Meanwhile In New South Wales (Where Common Sense Goes To Die)

The Creeping Authoritarianism In Australia Hits NSW

Say what you might about Greenies who chain themselves to trees or people who o marching for cause, outside of voting and lobbying, there aren't that many options to make  political point, short of violent revolution. You might - out of some class prejudice - dislike or disrespect dreadlocked tattooed grungy greenies marching to protest coal seam gas mining but you need the dreadlocked tattooed grungy greenies marching to protest coal seam gas mining to ensure governments get the message. The right to free assembly is an important component in our society because it's what allows political parties to exist.

Thus, the laws against protesters gathering actually strikes at the foundations of our rather fragile democracy.

NSW's harsh and unnecessary new anti-protest laws are the latest example of an alarming and unmistakeable trend. Governments across Australia are eroding some of the vital foundations of our democracy, from protest rights to press freedom, to entrench their own power and that of vested business interests. 

The NSW laws give police excessive new powers to stop, search and detain protesters and seize property as well as to shut down peaceful protests that obstruct traffic. They expand the offence of "interfering" with a mine, which carries a penalty of up to seven years' jail, to cover coal seam gas exploration and extraction sites. 

They also create a tenfold increase in the penalty applying to unlawful entry to enclosed land (basically any public or private land surrounded by a fence) if the person "interferes" or "intends to interfere" with a business there. At the same time as ratcheting up this penalty for individuals who protest, recent changes made by the NSW government mean that resource companies that illegally mine can receive a $5000 penalty notice instead of a potential $1.1 million fine. 

Disturbingly, these laws aren't isolated.

Tasmania last year targeted environmental protest with broad and vague new offences including "hindering" access to business premises or "obstructing" business operations, with penalties of up to $10,000 and four years' imprisonment. In Western Australia, proposed legislation contains extremely broad new offences of "physically preventing a lawful activity" and "possessing a thing for the purpose of preventing a lawful activity" with proposed penalties of up to two years in prison and fines of up to $24,000.
Common to these anti-protest laws are harsher penalties, excessive police powers and the prioritisation of business interests (particularly mining and forestry operations) over the rights of Australians to gather together and protest about issues they care deeply about.

We've been so distracted by how dastardly and woeful the Federal Government under the Coalition has been, it's allowed the State Government - also run by the same parties - to fly under the radar with their crappy authoritarian moves. These anti-protest laws are entirely the bidding of lobbies that pay into the coffers of the Liberal and National parties. These parties are brazenly shutting down democracy in order to appease their political donors. Just because the transaction can't be pinned down to individuals, it is no less corrupt than the Obeids who sought to influence matters of state to suit private interests (albeit their own).

Further to the point, the NSW police still have the APEC powers which are also anti-democratic. These came in at the time of the 2007 APEC meeting, and have not been rescinded. The current NSW government is essentially giving licence for the NSW police to brutalise those who would protest against mining or logging interests where the media is less likely to be there to offer coverage. In a year that the NSW police issued an apology for the brutal treatment it dished out to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras of the late 1970s, it seems like they're setting themselves up for more future apologies to protest groups.

Governments across Australia are deliberately using a range of funding levers to suppress advocacy by NGOs including gag clauses, targeted funding cuts and threats to the ability of environmental organisations to receive tax deductible donations from supporters – a tax status which is often critical to financial sustainability. 

Secrecy laws and an increasingly aggressive attitude to whistleblowers mean that people who expose even the most serious human rights abuses face unprecedented risks of reprisals, including prosecution and jail. Press freedom is being eroded by new laws and policies jeopardising journalists' ability to maintain the confidentiality of sources and to report on matters of public interest. All the while, in critical areas governments are undermining or sidelining the courts and institutions that were created to keep them in check.

On that note, I thought I should bring this up about any and *all* governments, *everywhere*:

Speaking Of Corruption

The NSW Liberals are under a cloud over donations they can't explain. suspect.

More than $4 million in public funding is being withheld from the NSW Liberals by authorities until the party can prove hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations it received before the 2011 election that swept it into power were not illegal. 

The donations were made by the controversial Free Enterprise Foundation, which the Independent Commission Against Corruption heard had "washed" illegal contributions from property developers before donating them to the NSW Liberals.
More than $690,000 in donations remains unverified. 

The NSW Electoral Commission has said it will withhold reimbursement of expenditure from last year's state election and annual administrative funding totalling $4.3 million until the matter is resolved. 

