News That's Fit To Punt - 30/Nov/2015

The Limits Of Malcolm

Malcolm Turnbull has been getting some nice pieces written about him. They're easy to write, partly because Tony Abbott was singularly awful in his stint as Prime Minister, but also because Bill Shorten looks a little light weight next to Malcolm Turnbull. This has made Malcolm Turnbull look a lot better than he is capable of being given the precarious nature of his backbench support. When it gets down to it, politics remains the art of the possible, and when your backbench is lobbied heavily by the Minerals Council of Australia - yes, those very same bloody-minded cunts who went after Kevin Rudd - then there really isn't much possible.

And so Malcolm Turnbull backed right off the pledge to stop subsidising fossil fuels. When it got right down the nitty-gritty, too many of his constituents weren't ready to face the future. So much for the tremendous courage and all that. At this point in history, you do wonder whether they really believe there is no climate change or whether they just dig their heels in to keep dying industries alive - and if so, why didn't they dig in harder for the automotive industry?  It's a veritable mystery.

What's more poignant is that as with Kevin Rudd at Copenhagen, Malcolm Turnbull's limit is demarcated by the very limitations imposed by his own side politics. He might believe that Global Warming is a terrible challenge we must face, as with all the other beggar-thy-neighbour moves that the Coalition seems to love, Turnbull is committing us to "me-last" as Australia's mantra. The surrounding rhetoric sounds nice I'm sure, but this is the same dog's breakfast government when it comes down to the crucial aspects of emissions control.

Conservatives Like To Control You Through Your Meal Ticket

I just want to point to this interesting thing in Peter Hatcher's series on the execrable Abbott Government and how it failed most dismally.

In another incident, Credlin was angered and distressed by a column in The Australian by Niki Savva that appeared on October 30 last year. The particular sore point? Savva reported that Credlin had organised a dinner launch for a group to mentor Liberal women staff in Parliament House. The guest speaker at the dinner was Abbott. 

Savva thought it odd that Credlin had not invited the only woman in the cabinet and the deputy leader of the party, Julie Bishop, to the dinner. Relations between the two women had been increasingly difficult. Credlin was unhappy that the Savva column could contribute to the impression that she was trying to freeze Bishop out. 

Credlin sent a text message to the newspaper's editor in chief, Chris Mitchell. He tells Fairfax Media: "For several months she'd been complaining about Niki and the text said 'I've had enough, you have to sack her'." 

Mitchell replied that in 24 years as an editor no political staffer had ever made such a request and that he was shocked that she would ask. 

"Then Abbott got on the blower," says Mitchell. "He rang me about 10 minutes after my response to Credlin. 

"He asked me why I'd object to Peta's request to sack Niki when I had sacked Glenn Milne [an earlier columnist at The Australian] at Julia Gillard's request. I explained to him that that wasn't what had happened." 

Abbott denies asking for Savva's sacking, but Mitchell says that was exactly the interpretation he'd put on the prime minister's call.

Let them eat cake, seems to be the going motto there. It's staggering that the Prime Minister's chief of staff rings up a newspaper and demands somebody get sacked of writing an article that had negative implications. And when she couldn't get her way, the Prime Minister calls and demands somebody lose their job for actually doing their job. Worse still, this was a Prime Minister who presided over more jobs lost than jobs gained, and essentially, he wanted specific people to lose their jobs for being politically unfavourable.

What's particularly nefarious about this is that, not only are they lobbying for somebody to lose a job, they're doing so using the weight of public office, and doing it in a covert manner so that the columnist has no rebuttal - and then they deny it. It's a flagrant abuse of power, to even try this crap. The fact that they expected results, and then covered their tracks by denying it took place tells you well enough that not only are they sneaky and evil, they know they're being sneaky and evil, and are further enlisting sneakiness and evilness to get their little way.

Amazingly, this is the government Australia elected.

No Age Pension For You

Australia's federal budget is in a spot of bother. Something like $50billion will be missing, thanks to the Chinese economy 'tanking'. It's bit of a worry going forwards because that kind of demolishes the old Coalition platform to reduce the deficit to zero by the end o this decade. Given the Federal Budget is roughly $400billion all told, that 50 is 12.5%. Whatever you call that, it's not chump change.

Naturally, this leads to Scott Morrison enthusiastically saying that we can't count on the age pension in our old age any more. I don't know that getting the age pension is a great thing to begin with, but let's face it nobody's going to employ the elderly - that's why you retire. On top of which it doesn't pay great anyway; some of the stories are downright harrowing. So you kind of hope you can kind of shore up some sort of position going into old age, but what Scott Morrison's doing here is stealing from the future to pay for today, and in the process, ripping up old social contracts. It seems like these kinds of announcements are going to abound. They're ding badly, and they need the money.

The bottom line is, the future is going to suck even more than the present, precisely because it's the only place from where this government can steal. In that way, it's somewhat like a bad Terminator sequel.

Shark Watch

We're Going To Need A Bigger Perspective

Going back to a decade ago around the time I started blogging, one of the things I used to track was shark attacks. I did it for two reasons, one for amusement factor, but the other was the strong suspicion that eating out fish stocks in the ocean would force apex predators to target something else. This is because in 1996, I was in Saikung, where the fish markets are for Hong Kong and were shown what that looked like. They had an Aztec pyramid row of fish tanks filled with fish - all kinds of fish - some of which were protected in Australian waters, but here they were, crammed into fishtanks on the shores of HK.

My guide to Saikung was a guy called Krys who was an ex-pat Aussie plying the catering trade. Kris too was overwhelmed by just what was there, ready to be eaten. It was that astounding. I'll never forget seeing amongst the fish, a big parrotfish.
"Do you think they know what it is?" I asked Krys.
"No, of course not. They're just going to eat it because it's pretty," he replied, unable to hide his moral contempt.
A parrotfish is beautiful, elegant fish when you see it in its habitat near coral reefs. Apparently they taste fatty and not very nice. But somehow the Hong Kong markets were selling these fit aplenty because they were "good luck". It's kind of strange how a fish species utterly unknown to China and its 3500years of written history, suddenly gets to be "good luck" to eat.

The way Krys saw it, the moment the Chinese got rich, they would eat out the world's fish stocks. There were a billion of them and if they all got a taste for sushi, the world could kiss all varieties of tuna goodbye. That was 20years ago. Since the Chinese fishing fleets have been going far and wide to service the ever-growing appetite for seafood on the mainland. Naturally, one has to wonder what this does to the food chain. If humanity goes in there and gouges a large chunk out of the middle, what's left for the apex predator?

Twenty years ago, coastal sightings of Great White Sharks were relatively rare. Attacks by Great White Sharks around the globe were even rarer, so much so marine biologists likened the odds of getting attacked by a great White Shark at around the same order as winning Lotto. There were single digit number of attacks around the globe any given year. The common consensus amongst divers that I knew was that bull sharks and tiger sharks were more likely to attack than Great White Sharks.

