Barnaby's A Bit Slow

Is There Any Other Way To Put It?

Maybe it's because he insists on being on the outer reaches of ideological extremism, it's easy to confuse Barnaby Joyce with somebody who might have a clue about what is good for the country. He's convinced he's a good man, trying to good by his country but his skewed ideology takes him to places where stupid cohabitates with insanity. 

That's really all there is to it. 

Come join the fun here.

Christian Porter's Spot of Bother, Part 2

He's Most Probably Guilty

So a few days ago Christian Porter one on the offensive and claimed he didn't commit an act of rape and he's only met the woman when she was 16 and he was 17. He made a few other ambit claims which at the time seemed neither here nor there so in my naiveté I thought it was prudent to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. 

All of that was predicated on not having read what the actual allegations are, and if we were being strictly principled about it, we would not form opinions without knowing what the allegations were. Quite simply he had denied the rape and then pointed to the presumption of innocence that is standard in the court of law. 

Well, Crikey has come out with an article overnight which details a good deal of what the allegations are, and how they might relate to Christian Porter. The article was penned before Porter's presser so the minister is referred to as 'John Doe'. The woman is described as Jane Doe. Here is a section that contradicts Christian Porter's press conference comments. 

The pair first met in 1986 and again in 1987 in Adelaide when Jane was 15 at a national school competition. The group of students travelling together became close friends, socialising, dancing and studying together.

While the group was close, one friend told Crikey that John Doe had an “arrogant” side to him and as competitions intensified he would become mean.

“[Jane] talked about how she was shocked because she’d imagine that everyone was friendly, and yet the way that [John] was behaving towards it was not as a friend would behave,” she said.

“I think that was the first inkling she had that he was not what she had thought that he was.”

John would make callous remarks at women, Jane wrote. She recalled him saying she didn’t “have the tits” to wear a bikini, and joking that the alfalfa sprouts on her salad made it look like she was “eating sperm”.

But later he would flatter Jane, complimenting her — and himself. According to Jane’s statement, he asked her to iron a shirt he wanted to wear.

“You would make a wonderful wife one day,” he said. He called her “so smart and so pretty”, capable of doing “all the good housewife things”.

At the press conference, Porter made it out that he only met the woman once at the debating competition. He explained that the line comes from the fact that this 'Jane Doe' knew how to iron a shirt and he didn't. It's interesting how he used his own inept male chauvinism at 17 as his defence there, - but it contradicted greatly by what is being described. He knew her, he liked her more than just friends. He knew her enough that he wanted to marry her, - which is to say he wanted to have sexual relations with her - at least that's what is being related. Chalk that one up to motive. 

After dancing in Kings Cross, Jane — who said she was in a dissociative state — agreed to a non-penetrative sex act propositioned by John. Jane wrote that she agreed to the act because she had been hurt by John’s comments about her body. 

He then allegedly violently forced Jane into performing oral sex on him despite her saying no. Jane said he kicked her to the ground and wrapped his hands around her neck.
Later, she said he bathed her thoroughly, dressed her and comforted her as she fell asleep telling her it was “all a bad dream”. 

She said she woke to John anally raping her. He allegedly raped her twice without a condom.
“The only thing that I remember [John] saying to me was that was ‘I don’t want to get you pregnant’,” Jane wrote. 

The next day, Jane said John joked about how the night “might have been different” if he had a condom before referring to his “good Catholic girlfriend” back home.

Great. So he had access to this woman, and therefore the means. This allegation also completely contradicts Porter's own press conference statement where he denied he knew her any more than the realm of the debating competition.   

The description in this allegation is is like something out of 'American Psycho'. It's completely alien to most people with common sense and judgment. 17 year olds with common sense and judgment don't go around getting women drunk and anally raping them. Porter essentially made an appeal to the empathy of most people to imagine themselves at 17, not even remotely likely to rape, and then asked them to take their good judgment and common sense as his own. It's so sickening that he would run that manipulation on the people of this country. 

You can't be asking for presumption of innocence at the same time running a gaslighting operation. We're not taking about what we would have done. We're talking about what he most likely did. 

The crux of it comes down to the believability of the allegation. 

Jane lived with the allegation for 30 years. Feelings of shame and guilt are common in survivors; 57% of victims experience anxiety and fear in the year after the assault.

One male friend, who met her around six months after the alleged assault said Jane spoke about experiencing a “serious and traumatic event” which he assumed to be a form of sexual assault.

“For many years, we’ve had many discussions around many aspects of her being assaulted and the damage that it did without her identifying who it was,” he said.

“At no occasion did she ever contradict herself or was she ever inconsistent.”

Jane had been a high achiever. School captain. Dux. She was incredibly smart, being accepted to school teams earlier than most students and was the “brightest star” out of the school team, friends said.

But Jane struggled, suffering from mental illness and substance abuse which intensified as she went into university. In one study, 45% of survivors of sexual assault reported having a drinking problem in the year before the survey.

“She did go on to experience real challenges with her mental health,” one friend said. They added that Jane believed her mental health issues were linked to her alleged assault. While Jane still worked and studied, friends say she never had a career of longevity or finished her PhD.

After seeking counselling from both a psychologist and a psychiatrist in 2019, Jane decided to make her allegations public. She reached out to friends who were around her in 1988. These messages, sent between 2018 and 2019, have been seen by Crikey. The three friends Crikey spoke to reject the idea that the memory could be false.

“The level of ancillary detail … the sidebars and the interpersonal things that she commented on, some of them I know to be true and some of them ring very true,” one friend said.

The three friends Crikey spoke to said Jane was determined and resolved in telling her story. Her parents reportedly only found out about the allegation in 2019 and they do not believe that it is true.

For what it is worth, I believe her. I completely believe this account. If it's Christian Porter's words against the words of this woman, I take the latter. And I do not take kindly to Porter's intimation that her account was not right because somehow she suffered a mental health issue (all while himself begged off work for a couple of weeks to regain his mental health ... p'uh-lease!). That was a cheap shot. 

I think Porter's press conference was good enough to buy a few days' worth of grace while we processed what was being discussed. What has come out contradicts Porter's own statements so greatly, one has to wonder if there's any truth to the denial itself. I kind of think he perjured himself in the court of public opinion by feigning that he hardly knew the woman. This was simply not true by the account of not just the woman, but the people who knew them back then. One can't lie about this fact and then make one's denial stand. 

My opinions here don't really matter. It doesn't affect anything. I just blog to keep track of my own thinking on things. All the same if you're asking me what I think, I think he did it. 

What Now?

As I said in my last entry, ministers have lost their jobs for less. If one is in the Prime Minster's shoes l- hate him or loathe him - he has no choice but to jettison this toxic mess. This is doubly so when there is the other business of Brittany Higgins going on, ensnaring Linda Reynolds with her 'Lying Cow' remark. When you think about it, Reynolds is not the rapist, merely the boss of the victim, who tried to minimise the allegation for political reasons - and she is in as deep trouble as she is. Porter's position is worse in that he is the accused perpetrator of a crime who cannot come close to proving his innocence; worse still, the more we learn of the allegations, the more we're convinced he likely did rape the woman when he was 17. Can Scott Morrison really countenance having this man as his top law official? 

The problem of course is the Morrison is sitting on a one seat majority, with the departure of climate-change-denying-Anti-vax-Anti-mask-Trumpist-nutjob Craig Kelly from the Liberal Party. The election that brought this sorry government back was May 2019, so we're looking at latest May 2021 as the election date. Presumably Morrison's play is to make it to later this year and use the COVID-19 vaccine and management of the pandemic in Australia as his ticket for reelection but you have to wonder if he's going to make it that far. So like it or not we're marching into an election year with a lot to process. A lot of it is exactly the women problem the Liberal Party has.

If you conducted a vox pop on any street in Australia today, how many people would be able to tell you the name of Australia’s Minister for Women? Just about nobody. Because Marise Payne has done just about nothing. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Even after these torrid and shocking weeks with accusations of rape against a Liberal staff member and a Liberal cabinet minister, senior Liberal men do not think their grip on power is under threat. These controversies might increase the Labor Party’s winning margins in seats they already hold, but are not powerful enough to cost the Coalition any of their seats, they assert.

This has the whiff of hubris. It’s true that Scott Morrison’s approval rating is strong, in the 60s. This is a result of his handling of the pandemic and the recession. But it’s also true that nothing has budged the critical measure – voting intentions.

