2015/05/26

News That's Fit To Punt- 26/May/2015

The Future's So Dim I Need Those New LED Flashlights

We're spending less on science and research in this country. This astonishing fact drew this article from the SMH:

"Having this reliance on the bottom end of the economy, like small businesses, is a short-term fix," said Andrew Hughes, a lecturer at the college of business and economics at Australian National University. "Cutting back on research is insanity."
Every country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has a plan to grow its scientific enterprise and aid its translation into technology, innovation and development, bar Australia, Chief Scientist Ian Chubb said.
"For 20 years, we have presided over declining levels of participation in science and mathematics" while the country assured itself that students will be fine with calculators, Chubb wrote this month in an article on his website. "I think about the sort of jobs a child in school today might want to do in 10, 20, 50 years. And I wonder, which of those jobs will not require an understanding of science?"
Australian school students underperform in science and mathematics tests compared with every other high-income economy in Asia apart from New Zealand, according to a report issued this month by the 34-nation OECD.
"We're already losing our power in the brains market because we're up against China, India, Japan and South Korea who spend so much more on research and development," Hughes said. "We need to think long-term."
Industry and Science Minister Ian Macfarlane in March said the country ranked 81st out of 143 in a global innovation efficiency measure, putting it "close to average in turning ideas to our advantage". The government is spending about $9 billion a year on science in what is "a conservative financial environment", he said.
And so we have it. Even our Science Minister can't do maths. 81st out of 143 nations is not what most people adept at mathematics would call "close to average". Mediocre, and sub-optimal are terms much closer to the mark that spring to mind.

Once upon a time, this was the fourth nation to launch an object into space. Think about that. USSR, USA, UK, then Australia. We were good at science and technology. Heck, we were formidable! And now, we're going to cut back even more than before.
Yet the nation now ranks in the bottom seven countries based on government spending on research and development as a proportion of gross domestic product, the latest OECD scoreboard shows. 
Australia isn't alone in trying to bolster lower-skilled careers as economies look to shore up manufacturing and fill an increasing number of service-oriented jobs. Both Singapore and South Korea have urged students to consider skipping university. 
Singapore, though, committed to increasing its R&D spending by 20 per cent in 2011-15 over the previous five years, while South Korea spent the second-highest proportion of gross domestic product on research among OECD countries in 2013, behind Israel.
The boost for baristas is partly a result of successive governments' failures during the decade-long mining boom to prevent a hollowing out of the manufacturing sector as the currency strengthened and investment flowed to the mines. General Motors, Ford and Toyota plan to quit manufacturing in the country within two years, while Alcoa last year closed an aluminium smelter and two mills. 
Belinda Robinson, chief executive of Universities Australia, said the research cuts announced by Treasurer Joe Hockey in his budget this month will make matters worse.
"Against the backdrop of low commodity prices and the downturn in traditional industries, a prudent approach to stimulating economic renewal is to invest in, not cut, wealth-generating activities like higher education, research and innovation," she said.
Good grief. The worst aspects of conservative thought is that it fears change so much, it thinks nothing of slowing down progress, shutting down developments that might change the status quo (they like to call this 'the social fabric' - it's bullshit). It's all too easy for these idiots to cut science because not only do they not understand it - as evinced by the number who deny climate change - they fear it.

Evidence Our Government Is Even Worse Than We Thought

Pleiades tells me all the time, "you know, these people are completely fucked."
I'm inclined to believe it.
Six members of the Abbott cabinet have risen up against an extraordinary proposal to give a minister the power to strip an Australian of their sole citizenship. 
The idea, proposed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton with the support of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, divided a meeting of the cabinet on Monday night. 
The hour-long debate was described by participants as tense and sometimes heated.
The cabinet members who spoke against the proposal were Defence Minister Kevin Andrews, Foreign Affairs Minister and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop, Attorney-General George Brandis, Agriculture Minister and deputy Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, Education Minister Christopher Pyne and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, according to people present in the room. 
The same plan had divided the cabinet's national security committee.
The idea is that even an Australian-born citizen, without any other citizenship, could be stripped of Australian citizenship at the discretion of the immigration minister alone, without a suspect being charged or facing a court. 
Under the proposal, the only protection against an Australian being rendered stateless is that they must also be eligible to apply for citizenship of another country, even if they do not actually hold that second citizenship. 
Ms Bishop posed to the cabinet meeting this question: if Australia were to strip one of its people of citizenship on suspicion of terrorism, would another country be likely to approve that person's application to become a citizen?
The core objection was that an Australian effectively can be rendered stateless, losing fundamental rights and in violation of international law, without due process.
Bloody hell.
They made laws that joining a terror organisation abroad is against the law. Presumably if somebody returns from ISIS / ISIL /Daesh, they will be arrested and hauled in front of a magistrate. But they hate these people so much they want a special law to render them stateless. The mind boggles at this sensibility, and the fact that it was discussed like it's some kind of legitmiate option.

The lunar right is fixated on this notion of "un-Australian" acts, and keep coming up with novel ways to punish the un-Australian-but-still-Australian-by-citizenship citizen. Rendering people stateless and dumping them on other nations was one of the Howard government's favourite tricks, but it's plain ridiculous. The fact that ten years on, Tony Abbott wants to bring back this kind of idiocy speaks volumes about just what a fuckhead he really is.

Quick Shots - 26/May/2015

'Horrible Bosses 2'

Oh dear. It's one of those films where you don't think the first film warranted a sequel, but here it is. Jason Bateman steadfastly plays the straight man while his cohorts get to play the dumbest of the dumb. It's comedy, I know, but sometimes you wonder if you have to have characters short of most of the deck to make comedy work. It's about as subtle as a glow-in-the-dark dildo.

Very notable thing: Chris Pine plays a great psychopath. He's got a fantastic energy to him and you can sort of see why he got the Captain Kirk job. I don't know if he's doing a good job with Kirk, but in this film, you get to see a lot of verve and style.

The not so good thing: Jennifer Aniston is short on the acting chops and therefore even the limit believability to sustain a character. She was like this in the first film too, but honestly, she's actually gone backwards as an actor.

Is it funny? Kind of.
Is it interesting? Not really.

'Dumb And Dumber To'

As described in the title, but with less irony. It does have some guffaws and chuckles. I can see why critics panned it, but they paned the original too and look what a cult film that became. Nothing is impossible - this thing could turn out to be yet another cult classic. Jeff Daniels is a versatile actor doing 'The Newsroom' AND 'Dumb and Dumber' movies and being convincing in both. Jim Carrey is surprisingly unchanging, although the mask is slipping in this one. It's harder to believe his character is as dumb as advertised.

Very notable thing: Kathleen Turner makes an appearance as an aged, old flame. You can barely tell it's her, but it's actually good to see her on screen again.

The not so good thing: the original ended with a killer setup and pay-off gag. The gag that ends the film in this one isn't anywhere near as good.

Is it funny? Yes, sort of, in parts.
is it interesting? Yes, it shows a great deal of anxiety about paternity which was sort of surprising as well as profound. Certainly surprising that a dumb & Dumber sequel wanted to use this as the plot spine.

'Inside Llewyn Davis'

A rather bleak and patronising look at a guy who is simply not going to make it as an artist in his chosen field. It must be all laughs for the Coen brothers making this, but this one is mean. And by mean, it's pretty clear from the early scenes of the film that there's no point barracking for the main character. So the rest of it is just us watching him flail around miserably.