About ten years ago when I started blogging, I noticed this number had risen and we were seeing around 3-5 attacks a year, just in Australian waters alone. If you wanted any kind of indication the food chain was being affected by overfishing, you didn't have to look much farther than what was happening with the apex predator.  Now, we're reaching the point where marine biologists are saying surfers should pay for shark protection measures.

The Great White Sharks are clearly coming closer to shore in search of food. This stuff simply never used to happen with the kind of regular frequency we're seeing today. If you have any kind of living memory, then it is alarming to see the rate at which this has happened. They nibble at humans because their normal targets are not there, and they're probably experimenting out of starvation. It's a little bit like big cat species that start hanging around closer to human habitation because their food chain is destroyed by encroaching civilisation. If this doesn't send waring signals to fisheries around the world, I don't know what will, but I don't seem to see that discussion going on. The Ocean just might be close to a mass extinction event., and hardly anybody's talking about it.

View From The Couch - 26/Nov/2015

The Old Companies Rule

For some time it's been apparent that Australia's industrial mix is getting a little ossified. Now that the mining boom is finishing and the capital expenditures that direction is shrinking, the non-mining sectors are supposed to be taking off except today we find that the last quarter saw drop in capex by 9.2%. That's a sheer drop off a cliff, which means the rest of the non-mining industries have basically said the future is just not all that interesting. And why would they, with interest rates so low? That has got to be the big indicator that the future is not that interesting to investors.

Anyway, this thing caught my eye:

Corporate Australia is pretty old. Certainly our biggest companies are, like CBA (which is actually 103 years old).

Take a look at the ten biggest companies on the ASX 200 index:

That, on its own doesn't say much except here's where America is at:

The picture you get is a greater mix of companies leading the pack. More importantly you can see the corporate engine of America is steadily moving towards high tech and higher expertise. The stark inertness of the Australian economy demonstrates that at the highest levels of corporate governance, they're really not interested in innovation or change; they're interested in oligopolistic rent-seeking. And because the top end of the town is essentially turgid and unimaginative an staid, the rest of the business sector takes its cues and behaves essentially the same way. 

There is a big discussion to be hd as to just how Australia should go, but history suggests even mounting the question is bound to be shot down by the oligopolists at the opt end of town. In the great reforms of the 80s, Australia shed its primary industry dominance and traded it in for tertiary industry dominance. The secondary industry never really grew in that mix and with the advent of China, manufacturing has been on the way out for some time. 

If you look at the top 10 companies in Australia, you have 4 banks 2 supermarket chains that form a massive duopoly, 2 mining giants and a Telco, and the lone biotech firm, CSL. This strongly reflects the point of Australia is housing loans, feeding families in the mortgaged homes and connecting them with phones, but also looking after them towards the end of life, having spent our lives being happy little consumers buying from Woolies and Coles, talked to our friends on the phone, and maybe had something to do with the export of commodities. 

One would think - if one were the thinking kind - that with all these graduates loafing around that the Federal Government would expand on research programmes like the ones that used to exist at the CSIRO instead cutting the CSIRO budget. Or that there would be greater expenditure in the arts (non-film division) and simply look for an exponential growth in Intellectual property leading to new industries. One would think - if one were the  thinking kind - that this was an obvious problem even back in the 1990s, and that somehow, successive governments have failed to address these basic, fundamental structural problems with our economy.

Of course, what we really did in this country instead was simply inflate a property bubble, so... You get the picture.

It Might Actually Be A Ponzi Scheme?

Ever since the Bernie Madoff thing, we've become sensitive to the term 'Ponzi scheme'. The proper definition of which reads:

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator, an individual or organization, pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator. Operators of Ponzi schemes usually entice new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. 

Ponzi schemes occasionally begin as legitimate businesses, until the business fails to achieve the returns expected. The business becomes a Ponzi scheme if it then continues under fraudulent terms. Whatever the initial situation, the perpetuation of the high returns requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to sustain the scheme.[1]

So calling the Property Bubble a Ponzi Scheme might be a little harsh.

As many first time buyers turn to the bank of mum and dad to top up their deposits, a new report "Parental guidance not recommended" warns Australians are being caught up in a classic "Ponzi scheme". 

The report by economic consultancy LF Economics – which has previously sensationally warned of a "bloodbath" when Sydney's property bubble bursts – estimates it will now take the average first time buyer in Sydney nine years to save a deposit, up from three years in 1975.

That seems a little drastic. After all, it's not like the market as a whole has turned fraudulent. Still, you can understand the alarm when it costs 12 times the average annual salary to pay off the average mortgage. Even if you allowed it for being an era of double-income parents, that 6:1 per person is 50% over the 4:1 that a single income dad would have carried 40years ago. In short, everybody's all in on the property market, and they've convinced themselves that they can take 20-30% of negative equity should the bubble pop. They might be okay with that calculation, but chances are their banks won't be.

In the last few weeks, the market seems to have come off the boil. There are plenty of places in Sydney experiencing falls in prices. So much for the talk that record low interest rates will keep prices soaring.

On The Road - 23/Nov/2015

Haven't Done This In A While

It's been like 8 years since I went on the road for any shoot so this is all a bit of a mind warp this week. The moment I was freed from the clutches of the little tyrant, I rang my friends and said I was free. It took 3 days before somebody called - and by somebody I mean somebody who had seen me work as an interpretter, and had spoken to one of my friends that I told, and one thing led to another and it's been this really busy month. If I combine how well I've done in the markets and doing these jobs, I'm actually way ahead of where I would have been had I stayed at the Events Lighting Company. I don't have a business plan, but I seem to have a personal business! At least just for this month.

The good news is, it's a shoot, it's on the road to get me out of my head if not my room where I'd likely brood or fret, and it's with a small crew so it's not that complicated. I'm a bit rusty with the airport run-throughs and sorting out extra luggage, but overall, we're getting our shots and the locations have all worked out. It's all coming back to me ever so slowly. The first day was a grind, but on day 4, it's feeling like old times but with better tech. For a start I'm blogging here from my iPad, right? When I think about the time I was lugging my iBook laptop around Japan for that Discovery Channel thing about the Aquarium and the H-IIA rockets, it's a far cry.

The bad news is that I don't really see much aesthetic or technical merit with Japanese TV crews. They're just so minmalist that working towards quality lighting and sound hardly figure into it. You can understand why Japanese TV looks the way it does, from the way they work. They don't really sweat the kinds of things I would, and shoot gobs and gobs of stuff you know is going to end up on the cutting room floor.  It seems like a colossal waste of time and money. The cameramn knows it too, so he's bitched about it in private.

