't have the language skills or knowledge of the area.

''For any military deployment, you have to look at a status of forces agreement with the government and, given the area the aircraft is in, I don't think there is anyone to make that agreement with. What I've heard is the rebels don't want more than 30 investigators there.''

What's particularly interesting about this is that while Tony Abbot was in opposition, banging on about how he will send the Navy to "stop the boats", similar leaks came out of the ADF saying the Navy wasn't exactly equipped to be doing this kind of thing. This was Advice which was promptly ignored - and so we can reasonably expect this bit of advice would be ignored as well.

More interestingly what we're seeing from Tony Abbott is a pattern where if he can't solve it through sloganeering, he's totally happy to send in the men and women in uniform to just sort it out, out of sight with the benefit of official secrets to make the whole thing un-transparent and utterly opaque. One can therefore imagine that should unfortunate things be found in Ukraine, they'll jump to an immediate "can't comment, our troops are in operations" mode of communication.

Age of Entitlement Ending? More like Age of Ultron-Perks

I offer this to you without comment.

Nice To Be Vindicated

"They Must Be Nuts"

I've been writing here for some months that the last thing we - as in non-specific people of the West - should do is send any troops to Ukraine. The MH17 incident and the 39 Australians on that downed plane have forced the issue of Ukraine's situation a lot closer to our shores in Australia. Sometime in the recent days of statesman-like posturing, Tony Abbott has been making noises about putting our boots on the ground in eastern Ukraine to 'secure the site' (whatever the hell that means, many days after there's been looting).

As readers know, I've been dead against sending anybody out there for good reason. If the separatists are dumb and ill-informed enough to down a jet liner from a neutral nation outside of he conflict, what's stop them shooting at our people just for being there? Today we find that some people with professional insight think this is a bad idea too.

"They must be nuts," Joerg Forbrig, a senior program officer for central and eastern Europe at the Berlin bureau of the German Marshall Fund of the US think tank, said. "It's a very dangerous proposal and will be seen as a provocation by the separatists and the Russians."

Ukrainians' desire for closer links with Europe, the US and their allies has long been a source of tension with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who intervened in Ukraine after the pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych stepped down in February fueling the five-month long insurgency.

The US says a surface-to-air missile fired from territory held by the rebels shot down the plane, while stopping short of alleging direct Russian involvement. Putin's artillery is firing on Ukrainian military positions from inside Russia, a US State Department spokeswoman said this week.
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A spokesman for the UK Foreign Office said Britain would "offer logistical support and is keeping in close contact with the Australians and Dutch over how it can assist, though it won't be putting be sending police or technicians to Ukraine".

"We believe a UK. armed presence in eastern Ukraine would not be appropriate," the Foreign Office said in a statement. "The UK stands ready to provide constructive support to the mission."

This isn't some trip into a place where there's not much civil authority - it's a place where Russia is using subterfuge to make it look like there's not much civil authority so they can wrest some more territory off Ukraine. The polite realpolitik thing to do has been to ignore the subterfuge and instead place mild sanction on Vladimir Putin and his crony-capitalists but sending troops has been and always will be one of those things we would much rather not do. The reality is that it would be sending people with an immensely blinkered perspective right into a war zone - and if seen with a colder objective view, would rightly be a provocation to the Russians.

In other words, "baby don't you do it".

I was watching The Drum this week and there was commentary to the effect that Tony Abbott's been getting some kudos for being the only Western leader to stand up to Vladimir Putin. This might be true, but this is only because Russia isn't a vital trade partner for us and we're really far away from Moscow's considerations. Sending in troops to Ukraine would change that greatly. The outcome of that shift will probably mean more dead Australians. And how the hell will Tony Abbott explain that when it inevitably happens?

Unfinished Business In The ALP

Gillard Wanted To Handball The PM Chair To Combet

I like Greg Combet. He's the only politician I know of who has admitted to being a fan of Frank Zappa. He's done now, but while he was around, I had hopes for the man. Perhaps these hopes were misplaced, given that the sort of man who likes Frank Zappa might look at Australian Politics and choose to walk away. I have to respect that as a voter, but it's still sad. Maybe it got too hard to work in Parliament all week and go home and put on a Frank Zappa record and there is Frank singing "Keep it greasy so it goes down easy". I'd imagine the cognitive dissonance might become unbearable. And so it is that he left Parliament at the end of his term at the 2013 election.

The news today - more like a non-news really - is that Julia Gillard offered to hand him the Prime Minster's chair, just to fend off Kevin Rudd. This is pretty bleak material.

An embattled Julia Gillard secretly offered to stand down as Prime Minister in June 2013 and secure the leadership for then Climate Change and Industry minister Greg Combet in order to fend off Kevin Rudd, Mr Combet has revealed.

But dogged by months of ill-health, and unsure that a switch to a third leadership contender so close to an election would improve Labor’s position, Mr Combet declined the chance to be prime minister.

‘‘I was struggling a good deal personally by the time June [2013] came around’’ Mr Combet told Fairfax Media in an interview this week. ‘‘I was in constant pain with the problems that I was having, and the thought of taking on additional responsibility and not being 100 per cent fit to do it, in that febrile environment, it didn’t look easy.’’

This ALP factional infighting is pretty awful stuff. It partly goes with the terrain of the Westminster system, and over the years we've been made to be inured to its odd outcomes. The ins and outs of these machinations are way beyond the purview of the electorate, and are subject to influences from such things as the Unions and lobby groups. It's just difficult to understand how they could have cocked up so many decisions along the way.