Very notable thing: It is melancholy and quaint, and the feel of 1961 captured in this film is so evocative it makes you want to cry. You can just imagine this guy trudging around New York, just a few blocks down from Sterling Cooper. Excellent production design and cinematography.
Also, the cats are great value in this film.

The not so good thing: the whole film comes across as a prelude to a suicide. Being a failed musician, it's really hard to laugh at the guy when in fact I am that guy. I guess comedy hurts more when you're the butt of the joke. Oh well, 'Barton Fink' was tough too.

Is it funny? Sort of. More like chuckles than guffaws.
Is it interesting? Very.


2015/05/25

Art For Money's Sake

Are The Arts Actually Important?

I railed a bit about state-sponsored art in the previous entry and realised I have to go back and explain a few things, so it's worth considering a few things about the arts. It's hard to know about arrangements in the ancient world and the dark ages but what we do know, we do so because of the arts and humanities. People wrote stuff down, and drew and painted depictions, sometimes sculpted them  beautifully. We know about some of the most important historic figures in the ancient world through people doing what we might perceive to be jobs, getting paid to do arts & humanities. So much of what we've pieced together of the ancient world comes to us via the arts & humanities.

In fact, it is so drastic that you could argue any civilisation that doesn't produce or leave behind gobs and gobs of this stuff is doomed to obscurity, deserving or not. Even if it looks like crap to us right now, all of this stuff in the arts and humanities matters. The only thing that is going to allow your name to echo through history is to write it down. The only meaningful communication you are going to make about the time you find yourself living with future generations, is to capture it in the arts. Photograph it, film it. draw it, sculpt it, record it, write it, shape it. And - unfortunately - all of this costs time and money, but every society would find it incumbent upon them to do this stuff we know as arts & humanities.

The demonstrable flip-side to this is that in his time as CEO of BHP Marius Kloppers directly invested in our artists so little, that in a thousand years time, nobody is going to remember his contribution to our society as a captain of industry (not that he's likely to care). He will not be a Theo Van Gogh. He will not be Francesco del Giocondo, the man who commissioned Leonardo DaVinci to paint the Mona Lisa. We do know one Richard Burbage because he was instrumental in building the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan England. That's where Shakespeare played. We know so much of Lorenzo Medici and the Medici family because they sponsored so much in Florence. But any of these munchkins fronting up as Board directors for public accompanies in this country raking in millions, are chumps in history, exactly because none of them put their own names and reputations in to the arts & humanities. And I'm afraid corporate sponsorship isn't the same thing.

One of the coolest thing you can do in Sydney town if you make it big, is to go donate chunk of change to the MCA and keep it going. They put your name up there in the eastern foyer. Once upon a time I told a chef this idea, and since then he's become very wealthy but he's also done exactly that - donated money to put his name there.

But in most part, Sydney is a city of philistines and haters.

The Banality Of The Audience


If you go to the Medici palace in Florence, there's a little prayer room upstair where the Medicis spent time in quiet contemplation. It would have been mightily distracting because there is a fantastic fresco painting on 3 sides, 'The Procession of the Magi'. As a work of art, it is breathtaking and defies easy description. Yet, for a great part of history since 1459 when it was painted, only the Medici family and their inner sanctum would have been privy to see this thing. Today, you just go pay your entrance fee and walk right up and look, but for most of its history, this treasure belonged to one family. It reflects - in most part - the power and glory that was Florence under the rule of the Medicis.

It is privately sponsored art by somebody in power of the state, so in a broader sense it is state sponsored art. The rise of the bourgeoisie essentially powered the rise of the arts as something valuable; and when we say valuable, we don't necessarily have to narrow it down to that which is monetisable. After all, the glory of the 'Procession of the Magi' is not defined by its power to earn a buck.

Throughout the second half of the last millennium, the bourgeoisie have picked and discarded many forms of arts and entertainment as their chosen vesicle for glory. Thus we have high watermarks in the arts with names we can bandy about; whether that may be Shakespeare, or Picasso, they represent various inflection points in turns of Bourgeois tastes. Amongst the procession include things like theatre, orchestral music, ballet and opera, painting and sculpture. At each turn there were bourgeois captains of industry that championed the cause of these things, right up to the 20th Century when Industrialisation changed the bourgeoisie itself into mass consumers.

What becomes clear is that regardless of whether it is the state or private individuals sponsoring an art form or venture, what seems bloody apparent is the need to appease the banal tastes of the audience. If indeed Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, certainly the audience for Wagner were most probably banal. If evil is banal, then banality is probably evil, although it is hard figuring which is the subset of the other. Can there be more evil than banality? Seems like there is much more banality than evil in the world.

If Van Gogh could not find a market for his work in his lifetime, then yes, the bourgeoisie buying art in the late 19th Century were banal. If you go watch the Opera or Ballet and take a look around at the audience, it is clear that the vast majority of the audience can be described as banal. Banality is everywhere consuming the arts & humanities. If you want to know who the phoneys that Holden Caulfield was so unhappy about in 'The Catcher in the Rye' were and are, they're the chattering classes with their support for the arts that they want to reflect upon them as people of worth in this bourgeois society. Therefore - inevitably and undoubtedly - the most banal (and therefore evil) of them all in Australia is likely George Brandis and his $104 million purse for artists of his choice.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.
It's a rare bit of work that rises above the banality of its audience. It is a rare artist who can produce more than one thing that rises above that banality. In most instances an art form is a mirror of the people supporting it, and in most instance of history, one is struck by the ever-growing banality of audiences. This side of 1970, with the complete breakdown of the classical hierarchy, we're left with a world where anything goes as long as there is money. Or, to quote 'This is Spinal Tap' wherein it is observed, "Money talks and bullshit walks". There's a lot of money out there for a lot of bullshit.

It's a curious thing how this bullshit transmogrifies around politics. George Brandis presumably likes classically sanctioned arts much more than the nebulous explosion of modern and contemporary art music, theatre, dantean whatever else. This in turn manifests the opposite call saying the traditional arts are somehow boring and over-serviced. But does one genuinely reject an art form for the audience it gets? Do we really reject Wagner as an artist for his Nazi fans? Do we really reject punk rock because of the punks? Do we reject Renaissance art because of those despots and tyrants who commissioned them? Do we reject pop art for its snide consumerist fanbase? Do we really reject the Australian Opera because George Brandis and people of his socio-economic ilk like it (or at least dutifully pretend to like to keep up their facade)? Are we willing to tread the lines that were once trodden by the likes of Hitler and Stalin? Do we reject any art for the banality of its audience?

Yes, it's a rhetorical question. Of course we do not; and so we have to cop the George-Brandis-badged bullshit on the chin. Yes, it's banal - the worst kind of banality it is too - but banality itself isn't evil enough to condemn. In the mean time, the state, which is of the banal for the banal, by the banal, offers up plenty of opportunities to experience the arts.

A Further Note About State Sponsored Art

Everybody laughs at Ken Done. I do too, but I admit it's a reflexive snobbery, and most likely unfair. I find it too pat when an industrial graphic designer sort of cobbles together faux-fauvist, infantile-looking paintings and proclaims himself an artist. It gets worse when he reproduces his art as teeshirts, tea towels, and coasters and sells them to unsuspecting tourists. It's enough to bring out all the cultural prejudices. The name Ken Done was enough to induce cultural cringe back in the 1980s. Ken Done the artist however has two things going for him that we must accept. He managed to sell his art regardless of the perceived quality or the reputation bestowed upon him. The state didn't pay for him to create this stuff; he just went ahead and did it.