The real joke is I was asked whether I thought I'd go back on the road by TDT at the Events Lighting Company. I gave him a non-committal "yeah-maybe-if-the-deal-is-right". It sure didn't take long before the deal looked right.

With The Luxury Of Experience...

I used to get down when working on other people's shoots. If I watched too closely as a crew person doing audio or gaffering or even doing post-production, eventually the director in me would start seeing faults and not the merits. Truth is, everybody's different and working to different urgencies, so it makes sense to not get wound up about it, but... I'm sort of a tough nut. I like doing things as best as you can, every shot, every move, every cut, every fade.

Anyway, being on the road with this crew as the production coordinator has been great because I bear absolutely no responsibility for the creative choices. My name won't be on this piece of crud when it's cut. This is really quite liberating; and at the same time I'm on a shoot, so it's like getting my sea legs under me again.

It doesn't matter that it's got nothing to do with my vision or my project. It's just something working in TV where at least I know what the fuck is suposed to happen. The fact that it doesn't quite happen the way I think it ought to, is just academic. And liberating.  Funnily enough, working for so long for the little tyrant made me not give a shit about working for other people's cockamamie creative pursuits. If I've worked on the lighting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and pretended it was 'art', I can sure as heck work on a few crappy Japanese shoots and pretend it's meaningful.

Remembering John Davis

Adventure Man

I went to the Memorial Service held for John Davis, who died in a helicopter accident last week. It was a crowded affair with a massive turn out. It was nice to see he touched so many lives, but it was also a little weird from the standpoint of us former employees at Classroom Video. He never really let on he had so many friends.

After the speeches were made, sharing the different sides of John, our little contingent started recalling the funny moments where we found ourselves confounded by some aspects of John. Put another way, while we held him in great affection, he was a difficult boss. He wasn't a horrible boss, he was more difficult-to-persuade, once he got some strange fixation in his head. I ventured to my former colleagues that perhaps he was a little Aspergers, to which they concurred and said they thought he was definitely on the spectrum. But such descriptions are too broad to paint a picture of the man.

My first encounter with John was at the job interview. He had his leg in a cast from an accident at a canyoning expedition. He was abseiling and attempted something stupendously difficult and broke his leg - on camera - and ended up having to be winched out of there in a helicopter. The footage, ended up in one of his videos. And so, he sat opposite me with his leg in a huge cast, telling me about what he thought about AFTRS graduates (not nearly as high an opinion as the graduates have of themselves) and the importance of working swiftly and cheaply.

He had a view on film making which was unique in this world - he was the only practitioner I met who wanted projects cheap, fast, and not necessarily the best-best kind of good. He wasn't interested in cheap and good, because fast was too important to be sacrificed; and he sure didn't like fast and good because he hated expensive. He also had the view that he would rather hire an intelligent person and teach them filmmaking rather than hire a filmmaker who couldn't be taught science.

As it turns out, he had hired a PhD in Pharmacology, who through sheer terrible people skills and generally low technical aptitude, failed to be taught filmmaking by John. In her stead, I was brought in, because I had all the skills. But more importantly to John - and  bless-his-sciencey-soul he is the only employer to whom this was a positive - I was a Med School dropout before I had attended AFTRS. He figured I could handle science content. He gave me the once over and said, "you look like a drifter but you also look like you're quite the talent. I'll give you a shot."
"Excuse me, a drifter?" I shot back, incredulous.
"When can you start?" he said, without even registering my shock. And that was John - sort of oblivious to what people thought of how he couched things, but very interested in how soon he could get results.

I know that reads like a terrible way to start, but it wasn't. He gave me a lot of rope to try many different things and many approaches. He gave me all the opportunities in making these educational videos I could hope for; and as I wrote on Facebook, you can't ask for more than that. He had a few rules: no mad scientist in coats, no show-and-tell donkey shows. Other than that, he was open to all kinds of whacky ideas. He liked whacky. He was a big fan of whacky.

He was also a non-stop action man. He would go to the UK to run the production house there, then fly to America and do a 5 city tour of educational facilities, pitch his product, share in ideas, come back on the dreaded LA-Sydney flight and go straight out to bushwalking. Sometimes he would come back with mixed footage of seemingly random things, and then somehow turn it into a programme. It was visionary, it was mad.

John Davis was indeed a man with a vision, as well as method to his madness. He was supportive of wild filmmaking ideas - as long as it could be done on a tight budget - and he loved seeing quality productions come out of his stable of producers. He pushed us very hard for the truth, facts, verification, verisimilitude of presentation, and just generally being able to back up claims. He was down on aesthetics for aesthetics' sake, and nuanced cultural discourses of the variety you find on university campuses. The vagaries of the arts were lost on him, but I was the one doing the arts & humanities programs, so naturally our discussions were "somewhat contentious" through to "difficult". They were difficult because he so wanted the arts to have black-and-white answers like science. Ironic then that what I had to offer him was a 3 programme series on 'Othello'.Yet together, our films won awards overseas. Even if it was a fringe area of filmmaking, collectively we did good work together.

The one thing I picked up working for John that I treasure, is that you have to come at most things, not just with a theory, but a method. In the sheer number of productions we churned out, we were forced to figure out how to do multiple projects on the fly, in parallel, and not lose the thread and make our deadlines. Sometimes it was better if you just had your method, and just forgot about theory. The Classroom Video production environment was conducive to figuring these things out. How to quickly bash a script into shape; how to quickly bash out a shotlist on the fly and make sure there's going to be enough to make sense in the edit; how to bash out a performance worth keeping, and how to judge when to move on to the next shot and work fast. And cheap! And make it look good.

That is sort of how I ended up working for John for nearly 6years, doing the thing that I loved, but at the same time fighting day-in-day-out for space and budget. In the final 18months of Classroom Video running as a production house, you could see him get tired and distracted. He wanted to develop software, he wanted to broadcast over the internet. In short, he wanted to invent iTunes, Youtube and Netflix, all rolled into one at the same time in one product and was wondering why he couldn't get it to work (pity the lone programmer working on this quixotic venture). Given the choice of continuing production and working on his pet project, he chose the latter; he sold up his business to a bunch of sharks, took their money and ran into retirement at the age of 60.
Thusly we got our redundancies and were shown the door. Shortly after that, he even gave up on the software thing.

At the memorial service, some of my former colleagues stated unequivocally that Classroom Video was the best work environment they had experienced in their entire career. I won't contradict them; It certainly was a lot of fun and learning for me as well. In retrospect, they were good days. After we went our separate ways I saw John only a couple of times. Time and distance did its thing as we drifted apart in life. I only heard through the grapevine that he ran for the local seat as a Greens candidate, and how he marvelled at the cut-throat nature of politics. At the time of his death he was working on a documentary about the terrible impacts of a coal mine and how we should all just drop using fossil fuels.

