Direct (In)Action To Be Enacted

...And Al Gore Was Nowhere To Be Seen...

Oh brother. Clive Palmer and PUP have reached an agreement with Greg Hunt to pass the Coalition's bizarre policy of paying polluters to pollute, 'Direct Action'.

Direct Action, the key plank of which is a $2.55 billion fund that pays major polluters to reduce their emissions, is now set to become law, assuming independents Nick Xenophon and John Madigan also back the legislation. 

The breakthrough represents a major win for Mr Hunt and a step forward for the government, which has been without a carbon abatement policy since dumping Labor's carbon price in July. 

But to achieve it, it has had to embrace the possibility of a return to emissions trading scheme at some point in the future.

At a media conference late on Wednesday with Mr Palmer and CCA chair Bernie Fraser, Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the government would restore funding to the authority, which would be "appropriately resourced" to conduct an 18 month inquiry. 

While Mr Hunt maintained that the government opposition to carbon pricing remained absolute, the government is now in the strange position of funding independent advice which may well recommend it does just that before the next election. 

A draft terms of reference, seen by Fairfax Media, shows the authority will be charged with investigating if and when Australia should implement an ETS, and what Australia's emissions reduction targets should be after 2020.

So Clive Palmer and PUP have offered a fig leaf for the Coalition, just in time for the G-20 meetings. No, we don't have a carbon price, but yes, we have this immensely cumbersome and white-anted policy called 'Direct Action' which is big government spending for dubious results. Very DLP. John Madigan will vote to support it. I would guess this works very well for the lobbying edifice of the energy sector because hey, it can be argued they get paid something for doing what they do best - keep polluting.

Despite Jacqui Lambe's far-right ethos of fining people for wearing religious garments, the Palmer United Party has put itself in the unlikely middle between outright climate change denial and having some kind of sensible policy. Unfortunately, they're not close enough to the sensible policy, but they are pushing for it. They've made the Coalition commit to another inquiry into the effectiveness of an Emissions Trading Scheme. 

Thus, the cycle of irony has gone full circle, possibly around some square peg-holes. Greg Hunt originally devised the Emissions Trading Scheme as mooted under the late years of the Howard Government, which Kevin Rudd cooped for the sake of convenience, and which Abbott and Hunt subsequently fought hard to brand a Carbon Tax and destroy. Now Greg Hunt has a chance to retrieve his original ETS from the mire of politics and look quite sensible. You wonder if the rest of the climate change denialist nutbars of the Coalition will let him. 

...but back to Clive Palmer for a moment. He and his party have somehow come up in the middle in the way that would have made the Democrats of old proud. You can almost hear Natasha Stott-Despoja squeal with joy at the deft manoeuvre. "Match-ia-vellian", she would've called it. Still, what exactly is the PUP platform that can pull Al Gore from a hat ("get into that, get into that!") and abolish Carbon Pricing, and then allow Direct Action to pass with a proviso to have an inquiry about an ETS? 

It helps to not really explain what the philosophical underpinnings of the party are, but it seems to be some kind of Whig-ist pragmatism mixed with hokey individualism and an avuncular populism. You could do worse. You could have no policy whatsoever on the issue of carbon emissions control. It is a kind of pragmatism to take a bad policy over no policy and promise to go investigate (again) a better policy. That, actually looks so much like actual politics. Natasha and Match-ia-Velli would approve!

I hate to say this but the Greens have so far dealt themselves out of the equation on the singularly most important issue on the environmental agenda. That can't be good. They might be the rising third force in Australian politics, but because they're too far to the left, it won't change the agenda in a meaningful way at all. It may transpire that the partnership they had with the Gillard Government in a hung Parliament was the high point of their electoral support, because as of now, you have to wonder how they're going to contribute in a meaningful way if the Palmer United Party can just put this deal together and make the whole party obsolete. 

Besides which it's not as if they managed to pull Al Gore out of a hat. 

What Can You Do At This Point?

These Are The Intellectual Runts We've Got In Government

Okay, first up is Barnaby Joyce who admits his staff changed the Hansard Records.

The Hansard record had been changed to correct an error Joyce made on Monday 20 October regarding the government’s drought assistance package. In the speech, Joyce referred to “over” 4,000 people applying for drought assistance. His office changed that to read “nearly” 4,000. They also added a qualifier line that wasn’t originally in the speech, saying that “recipient[s] of the Interim Farm Household Allowance” would also receive the assistance. 

Joyce set the record straight in parliament after question time on Monday, saying the “minor edits were made to Hansard by my staff without my knowledge. My staff have been counselled. Consistent with standing orders, I have asked that the changes requested by my office be removed from Hansard before Hansard is finalised.”
It’s not unusual for Hansard records to be submitted to MPs’ offices so staff can check names, spelling and other small facts. But the manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, said the changes went beyond the normal alterations made by politicians and their staff members. 

“Of all the things that you can do in this parliament that carry a penalty, the greatest gravity is reserved for deliberately misleading the house,” Burke said. “Whether it was him or his office, somebody appears to have deliberately doctored the official record of what was said in parliament.” 

The matter has been referred to the powerful privileges committee.

Of course, the Privileges Committee feature one Bronwyn Bishop, Speaker of the House who is the most one-sided, partial Speaker in the history of Speakers dating back to the British Parliament. And there have been a whole bunch of Speakers in that Parliament. In other words, we are asking one set of shameless people to adjudicate on another bunch of shameless people about shameful acts. How's that going to work out for us?

Are we vomiting yet?

This Guy Doesn't Care About The Law, He Thinks He's Above It

Scott Morrison seems to just do what suits his own rhetorical position. It's crazy, but true. He ignored departmental advice and refused permanent visas for boat arrivals found to be refugees.

The minister for immigration personally ordered protection visa numbers be capped for 2014 – to avoid granting permanent protection to any boat arrivals – before his action was ruled unlawful by the full bench of the high court. 

Overruled by the judiciary, Morrison has since employed a previously unused “national interest” clause in the Migration Act to issue unchallengeable “conclusive certificates” to refuse visas, but this is also being contested in court. 

Lawyers for the minister are back in court in December. 

Documents before the high court show Morrison was told on 15 January, in a brief from his department, that his policy objective of never granting permanent protection to boat arrivals could not be achieved “in the medium to long term” but that he could “delay being forced to grant” visas in the short term. 

The departmental brief is confidential, but sections of it are reproduced in submissions before the high court. 

Talk about crash or crash through. Just imagine Sir Humphrey Appleby getting ignored in 'Yes Minister' after offering his expert advice. I don't know if Sir Humphrey had any more superlative-ironic descriptors than "courageous". It's worse than Dutch Courage or something worked up in the trenches with the help of alcohol; we're talking about the kind of courage that lets people bungy jump with a faulty cord or skydive without checking their kit.

It makes you wonder if Scott Morrison ever watched a single episode of 'Yes Minister'. And if not, why the hell is he a minister-of-anything in the English-Speaking world? Incredulity aside, when in the hell is justice going to prevail and send this guy to prison? Shouldn't there be an arrest warrant for this man at this point? Or is there some kind of Parliamentary privilege for breaking the law? 

Laugh Of The Day

Without reference, I offer you this:

"That is my hope," he told Parliament, "that just for once it might be possible for us in this Parliament, one side and the other, the national government and the state and territory governments to have a mature debate rather than a screaming match."

That would be our Prime Minister Tony Abbott speaking. 

To which even Mark Kenny said this.

The man who coined such high-rotation gems in the political lexicon as "python squeeze" and "wrecking ball" and "hammer blow" in relation to the carbon tax is hardly well placed to expect meek co-operation now that he's in office himself.

Yes, it does seem rather hypocritical to be treated like an adult after you've behaved like a five year old for five years. As Moon Zappa famously intoned, "gag me with a spoon!"

