Politics of Stupor

Twenty Years Of 'Big Stupid' In The Making

For some time now, our polity has been beset by the idiocy, mendacity and disingenuous hypocrisy on all sides. How long does this go back? It may go all the way back to 1996 when we elected the Howard Government when the seeds for all this stupidity - The Big Stupid - were sown. In twenty years we have come a winding tortured road in climate policy where on the one hand we have made commitments to control our carbon emissions, but on a domestic policy level, failed to implement policies to make that happen. If that were the only area we would be in a position to argue, "okay, let's fix that", but we are not; for we seem to have a legion of linked ideological snares that have been set loose upon our nation and try as we might, we cannot seem to untangle the mess.

Case in point might be the desire not to tax the super profits of mining concerns, or the desire to open ever more coal mines like the Adani mine in Queensland, or the fact that the mind ignores the signs that fossil fuel use for energy generation may steeply decline. What's alarming is that the Australian government has had 20 solid years to do something about it and the break down of how we spent that time goes like this:

1. 11 and a half years under John Howard denying it was a problem, being 'sceptical'. Why he opted to be sceptical of scientific findings but not those of armchair conspiracy theorists is unexplained.  
2. 3years under Kevin Rudd trying to implement Carbon Pricing, whereupon the Greens refused to put it through the Senate because it wasn't their version. 
3. The Rudd government worked to implement as many climate sensitive policies as possible and became a major actor at Copenhagen where emissions talks fell apart. 
4. This prompted a retreat and a simultaneous drop in Rudd's support which led to Julia Gillard's ascendancy.
5. Julia Gillard called an election promising not to put in a Carbon Tax. The election resulted in a hung Parliament, and so in order to form government with the help of the teens, she acceded to their wishes and put in Carbon Pricing. 
6. That led to Tony Abbott's opposition claiming that Gillard broke an election promise and promising to remove the aid 'Carbon Tax'. 
7. 3 years of a Gillard Government and the Opposition attacks on its emissions policy led to a complete breakdown in consensus for carbon policy within the Coalition. 
8. When the Coalition won Government, it dismantled the carbon pricing mechanism and replaced it with Direct Action, which is less efficient and is not working to rein in emissions. 
9. 2years of as utterly retrograde and disastrous government-by-tabloid-headline Abbott government, they replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull who, having a reputation for having an understanding of the policy area, completely does an about-face and continues with the disastrous policies of his predecessor. 
10. Turnbull goes to an election, and he too gets his own hung Parliament, and so the numbers dictate he continues with the disastrous an stupid policy he would personally not endorse. 

That's the potted history that brings us up to date. Apart form the years the ALP were in government, the Coalition has done very little to even wrestle with the problem. They've done far more damage than any good and any credible observer would have give them negative marks for not trying and active resistance. Worse still, their constituency applauds this rearguard action for the petrochemical industry and fossil fuel interests.

The ugly prognosis is that it's not going get better any time soon. Worse still the Coalition government can't do better because it is in the pockets of these interests and basically would lie through their teeth to keep the idiotic status quo of climate change denial. It's staggering to think that something so important could be left to blow up in our faces because in the minds of these politicians, the interests of the lobby outweigh the interests of the public.

They can argue about it, but they're not really going to give up the money from the special interests.

No Power, No Glory, Just The Big Stupid Please

Australian kids are falling behind in the education stakes. It's not surprising that this is the case given the numbers of people voting for the Coalition. It would appear that the proportion of truly stupid people has increased exponentially, as evinced by the rise of support for One Nation.
In case you missed it, here's an time on what One Nation thinks should be climate policy.

"We are being controlled by the UN and these agreements that have been done for people's self interest and where they are driving our nation as a sovereignty and the economics of the whole lot," Hanson told the gathered media.

Wheee!
Anyway. Signs of a lack of education are here too:

People regularly cite Australia's economic strength and our egalitarianism as reasons why emotion-driven, fact-free and angry populism will not flourish here as it is flourishing in other Western democracies. 

But research recently published by a University of Melbourne academic, Roberto Stefan Foa, and his former Harvard colleague Yascha Mounk, shows that our democratic consensus is fragile too. 

The pair has been researching the attitudes of people in so-called "consolidated" democracies, to the conventions and institutions that comprise those democracies.
They have found a disturbing trend – over time, in all the liberal democracies including Australia, open-ness to the idea of military rule has grown, the number of people who think a democratic system is "bad" has grown, support for the concept of civil rights is less, and fewer people express an interest in politics. This trend is especially pronounced in young people, so-called Millennials. 

In these conditions, populist politicians gain traction by appealing to emotion and bypassing fact altogether. 

These politicians outrage the "elites", precisely because they don't adhere to the values of liberal democracy, which roll all the way back to the Enlightenment. They are playing "our" game but they won't accept the rules we wrote. They don't value rationalism over emotion. They don't abide by the norms so many of us thought (or hoped) were settled, and in this sense they are radical. 