He says he remains convinced that former Opposition Leader Kim Beazley would have won the 2007 federal election and become a highly successful Labor Prime Minister if Mr Rudd had not dislodged him.

ACTU polling as part of the Your Rights At Work Campaign in the run up to the 2007 election left him ‘‘completely convinced Beazley would have won’’, which would have resulted in a ‘‘vastly more experienced, mature person as Prime Minister presiding over, for want of a better description, a really grown up government, avoiding all the mistakes’’.

‘‘Neither Julia nor Kevin had had a lot of experience in leadership roles and I think that impacted on their capacity to do the job’’ Mr Combet told Fairfax Media.

So at least we were right all along in 2007, that the Rudd-Gillard leadership was a balls-up waiting to happen. It's a shame I can't point to neither Kevin Rudd nor Julia Gillard as the same kinds of leaders as Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam before them. The tumultuous six years in government exposed all the problems of the ALP that went unsolved since Keating lost in 1996. The problem is compounded by the fact that neither Kim Beazley nor Simon Crean were able to restructure the party in the way it needed to be restructured, and Mark Latham's turn was certainly hobbled by the same influences that replaced Beazley twice, that put in Rudd, removed Rudd, removed Gillard and essentially burnt the metaphorical house down.

Oh, and Ms. Gillard, I will never forget the slight you made when you said you were not a social democrat.

Here's Mark Latham being particularly frank about it.

Faulkner’s reform plan, to be put to State Conference this weekend, is to allow ALP branch members to select the party’s upper house tickets. Having given rank-and-file members a say in the selection of Labor’s federal and state leaders, why shouldn’t they be empowered to preselect upper house candidates? Why doesn’t Clements trust the True Believers who staff the polling booths, who keep their local branches alive, who fight so passionately for the cause of Labor?

Far from restricting rank-and-file union involvement, democratisation encourages it. It says to union members: don’t allow union secretaries doubling up as factional bosses to make all the big decisions. Join your local ALP branch and have a direct say in how the party is run: in picking federal and state leaders, in selecting Labor’s lower and upper house candidates.

This is what Faulkner is trying to achieve: Labor as a membership-based party, rather than a narrow factional-based clique.

Mark Latham's been made out to be a crazy person by the media which must be galling because he commentates in the media; and once upon a decade ago, he was the guy trying to put together a way back to office, when the party machine had run through both Beazley and Crean and found them wanting. It's hard to forget those terrible years either, together with the terrible campaign and defeat that followed. And all that time, the likes of Mark Arbib and Paul Howes were fucking shit up from behind the scenes.

It's really hard to forgive the ALP. Especially if you don't want to vote for the right.

Good Grief

'Partners In Grief'

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks in to mine," says Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in 'Casablanca'. The phrase popped into my head because of all the spots in all the troubled places in all the world, MH17 has to get shot down in Ukraine. And this has led, domino-like and contemptuous of our petty (lack of) interest, to a series of events where Tony Abbott is now talking about sending troops to secure the site.

One minute, the who situation in Ukraine was half a world away and somebody else's problem. When we send our troops in with other aggrieved nations to 'secure the area', you can bet your bottom dollar and your mortgage that the so-called separatists will be hostile and may even start a shooting war. Not only was the MH17 thing a game changer, it has thrust Australia into point to lead the way into the retro-medieval hellhole that is East Ukraine. You couldn't have scripted it worse.

It's a charming job where our troops would secure the site so people can collect the scattered remains of the bodies as yet unaccounted for. The last place on earth you'd want to send troops is Ukraine; and the only thing worse than sending troops in to shoot is to send troops in to not shoot. Good grief, what a rotten turn of events.

Why Would You Want To Own A Phone That Belonged To A Dead Person On MH17?

This business of looting the corpses is pretty awful.

Grieving relatives of the MH17 crash victims have had chilling confirmation that their loved ones' possessions have been looted from the crash site.

Relatives of victims in the Netherlands dialled the mobile phone numbers of crash victims and said the phones were answered by people with ‘eastern European-sounding voices’, the Netherlands' De Telegraaf reported.
The relatives were shocked when they heard the voices, the paper said.

Telephone companies agreed to waive the usual requirement for a death certificate and agreed to cancel the phone subscriptions, so those who took the phones could not continue to use them.

That would be really depressing. Not only have your loved ones been killed in the most senseless manner, you have concrete proof that their possessions have been looted by crass people without any class.

I Can't Begin To Fathom Their Pain

This just breaks me. This couple lost all three of their kids in the MH17 incident.

"We live in a hell beyond hell. Our babies are not here with us – we need to live with this act of horror, every day and every moment for the rest of our lives," the statement reads.

"No one deserves what we are going through. Not even the people who shot our whole family out of the sky.

"No hate in the world is as strong as the love we have for our children, for Mo, for Evie, for Otis. No hate in the world is as strong as the love we have for Grandad Nick. No hate in the world is as strong as the love we have for each other. This is a revelation that gives us some comfort."

I don't know how they'll deal with this. I can't imagine there's a way of really living through the aftermath of such a traumatic thing. I really fear for these people. My heart goes out to them.

I have nothing to offer for them to fall back upon. Fairness and deserving has absolutely nothing to do with something like this. It's just irredeemable stupidity on the part of the idiots who fired the missile; the idiots who gave those idiots missiles; the idiots who authorised those idiots to give the missiles to the idiots who fired it. The veritable chain of idiocy goes all the way to the top - Vladimir Putin - and the man had the gall to blame Kiev. And knowing this and spelling it out does absolutely nothing for these people.

It would destroy me. I know that much. But my response would be to demand nuking Donetsk.