He's been gone now for over a week, and I can't help but keep casting my mind over my time with John Davis. My mind goes around and around like a zoetrope, with flickering memories of this moment, that conversation, this image, that argument... I can't switch off the memory machine in my head. Half of it is shrouded in the mists of time before 9/11 changed our world. I can reach back and remember how I felt about things and people; how differently things felt before 9/11.

I remember the time John and I went up to Newcastle to shoot a programme about electricity. Typical to form, he had no script, just a shotlist. He had a lot to say about the generation of electricity and how privatisation was going to work. We got driven around, shot things that were shown to us, shot an interview, and took the plane home at night. Around the point we were flying over Narrabeen Lakes, we hit an air pocket and there was great turbulence. In all my years of flying it was a pretty frightening moment. I looked to John sitting next to me, and he said without being prompted "when it's your time to go, it's your time to go."
That matter of factness was also John.

I can't imagine what the last moments on the fateful helicopter were like. I do imagine he may have even said that on the way down. I don't know.

Vale John Davis, you were one of a kind.

View From The Couch - 16/Nov/2015

The Aporia Visited Sam Harris As Well

The recent attacks in Paris had a certain depressing quality that comes with repetition. My own sense of expended aporia has not left me, and yet here I am writing about it because ultimately the more I work towards articulating the problem, then maybe the problem will show itself in at least an outline. Notable today was Sam Harris who had a podcast up, and perhaps unsurprisingly he was making the point that the philosophical points to be made had already been made in response to acts of terror. Indeed, as Harris points out, if people are calling this attack a wake-up call, then they've been missing a lot of things along the way.

While I am not of the atheist persuasion to bang on about the the problem of Islamism and Wahibbism that is is funding the Sunni extremists, I do relate to Sam Harris' position that the Western small-'l' liberal mindset is so effete and navel-gazing, it can't dare name an enemy when it is there; it cannot bring itself to properly brand the enemy for exactly what it is, lest it offend people. I'm not one to be so vocal about this, but if religion is what drives you to do some of this stuff, then there's a problem with your religion.

Yes, it's not exactly a popular thing to say. Neither does it mean we go around pinning the blame on any and every muslim for the events in Paris. Yet it does seem pertinent for the small 'l' liberal people to get up and take notice of the fact that the events in Paris this week, and Charlie Hebdo earlier this year, tells us there are people who would piss upon the values we hold dear, and shit upon our niceties and politesse. These cunts want to kill us all if they could, and maybe, just maybe, we ought to take philosophical note of that.
Just writing that is going to put me at odds with my friends.

A Year On From The Man Monis Thing

Back last year when I was still working with the Events Lighting company, we got this job from the City of Sydney whereby we would install colourful "disco lights" to be shone upon silver sequin fabric flags. The flags would flutter in the wind as they reflected lights like a mirror ball. It was a fabulous idea. Not content with that, there were colourful lights installed everywhere along Martin Place. Then of course on the first week it was up, the Man Monis Lindt Cafe siege happened.

If you go back and look at the news footage of the Monis siege, you can see in the background of the shots where people were running out of the cafe, the changing lights. Early on in the evening, it occurred to the City of Sydney that the disco banner lights were somewhat inappropriate to the unfolding situation. They rang up our office and asked to have it turned off. The Little Tyrant replied,

"I tell you what, if you can find a bullet proof vest, I'll tell you how to turn it off from a phone, far away."

Needless to say, the lights stayed on. The incongruity of the disco banner lights grew as the evening wore on. Eventually the siege was broken that night, but the disco banner lights were there, all night long, adding colour so to speak. Man Monis turned out to be a lone nutter more than a proper jihadist, and we all chalked that one up to the terror threat being over-stated.

Still, a year on, I can't but help think what a fiasco the whole thing was.

The Enemy Isn't Like What You Think

Here's a must read article about the kind of person who ends up in ISIL. It makes for sobering reading because it illuminates the depth of the problem.

For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

So there you have it; the perils of buying into identity politics. Not only that, we can see full well what the dividends are for America's misadventure in Iraq. In a bid to - allegedly - strike at the heart of terror by bringing down Saddam Hussein, thus ending the terror threat of things like 9/11, they turned a whole generation of men in Iraq into exactly the sort of people who become terrorists. Talk about snatching a bomb from the jaws of defeat. There's been nothing more self-defeating than American imperialism in the Middle East.

Paris Burning

This Is Serious, François

France seems to be the easy underbelly for terrorist strikes. The abject evil, the banal brutality and the inferiority-complex-charged vitriol walked into Paris and opened fire. The carnage that is being reported is staggering in scope as well as qualia, quantity as well as quality. Whoever the perpetrators were, they meant to do maximum damage and if we're keeping score, they did a heck of a job on the French - because the French are promising a merciless retaliation. 

It has only been a mere ten months since the Charlie Hebdo incident. If anything, the ferocity of this attack underscores the notion that Charlie Hebdo was just the beginning. We may opt to ridicule the terror threat, but in reality, it is a bit like the exchange in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil', where the minister says the terrorists are bad sports. It's looking like a certain amount of terror-threat paranoia is a healthy option. let's face it, we've been at war with Islamists for some time now, whether we admit it to ourselves daily or not.

Look, just today we drone-bombed Jihadi John. Remember Jihadi John?  That idiot English boy who got himself wrapped up in the ISIS business of beheadings and video? Well, the US is reasonably certain they got the twerp. And that usually means, they found where he was staying and called in a drone that launched a smart-missile and the-rest-is-history-Jihadi-John. Is this good? Is this ethical? We don't know, but this seems to have turned into the frontier of our wars; and let's be honest with ourselves, this is a kind of post-colonial backlash war that's been repressed since the end of World War I, so nearly hundred years on, it's sort of on for young and for old. Foolishly, the western retreat from its own colonial aggression in the late twentieth century opened up the vacuum to be filled by some genuinely awful antagonists.

It's not some kind of mistake. The West shrunk back far enough and the islamists are trying to seize the moment. I'm not advocating the West go back in, but we have to understand that we're in some kind of war right now, and that events like in Paris aren't just blowback, they're efforts to hurt our polity. And while we strike this pose of "no compromise with the terrorists", we're locking ourselves further into this cycle of violence. Make no mistake, the asymmetry of the war is misleading, and we might fool ourselves into thinking we're not at war in the same manner that a citizen in 1939-1945 was at war.

The only reason we think that is because in light of the 9/11 attacks, the war we unleashed upon
the Taliban and Saddam was so remote, it left us the luxury to imagine we are not at war. Yet, since the fateful invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, we've had war. And as wars go, it's a pretty crappy protracted affair, with very vague victory conditions - far worse than the Hundred Years War or the Thirty Years' War, where people were waging wars wherein the context was lost and it was just more people fighting for the sake of fighting; Wars with reasons and processes that make 'Game of Thrones' look stream-lined in its plot perspicacity. Frankly, this one has the sort of metaphysical idiocy of the Crusades, once waged by the West on the Muslim world. This time the metaphysical idiocy is coming back from the Muslim world, but on the whole we have the recipe for something that could last a very long time.