The Cost Of Stupid Life Decisions

For People Trying To Talk Down Free Education 

Life's weird in the tricks it plays. I got free education at tertiary for a time. I did two and a half years of med school and quit, back in the mid-80s. I realised half way through my first clinical year that I wasn't exactly cut out to help people; I also realised I was ideologically at odds with my colleagues, and refused to change my views. It was enough to drive me out the school. Because med school in those days really crammed their hours, in the two and a half years I was there, I would've spent about as much time as a normal Bachelor of science in those days. I have nothing to show for those days except that which I retained from things I learned. That's the way it goes with most education, I guess.

Still, I don't regret quitting because if you have anything else to do in life, you probably should pick that over being a doctor. Medicine, more than any other profession I've observed, should be practiced by those who cannot - and will not - do anything else. Conversely, if there's a choice to do anything other than being a doctor, you should do it because doctor-ing requires a certain single-mindedness and an understanding of that single-mindedness that allows one to be a good doctor. All of which is to say, if you're not a good doctor, then there's no point being a doctor.

When it came to quitting, I had to go talk to the student officer, who was alarmed and appalled because it took him completely by surprise that somebody would quit half way through the course. Most people who quit, quit early. Nobody waited until third year in the dead middle of the course. What he didn't know was that I had considerable parental pressure to be there. He didn't exactly make it easy. He berated and insulted me, and he resorted to putting a money value on it. He told me my time had cost the government $300,000, and I was pissing that down the drain.

I still remember the look on his face, flushed red, practically yelling at me. He was in his forties, horn-rimmed glasses and white shirt and dark blue tie. He looked like a character straight out of the early seasons of 'Mad Men'. I remember thinking, "What has that $300,000 to do with with me now?"

It was the faculty's 'opportunity cost' in investing in me instead of another candidate who might have wanted to really be there. For me, it was an expensive bill I ran up on some tab for having to figure out what I wasn't cut out to do. He was trying to pin it on to me as a reason for guilt and the need to stay. I wonder if he'd thought through the ramification - that even if I'd stayed, I wouldn't practice medicine, so the next $300,000 the faculty would spend on me would be good money after bad, one huge sunk cost. I didn't exactly think about things in those terms then, but I recall thinking, "how's it going to help anybody - me, him or the faculty - if I stayed on?"

I imagine that he didn't get free education under Whitlam's reforms. So he was appalled that I would walk out. I didn't get it at the time, because I was an entitled little shit; but it was a lot more complicated than that. I was failing. I was failing because I missed time from an ankle injury; I then had a bad bout of flu and missed exams, and then got penalised. The faculty seemed to delight in telling me I had blown it. I had just had a bad breakup and was totally messed up. I was not interested in the career let alone in helping sick people, I had discovered in the hospital wards. If I had to repeat the year, I was going to drop into the year that was doing a 6 year Medical course, which would mean I would be at the faculty for 7 years. That was 7 years for a degree that I knew I wasn't going to use. If I were going to get out, then I just had to get out right then and not 5 years further down the track, just for the piece of paper. (and I look back and shudder because in the end I'd finished my 3year AFTRS degree roughly around the time I would have graduated, with a 1year stint at the ABC as well).

To this day it remains one of the most important decisions of my life. Because of that decision, I got the most important life education in the things that followed. It is unfortunate that it took the faculty $300,000 to find out I wasn't going to be any kind of doctor. It reminds me of 'Moneyball' when they signed Billy Beane as a top draft pick and it didn't work out, although the faculty would be a bit too dense in understanding that analogy (and I would be praising myself too much in likening myself to Billy Beane). A good mark in the HSC is not 'due diligence' enough in selecting candidates for Med School. If the system is deluded in thinking this is sufficient, it gets everything it deserves.

The faculty did very badly out of it, if indeed the cost was $300,000. But they did do me over. Instead of putting me down as "withdrawn without fail" as agreed, they put me down as 'fail' - which removed any chance I would have returning to study anything else at the tertiary level under the UCAC system at the time. So the life lesson there is, "don't piss off the powerful". Since then I have been very suspicious of universities in this country as a result. I sure as hell don't buy into the self-allocated esteem these institutions hand themselves. I am still largely hostile in sentiment towards the University of Sydney and its Faculty of Medicine (may they all rot in hell). If the place was on fire, I wouldn't cross Missenden Rd to piss on it.
And even then, and even after my terrible experience at the University of Sydney, I stand for free education. Think on that for a moment!

Studying at Med School for me, was a big mistake. The mooted sum of $300,000 for that bad decision was a costly mistake, but I don't think that sum rests entirely with me. And in that sense I would posit that saddling enormous student debts is a very bad thing for society. I didn't arrive at my $300,000 decision lightly. I suffered and agonised greatly and it was in the final count that I had to push forward with it. And if the faculty punished me for it, well, that's life too. But if students are shouldered with this debt on the front end, they won't be able to make the decision I made; and I would contend it is important that people make ethical decisions when it comes to important things like this.

I have no doubt that I would have made critical errors as an uncaring, unmotivated, lousy doctor; I have no doubt I might have let somebody die on my watch by mistake or incompetence. I have no doubt that the craptacular efforts of my endeavours in medicine would have cost somebody much more than $300,000. People ought to be able to make decisions about their lives - important decisions - without getting penalised with money or encumbered with ridiculous debt. Those are the decisions that are going to contribute positively to society. No matter what the man in the horn-rimmed glasses says, you can't put a price on that. In turn, one should be very frightened of the doctor who is only there because he couldn't get out because the money was too much. I can tell you from first hand experience that most doctors are social idiots, but they are well-motivated social idiots. You wouldn't want to put your lives in the hands of anybody worse than a well-motivated social idiot.

'Once Upon A Time In Anatolia'

CSI, A La Turko

I don't watch a whole lot of movies from the middle east, I must admit. Truth be told, you have to actively go in search of them on SBS to find them so it is rare that a Turkish film ends up with a wider distribution than the usual suspect outlets. This one was on Fetch TV with a very high Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Spolier alert. It's a hard film to talk about without actually mentioning things that happen in it.

What's Good About It

It's good to see that film making in Turkey is more along the lines of Russian cinema and have little interest in building tension through the conventional shots. There's a lot of watching scenes unfold in wide shot and the closeups happen most unexpectedly. The style of the shooting lends itself to the meandering of the characters. It also obscures the sense of genre conventions so you're not quite sure how to interpret what you're seeing. In other words, it makes you think and gives you time to think about what you are witnessing. It's very good cinema that way.

It's also great to be wandering around the rural Anatolian hills with these characters because I figure I'll never have to go looking there as a tourist, thanks to this movie. The landscape is rendered lovingly and you get the full bleakness of the place.

Nothing is glamorous, nothing is grandiose or made to be aesthetically pleasing. There is a stick in the mud social realism that runs through the film that would make legions of film critics delighted. The performances are understated, yet filled with emotional commitment - even the guys playing the dullest tools in the box carry so much commitment. It's simply a great film to watch.

What's Bad About It

Can't think of anything bad about it. It is somewhat dissatisfying in not knowing what actually happened in the beginning. The film skips the central crime while going on a dark odyssey through the night to find the corpse from the crime. We never get to find out how the crime took place or what the motive might have been. We only get fragments to piece together but they are so ambiguous, it's nearly impossible to construct a narrative that makes sense.

It is the way the film should be, in some ways, but in another way, I'm left wondering if crimes are so common place in Turkey they've stopped asking why. I'm not asking for closure in the Hollywood movie sense, but I think they might have offered a glimpse of the police interrogation that led to the trip through the night. So much of it is gleaned through dialogue that it renders the film almost un-cinematic when it comes to the central crime in the film.

What's Interesting About it

The film is like a cross between 'CSI' and 'Waiting for Godot'. The whole film is like a metaphor for life, where a bunch of guys thrown together by fate and the whim of bureaucracy get in 3 cars looking for a buried corpse in the Anatolian hills. As one of the oldest locations for human civilisation, the place is freaky to look at as it is. It hardly has any trees, hardly an animal grazing and the soil looks tired and worn. Once upon a time it was covered in forests and one of the most verdant places on the planet. Denuded, the landscape is haunting and strange.

