News That's Fit To Punt - 29/Sep/2015

Circular Quay Revamp

The Baird Government wants to drop some money on Circular Quay and its wharves. Naturally it wants to sell off some assets and privatise stuff. It also wants to breakup Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority and hive off  the various functions to various departments. Of course Mike Baird won't care if some jobs will be lost - because of course that's why a government privatises stuff - to carve off the barnacle state employees who could not be gotten rid of in any other way. 

Be that as it may, here's the article from the Shake-My-Head journal.  

"We're not going to make a decision that is not in the best economic interests of the state of NSW," Mr Perrottet said. 

The move is the latest push to privatise government assets perceived to be serving little public use and follows the announcement of a plan to convert historic government offices into a five-star hotel. 

As well as the properties owned by the government in Circular Quay are buildings currently operated by the Mercure and Four Seasons hotels at Darling Harbour and office space at Darling Park. 

Mr Perrottet said the plan would not the diminish heritage values of the area.
The plan coincides with the abolition of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, following a review of the agency. 

The organisation's functions and more than 100 of its staff will be transferred to other departments. 

The Premier said he expected most staff to be retained but would not categorically rule out job losses among bureaucrats. 

"The expectation is the vast majority of the roles will go to Government Property NSW," the Premier said. "We're trying to take away duplication and inefficiency in government."

Damn the SMH and its one sentence paragraphs. The picture that's emerging is that the NSW Government wants to sell off some prime real estate before the bubble pops. 

Property Bubble Isn't Ready To Pop.

I know we've been told there isn't a Property Bubble, but if there happened to be a Bubble, it's not yet ready to pop. You can go to the link and read through it but it won't tell you anything they haven't told you before. I'm sure it's all fine as long as China is sort of doing somewhere in the vicinity of "Business-As-Usual". 

Of course, China might not be doing such a thing nor doing well as hoped. Try this article for size:

On Friday, in a move that would make even Hewlett-Packard's Meg Whitman blush, Harbin-based Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group, or Longmay Group, the biggest met coal miner in northeast China which has been struggling to reduce massive losses in recent months as a result of the commodity collapse, just confirmed China's "hard-landing" has arrived when it announced on its website it would cut 100,000 jobs or 40% of its entire 240,000-strong labor force. 

Impacted by the slump in coal prices, the group saw its loss over January-August surged more than 1.1 billion yuan ($17.2 million) from the year before. In the first half of 2015, the group closed eight coking coal mines most of which had approached the end of their mining lives, due to poor production margins amid bleak sales. 

Chaiman of the group Wang Zhikui said the job losses were a way of helping the company "stop bleeding." The heavily-indebted company also plans to sell its non-coal related businesses to help pay off its debts, said Wang. The State-owned mining group has subsidiaries in Jixi, Hegang, Shuangyashan and Qitaihe in Heilongjiang province, which account for about half the region's coal production.

That's a lot of people to go lose their jobs in one hit. 

Just to give you a feel for what 100,000 in one fell swoop means, Australia's unemployment figure is something like 600,000. All the people losing their jobs in the collective withdrawal of car manufacturing from Australia is estimated to be about 20,000-30,000.

Maybe more eye-opening is the fact that the coal miners of the world are still profitable, even more so than the Chinese coal mining industry that hangs on cheap labour, despite the total devastation of commodity prices this year.

Of course, the good Tylers at Zero Hedge might be right: China might be heading straight into a hard landing. In which case there will be ramifications for Australia, and amongst the things it might hit would be that Property Bubble that everybody is pretending it's not a bubble. Let's face it, when the money stops flowing in China, it's going to stop flowing all the way out here and into the property market.

Oh, and look, here comes October, Month of Crashes!

Phoenix-ing Companies Under Scrutiny, Again

It took a long while but the Federal Government is finally on to the scourge of phoenix-ing companies.

At least $3 billion of debts are being shirked in the construction industry due to the insidious and illegal practice of phoenix activity, a Senate inquiry has heard. 

So-called phoenix companies are businesses that collapse one day with a pile of debts then rise from the ashes with the same assets and customers to avoid their bills.
They rip people off, go broke and emerge debt-free. It is a practice that has become the scourge of the construction industry. 

In the words of the Australian Taxation Office in a submission to the Senate: "Where such insolvencies result from intentional or systematic planning to become insolvent, we see this as a serious threat to the integrity of our financial, employment, regulatory, taxation and superannuation systems – harming both these creditors and all Australians."

It's not a practice limited to the construction industry. I've seeing a few times in the events business and film business. It's too easy to do and there's really no viable recourse if you are a creditor. Most small businesses can't go to court over debts of five figures. But swallowing losses of five figures to such 'enterprises' is debilitating. If it's six figures, it's still prohibitive to down tools and go to court and hope to win - if you lose, it's a double whammy. And so the practice continues with impunity.

The latest attempt to tackle the problem was back in 2012 when directors were made personally liable for the debts of the phoenix company in relation to non-payment of amounts withheld from employees' wages and super. 

To date, the various inquiries and changes to the law and ATO and ASIC crackdowns have had little impact. 

What is most concerning is it is getting worse.

That's not exactly pleasing to our eye to be reading that last line.

Somebody Leaned On This Guy

Back in late April, Tim Williams, the Chief Executive of Committee for Sydney came out swinging against the toll-road-centric road-buildit agenda that is becoming the norm for transportation  planning in NSW.

Dr Williams, whose organisation's members include major construction, finance and engineering firms, also called on the government to release the business cases for the new mega projects being proposed for Sydney which, to its detriment, remained in the thrall of road builders.

"There is no strategic or structural planner of Sydney at this point of time outside of RMS [Roads and Maritime Services]," Dr Williams told the Halloran Trust event at the university. 

"RMS is the structural planner for Sydney," Dr Williams said, before quoting George Orwell to the effect that Sydney was "a family with the wrong members in control".

"I'm sorry to have to say it but I think it is, I think we've got problems," he said. "I think in its current form, RMS needs to be reconstructed."

Dr Williams' presentation largely reflected familiar themes advanced by transport academics and urban planners. As cities became denser, governments needed to fit them with better public transport, cycling and walking facilities, rather than focusing on new motorways that encourage sprawl and car use. 

But the intervention is significant because it is rare for a big business group to press these points. Members of the Committee for Sydney include major engineering firms like Arup​ and AECOM, as well as finance companies like Macquarie Group, Westpac and ANZ. 

"We are in the presence of another road transport upheaval in this city," Dr Williams said, while showing a slide of the $15 billion WestConnex motorway and its proposed extensions to the north and south. 

"Which, by the way, we are not seeing in any other cities in the world," he said. "And that's the issue – many other cities in the world are taking their highway capacity out and I'm just wondering, what is so different about the Australian city experience that means that they're wrong and we are right? 

"We think this is a congestion-busting proposition and nowhere in Christendom does that appear to be the case – so what's going on?"

He kind of spelled out the common sense problems of just bunging in more toll-roads as the answer Sydney's transportation problem.

Of course, today we read this:

The chief executive of business lobby group the Committee for Sydney has apologised for his candid criticism of Sydney's toll-road agenda. 

Tim Williams used a recent presentation at Sydney University to argue the city needed a "public transport revolution" and that "all sides" of politics had got it wrong on transport planning. 

The criticism was powerful and unusual because of Mr Williams' position as head of an organisation that represents firms that might expect to benefit from the construction of new motorways, and particularly the $15 billion WestConnex project. 

But in a note to members this week, as well as in a letter to the Herald, Dr Williams backed away from the criticism, saying it reflected only his personal views.

"Some members will be aware that during an unscripted speech I recently gave at Sydney University I uncharacteristically commented from a personal perspective and went beyond the formal position of the Committee without clarifying I was doing so," Dr Williams wrote in a note. 

"I have apologised to all partners and to my board who have been very magnanimous although concerned for 'normal service to be resumed'," he wrote.
"I also apologise to members for this untypical event." 

Dr Williams' swift backdown on the presentation - which he supported with 95 slides - underlines the sensitivities around the WestConnex project, which at 33 kilometres is the largest motorway proposal in the country.

And in case you couldn't tell, that's what a guy who got leaned on to shut-the-fuck-up-and-get-with-the-program, says. You speak the truth, they threaten to take your livelihood away and so you recant.
That's how Room 101 works in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' :"Under the spreading Chestnut Tree, I sold you and you sold me". It's kind of crazy that the powers-that-be think this makes the original speech not stand.

Oh by the way, if you click on the 95 slides link in the quoted bit above, it goes to a 404 Error page. Yes, they've taken down the 95 slides that show how fucked WestConnex was, so you won't see it. it has been made a non-article, because it never happened. Dr Tim Williams is lucky he wasn't made into a non-person and erased from history. These bastards are working hard to ram WestConnex through. They're not taking any prisoners and they don't care who they destroy along the way. It's a disgusting collusion between the state and private enterprise.

'Narcos' - Season 1

Wherefore Art Thou, Pablo Escobar?


Now, there's a name from the 80s: Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin Cocaine Cartel. If you wanted the archetypal Columbian Drug Lord, Pablo Escobar was your man. Since he was shot dead in 1993, his fame has receded into the history books as a footnote but while he was around in the 1980s, he defined the sort of drug-cartel-chic of white runners, tracksuit pants and briefcase look.