Worse still, it's a war without decisive battles. There won't be land forces meeting on the field to contest terrain. There won't be battleships or aircraft carriers going toe-to-toe on the high seas. There won't even be a dogfight between fighter jets. Instead, it's going to be one side with the high tech espionage with drones and the other side with the suicide bombers. And it will drag on, tit-for-tat for decades to come.

That's just about how over a hundred people have ended up dead in Paris. It's insanity on a stick.
I don't know how to express just what I feel about all this, except to say that whatever it is that I feel, it's overwhelmingly negative, grim, and distressed. Whatever it is France intends to do, whoever it thinks is going to hold accountable and punish, so far the language says it's going to be war and more war as they re-commit to expanding the cycle of violence. John Kerry might bang on about finding the culprits and punishing them, but it just goes to show that the Secretary of the State for the United States of America hasn't got any historic perspective on this war, and he's even a veteran of the Vietnam War. The rhetoric is practically schoolyard-childish; and it just doesn't look like he's got a grip on what kind of hell kind war that's been unleashed.

You see why this is all so distressing, beyond the violence and the body count and the metaphysical idiocy.

Well May We Say, 40 Years Is History

That Day Again - 40years On

11th of November commemorates two things in Australia - the end of World War I, but also the sacking of Gough Whitlam in 1975. Of the two, the former is receding into history fast as we experience the centenary of various sign posts of that accursed war. The latter, is proving to be the touchstone event that feeds into Australia's own Republicanism.

Recently John Menadue penned a piece that firmly placed Sir John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser in collusion with one another, with the inference being Kerr sacked Whitlam before Whitlam could sack him. Today, Whitlam's biographer who has extensively collated documents relating to the Dismissal, has charged that the British Crown - i.e Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles - knew full well by a month and a bit that Kerr was looking to sack Gough Whitlam, and sat mum that information.

The implication of these revelations is that it highlights a specific conspiracy on the part of Sir John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser, who essentially conspired (there's really not another word that is more appropriate in the english language) to bring down Gough Whitlam and his government.

As long time readers of this blog know I've spent a good deal of time thinking about the Dismissal, and perhaps have drawn a different conclusion to most people who now clamour for a Republic. While I'm definitely not a Monarchist, I've browned off from the idea of the Republic being any better than the Constitutional Monarchic model, as a system. All systems of government are only as good as the people working in the system. If some people decide to game the system and/or short circuit the system, is it really a problem of the system? The events of the Dismissal actually point the other way.

To put it more plainly, if the advantage a Republic has over the Monarchy is symbolic, is that symbolic difference enough to prevent a repeat of the Dismissal? Given what we know of the event,  the answer is most likely not. That being the case, would it be less likely for the Head of State President to sack a head of Government Prime Minister under a Republic than the Constitutional Monarch who allowed the Dismissal to take place? Most likely not.

More over, given that it was collusion - if not a conspiracy - between the then Governor General and Then Opposition Leader, the answer is again, most likely not. If one were to become an Australian Republican in response to the Dismissal, then it's really no help because a similar incident could easily happen again given the Reserve powers vested in the Head of State. Really, we lucked out that Whitlam didn't press upon the military to back him; which is what happens in coups in Latin America which end up with a Generalissimo in charge of a junta. We were - we've been told - blessed that Whitlam had the 'common sense' not to drive Australia into a civil war over his own highly questionable sacking.

At the core of the Dismissal, is not the failure of the system of government. It is the failure of people to act in accordance with the system's rules. In other words, there's really no accounting for dickheads being dickheads; and unfortunately Malcolm Fraser went along with Sir John Kerr's dickhead plans which makes him an accomplice dickhead. 40 years on, now that it is baked into history (and nearly 20years on from the republic referendum), it bears pointing out that if the problem is the Dismissal, then becoming-a-Republic is most certainly the wrong answer.

Yes, it sucks that it went down the way it did. Yes it sucks that the head of our state is some doofus representative of the Monarch of another country. Yet if it's a choice between say, 'Change to a Republic' against 'reducing poverty/inequality', I'd much rather they tackled the latter than the former.

The Education-Jobs Disconnect

The Worst In A Generation

Here's an article that paints a familiar picture. It shows that the relationship between education and employment is a lot more tenuous than assumed by large parts of our society, up to and including the government.

Among tertiary students, one in two said they felt so pessimistic about their prospects that they were considering further study so they could avoid making career decisions.
Their doubts may be justified. Today's graduates are facing the worst job prospects in a quarter of a century - and perhaps even longer, the latest research shows. 

"I wouldn't use the word 'bleak' … but these are the toughest labour market conditions since the early 1990s, that's for sure," says Graduate Careers Australia strategy and policy advisor Bruce Guthrie. 

"The demand for graduates has dropped away."

Ooh, I remember that '92-'93 peak. That was something else. I had experienced the '87-'88 unemployment as a dropout without any qualifications and found that challenging - it took about 8weeks to find any kind of job - and they were relatively benign years for youth unemployment. I spent most of 1993 working at AFTRS, trying to finish my graduation film, and remember being burnt out by September when I finally finished it. As a graduate, it took me until February the following year to find a full time job.

Back in 1993 before the "internets" as GHW Bush derisively called it, you were scouring the newspaper for job ads and applying for things that were remotely related. What was amazing was the utter dearth of jobs. You could go three weeks without seeing a single job in the arts sector. I couldn't get back into the ABC, and there was really nowhere I knew to tug at getting a job. I eventually lucked out and got picked up by a Japanese ad agency in East Sydney, but that was simply blind luck of the sort where a blind squirrel runs into a nut by accident.

When I reflect on the numbers being reported at the time, youth unemployment was hitting 20-something percent as an average across the nation, so having any kind of degree was no guarantee one would find a job. If it's sitting under 1-in-4 since 2010, then kicks up to the same kind of peak (worse, actually), what it's saying is that there is a backlog of graduates who are simply not getting in to the workplace.

It's a little disingenuous talking about this sort of thing as if somehow Gen-Y job seekers are a different category of job seekers to those in the past, and they are to blame for part of this for having silly expectations about their careers. They're most certainly not to blame - it's the entire market place for jobs that's changed significantly as a result of demographics and economic change: Mature economies with slow growth simply don't have the need to take on new graduates; The older workers are still working on; many Baby Boomers are delaying retirement; economic growth is in low single digits, and there simply aren't enough places for new graduates opening up.

"It's a global phenomenon. We're going into a phase where work is precarious," she says. 

"For the first time in history, people who are qualified are struggling to get a foothold ... professionals are now on contracts or doing casual work, whereas becoming a professional of some sort used to mean you'd get a proper job." 