The old lesson I learnt from my boss at Dentsu Australia was that you could measure the maturity of any industry in any country by the proportion of public money invested in the industry. By this measure, the arts in Australia might be very underdeveloped, given how much public money goes into the arts from the government. All those artists complaining about funds being cut might consider Ken Done's career a bit closer. It ain't pretty but you're really setting out to live on your talents, the least you could do is market it properly. There's simply got to be a way. And if you think Ken Done's art is pretty crappy and yours is better, then really you should do much better than Ken Done in the market place.

2015/05/23

Bread & Circuses Part 2

So There Was A Protest Yesterday...

Make of this what you will.
Dancers were out in force in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday as part of Australia-wide protests against more than $100m in cuts to the country's top arts funding body, the Australia Council. Around 100 artists and members of the arts industry turned up to perform the so-called 'dance action'. Arts minister George Brandis attracted criticism for his decision to cut funding in the May budget.
I learnt of this protest action late last night at a dinner, marking the launch of Vivid Sydney 2015, which is ironic because Vivid Sydney - as far as anybody can tell - is a kind of state-sponsored arts festival and if people got money from the Australia Council to do artistic things, that too is a State-spomsored art, as much as any arts body person who receives the money from George Brandis' office directly. It's all a kind of propaganda more than proper art, and by proper, I mean art that finds both creation and audience from the artist's own practice and application. Without a doubt it goes to what I wrote about in my recent entry, about bread and circuses.

As somebody whose arts repertoire is rock music and film and writing, it's really quite hard to relate to the artists who need government monies to continue their craft. If you are a ballet dancer or a fine Shakespearean actor, chances are you need to work with some kind of body that gets this state-sponsorship. Those people are working in an area of the arts where the market is no guarantee to sustain you, and in turn, there are heavy cultural reasons to sustain these arts. This is why we have the  theatre companies and dance companies we have - good or not-so-good as they may be. I myself am not a great fan of these big old arts companies but it is clear that we need an active pool of practitioners to sustain the entire arts in general.

That being said, if you play rock music like I do, you fund yourself, and your entire adventures are risks you bear by yourself. Nobody I know ever got an arts grant from the Australia Council to record their rock album; and that's probably the way it should be. As a film maker in Australia, the majority of my production experience has been outside the funding structure. Any time I have approached bodies it has been painful, humiliating, insulting and irrelevant so I can't say I'm a big fan of the government sponsorship model of cinema any more. As for writing, well, here you are reading what I do in my spare hours and there's no government money involved here. I was working on a novel for a while but it's not like I was getting government sponsorship money at any time while I did so. I know writers who do, but it's just different when you take the government's money.

You get the picture. I'm a pretty committed arts practitioner but I have the strong (but odd) 'luxury' of not having to answer to a government body. The exchange for this luxury is that my life is nothing like my friends who are not in the arts. My friends who are in the arts are similarly afflicted with very non-standard living arrangements and family arrangements. It's not a light exchange - it's heavy, man. You do arts in Australia and you can count out the normal arrangements for family unless you're born rich.

Here's an article in the SMH that describes things bit better.
Arts leaders have stepped up their campaign against the federal government's cuts to the Australia Council in a national day of protest that included a "mass dance action" to demonstrate their displeasure. 
About 300 people turned out in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday despite wet conditions and performed the "hoofer dance" from a clip by Melbourne band Fondue Set. 
Speakers echoed Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's comments that the transfer of $105 million from the Australia Council to the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts, controlled by the arts ministry, was a politicised power grab by Arts Minister George Brandis.
Hmmm. 300 people. Like Spartans of Art at the Thermopylae for government funding, dancing in protest.

I was lambasted at the dinner table for not being there at the protest, by an artist who did go to the protest. I told him, for a start I didn't even know it was happening, and secondly I was at work at that time. I got further lambasted for my self-interest but really, who is an artist angry about how government funds the arts to judge somebody who actually has to work for a living in the arts industry, and doesn't have the liberty to go protesting at the drop of a hat?

As I wrote a few days ago, it's not like I'm not sympathetic, but we're talking about entire programs of funding the arts from the government. Colour me somewhat unimpressed. I do understand the problem for people who do rely on the government and may be somewhat institutionalised in their need for the government to dispense its funding in the way it has established for over 45years. George Brandis is cutting off the teat from which they suckle. That would be rough.

The complaint is that George Brandis has taken 104 million dollars out of Australia Council and is going to give it to his favourite artists directly on the basis of ideological alignment. Yes, it totally sucks and is perfectly in line with what the Nazi government did in the 1930s and I say that without any equivocation or exaggeration. It is highly suspect, if not downright rotten. With that part of it, I certainly agree. George Brandis is essentially behaving like Dr. Goebbels but without the Jew-Killing program. I get it.

"So why weren't you there at the protest?" I was asked. "Self-interest kept you away!" the artist thundered.

Partly because that $104 million will still go to some person(s) in the arts. Just not the regular Australia Council roster recipients. It's not like it got completely taken away from the arts and given to constructing a football stadium or something of the ilk. It's still, presumably going to some other parts of the arts industry who are presumably not so stridently pro-ALP and anti-Coalition. It sucks that it's going to some reactionary, but it's still going to the arts - just not to the classic trendy Left crowd. Is this really as big a protest-worthy-thing as say, asylum seekers on boats being sent to Manus Island?

I still had to explain my Jean-Paul Sartre reasoning from 'Age of Reason' as to why the main character Mathieu does not go fight in Spain during the Spanish civil war. That he would only fight if the war was at his doorstep. Which earned me the charge of "a kind of xenophobia for other forms of arts". But it's unfortunately true. If you're me, it's really hard to sit there and try to relate to the plight of, oh I don't know, something like the Bangarra Dance company when I work for an arts company that worked its way up from the ground up without any direct or indirect government fund injection; or the plight of an artist who needs government funding to pay for materials when I've bought all my gear to do my recordings; or to some writer who needs funding to go buy time to write stuff when all you really need is pen, paper and the commitment to write.

These 300 artists protesting, as self-important as they may be, are so distant to my own experience of being an arts practitioner that they may as well be from ancient Greece. In the broadest strokes, if you were getting money for your work before from the state, and now you are not, the general term for that condition is, you got fired. The reason you get fired at most workplaces is if your work is not good enough. You can protest your layoff all you like and you do get my sympathy as a fellow practitioner, but it does make me wonder if your work is any good at all.

As you can imagine that conversation didn't go down well with the artist at all.


2015/05/20

Bread & Circuses

What Does The Future Of 'Work' Look Like?

I don't know if anybody's really pointed out the problem with the drive for productivity in this country, but basically, the increase in productivity is subtracting jobs faster, the more efficient we become. It's pretty apparent when you watch something like 'Mad Men' and the pool of secretaries they used to have that got replaced by computers, that simple jobs are going to be swept away by technology at an ever increasing rate.

Somebody did some sums over in America and it turns out that the man-hours worked in 1998 and 2013 were essentially the same, but produced so much more GDP. The problem was that there were 40 million more people in the pool of workers.:
Martin Ford explained, "In 1998, workers in the US business sector put in a total of 194 billion hours of labor. A decade and a half later, in 2013, the value of the goods and services produced by American businesses had grown by about $3.5 trillion after adjusting for inflation - a 42 percent increase in output. The total amount of human labor required to accomplish that was...194 billion hours. Shawn Sprague, the BLS economist who prepared the report, noted that 'this means that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year-period, despite the fact that the US population gained over 40 million people during that time, and despite the fact that there were over thousands of new businesses established during that time.'"
That brown line plateau on the right is essentially the 21st century where productivity keeps growing while private employment has plateau-ed in America. When you consider that America used to be a manufacturing powerhouse but shipped all of its menial manufacturing jobs overseas to China, you get the picture that there really isn't enough work to go around already, and there's going be even less. Which explains the serious anger in some underprivileged communities over in America.