A whole series about the 1980s Columbian Drug Cartel from their point of view is as unlikely as anything you're likely to see, but here goes Netflix trying to give us a series that shows Pablo Escobar's story. It is radical and weird, edgy and strange, absurd and wondrous, all rolled into one. It is completely unlike this thing here.

Spoiler Alert here.

What's Good About It

For a while during the 1980s, the main plot of many a detective drama consisted of drug busts involving cocaine importation from Columbia. A lot of the time, the busts would consist of tens of kilograms of the substance being worth millions. That was the nominal range of busts. The reality of the scale of the importation is brought to the forefront and it is clear that busting some smuggling operations for mere tens of kilograms was chicken feed next to the metric tons of the stuff that was being moved into the USA, and consumed. The figures are simply staggering.

Central to all of this is a narrative of how the cocaine 'trade' came about and how Pablo Escobar essentially fell into the role of drug lord, merely by being the right kind of smuggler. The complexity of the character and his circumstance are explored in great depth and it is all utterly fascinating. Some of the detail leaves you astounded that the legendary drug lord was in many ways quite the family man, and had aspirations in politics.

Wagner Moura who plays Pablo Escobar is a stand out that holds the series together. With a weird piggy charm and a slouched posture and protruding belly, he is nobody's idea of a dashing crime figure. Maura's Escobar is more avuncular and restrained compared to the imagined figure across so many movies, while also dealing out tremendous violence with an unchanging creepy calmness. He was most certainly a very strange man, and that comes to life in this series.  What's truly scary about the portrayal is that we recognise our everyday humdrum in his, juxtaposed with the power that money brings. It was a lot of money, and so it was a lot of power that distorted the nation of Columbia's politics to the core.

What's Bad About It

The narrative is a little spotty and the story jumps through time at irregular intervals. Pacing is a major issue. You get the feeling for Pablo's ascent to being a powerful player in Columbia, but sometimes the jumps forward in time are too radical.

The series also loses touch quickly with the mechanics of the drug manufacturing and smuggling operation in the second half season 1, but presumably this stuff was being made ever faster in greater volume. While the narrator talks the numbers, we don't get to see the mind-numbing volumes being shipped to America. By extension, the series shirks from illustrating the problem with the War on Drugs back home in America and how the US agencies utterly failed to address the size of the demand for cocaine.

We're also trying to understand the Medellin cartel from an American point of view, in having the show narrated by the US DEA agent. The cultural prejudices come thick and fast, but some times you think they're missing something about the whole rise of Pablo Escobar, and how much support he had from poor people.

What's Interesting About It

The thing about Columbia is that it is a smallish country of 20-odd million people in the 1980s. It's about the same population as Australia but the poverty is much worse. The 'Oligarchs' as Pablo calls them are entrenched interests of the ruling elite, who preside over a nation in dire poverty. Then along comes the cocaine trade, and suddenly money floods into this country in a way that not even the financial system can handle. US$60 billion is simply too much to be laundered so they end up having to bury the cash. It is as if out of nowhere, a company the size of BHP manifested itself out of this white powder; and the biggest banks about the size of the Bendigo Bank today.

Looked at another way, it is as if all of a sudden, the USA decided to snort the monetary equivalent of BHP's entire iron ore and coal haul every year. This is phenomenal amount of money that simply dropped itself into the laps of small time smugglers who suddenly grew into the largest industry in Central America. The United States Government meanwhile was spending a lot of money on law enforcement in their 'War on Drugs', but clearly it had very little grip on the size of this demand. If the demand for drugs is big enough, it becomes a social issue; if the supply is big enough to meet the demand, then it becomes an economic issue.

At the crux of the drama is that Pablo wants to participate in the political process, but he is shown the door by the ancien regime. So he sets about shaking the foundation of the country through the sheer weight of money at his disposal. With enough money, just about anybody can be bought. The cocaine trade's annual turn over was so huge, it dwarfed any other industry in the nation. Almost by default, the drug cartels became the greatest export industry of Columbia as well as its biggest rent-seeking lobby.

The War On Drugs 

Whether it was heroin that crept into American life through the Vietnam War, or Cocaine that washed through America from Latin America, in each instance the US Government failed to anticipate just how big the problem was and what the nature of the problem happened to be. If it were simply about stopping drug use, there was too much emphasis on busts of users and low level dealers to actually get a view of even an outline on the problem. If they really wanted there to be less drugs in society, they had to address the explosive demand in another way than arresting them and throwing them in to jail.

Instead the DEA sent 2 agents to Columbia, ostensibly to help local police make some arrests, which makes about as much sense as sending 2 people to stop Sauron. Even if in their luckiest moment, should they have stopped Pablo Escobar and his entire Medellin Cartel, there was so much demand for cocaine that somebody was going to step into the breach and keep supplying that demand.

It's not a very popular thing to say it, but on some level, the government has no business intervening in how people choose to entertain themselves. Drugs are stigmatised because of the social problems a drug habit will engender, but it fails to address how much of that stigmatism creates the social problem. With whatever 'vice' there is, prohibition of the vice only pushes it underground, and in the underground is exactly where organised crime flourishes. In one sense, Pablo Escobar comes to prominence exactly because the USA insists on the War on Drugs policy. That dynamic is never clearer than when Escobar is able to dictate the terms of his surrender. Escobar is an American problem that happens to reside in Columbia. The Columbian state is essentially unable to deal with the American problem precisely because it wishes not to be co-opted into America itself.

If the US Government dislikes the Pablo Escobars of this world, it has an interest in trying to figure out a way of cutting demand.

Communism On The Wane

In the series, the US military and CIA are rabidly worried about the minuscule terror threat of communist guerrillas while the massive threat of the Medellin Cartel sits under their noses. The communist guerrillas they are pursuing in the jungles appear to be much smaller fry than than the cartel.

The 1980s of course saw the decline and demise of communism. You can see it in the relative irrelevance of communist slogans and ideological positions relative to the government backed by the military and the Catholic Church. In fact the M-19 - while dangerous - appear woefully inadequate to changing society let alone ushering in a revolution.

The cartel drug money on the other hand lends support to Pablo Escobar's election campaign. It suggests that change in society doesn't come from ideas, it comes from changes in flows of capital. Escobar certainly puts a bullet into Marx and Engels. Columbia was a microcosm of how Reaganomic over-spending essentially blew out Communism and its claims to the future. By 1989 the Berlin Wall came down but the dawning reality of the end of Soviet communism was presaged in the jungles of Columbia in the preceding decade. You could almost say it wasn't about labour; it was about the pursuit of physical pleasures.

In one sense, the people cannot join the communists because it compels them to go way outside of the law and end up camping in the jungle getting hunted down by the government. The M-19 and its ilk were puny and bad persuaders with a bad product. Sex, Drugs and Football, was a much more compelling horizon to pursue for the people around the world.

Columbia, Home Of Magic Realism

At one point the narrator touches upon the fact that Columbia is home to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and magic realism. There certainly is something very magic-realism about the landscape in which the characters move, whether it be the jungles or mountains or across the bridges and through the barrio. Somewhere in the country side is a vision of Macondo in this landscape, that peeps through ever so often. Even the bizarre rise and fall of Pablo Escobar could have been better narrated with the aesthetic irony infused in Marquez's writing and it might have been better. There are certainly, horrors aplenty that need transmogrification through art and language.

In 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', there is a long drought that is then broken with a long rainfall. The appearance of cocaine in the landscape and these people has a similar quality of 'happening'. The absurd juxtaposition of international smuggling of drugs - and the money that comes with it - with the people who are like the simple farmers in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' makes for tremendous viewing. You can almost imagine Marquez's version of the narrative.

The other part that cannot go without mentioning is just how deep-seated corruption is in Columbia, because of the hold of power by the'Oligarchs'. Because Columbian society in the 1980s had immense disparity in wealth and practically zero social mobility, the society resembled a zero-sum game between the haves and have nots. The appearance of vast quantities of drug money of course shakes this up significantly, but more importantly it exposes why officials were corrupt in Columbia. It would have been too easy to bribe anybody given how little money there was in society. The real threat of Escobar wasn't just that the was a drug trafficker. It was that he was capable of buying out the entire economy of Columbia.

The World As We Find It

It's a strange feeling to watch a series that is at once history but an epoch you lived through. There was no cocaine in my orbit at any pointing time, so it strikes me as a kind of drug arcana that all this was taking place in the 80s and 90s. Still, if you parse through the dramatisation and the editorialising narration, you get the picture of a man who took the world as he found it.

Why do some people become famous? Why do some become infamous? Why do some people ever emerge at all, and others, never emerge? It's one of the interesting aspects to the story, that just at the moment history needed somebody to be the man to front the cocaine trade, there was a smuggler who was ready and able to be that man. Some of it might have been Darwinian section for the most brutal most determined man, but by this account, he was exactly the man to rise to the occasion. It's an amazing thing; he was as right as Bill Clinton was for the Presidency in 1992, or Derek Jeter was, to don a single digit for the Yankees and become a Hall of Fame ball player. The perfect fit, for the perfect role at the perfect time. It's a weird thing about superstardom, and make no mistake Pablo Escobar was his own kind of superstar.

You do wonder how many people in history simply found the opportunity open up before their eyes and were able to capitalise on it. There is no explaining it, which is why we watch in fascination.