Failure to secure the funding would potentially leave the NSW division in financial dire straits just months before a federal election.

Good. They deserve the grief.

But Wait There's More

There's also this doing the rounds today.

The New South Wales Government's Upper House whip Peter Phelps has quit the role and says he will cross the floor to vote against the Government's biofuels amendment bill. 

The goal of the bill is to force small retailers to meet the government's 6 per cent ethanol mandate by applying fines of up to $550,000 for business owners who do not comply with requirements to sell E-10 fuel. 

In a fiery speech to Parliament, Peter Phelps described the bill as a "fundamental attack on small businesses", "a joke" and "disgraceful". 

He said the bill went against the Liberal Party's principles.
"We believe in a series of pro-business, pro-individual ideals," Mr Phelps said. 

Mr Phelps said he had fought the bill every step of the way, raising it in the party room and with NSW Premier Mike Baird. 

He then said he could not vote for the legislation, so under Liberal Party rules was resigning as whip as well. 

"For five years now I have enjoyed the golden handcuffs of being the whip ... and as part of that for my extra $20,000 a year I have on occasion had to whore my principles," Mr Phelps said. 

"But this bill, this bill which criminalises people for the purchasing decisions of their customers, is such an egregious breach of the core values of the Liberal Party that I cannot support it. 

"As whip I am supposed to encourage people not to cross the floor, so on that basis, I resign as whip effective immediately."

I don't think Mr. Phelps is about to go Frank Underwood, but it is an interesting spectacle. The government is pandering to lobbyists and a party whip is objecting. The joke is that te bill is set to pass because even the ALP is supporting it. So the lobbyists got to them too. Talk about being disgraceful.

It Would Make Too Much Sense So They Won't Do It

Here's an article by Jessica Irvine on a Land Tax.it's a touchy subject because people who don't move and change houses would suddenly be paying for the privilege of owning a house, in exchange for no stamp duty. 

The McKell paper proposes a broad based land tax levied at 0.75 per cent.
On a median priced Sydney home, the land would be worth around $700,000, meaning an annual tax of $5250. 

Owners of expensive homes would pay more and taxes collected would rise over time with land values, providing a steady stream of income for state governments.
A land tax would also allow state governments to more easily fund new urban infrastructure projects, the paper argues. 

"One of the key factors that increase the value of land is its proximity to public transport and good roads." A new rail or road project, therefore, boosts the value of local homes, providing a windfall to existing landowners. 

"If land values are taxed, then the annual tax bill would increase slightly to reflect the increased value of the land. Therefore those who are receiving a significant windfall from public expenditure would make a small contribution towards the project."

Which is all very nice but you know this NSW government is going to balk at it because its constituents are the older demographic who own lots of property.

There's more on the actual study, penned by the guy who worked on the study here.

For a start, land tax is extremely fair. All landowners would pay the tax annually based on the value of their land, and not on what improvements they have made. This means renovations would not be punished. 

Land tax is also easy to understand and administer, while being nigh-on impossible to avoid. 

Land tax does not disincentivise home owners from moving freely, making it easier for workers to accept jobs where they crop up, providing a boost to the economy. 

Land tax would also encourage more infrastructure spending by making it possible for the government to tax some of the additional value it creates when it builds near homes. A rail line that boosts property prices in a given area, for example, could be partially funded by those whose homes had shot up in value as a result. 

Now this is the point where the hardheads nod sagely and say while all these advantages sound attractive the reality is that any attempt to introduce land tax would be susceptible to the mother of all scare campaigns.

Another argument in favour of putting in a Land Tax is that it likely will take the heat out of the property bubble because people would be disincentivised from speculating through house-flipping. It would also disincentives land banking where people buy property and simply mothball it, taking it out of regular usage. 

Of course it would be hard to convince this NSW Government of doing anything so bold as to abolish Stamp Duty and put in a Land Tax. It would cause enough of a furore to get themselves voted out.
As with all these things, the politics of implementing good policy is going to be difficult and you can see the Coalition government in NSW has no appetite for selling this policy.

Still, given the current problems to do with the Property Bubble are going to significantly impact on future growth, and therefore Stamp Duty revenue, one might think the NSW government might look at this sooner than later and before the Bubble pops.

"Vote Mal, Eat Pal" Pt. 2

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Keen Says Recession By 2017

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

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

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

The 2016 election could be a good one to lose.

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

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

Shutting Out The Scientists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of the article makes for depressing reading. 

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

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