Politcal Donations Are The New Inefficiency

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

It's kind of laughable that the first casualty of this Parliament is an ALP Senator, but that's what we've got with Sam Dastyari stepping down as manager Opposition business in the Senate and shadow spokesperson for consumer affairs - and, really, rightfully so.

"In the past week, it's clear that the ongoing examination of my behaviour is taking attention away from bigger issues facing Australia and Australians. Yesterday, I called a press conference and answered questions. Today, I have reflected on that and decided that wasn't enough. It's clear to me now that this has become a distraction. 

"I made a mistake and I'm paying the price. For that mistake...I will continue to serve with pride as a senator for New South Wales and I look forward to serving a Labor Party government in the near future in whatever capacity I can."

...and so that went. To be frank about it, I'd say Senator Dastyari fucked it up well and good, and looked terrible when he went and defended the Chinese position in the South China Sea even before it was evident that he was on the take from the Chinese. The moment you end up mouthing propaganda for another sovereign government, you disqualify yourself from your own. The bit where you took money for it only lessens your character. The propagandising for others is a form of treason.

Political donations will continue to be a topic that never gets fixed; a little like Negative Gearing and Asylum Seekers stuck in off shore detention centres. It's an issue but our government has no spine to fix it. Really, Sam Dastyari's case is being looked at in the wrong way. It's not just that he peddled influence for another government for a measly sum of $1600-odd. It's that other entities can buy influence of MPs for the same measly amount of money and it passes their own scrutiny. That is to say, it's okay for Barnaby Joyce to court the donations from Gina Rinehart, because she's an Australian citizen and hat she wants is conservative policy - according to Barnaby. Make no mistake, our politicians are for sale.

The truth is, there's a whole, bunch of people with way too much lobbying power through the weight of money, and so if it's not straight out corruption of access through money or policy formation through lobbying with money, it's going to be junkets an trinkets and wining and dining to put a point across forcefully. Otherwise, how does one explain the extraordinary influence of the mining lobby in Canberra? The Coalition obsess over the relationship between the unions and the ALP, but equally suspect is the relationship between the business lobby and the Liberal Party. That being the case, it's no surprise John Howard doesn't want the donations rules to be changed.

It's a bit of a joke because Mr. Huang who has donated over a million for both sides of politics thinks the Chinese get a bum deal because for all the money they've donated, the politicians of this country simply don't do as Mr. Huang says. If that bit of mumbling doesn't tell you what the expectation is for those who donate money, you'd be sticking your head in the sand, ostrich-wise. I guess the good news is that the needs of Australia still outweigh the needs of China in the eyes of our politicians, but even so the Sam Dastrayi thing together with Barnaby Joyce' contention reveals just how blasé these politicians have become about these donations. It certainly explains NSW politics, it would be a fool to think it's not affecting national politics.

I've mentioned before how vested interests ate out the prosperity of Japan. The same thing is happening here, but nobody is doing anything about it.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.

Quick Shots - 04/Jul/2016

A Well-Hung Parliament - A Balls-Up By Any Other Name

Oh what strange joy it is to find out we've got a hung parliament again. And I'm not being sarcastic - I'm getting a kick out of it. It was on the cards, and in an interesting mirror image re-run of the 2010 election that took place after Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd, we now have the same outcome with Malcolm Turnbull after he replaced Tony Abbott. There are some - crazy some - who are screaming out in the far right yonder that the Coalition should have stuck with Tony Abbott because he wouldn't have done any worse. That's hard to imagine. By rights, Tony Abbott was looking more like he was going to surrender a landslide so those far-right people are frantically rewriting history right there.

It is being painted as a disastrous outcome for Malcolm Turnbull, but that overstates his impact on the campaign given what he inherited, as well as how much the party tied his hands. The Malcolm Turnbull people thought they were going to get, and the one the Liberal Party allowed him to be were two completely different people. The Coalition are blaming the ALP for the medicare scare campaign but here's the problem with that theory: 1) Who exactly created the social environment where a Medicare cut would be so devastating? the Coalition; 2) how puny were the Coalition's selling points if a mere scare campaign could defeat their proposition; and 3) blaming other for your own mistakes is unbecoming of the party that tells people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
Just sayin'.