View From The Couch - 27/Sep/2015

Does Privatisation Actually Work For The Citizen At All?

Sometimes I think privatisation of government monopolies gets discussed in a vacuum, free of context so all anybody has to do is fling figures around the abstract and settle on a deal in the abstract, thus letting the chips where they may fall in reality, far from the negotiating room. So far, since the late 1990s when NSW embarked on allowing competition in the marketplace for electricity billings, it has contributed to condition whereby we seem to be getting charged more, thanks to the gold plating going on with the electric companies. this has led to the Australian Competition Tribunal to step in and overturning a decision by the electricity price regulator that would have allowed the electricity price to group even more. Now, that intervention is being contested with a phalanx lawyers, trying to get back to charging whatever the hell they like.

A phalanx of about 40 lawyers representing electricity networks across Australia are attempting to convince three men – the members of the Australian Competition Tribunal – to overturn a decision by the electricity price regulator which would have rewarded NSW households with a $100 to $300 a year saving on their power bills. 

And get this: because the electricity networks in some states are publicly owned, it is taxpayers who will pick up the tab for this legal free-for-all – rumoured to be as high as $90 million – which is also aimed at getting them to pay higher bills. Other states, where the networks are privately owned will also see the effects over time. 

Also present in the room are two barristers for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre which with a modest annual budget of $3 million, is mounting the case consumers should pay even less than the regulator's edict. 

The case has emerged as a fascinating window into just how far our economy strays from the free market ideal. 

Electricity networks are, of course, natural monopolies.
In a competitive market, firms are forced to operate efficiently, and at lowest cost, lest their customers flee to their competitors. 

Without this disciplinary force of a free market, electricity networks require a regulator to hold them to account, impose efficient pricing and keep prices as low as possible for consumers. 

Every four years, the Australian Energy Regulator determines how much electricity networks can charge customers, based on what an "efficient and prudent" business would need to charge in order to cover its costs and make a profit.
Networks costs make up about half your household bill.

And there you have it - the very picture of how the electricity industry is one big rent-seeking enterprise, trying to set prices not by any relationship to the market but by how much it can gouge. It kind of puts to rest any notion that there is any kind competition going on; instead is abundantly clear that it is yet another oligopoly that has the power to set prices any which way it likes. Worse still, the current Coalition Government has created conditions whereby there is minimal investment in renewable energy, so things quickly reduce to minimal choices for the consumer, and every opportunity to collude and set any price they like, for the electric companies.

Compounding the problem further still is the desire by the NSW Government to lease out the poles and wires so they can "build more infrastructure" with the proceeds. So it goes without saying that the NSW Government wants to be able to gouge lots of money so that it looks good on the bottom line for investors to pay up for the poles and wires. Once it goes private, the private ownership will do everything in its power to push up prices to what the market will bear. Again, it is not clear how privatisation actually helps the public. 

It is understandable that as a government monopoly, it is ripe for a sell-off and that the proceeds from the sale are desirable. It just doesn't seem to fulfil the bit where the government is supposed to serve all of its people, and not just the wealthy private interests. 

What Infrastructure? WasteCONnex!?

There's a certain element of predictability about what the state government of NSW does when it comes to infrastructure - it basically builds big budget toll roads first and foremost, and not much of anything else. They do this because General Construction forms a vast rent-seeking lobby whereby they can promise jobs as well as the seeming appearance of progress, by building vast concrete structures. What's truly amazing about the WestConnex project underway is that it is being built without a business case for which to answer. In other words, the government is promising to spend oodles of money on project without really knowing if it is going to be productive or useful, but it's insisting on doing so because the people who stand to make lots of money at the public's expense are their friends. The Government is minimally interested in the collateral damage it is likely to cause, and all of it is centred around the notion that toll roads are good things. 

I won't go into my usual complaint that the nepotism and crony-capitalism is a terrible thing (it is); I won't go into my rant about how medieval and anti-progressive toll roads are in concept (they are); or how self-serving the arguments are in favour of these things (God bless Adam Smith and self-interest); but I do want to point at the urban sprawl these developments are encouraging.

The NSW Government is saying, with its semaphore of policies, "go live out in the boonies 50km away from you jobs. We'll put in toll roads so you can pay $100 a week to go to and home from your jobs. But you get a backyard in a cookie-cutter suburb designed by the lowest IQ architects and town planners we could find." And they're not in the least bit ashamed that this is happening because hey, the electorate is so stupid they think they really want this too. And maybe it does - which goes to show we really get the leadership we deserve.

I've said this before but if you apply the simple cui bono test, you come up with the same old crony-capitalist rent-seeking lobby groups. If somebody goes with a proposal for rail - whether it be a high speed rail system or a metro network - the government offices immediately think they're some train-spotting rail enthusiast nut with little understanding of state finances. It really is quite barbaric. In the mean time it commits us to more cars, and rampant emissions and urban sprawl. If this really is our way of life, we need to change our way of life.

Cars Cars Cars

Speaking of motor transport, the Volkswagen scandal this week has been quite informative. The notion that there can be clean diesel combustion has taken a major hit as Volkswagen admitted to screwing with the emissions test with a bit of software.

I grabbed that screenshot from the WSJ to show just how much VW vehicles are over the various limits.  We don't know if this kind of cheating is widespread, or whether it is just VW/Porsche/Audi indulging in this kind of chicanery. Anybody manufacturing a diesel model is now under a cloud. Sometime ago I read a report that Mazda had built diesel versions of their vehicles and while they could get fuel efficiencies up, it was harder for them to meet emissions targets, which feeds into the notion that maybe there's a lot of motivation to cover up emissions from diesel vehicles. Japanese manufacturers have been much slower in coming up with diesel as a cleaner option - they've tended to explore things like Hybrids, electrics and hydrogen fuelled cars; which tells you something about how hard it is to get emissions down on diesel.

Thus when you look at the overall picture, it is looking less likely that diesel cars are anywhere near as 'clean' as claimed. As a personal side, none of this surprises me. Next to big black German 4WDs, the biggest dickheads on the road seem to be guys driving VWs. You can easily tar the lot of them with the same brush and file them under dickhead consumers, dickhead corporation. 

But hey, we want to build our future cities around dirty big toll roads going out 50km to outer-ring suburbs where people can drive to commute every day. What could possibly go wrong?

The Stupid Continues

Even After His Political Death, The Culture Wars Rage On

Oh what joy. The anti-radicalisation kit handed out by the Federal Government to help teachers spot radicalising kids is a travesty.

News of the booklet, launched last week by the counter-terrorism minister, Michael Keenan, was first published in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph under the headline, “Schoolyard Terror Blitz”.

But Bouma said the information in the kit was not intended for public consumption. “People should have been trained in how to use it and how not to abuse it … to simply throw it out there was not the intention,” he said.
Other experts in radicalisation told Guardian Australia on Monday that teachers should not to “jump to conclusions” about students who show symptoms described in the kit, warning Australia risked its own Ahmed Mohamed incident. Ahmed, 14, was arrested in Texas last week after a clock he assembled was mistaken by a teacher for a homemade bomb.
Grossman, who also said she was unaware the booklet was being produced and distributed to schools, questioned the use of the case study relating to “Karen”.
“For me, that is not an example that I think is particularly helpful,” she said. “I think we want to be very careful not to conflate political activism automatically with violent extremism.

“There is a difference between people who get involved in what you would call incidental violence as a result of a political protest. To me, that’s not what we mean when we talk about facing and tackling the very serious issues around violent extremism.
“It’s going to draw attention away from some of the really valuable things that are included in the awareness kit that should be up for discussion and debate.”

The case study of 'Karen' is particularly worrisome because it links 'alternative music' to radical eco politics. You sort of wonder if by radicalism, they really meant the kinds of people who chain themselves to trees to stop logging and CSG mining. If so, this is nothing but the same old culture wars being raged by the Liberal and National Party, that places the alternative and counter-culture groups as the 'other' and sets about trying to disenfranchise them out of their own country. 

Which is to say, the execrable Tony Abbott's leadership was pretty off-the-mark in so many ways it wasn't funny. It's barely been a fortnight since he was ousted so it is hard to sheet this home to Malcolm Turnbull, but the fact that this kind of idiocy is being carried out by the government shows that you only have to scratch the surface these LNP types to find seething hateful culture warriors, carrying on like they are the sole inheritors of civilisation. They're wowsers - every bit as backward and stupid as the Mothers of Prevention in the USA. 

Deservedly, there is a piece of satire going the rounds:

The Stupid Never Stops. 

Living The Future Shock

Techno-Junk 

I have a lot of techno-junk. A lot of times, it starts out being the cool thing, but as I keep using it, it just ends up being kipple. I've been using my second 160GB iPod Classic for like 6years. Now I have the choice of moving to an iPod Touch with 128GB or shelling out big and using my phone as the music player. Given that I simply have the iPod Classic as my car audio thing, it's not likely I'm going to shell out for the biggest-capacity iPhone 6S as a music player. I'm going to move to another dedicated audio player and be done with it.