The voting intentions have not moved. The electorate is split roughly 50-50. So maybe Morrison intends to just ride it all out, pretend nothing's happened. Except right now, Morrison seems to be presiding over a Land of Rape. Things are absolutely, decidedly totally not fine - the house is on fire when it comes to topic of women's safety, and right now the fire is burning down the authority in the House of Representatives. If he doesn't do anything, Morrison may as well be anointing himself rapist-in-chief. 

The thing is, as of now, Christian Porter can just fuck off. There's no upside to the man in terms of policy, politics or legislature. There's no coming back from this allegation. He can't have moral authority as the top law official of Australia while the allegation remains - and it will remain by dint of the woman's suicide. Luckily for Porter he won't see the inside of Prison. 

So he's done. The only questions are how soon will Scomo wake up to this dire reality and how far will he be punting Porter. 

The Unfair Society

Is Fair Worth Fighting For?

After writing about this business of Christian Porter, I got to be thinking about what was disturbing me so much about the press conference. On the one hand if we are being fair to the person who accused the Attorney General, we have to be fair towards her and ask the questions. On the other hand if we're living in a society with due process, the manner in which we ask the question should have a bit more epistemological precision than a heated presser to get towards justified, true, belief on the matter. It would be unfair to everybody in society if we judged guilt on rumour and innuendo. 

Which got me thinking, I guess I'm a sucker for this notion of 'fair'. 

I saw a number of people going off on social media today saying Porter was merely denying it like Bart Simpson - "I didn't do it, you didn't see me do it, you can't prove anything" - which, to be fair is true as well, but if his denials are not sufficient from making your negative judgements, then doesn't that mean this really needs to go to court? 

If you were being accused rightly or wrongly, you'd want your day in court instead of just a presser. Yet because the would-be plaintiff is dead, there can't be a court date. It is entirely unfair to be judged on the letter. That's Porter's point. Thus fairness seemed to be one of the nodes on which this process was buckling.

This brings about the next question:

Do We Live In A Fair Society?

We value fairness in Australia. Everyday Australia's journalists describe our society as egalitarian. This is probably not quite right. I can say that it used to be egalitarian but years and years of Coalition rule has ensured a lot of privileges have been baked in as advantages for wealthy people. Going back 30 years to the year Paul Keating ousted Bob Hawke from the Prime Minister's office, there have been 11 years of ALP rule and the rest belong to the Coalition. They won a lot over the years, some times in the most dodgy manner (which I won't bother going into here) and the ALP for its part has found numerous ways to hobble itself over the years. And each time the ALP hobbled itself, that was an opportunity lost. 

Fairness has been slipping in the socio-economic sense for 3 decades. We are far less equal now than we were in 1991. Year after year we find economic inequality has risen and that the gap with the indigenous community has not closed. Opportunities are less, the economy is far less diverse, and labour conditions are more precarious for far more people. It turned out this way because successive governments have been undertaking the Neo-liberal social experiment where governments no longer look to achieve full employment, they try and cut taxes instead and hope private enterprise pulls it weight. It has not. 

A simple analysis of GDP spread tells a simple picture of unequal spread of wealth. It was pointed out by an academic to me that 8% of Australia's GDP is derived from the surrounding blocks of Wynyard and Town Hall stations in Sydney. Melbourne similarly has 2 stations that provide a similar amount, and Brisbane has one that provides about 5. If you add it up, 1/5 of Australia's GDP rests on 5 suburbs out of all the suburbs in this wide country. This skewering is partly the result of public infrastructure policy (or absence thereof) but also an expression of the unequal opportunities present in our society. 

There are whole swathes of the country physically cut off from the opportunities that are available in concentrated spots in the middle of these urban centres. Australia's unemployed numbers 700,000 and upwards. In any given week there are job listings that number about 200,000, most of which are closely tied to these GDP engine sites. In any given week there are 500,000 people who need a job, are actively looking and cannot get the economic opportunity to better themselves as per the conservative Liberal National Party prescription for self-betterment. There's no rhetorical device to cover over the plain fact that the Coalition government can't even deliver on its own stated policy. It just can't work the way they say it does, thanks to the tyranny of distance. We live in a country that if you live in the wrong place, your odds at success get very long.

So no, we do not live in a society that is in any way fair; we have a government that has made it its stated policy to keep it unfair; and unfairness is celebrated by this ruling party at just about every turn. 

Therefore, it has to be asked how is it fair that the Attorney General of the party of unfairness, presiding over a government that enacts policies to bolster enduring unfairness, that spreads the unfairness and celebrates the unfairness it creates and sustains, complain when he is not being treated fairly? Can Christian Porter really complain about all this being unfair? What has fairness got to do with his party, his government, his life experience of wealth and privilege and his pursuit of said unfairness over his entire political career? 

What, fair? Christian Porter wants fairness? Due process? Who is he trying to kid? We don't get fairness from him or his government, why should that old expectation for egalitarian, democratic fairness still stand? He's getting exactly what's coming to him exactly because of the many many actions of his life apart from his possible rape that put him in a position to look like a rape suspect. It's extraordinary in some ways that a man's life in the law and politics has led him to being utterly unbelievable when he himself is accused of a heinous crime - but that's all on him. 

You Know What's Weird About The Date?

January of 1988. 

I keep looking at the date of the alleged rape and keep thinking it's peculiar. What is peculiar about it is that it's roughly the time of Australia celebrating its Bicentenary. I remember the event. On Australia Day that year I was down in Blues Point Park with my friends to see the fireworks which, for the first time were mounted from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Then they announced they would become incorporated into New Year Celebrations and the rest is history. The jingle went "Celebration of a Nation, lend us a hand," so we spent the year making jokes about hand jobs. It's hard to forget. It was typically a Hawke-Keating kind of Green-and-Gold Australia looking fo an identity to hang its celebrations upon, and much less the Southern-Cross-and-Union-Jack kind of Australiana preferred by John Howard.

All the same Australia Day remains hotly contested, with Porter's own party doing the defending of the day of invasion for the indigenous people of Australia. It's the ultimate day of unfairness that his party insists we keep as the day to celebrate our nation-hood. I'm pretty sure Christian Porter is also one of those guys who don't think we should move the date. It seems incredibly emblematic that around the time of the most unfair moment being celebrated was when the alleged events took place. 

And he wants fairness. Let that sink in. 

A Bit of Kafka, A Bit of Kant

I guess a part of me is still wedded to fairness. If one were to give Porter the benefit of the doubt, then it must be harrowing to wake up one day and be accused of a heinous crime 33 years ago when you were a teen. It's like something straight out of Kafka (or Philip K Dick). Like Kafka's 'The Trial', the allegation sticks, but he can't get to a courtroom to challenge his accuser or clear his name. Or maybe it is more like 'The Metamorphosis' where he woke up one day as a beetle (I have often wanted to wake up one day as a Beatle but that is another story). Instead of a beetle, Porter has woken up to find he is an alleged rapist.

It doesn't end well for Josef K. or Gregor Samsa the protagonists in Kafka's stories. It's hard to imagine this ends well for Christian Porter. He might not like it but his only shot at clearing his name is the independent inquiry being tossed around.

Immanuel Kant made a point in his book 'Critique of Pure Reason' that there are any number of things in the universe one could discuss but because of the way we are constructed, there is no way of knowing. For instance we cannot know if there is an afterlife because we can't die and come back. So any discussion of the afterlife cannot be sensibly made because nobody knows what they're talking about. Similarly, if we're careful about what we can know and what we can't know, the range of subjects we can discuss sensibly becomes self evident (or words to that effect, it's been a decade since I read the big fat turgid book). When applied to the situation of Christian Porter, it becomes self evident we can't talk about this case in any sensible way, given the circumstances. 

People are going to try anyway because it's their job to commentate, but keep in mind what Kant had to say about the limits of what we can know and whether sensible judgements can be made. They can have the independent inquiry but they might come up with bupkis. Is this fair? Is this fair on the woman? Is any of it fair? Like I said, I'm a sucker for fairness, but we're talking about a guy who tried to make fairness obsolete, asking for fairness. By all means have the independent inquiry but I can hear Kafka and Kant laughing from the grave. 

Whatever the outcome, it sucks to be you, Christian Porter. But it's no worse than the life of the disadvantaged in this country - a disadvantage your career was spent in trying to sustain.

Christian Porter's Spot of Bother

 How Awkward Was That, Shtraya?

That was a really uncomfortable press conference. I can't recall a press conference that was more awkward than that one including the one where Bill Clinton wagged his finger and told us he "did not have sex with that woman". And we know how that one turned out. Christian Porter's press conference was much more drawn out and filled with bewilderment and pointed, accusatory questions. 