The film makes reference to the layered history of the land when the doctor goes off track to urinate, and comes across an ancient statue. It's like something straight out of Peter Jackson's Tolkien book movies, but much less dramatic. It gives the sense that people in Anatolia are living amongst the ruins.

The Modernist Angst

The Modernist Anxiety is well and truly alive in this film. The characters are bothered deeply by the process they are enduring. Professionally they are bound to be on this trek but on a personal level they would rather be somewhere else. The anxiety bursts through when they realise at certain points that bureaucratic duties require men better equipped than themselves. The anxiety is mainly to do with human fallibility and the unlikeliness of living up to the demands of bureaucracy.

Some of this manifests itself as very uncomfortable black comedy as they eventually uncover the corpse. The scene with the corpse and trying to bring it back to the city is hilarious. The mayor negotiating for funding is equally interminable and rambling. It is like a special revenge for imposing upon his village. As the audience, we're forced to endure his pitch for funding a morgue as well. It's funny and sad, tedious and curious, all in one long speech. A memento mori moment for all the characters.

It doesn't get more existential than driving around a haunted barren landscape in search of a corpse in the middle of the night. It's a metonymy for the condition of man - the corpse they find is in a sense their own meaningless deaths and by extension their current meaningless lives. In Turkey, it's not some radioactive monster that comes and smashes you; it's the weight of history and one's insignificance in light of it that smashes you.

Absent Lovers

For a film filled with guys bumbling around in the dark and police officers and soldiers at that, the film is rather un-macho. The men in it are not only haunted by where they are and what their jobs makes them do, but also by some in their lives. The principal men in this film are essentially walking around in the aftermath of their own catastrophic love. Femininity only appears as a glimpse, ever mysterious and largely silent. Women don't seem to get a whole lot of say in Turkish society and their own response to this is suicide. It's pretty poignant that the men barely have a grip on their own lives. Women appear to these characters as phenomena, rather than human beings.

Should We Be Concerned?

The Junior Murdoch Speaks Up

I always find it unlikely when a Murdoch stands up for freedoms, what with the generally casual fascist tone their editorials in their miserable newspapers take. Of course, one shouldn't be surprised that they do it when it suits them directly to do so, for maximum effect. And so it is with Lachlan Murdoch who is invoking his grandfather's reporting of the Gallipoli campaign.

Mr Murdoch said Australia's press freedom was under threat and had already fallen dramatically by world standards. 

"It might surprise you that today Australia ranks 33rd, just behind Belize, on the Freedom house index. 20 years ago we ranked 9th," Mr Murdoch said during the Keith Murdoch Oration at the State Library in Melbourne on Thursday night. 

Mr Murdoch said the government was frequently asking Australians to trust them 'we're from the government', when attempting to censor the media. 

"But trust is something that should not be a consideration when restricting our fundamental freedoms. Our freedom of speech and freedom of the press are not things we should blindly entrust anyone." 

Mr Murdoch singled out the government's national security laws that could jail journalists for up to 10 years for revealing "special intelligence operations".

Mighty fine sentiments on a night for orations. I have to say, it's still a bit rich coming from the scion of Rupert Murdoch, hardly an egalitarian or democrat. If Mao said justice comes from the barrel of a gun, the Senior Murdoch certainly has behaved like governments are born from the printing press. The senior Murdoch set about killing Whitlam's government back when he was junior's age.

The US National Archives has just declassified a secret diplomatic telegram dated January 20, 1975 that sheds new light on Murdoch's involvement in the tumultuous events of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis.

Illustration: Ron Tandberg 

Entitled "Australian publisher privately turns on Prime Minister," the telegram from US Consul-General in Melbourne, Robert Brand, reported to the State Department that "Rupert Murdoch has issued [a] confidential instruction to editors of newspapers he controls to 'Kill Whitlam' ". 

Describing Mr Murdoch as "the l'enfant terrible of Australian journalism," Mr Brand noted that Mr Murdoch had been "the principal publisher supporting the Whitlam election effort in 1972 Labor victory". 

With a publishing empire that included The Australian as well as daily or Sunday newspapers in every Australian capital, Mr Murdoch's new editorial direction was seen as a critical political development. 

"If Murdoch attack directed against Whitlam personally this could presage hard times for Prime Minister; but if against Labor government would be dire news for party," Mr Brand telegraphed.

And so it was in 1975 that Rupert bent his considerable powers of the press to undermine and ultimately destroy the democratically elected Whitlam Government. It's pretty much in line with what Chris Boyce (the Falcon in 'the Falcon and the Snowman') told us all those years ago. The CIA took a great interest in undermining Whitlam's Labor Government. Rupert for his part obliged by unleashing his dogs - just as he did with Beazley, Crean, Latham, and ultimately Rudd and Gillard. It's almost the rule that the ALP should find every legislative means of limiting Murdoch's power because it is the largest opinion-maker as well as being totally anti-democratic and anti-social. He likes us to think of him as a contrarian codger. He's not. He's full-blown Citizen-Kane-type, trying to turn our democracy into his plaything.

In that light, it's really difficult to imagine that the son is any less meddlesome as the father. And by extension, he's not really standing up for journalists, he's standing up for his right to publish and report a scoop in the press without facing gaol time. I mean, yeah, that's really bold of you Latch. 

How Can They Call Their Rag 'News'?

While I'm on this topic, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey that lays out where the News Corp mouthpieces sit in the wake of Whitlam passing away. Here's the juicy bit:

The first person who might consider checking “the facts” is Sheridan. He asserts rather confidently that under Whitlam, “inflation got above 20% at one stage”. His confidence is misplaced. During Whitlam’s government, inflation as measured by the consumer price index peaked at 17.7% in the first quarter of 1975. Since the beginning of Australian Bureau of Statistics records, inflation has only exceeded 20% in three quarters, and in all three of them, it was Robert Menzies’ pyjamas that were tucked under the doona in the Lodge. (Perhaps Sheridan could let us know if “ruinous” is the right adjective with which to garland our longest-serving prime minister.) 

Things don’t get much better when Sheridan turns to the international scene, where he is apparently more of an expert. Here we discover (and though Sheridan generously allows that there was a tiny little oil shock to contend with) that on the question of inflation, “the outcome in Australia was much worse than in comparable countries”. This might have come as a surprise to Aldo Moro, the then-prime minister of Italy, where inflation reached 24%, or to Harold Wilson, who presided over a British inflation rate of 26.6%. 

Other commentators trying their hand at sacrilege fared no better. Thanks to Gough, Miranda Devine lamented, “half the ­nation is now on welfare”. In 2012, the last year for which the Department of Social Services has released data, only around a quarter of the population over 15 was receiving some kind of income support payment. A bit under half of these are old age pensioners. Presumably, sans Gough, we would have adopted work-for-the-pension schemes or simply euthanised the elderly to spare them the moral decay of Devine’s “culture of entitlement”. 

Meanwhile, Andrew Bolt, making the daring argument that Kevin Rudd was merely Whitlam digested and reconstituted, credited the former with “the same debt blowouts” as the latter. When Whitlam left office, Australia had negative net debt. But did not Whitlam “lose control” of the purse, as Alan Mitchell wrote? Of the three budgets prepared by Whitlam’s government, two resulted in surplus; deficits accounting therefore for a third of his budgets. That fiscally continent duo Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, on the other hand, recorded 10 deficits from 13 budgets (about three-quarters in the red).
For all of the ruin occasioned by Whitlam’s supposedly disastrous programs, government spending has, as a proportion of economic output, never retreated to the levels seen before 1972. 

Whatever else the electorate might have thought or now thinks of the government he led, they have never really shown much interest in reversing the increase in the size of government he oversaw. In this sense, budgetary history since 1975 has been a remarkable vindication of Whitlam rather than an repudiation.