Double Standards

It's That Kind Of Day

The reports in the news sites say that Australia really swung behind getting a meaningful resolution out of the UN, in the aftermath of the MH17 event.  The SMH is really giving our diplomats a pat on the back - seems to me they're just finally earning their keep after years of cushy livin' in New York on the public purse! Besides, suddenly beset with Julie Bishop's death stare, how could the unsuspecting people of the world say no?

Of course jokes about Julie Bishop's death stare aside, the dynamic diplomatic deal-making does stand in stark contrast to the way this government minces words and tries to parse interpretations that do not exist (let alone be supported) from our commitment to the UN Charter on Human Rights and how we treat refugees. On that score, we're one of the worst violators but we keep on coming up with legal fictions as to why it's okay to run concentration camps on Manus Island and Nauru. Millions have been displaced by civil wars in places like Syria, and our government is buys telling them they can't come. 37 Australians die in a plane hit by a Russian missile an we're all over it at the UN. No mater how you look at it, it's a kind of double standard.

In the mean time, PUP senator Jacqui Lambie has made international press on the back of an interview where she claimed her ideal man would be rich and well hung.

Later, when a prospective suitor called up the show, Lambie enquired (sic) if 22 year-old Jamie was "well-hung".
This induced great mirth from Kim and Dave (ratings gold!), but just imagine if a male politician had offered a similar opinion, about say, a woman needing to be "really rich and have massive boobs".

It would be a career-ending, resigning offence. Facebook groups would spring up in protest. People would make t-shirts and take to the streets in outrage.

In recent months, Tony Abbott has weathered howling storms for suggesting a Liberal candidate had sex appeal. And for winking when a talk back caller revealed she worked on a sex line.
Clive Palmer has also raised the eyebrow of disapproval for calling female journalists "madam" and "my dear".
And yet, Lambie is sure to stroll away from her Heart appearance and into her next set of public comments with nary a scratch.
Yes, they are lighting up the internet - but only for their "omigawd" value. Not because they might be construed as demeaning and well, sexist.

The thing is, it probably is some kind of double standard that lets Lambie off the hook when if she were a member of another party and a male, she might not have gotten off so lightly. I'm not saying she should be condemned or that this bit of double standard is particularly noteworthy - merely that double standards seems to be the notion of the day.

Obviously there's a fine line between the double standard thing and the deliberate hypocrisy inherent in the double think we are asked to endure with all its cognitive dissonance, but this is a country made up of inherently contradictory ideals. It stands to reason that there's a different rule or standard applied to everything, based on the values of nothing-in-particular.

The View From The Couch - 20/Jul/2014

The Politicians We Get Are From Those On Offer

Who would run? Why would you run? Who would back you? These are the kinds of questions that might cross the aspiring politician. I'm not one of them, so I can watch people run and fail with a certain amount of objective distance but ultimately that's hurting me. It hurts me because I'm letting somebody with not the right tools to do the job, and on this blog you'd know for a fact that I'm pretty harsh with politicians. The higher the office, the harder I kick.

Democracy is a funny thing. In America, the most watched kid in high school is not the smartest kid, not the best looking kid, but the most popular kid. Being smart and good looking but not popular (heh, Irony alert!) I always found this American fixation on popularity particularly strange - but it stands to reason.If you're not popular, you can't win election, and only by winning elections can you access power, popularity as a character trait then is the highway to power. So all these people running for office, at least in America would be all these kids who once upon a time were the most popular kids in their year and there's no reason for them to have been the smartest. And so even there America at least gets the politicians it deserves. It explains a lot.

In Australia it is a bit murkier as to what makes a person a good candidate in the eyes of the two great parties or for that matter the lesser parties. The process of preselection in various seats is opaque, and every documented account of how people are chosen is filled with intangible processes and thoughts that defy explanation. My local member - one Craig Laundy of the Liberal Party who looks like a gerbil - must have made some deal with some entity in the party to be the candidate. And so far, he's just okay. Not terrible, not good, not anything in particular - a perfectly fungible replacement level MP. That Jaymes Diaz guy who went from gaffe to gaffe came from the sort of party room machinations that gave us Pauline Hanson a a Liberal or Eddie Obeid as a State ALP candidate. The point being if you asked (and expected) the parties to pick smart people to run, you still get candidates like Diaz, Hanson, Obeid, Craig Thomson, Peter Slipper, and so on.

Given politics i a kind of necessary evil, it is a good thing we're forced to think about it seriously in Australia. In countries where they don't have compulsory voting, the track record for democracy in many places is even worse. As Winston Churchill said, it's the least worst option.

In that light, I want to just bring your attention to this article.

“What you say – always – is that you want to make a difference. You believe your experience qualifies you to serve. These circumlocutions are the etiquette of democracy, the ritual salute … [people] want to hear you say that you are in it for them.”

And how many times have you heard the pledge. To make a difference. To build the economy. To fight for education. And do you ever really believe it? Or do you suspect politicians are in it for themselves, far more than they are for you?

“It’s worth considering,” Ignatieff goes on, “that such dissembling may have its uses. The pretence may begin as a piece of hypocrisy and end up becoming a politician’s second nature. From pretending to serve, you may surprise yourself by actually doing so.” But the biggest challenge is to pull off the confidence trick. "You have to invent yourself for public consumption."

And therein lies the asymmetry. Politicians do not get rewarded for candour or honesty; their first step is to commence from the hypocritical position to tell the audience what it wants to hear. If the audience is dumb and ignorant, these things are going to be a lot worse than you expect. This is exactly how democracy ends up offering the seeming, willing, willful idiots we get on election day. We can talk reform all we like, but unless the electorate smartens up a lot more, we're always going to get the kind of politicians we want to throw off the top of a cliff.

but then, that would be why they're cutting education. They ant to make it a lot harder for the populace to smarten up.