Naturally, this leads us to wonder what the future looks like for us. For a long time it's been apparent that there is a growing gap in the owners capital and workers in the classic Marxist sense. Thomas Piketty's argument essentially is that the post war period was the historic anomaly, and that capitalism always trends towards massive inequality opening up. Based the first 15years of this decade, it seems clear we're seeing that not only will there be inequality, there won't be the work to go around. Which is essentially how the serfs came to be in Russia. If you subdivided work into tiny components to the point that each component alone cannot support an individual, you end up with what the serfs in Tsarist Russia had.

Which is alarming. Because the future of work, after more and more machines take over, is for us to do ever more menial things for less money. Big business might bang on about productivity, but the real picture is that big business is trying to turf people out of jobs. Once out of jobs, people go on welfare; but the same big businesses that turfed people out will also lobby governments to cut spending, which is going to disenfranchise these people more. If this doesn't look like a class war, I don't know what does.

In that context, I present to you this next bit:

Work For Nothing Means Slavery, No?

Tony Abbott's government wants to let businesses audition unemployed people. If they like them, they can hire them; if not, they can let them go.
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has come under fire for suggesting employers “try before they buy” when hiring long-term unemployed people. 
Abbott made the comments during an address to the Queensland Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday morning, where he was highlighting a new initiative which allowed people who have been unemployed for more than six months to work for a private enterprise for a month before losing the dole benefits. 
“That person can do up to four weeks of work experience with your business, with a private sector business, without losing unemployment benefits so it gives you a chance to have a kind of try-before-you-buy look at unemployed people,” Abbott said. 
“What we have permitted for the first time in this budget is, if you like, real work for the dole. Work in a business for the dole,” he said.
As far as I can see, it costs the businesses nothing to hire and fire these people. One of the dodgiest and most suspect ideations to do with these work-for-the-dole schemes is that the government is paying a person something so the person should go do work in exchange for that money.

The last time I looked, the labour one undertakes in exchange for money is called 'work' and in fact if the government is calling it work-for-the-dole, then it should pay the person the proper market rate for the work being done. Equally, if a business is in need of such a person to come in and do "real work"(their words not mine), then they should bloody well pay them properly for the work performed instead of leeching off the government for free labour. Pay the person for the work they did. That's how capitalism is supposed to - pardon the pun - work.

Additionally, if a work-for-the-dole person goes and does this work for gratis, it's undercutting a person who genuinely is able to do the work, because that latter person cannot undercut the former who is working for no cost to the company. It might be fun to imagine the biggest dole-bludging teen and forcing them to clean toilets, but really, that company should be paying a professional, their professional rates. Especially when you consider things like WorkCover and workplace health and safety laws which are now Federal, not to mention liability and indemnity insurances. Who is covering this imaginary teenager cleaning toilets? The government? The company using them?

I get it that there's always mileage in picking on the next Paxton kids and demonising the unemployed but this is really pernicious. In a broader picture, what's really worrying is that the leadership of this country has no fucking idea, not a scintilla of a clue as to the problems of a future economy where there might not be enough work; and all they've got to show us is this kind of political stunt. I would think the truth is that the Coalition is very happy to cry 'class warfare' while actually engaging in it with gusto.

So What's Growing?

Would you believe restaurants, and events are growing very fast? I can tell you form an insider's point of view that food and wine fairs have grown more elaborate with larger budgets in the last decade, while governments have started spending serious money in events to boost tourism.

If you want to understand this, it's easier to translate "restaurants and events" into "bread-&-circuses". Especially considering how much government spending on this area has grown, there is a good reason to look at this growth s some kind of attempt to reflate the arts sector, without the highbrow discussions that would plague things like the Australia Council or Screen Australia or whatever the state-based organ for the arts now calls itself.

It's nice to have landed on my feet for once and watched the sector grow in the last decade or so. I also get front row seats to the fact that the government is running out of ideas as to how to make itself useful so it's decided show bit of leg and spend bigger money on events. But you know the best circuses in Ancient Rome were when Rome was closest to its demise. It really doesn't bode well for our government that they have to go with bread-&-circuses.

2015/05/17

Mötley Crüe (& Alice Cooper) - Sydney 16/May/2015

The Times They Are A Ending

Mötley Crüe are on their farewell tour around the globe.The calculus is that they'll never play together again, and beyond that, they'll ride off into the sunset with one last cash grab. They're hoping never to go to this well again, and are trying to drink it all dry before they go out. to paraphrase TS Eliot, we don't go out with a bang, we go out with a 24month global farewell tour screaming "I'm really going to miss you guys!" in the microphone in-between playing your greatest hits.

I was lucky enough to get an invite to the corporate box so not only did I not pay, I got fed very well. I'm not entirely sure if this is meant to be the way Rock music goes - it was almost an un-Rock sort of experience having canapés before Alice Cooper came on. 

What's Good About It

The amazing light show and pyrotechnics that accompany the band on stage, are amazing. The staging is extraordinary. It's somewhat like a circus - and you got Alice Cooper as the support act to boot. It's one big phantasmagorical hair metal festival that takes you back to the bits of the 1980s you didn't really enjoy the first time. (It helps to have the distance of time and the protection of the above-mentioned corporate box.)

The lighting is amazing. It has 50 moving lights, a massive structure with LED fittings, there are 10 flame-throwing things as well as umpteen pyrotechnical devices. The design of the lighting array is breathtaking and always in sync with the music. It looks the way MTV made you believe all concerts looked, back in the 80s. 

The band is tight; very well rehearsed and don't miss their cues at all. The whole enterprise has a very mechanically correct feel, even to the point of making Alice Cooper's act look a little quaint. There's a high energy level that never really lets up and goes right to the end with it. It's a really good show. 

What's Bad About It

They put across what they have very well, but what they actually have is 80's hair metal. It's been a long time since I was living the musical universe where this stuff was the backbone the music industry, but basically their material is as simple as any old dumb rock band of that era. There's a lot of sound and fury but there's very little actual musical content to hang your hat upon. It's sort of amazing that music this simple in conception could have rung up so much sales. 

Never has so little been stretched out to such magnificent folly-like dimension. But then again this was unabashedly showbiz and hardly an attempt at art. If you' looking for artistic merit, you'd be very wrong to look for it at a Mötley Crüe concert. So, back to what's good about it - it was actually a good show. 

What's Interesting About It

Oh the irony of it all, really. 

There I am sitting in a corporate box watching this corporate entertainment. It was entirely the opposite experience to seeing the Crimson ProjeKCt last year. With that one, I was up front by the stage listening to musicians craft the most adventurous music in the total dark of the Hi-Fi Bar. This was me sitting up on the third deck looking down at the throbbing throng crowding the stage to hear this unadventurous music packaged with the most amazing light and fireworks show. 

To add ironic insult to injury, they covered 'Anarchy in the UK' by the Sex Pistols, which was most likely the worst act of appropriation I've ever seen. Not only were they phoneys, they made us the audience equally phoney and even complicit in this orgy of phoniness. It was like a semiotic train wreck; a cum-shot of phoniness splattering across our faces. Yes, horrible metaphor, but it's still accurate.