In other words, the Murdoch journalists are still banging on about the Whitlam Government, believing in their own crappy press which was all made up in the first place, for the sole purpose of destroying the standing of the Whitlam Government. Stuff most people would call mischaracterisations. It is mischaracterisation right now, as it was back then. So it's really just too rich hearing from Lachlan telling us how journalism should work. 

Blast From The Past

'Pizza Driver'

I think I was out of film school a mere 2 years and decided to do a short film. Got my old crew together and did this thing here:


I just realised it was coming on to 20 years, so... wow.

From The Pleiades Mailbag - 22/Oct/2014

The Gough Whitlam Articles

Digging in to the Pleiades mailbag today...
Some poignant articles have been written in the wake of Gough Whitlam's passing.
Here's one from Helen Razer that's worth a read. This bit stuck out as particularly worthy:

It’s tricky to do this and not least because the cultural and political right has done such a marvellous job these past 40 years of rewriting Whitlam’s reforms as naïve. While it is certainly true that the man’s cabinet behaved, at times, like toddlers unchained in a left-wing lolly shop, it is also true that the Ideology V.2 that grew in the rotten bog of ’70s stagflation had much worse consequences for the nation and the world than the purchase of Blue Poles.  If you want delusional thinking on political management of the economy, there is no better place to look than Milton Friedman whose works would influence all western liberal democracies, including our own, from about the day Whitlam was ousted. Friedman’s thinking led to inequality. Whitlam’s led to a brief moment of reform with some stubbornly enduring heritage. If Whitlam was history’s most naïve politician, then last night’s X-Factor Grand Final was a glorious moment of uplifting hope.

Here's one from Michael Pascoe.

He had done all and more that a man might reasonably think possible to do. 

His contribution had been huge and the years were reducing him. And even Gough had suggested that even Gough might not be immortal. To recall a phrase, it was time. 

So why does his inevitable and any-day-now-for-the-past-several-years death strike such a chord? 

I think it's partly because of the invidious comparison with what our nation has become.
The optimism, the positivity, the change, the opening up, the justice, the independence, the betterment of the nation, the internationalisation that Whitlam sought and represented has been replaced after four decades with a more general negativity, with so little ambition, with a conservative determination to uphold the status quo or even return to some earlier imagination of it, with white-bread nationalism resplendent. 

I fear we don't mourn Gough, but ourselves.

There's a lot of truth right there too. Pleiades also dug up this beauty from somewhere on the internet:

It was the Whitlam Government that:-1. ended Conscription,2. withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam,3. implemented Equal Pay for Women,4. launched an Inquiry into Education and the Funding of Government and Non-government Schools on a Needs Basis,5. established a separate ministry responsible for Aboriginal Affairs,6. established the single Department of Defence,7. withdrew support for apartheid–South Africa,8. granted independence to Papua New Guinea,9. abolished Tertiary Education Fees,10. established the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme (TEAS),11. increased pensions,12. established Medibank,13. established controls on Foreign Ownership of Australian resources,14. passed the Family Law Act establishing No-Fault Divorce,15. passed a series of laws banning Racial and Sexual Discrimination,16. extended Maternity Leave and Benefits for Single Mothers,17. introduced One-Vote-One-Value to democratize the electoral system,18. implemented wide-ranging reforms of the ALP’s organization,19. initiated Australia’s first Federal Legislation on Human Rights, the Environment and Heritage,20. established the Legal Aid Office,21. established the National Film and Television School,22. launched construction of National Gallery of Australia,23. established the Australian Development Assistance Agency,24. reopened the Australian Embassy in Peking after 24 years,25. established the Prices Justification Tribunal,26. revalued the Australian Dollar,27. cut tariffs across the board,28. established the Trade Practices Commission,29. established the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service,30. established the Law Reform Commission,31. established the Australian Film Commission,32. established the Australia Council,33. established the Australian Heritage Commission,34. established the Consumer Affairs Commission,35. established the Technical and Further Education Commission,36. implemented a national employment and training program,37. created Telecom and Australia Post to replace the Postmaster-General’s Department,38. devised the Order of Australia Honors System to replace the British Honors system,39. abolished appeals to the Privy Council,40. changed the National Anthem to ‘Advance Australia Fair’ (confirmed at 1977 Referendum),41. instituted Aboriginal Land Rights, and42. sewered most of Sydney. (Hard to believe, isn’t it, that Sydney wasn’t even sewered 40 years ago???)Mind you it took ‘em all of 3 years!!!

3 years of furious reforms. 

Soft Landing in China?

There are two big assumptions about the Australian economy going forward. One is that property rices will never go down, even if they don't exactly keep going up. The others that iron ore and coal exports are going to pay for everything, and that China is going to keep on gorging itself on our commodities exports.

Here's an article that begs to differ.

Back in 2009, problems for China were external. Now, apart from still sluggish export demand from Europe, they are pretty much home-grown. China is suffering from massive debt hangover from the stupendous multitrillion-dollar stimulus its government sprayed in every direction in response to the GFC. The country is also hindered by an economy that continues to misallocate capital, is far too reliant on state-owned enterprises, and a population that is beginning to age before the country has reached even middle-income status. 

As its hedges its bets a little, the government has been pumping money into the banks and providing low-level stimulus, so some economists reckon that official figures may lift in the fourth quarter. But next year ain’t looking as good, with many economists predicting sub-7% growth. 

But if the official figures — much derided by many economists — look bad, the key measures, to which Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has previously said he pays most attention, look decidedly worse. The so-called Keqiang Index consists of electricity consumption, rail freight and credit growth. 

“Electricity consumption improved, up by 2.7% year on year in September after a 1.4% decline in August, but is still the second-lowest print in 18 months. Railway freight traffic fell further, down by 6.2% y-o-y after falling by 0.2% in August. New RMB loans rose more than expected, but outstanding loan growth slowed to 13.2% year on year from 13.3% in August,” analysts at investment bank Nomura said. 

With that on the table, the forecasts from the Australian Treasury, which underpin the budget, are already starting to look a little loopy. Treasury’s global GDP growth figures for this year and the next two years are now consistently ahead of the latest forecasts from the World Bank — this year by 0.7% and next year by more than 0.5%. In a world where growth is only 3% to 3.5%, such differences — of up to 20% — are meaningful.
Treasury’s forecasting 7.25% growth for China next year after 7% for this year. Those now look a little high, but it’s the figures underneath these big picture estimates that look even more divergent from the emerging reality. 

Treasury has Australian metallurgical coal exports doubling over the next four years to 300 million tonnes, but the latest forecast from UBS expects these to top out at 175 million tonnes by 2017.

It feels like the RBA might be a little too optimistic with its forecasts. In turn, we might be headed for a pretty big recession the next time China hits a snag. That being said, China seems to keep on coming up with ways to cheat the slow down. It's a desperate thing for us, but its even more desperate for the Chinese leadership. Perhaps this tends to focus their minds on their issues harder. So far they keep on bailing out strategic companies and banks without handing out a big stimulus.

But one does wonder about the sudden ballooning debt and the demographic issues.

The Singularity Gets Its Serving

Look, I'm actually a convert to Ray Kurzweil's Singularity vision. If you haven't heard about it by now, here he is doing a Ted talk explaining his diabolical thesis he came up with based on grabbing empirical evidence. People tell me it's fanciful but... I dunno, I have to hang my hat on something, so I choose to hang it on humanity and tech. :)
This is his talk from 2007. 

In the seven years since, we have Siri, we have Googleglass and the Apple watch, he's been pretty accurate. Just today a guy with a broken spine got up and walked and that was down right miraculous by scientific standards only 3years ago. 

People may laugh, but I get what he's saying about the accelerating curve. The cutting edge of tech is going places a lot faster than they ever have before. One would underestimate where things are going at one's own peril - and that is for better and for worse. 

Anyway, Pleiades thinks I'm a little too optimistic about all this, so he sent in this little crit. It's a pretty cool video. 

Woz Comes To Sydney

Does This Mean Sydney Has Hit The Hi-Tech Big Time?

Whoah!