In 2011, 26 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with only 5 per cent in 1976, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In a day and age where universities are asking people to pay huge fees, the same universities are going to come under scrutiny for their graduates who don't get placed, especially if the students are carrying astronomical debt. I don't know how I would advise a young person today about how to go about with their tertiary education or gaining employment. The ease with which you can get an education in, say, media, is in no relationship to just how rare and difficult it is to get a job in the media. Or Graphic Design (the 1980s dream job). Or Marine Biology (the 1970s dream job) before that. It's not surprising that 90% of people who study any given area do not end up working in that area.

The lousy thing about stories like this is that there isn't a political solution for something like this. It's not like some government(s) can put in some policy to make the field more accessible for young graduates. It's something fundamentally structural about our society whereby we have to monetise everything in order to pretend there is real economic growth. In doing so we've monetised education without thinking of the consequences, and one of the unintended consequences is that it is being manifestly demonstrated how there is no real connection between getting a qualification in an area and getting a career in that same area.

Quick Shots - 08/Nov/2015

Japanese Film Festival

Just a quick note. I've been doing my annual interpreting gig out at the Japanese Film Festival. It's amazing that the year went by so quickly - seems only not long ago that I wrapped up Melbourne with them last year. Since then 3 out of the 4 people who ran the thing have been promoted or moved on and have bee replaced. The festival hasn't missed a bit but it's pretty weird not seeing Festival Director Mr. Konomi and the other two. If I add DF who left in 2014, it's the entire group who ran it for roughly the last 5years that turned over in little over 18 months. When I think about my own recent changes, it sure has been a year of changes.

The film selections look good this year and the guests from Japan are interesting as usual. Still, there didn't seem to be quite the same buzz as previous years. It's going to have to build up steam again.

Tent Poles And No-Budgets

Over in Japan, they're telling me the production slates are moving to two extremes where the big budget numbers are concentrated in the hands of fewer players, and the other independent films get smaller and smaller as budgets get tighter. The divergence has killed off the middle terrain of film making where the interesting films used to be. This mirrors developments in America where the tent pole films get bigger but the medium sized films have disappeared.

It's hard to pin a single reason upon it, but basically the tent pole pictures support a greater industrial structure that's already in place. The studios and TV stations have to budget to make the big summer hit and big Christmas hit somehow, and this means they our their resources into the tent pole pictures. In the mean time, technology has allowed people to make audiovisual content cheaply, so the assumption for investors has become, "surely you can make that for less". In both instances, content is suffering because as money gets too big, they can't take proper creative risks; and as money becomes short, there isn't going to be content worth shooting.

The Non-Competitive Casting Couch

The other interesting tidbit from this year's director is how sewn up is the casting arrangements. If the studios and casting agents and talent agencies collude to pool resources, then casting inevitably comes from the same talent agencies through the casting agent. The collision is such that auditions just don't happen for top actors. Now, top talent means they know what they're doing and you're getting a known commodity, but then the supporting cast comes from a mic smaller pool of actors when what you want is to cast a wider net.

According to the director, it means there isn't proper competition to get the best actors for the role and this has led to a certain same-y-ness in casting. It has all the bad parts of the old Hollywood style studio system without getting good results. He doesn't see things getting better because as budgets go up in the tentpole pictures fewer risks will be taken, and so in the name of taking fewer risks, they will keep casting from the diminishing, small pool of actors who are linked to the tentpoles, not through talent but by mere association.

That being said, it's still a nice problem to have from our point of view. Anyway, it was an interesting note from the frontline of film making in Japan.

Quick Shots - 06/Nov/2015

That's Not Chump Change

Making the headlines is how increased regulatory scrutiny has revealed there is an additional $50 billion of property investor loans on the banks' books. This is such a big discrepancy, it was enough to boost the portion of investor loans on banks books from 35% to 40%. Naturally the RBA is letting it known they are unhappy.

The Reserve Bank's deputy governor has scolded the banks over poor home loan data that is "complicating" its understanding of the housing market and clouding its ability to make and enact policy decisions. 

In a strongly worded speech delivered at the Finsia regulators' panel in Sydney on Thursday, Philip Lowe said he was surprised and concerned over recent problems with the data relating to banks' owner-occupier and investor housing loans, a development he described as disappointing.

Disappointing might be an understatement. Figures like this mean the banks are far more precarious than previously thought.

Ross Garnaut Spells It Out

With all this talk of tax reform you would think that they were going to make taxation feel good. They're not. Yet it also needs to be said that the whole reason they should look for efficiency and better balance is to spur better growth in the economy. So in the quest for more revenue, the government's going to hurt our wallets, but it's all for the good of the economy so that you'll get something in your wallet again, okay? Uh-huh.

Ross Garnaut has come out swinging saying that there's no point in doing taxation reform if it adds to the inequality.

"Does increasing inequality and stagnant or declining real incomes of ordinary people in the developed countries matter if it occurs alongside rising incomes in the developing world?" he said. 

"I think it does," he said. "Stagnant incomes for most people place a great strain on a democracy. Governments tend to be nasty, brutish and short. 

"If there was any doubt about this simple reality, it was removed through observation of the fate of the Abbott government. We have no experience of democracy flourishing with stagnant or declining living standards for most people."

As strange as that seems, he's got a very big point. If at the end of raising the GST, and then compensating the low income earners, and they are worse off for the exercise, the taxation system being more balanced and efficient isn't going to do much for the betterment of society.

It's true that unbalanced taxation systems give rise to perverse incentives. The same could be said of all the corporate welfare given to rentseekers. When you look at the kind of money the GST may raise (the maximal version sits at about $130billion), and you look at how much corporate welfare is expended, one might think it was stupid not to cut the corporate welfare first before raising the GST. 

Hypocrisy At Its Most Shameless

George Brandis is a funny man, isn't he?

Attorney-General George Brandis has hit out at criticism of Tony Abbott's religious beliefs, describing the "ridicule" to which the former prime minister was subjected as "bigotry at its most shameless". 

Senator Brandis, who last year defended people's "right to be bigots" amid debate over proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act, has told a roundtable meeting of religious and non-religious representatives that "religious freedom is every bit as important as political freedom".

So, the man says people have a right to be bigots. AND the ridicule of Tony Abbott's religious beliefs  was bigotry at its most shameless" because Tony Abbott is religious freedom to have his religion the way he likes it. I mean, by his own reasoning, the people doing the ridiculing of Tony Abbott have a right to be doing it; he can't very well be complaining about the kind of ridicule when he's not willing to stand up for others, like say, Muslims.

Besides which religious freedom does not include freedom from ridicule. Get over it George; especially if you go around espousing freedom of expression.