We all know the sordid sorry truth: Had they let Malcolm Turnbull properly address the issues that mean so much to the political middle instead of holding him captive to the right wing of the Liberal Party, they would have had a positive proposition to sell to the electorate. What's amazing is that the Liberal Party can't see it at all. They had the biggest election-winning advantage in Malcolm Turnbull's personal popularity, and they managed to squander it by not letting him do the things people expected of Malcolm Turnbull. That the party strategists seemed to think his popularity was somehow separate to the policy positions he espoused in earlier incarnations is quite staggering in its wrong-headed-ness. It is what it is, and what it is, is the height of stupidity.

The ALP medicare scare campaign? I mean, put-lease!

I Thought More Old Codgers Would Have Died Since 2013

I recently attended a funeral of an elderly woman who passed away. The attendance was scant of the elderly. When I enquired I was told most of the deceased's friends had already died or were too senile and demented to attended. It made rethink the Howard-supporting geriatric generation were finally pushing off their mortal coil, moving on into the next world. I mean, let's face it, we've lost some pretty big Baby Boomer musicians this year alone - you'd think the even older were even more dying-er. So in the three years since the 2013 election, one could surmise the ranks of the Howard's grey-power demographic would have shrunk considerably. The hung Parliament sort of shows that maybe this wasn't as big a factor as other things after all.

Of course, I'm told the percentage of the young not enrolled to vote is as high as it's ever been, so perhaps that balanced itself out. Really, we live in difficult times when we need everybody's thinking caps on. It's amazing that this is the moment at which youth apathy has reached pinnacle.

In other sad news, we find Tony Abbott is still alive and well, elected and in office as member of Warringah. Who will ind us of of this meddlesome Abbott?

The Good News

Sophie Mirabella is gone. Miserabella is done as a lower house candidate having now lost twice. With a 3.1% swing against this time and 9.5% swing against last time, she managed to freshly alienate 1/8th of an entire electorate that was once a safe seat for the Coalition. She sure won't be running again - unless of course the Liberal Party is a lot more stupid than we're led to believe.

The Ungovernable Demographics Of Australia

It's no coincidence that the hung Parliament comes so close on the heels of the previous hung Parliament. When you think about how the seats are allocated and distributed, it is pretty clear that over time, seats are becoming more entrenched, not less. The entrenched Liberal seats of the Sydney North Shore, together with Wentworth represents a particular demographic that keeps getting more entrenched, not less. It's hard to imagine any of those seats going to the ALP in the next 10 elections, Maxine McKew's amazing effort in 2007 notwithstanding. The equivalent of those seats in other Australian cities represent the bastion of Liberal Party support. Around those suburbs are the suburbs that are the traditional ALP heartland - and these might get flipped to Liberal as they become wealthier and gentrified, but on the whole the parties are entrenched according to class and income.

If the seats divide up so easily and get entrenched as a result of increasing inequality and disparity, we're going to see a lot more of these hung Parliament scenarios. There's a lot of disillusion going on out there in the deep electorate. It's no coincidence that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation brand have made a comeback, exactly at the moment of maximum uncertainty. The Two Party system funnels everybody's votes into two parties, but people are squirming like mad for another option. Add this altogether and you get a picture of a deeply divided electorate that is suspicious of anything and everything it seems. The hung Parliament isn't a simple dis-endorsement of politics or politicians or the political elite; it's a deeply structural problem manifesting itself in votes.

If the major parties can't pull themselves together they can damn well expect this to keep on happening because the entrenched rigidity of class mobility is only going to increase and reinforce what is already there. People are actively looking for an alternative that is not the major parties. It's only going to get worse for the major parties from here on in, and they themselves are to blame.

The same voter rage that drives support for Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK has taken hold here. Some of it is a perfectly rational response to a political system that is not working for the people it is designed to serve. 

Australian politics broke in December 2009 when the major parties could not reach a consensus on Labor's climate change bills. 

Mr Abbott rose from the ashes of the Coalition leadership spill and so terrified Kevin Rudd that he cut and ran from "the greatest moral challenge of our time". 

That massive breach of trust with the Australian people was compounded by his midnight assassination. It, in turn, fatally wounded Julia Gillard.
The parallels between the two major parties are now eerie. 

Labor dispatches a first term prime minister in 2010 and emerges from an election into a hung parliament. The Coalition did it last year and now faces the same future.

Remember what happened next?

Yes, Tony Abbott ran at the ALP with maximum malice and no intention of governing properly. So the question is whether Bill Shorten is going to pull the same stunt. Arthur Sinodinos seems to think so.

