"Vote Mal, Eat Pal" Pt. 2

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

The government wants to claw back some money without raising taxes or closing loopholes for their own rich constituents, so the new idea is to collect HECS debts from the dead.

The Turnbull government is considering the controversial move of collecting student debts from the dead, as well as increasing university fees, as it seeks to find higher education savings in the May budget. 

Former education minister Christopher Pyne backed the idea of recovering HECS from deceased estates two years ago, but was quickly shut down by Tony Abbott to avoid a scare campaign on the sensitive issue. Labor slammed the idea as a "death tax" - even though most other loans, such as mortgages and credit card debt, must be repaid upon death. 

Ending the HECS write-off from deceased estates worth over $100,000 would save up to $800 million a year, according to leading higher education analyst Andrew Norton.

Sources in the higher education sector said the proposal had been raised in recent discussions with Education Minister Simon Birmingham, who is under pressure to find substantial savings in his portfolio. 

Asked if he was considering recovering HECS from deceased estates, Senator Birmingham said: "The costs to taxpayers of higher education over recent years have grown dramatically "Since 2009, taxpayer funding for Commonwealth supported places in higher education has increased by 59 per cent as compared to nominal growth of GDP that has risen by 29 per cent."

It's downright evil, is what it is. I get it that they have pressing needs to shore up revenue but increasing Tertiary Fees, sticking the student with the massive debt, and then chasing them beyond death and into the grave for that debt seems like a total breakdown in the social contract. The model of user-pays and education as vocational training model that successive Australian Governments have been pushing should mean that when a person is dead-but-in-debt, they are no long in their vocation (I can't believe I had to write that just then) and therefore are no longer beneficiaries of the said user-pay vocational training. 

It's bad enough that this government like its predecessors is downright anti-intellectual. Reducing education to vocational training happened under the Hawke-Keating government when they committed to the Dawkins reforms. Connecting up the earning potential of university graduates and then lining up a fee in correspondence to future earnings was a Howard Government decision. None of these decisions understand education at all. The point of education is to understand the world in broader terms - whether it be through science or the arts - so that when they are eventually employed, they can work with a wider perspective on what it means to be doing that work.  

The anti-intellectualism of this government is so deep, it views education strictly as a means of creating taxpayers. Tertiary education is clearly the means of extracting bigger tax money out of Tertiary graduates, and that's it. And should they die young, this government is saying the tax from the unearned money over the career of the dead person still belongs to the government. They don't understand that even talking about this makes for a great disincentive for people to get more educated, when in fact our democracy needs as many educated people it can get - and by educated, I'm not talking about vocationally trained people, I'm talking about people who can do critical thinking and analysis. 

Just when did our government get so stupid and so evil all in the one go? 

Steven Keen Says Recession By 2017

Here's the article. In a nutshell, for all this talk of 25years of constant growth, parts of it were accomplished by going deeper into debt for the private sector to goose demand through the rough patches. Now it has gotten to the point where Australia's private sector is the most indebted per capita in the world. The consequence of all this is that there can't be much debt that can piled on top, and any drop in debt will usher in a collapse in demand. There's nowhere to go with the debt upwards, and the only way for demand is down. 

This is the inevitable debt crunch coming Australia’s way, but conventional economists are oblivious to this danger because they’ve brainwashed themselves to ignore private debt as just a “pure redistribution”, to quote Ben Bernanke. This deluded textbook thinking is why Bernanke didn’t see the GFC coming. 

The day of reckoning can be delayed by encouraging yet more private borrowing, which the RBA can attempt to do by cutting interest rates, and the government can reduce the crunch by running a large budget deficit. But these are likely to happen after a crisis rather than before it, because our Reserve Bank and our politicians are as oblivious to the dangers of private debt today as Bernanke was back in 2007. 

The 2016 election could be a good one to lose.

Yes, it could be a real bugger. I sure wonder what the debt crunch is going to look like in Sydney. 

The RBA is taking a steady-as-she-goes view on the economy. This would lead one to suspect that Glenn Stevens isn't likely to see the next downturn coming over the horizon. Of course, there probably isn't much more he and the RBA can do at this point. They're not going to raise interest rates for a whole gaggle of reasons, and they're not going to cut them any more because the worst isn't here just yet, but chances are we're sill headed towards Zero Interest Rate Policy when this recession arrives. We're just suckers for punishment.

Shutting Out The Scientists

The true hallmark of this Coalition Government is its anti-intellectualism, which is exemplified by its constant shift to appease those who deny climate change is happening or that it is man made. As such, it tends to find itself on the wrong end of science and scientific fact quite a bit. Indeed, they are slashing the budget to actually study the climate at the CSIRO.

One of CSIRO's main climate science units planned to slash four out of five researchers, all but eliminating its monitoring and climate modelling research, a new document reveals. 

The cuts are contained in an analysis for the Oceans & Atmosphere division, dated January 25, 2016. CSIRO handed over the document to the Senate committee investigating plans to slash 350 staff overall, and it has been made public on the Senate's website.

Doubts over the rationale and planning of the cuts flared on Tuesday in another CSIRO section facing deep job losses, with many Land & Water staff walking out of a meeting with chief executive Larry Marshall.

"People got fed up of having their questions marginalised, trivialised, and with being lied to," one senior researcher told Fairfax media. He added the division's head, Paul Hardisty​, had led the walkout. 

"We understand CSIRO scientists are passionate about their science and also about some of the changes to the structure of their organisation," a CSIRO spokesman said, declining to elaborate on the meeting. "CSIRO is committed to continuing to have open and transparent dialogue with staff and hearing staff views and concerns." 

The new document, though, highlights the extent of the original cuts being considered by CSIRO before pressure – including from thousands of international scientists – prompted a scaling back of the job losses.

The rest of the article makes for depressing reading. 

Here's what I don't get. This government is pretty disdainful about the Arts. Here it is also having a go at Science, making stupendous cuts. It doesn't really put its money where its mouth is at when it comes to Engineering or manufacturing or any kind of secondary industry - it tells us outright we can't compete and is happy to ship those jobs abroad. They shut down the automotive industry. They won't build VFTs, sabotage their own NBN, but they'll build more unwanted motorways so they can collect more tolls. They won't build submarines, they'll opt to buy them instead. They'll allow agricultural land to be sold off to overseas interests. They tell us our economy is going to be built on construction and housing and service sector jobs. And let's not forget they want to squeeze HECS debt out of the dead. 

Just what kind of country do they think they're building here? On the evidence, you'd have to conclude even they have no idea whatsoever.