You can see parts of it for yourself here.

All of it is here.

It's pretty gruelling to watch.

I Hate Christian Porter But...

It goes without saying but by dint of him being on the infernal side of politics, I don't like Christian Porter. I don't much like the smug smirk and condescension that he usually throws around, and as for this notion that he might be a future Prime Minister, well, if Scomo can be our PM a monkey's ass can do it too. When we all started playing the game of"who-is-the-rapist-minister?" his name was the slam dunk favourite. And your name doesn't become the front-runner in those stakes if you weren't some kind of entitled fuckwit that invites that judgement - more on that later.

I really can't stand the guy; but I have to say that I'm inclined to believe him based on that interview. We might quibble with the way he played politics at the edge by bringing up allegations against Bill Shorten some years ago, and implied that the press were part of the public lynch mob. I mean, come on, if it were the other way around you know he would be using the press to drum up the very same lynch mob. So the pleading for politics didn't really elicit my sympathy. 

What did get my attention was the scenario. It was January 1988. He and 3 other students were in Sydney for a debating competition. He as 17, she was 16 when the alleged rape took place. And it took 32+ years for this to surface as a case. Keeping in mind the man was in the Western Australian state government Assembly since 2008. The woman accusing him of the rape committed suicide late lats year, having battled mental illness. They're the facts as presented to us. 

Look, I'll be honest with you - Porter didn't look like a guy who got found out for a transgression from years ago. He looked like he was bewildered that the rumour mill had found him as the target of a wild allegation. Believe me, there are not that many people who would love to see him go down more than me, but I couldn't bring myself to think he was the perpetrator as described, based on how he presented himself at the presser. 

People are going to believe the accuser and that's fair enough. I was on their side right up to the point I sat through that miserable, nerve-shattering press conference. 

Maybe In The Confirmation Bias Wheelhouse?

If we were to nominate one cabinet minister out of Scomo's veritable lineup of misery-makers, Porter fits the bill like no other. Most of the prominent men in Scomo's cabinet look like Incels. Porter alone looks like he can play the player and maybe get laid in a way that is beyond say Greg Hunt, Josh Frydenberg or Peter Dutton. If you had to pull a name out of that bunch as the likely culprit, Porter would have been at the top of a lot of people's lists, not just mine. 

He's the obvious person to think the worst of, and just maybe there's a problem in that. Just because we think he's the odds-on favourite to be the one to do it, doesn't mean he did it. As much as I would like to believe out of malice and schadenfreude that Porter was the likeliest to be a teen rapist, that doesn't mean he was a teen rapist. It's not a matter to be left to conjecture or random judgments of character. Belief alone isn't going to get you anywhere meaningful. This isn't some joke about figuring out who farted in the lift. It's as grave an allegation as grave allegations come. 

Worse still, we're not going to get to the bottom of this because the accuser is now deceased. No court case can be brought, no investigation can really be completed. The people calling for an independent inquiry are on principle correct to do so, but in light of the circumstances it is doubtful meaningful answers can be gained. And by meaningful, I mean those that stand up to some kind of epistemological interrogation, with conclusions that are justified and true.  

As it is, it's left in the world of he-said, she-said. The allegations are just going to sit in the half-light of social media and mainstream media without ever seeing the inside of a court. If anything the press conference drew the line under the need for presumption innocence especially in such murky circumstances. 

Making Sense of The Bits That We Were Told

Porter had the look of a man who wanted to say "look, I am an arsehole and you can think me a tremendous, awful, entitled, arsehole but I am not that arsehole." 

It reminded me of the Nixon adage "let the bastard deny it". Or the fart joke "He who denied it supplied it." If you're out in front of the press denying something, you look guilty any way. Which is to say, that right there is the court of public opinion running wild, independent of any real court or rule of law. It's not that I don't believe the allegation or that I believe Porter is a more reliable human being than the accuser or any of that. No. None of that. It's just that right up to seeing the press conference, I was smugly convinced he was the rapist and he should go down regardless of the circumstances. 

What I discovered in the process of watching his press conference was that I got squeamish. I realised I would much rather this whole business went through courts and got litigated and contested by eminent, studied, venerable lawyers. Except it can't because the accuser is dead. This stuff of journalists hurling loaded questions - the "when did you stop beating your wife?" variety of questions, did not make me feel any closer to the truth or a just outcome. And Porter looked just as frustrated as we were in that what he was being asked to do was to prove a negative in a court of public opinion and anything less should mean his job and career. He's certainly correct to see it that way. 

In turn, I had to ask myself am I happy being a juror in a kangaroo court? You know me, I hate jury duty even in real life. Sure I'd love to see him gone, but he'd only be replaced by the next entitled jerk-off Tory, so what would be the point of a gratuitous send-off in real world terms? Meanwhile Porter can't even name his accuser in the press conference defending his name. A wag pointed out even his surname rhyming with daughter is going to kill him at the next election: "would you trust your daughter with Christian Porter?" It's a circus of malice and innuendo.

This is so murky and awful that if the ALP ran with it against the Coalition, they too would suffer a tremendous blow to their own prestige and integrity. They would never be able to argue anything from principle in Parliament again. That's how toxic this scandal has become. It's one thing for this sorry government to cover up the Brittany Higgins rape. That's terrible enough and the government deserves to be castigated. Yet I thoroughly understand the government's perplexed aporia about this allegation. I guess that's why they sent him out to face the press today. 

  

 

There's No Money

There's Never Any Money

Some time after those terrible fires, it got to rebuilding, and affected people went looking around for reconstruction/support money from the government. At the time, announcements were made that there was 2 billion dollars to go around but months later it was found out that there was no such fund as announced. People found it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy to be heard by the Federal Government. Arguably, the Federal Government put in wear plugs and sat in the maze in order to make it inaccessible A little like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22 when he says he will only take meetings when he is not in his office.  

People affected by the fires went into the winter of 2020 with the pandemic going, without having rebuilt anything. It should have been a bigger scandal but of course this Covid-19 pandemic has been such a monster of sorts it ate up all the airspace for the message to get out. 

I kind of imagine that Scomo, having been snubbed pretty hard in his attempt to PR and Spin his way out of the deep ditch he had dug himself, decided these people would get punished through the power of bureaucracy. The ABC was reporting people still living in tents in the middle of winter. This is a terrible state of affairs. 

All of which got me thinking that we do terrible things to one another. I didn't vote in this terrible government but somebody did, and those people knew full well what kind of crackpot policies would be put into place or left to die through inaction and omission. And now that people in the south end of the continent were facing this terrible plight, there were people in Queensland who were quite smug that they got the government for which they had hoped. The absence of empathy is psychopathic. It's a horrible thought, really when part of the populace abandons another to depredation and neglect. We used to be better than this. Really, we were, once upon a long time ago. 

 Come join the fun on Spotify.

"Oh The Stupidity"

Yeah. Just thought I'd put that there.

Is It An Election Or A Circus?

One Of The Most Disturbing Things

By this time all of you with a connection to the internet should know that Donald Trump took a big hit last week, when a 2005 recording was released wherein he displayed the most misogynistic frat-boy sensibility we all suspected he had. In fact if you didn't suspect it or felt compelled to defend it, it probably meant you had it as well. Since then his polls have plummeted, and it's been such a meltdown in the media about it. Republicans who once offered their support to the Donald are now withdrawing it; some are even calling for him to pull out. It's all looking a bit untenable for the Donald.

President Obama has said:

"One of the most disturbing things about this election is just the unbelievable rhetoric coming at the top of the Republican ticket,"

"I don't need to repeat it. There are children in the room."

... which pretty much sums it up. If you thought Mitt Romney giving a speech about the 47% of Americans being freeloaders was damning, this bit of audio consigns Trump to the ranks of those who truly did not deserve to run.

The more interesting thing this week is that Donald Trump's 2005 leaked audio has become something of an enabling cipher for our politicians to discus the American election - something that politicians rightfully avoid doing.

A handful of Australian politicians have now expressed their opinions on the Trump scandal ahead of the second presidential debate. 

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull labelled Trump's comments "loathsome" and said they deserved the "absolutely universal condemnation that they have received". 

Minister for Women Michaelia Cash said Mr Trump's comments were "demeaning, they were disappointing and they were wrong, full stop". 

Deputy Prime Minister Barnarby Joyce, while labelling Mr Trump's comments as unacceptable, criticised both the Democrats and Republicans for digging up rubbish from each other's past. 