The iPhone has made the point and shoot camera redundant. I have an old Canon G9. In the olden days of 2009, it was a pretty cool compact camera. Of course the camera on the iPhone ate its job, so now it sits on the shelf un-used, and worse still it's far too obsolete in spec to be waved around in public lest people think I am a retro-fetishist. Which goes to show tech isn't worth spending money on until it becomes necessary to have that tech. I've given the Go-Pro cameras a wide berth as a result. They look like a lot of fun if you like strapping the camera on to moving things, but it's hard to argue a need for one on a day to day basis. It's usually easier just to grab the iPhone and shoot video.

Still, I have weird techno-junk which are noise-making devices of various types. These don't go obsolete; they merely extend the sonic palette for recordings so they don't tend to be as bad an investment as a camera. As good as iRig is on the iPhone, it is simply no match for the Catalinbread WIIO pedal for its ability to make my guitar sound like Pete Townshend's tone on 'Live at Leeds'. It never really goes old as a piece of technology; although the desire to want to sound like Pete Townshend on 'Live at Leeds' sort of dates a lot faster than any bit of techno-junk.

It's not all bad news. I have an app on the iPad that can fire samples of an old Mellotron with great accuracy. I have a whole array of synths on the iPad, I could do anything from Kraftwerk style blips to fairly modern trance music sweeps. The option anxiety that arises from my iPad alone is substantial, so it is doing a great job as this sort of noise-making machine. And of course one day it will become this obsolete little tablet that I can't wave around public, but while it can make all these noises, it's going to remain one of my important noise-source units.

The speed at which things become obsolete has me in a bit of a headspin when I survey the things that are going out of date in my lifetime. The LP record lasted about 35years; CD Players lasted about 25; The Walkman went 15years somewhere in there, 20 if you count the portable CD iteration; the iPod era went for about 10years. I feel immense pressure to move on to streamed music but it just runs hard against my instincts. Film cameras of still and moving variety went for decades before digital knocked them off, but the reign of the stand alone domestic digital camera lasted all of 12 years by the time the camera in the phone ate up most of that market. Somewhere in there there was the U-matic video tape which seemed to be around since the 60s for about 25years, and VHS tape which lasted as a popular format for about 20years. DVDs as a media format really only lasted 12 years before HD video and Blu Ray supplanted it; and Blu Ray has really only gone 5 years as a mass consumer format before Netflix and streaming services have killed that market.

You can chalk all of that up to Future Shock. Computers too are accelerating in a disconcerting way. I went 5years with with the G5 PowerMac, 4years with the Tower Mac, and now 2 years with the Mac Mini, and I'm already thinking maybe I should be upgrading the computer soon if I want to be able to edit 4K Video.

As you can see, not only are the product cycles getting shorter, the actual lifespan of any given tech is getting so short. My first iPhone was the 3GS because I was a late adopter. I went three and a half years until it was so obsolete I couldn't show people I was still using it; so that put me onto the iPhone 5S which I've had for 22months - and well, it too is feeling slow, old and obsolete next to the iPhone 6S. I couldn't have imagined that, back 22months ago when I got my 5S. I fear for the lifespan of iPhones and smartphones as a technology, in general. With the pace things are going, there might not be much left in the future of smart phones. I might buy an iPhone 6S the day it goes on sale, but it is in danger of becoming super obsolete, well within the lifespan of its 24month contract.

That's all on the one hand. Contrasting against all that is my pair of Optonica Speakers from the 70s which still sound great. They sound full, broad, punchy and rich. The Arcam Amp powering it is from the mid-2000s, while the CD player is a 5 plate Sony from the late 1990s and it still works great. I have guitars and basses that date to the 1960s and 1970s that work perfectly well, pedals that date to  the early 1980s that still work perfectly well, a 1985 Roland synth that still works fine, and other bits and pieces from somewhere in the last half century that still do what they're designed to do. Somewhere in storage is a top of the range VHS player, and a turntable. All of this stuff still works.

And so gradually you end up being a weird mosaic of tech ownership. I feel like I live in the Bradbury building of 'Blade Runner' ("Good evening JF!") of my own devising and I didn't necessarily plan things that way. I am, to confess, a little more than simply shocked about all this. I never imagined what it would feel like to end up so layered up with the experience of technology. It's even true of this very blog too. When I start blogging over a decade ago, I was the only person in my circle doing it and everybody else was incredulous or disinterested. Now that decade has passed, blogging went from being a fad to a phenomenon to then being reduced to microblogging, and now this kind of blogging -writing out full sentences with the pretence of ecriture - has become somewhat quaint in its archaic-ness.

I write all of this down because I think there is great scepticism about the rate at which things change. The delusion we've been given in our childhoods was that it would be gradual, and mostly linear. The lived experiences inform us that it is rapid and ever accelerating. People think Ray Kurzweil's description of an ever-accelerating technological progress as being fanciful, but I have to tell you the subjective experience of this notion is far more true than the persistent critique that somehow technological development is going to plateau and level off. I won't vouch for the technological Singularity, but I will say that the future change is going to speed up even more.

RIP Yogi Berra 1925 - 2015

"Baseball is 90% Mental And The Other Half Physical"

Ninety is a good life for a man who was a pro athlete in the mid 20th century. And even then I thought he would live forever. Yogi Berra is is one of those people who seemingly exist beyond the narrative of history, immortal and beloved of their reputation. So many phrases are attributed to him, so much so he once quipped "I didn't say everything I said.". More than anything else, Yogi's presence was a link to the great Yankee teams of the 50s and early 60s, a link to the Mickey Mantle era that was fading fast after the Mick's passing in 1995. 

He was so much more than just a footnote or a corny quote. A 15-time All-Star and no-doubt Hall-of-Famer, he was one of the greatest catchers to have played the game; he was one of only six managers to have taken two different teams to the World Series, managing the Yankees in 1964 but also the Mets in 1973; and he was even a World War II veteran, a war hero by most accounts, serving in Normandy on D-Day. 

For a kid growing up as a kid in NYC, he seemed as sage as his nickname, avuncular and charming. He also seemed like a man out of his time, especially as the late Twentieth Century unfolded - that somehow the world in his retirement had left him behind in some very basic way. Even his spat with George Steinbrenner in the mid-1980s that kept him away from the ballpark for 14years left you with the feeling that it was Yogi who somehow got lost in the changing times. 

He was, in any case, a very upbeat figure who was always loyal to the Yankees to the end. Having never seen him play, it was as if he were always ancient, but this is illusory. He was only 12 or so years after his playing career when I used to see him on TV in the mid-70s. That's not that different to Joe Girardi today. He was fired by the Mets in '75, and went to the Yankees as bench coach in '76 and was part of the Bronx Zoo Yankees that won 3 AL Pennants and 2 World Series. 

He will be sorely missed. Knowing he is gone is like knowing there is a dirty big void in the universe that cannot be filled. 

Cherry Blossoms Over Springboks

34-32 - The Win That Shook The Rugby World

I haven't blogged anything to do with sport for a long time. I just don't watch a whole lot of it any more let alone play. It's taken me 19 years from 1996 when I was the definitive sport-nut guy to 2015 where I just don't care much any more. I've seen a lot in the time in-between and heck, even the time before. In the late 1990s I was even tangentially involved with the business of sport when I was roped in to being the interpreter at contract negotiations for Rugby players going to Japan.

This was back in the heyday of Seiji Hirao who was captain of Japan rugby, followed by a stint as its coach. He came down to Australia quite a bit to watch Rugby, talk rugby and drink with rugby players. In one of his talks, he was asked to explain the 17-145 loss to the All-Blacks at the '95 World Cup. Hirao got up and said he went to his mentor leaving before for Scotland where the game was played. He asked his mentor if there was any one aspect of the game where the Japanese team had some kind of edge. His mentor said, "of course there is no such thing. Your team is inferior in every single aspect of the game. You'll lose. Just go lose honourably."

Thus they went like lambs to the slaughter. Japan own some pretty sad scorelines for losses at the World Cup. There's that 17-145, but also drubbing by the Wallabies 11-91, and another drubbing by the All Blacks that is just as lopsided. If you're not the Tri-Nations in the Southern Hemisphere or one of the Five Nations in the Northern Hemisphere, World Cups have been where your country's team goes to get drubbed. It's a small miracle the drubbings didn't flat-out kill the sport in Japan. Each time they got drubbed at the World Cup, they were compared less favourably to the soccer teams that did better at their World Cup.

Still, there's a case to be made that Rugby in Japan had been - to the point they started getting drubbed at World Cups - more successful than Soccer in Japan, in finding its audience and crowds. Lots of good players have gone to Japan to make a living over the years so their industrial leagues are not to be sneezed at. They can easily offer the kinds contracts that the NSW Rugby Union were offering their fringe players, and they send scouts regularly to watch club games in Australia, looking for talent.

During that period, there were several times I found myself in the company of Eddie Jones. Eddie had coached Japan as well by that stage. He viewed it as the poisoned chalice. It's the pinnacle coaching job of Japan but the expectations were too high for what could be realistically achieved with the talent on the ground. Being the interpreter, I'd just sit and listen most of the time, but it was apparent that Japan's Rugby was so far behind the top nations that it was inconceivable to send a team that could compete with a nation like South Africa. Japan Rugby was further behind Australian Rugby than Australian Baseball was behind Japanese baseball.