I mean, really, what would Johnny Rotten of '77 make of something so cynical, exploitative, and unedifying as Mötley Crüe? 'Anarchy in the UK' sung by LA native corporate rockers in 2015? It's banality stands as the mirror image of Sid Vicious covering 'My Way'. Oddly enough the band walks off to Frank Sinatra's rendition of 'My Way' at the end of the night. 

Alice Cooper

In some ways the highlight of the night was the demented gothic vaudeville of Alice Cooper and his band. being the support act, the sound had the clarity of a sewage outlet in Shengzeng industrial sector in China. Yet the playing was spirited and the stage show a pleasant pantomime of gothic horror archetypes. He even did 'Welcome to my Nightmare' which is the title track of my fave Alice Cooper album. Steve Deacon wasn't there, but he had 3 shredding guitarists playing their hearts out. 

The show sort of underlined the possibility that if Rock isn't dead, it surely is in its undead zombie phase. The problem I've always felt with Alice Cooper's material is that these play-acting mini-stories he tells in song and on stage don't point to any kind of authenticity. Instead it underscores the entire edifice of show biz that plays musicians like puppets. That underneath all the makeup and pretend gothic-gore, there's a guy playing his audience for suckers. After all, he's now a keen golfer and votes Republican.

He's a fricken' class enemy for the values of Rock. 

Mick Mars

Mick Mars looked sickly. At 64, he's a full 10years older than Vince and Tommy and Nicky. He looks like a vampire. Alice Cooper's ghoulish makeup's got nothing on Mick Mars. But he sure can play. He gets beautiful singing tones out of his battered white Strat and the overtones are to die for. 

Mars is the saving grace of Mötley Crüe. He is controlled, studied and succinct. While all the silly bombast comes from Tommy Lee's drumming and the pedestrian bass playing of Nicky Sixx, Mars' is the contribution that gives the rather skeletal music some actual flesh. As shredders go, he's not as impressive as a Van Halen or a Steve Vai. He's very good, but not enough to be a generation-defining player.  His solo spot is pretty ordinary and reveals a rather quirky player with some fine touch, but it has nothing on the likes of his leading Heavy Metal contemporaries when it comes to gusto or emotive power. 

It's a weird band to look at these days. Vince looks like a gerbil, Mick looks like a vampire, Nicky looks like he's wearing underpants on his head and Tommy Lee looks like he's getting fashion cues from Henry Rollins. 

Goodbye Rock

Rock music used to mean something - I should know, I meant it when I played. Then it sort of slowly drifted up its own fundament to the point where it's now mostly just corporate entertainment. The counterculture of the 60s and 70s gave way to the Reaganomic, Thatcherite 1980s and rock music got sucked into the vortex of commerce. It became this thing where pop music could be packaged up and sold like commodities, it didn't even need to be good or meaningful. And that's how we got Mötley Crüe in the first place - a vapid mirror for a vapid age. 

The fact that today, they're old and shrivelled and too misshapen to fit into their spandex trousers any more, is almost irrelevant because there is no legitimate nostalgia. It's all manufactured and marketed from the monolithic industry in LA. There was nothing ever real or authentic about this band to begin with, so complaining about the un-reality of their career oeuvre is like complaining about McDonalds as a form of cuisine. Frank Zappa used to say that anybody who thinks rock video clips (like you see on MTV) are a new form of art probably thinks Cabbage Patch Dolls (remember those?) are a new form of soft sculpture. Mötley Crüe is exactly what Frank Zappa was talking about; the disdain from Frank is fully well-earned. 

But it's easy for me to diss their music. It stand for all the wrong things in rock.
My better half thought they were gas in their heyday, what with their hair and clothes and makeup and outlandish behaviour. She thought that, was rock. Needless to say, she had a good time. I did too, but it had nothing to do with the actual music. 

2015/05/15

Budget Fallout 2015

When The SMH Calls You Stupid, You Just Might Be

The Wow-Just-Wow moment arrived in the Herald this evening, and it goes like this:
You would have thought Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey had learnt their lesson – after all, it had very nearly cost them their political lives.
But no. 
The paid parental leave debacle now consuming an otherwise soft and friction-free budget, is testament to the stubbornness of ageing white men and to the durability of their ideas, even really bad ones.

When the all-male Expenditure Review Committee members huffed their scornful reproach and conspired to nail greedy mothers involved in welfare "fraud", as Hockey readily agreed it was, it eluded their lofty wisdom that (a) this was egregious nonsense (b) their policy shift contradicted a core value to which the Prime Minister - no less - was thoroughly welded, and (c) some of their own wives had taken maternity leave from their employers, and the basic federal government scheme of $11,500 over 18 weeks. Oops. 
The stupidity of Abbott and Hockey now paring back entitlements are too numerous to list, but include that right up until months ago, they had wanted to pay $75,000 for six months to wealthier mothers – non means-tested. It was Abbott's "signature" policy remember – specifically confected to fix his "women problem". How's that looking now? Hockey had been its next most enthusiastic proponent. Both had argued it was an employment entitlement akin to annual leave and thus an inalienable right. Once a bitter opponent of paid parental leave (over my dead body) Abbott became unstoppable - a born-again zealot intent on staring down colleagues after foisting it on them without consultation.
Look, there are days where I think I might be the only person banging on about just how stupid WTE Joe and Phoney Rabbit can be, but amazingly, this is not the case. The mainstream journalists picked up on this thing and are writing it. I can't recall Peter Smark ever writing Bob Hawke was stupid, or Alan Ramsay writing Paul Keating was stupid, or for that matter John Howard who might have deserved it more than Hawke or Keating.

I mean, the logic is without flaw; these guys went out and shot themselves in the foot, in broad daylight. What are we to make of this? That it's a part of a some greater cunning plan? Words escape me. And so we're here today with the spectacle of a journalist of a major newspaper in Australia calling out our Prime Minister and WTE as stupid people. And here I was thinking that day would never come!

UPDATE: It's Idiot Season, Open For The Hunt

Today it's Peter Martin starting out with "Idiot":
What kind of idiot labels mothers "rorters"? 
It's the same kind of idiot who thinks it's a good idea to draw a line in the sand between the Coalition and Labor over super. Tony Abbott told Parliament last week there would be "no changes to super, no adverse changes to super in this term of Parliament, and we have no plans to make adverse changes to super in the future".
It was remarkable coming from a government whose Treasurer only six weeks ago reached out to Labor for a "bipartisan" approach on super, saying he had measures "under very active consideration". 
Labor took him at his word, announced its own very mild position, and had the door slammed in its face. 
Everyone knows something will have to be done soon about super tax concessions. The Henry tax review said so, the Murray financial system inquiry said so, and the government's tax discussion paper as good as said so. The cost of the concessions rivals that of the pension, and it is growing more quickly. To say that isn't so, after saying it was so, is to redefine reality. 
On mothers, Abbott took to the election a proposal for six months' paid maternity leave. He picked the period of 26 weeks rather than Labor's 18 weeks "to support women to have the best chance to breastfeed and bond with their infant for the six-month period recommended by international and Australian health experts". The Coalition's policy still available on its website cites the National Health and Medical Research Council and the World Health Organisation as experts finding that the minimum recommended period of exclusive care and breastfeeding is six months. 
In the meantime, Labor's paid parental leave scheme was ensuring that some women had more than 18 weeks. That was its aim. Its explanatory memorandum said the scheme would "complement" existing entitlements, being paid "before, after, or at the same time". Never intended as a substitute for employer-provided leave, it was an add-on that would bring some women close to six months. 
The Fair Work Ombudsman puts the intention beyond doubt. "Employer-funded paid parental leave doesn't affect an employee's eligibility for the Australian government's paid parental leave scheme," it says on its website. "An employee can be paid both."
So it's hard to know what to make of the sudden quasi-criminalisation of mothers who do as the law intended to get paid leave approaching the six months that Abbott insisted was the minimum needed for breastfeeding and exclusive care. 
Labelling them "double dippers" on Mother's Day and announcing that from next year they would be denied access to the government's scheme, Joe Hockey was invited by Laurie Oakes to agree that accessing both was "basically fraud". He replied: "Well, it is.
An object lesson in how to win enemies and influence nobody. I'm glad the press is finally seeing what I saw a long time ago. All it takes is track record of contradictory statements and obvious lack of reasoning by this government to demonstrate just how stupid are these people.