Yes, that Steve Wozniak is coming to work and live in Sydney. He wasn't kidding when he said he liked the NBN so much he wanted to live here. I thought he was being flattering and nice, but no, the man who started Apple Computers with the late Steve Jobs is coming to Sydney.

Apple co-founder Steve "Woz" Wozniak is set to join the University of Technology, Sydney, in December as an adjunct professor. 

He will become a key part of the UTS "Magic Lab", the university's centre for innovation and enterprise research, which conducts research into robotics and artificial intelligence. 

Mr Wozniak has harboured intentions of moving to Australia since 2012, when he said he was going through the process of becoming an Australian citizen, according to Gizmodo. 

"I am under way to becoming an Australian citizen. That's a little known fact," he said. 

"Turns out that I get to keep my American citizenship and I intend ... to call myself an Australian and feel Australian and study the history and become as much of a real citizen here as I can."

I have to tell you this news makes me feel great, and I don't know why. It has absolutely nothing to do with me, it certainly won't stop the Coalition Government from trying to dumb down the NBN, but hey, it's Steve Wozniak! It's so cool!

Welcome to Sydney Mr. Wozniak!

Gough Whitlam Passes Away

Farewell To The Titan

The man was 98. It's not like there was much more for the man to offer us beyond symbolic gestures, and his time in the limelight of history was long behind him. Perhaps his career embodies one archetype of the ALP leadership - invested with Charisma, invested in big ideas - much like his successors. Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd were all charismatic leaders, and even Julia Gillard would have to be some kind of poster-person for the gender-issuue-drive critique of ALP leadership. In a democracy, you don't get ahead without the galvanising power of charisma, and if anything the Gillard years highlights the problem of not having it.

Indeed, Bill Hayden, Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Mark Latham can all equally be dumped in with the Gillard years as examples of how the lack of a broad political charisma can sink the ALP's prospects. The wild electoral success of Whitlam in '72, Hawke in '83, Keating in '93 and Rudd in '07 actually line up in a very similar way. The connectedness of Hawke-Keating years is possibly the anomaly. Maybe ALP governments can't be long because their electoral successes contain a contradictory impulse which makes them vulnerable in the long term. If you exclude the Hawke-Keating years, you have roughly three years of Whitlam, Rudd and Gillard each. All of them had their terms ended by internal politics.

It also means Bill Shorten's leash probably ought to be (pardon the pun) shorter. If he can't get his electoral mojo going, he's not going to get the ALP back into government. He really only has one shot at dislodging Tony Abbott, and if so, he'll likely only get 1 term unless he can get his party reforms through.

Peter Carey And Conspiracy Theories

Coincidentally, and totally out of the blue, I saw this article today.

Has anyone has accused him of being a conspiracy theorist? "Not for years," says Carey, who is in Sydney to do a rapid round of interviews and speak at the Opera House on Monday night. "What comes with the term is the notion that conspiracies don't exist and the deeply troubling reactionary problem with the name is that if someone thinks there's a conspiracy they're wrong."

Amnesia is driven frenetically by two characters: Gaby Baillieux, a young computer hacker from Melbourne who releases a virus into the Australian detention system to release asylum seekers, and through the controlling US corporation opens doors to American prisons. And Felix Moore, "Australia's last serving left-wing journalist", who believes as Carey does that the CIA was instrumental in the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 and is hired by his old "mate", property developer Woody Townes, to write Gaby's biography. 

Carey has no doubt the US government, under Republican President Gerald Ford, was suspicious of Australia's Labor government and reacted against Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's threat to reconsider the lease on the Pine Gap satellite tracking station. 

Although he had been active in the Vietnam War moratorium movement, Carey says, "I tended to be rather slow on things and rather naive". So it was only when Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, published secret US military and diplomatic documents that he started to speculate that his actions were revenge against that almost forgotten rupture in Australian politics.

It's an odd coincidence the interview comes out on the same day Whitlam's passing is reported.
I would point to the denunciation of the term 'Conspiracy theorist' - and a pretty strong one at that - that Carey probably has gone down the rabbit hole and seen and read and heard things to vex him. 

'Nebraska'

Down And Out With Alzheimers

There are these places on Earth that were once bustling communities that are now in decay because the young have moved away. The old are left behind and some of them are giving way to Alzheimers and otter degenerative diseases. The communities continue but the sense of decay is everywhere. It's happening in rural Australia as it is in Japan and America. As we move from industrial to post-industrial and whatever it is that comes after that, we often don't think about these communities a whole lot. We know they're there, we make a mental note of it, but we don't exactly picture the emotional bleakness surrounding these people.
This film decides to illustrate that bleakness.

What's Good About It

It's nice to see a very human, naturalistic film for a change. The indie film circuit is probably full of these things but you don't come across them that often. The blackened white cinematography is nice and stark while the misc en scene is quite exquisite. The wind swept plans of Nebraska evoke a loneliness and desperate fear of isolation while the clearness of the air makes the light even more stark than one would imagine.

It's a bleak kind of journey through sections of what might be described as flyover land. It's not a place one goes to, looking for joy. The usual trope is to go looking for weirdos, which is what the Coen Brothers did with 'Fargo'. It does deserve a different look.

What's Bad About It

Maybe it's just me dragging the trauma of watching '12 Years A Slave' only weeks ago. It's kind of hard to take serious the kind of ethnographic investigation of rural white people in Nebraska when the realty of race relations in America is a lot more dire. With documentaries like these also going on, you sort of wonder if the film really dug deep enough into these characters.

I know it's rural America and very unlikely but this film has no black people in it. No minorities except a couple of Mexicans who are outrightly portrayed as the other. Race issues like this don't often come front and centre but this is 2014. This film is by negation, a trip through the bleak heartland of white person rural space. While it might be demographically accurate, the film feels very skewed for it.

What's Interesting About It

Age is a terrible thing. Spelling it out is no great shakes in the insight business. All the same, the film underscores the general bleakness of life with the bleakness of ageing. We relate to the younger son who is navigating his own strange path through a post-GFC America, and laugh along at the casting of Bob Odenkirk as the older brother, but above all we're made to sit in with Bruce Dern playing this old man who's lost it. The drinking holes and lounge rooms of the forgotten America are depicted with the kind of downbeat grit not seen since 'The Last Picture Show'. In many ways this film is spiritual descendant of that film which trawled the country town bleakness of youth. This is the film that trawls the country town in old age and puts us face to face with faded glories.

The film is more evocative than anything else, and proceeds to show minutiae and detail in such a way to form a flowing narrative. Our incredulity is carried by the son David played by William Forte, as the diminished father stumbles and falls and staggers. There are no moments of glory to be found like in 'Gran Torino'. The salvation the film offers is as delusory as the sweepstakes ticket itself.

The Shattered Identity, The Absent Cars

The old men talk bout cars. It's the sort of dialogue that follows on from 'Gran Torino' that glorified Detroit but in this film the products of Detroit are strangely absent. Without them the identity of these elderly men is somewhat compromised, largely moth-balled and basically incomplete. We spend time in a Subaru Outback and a little bit more in a Kia hatchback. Eventually the film settles for a big American pick up truck, but it doesn't fill us with a sense of greatness of the vehicle. We're more struck by how arbitrary the truck is, and that the emotional investiture in vehicles made by Americans is a love song, sung as an empty gesture.

The Pinko Crisis

Pinko Blues

The big irritating topic of the month was the brouhaha surrounding Ben Affleck's appearance on Bill Maher's show together with Sam Harris. You all know what happened next - Ben Affleck said "That's gross, you're bigoted, and you're racists," then proceeded to lambast Maher and Harris for the rest of the short segment. What was more perplexing was how Affleck would garner a lot of public support for having tarn a stand against racists and 'Islamophobes', and then there was a dearth of any kind of sensible discussion about any of the topics. Since then Sam Harris has put up an excellent explanation of his side of the fracas so I won't be mounting a defence of atheism or central state materialism here.

