The Breaking Of The Middle

...And The Disintegrating Centre

I was at a party surrounded by many active thinkers and writers. You could say they were the best minds of this generation once upon time ago, who had gone on to do their respective important things in their lives. It's almost humiliating to be the guy who didn't do much except this blog here, but hey, that's life. Not everybody gets what they want in their life.

Most were academics and teachers, and those that weren't were owners of white-collar businesses and authors of note. What was interesting with this crowd is how they were once centre-left moderates on University of Sydney's campus a few decades ago, and until very recently had stayed moderate and centre-left, but had decidedly turned to the hard Left in the last 2 years. They're now telling me they were going to vote for the Greens at the next election. They're abandoning the ALP.

I listened to what they had to say and it boiled down to a no confidence motion towards the entire ALP as it stands today. Bill Shorten wasn't cutting it as their leader. It's not surprising given the brain power of the people at this party - Bill Shorten isn't impressing them any one bit. Shorten's mumbled position of small-target-until-election-time isn't going to strike a cord with these intellectuals. The Gillard government essentially burned through their patience with the ALP already, so Shorten was essentially getting no leash from these people. The vision they had was for the Greens under Dr. DiNatale to step forward as the senior partner of a Broad Left alliance with the ALP reduced to a junior role. They said they couldn't wait for the ALP to reform while there were pressing issues. They needed a Leftist party with which they could throw their lot in.

They're not growing conservative with old age, this lot. They were strengthening in their conviction, as they decided to move to the left, abandoning the ALP. And these were the people who grabbed me back in my youth and took me to the Centre-left in the first place. They've now vacated that spot and decamped further away leaving me sort of holding the ALP bag. Basically it looks like the ALP lost the campus and intellectuals to the Greens.

What this means is that the centre is being vacated by the left, while the ALP itself is left stranded without its traditional base. The ALP might end up fading and disappearing.

Bob Ellis Thinks The Liberals Will Disintegrate

Bob Ellis thinks there won't even be a Liberal Party by 2020. What's interesting about his post is that he seems to think the centre is crumbling for the Liberal Party as well, as they too shift, but further to the political right. As the great brains trust was explaining to me at the party, if Christopher Pyne and George Brandis represent the moderates in the Liberal Party, then the right end of the Liberal Party are nutjob rightwing fascists. The stupidity of the fascist position is being played out daily with the incessant appeals to fear through beating the drum of the security issues. Quite simply, the Liberal Party has long vacated the middle and gone to the right, and that should be leaving the middle the the ALP. Yet the ALP has been so inept it is losing its base as it occupies the middle.

Demographically speaking, the Pre-Boomers who support the conservatives are dying out. That vision of Australia is vanishing daily with the elderly checking out of Life Hotel. In its stead are the Baby Boomers heading into retirement, but they haven't changed their politics a great deal. There's a large chunk of them who are still on the political left, and so the demographic certainty that the Coalition had during the Howard years where they could rely on the passive grey vote, is not likely to hold in the near future. This leaves the decidedly ideologically right fascists - and this explains the scary three ring circus that is the Coalition government today, where the motivated members of the political machine on the right are not conservative in the older sense but ideological fascists.

Naturally one wonder just how much fascism can appeal to wider Australian electoral sentiments. One Nation with its clocked Bogan moron-o-cratic ideas indicates that it can be dressed up in jingoism and sold to a portion of the population. Yet One Nation never really made inroads into the middle enough to last. Independent senator David Leyonhjelm is a 'Liberal Democrat' in name but is essentially running a radical libertarian line - and I don't think he's having any more of an impact than Brain Harradine did in his day. This leads one to suspect that if the Liberal Party does fade or disintegrate due to demographics, then we will be seeing a particular vision of and for Australia, passing into history.

All Of This Is Very France In The 1930s

I like to remind people of Jean-Paul Sartre's book 'Age of Reason' in such instances. In the context where fascism was rising in Spain, the main character Mathieu is approached to joining the left in the Spanish Civil War. Mathieu turns them down because he judges it to be not yet his own war. And until the war come to his doorstep, it is not for him to take up arms.

The hardening of the fascist position in Australia is only in its second phase at this point in time. There arena weapons and signs of armed conflict. Yet if this is enough to provoke the Centre-Left moderates to move to the Greens, then we're seeing a replay of that dynamic. What concerns me the most is that all of these people moving to the left know how student politics played out in the late 1970s and they are totally cognisant of the players involved in that event, now being in Parliament. They are not taking chances. So while we may not descend into a civil war, we may descend into utter chaos when the middle ground totally dries up and there is only the hard right and hard left.
And frankly, this is now possibly on the cards for Australian politics.

Speechless

More Stupid Than We Ever Could Have Imagined

Just when you thought this government couldn't get any lower, any dumber, any deeper into the poo, along comes yesterday's gem of a cockup, Border Force. Lenore Taylor has the shortest, sharpest knockout here so let's defer to her for moment.

It began with a morning press release, announcing proudly that our new “border force” – a revamped and armed version of the frontline activities of immigration and the customs service that began operations in July – would be part of a big “crime crackdown” in Melbourne on the weekend. 

“ABF officers will be positioned at various locations around the CBD speaking with any individual we cross paths with,” said the border force regional commander in Victoria and Tasmania, Don Smith. 

“You need to be aware of the conditions of your visa; if you commit visa fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you’re caught out.” 

Immediately apparent to pretty much everyone except Smith, or whoever writes his press releases, was that this would require border force to “profile” who they questioned, or else uselessly question an awful lot of people out having fun on a Saturday night, that it would mean they were asking for documentation without any real reason to think the person had committed an offence and that – given all the pre-warning – anyone who really had a problem with their visa would probably be elsewhere. 

It was also pretty obvious this was border force establishing its paramilitary credentials as a law enforcer (it can now carry arms, detain people and gather intelligence) with a remit far beyond our borders.

Turns out there is a good reason to follow proper process when it comes to paramilitary and law enforcement type things – the kind of processes the actual military and police force often have.

By the time I heard about it on the ABC radio at midday, it was all ablaze. Public fury grew and by mid afternoon the goons had to back down. And so now we're picking up the pieces of the aftermath trying to figure out what kind mentation led to this escapade/fiasco.

It's most likely the fact that the Abbott Government can't come up with anything that wins the support of voters except banging on about security - so presumably they thought if they could bring that tough stance on immigration and terrorists and death cults like ISIS/ISIL to the street level, then people might be impressed. That they chose to unleash the stupidity in Melbourne CBD goes to show how tone deaf they are about just who might be impressed and who might be objecting. The last I looked, where they staged this 'Operation' is in the middle of Adam Bandt's seat - arguably the Urban Green Left hipster bastion of Australia outside Marrickville Council. Like, uh, hello is there anybody in there Mr. Abbott?

Others have dissected fully just how misguided and terrible this action was, so I won't go into it too deeply but I will suggest that this desperate stunt is surely a sign that Tony Abbott's time as Prime Minister is terminal. Surely the Coalition can't keep going with this; surely the Liberal Party cannot keep going with this; because the Australian public sure can't keep going with this stupidity. And if they can't replace him in a spill, the Governor General needs to step in and sack this government.

View From The Couch - 27/Aug/2015

Norovirus

I've come down with some weird lurgy this week. It's giving me nausea and acid reflux. I burp like a baby and can't seem to keep food down. My joints ache, moving around is a pain, and all the old sports injuries are barking. We grow old, we grow old and all that; but you really get to feel it when the joints hurt. Judging from the symptoms, my best guess is that it's the Norovirus. I've been going to work because it's not like I've got a fever or I'm totally incapacitated, but today I was just overwhelmed by this thing. It's a weird thing wanting to vomit and not wanting to vomit at the same time. There are few bodily functions where you simultaneously want to do it and you don't. Ejaculation comes to mind, but that's about it, and it's worlds apart from vomiting in the unpleasantness stakes.

Anyway. Let's really have a spew!

Markets Are Up!

I guess the predictions for a global meltdown were misplaced after all because share markets are up today. Sydney was up yesterday, defying global trends towards the financial apocalypse. This was possibly because going any lower would have made valuations totally 'under', on too many stocks. Jokes aside, BTFD ("buy-the-fucken-dips") is a legit strategy until you find yourself cresting on a bubble like the markets in China. The ASX on the other hand hadn't bubbled at all in comparison to some of these other changes around the globe, and so had less to fall. For all the screaming headlines of "$60 billion lost in a day!", that was roughly a 2.5% drop or so and much of that has recovered. If you bought in on "the-fucken-dip", then you would've done alright.

A lot of commentators are saying this was no Lehman Moment. Maybe that's true, but having experienced the original Lehman Moment, I don't think anybody wanted to chance it, which explains just how much things got oversold in markets outside of China on Monday. Michael Pascoe even had a column yesterday crowing about how he was going to BTFD. Like I said, if you bought in on "the-fucken-dip" this week, then you would've done alright.

