Double Disillusion And Other Follies

Could Be Good To Tip Over The Table

Some months ago when it became clear that even the Liberal Party had grown a little browned off with an Abbott Prime Ministership, I had this wicked idea that maybe Tony Abbott might forestall his own backbench rebellion and call for a Double Dissolution election, just to spite his disloyal minions and get a jump on the situation. Of course I was 1) joking 2) speculating wildly 3) guessing he was crazy enough to cut off his own balls topside his dick.

Turns out, Tony Abbott is thinking of a Double Dissolution as an option.

Tony Abbott and some of his cabinet ministers have canvassed the prospect of an early double dissolution election to be held in the next few months. 

A minister who was present at the discussion over a private dinner on Monday night said that the idea was talked about but "not under serious contemplation".

And the Prime Minister told Fairfax Media that "the government intends to serve a full term". 

But the mere fact that it was mooted has had an unsettling effect inside an anxious government. 

"The concern is that Tony might consider it to forestall any move against his leadership," said a minister. 

"Given his increasing desperation, there could be a rush to the Governor-General," with the implication that Mr Abbott would gamble government to preserve his position.
The scenario canvassed at dinner was that the government would bring down its second budget in May and then quickly call a double dissolution election, ostensibly to clear an obstructionist Senate.

... and thereby forestall another possible spill. From this we can gather that Tony Abbott is indeed 1) a joke 2) Wildly speculative and 3) crazy enough to cut off his own balls to spite his dick.

Like I say, this stuff writes itself.

Stop The Lies, Please

I've been following this GFC thing and its aftermath as closely as I can here and I have to say that Greece is the canary in the coal mine of the post-capitalist world. If Greece goes, then Portugal, Italy, Ireland Spain are not far behind and this is all because these countries rebound up in the Euro, owing too much to German and French banks. If Greece 'goes', so do the other PIIGS countries, the Euro is finished, and so are some of the biggest banks in Europe. Financial Market hell will be unleashed upon a long-suspecting (and suspect) world, resulting in "scenes from 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' but without the apes".

So far, the world has managed stave off this spectre. The neck of the question has been what it means for Greece to 'go', in the sense that it is enough to unravel the Euro. Greece has many reasons to quit the Euro, but the best reason of them all is so that it can issue its own currency, and devalue it against the Euro so that it can get some breathing space. Without this 'Grexit', Greece has no option but to listen to what the Germans tell them and this is no longer viable because what the Germans are telling them is wrecking the Greek economy and society.

The three big points to remember about Greece is that it is a member the Euro and therefore cannot set its own currency policy; it is a member of the Euro in such a way that it has no control over the greater economic policy and conditions; and its government is in debt to the tune of 164% of its GDP.

It is then, mighty insulting when the Prime Minister of Australia says that Australia was somehow a likely candidate in becoming like Greece.

"Under the former Labor government we were heading to a Greek-style economic future," the Prime Minister told 2SM host Grant Goldman. The Greek economy has been notorious in recent years for high levels of spending and debt, culminating in the Greek government-debt crisis.

I mean, how? How on Earth is Australia going to get remotely close to where Greece now finds itself? It's like saying I am in danger of driving off The Gap in my Range Rover wearing a Chelsea FC jersey when all I own is a Mazda 2 and I commute to the South from the Inner West, and I hate Football. I mean, yeah, I might, but a lot of ducks would have to line up before that happened.

To be like Greece, Australia would have to give up its own RBA to a body like the European Central Bank (doubtful and unlikely), give up its own currency and start trading with a shared currency with much larger economic bodies (possible but not any time soon), and then proceed to rack up debt in that shared currency to 4 times the debt we currently have - and that's an overly generous estimate. If you look at the OECD chart, it thinks the Greek debt is 147% of GDP while the Australian  government debt is 11% of GDP, making the different more like 14 times than 4. Our economy - with all its faults and problems - is as close to Greece's economy as Bondi Beach is to the Acropolis.

