View From The Couch - 05/Aug/2015

Just How Dumb Are These Guys? - Part 1

I've been saying for some time that the competence of this government is seriously under question. The way they bumble along from one dumb decision the next and the way they keep pandering to the donors of their party at the expense of the rest of the country can drive a man to drink. But you sort of expect all governments to have a level of competency that can be measured.

It turns out this might be the worst government for actually doing the governing bit, since Billy McMahon's ill-fated government the 1960s.

To date, the Abbott government has passed just 0.372 acts per day since it came to office, compared to 0.438 for the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments (and Gillard had to contend with minority government), 0.452 during John Howard's tenure, 0.476 for Paul Keating, 0.491 for Bob Hawke's governments, 0.481 for Malcolm Fraser, 0.472 for Gough Whitlam, and 0.436 for McMahon. Barring some unexpected burst of productivity in the latter half of this year, the Abbott government is on track to have the worst record for passing legislation since the late 1960s.

Legislative malaise may help explain why some key statistical indicators relating to health, education, poverty, Indigenous Australians, women's progress and home ownership, show the Abbott government has conspicuously failed to make progress. The Abbott government may have "stopped the boats" and repealed the carbon tax but these are not policy measures that have a demonstrably big impact upon the lives of ordinary Australians. 

The Abbott government's failure to implement so many of its own pre-election promises has contributed to a perception of it as an inefficient government. It has also experienced some very public reversals and botches on policy, including the Medicare co-payment, delaying payments for unemployed young people, cuts to the age pension, race discrimination law, jobseekers applying for 40 jobs a month, deregulation of higher education, and Tony Abbott's signature paid parental leave policy. 

The unexpectedly harsh budget of 2014 is likely go down in Australian political history as the worst received federal budget and especially because, unlike "horror" budgets of the past, all the pain inflicted didn't even achieve what it was intended to do – it didn't reduce the deficit. Gross debt jumped from $59 billion in June 2008 (or 5 per cent of GDP) to about $430 billion by June this year (26.3 per cent of GDP). The Commonwealth's debt-to-GDP ratio is now at the highest level since the ABS's quarterly records began nearly 30 years ago.

There's a term for such performance in sabermetrics. They call it 'below replacement level'; by which they mean there is a threshold above which good performance becomes significant, and below which the performance needs to be replaced by some fungible entity from the freely available pool of talent. In other words, if they sacked Tony Abbott and replaced him with a replacement level backbencher like Wyatt Roy, they may actually do better. 

Just How Dumb Are These Guys? - Part 2

The Abbott Government is trying to force through legislation that allows it to strip a dual national of their Australian citizenship if they are found to be terrorists. It's an ugly can of worms to begin with, and hardly something yucca justify logically; it's more of a "Fuck-you-you-Arab/Leb/Muslim/jiahdist-terrorist" move that attempts to bypass fairly fundamental rights Australian citizens have. Just how awful this bill is, has been revealed, and it makes for some hilarious reading.

Constitutional lawyer George Williams has described the Abbott government’s bill to strip citizenship from dual nationals as “one of the most poorly drafted” he has seen and warned it would catch many Australians who have “nothing to do with terrorism”. 

The bill, which aims to strip citizenship from dual nationals for taking up arms against Australia, removes “natural justice” rights and allows for no public notification for stripping citizenship from dual nationals, he said. 

“The first thing the person may know is when they get a knock on the door and in fact that’s probable if only because the authorities don’t have to alert a person beforehand,” Williams said.

“They may want the person to find out they’ve lost citizenship at the moment they are taken into immigration detention.”

Williams told the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security (PJCIS), which is examining the bill, that due to its poor drafting the Australian Citizenship Amendment was in “no fit state to be passed”.

So, in a rush to write this piece-of-shit bill, they've not done due diligence and thought things through and in the process created more problems for themselves that are not easily solved, nor are they entirely constitutional. 

Williams said while he was mindful of the need to deal with non-state actors involved in terrorism, the bill could revoke citizenship for dual nationals such as:

• a business person travelling to declared area to conduct “innocent business”,
• people who incite violence against other groups on the basis of race, such as those involved in the Cronulla riots,
• people who train others, even if they are unaware how the skills are used, such as computer teachers,
• the Red Cross providing humanitarian assistance in war zones, and
• those involved in minor property crimes such as graffiti artists or protestors “sitting in” on commonwealth property.

Williams said he had already been approached by lawyers asking advice on how dual national bill, introduced prior to the winter recess, could be challenged in the high court.
He said he was confident there was a strong case against bill on three grounds. That is, the “inescapable aspect” of the separation of powers, the removal of voting rights from dual nationals and the fact that the bill renders Australian dual citizens as “aliens” when, in his opinion, the court would not see Australian-born citizens as “aliens”.

 Clearly they can't make this work without taking a giant axe to the rule of law. The fact that they even thought this was viable tells you they're not really the full quid.