The Looting Says A Lot

I know it's a war zone but the utter lack of respect shown by the East Ukrainian rebels around the MH17 crash site is pretty staggering. It sort of shows the crassness of the people on the ground near the crash site.

I keep getting told by Tomas how awful the Russians were when they occupied Lithuania. The stories are colourful (in a really bad way) and grim. I have discounted the awfulness because they were testimonials from the wronged, because they had reasons to paint them as badly as they could, and Russia under Stalin probably had very few luxuries of thought for people to behave better in occupied territories. Yet, when I see these reports of looting, I can't help but think of those stories and consider the likelihood that these Russians in East Ukraine are not so far away removed from the brutes who occupied East Europe. They are as socially backward as you can imagine. What they're doing out there looting is like something out of history books that tell you about early medieval peasants and serfs under the Tsars. It's disgraceful in this day and age. I'm sorry but it's culturally repugnant and there's no valid excuse for them to be this way.

I really hope we don't end up sending any troops into East Ukraine to fight these people. It really would be a waste of perfectly good ammo.

 

Outrage Over Ukraine

From The Land Of The Pathetic

From the sensibilities of the west, it has to be said the sensibilities of Slav countries are pretty gross. They think the west is a bunch of pussies running scared with effete, gay politics and feminism and political correctness. Judging from the way we behave, they might even have a point, but the flipside is that the sensibilities of say, Russian militarism or Ukrainian separatism are deeply alien to the west. As such, I've felt it unlikely for us to muster the energy, finance and logistics to mount a war in Ukraine to help our new friends who want to join NATO and the EU and be effete, gay-accepting, feminist-run and who want to be politically correct like us. It's too much too soon and too far away and too expensive.

It's a bit like being asked to drive out from Bondi to Penrith for a one-night stand. Can a one night stand be that good to warrant the drive? Similarly, can having Ukraine as part of NATO and the EU be such a good thing? Think of the differences in culture and cultural attitudes, history and views on history. About the only thing the west has in common with Ukraine might be white people with particularly pale skin and that might even be the grand total sum of it.

Anyway, the Pro-Russian separatists among the Ukrainians has shot down a Malaysian airliner with a missile; early accounts suggest that it was a mistake - they thought they were shooting at a local military aircraft. Imagine their shock to find raining burnt corpses. Now it's an unspeakable political mess.

Vladimir Putin is blaming Kiev; The Russians are denying culpability; Americans have verified it was a surface to air missile; Tony Abbott is making a fist of being a statesman. It's a veritable scene of chaos out there, leading to the question, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, what exactly are these politicians going to do to avert World War III? Putin trying to pin it on the Government in Kiev and Tony Abbott beating his chest, seem like "fightin' words" to me. If it was a genuine mistake and they fired on the wrong plane, then they should just scapegoat this Igor Girkin and make him wear the blame. It's not like we'll be missing this miserable soul on this face of this planet. The refusal to just hand this guy over to The Hague for the Western European hypocrisy show for crimes against humanity would look to the world like Putin was condoning the missile firing.

Then again, Vladimir Putin has a way of doing things in just the right Soviet Russian way to bring disgust and repulsion to the front of our hearts. A despicable practitioner in repugnant artless propaganda, Putin will surely hit all the wrong PR notes as he insist on his insane position that this is all the fault of the people in power in Kiev. Like, hullo!

As Pleiades pointed out to me over the phone this morning, it's interesting how this event has shoved the Israelis marching their forces in to the Gaza Strip from the headline of most news sites. But that is not the only thing that is disturbing about the timing of this event. two days ago, the BRICS nations launched their own international monetary fund, cutting out the US Dollar as the reserve currency. Not many in the mainstream media talked about it, but it represent nations with over 3 billion people combined, giving the US Dollar the middle finger. A day later, President Obama stepped up sanctions against Russian firms, locking them out of debt markets. Within 24hours, a rocket from the Russian side of the Ukrainian conflict shoots down an airplane.  It's enough to make you raise questions about just exactly where do Putin and Obama see things going.

As for Tony Abbott, he remains the dickhead he was yesterday and all the days before. No amount of Thatcherish poseur-hood is going to help him look better in the eyes of the electorate.

Conversations Around The Traps

Who Suffers From Zero Interest Rate Policy?

Zero interest Rate Policy or ZIRP as it is known in some circles has been going on for two decades in Japan. It has also been going on for 7 years in the USA and Europe. The reasons have ostensibly been from keeping asset prices to stopping banks from toppling over due to lack of liquidity, through to keeping people employed. The extremely accommodating policy has been running parallel with the Quantitative Easing program in the US and Europe which have somehow helped to prop up asset prices in bubble condition around the globe, but also not spurred growth as promised.

The way the traditional/classical economy was supposed to work was that lower interests would fund capital investment for the next phase of economic growth. Instead the low interest rates have allowed speculators to place bets at lower cost, while the piled up debt has eaten into future growth in a big way. The point of all this is to say, the things the easy money has gone towards have not been exactly productive or helpful, while there are people who are genuinely suffering because interest rates have been kept so low for so long.

For instance retirees in America and Europe with some amount of money saved up during their working lives would be finding that they won't be living off the interest of the money they saved, but be forced to eat into their savings just to survive. This sort of thing can be seen as a breaking of the social contract. There would be a whole generation of kids growing up without learning about the virtues of saving because  they've never seen interest payments on their bank accounts. I don't think this is a good thing because we're raising people who haven't seen the benefits of saving and compound interest.