The mid to long term is much, much murkier. I'm not the grizzliest of Market Bears, but China still scares the hell out of me. There's still a lot of drama to be played out in response to the share market bubble popping, especially when the people decide what they need to do is string up the market boss. It might be the case that there aren't that many shareholders in China, it's also true that they would have lost a bundle if they were leveraged up to their eyeballs leading up to the share bubble popping. There's still all that Property Bubble out there in China, with all the empty cities, leveraged shadow banking using commodities as collateral, and the commodity prices have bottomed out so you know there are margin calls going on. None of that has changed. There's no reason to think that we're out of the woods with all this China mess business.

Hockey's CYA Republicanism

Out of the blue, WTE Joe Hockey says he wants Australia to become a Republic. It's kind of weird, but I guess it's one way to rebrand yourself as "I'm not with Tony Abbott, I'm not on that team of suck". Uh, WTE Joe, oh-but-yes-your-are!

The other possibility I thought of was that Joe fears the incompetence of this government so much, he even fears the Governor General sacking Abbott's government. In which case, moving to a republic would kind of cover his ass. Perhaps I shouldn't try to guess the motives of the Worst Treasurer Ever.

The Republican debate is one of those interesting things that bring out all sorts of spurious arguments of identity. Admittedly, when Paul Keating was pushing for it, I thought the notion was totally logical and the conservative forces allayed against an Australian Republic were doing so out of zombie loyalties to a crown of a distant land who cared so little about any of us to the point of mutual irrelevance. And while that may be true, in the years since the referendum was lost I've had some time to read and think about all this.

One of the more disturbing things about a Republic - with a President - separate to the Parliament/Congress assembly is that you have to begin asking who gets to call the shots on the military. In America, this is the President and since some time around Lyndon Johnson, has been able to go to war without the approval of Congress. This is a big issue because hidden in it is the possibility of an exacerbated conflict between the Presidency and Parliament. It hasn't come to blows in the USA, but the track record of Republics around the globe are pretty telling. This problem happens far more often than not, and on a long enough timescale, it seems to happen inevitably.

It is such a woeful record that so many Republics fail, and give rise to military juntas that it is worth reflecting on whether the Republican model of any stripe can forestall this problem. Some argue that Australia's democracy is more mature so it won't happen. Yet I have it on good authority that during the Dismissal crisis in 1975 a trade unionist suggested to Gough Whitlam that he order the Army to remove  the Governor General. Gough laughed off the idea as lacking in common sense - but Australia's maturity as a democracy hinged on Gough Whitlam's good common sense. These things that inform good common sense are razor thin, and hardly robust at all.

As a centre-left-voting-pinko-pseudo-intellectual, it's tempting to remove the Queen, let the ancien regime be damned. Yet the historian and nascent political scientist in me says this is a dreadful risk to be imposing on this nation. I'm not as gung-ho as I used to be in the 90's about a move to a Republic. Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm just sick and tired of an abstract debate when we have actual, real-world difficult problems lying ahead of us. Malcolm Turnbull might ride again as the standard-bearer for the movement, putting in the good fight once more but that alone won't do it for me. I'm so leery of this topic, I don't even want to change the flag.

Speaking Of Our Real World Problems...

Former head of treasury Martin Parkinson says the Abbott Government is sleep walking its way into a recession. If things stay the course under this go-slow, do-nothing, collect-the-rorts Government, we would lose 5% of GDP in the next decade, which would be a pretty serious recession.
Pretty sobering, no? He wasn't the only one pointing out the problems we've got. Try this bit:

Economic modeller Janine Dixon from Victoria University had told the summit the Treasury's Intergenerational Report had painted a "rosy" picture of the future, projecting average growth in real income per person of 1.4 per cent, meaning that by 2055 Australians would enjoy real incomes 75 per cent higher. 

Her own modelling had real incomes growing by less than 1 per cent per year, meaning that by 2055 incomes would be only 44 per cent higher.

Put another way, it would take an extra 20 years to reach the income forecast in the Intergenerational Report for 2055," she said. 

Her modelling has productivity growing at only half the pace assumed by the Treasury, whose assumption was based on the unusually high decade of productivity growth that followed the economic reforms of the early 1990s. 

Melbourne University economist Ross Garnaut said if her estimates turned out to be correct, the budget would "never get back to surplus". 

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said Australia's economic growth rate had mostly started with a "two" instead of a "three", "despite the lowest interest rates in our lifetimes". 

Dr Parkinson said if economic growth remained nearer to 2.5 per cent than 3 per cent, as much as 5 percentage points of gross domestic product would be lost over the next decade. 

"If this is not happening because our population growth is slow, it means willingly accepting the impact of a recession," he said. 

"The loss of GDP from a recession is about 5 or 6 percentage points."
Without acting we would be "sleepwalking into a real mess".

Just as an aside, I don't know what to make of this new trend of one-sentence-pragarphs being written at the Sydney Morning Herald. It's like ADHD Journalism. Complaints about style aside, that's like a who's who of economic boffins saying - nay, shouting - to the government "LIFT YOUR GAME!". And my question to these esteemed boffins is, "WHAT IF THEY ARE SIMPLY INCAPABLE OF LIFTING ANY GAME THEY MIGHT HAVE, WHATSOEVER?!"

I guess we'll be kissing away that 5% in GDP. Still want to talk about Republics? I just want the Governor General we have now to sack this lot, pronto. Maybe it's not Norovirus that's making me want to vomit but simply living under this nauseating excuse for a government.

One More Plea From The RBA

So, at this conference going on, Glenn Stevens, he of the Reserve Bank of Australia had a few choice advice for this government.

Ordinary Australians don't relate to calls for reform emanating from politicians but they do want economic growth to create new jobs, grow prosperity, and provide long-term financial security for their families, Glenn Stevens has told policy makers in Sydney. 

However the Reserve Bank governor acknowledged that focusing on growth was no populist option and would mean squaring up to the kind of hard political challenges that both the current government and the opposition have shown no appetite for.

The call for growth came as Mr Stevens repeated his concerns that the Australian economy had entered a long-term plateau, in which trend growth is significantly lower than Treasury and therefore government forecasts assume.

In arguably the most significant contribution to the National Reform Summit, which has brought together business, union, community, and policy leaders, from around the country, the central banker said for economic restructuring to be embraced by voters it needed to be framed in terms of its end-stream benefits for people. 

To that end, he told the high-powered gathering that "the general public is much more likely to grasp, intuitively, a conversation about growth".

I don't know about you, but I take that to read, "do your jobs properly you stupid intellectual runts". And I think it applies equally to the Opposition as it does to the addled minds that are in power this minute. Collectively, this political caste has to stop playing too much politics, gaming the ideology stakes, and get on with the job of addressing the real issues.

Heydon Hanging On

You get a guy who is biased pretending to be unbiased. He subsequently gets busted for being biased. Yet the same biased guy gets to decide if his bias is a problem. He had last weekend to think it over and said he couldn't. Now that the week's dragged on to Thursday he says he still can't decide whether his bias is a problem in being a Commissioner for a Royal Commission. He says he'll tell us Friday.  In the mean time, the ACTU says not only did the guy biased, he misled everybody. That's being euphemistic - what I think they want to say is that he lied.

It just doesn't look good. So why would he opt to keep twisting the breeze any longer than he needs to? Imaginer's misplaced professional pride, but every minute he stays on runs through whatever professional credibility he has left. So he must be hanging on for some other reason right? Like... money, perhaps?

I guess it's just another thing going on in another ring in Abbott's Three Ring Circus Government.
I think it's time for me to give into this overwhelming desire to go puke. Good night!

'True Detective' - Season 2

All Those Bad Crits

I'm not sure what to make of all the bad crits season 2 has been receiving. A lot of them seem centred around the fact that it's unlike Season 1 in so many ways. Some have been more scathing than others, but I'm yet to read a crit that makes a defence of the creative choices of season 2. It is a very different animal to season 1 - yes, we all loved season 1 - so the expectations were rightfully high but perhaps largely misplaced.

The most disappointing part of that difference for me is that the over all story has nothing whatsoever to do with the story of Season 1. Season 1 had so many mythic elements that fused into the occult and traditions of American Gothic as well as the Cthulhu mythos which made it resplendent. The continuous philosophical excursions made by Rust made for some delicious cogitation on the meaning of what we were seeing.

To be disconnected from all that wonder is a little sad. But that doesn't mean this season is so bad as to incur the contempt of all these critics. I guess I liked it and appreciated it a lot more than those critics. It's funny how they have jobs writing about TV and have so little idea as to what they are watching. After all, if you didn't get it and didn't like it, it's not much of a crit, is it?

Anyways.... the usual spoiler alert!