"I just think this whole debate in the United States is turning into a dirty, filthy concoction which belies the respect the American people deserve," he told ABC radio.
"They're all digging up rubbish from each other's past and I just think the whole thing is pretty unsavoury."

It's not just a bunch of nobodies saying this stuff in the press, and that's a little surprising.

Regular sparring partners Pauline Hanson and Derryn Hinch, two of the most outspoken crossbench senators, have exchanged heated words in the hallways of Parliament House about Trump's attitudes to women. 

Fairfax Media's political reporter Fergus Hunter reports that the spat, caught on camera, followed a television interview where the pair were asked about whether Trump should quit the race for the White House. 

As the pair left the television studio and walked on to their next Parliament House engagements, Senator Hinch pursued his Senate colleague over her attitude.
"That you, as a woman, could even make any justification for what he has said and what he has done is just ...," he said. 

"Well, I didn't condone what he said," responded Senator Hanson. 

"No, you said the people of America will decide. If you are even slightly right, then God help the country and God help the world. The man is a sexual predator and he is a disgrace," the former broadcaster said, before getting a lift.

Great Googly-moogly. One can only imagine the rest of that conversation. On the one hand you have the crank Pauline Hanson tacitly trying to continue support for the unsupportable Trump, and on the other side you have a shock-jock-turned-pollie looking for some moral high ground; The two of them arguing over a candidate whose approach to elections was to turn it into a reality show. You can't come up with this stuff.

Australian Labor senator Doug Cameron doubts there will be a Trump presidency.
"Why would any woman in America vote for Trump?" he asked. 

"The sooner he's defeated, or the sooner he gives in the better." 

New Labor MP Emma Husar said Australia would work with whoever was elected, but called Trump a "pig". 

"He's an absolute repugnant animal who deserves to have every single Republican who is well-respected over there walk away from him," she told reporters.

You know, in the days not so long ago, our politicians would have refrained from saying stuff like this. What the hell is Senator Hussar going to do should the Donald pull out an unlikely win and visit Australia? Hide? Apologise? Yes the Donald is a terrible human being, but is it that necessary for a Senator in Australia to be hammering in nails of his political coffin when others inches own country are doing a perfectly good job? It actually doesn't say anything good about our polity. If lack of restraint is Donald Trump's problem, then our politicians could have done better showing that very same restraint.

A World With POTUS Trump

Peter Hartcher has this article:

The US under a President Trump would withdraw Australia's security guarantee and become a "rogue superpower", according to a scholarly analysis commissioned by Australia's Lowy Institute. 

The results would be so dire that the US election is the most consequential for world order since World War II, and the most consequential for the US since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the report says. 

"For the first time one of the two major party nominees for the presidency, Donald Trump, is campaigning on a platform of weakening the core elements of the international order, including the US alliance system and an open global economy," concludes Thomas Wright from the Brookings Institution in Washington. 

He says Australia's alliance with the US would suffer directly as a result. 

The Republican candidate has said he'd be prepared to re-negotiate or abandon US alliances with Japan, South Korea and NATO, but has not specifically mentioned Australia. 

"Honestly, I think you are probably in the same category" as those US allies, Dr Wright told Fairfax Media. "He just hasn't been asked.

It's a genuinely scary world where Trump's in charge. There's not a lot of conversation about it in Australia, but there's quite a bit of it in Japan where they've budgeted the possibility of a complete US Withdrawal, and just how much money would have to be spent by Japan to fill that vacuum. In short, Japan would have to re-arm in a way that would bring back a proper military. A Trump-led US pull out to from Japan and Okinawa will necessitate Japan return to being a military power.  Presumably the same would apply for Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. Not only would that be a more dangerous world, it would be more expensive in a time when governments don't have money.

Peter Hartcher is so disturbed by this, he wrote a further comment piece on the same topic:

In trying to make believe that Donald Trump is not as dangerous as he promises to be, millions of people have resorted to denialism.
On three levels. 

First, that he could not possibly win. This remains in the hands of events, of course. But even after he was exposed boasting of sexually assaulting women, US betting odds on Sunday gave him one chance in five of taking the presidency. 

Two, that he could not possibly be serious about the things he's said. He does enjoy being outrageous. And on many issues he has had more positions than a yoga instructor. 

(edit) 

The third and final level of denialism is that even if he's elected and even if he tried to press ahead with his policies, the American system would stop him.
Wright agrees that Trump would be frustrated on domestic initiatives by the Congress or Supreme Court. 

But on his foreign policy ideas? Wright's analysis paper, to be published by the Lowy Institute on Monday, says: "He will have a freer hand internationally. There is no body or law that can prevent him from aligning himself with Putin, ignoring an ally, or shaking things up with a far-reaching foreign policy statement. And, as we have seen, grievance against the rest of the world is not just a part of Trump's ideology, it is at its very core."
Denialism is no defence. Trump, even now, is possible. He's serious, and some of his most dangerous ideas could become real.

Well that's all well and good, but our country has very little sway over the electoral outcome in the USA. So denialism or not, there's solid chance that Donald Trump might still survive this round of scandals and end up POTUS and unleash fresh hell. Should that happen, those Australian politicians who slammed him are going to look really dumb for having done so.

Yeah, it's a problem.

Populism And The Politics Of Blame-Throwing

As with Australia, you do wonder how in the hell America got to where they are now. After all, if Pauline Hanson is back, and she's sort of okay with Donald Trump, you know he's appealing to the demographic of wilful ignorance and cranks. That there are so many of them attests to the 'success' of conservative governments who tried to create a populace more prone to populist arguments by degrading the quality of public education.

In ever way possible, the Donald Trump candidacy is a symptom of the anti-intellectual malaise thetas endemic amongst the conservatives. What the Republicans didn't count on was for the election to be hijacked by a reality show host who understood the schema of democracy's prime election as nothing but a popularity contest; And this, was essentially made possible by the very education-deprive populace the conservatives helped neglect - not nurture - who decided to choose the person who made the show more interesting.

The impact of Reality TV in the last 15years has been devastating. It's no coincidence that Pauline Hanson herself was a contestant on dancing with the stars. If one thing these shows have taught the populace, it is the entertainment to be had by having fractious, conflict-generating individuals on the show to stay longer. Donald Trump himself understands this very well, and so went about the primaries behaving more like a boor than a candidate, and still managed to win because he drew upon the votes who understood this dynamic the most. If the Republicans didn't see this coming, that would be because they were complaining about a black man being in the White House a little too much. It would appear their neurosis was entirely misplaced.

View From The Couch - 01/Oct/2016

A Nation Of Cranks

I recently got back my copy of John Gardner's 'The Art of Fiction', and not having looked at it in a number of years I decided reread from the front. Interestingly enough the first big section covers why one must have a literary education in order to tackle being a writer and heroes through all the arguments in favour of having an education. If one had to distill it into a two sentence pitch, it boils down to this:

1. You need to have some kind of intellectual context and framework for doing your writing.
2. If you don't have any context you're very susceptible to being a crank. 

It's a little bit like how John Goodman's Walter thunders at Steve Buscemi's Donnie in 'The Big Lebowski', "you don't have the context Donnie!" The above two points would be John Gardner thundering at any novice writer attempting to write without a literary education of some description.

Which led me to ponder about pedagogy and why we insist - in general - on people getting any kind of education in anything, and it comes down to the fact that without it, your thinking could be that of a crank. When you look at the One Nation senators Hanson and Roberts, you take Gardner's point. If those people had an education worth spit, they wouldn't be saying the things they say. The fact that they don't possess the education to be Senators of this land, is betrayed by the very crank opinions they cast about.

That might sound like snobbery towards a woman whose main careers running a fish-and-chip shop and found her calling in politics relatively late. Back in 1996, she was the sort of talent the Queensland Liberal Party could find to run for them, and illustrates the low level education of that state. And while not everybody needs an education in order not to be a crank - as was the case with Paul Keating - most mortal minds cannot negotiate the path away from crank-dom without an education.

In fact, the path around crank-dom is so fraught, one can be susceptible to its gravitational pull, even with an education - as is the case with Malcolm Roberts. Roberts' case is more egregious because he had the opportunity of being educated as an engineer, which means he would have spent a minimum four years at a university, and for him to have formed the idiotic opinions he has formed and is trying to foist upon this very land, is nothing short of a tragedy; The 'reverse-miracle' whereby it is both unexpected, irrational, inexplicable, yet totally undesirable. The institution who conferred a degree upon Malcolm Roberts should be ashamed of itself for sending out into the world a mind so barren and misshapen.