In short, the Prime Minister is lying.
He's not cherry picking stats or fudging numbers approximating or reducing arguments to talking points, or playing semantics, no. No benefit of the doubt goes to this one, he's lying to scare the ignorant, and scare them into not voting ALP, and thereby hope to pickup some loose votes from the stupid and ignorant. It truly is pathetic.

Thus I say bring on the Double Dissolution to end the Double Disillusion of this mendacious miscreant government. We've really had enough of this stupidity. Really, we have.

UPDATE: More Folly - Pyne Wants To Fine Universities

After I put this entry out, it turns out Christopher Pyne has been working on a diabolical plan whereby universities are punished if the graduates don't pay up with their student debt.

Universities churning out graduates who do not repay their student debts would face financial penalties under a proposal by Education Minister Christopher Pyne aimed at securing Senate support for fee deregulation. 

Despite a 34-30 Senate defeat on Tuesday, Mr Pyne vowed to reintroduce legislation this year to allow universities to set their own fees.
"We will not give up on ensuring that Australia has the higher education system it needs - the best in the world," he said. "Great reform takes time." 

Universities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson warned that without increased revenues university vice-chancellors would consider increasing class sizes, shedding staff, closing campuses and discontinuing some courses.

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Mr Pyne proposes "a mechanism to make a proportion of each higher education provider's direct grant funding contingent on its performance against a key set of indicators" - including the debt not expected to be repaid (DNER) by their graduates.
"We are confident that the higher education sector will be responsive both to transparency of data in this area but also to a relatively modest amount of their annual grant funding being at risk in relation to their DNER performance," he said.
The government aims to have proposals ready for discussion by July. They would take into account repayment differences based on gender and rural and regional factors.

Graduates do not repay their debts if they are earning under $56,000, exit the workforce or move overseas.

The value of student debts not expected to be repaid is forecast to grow to $12 billion by 2017-18 - 23 per cent of all outstanding debt.

Which is all very plant-your-face-in-your-palms crazy. Education is an investment a society makes in its own people. There's just no two ways about it. You only have to look at the terrible third world nations where governments opt not to make these investments and how the lack of education perpetuates poverty and low economic growth. It's bizarre and ideological buffoonery for this government to cary on as if the money invested into education is somehow a terrible cost and impost on government. With that kind of illogic, nobody would do anything to get educated - which is clearly not what these conservative politicians have done for themselves. So this attempt to narrow the doorway to tertiary education is doubly pernicious as it contains within it a hostile streak that can only be described as class warfare, as well as this moronic obsession to off-load government investment into education.

If money spent on education really wasn't an investment but some kind of loss-leading loan, then surely students would have the option of bankrupting themselves out of this debt - a surely as some of the wealthy do in this country. The fact that they don't allow this to happen means the government agrees that the money spent on educating and training people is an investment from which the government hopes to benefit through higher earnings leading to higher taxes upon that individual.

If there ever were self-defeating, contradictory position, it would have to be the conservative impulse to cut taxes and sell off government assets that earn revenue and complain when government is always in deficit. Ignore for the moment the perennial problem of people carrying on like the national budget is some kind of private household ledger that needs balancing, minutely on a constant time scale.

Basically, Christopher Pyne wants to encumber students with student debt in such a way as to cut government investment in education, cut government support for people getting education, and somehow magically produce growth out of a population that either has too much student-debt to do any consumption, or produce a population that is so averse to getting an education thanks to the threat of the student debt they cannot produce the economic growth the government seeks. He's socialising the debt, but he's doing the debt-loading as a pre-condition of adulthood. And he thinks this is somehow a fantastic idea.

Its so stupid. But this stupid thing is exactly what these idiots want to implement. It's not even an issue of fairness (which it also is, but I'm putting it aside for a moment), but an issue of basic logic. It's like these people can't think through the ramification of their own stupid ideas.
This is what happens when you put an ideological idiot in charge of higher education.