What's Good About It

The interesting choice with the series that they opted to completely start up another story with different characters. The casting choices are reasonably weighty, while the change scenery is incredibly stark. If the open blankness of the South in season 1 was haunting and evocative, the industrial sprawl in season 2 is menacing and raw.

The new characters are a revelation. They are in of themselves gripping and interesting figures, loaded with ambiguity. The moral ambiguity of Colin Farrell's detective Velcoro, the sexual ambiguity of Taylor Kitsch's Paul Woodrugh, and the emotional ambivalence or Rachel McAdam's detective Ani Bezzerides makes for compelling viewing. The urban industrial backdrop makes for the most harrowing of landscapes as it builds inexorably to the climax and denouement.

The supporting plot line of the gangster Frank ands wife Jordan is also gripping and full of interesting turns. If it were not for this subplot, we wouldn't get a picture of just how deep the corruption and conspiracy goes in the story. It goes so deep, event the principle outlaw cannot overcome its effects. The corruption is big, the compromised state is a plaything of he moneyed interests, and the little people get squashed. There is no justice, there is only retribution.

As a palimpsest of the post-GFC world, nothing could be more on the mark than the problematic with which the main characters wrestle. If the corruption goos all the way to the top and every stopping between, how can any investigation survive? What moral obligation can a detective exercise, becomes a very pressing issue.

What's Bad About It

Season 1 established that at least in the 'True Detective' series, there is metaphysical evil. In fact, after harping on for most parts of season 1 about the fundamentally meaningless-ness of existence, Rust encounters the sublime darkness that is worshipped by the cultists and he is transformed into  believer in death. It's one of the most amazing turnaround stories on screen. This series comes nowhere near that sublime aporia and awe-filled gaze into the heart of darkness.

In its place in season 2 is a more prosaic piecing together of an unspeakably awful conspiracy that is man-made and thoroughly degrading to humanity. The absence of the sublime drives the story into rather tepid retreads of other noir stories; but it never reaches into the heart of darkness like season 1 does. It's not that the evil isn't spooky in this series; it's that having seen the hint of the spookiest evil, it never comes close to discussing it; and that's the great shame. The missed opportunity to really develop the theme.

What's Interesting About It

Now having seen two seasons, we're getting a better view of the outline of the overall concept. It is in most part, a film noir sensibility played through a discursiveness on the nihilistic impulse in humanity. The characters have fairly primal needs and fears that drive them, and they barely keep it together for the story to unfold. All of the protagonists are like deer in the headlights, stunned at the sudden need to act. The antagonists are many and much less delineated than the protagonists; they remain murky and hard to fathom, their motives constantly shrouded by the apparent randomness of violence.

The patter of Frank played by Vince Vaughan gives us a view into what the world of gangsters might be, post-Tarrantino. Post Modern and self-reflexive, Frank seems to lurch from one state of discomfort to the next while offering expert commentary on his plight. Even his relationship with his wife comes with a commentary, almost in the third person; the self consciousness is oddly compelling as it is deeply ironic.

The night aerial shots over the industrial wasteland are amazing. They evoke  the opening sequence from 'Blade Runner', but it is actual and real. The brutal industrial facade of modernity is at times savagely beautiful and alarming with its barrenness.

Eaten By Despair

You get a lot of downer characterise the detective genres. They have substance abuse problems - most likely alcohol and tobacco products, but this might extend into recreational drugs. Even Sherlock Holmes was an opium addict so there's some insight there about the nature of detective work. Colin Farrell's character Ray drinks, smokes and takes drugs. He enters the series fully compromised, having committed some unspeakable act against the rapist who fathered a child by his wife - or so he believes. Dramatic irony being what it is, it turns out he did not kill the right man, but also, he is the biological father but he never finds out.
In the mean time, he only has this horrible despair eating out this character.

Desire runs deep in Ray precisely because the genre attempts to grapple with the nature of hope, and hope that emanates from illuminating the truth. To that extent Ray has hat in common with Rust from Season 1. Except in Ray is far less articulate and perhaps not as well educated as Rust so as to articulate his sense of hopelessness. He is aware of how deeply bent out of shape he is, by the force of this despair; he' just not good at explaining himself. Both season 1 and 2 hinges on this despair as the axis on which the story turns. If Ray were happily a crooked cop (a kind of psychopath), then the events would take a different turn. His despair marks him out as being vulnerable to the problems at hand.

Ani played by Rachel McAdam is thus like Marty Hart from season 1, where she is loyal to her appetites and not very concerned about the social damage this creates. The wanton-ness is less pronounced, but it is what governs her, and so she makes a good foil for Ray, but it is important to note that this character dynamic is a transplant from the dynamic in season 1. As with season 1, it is despair that provides the key to understanding the mission of these characters. Without their despair, they cannot dig deep down into their existential selves to do the right thing. It is in some ways very harrowing, but the characters are so gripping we keep watching.

Echoes Of Noir Films Past

The corruption plot and how far it extends reminds us greatly of 'Chinatown'. The prostitutes cut by surgeons to look better for a select clientele reminds us of 'L.A. Confidential'. It is some part 'The Long Goodbye' and some part 'Bullit'. All of those films spawned out of the 40s film noir genre, so the narrative is well-marinated in the juices of Californian crime fiction. The concerns are remarkably similar as it divides society into haves and have-nots, inside and outside, protected and unprotected.

The conspiracy in season 2 is deeply structural. It encompasses the criminal underworld money as well as private developers and bureaucrats as well as politicians and corporations. They are all rent-seekers, united in their cause to ilk the public purse for as much money as possible; so the question that gets posited is how are the police supposed to stop a crime of this scope and magnitude?

The story is believable. Variants of this story could be told anywhere, where business interests and government corruption intersect with such force and alacrity. We assume that the police are there to get the bad guys, but we are asked to follow compromised, broken and bent police officers trying to uncover the sort of corruption that is deeply ingrained in to the structure of our state and economy. There is no resplendent moment in season 2 precisely because this hell is man made. There is no metaphysical evil in season 2, simply the world made by bad men. It's not sublime, it's just grime and crime

The Shadow Of Celts, Shadow Of Canada

The characters have Italian and Greek names, but the thing that sticks out about the actors is that they're Irish and Irish extraction: Colin Farrell who is Irish; McAdams; Vaughn; Reilly; form 4/5 of the leading cast, their surnames screaming Irish origins (Kitsch being the exception). It clashes with the underlying Mediterranean heritage evoked by the character names. McAdams and Kitsch are Canadian, so that too adds to the level of seeming weirdness. In any case, none of them seem smooth or comfortable in their skins or in the skins of the characters. it's very strange to watch.

None of the characters strike you as native to the scene. Instead they feel like drifters and loners that blow into the world of the story. There is something angular and not quite right to their placement. Body language and demeanour betrays them as outsiders. As outsiders their characters are superfluous and expendable but also pregnant with potential to change things. It's an interesting dynamic compared to the run of the mill casting.

Bloody Monday - 2015 Edition

Well, What Goes Up, Must Come Down

It's been this growing disquiet all year around China. The cracks were showing but maybe the market was in denial. Or maybe they convinced themselves all was well in the face of the share market rises in Shanghai. After all, if the shares are rocketing up, something must be going right in the market, people figured. But slowly we kept hearing things that belied that simple understanding. We heard that the growth figures were not something measured, but more like aspirational targets expressed by the Communist central government, which would prompt everybody to chip in and hit the target. We had read reports of ghost cities built on borrowed money with price tags too high; and then of course there was this notion that China would simply move to a consumer-consumption driven economy.

This must be the month where it all went out the window because fear has gripped international markets and everybody's selling out their positions. They're not even going to wait for October, they're going, getting right out. And so we're seeing the entire worlds' markets all retreating at once, one retreat feeding on to the next in the timezone domino of market collapses. It hasn't been quite like this since 2012, and quite honestly, it's sharing hallmarks of the 2007 collapse. It's all very ugly because the problems of 2007 haven't been solved enough to make us weather these moments better than 2007. And of course 2007 turned to the bailouts of 2008 and the rest fit has been about kicking cans down the road, which of course includes the Greek situation which is tethered to the rest of the PIIGS.

In short, we're on a clock of about 12 to 14 months before the Lehman Moment gets a sequel and people will scramble for bail outs - on the eve of a Presidential election. All the same, the most important notion is that this time, there's nowhere to go. They can't go below ZIRP to stimulate more credit growth; they can't cut taxes even more to stimulate consumption - that trick's already hit its limit; and none of the creditors can afford to let the debts go bad because it would blow up their own position - which last time prompted Quantitative Easing so people could get over the hump. "Moral Hazards" - and I say that with irony because you know it turned out that it was more important to save everybody's bacon than encouraging "Moral Hazards".

So depending on how badly this drop affects Australia and its consumer sentiment, you can count on the RBA to go to ZIRP, just to support asset prices. There's not much more they could do as the perfect storm hits for the second time in a decade.