What I do want to write about is this growing notion that you can't criticise a group of people for having a particular beliefs, and to criticise them is

1. somehow intolerant 
2. leads to 'ethnocide' and that is 
3. tantamount to genocide.  

These thing are clearly big leaps. You can be tolerant of people having beliefs and still question the basis for their beliefs. This is not offensive in of itself - although let's be honest is is offensive to religious thinning to ask any questions, no matter how value neutral the question might be. All the same, asking questions of beliefs does not automatically indicate intolerance. If people are going to go around waving their beliefs, then it is legitimate that they get ridiculed for their silly beliefs.  It's just the split coin of freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

The second notion that questioning the ideas in other people's cultural beliefs leads to ethnocide needs some examination. If we came across a tribe of people 'X' in a remote place of the world and they had a cultural practice that was against our values (and you can insert your most hated taboo here), is it ethnocide to try to change their practices?

I am reminded of a friend of mine who once taught a high school class about evolution. A muslim girl  raised her hand, and said "sir, I don't think you should be pushing your Christian views on to us."
Is teaching evolution ethnocide?
Sometimes bog ignorance is exactly that and getting educated might mean the abandonment of dearly held beliefs. After all, things that fly in the face of reality have a limited utility. It's hard to argue the gain in utility by the ignorant as ethnocide.

The third notion is perhaps the most pernicious. It suggests if we were to change people's beliefs, it would spoil their culture, and if their culture is gone, the people are gone. It is argued vehemently that this is genocide. I have great trouble with this construction. Genocide, to my mind of thinking is systematically targeting a people and trying to kill them into extinction. As the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians or the Nazis did to the Jewry in Europe, or the Bosnian Serb did to the Bosnian slims, which was to round them up an kill them; that strikes me as the working historic model of genocide, from whence we get this notion. The jump from ethnocide would mean if you taught the tribe 'X' not to commit taboos, it kills Tribe 'X'.

I have a friend Roddy the Samoan, who once told me that his people used to eat people. Roddy felt that this was just wrong. Some Samoans wanted to hide behind cultural practices as a defence, justifying cannibalism but Roddy was dismissive of such arguments. He felt that some things are just wrong and better left behind.
If you make Samoans stop cannibalism, is this ethnocide? Did they really lose their identity as Samoans when they stopped the practice? Can this legitimately be called 'genocide' in the same sense  as the Ottoman Turks and Nazis and Bosnian Serbs carrying out their respective killing programs?If we did, aren't we cheapening the definition and gravity of the genocide offence to take a cheap political shot? Is that a worthy exchange? Really, I think not.

I raise all this to point out to the hysteria on my own side of politics with the desire not to demonise people. It's understandable that we ought not demonise anybody for their beliefs. Not even Satanists - even though they're really into demons themselves - and so I totally understand the politically correct impulse to say one should not attack a people for their beliefs. Yet Maher and Harris made those caveats, just as any proper thinking small-'l' liberal pinko would do - and really wasn't the point under dispute. The mischaracterisation of their position that followed has left me wondering just how polarised the left end of the left has become.

The crux of the argument is, how explicit are the injunctions to attack apostates and infidels in Islam, and should this cultural practice really be given a free pass on the basis of our liberal tolerance. This actually hides a very difficult problem. For instance in Algeria during the 1990s Muslim brotherhood put up a candidate for election whose electoral promise was to shut down democracy and return Algeria to Sharia law. In other words, the candidate stood in a democratic election on the promise of ending democracy. It's unthinkable in the liberal west that we could have such a candidate, let alone that such a candidate would find significant popular support. Just how far must our tolerance stretch for these ideas? Is it really unreasonable to say, "look, you can have your religion but we're keeping our laws and institutions." Is that really bigotry, racism and 'Islamophobia'?

This is sort of weird. We're at the point where some small-'l' liberals are willing to sell out their own institutions and traditions that gave them the small-'l' liberalism for the sake of staking out the most politically correct position. And being the small-'l' liberal pinko lefty that I am, I'm just not comfortable crossing that bridge to that penultimate PC-ground being staked.
Instead I would posit that an infinitely open mind is not a mind at all.

Perhaps missing in this trendy-lefty intramural crossfire of abuse is that we have to understand that appeals to tolerance includes a hefty dose of our own cultural baggage that allows us to understand what tolerance might look like. we have freedom of speech, expression and religion, and nobody is talking about revoking those things. It really shouldn't exclude discussion of whether Islam has injunctions that we might find politically for philosophically unacceptable. That's not 'white privilege' and 'entitlement', as some have claimed in lauding Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck shouting down the discussion is privilege and entitlement.

They Can't Deny Forever

The Reality Principle

Reality, according to one science fiction author, is that which won't go away even if you close your eyes. One's denial of scientifically established facts and evidence can lead you to all kinds of interesting mental spaces but this is 2014 and the jury is in - there is anthropogenic global warming going on and it accelerating in proportion to our industrial activity. Putting a cap on emissions or even bringing them down is going to be a challenge given that nobody exactly wants the world economy to slow down in line with such deceleration.

The point being, reality is encroaching upon us rather rapidly, and so governments around the world are rapidly shifting focus towards addressing the problem. This is in stark contrast to Australia where a climate change denialist is firmly in charge of government policy, and he is taking us in the opposite direction to our desired destination of survival and repairing the climate. In that light here's an interesting article that argues that perhaps the world won't let Tony Abbott continue to be Tony Abbott about the problem at the upcoming Brisbane G-20 meeting.

When the world's leading economies meet in Brisbane next month for the G20, climate change will be discussed actively despite Abbott's insistence that it be listed only as "energy efficiency". He'll have the support of fellow sceptic and absentee at Obama's fore-mentioned leaders' summit, Canada's Stephen Harper. 

US and European leaders want it thoroughly discussed. "Mr Obama's international adviser at the White House, Caroline Atkinson, said the G20 economies generated 80 per cent of the world's carbon emissions and should give a political push to 'specific steps' to reduce global warming," The Australian Financial Review reported last week. 

To date the government has got by defending its bipartisan commitment to a 5 per cent cut by 2020 on year 2000 levels. The 2020 target however is not just pale, it is already old news. On top of whatever emerges from the G20, the international community will meet in Lima in December to discuss progress towards post 2020 emissions reductions targets. 

The big players, the US, EU, and China, are preparing to set those targets in the first quarter of 2015 as they move towards the major climate change summit in Paris in December. Copenhagen may have been the dismal failure that gutted Kevin Rudd, but it did agree to limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees over pre-industrial levels.
For Australia to meet its share of that based on our size, that means emitting no more than 8 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050 – the trouble is, on present emissions, we get to that by 2030. It is just more evidence of the parallel reality in which Australia is living. 

Abbott began this week talking about coal as "essential for the prosperity of Australia and … the prosperity of the world … for many decades to come". 

True enough, but he may end his first term talking about much stronger action on climate change whether he likes it or not after being "reverse Copenhagened" in Brisbane, Lima, and Paris.

You certainly can hope that he sees the expediency in dropping his denialism. After all, the true colours of this man are rather chameleon-like:

Turnbull wrote in these pages in December 2009: "Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it," he wrote.

"His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with "Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but..."

There's a man of high principle right there. A true champion of mutability and flip-flopping. There's hope for us all yet in the very eminent faults of his character.

A Memorable G-20 Is Looming

To Hell In A Handbasket

Things in global markets are looking pretty crook. The first real signs of trouble that the markets are beginning to unravel around the world, are over in Europe where deflation fears are riding right over the rhetoric of the ECB saying they're willing to do anything - including their own version of QE3.

RBS estimates that the inflation rate has already dropped to below 0.1pc in the eurozone if one-off tax rises and fees are stripped out, and this measure may turn negative in October. “Deflation is already knocking on the door. We think it could happen as soon as next month given the latest fall in food prices,” said Mr Roberts.

“We are reaching the end game in Europe. If they don’t launch real QE and start reflation by the end of the year or soon after, the consequences are too awful to contemplate,” he said.

