The World Series Game 2
For the first time in a decade, I was able to sit down with my father and watch the World Series. The post-season used to be more fun in the late 1990s and the early 2000s when the Yankees were there almost inevitably, and with good teams even if they didn't win. This year's post-season didn't work out well for the Yankees who were one-and-done as they bowed out to the Astros, who then lost to the Royals. What can I say, if you don't hit, you can't win.
Anyway, it occurred to me that there aren't too many World Series left where I could sit down with my father and take in the game. Who knows what my circumstances will be next year, and having just turned a venerable eighty, there are far more MLB post-seasons in the rear mirror than ahead for my father. It was just good old family stuff I've been missing out on because I've been at the Events Lighting company all these years. It's nicety get off the carousel of work and experience family life.
Game 2 was notable for Johnny Cueto pitching a complete game 2-hitter for the Royals. The first guy to do so since Greg Maddux in 1995. The Mets looked like they were never going to hit off Cueto. They also looked terrible in the field. The Yankees outplayed the Mets this year and the hallmark of those games were the errors the Mets made when put in the crunch, which allowed the Yankees to get on top. The Mets didn't look to have improved with the glove since the Subway series, so it's really not looking good for them as they fell to 0-2.
A 2-hitter is a terrible thing, given the context where you're botching it up in the field. Curtis Granderson looked out of sorts with the bat; David Wright looked like he couldn't hit a watermelon travelling at 92mph; Yoenis Cespedes looked like he was drowning in a deep slump; and Daniel Murphy who might be the Mets' hottest hitter right now, went 2 strike outs, 2 walks, and no hits. What can I say, if you don't hit, you can't win.
Sort Of Unrelated...
I went to see Fleetwood Mac on the weekend with Walk-Off HBP. At some point during the concert he offered the opinion that some of the songs were a little too sexy and jarring to be sung by a 70year old (Stevie Nicks is actually 67, but you get the drift). I offered up the counter opinion that Fleetwood Mac were like Wilmer Flores, the shortstop for the Mets. Quite serviceable but it's not like he's A-Rod or Jeter or Nomar. Fleetwood Mac are quite a serviceable pop rock band, but it's not like they're Led Zep or The Who or Pink Floyd.
I tried writing up a crit for Fleetwood mac, but couldn't be bothered finishing it. Ultimately, I feel I've got them well pegged as the Wilmer Flores of rock music.
From The Reading List
I'm still working my way through Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century' on my Kindle. It's actually too big a book to have on Kindle in my opinion, as it is hard to reference multiple pages on the fly, unlike a physical book.
I'm also muddling through 'Who Owns The Future' by Jaron Lanier but I've also picked up 'Ill Fares The Land' by Tony Judt. Amazingly, all three of these books cover the rise of the post-war middle class as a historic anomaly. Piketty demonstrates that it was indeed anomalous through figures; Lanier arrives at it through the weight of anecdotal evidence he has gathered, and Judt goes through the philosophical ructions that led to heavily socialist programs to limit wealth disparity after the two world wars.
While it may be the zeitgeist that we are discussing wealth disparity and inequality in a way we haven't up to now. The Reaganomic and Thatcherite economic program of deregulation and privatisation have essentially undone the efforts of the post-World War II thinkers, politicians an institutions, so it insult natural to see a return to the sort o wealth disparity and inequality we saw in the 1920s. Perhaps this is even why we've seen TV productions such as 'Boardwalk Empire' which brought the disparity in the late 1910s and early 1920s into sharp focus, as well as 'Mad Men' which delineates the pinnacle of society where there was much less wealth disparity and inequality, albeit with terrible, inexcusable sexism.
It may not seem to be an immediately solvable problem, but if politicians don't address these problems soon, they're going to make conditions for the rise of extremist ideologies once again. Dare I say we may even be seeing it already, given that we did elect Tony Abbott to be prime minister, and even after having been removed, he's proven himself to be ideologically indistinguishable from being a flat out fascist.
The Lanier book is particularly instructive in telling us that the creative destruction of capitalism as described by Schumpeter doesn't reconstitute itself in a more egalitarian society, but that it reorganises itself to suit ever smaller numbers of people with the accumulated wealth concentrating in ever fewer people. The Judt book is a little more disturbing in that it dissects the ideological roots of economic thought that has led us to our present day and it is clear that the welfare state that gave rise to a middle class could only offer one-size-fits-all solution, when in fact the middle class got accustomed to being consumers and consumers necessarily demand choice. In the case politics, this descended into the fragmenting New Left of the 1970s centred around a misunderstanding of Marxism and the proliferation of identity politics. meanwhile the return of the Right is merely a self-justification of those with wealth to justify their disproportionate wealth built on the destruction of the middle class.
In other words, the futures bleak, the past was bleak and the present is like a meatloaf going cold on the table. Piketty's massive tome merely gives us the numbers on just how bleak the past was and why, and the likely bleakness of the future based on the slowly dying consensus of today.
A Gen-X View of the Universe.
"The Issue Isn't Pussy, It's Monkey" - from The Right Stuff
Film, Cinema, Movies, TV, Music, Rock
2015/10/30
2015/10/28
The Things That Happen (While You're Busy Making Other Plans)
Goodbye Events Lighting, It's Been A Lovely Show
On Monday I had to leave my day job. The writing on the wall had been clear for a number of days, and the intractability of the situation I'd found myself made it more of a final straw that broke the back of the situation. I'm ashamed to admit it, but in the end I fucked up and it was a big enough fuck up that I had to wear all of the blame for it. It was a little like a cloth unraveling from a thread being pulled. This situation deteriorated pretty fast.
My company boss - you remember him, the little tyrant - was furious and seemed to think I wasn't contrite enough for my mistake; but then by the time he was yelling and screaming at me, I think I was half way out the door. I don't mind being blamed for mistakes I made - I can own up to those. I just can't stand it if it is couched as my being tepid in my commitment to the job or malicious sabotage or stupidity. For even one of those things to be a part of the consideration, revealed he held me in very low esteem. I realised contempt had crawled into the picture, and that's a tough one from which to come back.
I spent the weekend thinking about the mistake and how it came about and what more I could have done to have avoided it as well as various scenarios that could unfold. Sometimes all it takes is that "you fuck one goat"; and this goat wasn't going to get un-fucked. Of course the little tyrant had also spent his weekend fuming about my mistake, but rational analysis and management are not his strong suit. That's why I had the job I had; If he could do rational analysis and management, I wouldn't have a job in the first place because that's what I was effectively hired to do. The ironic logic in this is quite hilarious - but that too is life.
By lunchtime Monday, the situation had hit rock bottom with neither of us willing to trust one another's judgment. At that point you realise things are over and there's really no turning back. As manager Joe Torre used to say after post-season losses with the Yankees, "it is what it is"; and what it was, was that it was time.
You see in American films and TV shows where people leave jobs, and they pack boxes with personal effects and trudge out the door humiliated. I've always felt that was a bad look. In my time at the Events Lighting firm, I'd always considered it more likely than not that I would have to leave at the drop of the hat, given the peculiar (infantile, I might add) personality of the the little tyrant. So for the entire 8year tenure, I had that eventuality pictured in my head: The way I would leave would be to reach for my golden Don Draper AO Aviator sunglasses, put them on suavely and leave with a movie star smirk. Minimum fuss, maximum cool.
Except it didn't quite work out that way. I had to take the cat - yes, the factory cat I have been looking after for 18 months - and that meant I had to carry way more than a cardboard box. So much for the minimum fuss and maximum cool thing. For whatever it's worth, the cat hasn't really stopped purring since she's moved in - clearly she likes it better at my place than the factory.
On Monday I had to leave my day job. The writing on the wall had been clear for a number of days, and the intractability of the situation I'd found myself made it more of a final straw that broke the back of the situation. I'm ashamed to admit it, but in the end I fucked up and it was a big enough fuck up that I had to wear all of the blame for it. It was a little like a cloth unraveling from a thread being pulled. This situation deteriorated pretty fast.
My company boss - you remember him, the little tyrant - was furious and seemed to think I wasn't contrite enough for my mistake; but then by the time he was yelling and screaming at me, I think I was half way out the door. I don't mind being blamed for mistakes I made - I can own up to those. I just can't stand it if it is couched as my being tepid in my commitment to the job or malicious sabotage or stupidity. For even one of those things to be a part of the consideration, revealed he held me in very low esteem. I realised contempt had crawled into the picture, and that's a tough one from which to come back.
I spent the weekend thinking about the mistake and how it came about and what more I could have done to have avoided it as well as various scenarios that could unfold. Sometimes all it takes is that "you fuck one goat"; and this goat wasn't going to get un-fucked. Of course the little tyrant had also spent his weekend fuming about my mistake, but rational analysis and management are not his strong suit. That's why I had the job I had; If he could do rational analysis and management, I wouldn't have a job in the first place because that's what I was effectively hired to do. The ironic logic in this is quite hilarious - but that too is life.
By lunchtime Monday, the situation had hit rock bottom with neither of us willing to trust one another's judgment. At that point you realise things are over and there's really no turning back. As manager Joe Torre used to say after post-season losses with the Yankees, "it is what it is"; and what it was, was that it was time.
You see in American films and TV shows where people leave jobs, and they pack boxes with personal effects and trudge out the door humiliated. I've always felt that was a bad look. In my time at the Events Lighting firm, I'd always considered it more likely than not that I would have to leave at the drop of the hat, given the peculiar (infantile, I might add) personality of the the little tyrant. So for the entire 8year tenure, I had that eventuality pictured in my head: The way I would leave would be to reach for my golden Don Draper AO Aviator sunglasses, put them on suavely and leave with a movie star smirk. Minimum fuss, maximum cool.
Except it didn't quite work out that way. I had to take the cat - yes, the factory cat I have been looking after for 18 months - and that meant I had to carry way more than a cardboard box. So much for the minimum fuss and maximum cool thing. For whatever it's worth, the cat hasn't really stopped purring since she's moved in - clearly she likes it better at my place than the factory.
On my way out I got a goodbye-bear-hug from one of my colleagues. I shook hands with another colleague who seemed strangely delighted I was leaving. A couple of others from the crew emailed me their best wishes. My General Manager to whom I reported, offered to write me a glowing reference. I have no regrets except to say I let her down at the end.