AUD $60 Billion In A Day

Just how crappy was the All Ords today? Take a look at this:

Ouch. A few weeks ago, the ASX was hovering closer to 6000 than 5500. There was talk of a secular Bull Market forming, even though the earnings were not exactly like for what people had hoped. The splatting sounds you're hearing are leveraged investors leaping off the ledge. At least, it used to be in the 1929 crash. It's early days yet as investors will go on a big purge of companies carrying too much debt. The four major banks have beaten a retreat of 20% off their highs this year, just in this month, so this could transmogrify into something a bit scarier quickly. If you cast your mind back to 2008, when global credit totally seized up, there was talk that banks would fail and there would be a big run on banks. At the time Kevin Rudd stepped in by guaranteeing deposits and backing the banks to the hilt. He took lightning fast action to stave off the GFC induced collapse of banks.

This time, we're stuck with captain Snaily Failure in the Lodge, so we may not get a Decisive bit of action out of this idiot government until it's too late and even then it will likely be too little. Some ideologue - I'd guess Cory Bernardi or Eric Abetz - will bang on about moral hazard as Sydney and Melbourne property markets descend into carnage. Remember, we've got record private sector debt. A lot of positions are ready to burst if the margin calls are made. Hold on to your hats!

You Know What's Weird? Gold

Gold is a commodity as well as the metal by which currency used to be measured. Of course, none of the major currencies have the God Standard going, and it's been this way since Richard Nixon shocked the world and took the US Dollar of the gold standard. You'd think with this crisis brewing for the last few weeks that Gold would go up as people lost faith in equities and bonds and fiat currency notes. But no - it's been going down.

...which is weird.
So, in 2008, they start QE and you can understand the impulse to buy gold because, hey, they're "printing money". We would expect to see the sort of inflation that broke out in Germany between the war as it printed money to pay off the reparations for World War I. Now, inflation an the measurement thereof is a separate bugbear, but there simply hasn't been that kind of inflation going on. Instead the Central Banks have worried about deflationary pressures and so interest rates have plummeted to zero or near-zero in many advanced economies. Gold peaked at 2011, but has been sliding ever since - which I suppose suggests the inflation expectation is less than zero, and has been for a long time.

When you include the fact that gold actually has commercial uses beyond just being precious, then it makes sense that the Commodities collapse as well as the ongoing deflationary pressures has pushed gold down to this level we see today. What's weird is that if fear was really running around the globe, you would expect that gold price to jump.

Good God, Mark Latham

Take A Chill Pill And Come Back Wittier Please

It's been a weird - mostly losing - month for Mark Latham. He was supposedly penning nasty remarks from a fake/anonymous cyber-identity. In common parlance, he was indulging in some sock-puppetry. When he was found out, he had to part ways with the AFR where he was a columnist. A lot of people are down on Mark Latham for all sorts of reasons so he is not a popular cause to back. You could easily argue (maybe not even argue, rather, simply state) that he was not a great cause even when he was going up against John Howard in 2004. Not only did he lose big in that election, he lost his footing in the world of Federal politics and scurried home to be a stay-at-home dad.

Since then, he's been the go to guy for acerbic take downs of politics-of-the-day. On any given day he would be dishing out commentary on just how awful these people were, regardless of party affiliation. Then he ran into some trouble dealing with feminists and couldn't quite contain himself.

It's quite strange just how much his own side of politics reviles him so much. It's almost unfair. There was time in the late 1990s when John Howard was trouncing both Kim Beasley and Simon Crean that  it was clear that the ALP needed new policy ideas beyond the old protectionist, Union-driven rhetoric. He even fit a kind of ALP identikit. He was university educated, but from the Western Suburbs. He was seamlessly the product of Gough Whitlam's many reforms, and came to Parliament with a lot of ideas. He was part policy wonk and ideological warrior. Long before he became the Go-to-Guy for acerbic take down commentaries, he was the Go-to-Guy for intelligent progressive policy alternatives to the Thatcherism-Lite of John Howard's rule.

That's just a long caveat to say, yes I voted for him, and the ALP in 2004, and I have few regrets for doing so. If anything I'd castigate the electorate who chose to stick with Howard out of fear of the future. It can be a very stupid country with a stupid electorate at some times. Just look at 2013 that gave us the Abbott Government. The point being, there was a time the ALP needed this man. Now that things have gone horribly wrong, they may yet need this man; but he keeps disqualifying himself in the public view, from being that man.

Mr Latham told the audience he had taken pride in researching everything he wrote in the now-defunct column and no error had ever been found. 

"None of these left feminist activists went to the Press Council to complain and seek any correction for anything I said that was inaccurate," he said. 

He said there was now no outer suburban columnists in the Australian media with the last one - himself - now gone. But he said he would continue to express his opinions, but now unfiltered of the niceties of the Financial Review.

He said class politics was alive in Australia and while people had been happy with his past criticism of Labor power brokers, action to kick him off the paper started when he began "rousing the rich girls". 

Mr Latham went on to say the problem with the "left feminist elite" was that criticism was seen as being derogatory. 

"I am such a big misogynist that I decided I am out of politics, I'd stay at home to look after the children and support my wife's law career," Mr Latham said.
Mr Latham's address at the festival was supposed to have been on whether former politicians could write objectively on politics. Later in the talk, as the temperature in the room cooled a little, he spoke more clearly about being a stay at home dad, Tony Abbott and politics more broadly. 

At one point he revealed he had lunch in Liverpool, Sydney with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in early last year to discuss a range of policy issues. He added he helped write some of Mr Shorten's budget reply that year, but there had been no more contact from mid-2014. 

After the event the official Twitter account of the Melbourne Writers Festival said: "We're disappointed in Mark Latham's #MWF15 appearance today. Not the respectful conversation we value."

And more's the shame really. He has a point to make but it is so nuanced it's not getting past the static of the knee-jerk press. The hard left feminists detest Mark Latham for being so blokey, they suspect he is centre-right in political alignment, disguising himself as a leftist. A lot of people are projecting negative notions at Mark Latham and quite honestly, I think they're more revealing of the accusers than the accused.

One imagines that at this point in his life where he's no longer running for office, Mark Latham would rather serve up his contempt unvarnished.  And so it's become a weird media spectacle where people are ganging up on Mark Latham for what he is not - a contrite sensitive new age feminist - instead of the proud bloke with progressive politics from the western suburbs of Sydney. And Mark Latham to his discredit, fires back. His critics decry him for not being smooth like Kevin Rudd or not being a woman like Julia Gillard, or a winner like Paul Keating or political dynast like Kim Beazley. They accuse him of being crass and a misogynist as if these things are defining characteristic of the man. And that's from his own side of politics! 

It's sad that the caricature of Mark Latham has reduced him to some kind of boofhead-of-politics. I'm sure the right in this country take great delight in his fall, because it validates their victory in 2004. A decade on, all it does it prove just how negative is the politics in this country. Put simply, we are far worse off. 

Mark Latham for his part, really needs to go quiet for a while and sort out his PR. This brawling commentary persona simply makes him look worse than he ever needs to. 

Movie Doubles - 'Kingsman: The Secret Service' & 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'

The Spy Movie Shoot Out

It's been a long time since the height of the Cold War that we've found ourselves surrounded by an oversupply of Spy genre material. The ever-so-serious incarnation of James Bond movies with Daniel Craig is going to hit us with 'Spectre' sometime soon. The whole re-booted, retooled, re-designed and re-modelled vibe of the Daniel Craig Bond Movies has in a sense opened the door to a reinvestigation of just what the hell Ian Fleming was on about.

'Kingsman' comes from the humble pages of a comic book, while 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.' is a reboot of an old 1960s TV series. Neither have terribly highbrow origins. If anything they have lowbrow original, much lower than the pot-boiler airport-novella original of James Bond himself. Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuriyakin were indeed parodic figures to the ur-text of Bond. The 'Kingsman' then is like a syncretic re-imaging of the whole genre.

Cool Britannia Struts Its Stuff

Of the two films, 'Kingsman' is far more aligned with the Britishness of the spy genre, and in particular the Bond oeuvre. Through the energetic, youth-market driven frenzy of its stylings, 'Kinsmen' harks back to a Bond who is an Etonian, and ex-Military. And so, Colin Firth gives us his first and possibly last action hero in Agent Galahad. Gone are the rigid reticence of the Mr. Darcys he has played in his career, and in its stead is a high octane super spy, who is trying to pay off a debt.

'The Man From Uncle' also features Hugh Grant, doing a turn as a dapper-but-dour MI6 man - somewhere between the earnestness of 'Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy' and the nerdy-charming bookshop owner in 'Notting Hill' helping Julia Roberts through her submarine script. The casual irony and sarcasm in the face of danger is the hallmark of the British spy genre, and he does not disappoint. And while Henry Cavill plats Napoleon Solo, an art-thief-turned CIA Agent, there is something of the Englishman peeping through his performance. America is simply not all that big in this film.