As to the portion of the population to whom we apportion the blame of voting in this bunch, the same can be said. Back in the first incarnation of One Nation,the demographic support for the said party was always heavily distributed towards those with less or completely without an education, and least amongst those who could boast of an education. The fact that the nation could produce so many people who could be persuaded by such cranks, leads one to conclude that our education system has been subpar for quite a number of years. Funding Gonski isn't exactly going to fix this problem in a hurry. Worse still, if the conservatives of this land are a little taken aback by their brethren in rightwing politics, they only have themselves to blame for perpetuating the kind of class society that breeds such ignorance and cranks.

Cranks And Conservatism

On the Left, you used to have hard core Marxists. I don't know if they're still around rabbiting on about the eventual and imminent collapse of capitalism and citing page from 'Das Kapital'. They were cranks. Notably they went into hiding after the collapse the USSR. They're not coming back anytime soon, which is a kind of blessing. Of course, they've been replaced by the sort of Regressive Left social justice warrior types that make you cringe so maybe the Left is not freed from crank-dom either

Be that as it may, the Right had fewer cranks until relatively recent times. This was because they were cowed into hiding by the utter historic failure of Adolf Hitler who was chief amongst cranks to represent the right; it was Hitler who amassed a compendium of crank opinions and turned them into apolitical manifesto which resulted in catastrophic consequences. Citing right wing crank notions easily bought them comparisons to Hitler, which is about as favourable as being likened to shit on a stick.

The problem lately has been that the memory of Hitler is too far away and there are people with not-enough-education willing to try out some of these right-wing-crank opinions. Worse still, there are enough voters with not-enough-education to think these are somehow novel solutions to complicated problems with which they do not wish to entangle themselves, and this breeds the kind of crankiness we see in politics today. Any (pardon the pun) right thinking person would recoil at being compared to Hitler. Some of these people don't think it's such a bad thing.

Anyway. The point I want to make is that the Corgi Bernardis of this world might have an education, but are choosing to be wilfully ignorant when it comes to crucial issues such as climate change. it is then utterly unsurprising that he would like the Liberal Party to adopt some of One Nation's policies. He seems to have no idea how that reads on the headlines. The fact that he is oblivious to its impact tells you that his education, much like Malcolm Roberts' education was entirely faulty.

Similarly, the Prime Minister's desire to pin the event of the power outage in South Australia upon renewable energy illustrates the kind of wilful stupidity bolstered by crank opinions, shows just how far our nation has fallen in the intellectual stakes. It is hard to believe that at some point only half a decade ago, we viewed Malcolm Turnbull as a man of good sense and genuine advocate for having sensible climate policies. Now we can understand him as being no less a crank than Barnaby Joyce or Tony Abbott or worse still, Malcolm Roberts.

The take home message is this: a democracy is only as good as the education of its citizens, and judging from our politicians, we can see our education sector has failed us utterly.

On The Name Malcolm In Australian Politics

Just as an aside...
They say history repeats first as tragedy, then as comedy; thus, if Malcolm Fraser was the tragedy and Malcolm Turnbull the comedy, Malcolm Roberts must be the unwanted Hollywood sequel no one wants to see.

Reality Is Cheaper Than Fiction

Continuity With (Chump) Change

How do we put this to the people who fund the arts in the hope that 'culture' will somehow spring out of the manure of government funding? If you don't understand the broad spectrum of the arts, you're obsolete; and by obsolete, you're the laughing stock of the world.

Over the past couple of days, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been channeling his predecessor and whipping out a bit of a three-word slogan. He first broke it in on 7.30 with Leigh Sales on Monday night. Then ABC Radio in the morning, before heading to 3AW and dropping it four times in less than two minutes. The phrase: “continuity and change”. 

In Turnbull’s eyes, this is an eloquent way of commenting on the ongoing drama between his current government and that of Tony Abbott. “The bottom line is there is continuity [many elements of old policy] and there is change [leadership, number of raw onions eaten, et al]” he said in that first radio interview. But, to the rest of the world it looks a bit like this:

“Continuity and change” is the official slogan of Veep‘s main character Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis Dreyfus) as she runs for the US presidency in the show’s fourth season. It appears on her campaign bus, on her logo, and (as BuzzFeed‘s Mark DiStefano pointed out) is regularly whipped out in the same kind of interviews Turnbull has been facing this week.

And there in the nutshell is what is so out-of-touch about this Coalition Government - even with Malcolm Turnbull taking over from even-more-out-of-touch Tony Abbott - it is still hopelessly out of touch with popular culture. All of a sudden they are laughing at the Australian Prime Minister who adopted the most meaningless slogan screenwriters could think up, as his campaign slogan. It's like the Australian Prime Minister went and sucker punched his own face for absolutely no gainful purpose whatsoever. It's fucking hopeless, really.

'The Killing Season' - Episode 3

To The End, The Chaos

Aye Carumba, as Bart Simpson would say. Episode 3 puts us into the tumultuous 3 years of Julia Gillard's turn at the Prime Minister's chair and finishes with the election defeat. As with the previous episodes, it feels like too close to be called history as the heat from it being news is all too familiar.

Perhaps this is part of the Big Now where everything is in some way significant, but it leaves you feeling numb to realise that the ALP coughed up a big lead over personality issues. It is on the whole, unreal and unbelievable. Our disbelief marks us out as neophytes, the unwashed, and outsiders in the arena of parliamentary politics. Clearly we knew so little and have little to do or to say or give.

What's Interesting About This Episode

This was simply devastating to watch right down to the end. People have said some rather extreme things about Kevin Rudd but I don't find him that hard to understand. He's logical and principled and what you see is what you get. He's not perfect, he's not the saviour, but he's there for the greater good. When he was Prime Minister he was there for all Australians. Over the years I have been told how warm and friendly Julia Gillard is, but I actually find her mentation a lot harder to understand. I have to commit to political expediency as the guiding ruler understand why she would do or say the things she would. And yet it's not like she didn't have principles and she had much discipline.

Still, watching this episode was even more traumatic than the previous 2 episodes. Kevin Rudd is essentially self-conscious to a fault while Julia Gillard seems to be unaware of the extent she kids herself when she prevaricates. When she chooses to characterise things, she is far less convincing than Kevin Rudd, and Rudd to his demerit, does not characterise things enough. They may be two of the least insightful leaders from the ALP in a long time. It's funny because they're both clearly intelligent and educated, but insight into themselves seem somehow faulty. Mark Latham seems to possess more insight into his own character than these two, and we thought he was nuts and unworthy.

As long time readers know, I never warmed to the Julia Gillard Prime Ministership. What happened with the 2010 Rudd removal was too drastic and shocking for me to ever get over and then embrace the new Prime Minister. What it did was highlight how little control we had over the political process, and just how much the parties run on the cult personality and take our votes hostage. When Julia Gillard tells us her time in office started with a shadow over it and it only got darker, it highlights the fact that she's trying to ignore the deed that got her into office having any currency as a problem. You really shouldn't try to talk about accidents you caused in the third person.

Lessons In Power

In watching it, one thing becomes very clear. Julia Gillard should have been ruthless and forced Rudd right out of Parliament. As long as he remained, everything that happened was inevitable. The problem of courses was that she couldn't buy out his career, and there was not enough political capital anywhere to buy out Kevin Rudd's career. And so he stayed. Which is like one of those Bond movie bits where the villain's got James Bond strapped to a death machine, spills his beans on the dastardly plot to take over the world and walks away without killing James Bond. She really didn't finish the job she started. And as long as Kevin Rudd was politically alive, he was always going to come back.

The fact that Julia Gillard didn't have this simple insight alone tells you a few things. She didn't really think through what would happen in the event she knifed a Prime Minister in his first term, and a very popular one at that, and she didn't seem to have the insight that if the shoes were reversed, she would be the one doing the come back. In fact if there's one thing that could be said about Julia Gillard's time as Prime Minister, it would be that she didn't seem to have a hell of a lot of insight into the minds people who voted for the ALP in the Kevin '07 campaign. Maybe it was deliberate, maybe it was a blind spot, it's really hard to tell and we may never know. But it translated as being tone-deaf to the electorate.

Then again, former Senator Mark Bishop observes that she was miscast as the leader.

Albo Made Me Cry

There was a moment in March 2011 when there was the first spill to try and bring back Kevin Rudd, and Anthony Albanese pleaded for unity. It was busting him up that the ALP had come to such straits.  Holding back tears he fronted the microphones and pled. Seeing that footage again just broke me. It was pure grief.