Ruben Segura-Cayuela, from Bank of America, said low inflation has become “the biggest threat to the dynamics of public debt” in the eurozone, warning that debt ratios risk “spiraling up” even at levels of around 0.5pc.

France’s debt will keep rising from 93pc to 102pc of GDP by 2016, even in the best of circumstances. It will reach 117pc under a “lowflation scenario”, and 120pc if there is no further fiscal tightening. Spain’s debt will hit 113pc under similar circumstances. “What worries us is that we are not even stress testing for deflation,” he said.

It's all going south because of the threat of deflation; deflation of course means the investor class have to take a rap in the economic cycle, and that is something all the central banks want to avoid. Though it has to be said after all through the years of QE 1 through 3, we've had a nagging feeling that the economy is fundamentally broken. If you have to print that much money to fill all the liquidity holes and keep things going, one has to start questioning if the whole global economy itself is actually viable. It might be that we've been pumping litres of blood through a corpse in the hope that it springs back to life.

They may (and will) talk about a lot of things to do with deflation at the coming G-20. You would have to wonder if they will be talking about the current unfolding market mayhem as a correction or the beginning of the end.

Interest Rates At Zero or Near-Zero Makes For Bad Decisions

When we Gen-Xers were kids, we used to have saving accounts, and these things would bear interest. You would be taught the benefits of saving by having these accounts, but more importantly the banks were legitimately interested in investing in some way as to return interest to investors. After the 1989 market rout, Alan Greenspan cut rates, and they never went back up to where they use to be. Through his tenure, Greenspan gave to the markets what is known as the 'Greenspan Put', and cut interest rates every time investors ran into trouble. In one sense, the economy never really recovered from 1989 because US Fed's interest rates have never been as high as they were then. Similarly, Australian interest rates have never been as high at the time it hit 17% just before Paul Keating's "recession we had to have". Since then Australian interest rates have fallen to historic lows and have been there for 15months-and-counitng.

The upshot of all this is that it absolutely punishes savers. It drives them to chase dividend yields and take risks they would not like to take. Investing gives way to speculation, and worse still, it makes it cheaper for people to borrow money to play the markets. Whatever you might say about the risk appetite, when interest rates reach close to zero, it opens the door for people to make really risky bets.  Just how risky? It's said that there are 7 trillion dollars worth of derivatives that could blow up if the US Fed were to raise their interest rates half a per cent. And if such moneys should go up in smoke, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be a liquidity problem and markets would seize or crash or both seize and then crash.

It essentially means there is a sword of Damocles hanging over the US Federal Reserve to keep printing money and keep interest rates at zero. You can well imagine there's no such thing as 'prudential' in any of this. Worse still, it has effectively turned the market into one giant too-big-to-fail problem. And so we continue with the ZIRP (Zero-Interest-Rate-Policy) and Near-ZIRP around the world. It does make you wonder if the economy has flat-lined, if the only thing making the money markets go around is speculative bets made with borrowed money on near-zero interest. It seems completely non-sensical, but there you have it.

This article says we might even need QE indefinitely into the future. Ben Bernanke even said he would be surprised if QE ended during his lifetime. That's surprising on the surface, but not so surprising when you consider just how distorted markets have become.

There Is No Cavalry To The Rescue For Investors

The simple truth is, when you have America's Federal Reserve running Zero Interest Rate Policy AND Quantitative Easing (money-printing) for as long as it has, you sort of expect them to come to the rescue. That's been the moral hazard of printing money and giving it to Wall Street banks.

Except when the interest rate is at zero, and you've printed as much money as the Fed has, you have to say they've run out of bullets. So why are the markets jittering now? That would be because this is the month QE3 which started under Ben Bernanke's watch is going to finish its 'taper' under Janet Yellen. This is the end of the free punchbowl. The market jitters are a bit like an alcoholic's shaking hands when the grog supply is cut. It's amazing how the whole world's markets are jittering. That's a lot of investors who got drunk on the Fed's punch.

Anyway, with even the RBA in Australia at record lows in interest rates, there's really not much room for any of these Central Banks to move. I mean, what is the Bank of Japan going to do, when it's already doing 'Abenomics' and printing money like there's no tomorrow (...and maybe there isn't a tomorrow. Now there's a thought). And what has it done? Not enough to lift Japan out of its two decade long deflationary spiral. Maybe when the shit really hits the fan in Japan, they'll have jubilee and just cancel debts.

For the rest of us, we have a decades-long deflationary cycle looming up ahead. I wonder how they're going to address that at the G-20. Naah, they'll probably just throw Vlad and Tony in the ring to box and sell tickets.

Home Is Where The Bad Investment Decisions Live

It's like there's some chorus of bad news going on out there. Here's an interesting article about the property bubble in Australia.

No, blame high home prices on the global financial crisis five years ago. It gave us record low interest rates and a building slump even as the rate of population growth was increasing. 

So demand was fuelled by low interest rates and supply constrained by a lack of new building. 

If you believe the latest QBE annual Australian Housing Outlook, compiled by BIS Shrapnel, prices are going higher. 

I must admit each year it seems overly optimistic about property prices but that was so only once in the 13 years it's been published. Unfortunately that was a doozy because it got the direction wrong as well, and being in 2010 was just recent enough to survive my short-term memory. 

In Sydney, the market where the shortage of housing stock is the most chronic and investors are apparently running amok, it predicts prices will rise 9 per cent. Oops, that's over three years. In fact, the forecasts are for 7 per cent this financial year, slowing to 5 per cent the following year and then falling 3 per cent. 

Brisbane is the place to be. Its values are forecast to rise 17 per cent over three years with the Gold Coast not far behind with a projected 15 per cent.

That would be the standard explanation of how the current property bubble was allowed to remain in place by the RBA, back when the GFC began. This is the real trick. The RBA decided deflation was bad because it would hurt 'investors'. So they decided to run what amounted to a Price Keeping Operation for Australian property market by running a low interest rate policy. Naturally the real estate market and its rampant speculators stayed in the game - unpunished of their bad calls, rewarded with moral hazard removal. As a result, seven years later we have even more private debt, a lot of which is tied up in real estate, and the four major banks are even more Too-Big-To-Fail.

This is all very vexing because the real estate bubble is wreaking havoc on the rest of the economy. Australia is not alone with this problem. Canada, New Zealand and the UK all share this problem, and the property bubble in America certainly got a second wind in the last 24months. None of the  Central Banks have figured out a way of unwinding it without investors taking a real hit so they keep jawboning the future outlook of the property market down, but nobody seems to believe them; and they're right not to believe them because all these central banks are running ZIRP or near-ZIRP, the biggest enablers for the purposes of furthering speculative activity in property.

I do wonder if they'll be bringing up this problem at the G-20 as well.  This may well turn out to be the last G-20 meeting before the markets tank and global turmoil is unleashed in the markets again.

View From The Couch - 15/Oct/2014

The Storm

The banging rain against the window kept me up most of the night. It turns out it was once-in-a-hundred-years sort of weather event. I'm beyond perturbed in experiencing once-in-a-very-long-time weather events in my time. I've certainly witnessed more than my fair share. Living through them a couple of times makes you realise that the increasing frequencies of these things are telling us that the rare has become common and mundane. This much is according to the prognostications made about weather evens on the extension of climate change trends. We're now living to see those predictions borne out but of course global warming doesn't exist according to the Abbott 'Denialista' Government.

Not that one should expect to hear anything sensible out of the government. Facts and reality don't figure into these people's 'thinking'. But you knew that. You knew I'd write that. It's only been a year and it's already tired. Writing all that just feels hackneyed and tired because plenty of others have made these observations - and they all knew nothing would change. And it hasn't.

The evidence is more than in. We are well and truly into our climate dystopia.