Eddie Jones is a sanguine kind of character. When he was asked about the legitimacy of the Japanese team being Japanese (it has a third of its squad born overseas), he offered up the reply to the effect that in an ideal world, everything from top down would be Japanese native people including his job as head coach. But that kind of idealism isn't his job; he was briefed to put together a team that can compete at the world level, at the level the World Cup is contested. And so his squad is one third made up of players from New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, and so on. And thus, this team that beat the Boks is a lot more diverse, colourful and different in style to a team that might have been made of native Japanese players. Implicit in Jones' reply is the rhetorical question, does Japan still want to go out and lose 17-145?

Maybe there still are rugby journalists in Japan that want that kind of purity where a team of native Japanese boys go out to the World Cup and get smashed. Like some forlorn Banzai-charge at a machine gun nest or something. It might be a terrible defeat but it would somehow be racially pure, a glorious and grand gesture of defiance or some such nonsense. With all due to respect, I don't think the Emperor himself would be terribly interested in such an enterprise. Even Hirao's team of 1995 featured Hopoi Tainone from Tonga.

My own view is that the best thing about this win is that it allows Japan to see itself very differently from that monocultural monolithic self-image found on racial purity. It's already breaking down, thanks to foreign born Sumo champions dominating what was once the National Sport. It would be good to move on from that kind of self-image. It would be good to embrace people from Tonga and Fiji and even Australia and New Zealand as part of a self-image of Japan. After 20 years of being there, Eddie Jones is as much theirs as ours. How then can those foreign born guys donning the Japanese uniform, not be Japanese? That's the way it should be.

As they say in Japan, winning confers legitimacy.

Colonel Jessup Blues

We Can't Handle The Truth

Pleiades rang me up a couple of days ago to tell me he was in support of the protesters. I didn't even know they were protesting.

Yet, over in Japan, they're having a hell of a time passing a law allowing Japanese troops to be sent to help allies. Partly because it seems to fly in the face of the Peace Constitution to send troops anywhere if they're called 'Self Defence Force'. It is hard to imagine self defence going on anywhere outside of the country - so the argument goes - that it would be an utter change of national direction to make such amendment to the law. To this end, there have been protesters camped outside of the Diet in to the wee hours morning, which is the sorptive spectacle unseen in Tokyo since the student protests of the 1960s.

The origins of this current draft of the law can be sheeted home to the USA who basically want Japan to stop being so peaceful on somebody else's security budget. The USA want Japan to step up and part of an international group that maintains the peace. You can cue the Team America theme song here. As dutiful an ally to the USA as ever, Shinzo Abe and his cabinet are simply passing into law something that Japan's not been doing for a good 70 years - but nobody seems to want to discuss what that 70years has meant.

It's 70years in which the USA had to shoulder the geopolitical problems Imperial Japan was dealing with prior to 1945. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War were wars that likely would have fallen to the Japanese to fight had World War II never happened. Instead, America found itself at the edges of its hegemony fighting these wars. In both cases, the leadership of the USA had great difficulty explaining to its own population what they were doing there. If you're the Japanese, you're saying, "thank you!" or "lucky miss". Those were some pretty brutal wars being fought as a rearguard action for 19th century imperialism and hegemony being rolled back. It's a good thing to not be on the wrong side of history with those things.

With the rise of China, America does not want to be doing it all alone in the Pacific. It wants all the island nations to chip in on the effort to maintain international security. To this end, it's been sending delegates to ASEAN meetings, but basically America's been getting bupkis from ASEAN while China's been camel-nosing its way into the tent, building island bases on atolls in the South China Sea. The louder China rattles its sabres, there's more call for Japan from America, to step up. Of course, for the better part of the 70years, Japan's been playing passive aggressive to the hilt with its Peace Constitution, which of course was drafted up in General Douglas MacArthur's GHQ offices and not in the Diet at all. The argument has always been, "you gave this thing to us, you can't very we'll complain about it when it doesn't work out for you. We've been Peaceful Percy just as you've asked."

The passive aggressive argument worked satisfactory for all concerned until the point at which America found itself in two wars at once, in Afghanistan and then Iraq. In the mean time, the legitimacy of the Peace Constitution would only grow because 70 years is a long time not fire a shot in anger, for any government. And that brings us up to the point where this century, America has wanted the Peace Constitution to be amended to allow Japan to send troops to support its allies.

And that also brings us to this bill that is being vigorously challenged. The ramifications of which are meant to be simple, but the those aligned against it insist the law of unintended consequences will lead Japan to a war it doesn't want. The realistic appraisal of just how it might be implemented and what that would look like, therefore must be made. Judging from the geopolitical faultiness, it is highly unlikely the Japanese troops will be sent to places her troops weren't sent to during World War II. It is far more likely her troops will be sent to places like the Philippines or the South China Sea or for that matter the Korean Peninsula than anywhere else. And that being the case, it is going to reopen old disputes, layering them on with new ones.

The cleaner option is simply to not go.
It's long been observed that the countries that complain the most about the alleged re-militarisation of Japan - North and South Korea, and China - are the least likely to come to its rescue.  The fact that Japan wants to weather that risk of incessant misguided complaints probably means the post-WWII consensus is finally breaking apart.

It's a bit like a 70 year 'sin bin' time-out has come to an end and Japan will have to resume being a nation that will guarantee security in its own waters as well as send armed troops as part of international peacekeeping missions. It's also probably time that the exceptionalism in Japan to do with its stance on peace and war was made to reassess its viability. These aren't difficult notions to digest, but are hard truths to handle.

They Can't Handle The Truth

So just how is it being reassessed? In Japan, the bill only has 15% popular support. If you allow for 10% being the average size of any minority interest in any electorate, it's only about as popular as 5% more than the smallest single issue party. Like, say the Greens in Australian politics, or UKIP in the UK. The lack of appeal across the broader spectrum of society has resulted in a great deal of scepticism right across the rest of society that doesn't support it. Namely, they're complaining they don't understand the need for it. And if it's something that requires special pleading by the Prime Minister, then isn't it more likely it is just a case of pleading a special case? 15% for and everybody else either against it or undecided is a big obstacle.

This fact alone explains the strength of the voices arrayed against the bill, and many of them argue the contradiction of amending the Peace Constitution with technicalities about how to go to war. Most people in Japan clearly don't see the "clear and present danger" that deems it necessary to abandon the central plank of the Peace Constitution - that you forever don't go to war - for the dubious opportunity of supporting actions of the USA.

The USA of course has lost quite a lot of prestige since George Bush's Gulf War. Back in 1991, legitimacy was easily granted by the international community to swing into action. Indeed, it was expected of it to do so. Yet since Clinton's 'Desert Fox' (which took place the same week the Lewinsky scandal broke the news) and George W. Bush's Iraq War, many people in Japan find it hard to equate American military action as having the automatic legitimacy that they had in the Gulf War.

The fact that America has lost credibility, combined with the fact that it was the American GHQ which dictated the drafts of the Peace Constitution in the first place, makes it immensely harder of US interest to suddenly assert that Japan should become the sort of country that joins Team America on those wayward military misadventures. As a citizen of a country that does automatically send troops  to any old coalition of the willing led by the USA, I think it's a wise choice to balk at such a notion.

Nonetheless I can imagine the equivalent of Colonel Jessup from 'A Few Good Men' working in the base in Kadena Okinawa, ready to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese or North Koreans or God-Forbid-The Russians, and protect the FREE WORLD™; yet right around the base are local Okinawan people carrying on wanting them to leave and Yankee-Go-Home - but also at the same time expect them to be protected by the very same Colonel Jessup and his marines should the Chinese, North Koreans or God-Forbid-The-Russians come invading. That too would be a hard truth to handle.

Still, at 15% it's really not likely Japan wants to go to war on any kind of pretext or principle. The USA would be better advised to note that very single fact before trying to drag Japan into some misadventure.

Nobody Can Handle The Truth

Back in the late 1580s, Hideyoshi Toyotomi united the warring states of Japan and united Japan as a state with a central government. Having done so, he had found his population was more warrior and far fewer farmers, merchants and craftsmen. And so he went on the misadventure known as the Ming war. This is the origin of the invasion of Korean Peninsula that Korean people resent so much, because it was on Korean soil that most of this war between Japan and the Ming Dynasty China was fought, and by all accounts it was as brutal as any proto-modern war.

Fortunately Hideyoshi died, and the war came to an end with complete withdrawal of decimated forces. The war was so costly it brought about the early end of the Ming dynasty, which was the last of the Chinese dynasties headed by the Han people. The next dynasty that arose, the Qing, was led by the Manchurians, and China would crash into modernity without Han leadership. Something their historians still blame on Hideyoshi. They may even have a point, but China, like the rest of Asia opted to go slow on technology to keep the peace. It was the Neo-Confucian way to suppress progress to maintain the status quo - and if there ever was a system of thought that was very much the Ming, it was Neo-Confucianism.

After 1598, Japan wasn't found fighting the Chinese until 1894. That's close to 300years of peace right there. If you add the 70 since WWII, that's 366 years out of 415 years of peace going back to 1600. If you go on the most recent record, it's probably true Japan has no designs on China, and if you go back far enough, there's enough historic data to show that in most part, Japan is not interested in invading China. It's the kind of record that stands in stark contrast to the relationships between the UK, France, and Germany. Even America and Canada have fought a war in 1812. The weight of historic evidence says it is far more anomalous for Japan to be fighting with any of its neighbours.

