News That's Fit To Punt - 06/feb/2017

Australian Kakistocrats

A long time ago, Don Chipp defected from the Liberals to form the Australian Democrats, a party that was eventually brought to ruin by its own careerist apparatchik Natasha Stott-Despoja. Anyway, we are finding out today that careerist, right-wing-nutter, Senator Cory Bernardi is splitting from the Liberal Party to form his own right wing party.

Cory Bernardi is set to upend centre-right politics in Australia and announce on Tuesday that he is resigning from the Liberal Party to head his own conservative movement in a stunning move that will rock the Turnbull government as Parliament returns for the new political year. 

Fairfax Media has learnt that in recent days Senator Bernardi informed his staff of his decision to defect from the party he has represented in the Senate for a decade. He will join the crossbench as an independent conservative senator for South Australia, fearing that populist parties will continue to rise if right-wing voters aren't given a viable alternative.

That's all very interesting as a rationale. He's indicating that there is a crowd of deplorable people out there that need a Fuhrer, so to speak, and he's nominating himself. Its interesting how fascists always think alike that way.

It would be interesting to see if Fatuous George goes with him from the Queensland LNP. It would be a party of pretty awful kinds of reactionary fascists wanting to attract the worst elements of society. I think the term to describe that is 'Kakistocracy'. So it would be appropriate to call themselves the Australian Kakistocrats.

What Aussies Want (But Won't Get)

Pleiades alerted me to this one today. This one is an interesting bit of polling.

In a survey covering dozens of hot-button issues put to a representative sample of Australian voters, a desire to rely less on imports and to manufacture more at home stood out as the number one thing most people agreed on.

In the aftermath of Mr Trump's US election victory, where he strongly advocated reviving that nation's manufacturing industry, nearly 83 per cent of surveyed Australian said they strongly agreed (42 per cent) or agreed (40.5 per cent) with the notion we are too reliant on foreign imports. Only 6 per cent disagreed.

Support for an expansion of Australia's manufacturing sector was robust regardless of age, gender, income or locality.

This striking finding comes from the Political Persona Project, one of the most comprehensive attempts ever made to profile different types of Australians based on their lifestyles, social values and politics. Conducted by Fairfax Media in collaboration with the Australian National University and Netherlands-based political research enterprise Kieskompas, the project revealed seven types of Australians, representative of the seven most dominant patterns of thinking in Australian society.

I hate to break it to people, but this is not what the future holds. Manufacturing jobs are disappearing, even in China. Even Foxconn, the famed manufacturer that produces stuff for Apple sacked their workers and replaced them with robots. Even over in America, Elon Musk's Gigafactory opened and it is entirely 'staffed' by robots. The assembly line jobs are not coming back to Australia or America if they're being lost even in China. In fact the trend has prompted Elon Musk to declare that Universal Basic Income will become the future because he sees no other way giving enough people, enough jobs.

Thus our politicians can posture all they like, but those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. In fact, even the service sector jobs will also be under threat, and basically humans are going to be superfluous to the economy with the vast majority not being beneficiaries of the said economy.  In the past, the work ethic was used to compel people to work the boring jobs, but if those jobs won't exist, it's going to be harder to sustain a culture on work and valued labour. The near future will be the government flogging people for not getting work that doesn't exist... which of course is what Centrelink is doing already.

More importantly, China is trying to re-gear its economy so that domestic consumption can sustain its own manufacturing behemoth as the combination of automation and rising wages eats into the long standing competitiveness of the Chinese exports. China is going to be hard pressed to keep its manufacturing as time goes on, and then they will have the same question of just what kind of industries are meant to emerge to keep people employed. Against that context, it's hard to imagine manufacturing making a big come back in Australia. If it ever comes back, it will come back as robots.

It's amazing that neither political party is spelling it out, because not being honest with the public is what is going to give rise to the Deplorables who vote for Brexit, Trump and ... well, Abbott.

The Crazy Is Everywhere (Please Don't Go Encouraging It)

I have to say, Paulin Hanson is the herpes infection of Australian politics, a despised, socially embarrassing irritation that keeps coming back.

Senator Hanson told Sunrise on Channel 7 on Monday she was thrilled with the strong performance of One Nation and even speculated that one day she could be Prime Minister.

"To be PM, what an honour that would be. It is a privilege to be the leader of the nation. But it is a tough position and I can understand that you can't please everyone all the time," she said. 

"My job now is to represent the people of Queensland and to build the party. Maybe one day, let down the track, in 15 or 20 years time, who knows what will happen."

It's cloud-cuckoo-land, that conversation where Pauline Hanson is casting herself as a Prime Minister. I guess our society is dumbing down and the more and more of the worst elements are getting their way, but if it ever turns out that One Nation is producing a Prime Minister for this country, it is the end.