Gladys Berejiklian is our new Premier in NSW. The most interesting thing she said today might have been the fact that she considers housing affordability to be her top priority but she's not willing to consider replacing Stamp Duty with a Land Tax, and that her principle method of making housing more affordable was to increase supply. It sounded like somebody insisting that flapping their arms harder will accomplish flight.
The best thing about Berejiklian becoming Premier might be that Alan Jones didn't want it "in a million light years". I guess that's already happened twelve parsecs ago.
More On (Moron?) Housing Affordability
SWTE Scott Morrison is off to London of all places to see what he can learn about making housing affordable. It's a bit like a heroin addict visiting a crack addict how to beat addiction.
Asking the Liberal Party to tackle this problem is a little like asking arsonists to join the fire department because they understand fires really well. The Liberal Party represents the investor class more than anybody else, and so they're hardly likely going to be able to bring themselves to do anything that would put the investors at a disadvantage. For the same reason Gladys Berejiklian won't look at replacing the Stamp Duty with a Land Tax, Scott Morrison isn't going to wind back Negative Gearing.
It's all very strange how this is likely to turn out because it's already slowing down comic growth because people can't spend money on anything other than their mortgages and rent. The rent-seeking in the real estate market has basically maxed out to capacity and nobody seems able to claw back down from the stand-off.
In the mean time, there is all this private sector debt that's waiting to go off like a time bomb and the Treasurer is more worried about finding bandaid solutions.
If The Russians Love Their Spanking Too
Here's a weird one. The Russians want to 'legalise domestic violence'.
Russia's parliament is this week expected to take a step closer toward decriminalising domestic violence that falls short of serious bodily harm or rape.
Battery is a criminal offence in Russia, but nearly 20 per cent of Russians openly say they think it is sometimes OK to hit a spouse or a child.
In a bid to accommodate conservative voters, deputies in the lower house of parliament have given initial approval to a bill eliminating criminal liability for such violence.
If the measure passes its second reading in the Duma on Wednesday, when the draft can be changed, approval in the third and final reading would be a foregone conclusion.
It's hard to imagine it anywhere else but Russia. I guess that partially answers Sting's rhetorical question in his lyric whether the Russians love their children too. It appears yes they do, but not quite as much as we do.
"Alternative Facts"
Great scot, it's only been three days of Trump in da White House and it's been a non-stop parade ridiculous assertions and factually challenged statements. Kellyanne Conway has come forward with an eyebrow-raising explanation that the Trump Administration is in possession of "alternative facts".
Still more chilling was when the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared on “Meet the Press” on Sunday to assert that Mr. Spicer’s falsehoods were simply “alternative facts.”
Ms. Conway made no bones about what she thought of the news media’s ability to debunk those “alternative facts” in a way Americans — especially Trump-loving Americans — would believe.
“You want to talk provable facts?” she said to the moderator, Chuck Todd. “Look — you’ve got a 14 percent approval rating in the media, that you’ve earned. You want to push back on us?” (She appeared to be referring to a Gallup poll figure related to Republicans’ views.)
And really, there it was: an apparent animating principle of Mr. Trump’s news media strategy since he first began campaigning. That strategy has consistently presumed that low public opinion of mainstream journalism (which Mr. Trump has been only too happy to help stoke) creates an opening to sell the Trump version of reality, no matter its adherence to the facts.
As Mr. Trump and his supporters regularly note, whatever he did during the campaign, it was successful: He won. His most ardent supporters loved the news media bashing. And the complaints and aggressive fact-checking by the news media played right into his hands. He portrayed it as just so much whining and opposition from yet another overprivileged constituency of the Washington establishment.
But will tactics that worked in the campaign work in the White House? History is littered with examples of new administrations that quickly found that the techniques that served them well in campaigns did not work well in government.
And if they do work, what are the long-term costs to government credibility from tactical “wins” that are achieved through the aggressive use of falsehoods? Whatever they are, Mr. Trump should realize that it could hurt his agenda more than anything else.
It's going to be a long 4 years.
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