Between me getting the cat and the company losing my contribution, I figure I did better out of the divorce. You learn some things from cats. Like landing on your feet. Next week, I start work for the publisher Puncher & Wattman. Just as I did years ago for the Events Lighting company, I'll be doing a couple of days per week of office admin work. I'm looking forward to the challenge of helping this one grow. It will be a franchise closer to my heart than the little tyrant and his medieval fiefdom, and for that I consider myself extremely lucky.
2015/10/22
Talking About My Generalisation
Generalising Generations
I was on the phone to Pleiades today and he sort of laughed and said I was a bit heavy on the Baby Boomers yesterday, and being one of them he wanted to appeal to me that not all Baby Boomers were bad. Which, of course they're not; and most certainly not even half of Gen-X is particularly good. They're really rough demographic handles to talk about a large chunk of the population, and any generalising is bound to contain gross, boundless, indefensible inaccuracies.
Still, my problem is that years ago when I started blogging, I put up the stupid line "Gen-X View of The Universe" like it mattered and have been somewhat bound by that less-than-stellar choice. Had I hoisted "Dissenting Voice In The Universe", I might have had some more leeway to be just as general (and generalising), but without putting myself in one corner of the universe all the time.
Yes, Justin Trudeau is a Gen-Xer, as is David Cameron, but they have hardly anything common with each other politics-wise, and as a commentator, I can assure you I have even less in common with both men. Waving around the banner phrase is simply a kind overstatement of something that is probably a lot more subtle and fleeting.
The moment the demographic question comes to the fore the most, at least in Australia is that policy-makers have drawn lines in the past and into the future whereby things like HECS and HELP have landed firmly on Generation X while the Baby Boomers hardly got touched by it, and even the extension of the retirement age out to 67 applies from Generation X. The different laws covering superannuation contributions and taxation are likewise demarcated on the line - and the only reason I could think of was that the people who have drawn the line there were not Generation X.
Thus, it's not about what we are like, or what they are like; it's that demographically speaking, different rules and regulations have applied to the different generations, and this has resulted in different outcomes for people in different demographics. As a long time observer, it has been clear that a lot of rules had to be rewritten for Generation X because the money that used to be there is somehow no longer there. And so compared to the Baby Boomer generation, higher education cost more for Gen X (and even more for Gen Y), public primary and secondary education was poorer for Gen X (and even poorer still for Gen-Y), and access to jobs and finance was harder and took longer for Gen-X (and is even worse for Gen-Y), and so on.
Is all this the Baby Boomers' fault? No. It's just the way things went, out of over-arching necessities. Yet I think the ramification of all this, is that when Generation X will hold high public offices, it will result in a realignment of the old social compact. This includes things like gay marriage and addressing climate change as the challenge it really is. Generation X won't be progressive because they were born progressive; on the contrary they're likely even more apolitical than previous generations but for the fact that they will be forced to be political on a bunch of issues, and the viable answers are going to lean towards progressive ones because the conservative ones sure haven't helped.
This is why there is a gulf of difference in understanding by the likes of say, Eric Abetz, who is fighting a furious rearguard action, and the future progressive government which will manifest itself at some point eventually. It may well be a sea change of the kind we haven't seen since Whitlam came to power the back of the Baby Boomer vote.
The Awfulness Of Pokies
Mrs. Pleiades put me on to this one. This is an honest-to-goodness scary doco about how Pokies work and what they do to you. It goes through the history of their development, and the behavioural science of rewards, running the gamut from Pavlov, to BF Skinner to the latest MRI scans the brain and how they respond to pleasurable stimulus and how dopamine is released in the brain to stimulate the pleasure centre. Really, it's all about the dopamine and the pleasure centre and conditioned reflex.
It's one thing to be a gambling addict. I could be accused of being one, seeing how much time I do spend poring over the equities market and its gyrations. I hate it, but I like it and as my accountant said, "it's not like you can stop, now that you've started". It's a bit embarrassing but it's true. Even when I sell up the losing dogs at the end of the financial year, I'm still somehow in the market. I must be in it because I like it. It is pretty much gambling in the sense that I like the days where my shares go up.
Yet there is a crucial difference with Pokies in that the Pokies offer endless stimulus and reinforcement to keep you playing until you lose all your money. I've never liked pokies because I can't even begin to calculate what the odds are, just from looking at the machine. This is totally against the spirit of proper gambling to begin with. Then, I can't stand the endless music cues and sound effects because they're not truly musical if we're being specific about music - they're more like walls of sound to fill the air. I hate the nonsensical graphics that purport to tell a story when of course the only story going on is you sticking money into the machine and losing it chunk by chunk. I say, if you're going to a casino, play a real game with the real croupiers - but that's just me being a minority-report sort of guy. The majority of gamblers in Australia go to the local club and start inserting money into these terrifying things.
The doco tells you just exactly how much they tune these machines to fleece you of your money. They call it "gambling to extinction". They're fine tuned to get you hooked in, and suck you dry.
Peter Garrett makes an appearance to explain his little story about the gambling lobby and how powerful it has become and how it stopped the Gillard Government dead in its tracks from regulating the most vicious machines. We know the story, and how it went down with Andrew Wilkie wanting the regulations and pretty much holding the government hostage, only for everybody in government to back down in the face of intense lobbying from the gaming industry and clubs. With a hung Parliament, there simply wren't the numbers to do the right thing. It's a shame, but the real shame is that these horrible machines are still out there, chewing through the vulnerable wallets.
Just as a side observation, Peter Garrett makes a small mention of how the pokies came in and displaced bands in pubs. As one of the musicians that found pokies displacing bands in the late 80s, I can tell you Peter Garrett's nonchalant commentary was annoying as all hell. He got the good bit where pubs were venues, and his band got to play them. My generation got shafted and turfed out by Pokies. So, you know, tell me about it..
I was on the phone to Pleiades today and he sort of laughed and said I was a bit heavy on the Baby Boomers yesterday, and being one of them he wanted to appeal to me that not all Baby Boomers were bad. Which, of course they're not; and most certainly not even half of Gen-X is particularly good. They're really rough demographic handles to talk about a large chunk of the population, and any generalising is bound to contain gross, boundless, indefensible inaccuracies.
Still, my problem is that years ago when I started blogging, I put up the stupid line "Gen-X View of The Universe" like it mattered and have been somewhat bound by that less-than-stellar choice. Had I hoisted "Dissenting Voice In The Universe", I might have had some more leeway to be just as general (and generalising), but without putting myself in one corner of the universe all the time.
Yes, Justin Trudeau is a Gen-Xer, as is David Cameron, but they have hardly anything common with each other politics-wise, and as a commentator, I can assure you I have even less in common with both men. Waving around the banner phrase is simply a kind overstatement of something that is probably a lot more subtle and fleeting.
The moment the demographic question comes to the fore the most, at least in Australia is that policy-makers have drawn lines in the past and into the future whereby things like HECS and HELP have landed firmly on Generation X while the Baby Boomers hardly got touched by it, and even the extension of the retirement age out to 67 applies from Generation X. The different laws covering superannuation contributions and taxation are likewise demarcated on the line - and the only reason I could think of was that the people who have drawn the line there were not Generation X.
Thus, it's not about what we are like, or what they are like; it's that demographically speaking, different rules and regulations have applied to the different generations, and this has resulted in different outcomes for people in different demographics. As a long time observer, it has been clear that a lot of rules had to be rewritten for Generation X because the money that used to be there is somehow no longer there. And so compared to the Baby Boomer generation, higher education cost more for Gen X (and even more for Gen Y), public primary and secondary education was poorer for Gen X (and even poorer still for Gen-Y), and access to jobs and finance was harder and took longer for Gen-X (and is even worse for Gen-Y), and so on.
Is all this the Baby Boomers' fault? No. It's just the way things went, out of over-arching necessities. Yet I think the ramification of all this, is that when Generation X will hold high public offices, it will result in a realignment of the old social compact. This includes things like gay marriage and addressing climate change as the challenge it really is. Generation X won't be progressive because they were born progressive; on the contrary they're likely even more apolitical than previous generations but for the fact that they will be forced to be political on a bunch of issues, and the viable answers are going to lean towards progressive ones because the conservative ones sure haven't helped.
This is why there is a gulf of difference in understanding by the likes of say, Eric Abetz, who is fighting a furious rearguard action, and the future progressive government which will manifest itself at some point eventually. It may well be a sea change of the kind we haven't seen since Whitlam came to power the back of the Baby Boomer vote.
The Awfulness Of Pokies
Mrs. Pleiades put me on to this one. This is an honest-to-goodness scary doco about how Pokies work and what they do to you. It goes through the history of their development, and the behavioural science of rewards, running the gamut from Pavlov, to BF Skinner to the latest MRI scans the brain and how they respond to pleasurable stimulus and how dopamine is released in the brain to stimulate the pleasure centre. Really, it's all about the dopamine and the pleasure centre and conditioned reflex.
It's one thing to be a gambling addict. I could be accused of being one, seeing how much time I do spend poring over the equities market and its gyrations. I hate it, but I like it and as my accountant said, "it's not like you can stop, now that you've started". It's a bit embarrassing but it's true. Even when I sell up the losing dogs at the end of the financial year, I'm still somehow in the market. I must be in it because I like it. It is pretty much gambling in the sense that I like the days where my shares go up.
Yet there is a crucial difference with Pokies in that the Pokies offer endless stimulus and reinforcement to keep you playing until you lose all your money. I've never liked pokies because I can't even begin to calculate what the odds are, just from looking at the machine. This is totally against the spirit of proper gambling to begin with. Then, I can't stand the endless music cues and sound effects because they're not truly musical if we're being specific about music - they're more like walls of sound to fill the air. I hate the nonsensical graphics that purport to tell a story when of course the only story going on is you sticking money into the machine and losing it chunk by chunk. I say, if you're going to a casino, play a real game with the real croupiers - but that's just me being a minority-report sort of guy. The majority of gamblers in Australia go to the local club and start inserting money into these terrifying things.