Why Japan might have fought the wars it did in the 20th Century would be a long discussion so I'm going to skip it today. A lot of people think they were unjustified wars of colonialist invasion but others have found cause to see them as the first wars to roll back Western colonialism. It's far more of a mixed bag. It's interesting to note that when thrust into the cauldron of modern warfare, Japanese officers and soldiers reverted to cultural practices of war that date back to Hideyoshi Toyotomi. That is to say, the seeming barbarism of the Japanese troops had a great deal to do with culture shock on both sides. I would hazard a guess and say for all the talk of the warrior, Japan had stopped being a martial kind nation by 1868, and had to find that fire again, belatedly, in the context of 19th century imperialism.

The truth is, apart from some short stretches, Japan sucked at prosecuting its wars. World War II was a grind where all these valued tactical positions got wiped out by strategic carpet bombing. They spent more the time fighting the wrong war getting whacked. The next time Japan goes to war, it is equally likely that it would be very much out of practice when it comes to war. They're liable to bring forth the ghosts of 1944 as well as the ghosts of 1589 in a tight spot. It's amazing America wants them to come out of historic retirement.

By the same token, China after the Ming dynasty wasn't great shakes in any war either. They lost to the Manchus which gave rise to the Qing dynasty; they fought Russia badly several times and was on the losing end of the stick on several occasions. Of course there was the Opium War which was decisive in sending China to the ranks of the third world. They of course fought Japan badly, and then descended into a civil war. Since then they've been a military junta disguised in business suits, but they've really not distinguished themselves in many wars going back to the time they fought Hideyoshi Toyotomi's Japan. They might want to prove a point, but they're not exactly good at it.
Nobody's really talking about it, but it's true.

I'm so inclined to think that the historic mission of war itself is over in Asia. They should, in all instances, just talk. Because, they can. And that's the simple truth.

News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Sep/2015

ZIRP Didn't End Today

After months of threatening to lift interest rates, the US Fed decided not to raise interest rates today. Which is pretty damn amazing really because it does nothing but punch a hole in the credibility of the US Fed when it talks about how it sees its own policy. Think out it for a moment. If it were the RBA and Glenn Stevens, it would be unthinkable for him to spell putsch a move for 9 months of the year, only to squib on the threat when you were supposed to do it.

As it is, the RBA has us on a strange parallel world to ZIRP with our very own TWIRP, which is causing its own havoc. Interesting then that the constraints of the US Fed running ZIRP forcesAustralia to adopt its TWIRP and so Glenn Stevens wants to urge Janet Yellen to just get on with it.  Of course if the US Fed does raise it even 0.25%, about a trillion dollars worth of derivative contracts go up in smoke. but this is the thing about derivative contracts: they're only tangentially related to the real world economy.

Of course, the reason the US Fed didn't raise their interest rates according to Janet Yellen's statement is that they are concerned about China's economy - Something both Glenn Stevens and Michael Pascoe think are over-stated as being problematic. And yet, you have to wonder what the US Fed knows about China.

The Wild Wishcasting Phase

Those conservative chumps in the Coalition must be dreaming big, now that albatross Tony has been sent packing, and the poll bounce shows they would demolish a Bill Shorten-led ALP if there were an election held today. They haven't had numbers like since the days of Julia Gillard and even then Tony Abbott himself had terrible poll numbers. They might have to go back to 2010 just before Kevin Rudd got knifed by Julia Gillard to a time when they had a commanding lead in the polls.
Which is to say, at least for this week they've got it good.

They're probably starting to think big about how this might translate into votes, but really we need to put a big caveat on Malcolm Turnbull's alleged popularity. For a start if your predecessor is Tony Abbott, even a pile of dog dung is bound to come up smelling roses. This electorate was dying for something much better than Tony Abbott, so naturally there would be a poll bounce.

But here's the thing, if Malcolm Turnbull is really going to capture votes from the Left, he's seriously going to have to do something that even the hardest credential-ed lefty is going to admit is good, and that means having to do something the right hates, and there's simply no leeway in Malcolm Turnbull to do any such thing. And that being the case, it won't be long before the stench of old Liberal and National Party policy positions will stink like the dead fish that they are, and bring Malcolm Turnbull's popularity down to their level.

In turn, the smart advice going for Lefties is for them not to get too excited.

Not All That Dies Old Is Bad, Not All That's Young And Remaining Is Good

I haven't paid much attention to the Canning by-election brought on by the death of Don Randall. Don Randall of course tabled to motion for a spill back in February and was founded in his car not long after that. If this were a mafia movie, you'd draw your own conclusions - but it is not, they say he died of a heart attack in his car. It's hard to tell what sort of MP he was, but if he thought enough to urge his party members to dump Tony Abbott, there was probably a decent man right there.

Andrew Hastie is the man running for the coalition in his place and he's an ex-SAS man. This sort of candidacy makes my skin crawl because those guys lead a pretty narrow life with a narrow world view and they might have a world of experience in the extremes of a combat zone, they're not guys known for a deep and compassionate outlook on their fellow man.

Andrew Hastie has accused the ALP of not supporting our troops in the Afghanistan based on his personal experience. It seems like a really crass thing to say in your run up to your polls, and really shows you the sort of grubby candidate that he is. It's pretty bleak that a sensible elder dies to be replaced by some narrow-core one-eyed zealot. Our polity is doing really badly right there.

Ragging On Bill Shorten

You can count me as one of the people who got very hot under the collar about Bill Shorten's role in bringing down Kevin Rudd in 2010. I'm still not that crash hot about how that all went down as you know; but then, I wasn't exactly crazy about the whole ALP way before Kevin Rudd even became Leader back in 2007. For a better part of 24months while the Abbottoir reigned, Bill Shorten's stint as Opposition leader has looked at times like a very contrived, stage-managed wave to *his* people, a knowing wink that he was just going to sit pretty and be a small target - even though Tony Abbott made things simple.

An even then I have enough perspective and patience to say, the ALP need to let Bill Shorten do his thing, what ever it is. There isn't an easy road to government; there isn't a short cut.

In the wake of the Turnbull seizing the day, Shorten's approval rating has sunk to 24% and there are now grumbles in the electorate about his 'performance' already. This is galling because it's from the very same people who wanted Malcolm Turnbull over Tony Abbott but vote only for the ALP anyway.
Folks, you need to grow up and grow a brain.

Mind you I had a chance to chat to somebody who told me they were one of these ALP voters who wanted Malcolm Turnbull and their reasoning was that independent of sides, Abbott *had* to go for the good of Australia (which is hard to dispute) and that it was now time for the ALP to step up and put in their best leader to square off against the best the coalition has brought to the table. I enquired of them who they thought the better leader would be and they answered in a heartbeat, "Albo!"

When I expressed incredulity, they replied that Tanya Plibersek would make a better leader than Bill Shorten. I just want to point out that the ALP haven't contested a single Federal Election with Bill Shorten as leader. Do you think there might be a problem with the Australian political culture precisely because the electorate is already so bloodthirsty? These politicians are only reflecting our choppy-changey electorate.

It's not shopping for shoes or the next sugar hit at the candy store. It's political leadership we're talking here. ALP supporters would be out of their fucking minds to want to start jockeying for replacing Shorten.

View From The Couch - 17/Sep/2015

The Crippling Global Debt

Walk-Off HBP had this little conversation he wanted to share. It's Satyajit Das talking about the problems of our global economy. The gist of it is pretty much in line with the prevailing observations about where we are in the debt cycle. There's a mention of Hyman Minsky in there as well, describing the various stage of debt financing and how the Australian housing market is definitely in the third phase out of three phases wherein it is no capable of paying off the loan principle or interest, and the only hope of making the money back is through capital gains of the underlying asset.

Satyajit Das' cheery interview leads us to understand that there is no real distinction between public and private sector debt, which in turn means our colossal private sector debt in Australia is ergo problem for the government and society at large. Not that it matter much today, but when Tony Abbott was going on about the debt, he really should have looked at the private sector debt instead of the government sector debt.

Even so, Das doesn't think there's much governments can really do to address this problem. After all, when looked at globally, since the peak of the GFC we've leveraged up 17% more global debt rather than pay any of it down. Nobody really deleverages, nobody really get through austerity and austerity in of itself does nothing to address the large mountain of debt. Das doesn't think debt jubilee is even possible without wholesale destruction of value.

Which is in many ways the crux of the problems. Nobody wants to give up the price tag on what they are sitting on. The people who carry on how there is no property bubble in Australia do so on the basis of trend lines and market relativism (so to speak) but completely ignore the absolute numbers and what they mean. They argue "It's in line with what things are worth" and totally ignore the fact that "worth" might be the most contestable notions - much more so than "I never had sex with that woman" or "I am not a crook". Thus, as Das points out, we're living in houses with price tags that have been 'financialised' and inflated - but we're happy to bask in the wealth effect which is the dtluionary thought that we got wealthier sitting in our houses doing nothing. Worse still, the inflated price represents how global capital tried to find returns and being unable to do so, landed in housing. As the money recedes when debts are called in, people's positions are exposed, and suddenly the price tags don't look so tenable any more.