Worse still, with something like QE going on at the same time, Zero Interest rate translates into a situation where you cannot sit on cash because inflation is eating away at that value; and you can't stay in bonds because whole countries have been threatening to default for the last 3 years. That leaves equities or foreign currency trades, and they're no guarantee of a return.

In fact, it's worth asking at this point in time why people who save should suffer at the hands of the Central Bank while it essentially rewards people who go into debt to buy into positions. Why is it that people should not sit on their earnings as savings? If deflation is such a threat, then why is it so bad if the man on the street is able to get more for less?

Frankly I think the world is getting ripped off.

Politicians Lie, But Must They Be Brazen About It?

I was in a conversation earlier tonight with walk-off HBP, and the issue came up about how the Murdoch press essentially insist on telling non-truths and heavily-spun tag lines, all of which amount to nothing but lies. It's like an Orwellian thing where untruths are shouted out loud until everybody accepts it as the dominant discourse and acquiesces.

But then Tony Abbott gets up and celebrates the repealing of the Carbon Price, characterising it s this bug bear in the economy that was raising people's costs of living while not doing anything at all for the environment, and that his government is a "conservationist" government. All of these things are wrong. The Carbon Price was hardly a blip in the rising retail power prices, it was contributing to the reduction of our emissions, and there is no way you can call a government that insists on dismantling the Carbon Price system a conservationist government in any dialect or accent of English.

It's an astounding thing that we have a Prime Minister that stands there and spouts untruths as if they were truth, pronouncing white is black and black is white. I can accept that politicians will work the facts of the matter in their favour through spin, and that they sometimes get it wrong, making them liars after the fact. I just can't recall a single Prime Minister of this land lying knowingly with a straight face and expecting the people to buy it. This isn't "no child will live in poverty" things where a politician simply gets the scope of the problem wrong. These things happen and I don't judge too harshly. Going right back to Malcolm Fraser and looking through all the NSW premiers, I don't think I've seen a single head of government lie with a straight face as Tony Abbott does.

This is a person who knows the science but chooses to ignore it; understands the facts and chooses to deny them; and then acts on the worst possible advice for ideological reasons and then says he is something that that he has never ever been; and that the ignoring and denying of science and facts and going against them for ideological reasons represents something that is positive for this country when it clearly is not. For Abbott to characterise his government as 'conservationist', he may as well as be saying his is a ballerina government, or an artistic government, or a caring compassionate government, or a forward-looking government. These things are equally Un-true of his government as the expedient, idle, lunatic, conceited claim that his is a conservationist government, especially having repealed the Carbon Price legislation, and telling us this at the press conference to announce the repeal.

I've just never seen anything like it. And my mind boggles, my brain explodes... It's like a never ending torture of our minds.

Reserve Bank of Australia Says...

Renting Is better Than Home Ownership

This is strange. The RBA has done some sums and it thinks one would be better off renting than owning if house prices go up anything less than 2% p.a. (inflation adjusted).

"If this rate of appreciation is expected to continue then our estimates suggest that houses are fairly valued," the paper said.

 

"Many observers have suggested that future house-price growth is likely to be somewhat less than this historic average. In that case, at current prices, rents, interest rates and so on, the average household is probably financially better off renting than buying."

 

Assuming real house prices increased at the historical expected real rate of 2.4 per cent, buying beat renting if the owner held for more than eight years. However if the expected real rate of 1.7 per cent experienced over the past 10 years was used, owning only beat renting over longer than 30 years.

What's interesting about this is that the RBA wants to tell this to us now, a fortnight after telling us that house prices don't always go up. It is as if the RBA is trying to jawbone the price of homes lower without admitting to there being a bubble.

News That's Fit To Punt - 13/Jul/2014

Garbage In, Garbage Out Process

Leading economists are rejecting the basis on which the Abbott Government is proceeding with cuts. They don't think there is a budget crisis. At all.

We knew this going into the election last year, we've known it since; people ave been saying it across different media for most of the time since; and the only people who think there is a crisis is the Coalition Government. I know we've been through this topic on several occasions, but basically our Federal government debt is miniscule compared to the debt carried by other OECD nations; most of the government debt we do carry is in the local councils; and the big debt problem is in the private sector, where low interest rates have ruled supreme since the Global Financial Crisis has allowed for bubbling asset speculation on borrowed money.

In short, the government could possibly wipe out the debt in a small number of years if it were bloody-minded enough to not to care what happened to he economy. But nobody asked for this, and it would rewrite the social consensus about what government does. While that is an enormous problem all of its own, I want to focus on something for a moment. This government came up with the worst-received budget of all time on the assumption that there is a budget crisis when there manifestly is no crisis at all whatsoever. it stands to reason that none of the solutions they've reached for have gained any traction in the electorate.

Never has a bigger load of garbage been shoved into the process of government in this country, and never has it given rise to so many garbage policies you wouldn't wish upon anybody (okay, except maybe Iran).

Cue Jerry Harrison

The myth that grew up around Senator Ricky Muir arriving in Canberra was that he was a 'Bogan' - meaning exactly what, it's hard to say because Bogan-ism isn't a political credo, it's a class-conscious insult - but here's an article that reveals he might not fit the prejudices of the media. The way the media have portrayed him, he's been anything from the second coming of Pauline Hanson to some rural Victorian village yokel idiot who got lucky in the exchanging of preferences (as if such things happen regularly).