He then says Catholics cop it hard from prominent intellectuals and this is bad. But he's a Liberal Party MP - it's not that long ago that the Liberal and Nats on one side and the ALP on the other, was a cover for a Protestant/Freemasons versus Catholic split. It's kind of weird seeing Liberals who are Catholics, and Liberals who want to defend Catholicism. 

Really, the world has changed. 

Puncher & Wattmann

I started part-time work at the niche publisher this week. It's pretty cool so far. It's closer to home, the work's pretty clear cut. There's lots of it, but that's the good part. I won't starve, get bored, live in anxiety or for that matter lose headspace to the work. It's just what the doctor ordered. 

View From The Couch - 03/Nov/2015

Marxism In The Rearview Mirror

I'm going to write a bit about communism today. It struck me how strange it was that this ideology beat such a retreat that nobody would ever own up to having sympathies any more.

It's hard to believe today but there were people in the 1980s that still believed in communism, right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think about that today and wonder at the ability of people to believe in a system without any real world proofs. To be fair, none of the communist regimes existed in a vacuum where they could execute The Big Plan. Instead they spent considerable resources mounting the Cold War like the Eastern Bloc or simply trying to deflect the prying intrusion of the USA like Cuba or isolating itself like China, the communist program really didn't get to run the way its supporters in the west envisioned.

Ironically perhaps then, that there have been pockets of socialist democracies which have enacted significant chunks of welfare state policies like Scandinavia and France and Japan, where communists still exist. You sure don't find communists in the USA and here in Australia, I haven't met one since 1990. It might be an indication of just how far to the right the general discourse has run in this country that communists are in hiding the way fascists were in hiding until the late 1970s. I have to say I've seen and met more fascists since 1989.

All the same, Marxism in political terms has demonstrated that nothing in history is inevitable, and perhaps there are some flaws in Karl Marx's thinking after all. If you are on the centre left like I am, it's hard to give up Marxist thought, even though one never subscribed fully to communist thinking. This is partly because, Marxist thought still prevails in academic circles, and this is one of the interesting things. A lot of French criticism comes from Marxism, and this French criticism has become the mainstay of critical theory in the last 30years. Philosophy departments are shot through with Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida and Foucault, and all of their writings come out of a Marxist analysis. We're fed this stuff, and it informs a lot of the progressive thinking in this country. Weirder still is how nobody really calls them up on this as a problem.

It is a little bit like Freud, whose writings on psychology have long been superseded, but whose impact on literary criticism is enduring. The modern psychologist would tell you black and blue that Freud is no longer current or relevant, but there are any number of essays being written today about the Oedipal Complex in one book or another. The communication breakdown between the disciplines is a little comic, especially when the literature professor argues with the psychology professor about the relevance (or non-relevance) of Sigmund Freud's work to anything and everything.

Marxist thought is much the same. If you put a literature professor in a room with an economics professor, you get a similar sort of comic disagreement about the contemporary relevance of Karl Marx and his writings. You would think that if critical theorists could make so much hay out of Karl Marx, then just imagine what they could do with Schumpeter and Keynes and all the rest since Marx.

As much as we like to indulge in the Left-Right kind of political paradigm and all the dialogue that flows from it, it is obvious today that just as 1989 was the year Soviet communism died a horrible death, 2008 was the year Reaganomic and Thatcherite capitalism died its horrible death - in both cases, hoisted by their own petards.

The shame of it in Australia is that since then we've had a succession of governments in Australia that either try to pretend that the death was no big deal, or pretend that nothing happened at all. In both instances the Left-Right kind of discourse has persisted without any sense of the framework being questioned. This can be shown in the ushering in of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which amounts to more of the same Reaganomic/Thatcherite capitalism on a global scale, while the objections are mostly parochial unionist arguments trying to preserve their power base.

To a great extent, if the Left doesn't re-think its politics without being held hostage to the Marx of hold and the Marxists of old, it's not going to be of any use in the future. And if they are of no use going forwards, then surely it is a recipe to just let the discourse drift further to the right. The ALP doesn't have economic credentials exactly because people still think they are a pack of Marxists under the hood. They really need to find something else other than Marxist theory to come up with a framework to address economic inequality.

The Commies I Met

I think the first real commie I met was at university. He was an Irishman who studied history, but was firmly in the Marxist camp for the historic inevitability of Marx's vision. This would have been 1987 or so, so it wasn't yet obvious the Soviet Union was unraveling. Gorbachev was working through this thing called Perestroika, and according to this Irishman, it was going to work a treat and jump start the moribund Soviet economy. At this juncture I want to relate how one of the few fascists I've met was also an ex-pat irishman from Belfast, so don't for a moment think I think Irish people are particularly leaning one mayor another in their politics, merely that extremism didn't seem to phase these gents.

It was odd because Sydney University's campus was beset with a strange paranoia about the far left but when you spoke to the people on the far left, they were congenial conversationalists. Okay, perhaps not the radical feminist lesbians, but in most part, this particular Irish communist dude just wanted to talk and talk and talk. He wasn't loud or boisterous, he wasn't yelling slogans or quoting Mao or Stalin (thank goodness). Yet he was steadily insistent and perhaps a little too high on his own rhetoric about the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Mind you, his wild red hair was wilder than his rhetoric, but he was passionate about Marxism.

The second communist I met was after I dropped out of Sydney University, and went to North Sydney TAFE to study film making. For my weekend job, I worked in a parcel pickup service for Coles supermarkets. This would have been around 1988 or so. One of my 'colleagues' in the fine concrete box of an establishment, was a political science student who claimed he was a communist. This guy was boisterous and energetic in putting his point of view forward. He was much derided by all and sundry, but he too was convinced that communism was the way to go, simply because capitalism had - according to him - reached a limit.

I don't know what happened to him after I left that place to work elsewhere; I can't even begin to imagine how he got on with his professional life given that he was going to wave around a political science degree built around his strong belief in Marxism. Clearly he was intelligent because he understood what he had read and could build an argument based on it.  I can't imagine who would've employed somebody like that in 1988, let alone today. It made me think that it almost was the case that education was wasted on the intelligent idealist.

The third communist I met was 'G' at AFTRS. This was in January 1990 a mere couple of months after the Berlin Wall had come down. In G's case, he was fervently a Marxist because he was an exile from a land governed by fascists. To be a Marxist was his rebuke, his body-and-soul rejection of those who deprived him of his homeland. 'G' was pretty fierce. Everything was up for Marxist analysis. Even the food in the canteen was fair game. He was a tyro. If I had to imagine what Che Guevara was  like, 'G' was kind of it.

I'm still friends with 'G'. recently I chided him and asked him if he were still a communist. He totally rejected the notion. History since 1990 had been too traumatic for him to maintain the rage. None of these guys I imagine would want me outing them as ex-communists today and that just about tells you how far we've come in making the Left look abstract. it just seems so long ago, all of it: communism and varsity conversations about the end of capitalism.