In both films, it is a given that the British schtick kicks butt. That has to be a tacit nod to Ian Fleming via James Bond.

Dodgy Class Politics

Of course, the problem with Britain is the pernicious class system that keeps on dividing the haves from the have nots. It's hard to escape and immensely oppressive at every turn. If anything would push one towards a desire for the Marxist Revolution, it just might be the class system as deployed in the UK. 'Kinsmen' overtly tries to cross the divide in many ways but the problem lies in the fact that the only way the divide can be crossed is for the lower class to adopt the trappings - and therefore the bullshit - of the upper class.

The working class as portrayed in this film, is so obviously lacking in the kind of virtue required to become a secret spy. Small-minded, ignorant and very unworldly, the working class bumble around to present a backdrop of misery for Eggsy. Even though he identifies with his family and its place in the continuum of working class life, the film couches things in such as ay as to discredit his allegiance to his class. As Eggsy rightly observes, it is 'My Fair Lady' - and it it comes all of the class warfare George Bernard Shaw envisaged.

It's troubling to see that the rebellious youth is in the end, inculcated into the ways of the upper class as a prerequisite to being a super agent. Some of the rather less palatable toffs are shown the door along the way, but ultimately Eggsy has to join them rather than beat them. The trope is repeated several times in the film, and his ultimate confirmation as a secret spy lies in the emulation of Colin Firth's Harry.

'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.' is a lot more egalitarian in its view of class. Apart from Hugh Grant's character Waverly who condescends mightily to Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuriyakin equally because being American and Russian is simultaneously much worse even than being a working class Brit. After all if you are British working class, thefts that could be said of you is that you're British.  What possible hope is there for an American and a Russian?

Still, Kuriyakin is of the working class in Russia, while Solo's origin is a common thief with loftier targets. They don't have to lose their class origins to be better men; they have to rely on them greatly to get them through. It's not much of an affirmation, but it is much more egalitarian than the need to join the upper class before being any good in 'Kingsman'.

What Kind Of Villain Is That?

One of the best observation made by any film critic is the one that points out James Bond never actually goes any where dangerous. it's not as if he's out there in say, Baghdad during the occupation or Kabul as the bombs go off. He is instead going to places with gorgeous beaches, child cocktail drinks, beautifully furnished casinos with gorges women in dress gowns. And so it is with 'Kingsman' where the ultimate villain Richmond Valentine played by Samuel Jackson turns out to be a movie mogul turned apocalypse engineer. Funnier still, Richmond is fully aware of how villains behave in Bond movies, and is determined not to follow suit.

The villains always bring out the camp inBond movies and this is no exception with 'Kingsman' which came into being marinated in the Ian Fleming oeuvre. Samuel L Jackson's Richmond Valentine is ridiculously sensitive to bloodshed while sporting an outrageous lisp. It evokes Mike Tyson (and his incongruous apathy for birds) while also taking big stabs at tech giant Steve Jobs. When the villain gets as camp as Richmond, you get the feeling that the writers aren't really too worried about the world falling into their hands.

'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.' takes a different tack by placing the whole reboot in the 1960s. The bad guys are renegade Nazis, trying to get their hands on the bomb. Of course, being fascists, the bd guys operate out of Rome, and this gives the film ample opportunity to bask in the recreated glory of 60s Italian cinema as well. Then again, it does remind us of 'Hudson Hawk', another comedic action film where fascists stage their plans out of Rome. It's interesting how inevitably Rome interiors are predominantly hotel rooms. This may reflect the tourist experience of writers from abroad. Everybody sports the best Italian fashion, especially the villains.

In any case, neither film is the chief villain all that lethal or threatening. The dastardly plots of the villains in of themselves are meant to be seriously dangerous, but both films are so camp you rarely fear for the protagonists. The action becomes more of a pantomime rather than anything that is loaded with new meaning. We've seen all of this before- so much so 'U.N.C.L.E.' dispense with a crucial fight scene with a bunch slide-frame montages.

The problem for both films is that the violence crosses the border over into gratuitousness wit such abandon, it gets very hard to care about what's going on. Funny is a good thing, but too funny robs both films of gravitas. The tone wavers in both films, although 'Kingsman' is truer to its comic book original than 'U.N.C.L.E' is to its TV roots.

The Reimagined 1960s 

There is something magical about the 1960s being depicted on the screen today. I'll write another entry about it, but basically this instalment of 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.' shares with 'Mad Men' and incredible fetishistic love of the objects from the 1960s. The production design alone is worth the price of admission. Whiny consider what 'Goldfinger' and 'Dr. No' looked like, this instalment of 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E' gets you right into the ambience, the light, the texture of 1960s colour grades, the grain - but with very modern enhancements. The night sequences are delineated beautifully, and the day action sequences are right in line with the style of 1960s action movies.

It's an odd viewing experience because you sit there wondering if the 1960s really looked like it does on screen The truth is, it very well didn't, but we go along with it anyway because the production design is a tour de force of fetishism. In some ways it is the spy film we've wanted to see for a long time, where secret agents operate with the Cold War in the background, and with very much analogue technology. The limitations make for better story telling.

The past is an ever distant country, but these screen products offer a fantastic tour backing the recent past. it's modern enough to be modern history but just distant enough to bring out the different sensibilities that society has lost. The sexism and racism is good to have lost, but we also managed to lose elegance, style and poise. It's a good trade-off, but I'm sure nobody quite sees it as a trade-off. In a strange way the film posits the 1960s with the Cold War and fear of imminent nuclear armageddon was in fact the fun, innocent times. Maybe it's sardonic commentary of our contemporary world. Maybe it's just well observed, but the film certainly works very hard to charm us through the 1960s.

Armie Hammer as Illya Kuriyakin is also a stroke of genius bit of casting. Nobody does the earnest doofus better than Armie Hammer whose credits include the Winkelivi in 'Social Network' but also the Lone Ranger. It's hard to say he is a flat out leading man type but he is certainly versatile and funny. The earnest doofus of the Russian agent fits right in with the faux innocence of the Cold War.

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2015

When You Are Crap, The World Craps On You

167 bad polls in a row, would tell you something, most likely that you're not loved and you're not going to win.

Inside the Prime Minister's inner circle, they tell themselves that they can win the next election because Bill Shorten is so hopeless. 

They've told themselves that 166 times in a row; that's the number of consecutive polls since the government was ahead in any of them.That's counting all the surveys conducted by all six national pollsters, according to the research consultant John Stirton. 

With today's Fairfax Ipsos poll, they'll have to tell themselves once again, whistling past the graveyard for the 167th time. 

You have to go back 16 months, to a Newspoll in April 2014, to find any survey that put the government ahead. 

"I think the government is essentially stuck" in its long losing rut, says the Ipsos director, Fairfax pollster Jess Elgood. 

The closest Abbott came to breaking into winning territory was with its second budget, in May this year. 

The Coalition levelled with Labor on 50:50, on the election-deciding two-party preferred measure. 

"Its second budget was well received and its polling bumped up," says Elgood.

But three months on, we see that the budget was not an elevator to a higher level of support but a momentary appreciation. 

The electorate doesn't disagree with the Liberals' assessment of Shorten. The Labor leader's approval rating consistently has a minus sign in front of it. It's just that the people think Tony Abbott is even more hopeless. 

The really interesting thing there might be the run of one sentence paragraphs. Gotta love these subeditors out in New Zealand. :)

More seriously... it should be obvious by now that Abbott didn't really win in 2013 on any merit whatsoever except for the single fact that he wasn't from the ALP. It's getting to the point where Abbott's doing serious harm to the country. He might be doing things pleasing to the nut job right wing of the Coalition, but the more they insist on their crappy agenda, the more it locks the entire government into the electorally hated zone. And let's make no mistake, even the long-time Liberal voters in blue-ribbon seats hate Tony Abbott. They only vote Liberal because it's religion (and there's really no cure for that variety of stupid).

Of course, the obvious man with electoral appeal is exactly the man the right wing of the Coalition cannot abide, Malcolm Turnbull; which essentially duplicates - in mirror image - the problem of the Gillard Prime Ministership wherein the factional heads loved Julia Gillard, but she had minimal appeal outside of her base supporters. This allowed Kevin Rudd to stalk her leadership all the way - but the faction leaders hated Rudd too much to have the good sense to go back to him. And so, the right wing powerbrokers of the Liberal Party who continue to back Abbott might end up losing their seats. Worse still, it's threatening to take down swathes of rookie Liberal and National MPs who came to Canberra on Tony Abbott's coattails. These backbench will get restless about that sort of projection. It's the same calculations that brought about the Gillard downfall. It's hard to defy the gravity of 167 losing polls.