The so-called ''rev-head senator'' outlined personal passions that include organic food, which he grows and eats from his garden in rural Victoria, preventive healthcare, which he is interested in championing at a political level, and renewable energy, following his surprise intervention last week to protect the Australian Renewable Energy Agency from the government's budget knife.

------

Senator Muir revealed a broad belief in the environment, renewable energy and organic food. ''Just because someone is a motoring enthusiast doesn't mean they are an environmental vandal,'' he said. ''I don't think many people would argue that renewable energy is the way of the future.''

Asked whether he would use his balance of power influence to push for preventive health programs, he said: ''I will certainly look at it with a very open mind, that's for sure.''

For the Coalition, that's a Trojan Horse. The guy called himself a "motoring enthusiast" sounding like he's pro-roads and pro-construction and he's turned out to have a far more nuanced and sophisticated take on the environment and civilisation than anybody on the side of the Coalition. You could do a lot worse than that, and in looking at the sorry lot in the Coalition ranks, Australia has done a lot worse than Ricky Muir for a very long time, but Australia might have just got lucky right there with this Senator.

She said let's ride, rev it up, rev it up little boy and ride!

Not A Bubble (Nudge Nudge Wink Wink)

As we've learnt over our lifetime, nobody ever sees the big financial disaster coming. It's always "This time it's different". So in that spirit, I just want to say it's very different this time with housing in Australia because there's a ton of money being laundered out of China looking for landing spots and Australian Housing has turned out to be one of those asset classes.

Thus you have to take it with a grain of salt when economists say "yes it's overpriced but no, it's not a bubble". If you believed that then maybe I can interest you in this nice little coat hanger-shaped bridge in Sydney Harbour that you might want to buy. The conventional wisdom now is that it's never a bubble until it pops.

As with these things I've had a little while to reflect on it and it seems if there's one thing that limits future growth in an economy it is rent-seeking and there are a lot of rent-seekers. This is understandable because housing construction forms such a large part of the economy in Australia, somebody has to be the lobby that twists the economy in some way. In that sense negative gearing appears to be just one of the economically irrational policies we have going. Naturally if you look through old articles in the SMH for negative gearing, it is is littered with articles defending the policy - which in turn reminds us of this blanket denial that there is no bubble going on. Sure. No bubble, and negative gearing is working a treat.

So as with most things to do with what pundits say, you can be assured of two things. They're wrong, and we'll be the ones to pay for it.

The World's Worst Kept Secret Is 'Out'

Ian Thorpe says he's gay. I don't know what to say except we knew about this from way back in the heady days of the 2000 Sydney Olympics and all those gay people saying they gave him a pearl necklace. The denials over the years were comical and the topic of much derision. In this day and age, it shouldn't be such big 'news' but I guess wowserism is always going to make this news.

People, come on, he didn't win because he was or wasn't straight or gay.

'True Detective'

Journey To Carcosa

These TV series that HBO produce are so compelling you can't help but sit there and binge episode after episode. Part of the beauty is that they let the writers take the lead and just let them go. The results have been far more rewarding than your average run of the mill Hollywood Action movie or Crime movie. The expanse of time allows for exposition to occur more naturally while we get to know and understand the characters. The ambiguity and ambivalence of many characters in the HBO TV stable stands in deep contrast for the need to resolve everything in the allotted time in the cinema. It is a little bit like the tables have turned. It used to be cinema that was afforded the time and TV had to rush from one commercial break to the next.

'True Detective' sits on the more exploratory end of story telling as well, with its non-linear narrative across many episodes. It takes its cue from classic buddy cop formats but veers wildly from the normal/standard sort of story lines, leading us into a very dark kind of universe.

Here is the obligatory spoiler alert!

What's Good About It

The standout element is actually the performances of both Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, followed by the script and direction. The directing is notable in that is one person doing all 8 episodes of season 1 and and the consistency is noticeable when compared to something like 'House of Cards' where they had a bunch of different directors handling different episodes.

A lot of the philosophical issues being brought up by McConaughey's character Rust are very germane not only to the events in the script but to the wider world that encompasses the viewer. The film also harks back to the horror episodes of 'The X-Files' while not being as arcane.

What's Bad About It

Sometimes I felt that I wasn't all that interested in Woody Harrelson's character Marty and his impulses towards infidelity. Something has to be there, but half the time it seemed the sexcapades were pretty gratuitous and there to make up HBO's quota for T & A. Marty's marriage as a topic seems there to fill airtime. You can't but help feel they might have had a better thing they could have put in there in its stead.

What's Interesting About It

This is an interesting series because it leads you down a path thinking it's a psychotic serial killer that's doing the killings and then it becomes clear there's something about the symbol and cult that is doing the murders as ritual. The evidence is so grisly at some point, the characters are traumatised by the sight of the video and get very angry that they cannot "un-see" what they have seen. It is immediately reminiscent of the world of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction featuring the Cthulhu mythos and the various evil cults that carry out ritual slayings.

The ambiguity of the cult and whether it is supported by the fictional universe or not is also interesting.  It is not clear for a very long time whether there really is a metaphysical evil to which the sacrifices are made, exists in the fictional universe of these characters. To this end, the show spends a great deal of time with social realism stylings as well as extended speeches by Matthew McConaughey's character Rust where he gives remonstrations to the effect that the universe is essentially meaningless and there is no benevolent God. indeed, in the early going these speeches are so fantastic you think the series is about the bleak existentialism of this character juxtaposed against the existentially stunted Marty played by Harrelson.