They Cut Screen Australia! What Sadistic Joy It Gives Me!

I don't know how to put this nicely, but the film bureaucrats of this land give me the shits. As a class of citizens intent upon improving our lives though propagandistic (and bad) entertainment, they are all George Brandises of the movie biz without the actual "I-got-elected-you-mofos" bit going for them. They are what you might call unrepresentative swill who have spent decades keeping the pool small, the water shallow, and mostly poisonous. So oddly enough, when their budget gets cut, I have no choice but to rejoice. So hooray motherfuckers, they fucked over the other motherfuckers. Really, I hope somebody loses their fucking job. I don't know who exactly that's going to be, or how it will be broached - I don't give a flying-fuckety-fuck - I hope it's somebody whose career in film-bureaucracy is brought to a fucking miserable end.
The cuts to Screen Australia have been denounced by Screen Producers Australia, which claimed they "will seriously impact the industry", and the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which said "the cuts will undoubtedly impact the thousands of MEAA members who rely on these arts and cultural programs for work, training and development". 
The production designer of Mad Max: Fury Road, Colin Gibson, said though the cut was almost expected, he was sure it would have an impact on the industry.
"It's not really a government we were expecting too much largesse in the way of art or beauty to be coming from anyway," he said at the movie's vehicle show at the Sydney Opera House, ahead of the Australian premiere on Wednesday. 
However, Gibson added that he was "not necessarily convinced" that Screen Australia has the best system for supporting the industry anyway.
"So let's see if we can use the agony to our advantage," he said.
Cut it all, I say. Cut the fucking lot of them and throw them in the harbour to be eaten by sharks.

2015/05/14

Quick Shots - 14/May/2015

Binge Watching Galore

I had a stretch where I binge-watched the Fast & Furious movies. I figured there was so much ballyhoo over the new one and the tragic death of Paul Walker and if a movie series gets out to 7 films, then there must be something of some value there. This is the kind of thinking that gets you into trouble.

The Fast And The Furious

This is the first in the series that kicked it off. I don't even remember this being a big hit, and Vin Diesel was playing its antagonist who wasn't quite the villain. It's a terrible film-film.  There's hardly a story worth spit, the characterisation is thin an arbitrary and just enough to string together the car racing sequences which make uptake glory of this series. "Hit the nitro! Now!" - that sort of mentation predominates and there's nothing really profound or interesting except how Paul Walker's character Brian lets Vin Diesel's character Dom escape at the end. Amazingly, it's this moral ambiguity of the main character that actually allows the sequels to flourish - but it never seems to seriously get any probing or questioning that one would expect if there was any sense of realism about.

It also has to be said Walker is baby faced in this film and sort of quaint. He is also an inexperienced, terrible actor in this film. The blessing is that he does get better.

2 Fast, 2 Furious

This sequel is a caper movie set in Miami. The plot is barely more coherent than the first film. In fact, it is a rare sequel that is better than the original, and this one is such rare film. Indeed, the whole series is surprising this way. Considering how awful the first film is, the sequels just keep getting incrementally better. The bad guys are meaner and genuinely villainous in this instalment. It's not quite interesting so much as time-filling for the tired-brain. It has abuts much intellectual heft as a 70s cop drama, but the car action is good as the first and the film blunders its way through an almost coherent story about being undercover law enforcement - something the first film failed to accomplish.

Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift

And this little piggie went to a script-writer and got itself a story. This one has no Paul Walker, is set in Tokyo, and barely has a cameo from Vin Diesel who was obviously not in the second movie but got brought back for kicks. Instead, they cast another actor to play the lead, Bama Boy. Bama Boy ends up in Japan with his Navy dad, and this being a car racing kind of movie, has to learn how to drive in this funky slide-y way that they drive down steep mountainside chicanes in Japan. Then he runs into the Yakuza and the climax is a big car race down the steep mountainside chicane-infested track.

I understand lots of people think this is the worst of the series but it's not true. The car action is extraordinary, and the acting is very solid for a change. The characters have motivations that make sense, and the story has more than a passing relation to all the car racing sequences. Again, it is a better film-film than the predecessor. I can see why people don't like it - it doesn't have its usual star attractions without Paul Walker - but it has an actual actor who can act. In fact it has a lot going for it compared to the earlier iterations - namely, character and plot.

Fast And Furious

Confusingly titled, this is the fourth film. Paul Walker is back, and so is Vin Diesel. I'd like to crack a joke and say, "so are the skimpy plots" but it's not true. This time the characters of Brian and Dom have a more complex motivation for what they are trying to do. The stunts are more extraordinary than the last films. It's perhaps not as interesting as your average Bond movie or Marvel's Avengers movie, but you start getting into the brain-space of these characters and come to appreciate them for the testosterone-filled grease-monkeys that they are. At this point in time, anything that makes sense is welcome. Michelle Rodriguez also is back, but then she promptly dies off screen, which sets up a revenge plot, which, while it isn't exactly 'Hamlet', gets it over the line. .

And it is yet again a much better overall work of cinema than the previous four.

Fast & Furious 5

And this is as far as I got before I lost internet and phone line.
It's even more outrageous in its stunts and action than any of the previous entires. The writers have strategically moved from Paul Walker being the main hero, to Vin Diesel's Dom being the main character whereby Paul Walker's Brian is relegated to a mirthful second banana and it works better this way. Brian, is deeply shallow; there's really not much to go on there. Dom, on the other hand, is profoundly violent, so there is more gravitas to be mined. Plus we welcome Dwayne Johnson to the ensemble, and he is a big lump of ham on the side.

Looking back thus far, the amazing thing is how they've improved so much on such a flimsy first film. It's the opposite of most franchises where they start with a bang and the sequels get worse and worse, the bloat killing off the excitement and the stories receding into sentimental guff. This series starts of with the bloat and guff but pares it away with each film. It's quite remarkable.

At some point I'll get to 6 and then 7, but I thought I'd report back from the trenches of popcorn movies with something worth sharing.


2015/05/13

News That's Fit To Punt - 13/May/2015

We Live In A Peeping Tom Kind Of World

Pleiades had this link for me today. It's about how the NSA surveillance reaches and, to not put too fine a point on it, they reach everywhere for everybody.
Few people, for example, are aware that a NSA program known as TREASUREMAP is being developed to continuously map every Internet connection — cellphones, laptops, tablets — of everyone on the planet, including Americans. 
“Map the entire Internet,” says the top secret NSA slide. “Any device, anywhere, all the time.” It adds that the program will allow “Computer Attack/Exploit Planning” as well as “Network Reconnaissance.” 
One reason for the public’s lukewarm concern is what might be called NSA fatigue. There is now a sort of acceptance of highly intrusive surveillance as the new normal, the result of a bombardment of news stories on the topic. 
I asked Snowden about this. “It does become the problem of one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic,” he replied, “where today we have the violation of one person’s rights is a tragedy and the violation of a million is a statistic. The NSA is violating the rights of every American citizen every day on a comprehensive and ongoing basis. And that can numb us. That can leave us feeling disempowered, disenfranchised.”