The worst thing then, might be to pretend that polls go up and polls go down. In the case of Tony Abbott, they've never gone up enough call 'up'.

More On Dyson Heydon, Partisan Warrior

Not that I was ever close to the possibility of becoming a Rhodes Scholar back in my day at Uni, the notion of becoming a Rhodes Scholar does carry a certain gravitas with it. Well, it did, until I got up closed personal with some of the people who became Rhodes Scholars and quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't on the basis of the kind of merit or character that normal, ordinary people would call merit or character. Certainly my day, which was the second half of the 1980s, it was abundantly clear that it was more a case of smarm than smarts, charm than marks, connections and patronage than merit or character. I won't name names - it would be boring to do so - but I will say I lost faith in the title long ago.

That Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar gets bandied about as if he were an ace guy on campus. I don't know. He was a decade before my time so it's hard to say for sure but I've long suspected that by the time Tony was handed his, this fine institution had been rendered weak-chinned-and-neutered. Today we find out that none other than Dyson Heydon was on the panel that handed Tony Abbott his Rhodes Scholarship.

Mr Heydon was part of the seven-member Rhodes Trust selection committee in NSW that in 1980 handed the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to the future prime minister, then a 23 year-old student politician at Sydney University.

Tony Abbott, some time before his fateful boxing match that damaged his brain

According to documents seen by Fairfax Media at the NSW state archives on Monday, the selection committee was chaired by former NSW Governor, Sir Roden Cutler and "Professor JD Heydon" was a member.

The emergence of the Rhodes scholarship connection sets the personal relationship between Mr Abbott and his hand-picked judge to lead the trade union royal commission back decades.

Which all goes to show, it was smarm, charm, connections and patronage.  The men might deny - as they must, and as is their wont - but as any reasonable person could surmise, Tony Abbott was nothing special:

In his 2012 essay Political Animal, journalist David Marr, recounts how Mr Abbott "impressed a panel of worthies chaired by the governor of NSW, Sir Roden Cutler". 

"For Anglophiles and rugby players, the Rho­des was died-and-gone-to-heaven time. Winners must be scholars fond of sport who display "moral force of character and instincts to lead". The award to Abbott came as a surprise, particularly to those who had seen him up close on the SRC. One jibe at the time was, 'second-grade footballer, third-rate academic and fourth-class politician.'," Marr wrote.

Some men know how to cheapen the most impregnable heights of Empire. That's our Tony - everything he touches turns out cheapened; even the Rhodes Scholarship, even the Prime Minister's office. In some ways it is remarkable that a man could be of such low character and not get noticed on the way to the highest of offices. But that's how patronage works - picking out the people who would continue your cultural prejudices. And really, that's the kind of miserable government we've got, thanks largely to Tony Abbott.

As for Dyson Heydon, it seems he was getting his back scratched nicely by getting this appointment to look into corruption in the Unions. A real a snout-in-the-trough appointment by Tony to repay an old debt. Merit and character be damned. 

Mac Bank Boss Calls Out Government, Government Wimps Out

It seems to happen every day these days that the Liberal Party's own supporting lobbies step forward and slam the government for its bad governance and absence of policy worth spit. This time it's Macquarie Bank, which must feel like friendly fire with a howitzer in the back. 

Kevin McCann, the chairman of Macquarie Group, says the state of policy in Canberra is so dispiriting he feels he has to say something, despite his wariness about entering the political debate. 

In rare public criticism of the government of the day, Mr McCann has called on the Abbott government to stop fighting so many policy battles at once and to try to focus on just two or three priority areas.

"I've always been reluctant as chairman of a large company to start lecturing politicians and the community about what they should do, but I think I'm reluctantly changing that," Mr McCann said on Monday.

"With no disrespect to [Treasurer] Joe Hockey or [Assistant Treasurer] Josh Frydenberg, policy seems to have fallen off the table in Canberra."

Which is, neither here nor there, on its own. This bit however is pretty telling:

Mr McCann said on Monday that the Abbott government was failing to take the public with them on crucial policy reform and they desperately need to construct a narrative the public will find believable. 

And he singled out the Commission of Audit report as an example of the way in which the government had bungled its political messaging over the last 12 months. 

"I think it was a mistake to have the Commission of Audit say the country was busted, because the community knew that we weren't busted," Mr McCann said. 

"Surely we've got budget issues, but at the moment the community [feels] 'we're doing okay, why do we have to go through all this pain?' We've got to stop lecturing these people, we've got to have conversations and we've got to build up support," he said.
Mr McCann was speaking at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's business leaders' summit, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. 

He was sharing a panel with Mr Frydenberg whom defended the government's reform efforts, saying it is unfair to say policy has fallen off the table.
"The question [is], how do we get [reforms] through Parliament?" Mr Frydenberg said to the audience. 

"Let's call a spade a spade. The Productivity Commission ... was tasked by us to produce a blueprint for reform in industrial relations. [But] before they had even released their interim report the unions had come out against it. 

"[You should] say to our political opponents, don't run scare campaigns on issues as important as IR before the report has even hit the desk."

Good God Josh Frydenberg! So that awful Productivity Commission report which was a wishlist of crazy rightwing wet dream fantasies was the blueprint, and now that the Unions got up in arms and opposed it, they don't feel like they can get it through? It's not as if it's - God forbid! - a hung Parliament. They have the majority in the Lower House and the Senate has always been the place where negotiations took place. Just because you don't have the skills, patience, brains or stomach to negotiate in good faith, doesn't mean Australia's somehow ungovernable. It means you are insufficient to the task. It means you're not competent, worthy or appropriate for the job. It means you should quit. 

The Circus In Canberra

The Political Caste Is Forming

I've written a couple of times here that student politics from the early 80s has been casting a long shadow over real adult politics. Turns out this is a view that's being shared by journalists who watch these people a lot closer than mere mug punters like we can do. Mrs. Pleiades sent in this link by an article by Guy Rundle.

With the appointment of Smith – who was Melbourne University Liberal Club president in the 1980s, before being hired as press secretary and eerie doppelganger to Peter Costello – we have reached the point where all the key roles in both chambers are occupied by former student politicians. These are people who have had almost no job but politics, who went from university scuffles into back offices and then onto government or opposition benches.

Tony Abbott cut his teeth and punched near women’s heads in the cockpit of Sydney University’s late Cold War politics in the 1970s. Bill Shorten rose through the ranks of the Melbourne student Labor Right in the 1980s. Christopher Pyne and opposition leader in the senate Penny Wong tangled at Adelaide University in the same period, and George Brandis floated round Liberal student politics in Queensland. One could find another half-dozen figures in the front ranks who took the same path: a fee-free degree leaving plenty of time for student politics, all-involving clashes for the spoils of office, culminating in the annual National Union of Students conference where enmities and alliances, now of decades’ standing, were put in place.

Among the journalists reporting on them, analysing them, are more than a few who edited or wrote for student newspapers, including this correspondent. Political, personal and ideological battles fought in the confines of cramped student union buildings, fluoro lights and beige floor tiles, the chemical reek of the paper’s bromide camera, meetings run by 20-year-olds with their own copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. It never occurred to me at the time that it was the adult world in miniature, as prologue, but so it is. 

Parliament House, that great disaster, exacerbates this, a student union writ large, self-contained and too far from anything else to make leaving during the day worthwhile. For two decades, this new political situation has been under construction. Now it is here. We have been ruled by political professionals for decades, of course, but even those who started early, such as Paul Keating, went through an entirely different process, in a wider world that was also more testing. What we have now is the bonsai version. And it shows in our politics. 

So it is always amusing to see journalists from this milieu talk about “the political class” as if they weren’t part of it. Or as if there were a class at all. “Class” suggests a social category, a group too broad to know one another. The people we are now ruled by constitute a political caste, quite a different thing – a group small enough for all the principals to know one another, have associations, obligation and affinities stretching back decades, and hidden from wider view.

And that, in a nutshell is the origin story of how our politics got to be so - how to put this politely - fucked up. The worst irony (as I've written before) is that these very people got up on the back from free education offered up by Whitlam, and now that they've found the trough into which they've firmly affixed their snouts, they're busy pulling up the ladders by making university education prohibitively expensive. Think about that for a moment. These people reaped the benefits of a decision, got into a career in politics on the back of this decision, profited by it greatly, and are now busily removing the road that gothic there so there will be no competition.

As Guy Rundle properly points out, this is a caste; these people all know each other from a long way back. And what will become of this caste is that it will create whole families of people who will now run for office in the future, benefited by the ancestral decision to go into politics on tieback of a free education in the small window it existed in time. We will be seeing the beneficiaries of a hereditary political caste, and they will be running our democracy in ever diminishing effectiveness. Which is what we've seen in older countries like England and France but also in Japan and Taiwan.