The writers make a good deal out of covering their tracks  as to the metaphysical status of the diagetic space. The unknowability is undercut by several factors. One is the structure of the narrative for the most part involves the two main characters being interviewed by police officers in recalling their version of events. In some instances we are shown the recollection presented is an outright lie, which opens the door to the possibility that what we hear from these characters is definitely not the gospel truth. Half the time you are watching to see if the inconsistencies somehow fractures the narrative to reveal that maybe one of the characters is crazy enough to be the serial killer - It's that well-covered, most of the time you're looking at the wrong clues on screen.

There are of course hints along the way, with the mention of 'Carcosa'. The curious thing about it is that you don't know if the cult is acting on the fiction written about Carcosa or whether Carcosa actually exists as an entity within the fiction of 'True Detective'. When they finally track down the last remaining killer, they are led into a space that the killer identifies as Carcosa, but then Rust has a transcendent, inter-dimensional experience that is totally out of tune with his character. He has a fundamental shift in his perception of the universe as a result of what he experiences.

Pulp Fiction Style

It's 20years since 'Pulp Fiction' won Cannes and we are still seeing the far-reaching influences of that film. The relationship between Rust and Marty get introduced to us through a series of conversations in cars which is a technique straight out of 'Pulp Fiction'. The two characters have metaphysical concerns which seem wildly at odds with the apparent evidence on screen. The vagaries of the odd things that happen to people, the coincidences an chains of consequences are tightly wound in this series. It even shares the same concerns - where somebody is concerned with the metaphysical, nattering on and on about it until it is revealed that the metaphysical is of the deepest concern. In this instance, Rust is entirely concerned with Nihilism and the meaningless ness of everything only to come across the darkest secret of the universe and it shatters his sense of reality.

Inevitably Harrelson's Marty is equally imbued with overtones from Harrelson's previous characters as Marty proves himself to be a very unimaginative cop who is way too easy on himself. He is too likeable to be a genuine anti-hero, and he's too dislakeable to be a hero, and so his journey meanders in a way that dots the 'i's an crosses the 't's of cop show staples such as the affair, the drinking, the divorce, the domestic discord. All this is used as a foil for what is essentially a story about Rust's uncovering of the metaphysical mystery.

The back-and-forth narrative structure also lends itself to the wobbly story progression as the audience is led through at various points, the possibility that Rust is in fact the killer on the loose.

'Call of Cthulhu' Sanity Checks

You always have to laugh when a character is shown something and it is so hideous they react violently. The audience never gets to see the contents of the VHS tape, but the people who are shown the tape are never the same again. it's like something straight out of the 'Call of Cthulhu' role playing game where players have to roll for a 'sanity check' every time they come across a hideous fact. While nobody has successfully brought a genuinely sanity-twisting version of Cthulhu story to the screen, it is cool to see the name of Carcosa in the story leading to a truly Lovecraft-ian sanity-bending moment. Especially when you get to the end and realise that what you had been watching was a 'Call of Cthulhu' scenario.

Torpedo Clive

Sinking Abbott's Boats

If yesterday was eventful and humiliating for the Coalition government, then today must have been a gourmet meal built around a shit sandwich from Clive Palmer. Essentially, the Palmer United Party thwarted the government's third attempt to repeal the Carbon Tax.

The Pulse during the day made for interesting reading as things went awry for the Abbott Government. Reading the entires it seems really clear that the Coalition promised to word it in a particular way, and then in classic sophist-fashion, welshed on the deal by changing the wording which got the ire of Clive Palmer.

Late in the day Pleiades gave me a heads up about how Clive Palmer was on 702 later in the afternoon, talking to Richard Glover. The interesting thing is that Palmer says he was double-crossed by the Coalition in the wording and so he simply wouldn't support the Carbon Tax repeal bill that was so important to the Coalition. He then went onto say he won't support the co-payment to doctors, and h would rather cut the 45billion off the NBN, 20billion off the Paid Parental Leave being proposed, and 37billion dollars ear-marked for Japanese submarines, than have the Co-Payment.

Here's an interesting article on the day's proceedings from Tony Wright. Tony Abbott has a huge problem on his hands and he can't control it. He can now call a double dissolution but his polls are so dire he dare not. What threadbare preposterous notions the Coalition might have had as policy is being torn asunder. It's well-deserved, but it's going to cripple his government. He's not going to be able to game Clive Palmer out of the game quickly.

Pleiades had an interesting observation. He thinks Clive Palmer probably sees the end of coal fire and fossil fuels around the globe and wants to get into renewables; but to do so, he wants there to be a market for him to function within and that means retaining the outlines for an ETS. From that angle you can begin to understand the how and why of his road to Damascus conversion on an ETS and not removing the emissions target. In any case, things are only going to get more interesting for the Abbott Government. The inability of the Coalition to negotiate anything is starting to look like a major stumbling block in them getting their policies through.

Give The New Guys A Chance

Surprise! Not Your Villain du Jour

Ricky Muir - he of the Roo-Poo flinging Youtube videos and much media ridicule - entered Parliament House as a new Senator this week. By 10:30am this morning he had made news, first by not letting the Abbott Government have its way by steam-rolling the Carbon tax repeal. In a surprise move, Muir broke ranks with the Palmer United to defeat the government's motion to force a vote on the the Carbon Price repeal. After lunch, he sided with Palmer United and voted to preserve ARENA, which, surprised most onlookers.

Maybe Mr. Muir was going to surprise everybody any way. The way he had been portrayed by the media made him look like a dimwit yokel, but I felt at the time it was a beat up. By hook or crook, we in the electorate seem to have managed to send a totally ordinary citizen into the Senate. If our chief complaint is professionalised politicians, then surely we have to leave some ground open for rank outsiders to come in and have a look for themselves. While Mr. Muir didn't look promising going in, partly because of the immense vagueness of his party's platform, this week so far shows that he may yet turn out to be a reasonable, centrist man to have in the senate to balance views. So far his two major contributions don't seem to be those of an ideological extremist or a radicalised desperado.