The doco tells you just exactly how much they tune these machines to fleece you of your money. They call it "gambling to extinction". They're fine tuned to get you hooked in, and suck you dry.
Peter Garrett makes an appearance to explain his little story about the gambling lobby and how powerful it has become and how it stopped the Gillard Government dead in its tracks from regulating the most vicious machines. We know the story, and how it went down with Andrew Wilkie wanting the regulations and pretty much holding the government hostage, only for everybody in government to back down in the face of intense lobbying from the gaming industry and clubs. With a hung Parliament, there simply wren't the numbers to do the right thing. It's a shame, but the real shame is that these horrible machines are still out there, chewing through the vulnerable wallets.
Just as a side observation, Peter Garrett makes a small mention of how the pokies came in and displaced bands in pubs. As one of the musicians that found pokies displacing bands in the late 80s, I can tell you Peter Garrett's nonchalant commentary was annoying as all hell. He got the good bit where pubs were venues, and his band got to play them. My generation got shafted and turfed out by Pokies. So, you know, tell me about it..
Trudeau Wins In Canada
Canada's Generation Jump
And just like that Canada elected Justin Trudeau as their new Prime Minister, ousting longtime Conservative Stephen Harper. One does not want to comment too much about the people other people's nations elect but if there is one thing to be said about Stephen Harper is that his brand of conservatism enabled the likes of Tony Abbott to continue being a climate change denier head of government. Harper's Canada and Abbott's Australia were substantial holdouts in making any meaningful commitments towards curbing emissions or moving away from mining fossil fuels as the mainstay of exports in their respective countries.
Interestingly enough, Australia's Liberal Party ousted Tony Abbott to get some credibility back, and in so doing the right wing climate-change-denying end of politics in Australia has had to beat a retreat from the controls. It's probably not coincidence that Stephen Harper simply ran out of time, options and good grace as a new leader took control and won the election. There is something of Kevin Rudd who came to power after a long Howard Government, in Justin Trudeau's victory. Given that Canada has a Westminster system just like we do, whether we will see ructions developing as they have over here in Australia. It is quite possible that the long Harper Government has kept a handbrake on change for a long time, but now things are about to go into flux.
It's certainly hard to read the lay of the land in Canadian politics because there are 3 parties to the left of the Liberals including something called the New Democratic Party; they also have a Green Party; and they have a Québécois Party that caters to francophones; but only the Conservatives to the right. In the 2011 election the Liberals were decimated but now they've taken a solid chunk out of the middle ground, so much so they have a majority in their own right.
The even more notable thing is that Mr. Trudeau is a strapping 43 years old. Yes, he is Generation X, which doesn't mean anything about his potential competence as ahead of government; but it is remarkable in that Canada got there second in the anglophone nations (David Cameron was born in 1966, he is the first). You wouldn't have thought it was possible even 6 months ago. Just as the youth vote swung hard behind Kevin Rudd in 2007, one imagines the youth vote made a meaningful impact in installing a young leader.
It's doubly remarkable because it appears the Baby Boomers aren't going away in the upcoming US election - none of the Republican Gen-X candidates have a shred of appeal or credibility so far, leaving the leaders as Clinton, Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right; All 3 a bunch of old Baby Boomers. It's going to be a while yet before a Gen-X-er sits as President in the White House. Australia too has had a choppy few years of Prime Ministerial change but it appears to have been a musical chairs audition amongst Baby Boomers in Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and now Turnbull. As I've said before, if Turnbull is successful and stays a while, a Gen-X PM is going to have to wait in the wings indefinitely.
The point is, Trudeau has possibly arrived at his political destination a little early in history. Stephen Harper is roughly a contemporary of Barack Obama and Julia Gillard. 12 years younger, Justin Trudeau is a contemporary of Winona Ryder, Ricky Martin and Sacha Baron Cohen. It's a big jump. How can Canada's Baby Boomers handle this sudden jump? Or are they less conservative than their counterparts in America and Australia and the UK? It's hard to imagine, but it might even be the case.
So it is with that in view I'm going to make a fearless prediction and say Canada's polity will necessarily be infected by the Australian disease and start chopping and changing leaders as polls go south. Trudeau will be fine for a while until he is forced to break one of his big promises. His poll will sink, his backbench will get restless, and voila! Chop-and-Change time will manifest itself. Some Baby Boomer is going to try and reclaim their moment in history.
Really, it's not just about the hair.
And just like that Canada elected Justin Trudeau as their new Prime Minister, ousting longtime Conservative Stephen Harper. One does not want to comment too much about the people other people's nations elect but if there is one thing to be said about Stephen Harper is that his brand of conservatism enabled the likes of Tony Abbott to continue being a climate change denier head of government. Harper's Canada and Abbott's Australia were substantial holdouts in making any meaningful commitments towards curbing emissions or moving away from mining fossil fuels as the mainstay of exports in their respective countries.
Interestingly enough, Australia's Liberal Party ousted Tony Abbott to get some credibility back, and in so doing the right wing climate-change-denying end of politics in Australia has had to beat a retreat from the controls. It's probably not coincidence that Stephen Harper simply ran out of time, options and good grace as a new leader took control and won the election. There is something of Kevin Rudd who came to power after a long Howard Government, in Justin Trudeau's victory. Given that Canada has a Westminster system just like we do, whether we will see ructions developing as they have over here in Australia. It is quite possible that the long Harper Government has kept a handbrake on change for a long time, but now things are about to go into flux.
It's certainly hard to read the lay of the land in Canadian politics because there are 3 parties to the left of the Liberals including something called the New Democratic Party; they also have a Green Party; and they have a Québécois Party that caters to francophones; but only the Conservatives to the right. In the 2011 election the Liberals were decimated but now they've taken a solid chunk out of the middle ground, so much so they have a majority in their own right.
The even more notable thing is that Mr. Trudeau is a strapping 43 years old. Yes, he is Generation X, which doesn't mean anything about his potential competence as ahead of government; but it is remarkable in that Canada got there second in the anglophone nations (David Cameron was born in 1966, he is the first). You wouldn't have thought it was possible even 6 months ago. Just as the youth vote swung hard behind Kevin Rudd in 2007, one imagines the youth vote made a meaningful impact in installing a young leader.
It's doubly remarkable because it appears the Baby Boomers aren't going away in the upcoming US election - none of the Republican Gen-X candidates have a shred of appeal or credibility so far, leaving the leaders as Clinton, Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right; All 3 a bunch of old Baby Boomers. It's going to be a while yet before a Gen-X-er sits as President in the White House. Australia too has had a choppy few years of Prime Ministerial change but it appears to have been a musical chairs audition amongst Baby Boomers in Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and now Turnbull. As I've said before, if Turnbull is successful and stays a while, a Gen-X PM is going to have to wait in the wings indefinitely.
The point is, Trudeau has possibly arrived at his political destination a little early in history. Stephen Harper is roughly a contemporary of Barack Obama and Julia Gillard. 12 years younger, Justin Trudeau is a contemporary of Winona Ryder, Ricky Martin and Sacha Baron Cohen. It's a big jump. How can Canada's Baby Boomers handle this sudden jump? Or are they less conservative than their counterparts in America and Australia and the UK? It's hard to imagine, but it might even be the case.
So it is with that in view I'm going to make a fearless prediction and say Canada's polity will necessarily be infected by the Australian disease and start chopping and changing leaders as polls go south. Trudeau will be fine for a while until he is forced to break one of his big promises. His poll will sink, his backbench will get restless, and voila! Chop-and-Change time will manifest itself. Some Baby Boomer is going to try and reclaim their moment in history.
Really, it's not just about the hair.
2015/10/20
News That's Fit To Punt - 20/Oct/2015
He Said "Cunt-Struck"
Today's odd little furore is this thing here where one Michael Lawler used the term 'cunt-struck', on Four Corners.
Today's odd little furore is this thing here where one Michael Lawler used the term 'cunt-struck', on Four Corners.
The offending phrase occurred towards the end of a bizarre and damning program examining the relationship between former Health Services Union boss Kathy Jackson and Lawler.
"I'll be characterised as that scumbag, crook, fraudster, and, at the very best, somebody who's been bewitched by an evil harridan, namely Kathy [Jackson]," Lawler told Caro Meldrum-Hanna.
"That I'm cunt-struck and that I have been utterly taken in by somebody who's a serious crook," he said.
One person who has been intimately involved in the case from the start reportedly turned to his partner in disbelief and said, 'Tell me he just said 'dumbstruck'."
Ha. No, he did not say dumbstruck at all; and so the wowsers went into top gear and you could hear the whine from where I was down in Kingsgrove. The Macquarie definition for cunt-struck seems to miss the mark as well. It's not that the person who is cunt-struck is "infatuated with a woman", it is the fact that the act of sexual congress with a specific woman has altered their perceptions of reality around them in such a way as to benefit that woman's perspective completely.
Amazingly there's somebody there who claims to not have heard the term before. I remember when I first heard it - it wasn't long after the film 'Starstruck' came out in the 1980s. Yes, that's right, I heard it way back then, so some of these people really are sheltered. It is a mental state that I have catalogued as one to avoid, but it does make you less pliable in a relationship, and people start referring to you as an evil cynic.
Just as an aside, I heard a term with which I wasn't familiar, just this last weekend when people were discussing the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' auto-generator. The term was 'Cock Snot'. I'd never heard that term before so I guess I'm pretty sheltered too.
The Perils Of Student Politicians
While we're on the topic of Kathy Jackson, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey penned by Guy Rundle. It appears Mr. Rundle is very familiar with the student politician career of Kathy Jackson.
I'm going to be a little naughty and quote a big chunk:
That’s the real story behind the Jackson disaster, and the Craig Thomson affair that preceded it: the utter decadence, the real moral squalor that has infected sections of the Labor Party Right, and that other sections of the Right have failed to address with any seriousness. This moral decline has deep roots and complex causes, but part of it comes down to the collapse of a genuine Right/Left conflict within the party in the 1980s. The factions remained, but the real differences that had made them a rational form of political organisation had vanished. So the Right, always bound up with capital to a greater degree, simply became a machine without content. The unions that formed its base had been steadily amalgamated into super-unions with a dissolved relation to the particular occupations and workers they represented. In the years of full arbitration and centralised wages fixing, they had relatively little scope to make their own deals. When enterprise bargaining took over from awards-and-demarcation system, workers got the worst of both worlds from such unions: they were quasi state-apparatuses, laced into state power to administer labour, and they had a free hand to make deals with major employers. Their heads and officers came not from the floor, but overwhelmingly from student politics, as the first post-student step in a political career. The distance between leaders and led in right-wing Australian unions, always wide, became cavernous. There appears to have developed a real contempt and disdain for the people they represented.