But then it made me think, "who are these people making Albo cry? Who are these people in Parliament moving these machinations?"

They're the first beneficiaries of Whitlam's free tertiary education. They are that generation who got the free tertiary education and did with it whatever they could - and they made it parliament. It wasn't a birthright, it was serendipitous that it fell on their laps; and now they're milking it for what it's worth, damn the country, the future generations, the budget bottom line or any kind of integrity. They're grubs.

You Missed The Bit That Pissed Me Off, Sarah Ferguson

It's a very simple thing if you are not a union member but support the broad Left. In this country, if you can't go with the radical idealism of the Greens, then you have to find your place with the ALP. If the ALP tells you, we're putting union concerns ahead of your concerns - your 'social democrat' ones - then you are deprived of a political platform that represents you. Now, I might not agree with Kevin Rudd's do-gooder Christianity-tinged ethos on a personal level, but in all his time as leader and PM, I never felt like the ALP somehow didn't represent my broadly Left-y position. Julia Gillard set about narrowing what the ALP stood for, to the point she was telling us proudly she is not a leader of a 'social democratic' Party.

Gillard sold us out. She told me and my friends who are educated and progressive, and who broadly support her cause, to fuck off. And while I'd never vote for the Tories, she wonders why the middle ground never came back.

Alan Jones & Tony Abbott

Years ago I met a producer who was worried what would happen to an Australia where right wing shock jocks ruled the airwaves with their extraordinary rants. At the time it seemed a little too sensitive to the carping of people who were exercising their right to freedom of expression. Nonetheless it is abundantly clear that years of this kind of hateful bilge from the likes of Alan Jones has infected our democracy to the point where sensible dialogue does not find traction, and instead we get slogans and obtuse rhetoric.

The destruction of nuance and meaning in our polity by the likes of Alan Jones directly led to the rise of Tony Abbott, who can only be described as an utter disaster as Prime Minister. Now, Alan Jones might console himself by saying that he was a kingmaker, but what is the point of installing a functional imbecile as the Prime Minister of this land?

The poisonous slogans and rhetoric that emanated from Alan Jones and his kind has for worse and worser and worst-est, destroyed the political discourse in this country. It is shameful that Alan Jones still has a job and keeps doing it. It is shameful that the Prime Minister of this land takes his cues from the likes of Alan Jones.

Shameful and vile, is what all this is.

It's All Over Now

It's all a little quaint now that we've adjusted to the daily horrors of an Abbott Government. Right up to the last minute of Kevin Rudd's first Prime Ministership, there was a semblance of intelligent discussion about policy and where our nation was going to go. Julia Gillard did try to keep it going, but in the face o the monolithic negativity and feigned-stupidity that marked Tony Abbott's time as Opposition Leader, it never really survived.

Today, I have been reduced to just laughing every time somebody tells me the latest study thing Tony Abbott has said or done. The short answer is, on some level we have no control over any aspect of this stuff. Our democracy only offers us a delusion that our votes count, our opinions matter, facts trump opinions, that our democratic ideals are somehow intact. The fact is, Tony Abbott's government goes to show everyday how venal and menial our existence is, how much our political classes disrespect us, how little integrity there is going in Canberra, how close we are to an authoritarian state where things get decided by decree and not proper discussion.

There are days where I blame Rudd and Gillard for what transpired that brought us to this place. Then again, it might just be a reflection of just how dumb the population has become, and was inevitable that we would come to this point in time. We may marvel yet at Rudd and Gillard in future years - it becomes more likely the longer we are forced to live under the rule of these tories.

'The Killing Season - Episode 2'

We Really Lived Through That?

If there's one thing tougher than living through the tumult of the Rudd to Gillard change over and seeing it happen (and having no control over it, as with most things in politics), is having to relive the emotions of it all in this documentary series. I think it's a very valuable account by those who were there as participants and witnesses and perhaps it will serve as a lesson to the future.

The agony of watching the CPRS put on hold, watching Rudd's support fail and having Julia Gillard suddenly emerge as the Prime Minister was one of the greatest horror sequences of the ALP's time in government. It's hard to believe these people managed to forget what got them into government and pissed both the climate change issue and their Prime Minister down the toilet.

I'm sorry Ms. Gillard, but you don't come up smelling of roses when you swim in that toilet. As for Kevin Rudd himself, he hasn't really changed my mind about him. He was a populist PM, but he did have the big picture right. We were incredibly lucky to have had him at that time.

What's Interesting About This Episode

The number of people who contradict Julia Gillard's account is mounting. Sarah Ferguson has said she believes both Rudd and Gillard lied to her in the interviews, but as far as the headcount goes, quite a number of people are disputing her version of events. And she looks quite shifty in the interviewee's chair. Maybe Kevin Rudd was always a better media performer, but nobody except Julia Gillard is seriously contradicting his account. If indeed both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are lying, that's one thing; what we're seeing is that Kevin Rudd might tell little lies to smooth over difficulties and problems whereas Julia Gillard tells big lies to coverup her tracks.

Worse still, Wayne Swan was hardly the honest broker as Gillard went and white-ant-ed Rudd's Prime Ministership from her position as his deputy. The Removal was fomented on the backbench by first-timer rookie MPs, and the cabinet ministers were either on-lookers or unaware until it happened. It's quite insane when you think about that. A bunch of rookie MPs scuttled the very Prime Minister whose popularity brought them to power and at the first sign of trouble, they panicked. Nobody seems to have thought ahead to what that would look like and how it would play out in the electorate.  The colossal stupidity of it is breathtaking.

Which brings us to Tony Burke who comes across as this big doofus who let the whole thing roll into action. Whatever his reasons and his latter-day rationalisations, it is clear he totally ignored the contra-indicators and fairly historic reasons why you should not roll a Prime Minister in his first term. As such, he deserves his place in ALP history as one of its villains. Not that anybody's saying out loud, but yes, he did a damnable thing in fomenting the challenge. He should never be allowed to live that down.

We're Hostage To The Cult Of Personality

There's no other explanation for the rise and fall of Kevin Rudd in the eyes of the public as well as the Caucus. The ALP needed a man who could get its message out to the public. Once they put him in as Prime Minister they were constrained by the fact that he exercised power. As idiotic sit seems, the ALP clearly couldn't handle the conditions of victory any more than they could handle the condition of defeat in Opposition. Mark Bishop offers up a picture of how the various Senators started panicking at the polls while Tony Burke started spreading the word that Gillard should replace Rudd.

For all the high-minded talk about policy from Kevin Rudd, it's unbelievable that all these other politicians went about the business of replacing Rudd out of a sense of grievance against the persona. i.e., it wasn't a policy thing at all. At one point Julia Gillard starts psycho-analysing Kevin Rudd to justify her sabotage efforts and well... it drove me to drink I tell you.

Both Gillard and Swan let all the talk fester and pretended it wasn't going on and kept it from Rudd. The only person who conveyed to Kevin Rudd there was trouble brewing was Albanese. Justifiably, Rudd has not forgiven either Swan or Gillard. Seeing that the both of them presided over the election that brought about a hung Parliament and the subsequent government followed by the Abbot government, they have a lot to answer for. It makes it worse to think that Gillard wanted to ride through it with the 'First Female Prime Minister' branding as if this was going to negate the issues of how she came to power. As it turned out, the electorate was not interested in her gender, they were interested in the fact that she just rolled a popular PM, and in a most negative way.

Bitar, Arbib, Howes

Paul Keating referred to the Senate as unrepresentative swill. In the case Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib, he was right. What Paul Howes - who is not an MP, not an elected official in any government - had to do with any of this and why they needed his consent remains a kind of nudge-nudge-wink-wink mystery.

The most objectionable of the lot remains Mark Arbib who brought his NSW Right faction bullshit to Canberra and promptly applied the machinations (addition, it's called Mark Arbib, addition. Not 'calculus') he used to usher in the likes of Iemma, Reece, Keneally in quick succession in NSW with the help of the likes of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi. Yes, the stench of foul Morbid Obeidity stretches all the way into the Rudd Removal as it does to so many other things.

It goes to show that there is a great problem with the nature of party politics and the upper houses, and how people are chosen to preside there. If you had a normal street view of things and life, there's no way you give that kind power to the likes of Bitar and Arbib. Somehow, they happened to have it, and exercised it against the will of the people.