The other surprising tidbit that emerged during the week was how Glenn Lazarus - aka The Brick with Eyes - was instrumental in bringing Clive Palmer to the middle of the debate so that the emissions target would be kept. This was remarkable in as much as it showed the Palmer United Party is not Clive Palmer's puppet show, and that in turn he was somebody who was going to be persuaded by his new senators.

Again, it's hard to imagine just what would bring a retired Rugby League great into politics in this way - especially after Mal Meninga made a famously bad attempt at it - but it is clearly evident we can't be dismissing him on the basis of his previous career or his current party affiliation. The fact of the matter is we don't know much about the policy position of the Palmer United Party simply because the party is so new and everything seems to be made up on the fly. They can conjure Al Gore from a hat, so who are we to judge what they can accomplish? The PUP Senators represent an open end, rather than a closed, conservative alternative.

The silver lining on the generally angry black storm cloud that is the Abbott Government is that the Senate is so fractured that it's just going to have to fight out every policy morsel on its merits. This means that it can't bundle together things hoping for a horse trade. This Senate is fractious enough already that if anything it's going to be more parsing and demanding than previous Senates. This means that while the Carbon Pricing will likely be repealed, it is going to get replaced with an ETS of some description - even if it is priced to zero until certain conditions are met. It's quite the circus, but the point is that the Abbott government will find out just how little an endorsement it got from the electorate for it to be able to claim any kind of mandate. Our hopes actually rest with Ricky Muir and Glenn Lazarus being centrist, reasonable people. It's a far cry from the Democrats but they may well turn out to be more credible and laudable in the history books than Meg Lees and Natasha Stott-Despoja.

News That's Fit To Punt - 05/Jul/2014

Semaphore Of Sociopaths

It's all about the message, and what message we're allegedly sending to people smugglers. So goes the theory in the continuing shit-storm that is the Coalition 'policy' towards asylum seekers.but sometimes we're not even sure that's where the message is going to or whether it's being received properly. It's a mystery as to how this government thinks communication theory functions.

The latest corker episode appears to be Scott Morrison ordering Tamil asylum seekers  from India, to Sri Lanka, In all honesty it's hard to fathom the depths of the kind of morally deficient mind as Scott Morrison who would surrender the said Tamils to the Sri Lankan authorities. It's a bit like happily offering up Jewish refugees from say, Sweden and repatriating them to Germany in 1944 or something. He's certainly not talking about what exactly was done and this government is hiding behind its usual "oh, this is a military operation so we need more secrecy" routine. Which is to say Scott Morrison is offering up the moral tenacity of a Sergeant Schultz who always insists he "knows nothing".

Weirder still, Mr. Morrison, it turns out, is going to Sri Lanka to attend a commissioning ceremony for some boats.  You really wonder how these people live with themselves.

Financial Mischief Writ Large

The business of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia offering up inappropriate financial advice because of its incentive laden program for their sales staff has turned into the eye sore issue for the Australian financial sector. First, there were the whistle-blowers who carefully leaked the secret to the corporate watchdog ASIC. ASIC then sat on its hands for 18months and failed to investigate. After which the anonymous whistle-blowers were forced to come forwards so that ASIC could get off its backside and investigate the mess. If the 18month delay was bad, the Senate hearings into ASIC have shown that ASIC and its personnel are too close to the banking industry it regulates, for it to be a proper watchdog - (which, it must be said was also said of the SEC in America after the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scandal).

So the ALP government drafted up legislation to stop this problem, but then the Coalition government has since watered it down at the behest of the lobby groups on behalf of the big banks. In the aftermath, the minister responsible for this area Mathias Cormann claimed that there were enough safeguards and the industry had changed substantially so that the legislation didn't need the safeguard that required financial advisers to offer responsible advice. He then went on to talk down the situation at the CBA as some kind of temporal anomaly when in fact the Senate investigation had identified the misplaced incentive as a systemic risk.

The upshot is that the CBA will be forced to cough up more money for is victims but it wants to control the process - which is a bit like letting criminals decide their own punishment in court. Once again, you wonder how these people live with themselves.

We Cut Health And Education To Buy These Toys

On of the crappiest investments our government has made over the last decade has been the F-35 JSF project. Not content with the money we've already spent helping to develop these planes, Tony Abbott pledged to actually spend even more to bring these planes over to Australia. The joke, - as it were - is on us because we're about to take delivery of some of these planes that barely work in a matter of weeks, and the whole fleet has been grounded due to engine problems.

The F-35 is like 'The Zap Gun' in Philip K. Dick's novel, where our civilisation comes up with increasingly unlikelier weapons systems to make a show of having come up with new exotic ways to kill and destroy. The paper specs of the F-35 is meant to put the fear of something ferocious into the hearts of America's enemies but the only thing it's really scaring are the bean counters who track the expenditure towards their development.

The nutshell of the problem is that they set out to deign a plane that fulfills the varied needs of the four service branches of America, each with their unique profiles. Some of these requirements were going to be mutually exclusive and contradictory. As it stands it doesn't seem to have passed any of the tests to be commissioned. Not even the US Marines who were most bullish about getting their F-35s commissioned is looking like they will succeed by the end of this year, as they had announced.

Thus I point to the fundamental waste that is the F-35 at a time when there is *allegedly* such need to cut government services. If we should be buying any warplanes, we should be buying the F-22. At least they work, and come in cheaper.