And when you have a Prime Minister who refuses facts as squarely as Turnbull did this week, despite being educated, intelligent and on record as knowing those facts better than most people, we are edging towards the land of the radical, where policy-making is as fantastical as a go-nowhere boat trip over a bleached-out coral reef.

In other words, the Big Stupid is like a genie unleashed from a bottle already trampling across fairly fundamental philosophical positions upon which things like public discourse and democracy are built.
As George Lucas joked in his script for 'American Graffiti', Rome indeed wasn't burnt in a day.

The funny thing is that the headlines tell us our education system is underperforming. That because of this, our economy is suffering. We already know what we should be doing, - fund the full Gonski - but we have a government that won't.

not educating the populace suits oligarchical interests of the country in as much as more ignorance seems to directly correlate with voting Coalition. If one were of an academic mindset, such readily-made correlations would be embarrassing but that discounts the fact that this bunch of Coalition politicians know no shame. They just want power for the pay-check. It's quite extraordinary how such a situation came about, it is far easier understand that as Trump noted, the conservatives of any land would "love" the 'poorly educated'. Not, not the un-educated, but the poorly educated - which clearly means those who not only weren't left alone to come to stupid choices, but those who were educated so poorly they were given more wrong answers than right ones, and are definitely more inclined to vote for the conservatives. The cynicism involving education beggars belief.

The Stupid wants more Stupidity. It needs more Stupidity to sustain itself - nay, grow - and so Stupidity begets the Big Stupid that we have come to.

Interest Rates, Property, Banking, Greed, And Fear

The ticking time bomb is the housing affordability crisis and the Property Bubble.
The long and short of it is that all our banks have committed vast sums of money into private sector debt. It can't afford for the asset values to fall, or else all those big loans will go bad and wipe out the banks. Our society is too reliant on the four banks and Macquarie Bank because they are too big to fail. And so in order not make things harder for them or their mortgage customers, the RBA has eased interest rates to historic lows, just to keep the soufflé going. Will the Bubble pop? Over the dead body of the RBA.

And it's been going like this for 8 years going on 9 since the GFC. It has gotten so big, nobody can contemplate what a correction would look like.We don't even know what might trigger such a correction. It's bit like living the shadow of a very big object that is precariously balanced, but we marvel at the engineering that has so far kept it from toppling.

The Federal Government knows what it has to do. It has to wind back Negative Gearing. It has to implement rules to limit investors, it has to scrutinise foreign investors more, and it has to provide more supply, and more infrastructure. It's not exactly doing any of these things. The Federal government under the Coalition has argued that retaining the AAA credit rating is necessary in order to keep interest rates low. Except, they're already low enough. All that the low interest rates accomplish is help investors take more risks in the market.

It's not surprising then that nothing gets done. Nobody wants to fix it. So one of these days, there will be something that triggers a collapse and then we'll se how many people get out of the market ahead. but the long this goes, the bigger the impact is going to be and more people will get wiped out. It's like the Coalition government is committing Australians to play chicken with the biggest purchase of their lives.

That Infrastructure Issue

What little infrastructure they're building, the Federal government is for of building the wrong ones. This is because they are in the pockets of the general construction lobby and this lobby likes to build unless toll roads. Of course, they're so careful not to lose the AAA credit rating, they're not investing in much else, and this has led to a contraction in the economy this quarter.

Economic growth over the year to September was just 1.8 per cent, a big comedown from 3.1 per cent over the year to June, which was itself revised down from 3.3 per cent. 

"This is the second-worst economic growth result in 25 years," Labor treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said. "It's only the fourth negative quarter since 1991, and on the only other occasions there were good reasons. In 2011 it was dealing with Cyclone Yasi in Queensland, in 2009 it was the greatest international downturn since the Great Depression, and in 2000 it was the aftermath of the Sydney Olympics. It is also the case that this figure is worse than 2011, worse than 2000, and comparable with 2009, in the middle of the global financial crisis."

Mr Morrison said the unexpected result would be incorporated in the mid-year budget update to be delivered on December 19.
The government itself was responsible for some of the decline in GDP, with a wind-back in its spending accounting for 0.1 percentage points of the 0.5 per cent drop.

Mr Morrison said the December update would continue to show the budget on a path to return to balance by 2021. But it was possible the trajectory would change, so that the government supported the economy by investing more in infrastructure upfront in return for bigger cutbacks later, as recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

A further slide in business investment knocked another 0.4 points off economic growth, and a partly weather-related slide in construction knocked off 0.3 points.

And so that one went. The thing is, it's not like Australia' economy suddenly found its way into negative growth. It's been a few years now that the mining investment boom was coming off the boil so something had to be done to boost investment. Instead, under Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, the Coalition government went for cuts and destroyed the automobile manufacturing industry as well. It was hard to decipher what those two idiots wanted except maybe for people to lose their jobs but somehow stay off the dole. One ought to give ScoMo the benefit of the doubt, but it's not looking like he's got a good grip on the problem if he thinks tax cuts to businesses is going to do the trick. At this point in time, even the Coalition government ought to know that trickle-down bullshit just doesn't work, and that rhetoric is long past its use by date.