The recent airing of 'the Killing Season' illustrated how Tony Burke had no particular policy agenda but was willing to throw his lot behind Julia Gillard in order to unseat Kevin Rudd. There was no political principle involved, it was a nudge and a wink and time to round up the backbenchers. The cabinet knew less of what was going on until the coup was fait accompli. Did they oust Rudd because he was genuinely some kind of party outsider? Then who are the insiders? The insiders, as it turns out are these apparatchiks borne of student politics, the career politicos who fined being policy wonks but headed to Canberra for their big payday. It only made sense to machinate against Rudd if it meant a higher pay under Gillard and so they did. Tony Burke didn't spell it out, but it was always a nudge-and-a-wink with these people; and even in being interviewed, he didn't deny it.

They're not in to it for the power anymore. They're into it for the money that comes with power. They might not even care about the impact of the power they throw about in the process of grabbing the money. It's simply not about the policy or ideas. Just look at Sophie Mirabella who is desperately trying to get back in. It's not like she has any policy ideas; she's never had any worth a camel's spit. She just wants to get back in for the money and the perks. In some ways being a Parliamentarian might be the next gold rush, which explains the recent Senate vote which ushered in a candidate from allied (read, preference-swapping) micro-parties.

How does this thing play out in the short to mid-term? An interesting observation made by some pundits in the property sector some months back was that negative gearing because most of these politicians were themselves property investors and so were net beneficiaries. You can bet your bottom dollar that when most of them have paid off their mortgages on there properties, they will magically come to the conclusion that it is time to wind back negative gearing. This would be just one area where the interests of the politicians will speed right ahead of the interest of the economy or for that matter, this nation. And we wouldn't be able to accuse them of corruption because it's not corruption if everybody accepts the practice - an attitude we're discovering is prevalent and entrenched when it comes to perks.

In the mid-term, we will find that the policy wreck created by their collective indifference - and let's not mistake the mock outrage your see in question time as some kind of passionate display of ideas - which will ultimately drive this nation into a ditch. It's not that far off, especially given how quickly Andrew Robb is trying to sell us out to other nations with all these unfavourable 'Free Trade Agreements' that abdicate the sovereignty of our state.

In the long term, they will sell us out so much there won't be any decisions future Parliaments will be able to make. At that point it will become glaringly obvious, un-contestable and fact, that politics is indeed the entertainment branch of whatever rent-seeking-lobby du jour is running this country. And so, this kind of crony capitalist idiocy isn't going to stop even if the Liberals get rid of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister or if the people vote out the Coalition. The ALP will get right back in and it will just continue being a circus. We're really going to have to all get more involved politics (not less) if we're going to stem this tide.

Government By Disaster

...Of The Disastrous, By The Disastrous, For The Disastrous

What a day of pasting. If I were the media advisor for the Abbott Government, I'd suggest quitting while being far behind. It's a bit of a free-for-all in the Fairfax presses, slamming the government's performance every which way.

The first big one was Laura Tingle who is the politcs editor on the AFR, but her article made it on to the SMH website. (By the way, I understand SMH now also stands for "Shake My Head" in internet argot. There's a certain truth to that)

Bombing Syria. Messing with the constitution to get a political outcome on same sex-marriage. These are now the playthings of a prime minister so desperate, so out of control that he is overseeing the complete surrender of proper governance to day-to-day tactics. 

The problem is that it isn't even working for him. Every issue that is running in politics at present is highlighting the bitter divisions, or policy confusion, or both, within the government. Cabinet ministers are publicly brawling over the appropriate legal vehicle, and timing, for deciding the question of same-sex marriage. Attorney-General George Brandis dismissed Scott Morrison's suggestion that there should be a referendum, and was publicly backed by two other senior ministers. Six MPs indicated they would cross the floor to vote in favour of same-sex marriage. 

Coalition MPs recognise that Tony Abbott's suggestion this week that the issue of same-sex marriage issue should go to "the people" was a purely political gambit to get it off the agenda short-term, shore up his support with conservatives in the party room, and bury it all together long-term. 

But the glaring tactical flaws in this idea - the belief it would both stop the debate and could somehow stop same-sex marriage being an election issue - are so spectacular that even some of those close to Abbott are scathing. Then again, the Prime Minister is now at war with his own party. His tactics are as much directed at his colleagues as his political opponents. He was quite happy to allow a party room debate to take place that saw 16 of his ministers argue against his position on same-sex marriage. 

It's not just on issues of social policy, however, where things have gone off the rails. The government continues to announce policies that are long on columns of smoke, large in cost and short in detail.

And there's a good deal more there but the essential point is that this government has lost its way. Not only has it lost its way, it has traveled so far off the map that it can be likened to Whitlam's time in Government. But of course Whitlam's was a busy government trying to do too much at once. This one is exactly the opposite according to Mark Kenny:

Despite what used to be urgent debt and deficit crises, the 44th parliament has become notable more for its absence of urgency, its dearth of pressing business. That, and for being regularly derailed by controversies like Thursday's revelations of inadvertent political fundraising by the hand-picked trade union royal commissioner, Justice Dyson Heydon. 

True, some important legislation has been passed this term and plenty blocked, but hours this week alone, have been devoted to bloated speech-making about deceased former MPs and an uncontested motion commemorating the Gallipoli landings 100 years ago. Notwithstanding that non-government MPs have largely stopped contributing, the Gallipoli commemoration debate has wound on an on, its wordy importance helpfully filling the airy spaces and eating up time.   

So "crucial" is the debate about the 100th anniversary that even when news broke on Thursday, exposing Heydon's extra-curricular activities, Christopher Pyne opposed any suspension of proceedings to discuss it, pretty much on the grounds that the commemoration was of primary importance. 

Perhaps this is apt because this penchant for rear-view romanticism over current business feeds Australia's ongoing self-delusion. 

Indeed, our national character has long been framed by its curiously concocted Anzac legend. We are, we like to believe, a nation of iconoclasts, or as we might prefer to say, larrikins - good natured if disrespectful, egalitarian by instinct, inclined to challenge authority, suspicious of station and wealth, and above all, courageous. 

But how courageous really? And how genuinely egalitarian? The marriage equality challenge has revealed a woeful failure on both scores with fear of the future again emerging as the locomotive 'force majeure'. 

The country that will not consider changing its flag, cannot imagine constituting itself independently, and can no longer even discuss economic reform except by way of wild misrepresentation in the negative – think industrial relations, renewable energy, taxation, and the federation - has lost its bottle for social reform also.

And there is much more there. Kenny too thinks that the problem is that the government is too scared to face up to the future and so spends its time in abject denial of the changes it cannot control. 

Comparable countries have moved on marriage equality and done so under conservative governments. Think David Cameron's Britain, Stephen Harper's Canada, and John Key's New Zealand, not to mention predominantly Catholic Ireland. 

But not Australia. The famed social laboratory of the 19th and 20th centuries has become the laggard of the 21st. Scared, meek, backward-looking, gripped by polarisation and lumbered with a class of political leaders cowering against change.

They're pretty damning words - and that's just us talking about it as Australians. Turns out Peter Hartcher's been talking to some Kiwis, and they have offered some interesting insights:

The collective analysis of Key and his ministers, which came together over glasses of red that evening in Sydney, was two-fold. First, they saw that the Abbott government had no reform narrative. It had slogans, but no persuasive case.

Second, they concluded that it had no "political architecture" to manage the government. They were "puzzled about the absence of an architecture for conducting the business of government – how to take the backbench along with the executive, how to reach out to the crossbenches, how to connect with key constituencies", says a participant.

A glaring example the Kiwis remarked on – how could a political party whose support base is 50 per cent female have but one female member of cabinet?

In sum, Abbott was not equipped to carry the people or manage the government. These fundamental failures fated the government to fail. 

It was obvious to an experienced overseas leadership team a year and a half ago, and it's now glaringly, distressingly plain to all.

It's a little dramatic of Peter Hatcher to be writing that. Let's face it; if we exercised even a teensy-weensy bit of imagination back in say, - oh, I don't know - September 2013, it was glaringly obvious that Tony Abbott and his team were ill equipped to actually govern this country. Indeed Paul Keating even warned us saying "God help us, God help us all". It was glaringly obvious to most sane human beings of this nation, but not only did the Murdoch presses line up to shove this brain-damaged junkyard dog into the Prime Minsiter's office, most of the editors of the Fairfax Papers wrote they supported a change to this lot led by the brain-damaged ex-Oxofrd-pugilist. 

Since then it's been crappy policy enactments, one after the other; Sadistic treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boats? Sure. Wind back the carbon pricing mechanism that was working so well to cut emissions? Sure thing. Scream about a budget deficit problem like we're the next Greece? Why not? Worse, shittier NBN? Signature policy! Partisan ideologically driven budgets? Glorious! None of these moves are or were supported by the wider electorate - but they did it anyway, and they think they've done a good job.