Yet the world over there are people who borrowed money to buy things and when the debt gets called in early, are forced to cash out on the spot and lose money, or work very hard to stave off the debt collector. The post-GFC world has been marked by one effort after the other to secure these positions of 2007, trying to fix them in amber so people don't have give up their positions, their things, their assets that they got through borrowed money. The reason we kick the can down the road is essentially to preserve those people. And to that end the world has seen Quantitative Easing to facilitate that there is enough cashflow otherwise to make up for the debts that *can't* be called in, added with the monetary easing through low interest rates.

If that's not spooky, I don't know what is. We're doing all this "kicking-of-the-can-down-the-road" so Deutsche Bank doesn't blow up over Greek Bonds and derivative products based on Greek Bonds. Thus the Greeks have to wear austerity to save a German bank except of course in Iceland, they just let the banks fail. It probably worked out a lot better for Iceland to do so. The Greeks have no such choice. But Greece is actually what the future looks like for many parts of the 'Emerging Markets' world. Global debt will rob sovereignty from nations, communities, right down to individual people.

On Tony Abbott Being A Sore Loser

Look, he might be a sook. In the vernacular I grew up with, we call those, sore losers. Being a sook is what my office cat does on Fridays. Sore losers is what humans do, even when they're told not to do it. Kevin Rudd was a sore loser too, but hey, he came back like a champion. At least, my old tennis coach PB would mount those kinds of post-hoc argument: "That's what Champions do!" (Bless you PB wherever you are today.)

Julia Gllard's speech about being a woman wasn't everything and wasn't nothing, but something, was her only sore loser moment. Judging from 'The Killing Season' she does like to kid herself of a lot of things, but she doesn't seem to go sore all that often.

...but Tony Abbott? he's just.... argh...  For fuck's sake he faxed in his resignation to Sir Peter Cosgrove. Who the fuck does that in this day and age?  It says everything about the man who came to power promising ruin the NBN and 'fulfilled that sorry promise". To the end, a techno-loser, unfit to be PM in the 21st Century.

So I get it - he's a sook AND a sore loser. If you don't get it there's something wrong with you. But then this is a nation of sore winners, which is  a category I've never comes across outside Australia. Yes, we as a people can bask in the moments of great defeats and deep humiliation even though we won the war, so make of it what you will. Tony Abbott was in some limited ways, an exemplar of his nation.

View From The Couch - 15/Sep/2015

Oops We Did It Again

For the 5th time in 5 years we have a new Prime Minister! It was like I was in delirium, only to wake up as the action began to unfold on the TV. Before I go into that one, I just want to describe to you my past few days.

The Backstory

On Friday I contracted a Flu. Call it "Flu Strain 2015". As you may recall I only recently got out of under the Norovirus thing, so my immune system was not ready for this event. By 10pm on Friday night I was running a fever, my nose was running like a waterfall, and all the joints in my body were aching. I think I blacked out for most of the next 48hours. If you asked me where I was I could only tell you that I was at the fevered gates of hell trying to solve mathematical puzzles about logistical problems that didn't exist, while writhing and groaning in pain trying to find a comfortable position to rest. When you're like this, the bed becomes too soft, the floor is too hard, the couch is too cool, the bed is too hot; and around and around you go, twisting and turning and labouring under a head splitting headache, just trying to find a modicum of comfort that does not exist.

You think about dying and 1919.

The back hurts because you've been lying on it too much and your shoulders hurt because you've been lying your side trying to avoid lying on your painful back. The head thing was great. I felt like I'd caught a falling piano with my skull. I managed to lose a substantial amount of muscle mass in mere days, and now I can hardly get up, let alone eat anything. I went through 14 bottles of water and still felt dehydrated, crunched through and swallowed 50 Vitamin C tabs in that time. Now I'm on a course of antibiotics to stop secondary bacterial infections moving into my lungs.
Pretty happy scene over here.

Did I mention the fact that I stopped drinking coffee during this time? Well, that happened not out of choice but because I couldn't stomach anything - but it also meant I added the caffeine-withdrawal headaches into the equation. On Monday, I finally ate a scoop of ice-cream, a cob of corn and a wafer cracker as I hunkered down to watch some 'Daredevil'. This is the virtue of binge-watching on Netflix. You don't have to think about what you're going tow watch next. There's always more good content, it just keeps coming. You could be semi-comatose like I was and still get through the day, let time flow in a way that doesn't leave you thinking about dying and 1919 straight through the agony.

Anyway, around 4pm, I got bored, and switched over to ABC24, just to catch the beginning of the drama, with Malcolm Turnbull fronting the microphones, announcing he was challenging Tony Abbott for the leadership. It was on! And that meant I lay there sprawled on the sofa watching the whole damn thing - which was mostly commentators conjecturing and editorialising and parsing statements made by politicians. It's funny how irrelevant all this looks when you've just spent 48hours in a fevered hell.

I don't buy the Turnbull contention that Bill Shorten would be a catastrophic choice for Prime Minister should he win against Tony Abbott, any more than I buy the contention that this is a good or solid government as argued by the likes of Hockey, Abetz and Kevin-Bloody-Andrews. The pundits who are brought on for right wing balance sounded even more detached from reality than some of the fevered nightmares I was having earlier.

Still, the "Told-You-So" moment is resonating big in me because I did predict Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership wouldn't make October.

"Not The ALP"

Tony Abbott made his statement and his pitch was essentially, "we're better than them. If you replace me, we're no better than them. Do you really want to be them?" The interesting thing about that rhetorical construction is that by the time he's asking it, it's too damn late - your party has already become the enemy you so despise. Which is not surprising because these kinds of hatreds embody projections and misjudgments coloured by one's own prejudices. I for one just can't get into the mindset of conservatives who think Tony Abbott was doing such a bang up job.

It's also symptomatic of Tony Abbott's gaffe-prone leadership in as much as he opens his mouth, simple un-nuanced sentences come out, the meaning is parsed and misinterpreted, and results in a backlash. Malcolm Turnbull of course has a wonderful faculty of language where he speaks in full conjugated sentences and can convey nuanced arguments with varying shades of grey distinctions. It's really no match - but it explains the hostility of the rusted-on conservatives towards Turnbull. They just don't understand him. Because they're idiots.

If you had to put some finer point on Tony Abbott's failure as a leader. it was that he was not a terribly deep thinker. And as a trivial thinker, his worst mistake was that he hardly knew himself, but presumed to know the world. It's extraordinary in a man so traveled and educated and in such high office, but the man simply could not figure out the logical inconsistency of his platforms. Which effectively made him look like a functional idiot. And of course - as Machiavelli noted - once contempt sets in against a leader it is corrosive to the point of destruction. I am hoping today is the last entry wherein I tag my entry with both 'Tony Abbott' and 'Stupidity'. It is best for all sides to just out that Tony Abbott Prime Ministership into the record books and move right along.

And so it came to pass that Malcolm Turnbull finally ousted Tony Abbott.

Let's Not Get Carried Away, Their Politics Still Suck

I've written in the past what I think of Malcolm Turnbull as the alternative. I'm not so high on him as some on the left are. I think he's going to do the expedient thing to stay in power for as long as possible, which means he won't be putting through legislation for gay marriage or shut down the Nauru and Manus Island concentration camps. He is, above and beyond Tony Abbott himself, a candidate for the big end of town.

The marginal improvement will be that he won't be so beholden to particular people on the lunar right like Tony Abbott was to Gina Rinehardt. Instead, you can count on him to be deeply in cahoots with the Telco oligopoly, the Banking oligopoly, the Supermarket oligopoly the Mining oligopoly, and whatever else links he might have with boards of the ASX200. In other words it would look less like crony capitalism without executions - but when they talk about reforms to increase productivity, they're still talking about whacking out penalty rates and weekend rates.

As Tanya Plibersek blurted out this morning, it's the same package, different salesman. People are reading way too much in to the apparent socially-progressive-ness of Malcolm Turnbull. If he looks socially progressive, it's only because he wants a Republic, believes in climate science and climate change, and supports Gay Marriage. He's still into regressive taxation and $100,000 uni degrees, and dressing these things as "opportunity".

The Meaning Of Five In Five

Why has our polity been beset with the kind of ructions that result in 5 Prime Ministers in 5 years? This is the topic that will be studied for years to come. Antony Green, ABC election analyst offered up the view that our two major parties are now too rigid. The fact that in other parliamentary democracies, voting with the party is not enforced so vigorously, it gives rise to vote with the conscience. The flip-side of that is if a faction wants something their way, they have to install a leader who sees things completely their way. And this explains the tremendous amount of rope Julia Gillard got from the unions as well as the carte blanche destruction Tony Abbott was asked to wreak upon the renewables sector in this country by the climate sceptics in his party.

Is our democracy somehow broken? Tony Abbott blamed the media in his final speech as Prime Minister, but it seems what has happened is that the population has learned to hit the polity hard through polls. They voted in Tony Abbott because they didn't like the ALP. Then they realised they liked Tony Abbott less, and so they kept sending messages to Canberra. Eventually the party power structure took notice and swapped out the Prime Minister. The frenetic polling is in a sense, the substitute for voting - but it got the job done. Seems to me the people got what they wanted so democracy must be working quite fine.