View From The Couch - 02/Nov/2015

World Series Game 5

Well, that was tense, and then it all blew out in the top of the 12th. The most contentious thing about this loss is that going into the 9th, the Mets were winning 2-1. Matt Harvey was pitching a gem; Collins had his closer up and suddenly there was this shuffle of whether to pull Harvey or not. Harvey apparently instead on going out in the 9th, walked the first guy and then gave up a double. Collins pulled Harvey only then, but it was too late, that was enough for the Royals to tie the game, thus setting up a duel of bullpens. 3 innings later, the Mets blinked, and by blink we might mean completely shut their eyes because the Royals poured on 5 runs. Davis came in to strike out the side and that was all she wrote for 2015.

Collins is going to get grilled about that 9th inning choice for the rest of his career. Had it been Joe Torre, he would have pulled any one of his starters for Mariano Rivera, so as a Yankees fan, it's a little hard to understand how Collins could even flip one way and let Harvey go back out in the 9th. Even Joe Girardi would have sent out Dellin Betances or Andrew Miller, and before Miller, David Robertson and or Mo. It reminds one of Grady Little sticking with Pedro Martinez a little too long in 2003.

The top of the 12th featured yet another error for Daniel Murphy. Daniel Murphy got didley-squat to hit in the World Series - the Royals pitched around him as if he were peak Barry Bonds so Murphy ended up drawing a bunch of walks. the real shame was how everybody else was very quiet with the bats. When it really got down to it, the Royals really could hit bullpen arms like nobody's business, and there was no stopping these guys.

Still, 30years is a long time between World Series wins for the Royals. That goes equally for the Mets who last won it in 1986.

The GST Scuttlebutt

One shouldn't be surprised that the GST debate is back on the agenda as the Federal Government seeks to raise the GST. The old arguments against putting in the GST in the first place have resurfaced, pointing out how regressive a tax it is, but in many ways the Federal government can't restructure taxation in this country without addressing the GST.

The curious thing about the GST is that in its original guise, it was meant to usher in a reform of taxes back in the late 1990s, but of course nearly two decades later the government finds itself short of cash again, and so we must contemplate the GST once more. You really wonder where all the money got squandered.

The original version of the GST skipped food, health and education. It appears part of this exemption has come back on the table for reconsideration. This gives rise to a four way grid between keeping the GST at 10% or raising to 15%, with or without the exemption of food, Health & Education. One imagines the Libs would like to raise the GST to 15% while keeping the exemption while the ALP would like to keep the GST at 10% even if it meant losing the exemption. Put more bluntly, the rich bastards who send their kids to expensive private schools would much rather have a 15% GST and keep the private school fees off the GST discussion. If you saw them yourself, you'd understand why.

The ALP has far less of a worthy position on it. The last three times there have been discussions on the GST, whether it was Keating's 'Option C' in 1985 or John Hewson's Fightback, or John Howard finally bringing us the GST, it's not really had a economically credible position in opposing it except to say it was regressive and they were against it. When it finally came in, they said they wouldn't repeal it, and such has been the ALP's rather wishy-washy position on it.

Of course, there isn't a good position on it. It's all going to cost the average punter more; that's the point of all this tax review and shoring up government income. Either way it goes, we know the GST price rise is coming and there's probably very little we can do to stop it. The states simply need that money.

Couldn't Stand The Weather

The news today is that this October was the hottest on record in 106years.

"The extreme monthly anomalies were a result of exceptional early-season warmth at the start of the month and persistence of above-average temperatures throughout the month as a whole," the bureau said. 

Compared with the previous warmest October in 1988, last month was 0.7 degrees warmer. 

"Certainly it's an October that was hotter than most Novembers," Karl Braganza, head of climate monitoring at the bureau. The national mean temperature came in at 25.6 degrees.

Make of that what you will.

Sport Nut Weekend - 31/Oct~01/Nov/2015

World Series Game 3

Amazingly, the Mets pulled one out of the hat behind Noah Syndegaard and won a game. That first pitch was quite the message. Up-and-in on Alcides Escobar. 98mph, right in to the back screen.
Just once, David Wright got to be the hero in the World Series. It's a feel good win for the Mets. David Wright's been around long enough that he's staring down at the last third of his career. This is the second time he's made it to the post-season. It's been a long 8years since 2007.

In between, there was the GFC, and Bernie Madoff thing which spectacularly put a whole in the plans and fortunes of the Mets. For a solid few years there, the Mets were in triage, bleeding good players like Jose Reyes. If the GFC had never come along, the Mets probably would have retained Reyes and made a few more post-seasons along the way. Instead they went on a seemingly endless carousel of rebuilding from within and hoping for the best.

If nothing else, David Wright deserved that moment.

Rugby World Cup Final

And so the Wallabies' campaign to lift the big golden jug came to a shuddering halt this morning. The lads played well but kind of got outclassed. I wish I had a better word for it, but that's really it. I'd have given All Blacks by 10 and they beat that margin well and good. For the Wallabies, it's back to the drawing board because they just don't have enough of the right pieces to beat the All Blacks. It's a shame because the better story is always when the Wallabies beat the All Blacks.

Lots of people are looking a tad foolish today having made brave predictions of a Wallaby win. I never bought into that hype, so I get to feel a modicum of smugness for being right, but in most part, the morning would have been much better had they won.

Jarryd Haynes Got Dropped

This is a weird one.
The 49ers essentially worked on turning a league player in to an NFL player and after 6 games, gave up. The Hayne-to-NFL story's not something I've followed closely, but you read the headlines and watch highlight reels. Clearly they put money down and placed bets on the guy. Now they're waiving him to bring up somebody more orthodox. It begs the question why they even tried the Hayne experiment in the first place.

Most times a player gets waived, it's a numbers game. But it wasn't like the 49ers couldn't predict that they might have this kind of situation before they signed him. If they were going to dabble, they probably shouldn't have dabbled in such a way as to lose a potential asset so early. Then again, it might be so glaringly obvious to insiders that he's not going to make it, in which case you can understand they would cut bait early.

World Series Game 4

Ugh. This was a utterly muttly loss for the motley Mets. Steven Matz was pitching well and handed a lead to the bullpen who coughed it up in the 8th. The Royals really are on a roll with their late inning offence, and the mets bullpen really had nothing when it counted. A Daniel Murphy error opened the door for a 3 run inning, but even so the bullpen just looked shaky all along.

The Royals looked good on both sides of the ball. There was a mental lapse by Alex Rios that allowed Wilmer Flores (that name again!) to score on a sac fly, but apart from that they were solid in pitching and defence as well as hitting late in the game. When you consider that Flores run came off a single, a wild pitch a bunt and sac fly, and another run was a flukey solo homer by the rookie Conforto, the Mets looked worse than the 3 runs they cobbled together.