People Complain Too Much

A little over a month ago, Apple released its new iPhone 6, and with it came an automated download wherein just like that we were in possession of the latest U2 album. Rather quickly it turned into the pinyata-du-jour as everybody with a mouthpiece decided to deride the album's appearance in people's iTunes. It was unseemly if you ask me, because it is ungracious to complain about a gift - which is essentially what Apple had done.

Today Bono apologised for the whole thing.

"Umm, I had this beautiful idea, [we] might have got carried away with ourselves, artists are prone to that kind of thing."
He could have stopped there, but Bono wanted to clear the air and explained that a little insecurity may have been behind the move. 

"[The reasons were a] drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn't be heard. There's a lot of noise out there. 

"I guess we got a bit noisy ourselves to get through it."

It's been a long time since U2 were the 'it' band. Of course at the moment they reached that pinnacle, they put out 'Rattle and Hum' which immediately showed they were not quite as savvy as the monolithic rock gods of the 70s before them. They seemed to arrive there by careful marketing rather than the sort of galvanising generational shout. The predominantly Gen-X audience stood up to be counted as U2 fans because there simply had to be a somebody like that and nothing else was going. Through the Live Aid years and Amnesty International concerts, rock became mainstream and super-tame. Even Johnny Rotten went back to being Johnny Lydon. In short, the once wonderful, amazing, historic, profound, meaningful sort of Rock music, decayed into commerce. What we loved so much sold itself out so hard to so many people it lost its power.

But U2 were there. Still earnest, meaningful and energetic. That had to mean something to somebody, way back then.

U2 did go on to achieve quite a bit more in subsequent forays but they stepped back from owning the mantle as rock's-biggest-something-or-other'. The artistic maturity obscured them and allowed them to drift out of the glare. It's a bit sad that quarter of a century later, that all that stature got squandered to the point where, when they gave people a free album the people complained.

You've Got A Platform, Have A Swing!

Freshly minted Man Booker prize winner, Robert Flanagan took his shot at the Federal Government.

"I'm very saddened because Australia has the most extraordinary environment and I don't understand why our government seems committed to destroying what we have that's unique in the world," Mr Flanagan told the BBC.
When asked about Prime Minister Tony Abbott's comment earlier this week that "coal is good for humanity" Mr Flanagan said: "To be frank, I'm ashamed to be Australian when you bring this up." 

Mr Flanagan was also critical of the Tasmanian government's recent decision to abolish a forestry peace deal between environmentalists and forestry companies that was four years in the making. 

The end of the deal meant 400,000 hectares of native forests that were to have been protected were instead reclassified for potential future logging. 

"I genuinely believe that people of Australia want to see these beautiful places, these sacred places, preserved, [but] the politics of the day is so foolishly going ahead and seeking to destroy them when there isn't even an economic base to it, when there is no market for the woodchips that would result from the destruction of these forests," Mr Flanagan said. 

"I think it's unnecessary and I think it's just politics being used to divide people that could otherwise be brought together on all that is best and most extraordinary in our country."

Such joy. The first time an Australian wins the prestigious prize in a very long time, he wins it with a novel about the Burma Railway in World War II. I can hear the whippings and beatings from where I sit. Well, I guess I won't be reading that book, lest I ruin a weekend.

Anyway, it's a still good thing that he's taking a hack at the Federal Government. He bloody well should take his hacks because you don't often get given platforms from whence you can launch meaningful attacks on bad government policy- and by that I mean any policy from a very bad government. 

It's hard to get any kind of meaningful platform. Just look at this miserable blog. So when you get one, just flail away, I say. Good on you Richard Flanagan, tell them what for!

Movie Doubles - 'The Monuments Men' & 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'

The Bill Murray & Bob Balaban Double

It's purely coincidental, but both these actors were in both these films andI happened to catch them back to back. Apart from that, it's going to be hard to talk about these two films because the only other thing they have in common is a valuation of art. Yes, there is a painting in TGBH that is crucial to the plot and in the film universe, considered invaluable. TMM of course is about rescuing art held captive by the retreating Nazis.

The Value Of Art

'Monuments Men' makes an obvious appeal to the arts by sending in a bunch of art-loving professional guys played by stars and character actors to save the day. The bad guys are a Hollywood staple, the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, who himself once aspired to being an artist. It's sort of funny because if the Nazis were holding a sexy girl sexy, it doesn't make it sexy to rescue that girl. And so as the Nazis hold the art hostage, it's not very artistic when the art gets rescued. This might just be a kind of limit for entertainment to depict value of art.

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' proceeds to show us a work of art in what is a kind of an art house movie, then tries to parody the sort of explanations people give for art in an ironic attempt to establish a sense - an ever so faint and slightly cliched - of value in art. The funny thing about this film is that if a bunch of people pointed at a girl and said she was sexy, it doesn't therefore make the girl sexy. In the same way, a bunch of people saying art is valuable, doesn't make art valuable, in of itself.

Okay, I'll give the sexy girl metaphor a rest. Enough with the gratuitous sexism.

But you see the point. Value of Art in both films is a signifier that purports to point at the signified and there's actually a blank page on the signified. 'The Monuments Men' does mention that Hitler had aspirations to being an artist as a young man and his failure to fulfil that dream led in a twisted, vicious way for him to transform himself into the greatest (as in highest billing) villain of the Twentieth Century. If you want to see a really great film about that story, you should check out 'Max' starring John Cusack and Noah Taylor. It digs very deeply into the tortured story of how Hitler might have come to choose politics over art. 'The Monuments Men' merely hints at the struggle, and yet it is that very struggle that is both the struggle of 'Mein Kampf' as well as everything Hitler unleashed which includes the art confiscation against which the story takes place. The failure to go deeply into that problem weakens the importance of this film, because Hitler himself clearly believed in the value of Art. It went without saying for Hitler.

Perhaps it is then appropriate that the film is more interested in a showing us Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at least in the film seems rather unconvinced of the value of art and so is rather unconvinced of the merits of the mission. If art needs rescuing form the vaguely evil (or taken as read to be evil) clutches of Hitler and his art-confiscating henchmen, then 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' posits that Art needs rescuing from a materially possessive, spiritually bankrupt bourgeoisie wealthy. It is a subtle Marxist message that gets lost in the rather tepid screwball comedy. Everybody understand that art is valuable - it's just they don't understand what it means. But then again, who does?

Egalitarianism And The Untenable Art

The characters in 'Monuments Men' are portrayed as everyday people with extraordinary interest and knowledge in art. However the film might couch it, such men are hardly everyday people. A lifetime career in the arts, even as a curator takes tremendous learning and perseverance. One doesn't endure in such jobs without being part of the intelligentsia and not the lumpenproletariat. As such, the airs of egalitarianism in 'The Monuments Men' is a totally imagined, typically American concoction.

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' revels in the social climbing exhibited by Ralph Fiennes' M. Gustave H.  The inheriting of a priceless work of art -featuring an apple as if it were the very forbidden fruit - is the pinnacle achievement of his lifetime of sucking up to and pleasuring the bourgeoisie. The class distinction plays implicitly in M. Gustave H.'s predicament of a man who inherits the most meaningful thing ahead of the family. The film places art with a meaning beyond its own importance as art, it is doubly the trophy of the moneyed set independent of its inherent value.

All this breeds a strange paranoia about art. That perhaps art is laughing back at the ordinary man on the street together with the bourgeoisie who use it as currency. In 'Monuments Men', FDR's scepticism comes precisely because he suspects art embodies the problems of class, that class struggle engenders conflicts that lead to the rise of Hitler. It is no mere coincidence at all that a man rejected by an art academy sets about threatening the very foundations of civilisation in Europe. And so FDR is right to ask Clooney's character Frank Stokes whether it is worth the effort. When the film shows the aged Stokes saying "Yes", thirty years after the fact, it is too pat an answer. The problem goes much deeper than the film describes.

Excellence gives rise to elitism. Elitism gives rise to social Darwinism and ultimately fascism. Unlikely as it seems, in the very brilliance of a DaVinci or a Michelangelo lies the intellectual seeds of the Italian Fascist state of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps we should all hope for bad art.