In the case of the HSU, that disdain is sickening, utterly disgusting. All workers deserve to be properly represented, but there must be a special circle of hell for someone who whacks the plastic to the tune of $1 million-plus from the people who do the grunt work on basic wages, looking after those with chronic illnesses, cancers, and all that flesh is heir to -- work that often demands, even from those furthest from actual medical intervention, a bit or a lot more than many others are asked to give in their jobs. To represent such people should be a privilege and an honour, the cornerstone of a meaningful life. To turn it into a freeloaders’ picnic is not the only example of the decadent and diminished place the Labor Right has come to, but it’s one of the most visible. This is more than just taking a bit off the top. This is the betrayal of a membership -- and of a wider political movement. Labor is soft at the centre because the Right is soft at the centre, a quagmire made by two decades of the cynical politicking and character deformation of which Jackson is an example.
Goodness, look at the density of that text and deep conviction in denouncing Jackson. It sure saps credibility from the union movement, and by extension the ALP and Bill Shorten. It's not just a scandal, it's a fiasco and imbroglio, all rolled into one
Who The Hell Is Heffernan Talking About?
Mr. Fake Pipe Bomb himself, Bill Heffernan thinks that a former PM might be a pedophile. He's just not telling us which one. I know we've had 5 in 5 years, but the living PMs only go so far back to Bob Hawke. realistically, for what he's talking about to matter, he's talking about Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull.
A former Australian prime minister is on a list of "alleged paedophiles" that Liberal senator Bill Heffernan claims forms part of a police document.
Senator Heffernan used a Senate estimates committee hearing on Tuesday to discuss the list of 28 people, which he said formed part of police documents that had been "signed off" by Gary Crooke, QC, the former senior counsel assisting NSW's Wood royal commission into police corruption in the 1990s.
Many of the people on the list and otherwise named in the documents were "prominent", including a former prime minister, he said: "They were delivered to me by a police agency some time ago because no one seems to want to deal with them."
Every Commonwealth attorney-general since Philip Ruddock had seen the list, Senator Heffernan said.
You could rule out Abbott & Turnbull because they're too recent to fit the description. You can also rule out Howard because Heffernan is a partisan come hell or high water. That leaves the ALP Prime Ministers, of who, you could probably safely rule out Gillard on the grounds that she is a woman, she too is fairly recent, and she's not a NSW politician. That kind of puts the spotlight on Hawke, Keating and Rudd, and again maybe Rudd is too recent, and he too isn't from NSW.
It's some crazy shit we're even discussing it, and really you suspect Heffernan is flinging mud only because he's protected by parliamentary privilege. That being said, long time readers might recall that years ago, Bob Collins was revealed to have been a pedophile and rapist after he committed suicide. Since then I've taken the view that one shouldn't be surprised by anything that comes to light.
2015/10/19
View From The Couch - 19/Oct/2015
What Kind Of Man Reads Playboy?
Sometime last week, it made the news that Playboy magazine was no longer going to feature nude models. A thousand smart alec remarks would have been launched to such news. Instead, the women will be scantily clad, unprovocative poses, but not nude. In a day and age where Australia's leading lad mag 'Zoo' was forced to close shop, it seems rather retrograde that Playboy retreats to a position of further modesty, but perhaps on another level, subtlety is the new 'adult' thing.
Sometime last week, it made the news that Playboy magazine was no longer going to feature nude models. A thousand smart alec remarks would have been launched to such news. Instead, the women will be scantily clad, unprovocative poses, but not nude. In a day and age where Australia's leading lad mag 'Zoo' was forced to close shop, it seems rather retrograde that Playboy retreats to a position of further modesty, but perhaps on another level, subtlety is the new 'adult' thing.
At a time when every teenage boy has an internet connected phone and the web is rife with pornography, the magazine has opted to continue featuring women in provocative poses, just not completely nude, the Times said.
"You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free," Flanders was quoted as saying in the Times. "And so it's just passe at this juncture."
The magazine that featured Marilyn Monroe on its debut cover in 1953 is making the changes after circulation dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now, the Times said.
That is a relatively slow decline compared to some other magazines. Playboy always elicited strange responses from guys I knew. They would dismiss it as too tame (and therefore lame) next to the more explicit Penthouse magazine, and in the next breath denounce it as all sexist bullshit. Playboy's awkwardness probably lay in its decidedly middle-brow posture which gave it away as somewhat an illegitimate contributor to the public sphere of ideas. It's a quality it shares with Rolling Stone, but of course Rolling Stone magazine gets extra credit from people for dealing with popular music and not naked women. One can't help but think it's a kind prudery because Playboy was no less progressive than Rolling Stone ever was when it came to social mores.
If you think about 1950s America before Alfred Kinsey threw open his Kinsey Report, there probably wasn't any forum or framework for the discussion of sex and the pleasures of carnality. It might seem quaint today but Playboy probably lifted the blinds on the collective bedrooms of the mind. As a society we've come a long way since those days to the point where any teenager can click on the internet and find the most explicit porn to their choosing. It sure didn't turn out this without Playboy magazine along the way.
Try this article for the impact of Playboy on the public consciousness:
The November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine is the magazine’s best selling issue of all time. This is not because of the articles, but due to the proliferation of one iconic image from the magazine: that of centrefold model Lena Söderberg.
The original image was digitised by researches at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) in 1973. Alexander Sawchuk, the assistant professor of electrical engineering, his graduate student and the SIPI lab manager were frantically looking for a new image for a research paper.
They had already exhausted the stock of usual test images. It was at this moment — according to legend — that a colleague walked in with the November 1972 issue of Playboy. Seeing the predicament that the researches were in, he tore a 5.12-inch strip from the top of the centrefold and fed it to their scanner. As it had a resolution of 100 lines per inch, the resulting image was the perfectly cropped head and shoulders image 512 x 512 pixels in size.
This image has since been used widely in imaging processing circles. That’s because the nature of the image makes it amenable for testing a wide range of image processing algorithms.
Here's an article that gives you a better digest of Playboy than I can.
Playboy was always exceptionally decent. Hugh Hefner was helped by a start-up loan from his mother, not Satan. And Playboy had an impeccable record of literary publishing. Ray Bradbury's epochal Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in 1954 and the magazine hosted Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, John Le Carre and John Updike - not at all a shabby list. Presumably, they did not think of themselves as slumming it.
Photographers at work on Playboy included Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and Annie Leibovitz. The magazine interviewed major political figures, including Martin Luther King and President Carter. It was the latter who mournfully explained in 1976 that he had "committed adultery in my heart many times". I think he must have meant "head", because the big truth about erotica is that the real action takes place above the collar, not below the belt. Hence, Playboy's late decision to cover up its nudes does very little to defuse eroticism. In the contest between concealment and display, concealment is almost always more sexy: this is why classic Playboy nudes are actually so deliciously chaste.
That is an amazing list of names to have written and taken photos for Playboy. There is a Japanese edition of Playboy. It is remarkably similar in philosophy to its American source. They too hired some of the great writers and photographers to contribute and in most part it was more edifying than not. Nudes are nice, but the articles were the thing. Not that I've looked at any edition of Playboy since the 1980s so it's hard to say if the standard has been maintained.
Sometime in the mid 1980s, Andy Summers and Robert Fripp teamed up to give us the album 'Bewitched'. On it is an epic instrumental track 'What Kind of Man Reads Playboy'. I always took it to be an ironic, subtle admission of their prurient interest in pictures of naked ladies. Today, I'm thinking they meant it was a very different kind of man to look past the naked ladies to actually read the amazing articles contained within.
2015/10/18
News That's Fit To Punt - 18/Oct/2015
Wealth Is A State Of Mind
Just how well off are we in Australia? Quite a bit, but we don't seem to notice, is the answer.
It turns out that most people out there trying to get into the housing market waving around their deposits upwards of 100k, are very wealthy people already.
Just how well off are we in Australia? Quite a bit, but we don't seem to notice, is the answer.
It turns out that most people out there trying to get into the housing market waving around their deposits upwards of 100k, are very wealthy people already.
Inequality has grown since the global financial crisis (GFC) and the richest 1 per cent now own half of all household wealth in the world, a report has found.
So much of the world remains relatively poor that it has taken a net worth of just $US3210 ($4400) this year to be among the wealthiest half of all world citizens, according to Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report 2015.
And it doesn't take obscene amounts of money to rank among the richest of the world's 7 billion citizens. A net worth of more than $US68,800 puts you in the top 10 per cent of all global wealth holders. Once debts are subtracted, you need $US759,900 to be in the top 1 per cent, the report found.
That's not a great deal of money if you're sitting on a mortgage Sydney. Median prices eclipsing $1million puts that close enough to US$759,900. If you own a house outright in Sydney, you're in the world's top 1%. Of course this is different to the top 1% for Australia, but from a global perspective, our society is incredibly wealthy.
It's not terribly profound but it goes to show wealth is a state of mind.
Branding It Thrusted Custard
Speaking of wealth, the news this week was talk of Malcolm Turnbull's investments in a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands. It appears that the hedgefund in the Caymans pays no tax in the USA, but the returns that come to Malcolm Turnbull's holdings are taxed in Australia appropriately according to Malcolm Turnbull. That set the cat amongst the pigeons.
The ALP attack on Turnbull was branded as a ham-fisted 'class war' by defenders of Turnbull, but you have to wonder about this a little bit. Not everybody gets the opportunity to investing a hedgefund in the Caymans, which does benefit from dodging taxes in one major jurisdiction. If the residents of Australia all equally had access to such a fund as an investment vehicle, then Malcolm Turnbull's defence that it is like any ordinary investment would pass the sniff test. As it is, it's not likely that people have the kind of money to buy expensive units in such investments, so just being able to put your money into a fund that dodges taxes in America is a privilege of wealth.