In the same way, at the start of a war, the numbers of Americans killed are front-page stories, no matter how small. But two years into the conflict, the numbers, even if far greater, are usually buried deep inside a paper or far down a news site’s home page.
So basically, if a crime is blatant and big enough, we stop caring. I guess there's some democratic insight into that. We all get taxed. We all get perved. If it's a burden of civilisation that falls upon us equally, maybe we just stop seeing it as an issue and just "learn to love the bomb", so to speak.

That being said...
In addition, stories about NSA surveillance face the added burden of being technically complex, involving eye-glazing descriptions of sophisticated interception techniques and analytical capabilities. Though they may affect virtually every American, such as the telephone metadata program, because of the enormous secrecy involved, it is difficult to identify specific victims. 
The way the surveillance story appeared also decreased its potential impact. Those given custody of the documents decided to spread the wealth for a more democratic assessment of the revelations. They distributed them through a wide variety of media — from start-up Web publications to leading foreign newspapers.

One document from the NSA director, for example, indicates that the agency was spying on visits to porn sites by people, making no distinction between foreigners and “U.S. persons,” U.S. citizens or permanent residents. He then recommended using that information to secretly discredit them, whom he labeled as “radicalizers.” But because this was revealed by The Huffington Post, an online publication viewed as progressive, and was never reported by mainstream papers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, the revelation never received the attention it deserved.
That bits a lot more troubling. Even if this blog has nothing to do with porn, the NSA probably has you tagged as a 'radicalized' (sic) entity. Worse still, the powers that allowed the NSA to do this in America are up for renewal. It's been 14years since 9/11 and really, they have very little to show for doing all this perving.

What Next? The Academy Of Degenerate Art?

The picture of a publicly elected official handing out money to artists directly is not a good look. The Arts Council adds a kind of layer of respectability because presumably some committee meets and adds a cushion between the powers of the day and the artists seeking a grant. But why bother with the semblance of respectable distance when you can just control the budget and hand it out to your favourites?
$104.8 million over four years has been ripped out of the Australia Council’s budget to create a new slush fund, apparently to be decided at the discretion of the Arts Minister of the day. 
The funding cuts total $29 million in the coming year, a cut of 16 per cent for the Australia Council on 2014’s appropriation.
'The National Centre for Excellence in the Arts will allow for a truly national approach to arts funding and will deliver on a number of Government priorities including national access to high quality arts and cultural experiences,' Minister Brandis wrote in a media release.

The budget also removes $5.2 million in funding from the Australia Council, and gives it to Creative Partnerships Australia 'to foster private sector support for the arts'.
In the ministerial media release that accompanies the announcement, Minister Brandis launched a veiled attack on the independence and arms-length funding processes of the Australia Council. 
'Funds for these programmes will be transferred to the Ministry for the Arts from the Australia Council, ensuring that government support is available for a broader range of arts and cultural activities,' Brandis states in the media release.

'Arts funding has until now been limited almost exclusively to projects favoured by the Australia Council. The National Programme for Excellence in the Arts will make funding available to a wider range of arts companies and arts practitioners, while at the same time respecting the preferences and tastes of Australia’s audiences.'
What Mr. Brandis means by 'a wider range', God only knows (as in, "God Help Us All, God Help Us All"). The Arts Council already helps props up the vast village of cottage industries that subsist on government largesse, creating the propaganda that there is worthy Australian Arts - that while the average Australian might not opt to partake of it in any meaningful sense, we'd like to wave around at foreigners as something else to look at in-between a Koala and a Kangaroo. It's hard to say one liked Australia Council before but it's equally hard to say that what George Brandis is doing is any kind of improvement.

Oh, and they cut Screen Australia again. I admit I take great sadistic delight in this. It's more proof that your enemy's enemy is not your friend but still of some bloody use.

Speaking Of Western Civilisation

It so happens to turn out that the guy who started 'Jim's Mowing' has a PhD in history.
Who knew that the Jim behind Jim’s Mowing has a PhD in history? It turns out that Jim Penman only became an entrepreneur because couldn’t get a job as an academic.
Founding and running Jim’s Group has kept Penman pretty busy, but he snatched time here and there to continue his research and published various articles in peer-reviewed journals. Now, 32 years after completing his doctorate at Latrobe University, Penman has published a book called Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West. As the name suggests, Penman believes that Western Civilisation is already decades into a decline that could be terminal.  
His book applies the study of epigenetics – a branch of biology that looks at changes in genetic expression as a result of environmental influences rather than changes to the DNA sequence. Penman’s premise with biohistory is that trends in history have roots in biology – and there is more of this in the book and also on the website where there are two videos explaining the theory. 
It's quite an interesting interview. I can't say I agree with the man, his politics sucks, but he does make some interesting points. He thinks Western Civilisation is in rapid decline.
BRW: What is the cause of this civilisation decline? 
JP: “It’s to do with wealth. It’s the same thing that occurred in the Roman Empire and every other civilisation. When you become wealthy and urbanised, it changes temperaments and behaviours in a way that makes people less disciplined, less hard working, in the end less enterprising. It takes a few generations to take place and epigenetics explains why that happens. People think that technology is going to save us but in fact technology makes it worse because it makes us so rich.” 
BRW: Yet you said that Jim’s Group was investing heavily in technology – can it also be a force for good? 
JP: “Technology makes it worse to the extent that it makes everybody rich and that makes us have too much food. But technology that makes us understand the science to fight against those effects would be a good thing. If we could find a way to reverse it so people would not be inclined to eat too much and naturally want to eat less and be more disciplined in their lives, that would be a good thing.

“Technology is very exciting – Jim’s Group right now is investing heavily in new efficiencies and systems and I love it and think it’s fantastic, but we’ve got to use it in good ways not bad ways. Nitrogen-fixing technology is fantastic and helps us feed the world but it also makes it possible to have huge explosions and devastating wars.
I'm not sure I even agree with that last sentence for instance. He seems be a man beset by ideas about civilisation he can't let go, but he's blind to his own ideological bias.

2015/05/11

Introducing TwIRP

Not ZIRP

The news today is that not only is the RBA unlikely to cut rates any lower than the 2.0% where it sits, but it's also unlikely to start hiking them up for another 3years.
In the statement explaining the bank's decision to cut the cash rate to a record low 2 per cent, RBA governor Glenn Stevens omitted a key phrase used frequently in earlier statements to signal more cuts: "further easing of policy may be appropriate over the period ahead".

Financial markets are pricing in a just 30 per cent chance of a rate cut over the next 12 months, the longest odds for another cut in months. 
Rate cuts are good news for home owners and investors, but a prolonged spell of record low interest rates could be grim news for those who rely on returns from their bank savings, such as many elderly Australians.
Which sort of indicates that even if China's economy implodes under the weight of debt and the nation dissolves into civil warrior something catastrophic, the Property Bubble is unlikely to pop. That's the good news for those who took out (and continue to take out) stupendous mortgages. The RBA's right behind you, even when it says it might block you. Really. 2.0% - get over it! It's good (they say)!