Careerist Politicians

It used to be the case that people had careers in other things before they went into politics. Now, they seem to go straight into the business of politics as soon as they are able to, after finishing school or university. Being in office is kind a bonanza - a winning lottery ticket - that attracts all kinds of ambitious people, but it can also be seen from this series that they might be the wrong people.

It's hard to like the Nationals and Liberal Party in this country. The Nationals are old school fascists while the Liberal Party at this point in time seems like a Neo-Fascist party. The Greens at the other end of the spectrum appear to be just as mercenary and self-serving as the Nats and Libs. The worst thing about all this is that the whole lot of hem are careerists trying to look after their butts. It's despicable. And that includes the ALP in the ostensible 'middle'.

The light at the top of the hill is clearly only there to attract the worst moths in our society.

The Limits Of Holding Power

I might have pointed out this before but the modern ALP Prime Minister has a short time in power with the exception of Bob Hawke. For all this talk about the glory of the Hawke-Keating years, the second part where Paul Keating was PM only went four and a bit years. He won the incredible 'This is the Sweetest of Victories' '93 election, but from there, he only had 1 term. Whitlam was really only in power for 3 years. The same goes to Kevin Rudd and now Julia Gillard.

So if there is a pattern emerging, it is that the ALP has structural issues where it can't keep its Prime Ministers in power for long. This lay dormant through the Hawke years exactly because Hawke was an expert peacemaker and the ALP was still shocked from the events of 1975, nobody dare rock the boat. Perhaps the events of the late 2000s and early 2010's will be remembered as so shocking that the next ALP Prime Minister will be able to stitch together a long consensus based stay.

If this doco is anything to go by, it shows that there are simply too many factions and people who can destabilise even the most popular of Prime Ministers, and that they are none too wise about the consequences of doing so. The fact that the Removal was organised from the backbench and the cabinet were last to know indicates that a bunch of novices got way ahead of themselves simply because they could; but when they got what they thought they wanted in Gillard, they spent the next 3 years wondering why the electorate was in a punishing mood.

The worst aspect in all of this is that there are echoes of Bill Hayden's time as Opposition Leader in Bill Shorten already.

Hate Tony Abbott Coming To Power? Blame The Greens

I forgot how in the fray the Greens scuttled the CPRS because wasn't sufficiently pure for their liking. Given the opportunity to do something for the environment and nothing but grandstand, they clearly chose the latter. Then they held the Gillard government hostage and put in the carbon pricing which was more pure to their liking but saddled Gillard with a broken election promise.

In a roundabout way and then a direct way, all of that combined led to the Tony Abbott Government of today - and we know how environmentally un-friendly they are. Way to go stupid Greens, way to go! I'd forgotten just how odious the Greens were in this time. If you want proof that the Greens are just as careerist and self-righteous hypocrites, their actions during the Rudd and Gillard governments tells you plenty.

*ugh*.

'The Killing Season - Episode 1'

The 'Phantom Menace' Of Australian Politics

Earlier in the week it was reported that all the TV stations rejected a TV drama series based on Julia Gillard's Prime Ministership, a project that had Rachel Griffith attached. The TV stations all rejected it because basically Julia Gillard was still hated. I laughed when I read that because we all know it was low polls hat eventually brought her Prime Ministership to an end. 27% support at the end of 27  straight losing polls would do it to you; so maybe there is some truth there.

In any case, the ABC doing a documentary on the Rudd-Gilard-Rudd years was exactly the kind of thing I didn't want to watch. After all, I don't think I've ever endured as much trauma at the hands of the ALP at another time in my voting life, and I hoped not to be subjected to the same teeth-grindingly-awful sequence of events so soon. All the same, it has been 9 years since Rudd and Gillard took over from Kim Beazley and 8 years from Rudd's victory over the Howard Government. It might just be the right time to reflect on what once was and could have been.

And let's face it, for all the turmoil of those years, it was still a much better government than the daily farce presented to us by Abbott, Hockey & co.

Whats's Good About It

As long time readers know, I was in fact down on the ALP and Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard when they deposed Kim Beazley. John Howard had been in power for a good part of a decade and stinking up the joint while the ALP in the wilderness of opposition were doing a fine impersonation of the Coalition in their wilderness years. So it's good to be reminded of just what Kevin Rudd did as Prime Minister. He was indeed formidable as he was prescient on the GFC, and he was the right man at the right time.

What's Bad About It

It's in such a rush to tell the story leading up to Julia Gillard's coup, it glosses over some really important details about the unfolding GFC. it also glosses over just who some of these players were beyond their job titles. Some time is spent on the Godwin Grech affair, which was one of those awful things that ultimately had very little to do with Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan and just about everything to do with showing us why Malcolm Turnbull was a terrible alternative Prime Minister.

What's Interesting About It

It is the battle for posterity and my gut reaction to finding out about this series was "for the love God, please - both of you shut the fuck up and go away and leave us in peace!" That being said, once you start watching it, it does bring back memories of things and events that seem so distant now. The GFC really was terrifying. It still is terrifying; but back in 2007 and 2008, it looked like financial Armageddon was going to consume the planet.

The documentary goes some distance in explaining just how out of the ordinary Kevin Rudd was as an ALP politician. He didn't come up through the traditional Union ranks and he was also the right man at the right time even for the ALP to lead them to an election win. The ALP had gone through most of the Howard years recovering from the '96 election loss and reeling from the leadership failures of Simon Crean and Mark Latham; and without any meaningful direction or policy ideas worth spit, had fallen back on the caretaker Kim Beazley, and were going to lose again.

They really needed new policies, a fresh face, they needed a new direction, and had they been brave enough they might have settled on Julia Gillard right there and then. The reasons they didn't probably highlight the sign of the times more than anything else. The ALP of that era probably didn't want to go to the polls with a female leader against John Howard and taken extra punishment for gender politics, and they didn't really believe they were in any kind of winning shape in 2006. they sure didn't look like it.

I went back and did a quick scan of my own blog here and I can attest to the fact that all ALP supporters were deep in a funk, so picking the seeming populist in Rudd and pairing him up with the party apparatchik in Gllard made some kind of weird sense. What the doco goes on to show is that Julia Gillard saw herself as the person of destiny - Kevin Rudd turning up was a spanner in the works for her. And so the seed of the eventual destruction was sown right there at the beginning in the unholy alliance of expediency and need.

Still, all this machination and party-politicking seems quaint next to the monstrous stupidity of the Abbott Government. In trying to escape the horror circus of the ALP this decade, our electorate voted in the greater horror that is the Abbott Government. Just don't ask me how subsequent governments are going to repair this damage.

Horrible Bosses

Kevin Rudd's reputation as a boss was in tatters. It may still well be the case, and it comes down to this business of the kitchen cabinet "gang of four" and the urgencies and demands that the events made on the government. Ken Henry who was Treasury Secretary says in this doco that the cabinet process would not have been able to deal with the GFC. These were indeed extraordinary times. If Climate change was the moral challenge of a generation, the GFC was a once a century financial challenge that had to be dealt with and put to rest.

What's struck me as odd through out the latter part of Rudd's year as Prime Minister was just who was spreading this notion that Rudd was too chaotic, and how they were making a comparison.
Who was leaking? You can eliminate Rudd from the 4, and Lindsay Tanner who retired shortly after the period could not have a motive to be doing it. Wayne Swan was the Treasurer and neck deep in the GFC questions and by Julia Gillard's own reckoning she was going down to Swan's office to bitch about Rudd's style. By her own words she was destabilising Rudd in the same language that was used to bury him.

Even as events were unfolding it was hard to believe that the ALP would roll their own PM in the first term - especially one who was so popular for so long - and then run out an argument that he was a horrible boss. Naturally, the argument never really stuck with the electorate and Julia Gillard deservingly was hung by that rope.

Just A Side Note On Conservatives And Moral Fortitude

It was pretty galling to be reminded of the whole Godwin Grech saga. Like some evil Gollum from the dungeon caverns underneath Treasury came upon this land a blighted man of much negative charisma and visibly distorted persona with a fake email to bring about the complete humiliation of Malcolm Turnbull as Opposition leader. It was bad because it was stupid; and yet Malcolm Turnbull was willing to be that stupid because he believed so strongly that Gordon Grech had some kind of moral fibre as a whistleblower when there has been no such bone in the conservatives of this nation, all the way back to mother Britain.