Even without a class war take on it, it's a bad look when the Prime Minister of the land is getting special returns dodging taxes in America. It's made worse when you consider it's contributing to the inequality and not subtracting from it, in the sense that it affirms the investment options for the wealthy would be different to the ordinary citizens.
If we do put on the full class warfare goggles, then it is clear that it is a sign of a system that segregates options based wealth. I think the ALP is correct in pointing out that this is a problem for the Prime Minister to have such holdings as he shields stop companies from tax scrutiny. Russell Brand had an odd simile when he went on TV this week.
It's not terribly profound but it goes to show wealth is a state of mind.
Branding It Thrusted Custard
Speaking of wealth, the news this week was talk of Malcolm Turnbull's investments in a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands. It appears that the hedgefund in the Caymans pays no tax in the USA, but the returns that come to Malcolm Turnbull's holdings are taxed in Australia appropriately according to Malcolm Turnbull. That set the cat amongst the pigeons.
The ALP attack on Turnbull was branded as a ham-fisted 'class war' by defenders of Turnbull, but you have to wonder about this a little bit. Not everybody gets the opportunity to investing a hedgefund in the Caymans, which does benefit from dodging taxes in one major jurisdiction. If the residents of Australia all equally had access to such a fund as an investment vehicle, then Malcolm Turnbull's defence that it is like any ordinary investment would pass the sniff test. As it is, it's not likely that people have the kind of money to buy expensive units in such investments, so just being able to put your money into a fund that dodges taxes in America is a privilege of wealth.
Even without a class war take on it, it's a bad look when the Prime Minister of the land is getting special returns dodging taxes in America. It's made worse when you consider it's contributing to the inequality and not subtracting from it, in the sense that it affirms the investment options for the wealthy would be different to the ordinary citizens.
If we do put on the full class warfare goggles, then it is clear that it is a sign of a system that segregates options based wealth. I think the ALP is correct in pointing out that this is a problem for the Prime Minister to have such holdings as he shields stop companies from tax scrutiny. Russell Brand had an odd simile when he went on TV this week.
"Why do you put really, really rich people in charge of your country for, who want to build a thing called a tax shield?" he said, referring to the Coalition giving private companies that earn more than $100 million a year an exemption from new tax disclosure requirements.
He then went on to criticise Turnbull and revelations - hammered by the Labor party this week - that the prime minister has some of his wealth located in the Cayman Islands. But he did it in a very Russell Brand sort of way, with one of the stranger metaphors ever used in Australian public life.
"[Turnbull] goes he's got money in the Cayman Islands but there's nothing wrong with it... Having your money in the Cayman Islands is like putting your dick into custard," said Brand.
"We all want to do it, but there's no rational reason to do it."
"If your dick's in a bowl of custard you're doing it for a reason."
It's strangely accurate when you parse the logic. It would make us all feel better if we could all do it, but we don't or can't. If he's doing it, caught red-dicked, he's got a lot more explaining to do than simply dismissing it as class warfare. He ought to be embarrassed and desist.
Hiding WestConnex From Scrutiny
The ugly news this week amongst a week of fairly vanilla headlines was the news that the NSW Government shifted the controls for the WestConnex project into the hands of a private corporation which essentially shields WestConnex from public scrutiny. More specifically, information about the Sydney Motorway Corporation and its doings cannot be accessed or captured under the Freedom of Information.
Hiding WestConnex From Scrutiny
The ugly news this week amongst a week of fairly vanilla headlines was the news that the NSW Government shifted the controls for the WestConnex project into the hands of a private corporation which essentially shields WestConnex from public scrutiny. More specifically, information about the Sydney Motorway Corporation and its doings cannot be accessed or captured under the Freedom of Information.
The board of the Sydney Motorway Corporation, now responsible for all aspects of the project, is chaired by experienced engineering executive Peter Brecht, after former chair Tony Shepherd resigned this month.
Other board members are finance executives Penny Graham, Mary Ploughman and Cameron Robertson, former Boral chief executive Rod Pearse, Treasury representative Leilani Frew, as well as chief executive Mr Cliche and deputy chief executive Peter Regan. The two shareholders of SMC are Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian and Mr Gay.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the SMC said a 2014-15 financial report would be submitted to ASIC by the end of October, which would disclose information relating to key management compensation.
The spokeswoman also said that because the corporation is delivering and financing the road on behalf of RMS, RMS "will continue to hold information relating to WestConnex and remains subject to GIPA".
However Labor's roads spokeswoman, Jodi McKay, said the WestConnex changes were "all about shutting down scrutiny."
"I do not understand how they can call themselves a private corporation when they have two minister shareholders," Ms McKay said.
"It is government money, it is clearly a government organisation."
They're in a mighty hurry to build this thing. So far there isn't a business case to build it, the Environment Impact Statement is being carried out by the company that is contracted build it; there are no concrete plans open for discussion for the public, but they are furiously buying land to make this thing. The people who have analysed the bones of the proposal that has gone to the public have come to the conclusion that it's not worth building because there is no net benefit for having built this series of roads - which makes it a complete and utter waste of $15.4 billion. Nick Greiner who chaired the group who came up with the crazy proposal has resigned because even he can't see the point of building this thing.
But by all means, please, hide all this from public scrutiny and pay your crony capitalist lobby group friends to go ahead with this cockamamie plan, Mr. Baird. Something tells me you'll live to regret it.
Vanishing Point Of Politics
Paul Keating popped up today he still wants a treaty and a Republic.
Australia is in many ways a very strange country. Its penal colony roots and then the manufactured consensus on the meaning of nationhood through the 20th century has framed up national identity as the kind of topic through which all cultural discourse runs. Hence the big project to have an 'Australian' theatre or literature or cinema or music has driven the various arts funding for many years. Australian Identity is our of necessity - quite simply - a bun-fight for grants.
And it is through this distorted cultural prism that we come to the republican debate which pits on one side those who wish Australia to remain part of the vast British colonial past, and those who consider it somehow progressive to make the head of state a President and not the appointed representative of the British Crown. It is, to put it bluntly, the identity politics played by the political class of this country who largely remain, distinctly white.
To give you a picture of how disjointed the Republican debate is, consider that most Australians under the age of 40 were not alive at theme of the Whitlam Dismissal. If ever there was an incident which cast great doubt about the structure of the government of this country, it was the Dismissal, and all discussions of the Republic in fact stems from the constitutional shock that the Prime Minister of the land could be sacked by the agent of the British Crown. It is so opaque, we have no idea what Queen Elizabeth II thought about this incident that was carried out in her name, but there it is, the inscrutable event that robs Australia of its sense of independence - and anybody under 40 was not there to see it.
It is somewhat curious that the middle ground of politics finds an overlap between the ALP's right as represented by Paul Keating, and the Liberal Party's moderate/wet faction as represented by Malcolm Turnbull, who are both "republicans" and important figures to the Republican movement. You find to the right of these figures John Howard who screwed the referendum; and further to the lunar right resides the rump that is Tony Abbott who was the face of maintaining the monarchy. If you add the fact that Whitlam and Fraser made up before their deaths, and that Fraser renounced his membership of the Liberal Party, you get a pretty crowded view of who's who in this on-going discussion, and how the Republic sits on strange fault line in the political alignment. All these men who were instrumental in forming the framework of the debate have passed through the Lodge, which tells you that for the political class of Australia, it was a debate of paramount importance - but the point of that debate is vanishing before out eyes. Quite simply, we're no longer the Australia of 1993 or 2003 (or even for that matter, 2013).
It's interesting that Paul Keating sees it as unfinished business, but it might just be the case that the issue itself has ceased to mean what it once did in the heady days of Keating's prime ministership. After all it seems like a heck of a long time ago that Australia's first Baby Boomer Prime Minister got up and pushed for a Republic.
But by all means, please, hide all this from public scrutiny and pay your crony capitalist lobby group friends to go ahead with this cockamamie plan, Mr. Baird. Something tells me you'll live to regret it.
Vanishing Point Of Politics
Paul Keating popped up today he still wants a treaty and a Republic.
On the republic, Mr Keating blamed John Howard for the defeat of the minimalist model that was proposed by the advisory committee chaired by Mr Turnbull that he appointed in 1993. "That's the great mark against Howard in respect of the republic: he will have now, probably forever, denied the country the right model," he said.
The model provided for a president appointed on the recommendation of both houses of parliament with the same reserve powers as the governor-general. Mr Keating sees the alternative of a directly-elected president as shifting the balance of power and authority away from the cabinet and the House of Representatives.
Asked if he would join Mr Turnbull on a platform if the Prime Minister revived the model, Mr Keating replied: "Of course I would."
Asked if this might represent the "best and last opportunity" to get that model up, he replied: "That's entirely likely."Over the years, I've developed a more detached view. I don't need a Republic for Australia to be truly a self-respecting nation; I certainly don't mind that the British Crown has a place at the table in Australian politics. I certainly would've liked to have seen Sir Peter Cosgrove sack Tony Abbott, but that was not to be. I don't want to expend money trying to change the flag and I won't feel better about this country just because we have a President and not a Governor General. On a simple pragmatic level, the republican debate is actually not that relevant to the day-to-day running of Australia.
Australia is in many ways a very strange country. Its penal colony roots and then the manufactured consensus on the meaning of nationhood through the 20th century has framed up national identity as the kind of topic through which all cultural discourse runs. Hence the big project to have an 'Australian' theatre or literature or cinema or music has driven the various arts funding for many years. Australian Identity is our of necessity - quite simply - a bun-fight for grants.
And it is through this distorted cultural prism that we come to the republican debate which pits on one side those who wish Australia to remain part of the vast British colonial past, and those who consider it somehow progressive to make the head of state a President and not the appointed representative of the British Crown. It is, to put it bluntly, the identity politics played by the political class of this country who largely remain, distinctly white.
To give you a picture of how disjointed the Republican debate is, consider that most Australians under the age of 40 were not alive at theme of the Whitlam Dismissal. If ever there was an incident which cast great doubt about the structure of the government of this country, it was the Dismissal, and all discussions of the Republic in fact stems from the constitutional shock that the Prime Minister of the land could be sacked by the agent of the British Crown. It is so opaque, we have no idea what Queen Elizabeth II thought about this incident that was carried out in her name, but there it is, the inscrutable event that robs Australia of its sense of independence - and anybody under 40 was not there to see it.