The other notable phenomenon is that Australia has become incredibly diverse. The views held by the electorate - and let's remember there's compulsory voting so everybody's thinking counts - has become equally diverse. In many instances, the combined political views are simply too diverse to be put under 2 major parties all the time. There is no comfortable middle. There is just the frenetic movement of the opinion needle and polls, poking their displeasure at the politicians for not being as diverse as the public it serves.

The years Tony Abbott was Leader of Opposition and then Prime Minister represent 6 years in which the lunar right of the Liberal Party got a hold of the agenda to push it as far as it could take it. Naturally the public objected and so the lunar right's 'man' has been pushed out of the driver's seat. Democracy is still functioning.

The Demographic Long Game

The instalment of Malcolm Turnbull by the Liberal Party also marks a decided move to fight history. It is the conservative way. If the future comes knocking, they do their best to lock the doors and turn out the lights, and make like nobody's home. It's actually a pitched attempt to dig in with the Baby Boomer generation and up, one last time. If the current group of Libs lose to the ALP and Greens in the coming election,they would have to go through a generational change, and then it will be Generation X on leadership in both sides of the house. For the Boomer demographic, this is possibly the last or next to last stretch in which the demographic weight associated with the Baby Boomers can call the shots.

The move to Turnbull shows the Boomers are not going out with a fight - and this has interesting implications. If Bill Shorten is ousted and the ALP look for an alternative leader, they might settle upon Anthony Albanese who was the runner up at the last contest for ALP Leader. He's a Boomer. So  the picture becomes Turnbull versus Albanese, Boomer versus Boomer, locking in an entrenched position. If Malcolm Turnbull's should turn into a lengthy government, then we'll be holding off Gen-X for a long while yet, in which case the conservatives win big time.

It stands to reason. All the forces with the invested capital betting one way and one way alone on fossil fuels are not, will not, cannot just give in to the upcoming generation change. They have to delay it as long as they can to suck the most money out of the system to pay for their retirements. This is the core of the conservative cause, which used to be the grey power block in the votes. The fight is to entrench the interests of the elderly - which nobody disputes is important - but as economic growth has stalled globally, this has meant it comes at the expensive younger generations; something that 'the young' do not yet understand if some of them intend to vote for Malcolm Turnbull.

Yet the conservative cause in this country knows full well where the lines drawn because Joe Hockey's moving of the retirement age up to 70 starts with Generation-X, deftly keeping entitlements in place for the last of the Boomers. It also explains the $100,000 degrees, and a great deal of other unfair things in the 1st Hockey budget.

The trick is, when the following generation comes through, they might not look upon the entitlements as necessary as the current generation of politicians. I've long predicted that Generation X will be forced to not pay those debts because there will be other debts that have to be paid, and this is going to be a social fault line. Everybody knows this, so the game plan is lock in the entitlements now so it becomes impossible to lock-pick. And to that end, the conservatives needed somebody who can feasibly hold office a lot longer than Tony Abbott. Faced with being wiped out, and then seeing a rising Gen-X leadership of the ALP taking over, the conservatives must have figured they can't go down without firing their best weapon.

Syria Is The Apocalypse

'Reductio Ad Absurdum' Of State Power

The modern state monopolises power, and with it the capacity for violence. Yes it's true that in the USA there is an ardent belief that their constitution allows citizens to bear arms in order to confront this monopoly of power and violence, but strangely enough the kinds of people who subscribe to this view are also the most likely to support the kind of state power being exercised against minorities. That is to say, we would believe the protestations of the NRA more about the Second Amendment, if they were jumping up and down in support of black people getting shot by the police, and not the police. Still, this entry is not about that topic.

The ultimate state control of monopolised power is the modern military junta. Military juntas exist as proof that a stable state is not necessarily democratic or pleasant. People go on about stability ("vote Tony Abbott for Stability," the SMH said! Ha!) Many military juntas come into being at the end of civil strife, and enforce the military power as policing in order to keep a lid on the civil strife. This is true of Franco as it was of Pinochet, Saddam Hussein's or Bashar Assad's regimes. We in the democratised 'developed' world view these political arrangements with a great deal of contempt, but as the experience of Iraq has demonstrated, there are far worse things than the stability assured by a military junta.

Similarly, Syria is turning out to be the second recent case whereby our own idealism for democracy has brought to an end a stable junta government. In writing that sentence, I am overcome with a cultural revulsion, for I - in no way in hell - support military juntas anywhere on this planet. It is hard for me to write a sentence that even vaguely validates their existence. Yet the historic evidence is pretty clear that some of these juntas are sitting on great fissure lines of civil conflict and once unleashed, the state cannot even survive. This is a terrible state of affairs, where on one extreme you have the Orwellian regime and Room 101 and the torture never stops; and when we remove this horrible state that keeps the populace in a social stasis of uncomfortable peace, we end up with Bosnia and Kosovo, the battle of Fallujah, or the Islamic State which is an attempt to reconstruct a state, but around religious laws instead of common laws.

All of which is to say, military juntas come into being to stave off a slide into complete chaos, but then overstay their welcome as it goes through its own paranoia phase, torturing and killing people to maintain this uncomfortable stability. Again, I'm not writing this in praise of these horrible arrangements; I'm simply pointing out that in the absence of strong democratic credentials and traditions, a military junta ends up being the compromise arrangement to keep civil peace. You have to think of Tito's Yugoslavia as the shining example - but all these nasty regimes exist because of necessity. Nobody likes this stuff. And when they fail, they tend to fail spectacularly as they descend into chaos.

The refugee exodus of Syria isn't just an issue of Assad and his brutal regime or the fact that Vladimir Putin will not give-up his ally facing the Mediterranean Sea. To that end, Putin has now stationed his own warplanes in Syria. In the mean time we have Tony Abbott trying to engineer a 'request' from the President of the USA to enter into bombing runs on ISIL-held positions in Syria. Not only is Tony Abbott exacerbating the problems inside Syria which is already a war-torn post-apocalyptic landscape, he is adding to the reasons for residents to flee as refugees, while risking coming to blows with Russian warplanes. The people are running because civilisation has collapsed around them. Their civilisation collapsed because it was held together by the military might of the state, and then the state wasn't there any more - just the violence. And we want to ad to the violence.

The Syrian Collapse

Syria came to this collapse because of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring of course was prompted by high commodity prices, which led to staple foods being too expensive to buy. Not even the long-standing regime of Muamar Gaddafi could hold on in the face of the high commodity prices. Similarly, in Egypt, the high commodity prices drove people into the streets to protest and that brought down Mubarak's regime which had stood solid since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The irony is that the commodity prices surged because oil prices surged, and the oil prices surged because these very same OPEC regimes opted to make a killing out of surging oil prices thereby creating the conditions for their own demise. Oh the irony!

All the same, what is not well known is that Syria underwent a crippling drought between 2006 and 2011. This was such an historic drought that it decimated longstanding farming operations and communities. The drought pushed whole populations into urban areas without any means of survival. And the military junta remained locked in its rigid "maintain-order-at-all-costs" sort of thinking, which made things worse. The historic drought was most likely (nobody ever gets to prove these things) due to Global Warming and Climate Change. Again, these countries that export oil for combustion created the conditions whereby they strangled themselves. Oh the double irony!!

Today, Bashar Assad is in charge of his military, but Syria itself has collapsed as a civilisation. It is every bit like a failed state - much like Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and on the same trajectory as Iraq and Afghanistan. As Global Warming and Climate Change continue, there will be more and more places that succumb to its effects. There will be more refugees from failed states. The wave of refugees coming from these places are people who want to remain civilised. It's time we accepted this simple fact. We could do much worse than to take in these people.

Syria today therefore offers us a glimpse into the post-apocalyptic future we ought to fear. The fragile, brittle state collapses as result of economic and environmental chaos, there's nowhere to run. We can't go around assuming this is stuff that only happens in far away lands.

How Many Refugees?

Before the recent surge of Syrian refugees, I did a quick search on Google and found that in 2015, the refugee count according to the UN was 60 million people. Out of the 195 or so UN member nations, let's hypothetically say 100 are up to receiving refugees. The other 95 are candidates to send out more, rather than receive, but we'll leave that issue for a moment. I know this is a gross oversimplification, but I want to lead you through this so you understand the scale of numbers. That would make it 600,000 per nation to take in from the refugees that exist right now. If we said the realistic number of nations that are able to take refugees was more like 50, we're talking about 1,200,000 per nation.

That's a big number, but it goes to show that Germany is doing pretty well when Angela Merkel says they will take 800,000 people. It's effectively saying they'll add 1% to their population with refugees. In any case, 800,000 is not entirely out of the order of magnitude that sits between 600,000 and 1,200,000 people.

Australia on the other hand, says it will take 20,000 this year. It's an amazingly paltry figure, really. It's a whole order of magnitude out from the problem as it exists. If it were left to Australia, it would take 60years' worth of refugee visas before it took in its share of 1,200,000. So one wonders just what on earth Peter Dutton is asking "what can Australia do to help?" when the mathematics are very simple - Australia needs to up its refugee intake to about 240,000 before it can claim it's punching its weight.

More to the point, that 1% rise in German population is probably going to add a whole bunch to GDP growth in the coming years. Think about all the new whitegoods and TVs and demand on real estate that will arise out of the arrival of these people. Its not a half-dumb move to be taking these people in. Australia's economy could do a lot worse than adding 240,000 people straight off the plane from Syria.