The really strange thing is that after the Grech-fake-email-debacle, Malcolm Turnbull hung on as Opposition Leader despite an 18% support rating in the polls. The Liberal Party really didn't think they could do better than Malcolm Turnbull who basically humiliated himself with the chasm that was his "lack of judgment" (as described by Paul Keating). But when the topic got to carbon pricing and introducing the ETS, that was different, the Liberal Party and its climate change deniers erupted into an open rebellion and managed to put Tony Abbott in as their leader.

And Australian politics has been in a state of lobotomised moron-ry ever since. It's like our political leaders cannot talk about anything in sensible ways because Tony Abbott single-handedly destroyed all nuanced discussion of anything and everything by turning all topics into into three word slogans.  We've been dragged down to the abyss of unfathomable, intolerable, execrable stupidity by our very own political leaders.

Which just goes to show that for all this talk of morality and moral fortitude that conservatives love to bandy about, they're just as likely to excuse themselves and their friends of any unconscionable acts and keep pretending they have some kind of high ground in the morality stakes. If you could ever build a moral argument out of economics, then surely Kevin Rudd saving Australia from the GFC-induced recession was a much more high-minded act than the subsequent carping about deficits that the Liberals and Nationals have done. The brazen hypocrisy of the conservatives in this country - who undoubtedly benefited greatly from Kevin Rudd saving their bacons as well, for they had more to lose - essentially captures the intellectual bankruptcy of the government that today exults in winding back renewable energy in this country.

They Keep Warning Us About This Bubble Now

Rich People Problems

The one consolation for not being in the property market and thus not sitting on skyrocketing valuations or skyrocketing debt commitments, is that when it busts, you won't be hurt as badly as those in debt up to their eyeballs. When the downturn comes and the banks come knocking to foreclose and businesses are forced to close as much as private residences are sold out en masse - the sort of scenario you dread because unemployment will be up, economic growth will be negligible and banks too big to fail will be living up for government largesse at the public purse, - the non-owning, non-mortgaged will be the relatively lucky ones to escape the downside of all this risk building up.

Even so, it's kind of scary just how much private debt has been racked up in Australia. A lot of that is in mortgages, rather than credit cards. The build up is so epic, the RBA was in denial about it for the last decade until the last 12months or so where they've started to bleat about the private sector debt, and more recently, specifically the "overheated property market".

And so we come to this entry today:

While our society lacks a meaningful and open debate on the toxic and rising levels of household debt, new home buyers in Sydney and Melbourne are entering the market and taking upon the most illogical sums of debt, courtesy of our over-leveraged banking system. 

Based on median multiples, new home buyers in Sydney will spend the better part of 6.54 years savings (using 30 per cent of their income) for a 20 per cent deposit to buy a median-priced home. 

When it comes to servicing the first 12 months of a 25-year/80 per cent LVR mortgage, it will cost roughly 65 per cent to 70 per cent of household income to service that debt at current record-low mortgage rates. Melbourne is not too far behind. 

So what have our leading economists, regulators, public executives and politicians done to stop this debt-induced folly? Nothing. In fact, they have bent over backwards to inflate prices via stimulants such as housing grants and allowing retirees to tap into their life savings. 

These powerful stimulants have been implemented, not to improve home ownership rates, but to boost prices for the benefit of existing owners, bankers' profits and government balance sheets.

Now, just on the point of 'existing owners', the SMH also had this entry right here about politicians who own investment properties, and there fore are beneficiaries of negative gearing. 

Mr Daley said if the government was unwilling to remove the capital gains tax discount it should get rid of negative gearing altogether. 

"The most important argument against negative gearing is that it drives up house pricesbecause it increases the after-tax returns to housing investors, and so prices are higher than they would be otherwise," Mr Daley argued last week. 

Mr David, Mr Egan and Mr Soos last year warned that, with such high rates of property ownership among Australia's senators and ministers, it was "difficult to believe that politicians will address the real causes of housing unaffordability, despite the recommendations from government reports".

It's hard to see the vested interest, collectively acting against itself.

All of this is not new, there are no new wrinkles. The property market has been artificially inflated to pay for the retirement of the Baby Boomers. They're in power, they are invested, but at this point in history, they're not selling up and so the price stays up. They then go and get loans against their assets and invest in property even more, using favourable tax concessions. Given the shortage in relevant housing being built, you can see prices spiral ever upwards. Worse still, there's money coming in from China - some of which used to go to Canada until they shut the doors - and they're bidding up prices just to get in because the very point for them, is to get in.
Thus the ground is laid for one-way bets. 

With all these complicating factors loading the system so it only goes one way, we can only ask when it will pop, and how bad would it be when it pops. The latter demands that we know more about the circumstance of the former's condition. If you had to guess it would be 'soon', but this 'soon' has been going on for a few years now and not even the GFC killed it, thanks in part to Kevin Rudd's big spend and China's amazing 7+% p.a. GDP growth (scepticism of that figure aside).

If China tanks overnight, one can't be surprised if these prices fall back down to global norms. So until things head back down towards normal, people are going to keep asking, "will it pop? when will it pop?"

Miscalculating Inflation

For quite some time we've seen the debate about how CPI is calculated. The most glaring problem with CPI is that whinnied up against Cost of Living, it under-reports inflation. This is because the CPI system changes the basket of goods and substitutes things based on the assumption that if you can't afford something, you'll substitute it with something else similar. The strange discrepancy can in part be explained by the fact that cost of living has been following the same goods for the twenty-odd years it has been diverging with CPI.

If you looked at cost of living, it is clear that there is a significant amount of inflation going on with staple foods and accommodation. There is of course severe deflation as well, as the global glut for manufactured goods has commodified just about every possible manufactured item. If you parse through the changes, you can make out this horrifying fact that the less elastic a good or service is, the more it has inflated, while the more elastic it is, the more it has deflated. Or put more simply, the stuff that's undergoing steep inflation are things we need like food and shelter. The things that are deflating are things like mp3 players and tennis racquets and electric guitars. CPI says you've never hd it soggy with your mp3 players, tennis racquets and electric guitars being cheap, so you should be happy. Cost of living says inflation is killing you.

And so you wonder how far out this trend can last before something simply breaks. Indeed, the Arab spring that brought down North African military juntas can be sheeted home to the point at which the staple foods trebled, rents doubled and those regimes tried to buy out the difference and failed. The fact that the AK-47 became so cheap was ironically part of that equation.

But let's get back to the first world. The RBA has set interest rates according to the CPI, and has done so ever since it became independent. Back in the 1980s when stagflation was the big enemy, the US Federal Reserve Bank  chief Paul Volcker opted to fight the rampant inflation by raising rates; And so interest rates went up quite high in the mid to late 1980s in America as well as over here. Yet since those days, if they have been under-reporting inflation through CPI, then it means the successive FRB and RBA regimes have been setting the interest rates too low. If the private debt we've racked up in the last 20years is anything to go by, we've simply bought the economic growth we've had on the back of mounting debts.

When you think about it, the people who benefit the most from all this under-reporting of inflation are bankers themselves. They stand to make a mint, the more people borrow money. Going back to that article before:

So what have our leading economists, regulators, public executives and politicians done to stop this debt-induced folly? Nothing. In fact, they have bent over backwards to inflate prices via stimulants such as housing grants and allowing retirees to tap into their life savings. 

These powerful stimulants have been implemented, not to improve home ownership rates, but to boost prices for the benefit of existing owners, bankers' profits and government balance sheets.

Which just about sums it up. The point is, the bubble is built not on one thing, but many things, including miscounting things that ought to be counted consistently and properly.

No Land Tax, He Says

There's a party contesting the NSW election on one platform - no Land Tax. It's one of those rearguard actions by people with vested interests. Ken Henry's tax review under Kevin Rudd pointed out that Stamp Duty should be thrown out in favour of a Land Tax. The logic of this is quite simple - if you owned a house and never moved or sold it, you'd never pay the Stamp duty and this is the only tax that goes to he State Government coffers based on Land. It would be more efficient and representative of the demographic if they put in a Land Tax instead uncollected something from everybody who owns land instead.

It would go some way towards fair valuations of property, and it would encourage the Baby Boomers to cash out. Given the percentage of people who who own outright and are in mortgages outnumber the renters two to one, you can see there would be a great appeal in putting in a Land Tax, and therefore a great incentive in the electorate to resist it. If you count the fact that the political class is overly landed, there probably is no chance it happens anyway. 

It may even be redundant having a single issue party around not introducing a Land Tax, when you consider that it would paint all the other politicians as those who might be in favour. The numbers simply belie the sense of crisis that this bunch of elected officials would be interested in doing anything so fair or rational as implementing a Land Tax.