It is somewhat curious that the middle ground of politics finds an overlap between the ALP's right as represented by Paul Keating, and the Liberal Party's moderate/wet faction as represented by Malcolm Turnbull, who are both "republicans" and important figures to the Republican movement. You find to the right of these figures John Howard who screwed the referendum; and further to the lunar right resides the rump that is Tony Abbott who was the face of maintaining the monarchy. If you add the fact that Whitlam and Fraser made up before their deaths, and that Fraser renounced his membership of the Liberal Party, you get a pretty crowded view of who's who in this on-going discussion, and how the Republic sits on strange fault line in the political alignment. All these men who were instrumental in forming the framework of the debate have passed through the Lodge, which tells you that for the political class of Australia, it was a debate of paramount importance - but the point of that debate is vanishing before out eyes. Quite simply, we're no longer the Australia of 1993 or 2003 (or even for that matter, 2013).
It's interesting that Paul Keating sees it as unfinished business, but it might just be the case that the issue itself has ceased to mean what it once did in the heady days of Keating's prime ministership. After all it seems like a heck of a long time ago that Australia's first Baby Boomer Prime Minister got up and pushed for a Republic.
2015/10/14
View From The Couch - 14/Oct/2015
Syria Without An Endgame
Syria worries me. The Assad regime in Syria is a brutal dictatorship, of which there is no doubt or disputing. In our contemporary western sensibilities, we would like for Bashar Assad to leave the stage of politics and give up his reign as President. Yet, if there is anything that is just as clear about these Arab states is that when you remove the patriarchal secular dictator, the power vacuum left by their death invites all manners of sectarian crazies with even more violent mentation. Removing Gaddafi, Mubarak and even Saddam Hussein has not brought the light of democracy to these countries as hoped by democratic nations of this world.
What has emerged is the uncomfortable truth that democracy is possibly unworkable in the middle east, and that nobody counted on this likelihood at all. In one sense it is arguable whether we in the west are doing democracy all that well anyway; but it is also arguable as to whether democracy really does deliver the kinds of results its stated goals indicate. We think democracy is a pretty good thing - warts and all - because it fits into our cultural context and historic inheritance and reinforces our social values through its operation. It ignores the possibility that fundamental pillars of a working democracy like separation of church and state (or any religion for that matter) or separation of powers - especially the independence of courts from the executive, and for that matter women getting a vote; these things might all be an anathema in the middle east where there is simply no equivalent cultural or historic reason that would lead them to such positions.
Naturally the phenomenon of voting in extremists into government has taken place in Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt tells you quite a bit about the people doing the voting. In a kind of circular logic, the desire for extremism brings about the military junta to clamp down for peace, and that's what you had in Iraq and Egypt. It also doesn't say a lot for Yasser Arafat's tenure as PLO leader that the voters, once they were given a vote, wanted even more extreme action than a former terrorist.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying, removing Bashar Assad is no promise for better times or more peace and prosperity in Syria. If the cultural context has anything to tell us, it tells us that the alternatives to Assad are likely much worse than the secular, suit-wearing, beardless, Oxford educated Assad. Any discussion about Peace in Syria can't skirt this problem, although the rhetoric the west puts it on fairly decisive grounds that they want Assad gone.
As it turns out, Putin is dead set on keeping Assad exactly in place, in power and has somehow recruited the Iranians and the Chinese to this cause, while the USA and NATO forces attempt to supply the rebels who are not ISIS. Putin is hammering anybody and everybody who is opposed to Assad inside Syria, which means the mostly group of rebels funded by the USA are getting hit as well as ISIS positions. They're arguing about it but it's not going to present a solution for what happens after Assad is removed.
However this thing is meant to turn out, it's looking like it will be a long time before we get a picture of the endgame to this civil war in Syria - and that assumes it's not going to spread.
Putin In The Boot
One imagines Vladimir Putin must be laughing. Xi Jing-Ping probably is laughing too, but we'll go with Vlad first. Putin, in his second incarnation as Russian President has been rather like a 19th century colonialist. The incursion in to Ukraine to regain Crimea is nothing short of an imperialist land grab; his response to the mistaken shooting of MH17 has been nothing short of brazen; and Syria is offering him another opportunity to press his advantage through power projection and confrontational diplomacy against the west. In short, he's a ratbag, and he's not even our ratbag. He's just this ratbag out there behaving like the political clock stopped in 1914.
Like some parody of the boorish Russian peasant, Putin seems impervious to the opprobrium and contempt heaped upon him for his actions. He simply doesn't give a shit what we think of him - and rightly so, he is the strong and we are the weak. Behold his mighty bold moves to restore military prestige to Russia. No, it's truly impressive if it weren't like some timewarp joke.
Sarcasm aside, Putin has managed to get a port and base in Syria out of all this chaos and he even managed to wrangle an airbase out of Iraq to stage his version of anti-ISIS action. It is as if the world is playing 'Stratego' while he is playing 'Steel Fury Kharkov 1942'. One imagines the Russian forces do not have rules of engagement or any respect for human rights or international law. The only reason they're not rogue is because they sit on the UN Security Council. It's nuts, but there we have it.
In stark contrast, what have we got? Our unwillingness to jump into World War III, boots and all. Really, can you blame us for that? It's remarkable how we've ended up in this situation.
Air China Delivery
Somewhere in the media is a report that tells us China has sent war planes to operate in Syria, helping the Russians. They're trying out their new Aircraft carrier and J-15 fighter bombers. I don't know about you but this is all strangely reminiscent of Hitler sending his Stuka squadrons to the Spanish Civil war in 1935. When you're blatantly dress-rehearsing your fledgling carrier and war planes on a nation in civil war, (a country with which you have had very little historic contact, to boot), there's really no moral or ethical defence is there?
I am reminded the 'Guernica' by Picasso. I'm also reminded of the apocryphal story about the Nazis who visited him in Paris and on seeing the 'Guernica', asked him " did you do this?"; to which Picasso replied, "no, you did".
The thing that scares me is that these wildcat proxy wars and testing out troops and equipment is somehow going to turn into a full-blown World War III. It's highly likely if everybody sticks to their best senses but you just don't know with the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jing-Pings of this world.
Syria worries me. The Assad regime in Syria is a brutal dictatorship, of which there is no doubt or disputing. In our contemporary western sensibilities, we would like for Bashar Assad to leave the stage of politics and give up his reign as President. Yet, if there is anything that is just as clear about these Arab states is that when you remove the patriarchal secular dictator, the power vacuum left by their death invites all manners of sectarian crazies with even more violent mentation. Removing Gaddafi, Mubarak and even Saddam Hussein has not brought the light of democracy to these countries as hoped by democratic nations of this world.
What has emerged is the uncomfortable truth that democracy is possibly unworkable in the middle east, and that nobody counted on this likelihood at all. In one sense it is arguable whether we in the west are doing democracy all that well anyway; but it is also arguable as to whether democracy really does deliver the kinds of results its stated goals indicate. We think democracy is a pretty good thing - warts and all - because it fits into our cultural context and historic inheritance and reinforces our social values through its operation. It ignores the possibility that fundamental pillars of a working democracy like separation of church and state (or any religion for that matter) or separation of powers - especially the independence of courts from the executive, and for that matter women getting a vote; these things might all be an anathema in the middle east where there is simply no equivalent cultural or historic reason that would lead them to such positions.
Naturally the phenomenon of voting in extremists into government has taken place in Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt tells you quite a bit about the people doing the voting. In a kind of circular logic, the desire for extremism brings about the military junta to clamp down for peace, and that's what you had in Iraq and Egypt. It also doesn't say a lot for Yasser Arafat's tenure as PLO leader that the voters, once they were given a vote, wanted even more extreme action than a former terrorist.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying, removing Bashar Assad is no promise for better times or more peace and prosperity in Syria. If the cultural context has anything to tell us, it tells us that the alternatives to Assad are likely much worse than the secular, suit-wearing, beardless, Oxford educated Assad. Any discussion about Peace in Syria can't skirt this problem, although the rhetoric the west puts it on fairly decisive grounds that they want Assad gone.
As it turns out, Putin is dead set on keeping Assad exactly in place, in power and has somehow recruited the Iranians and the Chinese to this cause, while the USA and NATO forces attempt to supply the rebels who are not ISIS. Putin is hammering anybody and everybody who is opposed to Assad inside Syria, which means the mostly group of rebels funded by the USA are getting hit as well as ISIS positions. They're arguing about it but it's not going to present a solution for what happens after Assad is removed.
However this thing is meant to turn out, it's looking like it will be a long time before we get a picture of the endgame to this civil war in Syria - and that assumes it's not going to spread.
Putin In The Boot
One imagines Vladimir Putin must be laughing. Xi Jing-Ping probably is laughing too, but we'll go with Vlad first. Putin, in his second incarnation as Russian President has been rather like a 19th century colonialist. The incursion in to Ukraine to regain Crimea is nothing short of an imperialist land grab; his response to the mistaken shooting of MH17 has been nothing short of brazen; and Syria is offering him another opportunity to press his advantage through power projection and confrontational diplomacy against the west. In short, he's a ratbag, and he's not even our ratbag. He's just this ratbag out there behaving like the political clock stopped in 1914.
Like some parody of the boorish Russian peasant, Putin seems impervious to the opprobrium and contempt heaped upon him for his actions. He simply doesn't give a shit what we think of him - and rightly so, he is the strong and we are the weak. Behold his mighty bold moves to restore military prestige to Russia. No, it's truly impressive if it weren't like some timewarp joke.
Sarcasm aside, Putin has managed to get a port and base in Syria out of all this chaos and he even managed to wrangle an airbase out of Iraq to stage his version of anti-ISIS action. It is as if the world is playing 'Stratego' while he is playing 'Steel Fury Kharkov 1942'. One imagines the Russian forces do not have rules of engagement or any respect for human rights or international law. The only reason they're not rogue is because they sit on the UN Security Council. It's nuts, but there we have it.
