Dick Smith is a character. He's saying he'll run against Bronwyn Bishop if the Liberals preselect her again for the seat of Mackellar. If the Libs pick somebody younger and more open-minded to issues to do with economic growth and controlling population growth.
Mr Smith, who was on a yacht in Bass Strait on Thursday, said there had been a huge response to the news he might run in Mackellar.
He estimated eight out of 10 people in the northern beaches electorate - where he has lived for decades - are concerned by the prospect of Australia's population rising to 100 million and beyond in coming decades.
"I live in Terrey Hills and it can take an hour-and-a-half to drive into the city now. People will have to give up driving but there is no plan for a rail line [to the northern beaches]," he said.
"People want to have backyards and maintain their way of life."
So Dick Smith is -interestingly enough - a conservative who wants a rail service up to the Northern Beaches. The mind kind of boggles at the thought, not because it's impossible but because he's talking about the neck of the woods that would hate having a rail line running through it, even if it were convenient. It's a completely different part of Sydney out there. Even with my North Shore roots I find cultural attitudes up in the Northern Beaches quite strange. It's certainly not helped by the fact that they've kept voting in Bronwyn Bishop to represent them. If there is over 70% electoral support for Bronwyn Bishop in Mackellar as it is, it gives you a picture of just how ideologically whacko they are up there.
Even if hypothetically Dick Smith runs and beats Bronwyn and goes to Canberra, running a train line out to the Northern Beaches is a state issue. He's going to the wrong place for that particular issue. Certainly if Dick Smith wants rail lines into his neck of the woods (presumably because rail services are convenient and good things), then he should be a lot more vocal and active in supporting rail lines in general, right across Sydney NSW and heck, Australia in general. There are people doing that, working very hard to get things like the Light Rail extension up and running. You don't hear Dick Smith supporting that issue all.
Dick Smith usually puts his money where his mouth is, as he's done with his line of foods supporting Australian manufacturing, so it's not hard to imagine him actively supporting a good idea. It's just really strange to see him threatening to stand with one of his issues is wanting a rail line. In Mackellar of all places.
Metaphorical Gun To The Head
The Liberal Party must hate this one. It might even be undemocratic on some level. The Liberal Party putting up Bronwyn Bishop as a candidate for Mackellar again is barely democratic. We all hate her; we think she's a rorter; she's insensitive to the wider electorates' discomfort with her continuing; but she has this crazy support in Mackellar. We don't know if this is because those people would vote for a wooden dummy if it were the Liberal Candidate for Mackellar, or it actually is her singular appeal, even in a blue ribbon seat (I doubt it, but it's possible).
Nonetheless, the process by which Bronwyn Bishop is retained and preselected as the Liberal Candidate for Mackellar is not any more undemocratic (or, any less democratic in the conventional sense) than most other seats represented by the two major parties. However if Dick Smith's threat derails Bishop's preselection, then Dick Smith has effectively exercised much great control over the electoral process than any mere single citizen can do. He's basically doing this on the back his wealth and fame, and to that point, he's not that different from Clive Palmer. The Liberal Party has got to hate that.
Let's say for the moment the Liberal Party backs down and then Dick Smith backs down. That would be a good outcome, but it leaves major question marks about the decision itself being undemocratic. If the Liberal Party pushes ahead with Bronwyn Bishop, and forces Dick Smith to run, it might turn into a proper open race, thus depriving the Coalition of a safe seat. At least that would be more democratic in the proper sense, but the Liberal Party would hate that too.
The Right Is Wedded To Bad Ideas
The one big thing to come out of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that the Left could no longer be wedded to Marxist economics. That was *it*. 1989 marked the year that the project of 1848 finally came to an end. After that point, you couldn't be a communist because you really only had China and Cuba to offer you intellectual proof of concept, and China was frantically opening itself up for the world to make money.
One would kind of surmise that the GFC would have done something similar to the Right and disabused them of completely unregulated money markets. Judging from the articles over at Zero Hedge, it seems highly unlikely. That mob is still railing against the command and control model they perceive in the US Fed setting interest rates and carrying out QE exercises to get through the post-GFC era.
It's this denial that there's a real world problem in not reassessing the framework that characterised Tony Abbott's opposition as well as government. That is to say, the GFC was probably the one time the government had to go in to debt to bail out banks and people's savings, and asset prices. That was the right call to make, if they didn't want the whole economy to spiral into a sequence of margin calls and debts being called in at once and massive liquidation of positions. So with that in some corner of the mind, the Coalition set about complaining about the government debt that essentially bailed them out personally as well as the entire asset-owning class of people in this country.
With somebody like Bronwyn Bishop, you wonder if she actually understood the problem at all as it unfolded during te GFC, or if she was simply filling out more expense forms for more helicopter joyrides; but that is by the by. Amazingly, there are many people in the electorate who think the complaining-about-the-government-debt was somehow a legitimate intellectual position to hold, and voted for these knuckleheads.
It is then perhaps a great irony to see China - yes, that still ostensibly communist nation - hit a big road bump in its economic development, and for Australian export revenues to collapse, leaving this Coalition government with ever-diminishing revenue. Even at this juncture, the treasurer Scott Morrison is insisting there won't be a hike on taxes, just more cuts. This low taxation mantra too is looking like one of those bad ideas. Misreading the world going towards renewable energies and insisting on making coal the future of Australia is another one. The climate change denial to stick to that already bad idea of selling coal, is another one of those bad ideas. Other nations have committed to reducing carbon emissions by creating market mechanisms for it. Our nation has decided to go with "direct action" while w try and sell as much coal; 'Direct Action' is costly, inefficient and quite probably ineffective and it's another bad idea they're wedded to, because they argued so vehemently against the market mechanism - the ETS - which of course was a mechanism they themselves proposed when they were in with the Howard Government, so they couldn't back away from it once they had to have some kind of policy.
These interlocking set of bad ideas the Right is wedded to, can only be described as a Clusterfuck. Yes, we're living in a nation of one big Clusterfuck.
Why Do Climate Change Deniers Still Even Exist?
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