The funny thing is that the RBA can't bring it self to go right down to Zero Interest Rate Policy because after all, Australia's economy is yet to implode and it probably sees those 8 increments of 25 basis points down to ZIRP as being valuable because - I dunno - China may implode and dissolve into utter chaos after all. Otherwise it can't construct a scenario where the Australian economy becomes worthy of high interest rates - as in more interesting - in the near future. 2.0% - get over it. It's just crap (others say)!

So caught between a rock and a hard place, it's likely going to stay on 2.0% for a long time.
As such, we may as well name this the Two-percent Interest Rate Policy: TwIRP.

Those Who Live In Glass Houses

News Corp is hilarious. No, really, they are.
Detail is scant as yet but the first initiative delivers further anti-avoidance powers to the Tax Office to recover unpaid taxes from multinationals and issue fines. The second is the so-called "Netflix Tax" through which GST will be extended to digital downloads from overseas. 
The rich paradox in this Netflix Tax is that it was urged upon the government by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, whose Foxtel pay-TV business stands to lose from digital competitors offshore. As previously revealed though, News Corp has now been identified as the Tax Office's number one tax avoidance risk in Australia.
You have to laugh. Especially when you consider it's the Coalition Government going after tax avoidance by multinationals, and we know Rupert loves him some Coalition Government; he put them there and now they're doing this.

At least, they say they're doing this. You can trust a Tory and their professed policy about as far as you are willing to stick your genitals into a meat grinder.

2015/05/05

RBA Cuts Rates to 2.00%

Historically Low Rates

Just as the scuttlebutt around the markets predicted, the RBA cut interest rates yet again. At 2%, it's never been this low in the time the Reserve Bank has existed. More over, they did so even with the threat of real estate prices in Sydney going even more ballistic. It's pretty much as the IMF suggested, and really hen you look at it, it's still quite high compared to the other countries running their ZIRP, especially if the Reserve Bank of Australia likes to move in 0.25% increments. We have 8 increments to zero, and 6 to the 0.5% being offered in the USA. It's enough to still encourage wary internationals to buy our bonds.

Of course, as I've discussed before, low interest forms a very difficult frame around what exactly we're seeing as our economic future. The collapse in interest rates in advanced countries has gone hand in hand with the collapse of the future horizon, where it's unclear where the next spurt of growth is going to come. The fevered investor activity in real estate happens exactly because the investors cannot see the future-industry-to-come beyond the mining boom, they're rushing to lock up their spoils in real estate in the hopes of squeezing rents for their cashflow.

Added to the fact that speculative activity increases as money supply becomes easier, and you have exactly the scenario where there's too much money chasing too few assets. There is inflation going on in the markets, but interestingly enough, we're being dragged towards ZIRP all of our own down under precisely because the RBA doesn't want to pop the bubble and create a stampede for the door.  The problem is, the RBA has to either wear a preternaturally high Australian Dollar, or wear a property bubble. It's already at the point where the RBA is finding it hard to raise interest rates, so the question that looms is just when are we going to get down to ZIRP? Because the rates really appear unlikely to go up any time soon. In fact going up would act like a margin call and suddenly all these happy home loans will become distressed. It would cause a shitstorm. Besides which, given the weight of globalised capital markets, the only way forward is no cuts or more cuts.

And what the hell is Sydney going to look like when interest rates hit even 1.00%, let alone a number starting with zero? It's going to be really wild.

What's really strange is that politicians of this land seem perfectly okay with all of this.

2015/05/01

It's Still 'Binfield For Bankers'

The Banks Are Not Safe As Houses


Pleiades wanted me to have a look at something today to do with banks in the AFR. It's behind a pay wall so I can't really be copying and pasting the whole thing, but I want to share some things he wanted me to see:
The big four had been desperately pleading for APRA to kick the FSI's all-important capital and risk-weight can down the road at least 12 to 24 months. In its response, CBA amusingly had the regulator considering the recommendations through to 2018. Perfect for 27 times leveraged big bank bosses that can continue punching out 19 per cent returns on equity until policymakers wake up. 
That leverage number, by the way, is based on APRA's latest estimate of the big banks' assets divided by APRA's calculation of their common equity tier one capital as at December last year. Another way of expressing the same point is that the majors carry real, or non-risk-weighted, equity capital of just 3.7 per cent of assets. Perversely, you cannot get a home loan from the same banks providing that little equity, with most capping loan-to-property value ratios at 95 per cent.
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During a briefing with Murray for a panel session at The Australian Financial Review's Banking & Wealth Summit this week, he said it was "incredible" that the equity the majors hold against their home loans was completely destroyed in APRA's 2014 stress tests. The better capitalised regional banks had no such difficultly and were able to cover the losses flowing from the simulated defaults in a 1991-like downturn. 
The result should not, though, have been surprising. One only needs to read Westpac's response to Murray's report. The $114 billion bank revealed it only holds "capital of 1.32 per cent" against $468 billion of home loans (see second chart). That means Westpac is leveraging its wafer-thin equity 77 times when extending half a trillion dollars of finance to home owners, which is exactly the same leverage estimate we calculated in this column in July last year. Imagine how Westpac would react if you told them you could only provide a 1.3 per cent deposit for your home.
Which is to say the big 4 banks are really leveraged to the max on the strength of the Too Big To Fail guarantee. During the GFC, the Federal government under Kevin Rudd made courageous decisions to shore up the Big 4 banks plus Macquarie so they wouldn't collapse. By that, we mean so that something like 70% of Australians wouldn't lose their savings and deposits in a flash. Since then there's been BASEL and BASEL II to make sure banks held enough capital, but of corset was voluntary for the big banks to sort outlier ledgers. Somehow -  unsurprisingly - the Big 4 banks have dawdled on sorting out this issue and remain utterly vulnerable to the kind of seismic shift in the market place that could deprive them of liquidity or place them on the wrong end of a big margin call.

Which is kind of scary. The Federal Government under Tony Abbott might not be in a position to shore them up for ideological reasons or simple lack of brainpower or excessive love of  laissez faire neo-classical economics. Unlike under the ALP where they pulled out all the stops to make sure the banks didn't explode, this is a government that made all the noises to ensure Ford and General motors and Toyota gave up manufacturing automobiles in Australia for ideological reasons ("ending the age of entitlement!"). If something should happen, they will necessarily fuck it up because it's not so much in their blood or DNA, but in their defective ideology and therefore headspace.

Still, I shouldn't be slamming them for the fuck-ups of the Christmas Future they are yet to make. Nonetheless those Westpac figures are terrible. They sit as a grim warning to the irrational exuberance surrounding property prices in Sydney. And while it's having a difficult time figuring out a scenario in which the property Bubble pops in Sydney, if that should happen, it's going to be the Armageddon of banks we all feared when the GFC broke. 8years on, they've done nothing to fix the deer problem and set themselves up for bigger fall instead. What on earth were they thinking?

Sometimes these bankers and central bankers and prudential regulatory authority people live in a cloud of their own with gilded cages and distorted perspective. It's even more disturbing that they probably donate more towards the conservatives in the hopes of less regulation and after a generation of less and less regulation and oversight, they've created the current precarious position. Australia's economy might be advanced and post-industrial, but it is small. If the world's central banks are in Zero Interest Rate Policy land and can't get out of it, it's reasonable to think that Australia will be dragged down to that level. At a certain point there is no horizon for future growth - we'll arrive at the effective endpoint of development like the rest of the advanced economies have done. At which point it's conceivable that the only thing that can grow are house prices independent of any other economic indicator, and that is what is happening in Sydney - there is nothing but property to speculate upon, and that is why all the money is being printed by banks to place bets.

It sure is bleak.



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