In stark contrast, what have we got? Our unwillingness to jump into World War III, boots and all. Really, can you blame us for that? It's remarkable how we've ended up in this situation.
Air China Delivery
Somewhere in the media is a report that tells us China has sent war planes to operate in Syria, helping the Russians. They're trying out their new Aircraft carrier and J-15 fighter bombers. I don't know about you but this is all strangely reminiscent of Hitler sending his Stuka squadrons to the Spanish Civil war in 1935. When you're blatantly dress-rehearsing your fledgling carrier and war planes on a nation in civil war, (a country with which you have had very little historic contact, to boot), there's really no moral or ethical defence is there?
I am reminded the 'Guernica' by Picasso. I'm also reminded of the apocryphal story about the Nazis who visited him in Paris and on seeing the 'Guernica', asked him " did you do this?"; to which Picasso replied, "no, you did".
The thing that scares me is that these wildcat proxy wars and testing out troops and equipment is somehow going to turn into a full-blown World War III. It's highly likely if everybody sticks to their best senses but you just don't know with the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jing-Pings of this world.
2015/10/12
Sam De Brito - 1969-2015
The Fading Glory of Youth, The Flowering Wisdom Of Man
Sam de Brito was a tremendous writer who dressed up his offerings in a larrikin prose. He had a command of topics and profound insight that any one with a brain would envy. He was the jocular entertainer as well as the sanguine philosopher as he probed how contemporary masculinity shaped up and disintegrated on the shores of its own limitation.
I started reading Sam's blog 'All Men Are Liars' blog back in the 2007. It's a catchy title, and with it came his bounding observations about our sexual mores and the unraveling of the traditional masculine as it shed a skin and turned into something new. A committed feminist, he argued the case for women's equality on a regular basis even to the chagrin of 'proper' (read female) feminists; yet his writing was also archly masculine and was frank about what men wanted. He was simply a marvellous advocate for men being men, and for which he advocated that in exchange for that acceptance men had to make room for women.
Occasionally he would self-depracatingly refer to himself as a "wog", which betrayed the scars of identity alienation in his teenage years. He was an interesting study in how one became - existentially - a man in the twenty-first century. He would read up on history and regale his readers with ancient observations about men and women, as much as he would cheer for teams, athletes, causes and people. He was the egalitarian voice of a Gen-X Sydney.
In more recent years his blog gave way to a more mature column that took on weightier issues. While in his thirties and without child he was still a wild man writing about his experiences with cocaine or with prostitutes. Hemingway would have been proud of this bloke. As a father of a young child, he grew up into being a responsible citizen commentator - much more considered, erudite and rounded writer than many of the other columnists plying their trade. All the while the glory of youthfulness in his writing transformed into a robust persuasiveness for the right causes, and a better way to look at life.
Needless to say either of the speculations by the police that his death was suicide or murder gives rise to an alarm. It is hard to imagine the man from his writing that he would commit suicide and leave his daughter in this world; equally it is hard to imagine him offending anybody so much as to incite murder.
Vale Sam, you will be missed by all of your readers.
Sam de Brito was a tremendous writer who dressed up his offerings in a larrikin prose. He had a command of topics and profound insight that any one with a brain would envy. He was the jocular entertainer as well as the sanguine philosopher as he probed how contemporary masculinity shaped up and disintegrated on the shores of its own limitation.
I started reading Sam's blog 'All Men Are Liars' blog back in the 2007. It's a catchy title, and with it came his bounding observations about our sexual mores and the unraveling of the traditional masculine as it shed a skin and turned into something new. A committed feminist, he argued the case for women's equality on a regular basis even to the chagrin of 'proper' (read female) feminists; yet his writing was also archly masculine and was frank about what men wanted. He was simply a marvellous advocate for men being men, and for which he advocated that in exchange for that acceptance men had to make room for women.
Occasionally he would self-depracatingly refer to himself as a "wog", which betrayed the scars of identity alienation in his teenage years. He was an interesting study in how one became - existentially - a man in the twenty-first century. He would read up on history and regale his readers with ancient observations about men and women, as much as he would cheer for teams, athletes, causes and people. He was the egalitarian voice of a Gen-X Sydney.
In more recent years his blog gave way to a more mature column that took on weightier issues. While in his thirties and without child he was still a wild man writing about his experiences with cocaine or with prostitutes. Hemingway would have been proud of this bloke. As a father of a young child, he grew up into being a responsible citizen commentator - much more considered, erudite and rounded writer than many of the other columnists plying their trade. All the while the glory of youthfulness in his writing transformed into a robust persuasiveness for the right causes, and a better way to look at life.
Needless to say either of the speculations by the police that his death was suicide or murder gives rise to an alarm. It is hard to imagine the man from his writing that he would commit suicide and leave his daughter in this world; equally it is hard to imagine him offending anybody so much as to incite murder.
Vale Sam, you will be missed by all of your readers.
2015/10/05
View From The Couch - 06/Oct/2015
TwIRP Towards ZIRP
This is disconcerting to the people who watch numbers all day. Financial markets are pricing in a 65% chance of further interest rate cuts, taking us down to record lows of 1.5%. When it hits that number, I guess we won't be calling it TwIRP any more, it'll be some other beast headed towards Zero Interest Rate Policy, even in an allegedly healthy Australian economy.
This is disconcerting to the people who watch numbers all day. Financial markets are pricing in a 65% chance of further interest rate cuts, taking us down to record lows of 1.5%. When it hits that number, I guess we won't be calling it TwIRP any more, it'll be some other beast headed towards Zero Interest Rate Policy, even in an allegedly healthy Australian economy.
"If they wait until February, it will be too late and they'd need to cut again immediately after the first one. So we're hoping, and expect them to go in November," economist Josh Williamson said, citing the labour market figures as the trigger.
Meanwhile, Bank of America Merrill Lynch has looked at the timing of the first rate rise by the Reserve Bank, generally not expected before late 2016.
Analysts say even that may be too early as the local central bank is viewed as facing similar challenges to the US Federal Reserve on its path to lift-off.
"The US Federal Reserve has been extraordinarily transparent in its intention to lift interest rates at some point this year. It has also been extraordinarily cautious," chief economist Alex Joiner wrote in a note, which, in a subhead, pointedly and somewhat provocatively asked: "Will the RBA ever be able to raise rates?"
He said that "this all comes as US economic growth, although absent an inflationary pulse, appears quite solid".
Well, where do we start? We all know about the inflation figures being wildly inaccurate thanks to the development over the years of ways in which not to calculate inflation, just so that central banks look good.
Every time a central bank cuts rates, it gooses the equities market, and everything looks good. There's an imperative to goose the share markets because that's where our superannuation is tied up one way or another, and with low interest rates, there are a lot of people who are forced to take the risk of being in the share markets so they can collect the dividends and live on that, instead of the appallingly low interest rates.
But of course lowering interest rates adds fuel to the hot air balloon that is the property bubble in this country; and let's not forget all our banks are plugged into this bubble at the fundamental level of mortgages. They dice up the mortgages into mortgage bonds and on-sell it, but in most part, if the bubble blows up, the banks are going to take a hit. When the banks take a hit, their shares are going to go down, and with them dividends. There are going to be a lot of retirees who are going to have their cashflow blown out of the water, even if they're not real estate investors.
How likely is it that the bubble will burst? I don't know. I've asked people from Japan how long the Bubble took to build in Japan but I only get a vague time frame of 5years, maybe 10years. They're vague because the original slope upwards was very gentle and you couldn't say for sure where the definite start point sat. This would be true of Australia, where until early this year most authoritative pundits were telling us there was no property bubble, and that things were priced fairly.
Maybe the picture is changing. Paul Sheehan of all people is now going on about what happens when the Australian property bubble pops. It's a bit of a joke because his real target is Bill Shorten and the ALP and what terrible policies they would have should they be in power when the bubble bursts. It doesn't seem to occur to him that if it bursts in the next 12months while Malcolm Turnbull is the Prime Minister, the Liberals collectively don't have a better idea as to how to rescue the economy.
It's really unlikely there's a plan for when the bubble bursts because there's simply too much money in the real estate market to bail out with public monies. Banks will be shored up, but beyond that, there won't really be a way of shoring up housing prices. If you can even imagine that scenario, do you think it's in the Liberal Party's thinking to manipulate markets to save asset prices? Remember, these were the munchkins going on about government debt during the GFC when liquidity dried up and could have felled our major banks. Besides which, proper liberal thinking would say market corrections are part of the market so let the prices fall where they may.
Which brings us back to the RBA which is charged with setting interest rates to aim for certain outcomes and has sat on the sidelines when it comes to housing prices and property bubbles and any such talk. They're already in a vice grip because they want the Australian dollar to go down; but interest rates are already at historic lows. If people aren't borrowing money to invest in businesses and making capital investments but instead are locking it up in housing, then lowering interest rates isn't doing the trick. If they really do go to 1.5% by the end of the year, then that's an indication that our economy is in dire, dire straits.
When The Bubble Pops
You can cue 'When the Levy Breaks' if you like. Or 'Here Comes The Flood'. I was talking to some people who lived through the rapid devaluation of property in Japan when the bubble popped. They had bought investment properties at about the equivalent of $300k. Then, it started to climb steadily until 3 bedroom flats in suburban Tokyo and Osaka hit the equivalent of $1million, but they didn't sell. They thought that was priced fairly - and they based their judgement on the fact that if the rest of the market was asking for the equivalent money and getting it, then it must be worth it (sound familiar?). When the Bubble popped, prices slid down to the equivalent of $400k in a matter of months, the banks went into receivership by the dozens, and so the government stepped in to shore up the banks and made them merge.
The bank mergers were a messy affair. Lots of people in banking lost their jobs in the big squeeze, cutbacks, redundancies, and shuffling and culling of offices. It was a disaster for people who picked banking as a career and were in their 20s. They were cast out the door first with nowhere to go. There's a whole generation of mostly Gen-Xers in Japan that copped this turmoil straight in the face, and naturally those people didn't go off and have kids because their financial security had evaporated. This contributed to the slowing population growth, the effects of which we're seeing now.