And they wonder how they got into this mess.

Back to Laura Tingle who closed her piece with this bit:

If you hang around in Canberra long enough, you start to recognise the point where a government has become terminal, where the death spiral is irretrievable. It's got nothing to do with the polls, or leadership rumblings. 

It's the point where the sheer stupidity of its decisions is so obvious, so craven, so contradictory, that everyone involved - ministers, backbenchers, the opposition, the media, voters - just know it can't go on like this. 

Some would argue that most of the Whitlam government's time in office was like that. But the days when Malcolm Fraser warned voters their money was safer under the bed than it would be under a Labor government, the days of forged faxes under the Keating government, the days when John Howard pledged $9 billion of spending in just one campaign speech, when Kevin Rudd announced the moving of the Sydney naval base to Queensland, all smacked of that time when everyone knew all was lost. 

But with the exception of Whitlam, all these things happened with just days or weeks to go before polling day. 

We are as much as 12 months from the next election. Abbott's conservative supporters might not want to abandon him. Scott Morrison is clearly positioning as an alternative conservative candidate. 

But at some point the conservatives - and the Coalition more broadly - will have to decide not just whether they are prepared to lose an election, but whether they are prepared to have the Coalition's reputation for good government become likened in history to that of Whitlam's.

Tony Abbott certainly doesn't want to admit it, but the writing's on the wall. It's "game over" with nothing but the running down of the clock. As Tingle notes, it is amazing that there's 12months to go to the next election from this point in. It feels way more terminal than that. I'd be surprised if Tony Abbott was still Prime Minister in October. Just looking at these journos, it is clear there is a groundswell of a chorus in the community that wants Tony Abbott to go. The Liberal Party just isn't listening. That leaves us with the continued train-wreck-governance to carry on until the next election. 

When they said may you live in interesting times, I sure didn't expect it to be this kind of 'interesting'. 

More Stupidity - 13/Aug/2015

Impartiality? What Impartiality?

Just how stupid are these guys? Tony Abbott's 'front' for nosing around in union business looking for corruption is a point man, Judge Dyson Heydon. Now, without prejudice, here's what is says about being judge in the law books:

"Although active participation in or membership of a political party before appointment would not of itself justify an allegation of judicial bias or an appearance of bias, it is expected that, on appointment, a judge will sever all ties with political parties. An appearance of continuing ties, such as might occur by attendance at political gatherings, political fund raising events or through contributions to a political party, should be avoided."

So with that, we are given the news that Judge Heydon was going to be a keynote speaker at a Liberal Party fundraiser.

Mr Heydon was listed as the keynote speaker at the Sir Garfield Barwick Address on August 26 at the Castlereagh Boutique Hotel in Sydney. 

An invitation written on a Liberal Party letterhead obtained by Fairfax Media says the $80 cost should be made to the Liberal Party of Australia's NSW division. It also calls for donations if people are unable to attend.

"All proceeds from this event will be applied to state election campaigning," the invitation's fine print notes. 

A spokesman for Mr Heydon released a statement shortly before 11.30am saying he would now not deliver the address. 

"As early as 9.23am this morning (and prior to any media enquiry being received) he advised the organisers that 'if there was any possibility that the event could be described as a Liberal Party event he will be unable to give the address, at least whilst he is in the position of royal commissioner'."

Which is just as well, but by then the cat washout of the bag. This is the problem with this government - apart from the repeated acts of stupidity - they seem to have stuffed a lot of cats in lots of bags and they keep getting out. 

This is a remarkable own goal. They set up a commission to bully the unions. They put in a judge who is clearly a party sympathiser in charge (ignoring the conflict of interest). Then they invite him to speak at one of their own fundraiser, thus blowing his cover. What a fiasco. The ALP had no hand in this, and now whatever shred of credibility the stupid Royal Commission was holding on to has been blown away, exposing the naked partisan politics writhing like some exposed worm in the sun. 

You can't make this stuff up. You just can't.

Now the lawyers are saying the union officials who were forced to appear in front of this Royal Commission could sue the government. 

Patrick Keyzer, who's head of La Trobe University's law school, said he respected the former High Court judge, describing him as a "distinguished Australian jurist", but said there would be an obvious difficulty with a royal commissioner agreeing to speak at a fundraiser for the Liberal Party.

Labor and the Greens called for Mr Heydon to be removed as a commissioner. Mr Abbott refused, defending him as "beyond reproach."

"Before now [bias] wouldn't have been faintly arguable, but these circumstances may cause some parties before the commission to head for the books," Professor Keyzer an expert on public law said. 

While there was a "higher threshold" of evidence required to prove a royal commissioner has been biased compared to a sitting judge, Mr Keyzer agreed it was a "real possibility" that witnesses could argue Mr Dyson "has engaged in an activity which creates a reasonable apprehension of bias".

What a joke. I doubt they would sue the Royal Commission, but the mere fact that it could be suggested has essentially robbed the Royal Commission of any claims to impartiality. What's even funnier is Tony Abbott defending his judge-friend-partisan-warrior, just as he did with Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker of the House and we all know how that went. Does he have any political capital left to be mounting that defence on the judge's behalf? Will it wash? Does it wash? Does it pass the sniff test? 

Mark Kenny has written a piece saying the question has moved from if the farce willed to when it will end.

For Abbott, it is another decision gone wrong. Just as Bronwyn Bishop's demise was the maturation of a dud call made long before, Heydon's judicial appointment had been aggressively partisan from the beginning. 

Unless Heydon can come up with a compelling explanation for his involvement in the address, then any suggestion that he was unaware that he was participating in a Liberal Party fundraising event when he agreed to speak will be extremely hard to believe - a lot less so in fact than the conclusions and inferences he would be likely to draw from the evidence his inquiry adduces. 

Besides, what does such ignorance say for his inquisitorial prowess, and or for his attention to important administrative detail? 

Liberals worried about their leader's performance this week on same-sex marriage now have another problem to add to the list. 

What was it Abbott told his shell-shocked colleagues in the wake of the Bronwyn Bishop crisis? When we talk about jobs and the economy, we thrive.
Not much talk of that at present.

I'd be surprised if he's still Prime Minister at the end of October. 

View From The Couch - 13/Aug/2015

Double Dose of Chinese Reality

For two days in a row, the Chinese government devalued the Renminbi in what is seen as a currency war. Xi Jiping denied it was a currency war, but sometimes when you get punched in the face, you have to accept it's a fight even though the other guy denies it was a punch thrown in anger. The devaluation hit the AUD as one would expect seeing that we are a handful of economies that are seen to be largely commodity-driven. Indeed, Brazil might be the only other nation that is just as deeply dependent on commodity exports and specifically exporting them to China.

As it stands we saw the bourse drop in Australia, as well as seeing the AUD drop 1.3% before it regained some ground. The good news is that China's share market crash doesn't reflect the entire Chinese economy; much in the same way that the All-Ords does not reflect the entire Australian economy. The bad news is that taken as a whole, the collapse in the Chinese markets as well as the devaluation and the resultant drop in the AUD and the ASX are all part of the one big picture where by China is struggling to adjust to slowing growth.

China of course even denies it is doing the devaluations because of the slowing economy. If a government lies this much about what it is doing, do we ever trust it with any announcement? It's hard to say. There's a certainly level where if it talks like a duck and walks like a duck but denies it's a duck, you call it a duck at your own peril because it's a duck that's in charge of 1billion people of the planet, and you never know what might do with those numbers.

A quick look at Brazil suggests that this downturn in demand for its commodity exports as wells the devaluation of the Yuan indicates this is a terrible thing to have happened to Brazil, one year out from their staging of the Olympics. Iron ore, copper, oil are all falling. Even agricultural commodities are falling to 6 year lows and 7 year lows. Those figures have not been this bad since 2009 when the markets turned around thanks to Quantitative Easing by the US Fed. Naturally, Australia is not too far behind in being hit by investors because the income we thought we had coming from China doesn't seem to look like it's going to materialise. It's not a catastrophe yet - but as Rob Gordon asks, does "yet" mean we will eventually end up doing/witnessing/living the catastrophe?

On The Radio They Said...

I caught a snippet on the radio in Pleiades' car today. They were saying that as unemployment has gone up, so has personal loan defaults. The bank spokesperson also said so far loan defaults have not broken out amongst mortgage holders, but they are "keeping an eye on it". An interesting thing is happening with the banks: they are posting record profits on then hand, but they're also raising capital from their shareholders. That bring up the question - why?

Obviously Basel II means they have to have a certain amount of cash handy to withstand any shocks to the financial system, but it's also curious that ANZ, NAB and the CBA have all chosen to undertake the raising of capital this year. If nothing else, it telegraphs they are expecting trouble. If China really falters, then there will be deeper impacts to Australia's economy. Investors will run to the door. If that brings about a collapse in the property market in Australia...