All the while asset prices were pulverised. Bad debts multiplied. You couldn't keep track of the spiral as just about anybody and everybody with a mortgage found themselves underwater. Banks simply couldn't write off the bad debts because all this capital had been destroyed simultaneously- writing it all off would have meant instant closures of all these baks, with deposits and all.
The government went on a spending spree, trying to stimulate growth for a decade. It spent big and it went into great debt to do this spending - but of course most of the infrastructure investment went to vested interests with lobby groups and resulted in a plethora of unnecessary capital works, (think, WestConnex all over the country) which in turn turned out to offer no increase in productivity, but merely put the government further in debt. The central bank put interest rates at close to zero. This destroyed the retirement plans lots of people - and with the growing number of elderly people thanks to an ageing population, shaved the living standards of the middle class right down.
In short, it's been cripplingly bad ever since; but at each juncture, what all the players did was go by the options given and choosing the least worst option out of many bad ones. That's how it goes. So when you look at Australia where inner city dwellings have hit well over $1million, you have to think it could easily all go to shit. If Paul Sheehan thinks he's going hang it all on Bill Shorten and the ALP, he is an imbecile (but we knew that anyway). If the day comes when the bubble bursts in Australia, it's going to eat up much more than a couple of careers in politics.
The Price of Doing Business
Here's something interesting that must be the sign of the times:
Cr Byrne, who will seek the backing of his fellow Leichhardt councillors on Tuesday night, also hopes to win the support of other Sydney councils that have similarly seen their commercial centres hurt by a mix of factors including high rents, competition from mega malls, and the rise of internet shopping.
The mayor's proposed "carrot and stick" approach would pair incentives such as speedy approvals for short-term leases with amendments to state and federal tax laws that would discourage premises being left vacant indefinitely.
"Under the Local Government Act, there is currently no allowance to reduce rates for those property owners who keep their properties tenanted or to increase rates for landlords who are using their properties as a tax write-off," Cr Byrne said.
"It's time for that to change."
However, Angela Vithoulkas, a City of Sydney councillor and small business owner, cautioned that the causes of declining main streets were "much more broad" than the role played by property owners.
"I've spoken to landlords who have vacancies on Oxford Street, they're as equally alarmed about the problem, not being able to find a tenant," Cr Vithoulkas.
"Do they just put in pop-ups, peanut rents? How do they fund that because that devalues their property as well once there's a rent value attached."
Cr Vithoulkas said incentives were the answer rather than "the stick", adding that changes could be introduced through the Retail Leases Act, which is already under review.
"Maybe you could have a discount on your land tax if you were encouraged to put in a tenant at a discounted rate," she said.
Good god, it's hilarious reading that. Nobody wants to take a haircut on their investment, right? One councillor thinks if they fined the property owners, that would encourage them to lower rents and get tenants in. In other words, there should be an enforced haircut to the property owner because it's a bad look for the council to have empty shops.
The other councillor says, no, no, no it's hard getting tenants. Not many people can afford the rents, but if hey lowered rents, it effectively is a haircut. So no. But if the council took the haircut on behalf of the property owners, then that might be okay.
There's nothing so awful as the aggressive pursuit of self interest at the expense of the public purse, but be that as it may, it shows that retail in Australia is squeezed not only by the competition from on-line but from the property bubble itself, demanding high rents. On the one hand, the consumer has many means to price the wares on offer more accurately which eats into the margins; but the landlord also wants a bigger chunk of the margin. What's a retail business renting a shopfront to do? Maybe the numbers have reached the point where there just can't be retail businesses in certain areas, thanks to the property bubble?
At a certain point the landlord has to recognise what the market will bear is much lower than they are insisting. The haircut is theirs to take, and they can't be passing it on to the council. If the council gave into that demand, it's giving way to a moral hazard. If you go out there and invest in a shop, it's part of your risk that you might not get the rent you want. The tenants are already shouldering the risk of having to meet rent and trying to squeeze out a margin - they're the ones that need the help, not the property owners.
Over the last few months I've noticed some old musical instrument shops go out of business. It's not long ago that Jackson's Guitars went into receivership but Smithy's seems to be gone, and the Classical Guitar Shop has also gone from Parramatta Road. It's not exactly surprising given just how much money has headed on-line and away from traditional retail outlets. I think Dickson's Music in Chatswood has also closed its doors. That's a sad one for me because once upon a time I worked there when I was a youngster.
I guess it is ironic that after the musicians were mauled out of business by the digital economy, it was then the retailers of musical instruments that got mauled out of the economy by both the digital economy and the property bubble. I wonder who will have their meal tickets taken away by the digital economy next. It would be kind of funny if it happened to bankers, lawyers and doctors.
2015/10/02
News That's Fit To Punt - 02/Oct/2015
The Bubble We Had To Have
Not sure how people construct notions like that, but here you can see it as the headline.
What Banks Are Doing To Hide Bad Credit
You won't hear this anywhere else. This is my exclusive. :)
Recently a 20year old kid borrowed 25k from one of the Big Four banks. At the time he had a steady job, and he had the patter to sound like he was a good bet to pay it back. So they lent him 25k with a 5year repayment schedule. He then went and splurged the 25k on what you and I might surmise are more toys than chattels or assets. Then he lost his job and couldn't pay. Thus he marched into the bank and told them the situation. They asked him just how much he could pay, and he replied $20 a month. So the bank said that was okay and took the $20 per month on good faith. It took a few months for him to find a job again but by then the bank unilaterally closed out the account, saying the 25k had ben paid (news to the kid, he couldn't imagine who it might be). What happened is unclear, but basically the bank told him because the loan had been paid off, the loan account was closed.
I know it sound amazing but it's true. The bank closed out the 25k in bad debt by writing it off quietly, rather than pursue the money. The 20year old kid effectively walked out of the bank 20k or so richer, for no reason other than the bank didn't want that bad loan on its books. So the banks purged the bad loan off its books.
The question you should be asking yourself is, just how much of this kind of things going on? How safe then are the Big Four banks? I'll leave that with you to decide.
There's Water On Mars
The big announcement of the week was that NASA says there's liquid water on Mars. It seems like it's been coming for a long time, but it's taken until 2015 for NASA to verify all the data and say, yes, there's liquid water on Mars. If you stop to think about it, it seems quite obvious that there would be water, and liquid water at that given the conditions of the planet, but that is just an aside. Science says, not until all the data is in, is it incontrovertible, so here we are.
The weirder turn was how Ridley Scott knew that NASA knew, but couldn't revise his film 'The Martian' to include that new discovery, because it would have let the cat out of the bag. Ridley Scott also made news in that he spoke to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop saying he wanted to shoot the sequels to 'Prometheus' in Australia.
The fact that there is liquid water on Mars bodes well for a possible future human colony on Mars.What doesn't bode well still are the low gravity, thin atmosphere and punishingly cold temperatures. It's not like we can grow things with much ease on Mars which means we won't be getting a food cycle happening easily. Ironically, what Mars needs for human habitation is a good dose of greenhouse effect.
Not sure how people construct notions like that, but here you can see it as the headline.
"The government has to try and talk it down and say it's inflated, but at the same time all they can try and do is control the ongoing growth as best they can," Mr Van-Petersen said. "If they wanted to prick it, they could, but Australia simply cannot afford to."
New Zealand and Singapore have enacted strong policies to force adjustments in housing markets and Mr Van-Petersen said Australia could easily deflate the bubble by pulling the stamp duty tax charged to foreign buyers from properties of more than $15 million to, say, $1.5 million.
But the property market is one of the few areas of the economy that is growing adequately as terms of trade plummet and mining companies shed value because commodity prices are falling in light of a slowing China.
"Australia can't afford for property to have a hard landing. If housing prices bust, the banks will get hit hard. And then what is there? It's in everyone's interests right now."Pretty spooky when they couch it that way. There are lots of places and things that can't afford to have hard landing - for instance China - but we know they're going through one as we speak; and if we are to understand correctly how our real estate market is connected to the Chinese economy and the money trying to get out of China, then it's likely not going to be the happy 9.8% growth prognostication.
What Banks Are Doing To Hide Bad Credit
You won't hear this anywhere else. This is my exclusive. :)
Recently a 20year old kid borrowed 25k from one of the Big Four banks. At the time he had a steady job, and he had the patter to sound like he was a good bet to pay it back. So they lent him 25k with a 5year repayment schedule. He then went and splurged the 25k on what you and I might surmise are more toys than chattels or assets. Then he lost his job and couldn't pay. Thus he marched into the bank and told them the situation. They asked him just how much he could pay, and he replied $20 a month. So the bank said that was okay and took the $20 per month on good faith. It took a few months for him to find a job again but by then the bank unilaterally closed out the account, saying the 25k had ben paid (news to the kid, he couldn't imagine who it might be). What happened is unclear, but basically the bank told him because the loan had been paid off, the loan account was closed.
I know it sound amazing but it's true. The bank closed out the 25k in bad debt by writing it off quietly, rather than pursue the money. The 20year old kid effectively walked out of the bank 20k or so richer, for no reason other than the bank didn't want that bad loan on its books. So the banks purged the bad loan off its books.
The question you should be asking yourself is, just how much of this kind of things going on? How safe then are the Big Four banks? I'll leave that with you to decide.
There's Water On Mars
The big announcement of the week was that NASA says there's liquid water on Mars. It seems like it's been coming for a long time, but it's taken until 2015 for NASA to verify all the data and say, yes, there's liquid water on Mars. If you stop to think about it, it seems quite obvious that there would be water, and liquid water at that given the conditions of the planet, but that is just an aside. Science says, not until all the data is in, is it incontrovertible, so here we are.
The weirder turn was how Ridley Scott knew that NASA knew, but couldn't revise his film 'The Martian' to include that new discovery, because it would have let the cat out of the bag. Ridley Scott also made news in that he spoke to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop saying he wanted to shoot the sequels to 'Prometheus' in Australia.
The fact that there is liquid water on Mars bodes well for a possible future human colony on Mars.What doesn't bode well still are the low gravity, thin atmosphere and punishingly cold temperatures. It's not like we can grow things with much ease on Mars which means we won't be getting a food cycle happening easily. Ironically, what Mars needs for human habitation is a good dose of greenhouse effect.
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