Senator Sinodinos said Mr Shorten's election night speech was "very negative". 

"What comes out of that speech is he's saying the government has lost its mandate. [Mr Shorten] doesn't have a mandate for anything." 

When asked if he meant a re-run of the election, he said: "If Bill Shorten is saying... that he will be frustrating everything the government wants to do. He wants to cut the government down. 

"That is what he is saying. He's saying I've got them on the run, I'm going to cut them down. For what? Is he endorsed on a scare campaign. Is this what this great country has been reduced to?"

Good heavens. Really? Who did the reducing last time? 

Anyway, that's the picture we have of this increasingly unruly electorate. Yay for the unruly electorate, I say.

Quick Shots - 21/Jun/2016

Trying To Read The Electorate From Headlines

This election certainly is tight. It's probably as tight as the 2010 contest which saw the Hung Parliament. There's a swing calculator on this SMH article which is worth playing around.

Stirton notes further, on the state data, that Labor could pick up 16 seats, getting it to 73 - just three short of a majority and ensuring a hung Parliament. 

Seat-by-seat, Turnbull may be ahead. But when Labor won the unwinnable in Queensland, some pointed back to polls asking why they'd been ignored. Good question.

The uniform swing needed to put the ALP back into government is 4.5%. At 4%, which is where the polls are now sitting, it gives rise to a result of 73 seats each for the ALP and Coalition respectively with 4 seats in the cross bench, just like in 2010. Both parties have disavowed forming a minority Government, and in the case of the ALP, you can fully understand why bad on their experience. As for the Coalition's disavowal, one is struck by the oddness of the luxury provided to them through being the incumbent, and how they will likely retain the role of caretaker government.

All of this goes to show the rearguard action of fighting the 2013 election with a a restored Kevin Rudd was in fact, the correct move if only to "save the furniture" as they said at the time. The furniture saved in 2013 is roaring back after only 1 term of the Coalition Government which was a truly shambolic, pathetic, idiotic  government if there ever was one. 

The bigger question mark is if the demographic has changed somewhat since 2010. It's been 6 years of lots of people dying and presumably those deaths would have - excuse the word - 'favoured' the older voters siding with the Coalition. It is eminently possible that the polls are under-reporting the sea change in the demographics and that maybe the ALP has more support than shows up in polling. 

The Never-Ending Campaign In The USA

Goodness, if you thought this current election unleashed by Malcolm Turnbull was seemingly without end, then the 18month epic preselection and then election process of the US Presidential elections is just interminable. At this point in time, Hillary Clinton is claiming she has enough votes to win the Democratic nomination, although this point is contested by Bernie Sanders' camp because those 'Super Delegates' don't get to vote until the 25th of July - which is a whole month and a bit more away from this writing. 

I'll be honest, I think Bernie's been licked, but I refuse to piss my pants; and thus I say to anybody who listens, let's see how this plays out. As they say, a week is a long time in politics. There are four and a half of those "long times" between now and when the Super Delegates decide who will be their nominee. There are already disturbing revelations being thrown out to the media about Hillary Clinton, thanks to Wikileaks. 

Yeah. That right there is Hillary Clinton recommending Regime change in Syria. What's coming out of this is the notion that Trump might be scary because he's a bigoted xenophobe with little tolerance for anything that requires nuanced thinking; Hillary Clinton is just as scary being a hawk of unrivalled dedication to toppling Middle Eastern regimes just to 'protect' Israel. You'd think that maybe the Super Delegates might want to ponder if they want to line up behind a President who is going to go to more wars to 'protect' Israel. 

In other news, Trump's campaign might be running out of money. 

Quick Shots - 19/Jun/2016

Are We There Yet?

I guess if I don't read a little about the election I'd be amiss in keeping breast of what the pundits think. The call seems to be a narrow Coalition win, which is like a kiss of death. Mark Kenny is also a little down on Bill Shorten and the ALP in spite of what he thinks has been good campaigning. I wouldn't know whether Bill Shorten has been all that great but e seems to be turning around the loss of smarter people to the Greens, which was a serious issue as late as 1 year go, which I covered in the last post.

Peter Hartcher thinks that Shorten has a credibility problem every time he promises policies that will involve spending billions. In a vacuum, yes, but he is running against the Coalition who are infested with climate change denialists. It's not like the Coalition have any degree of credibility at all. Compared to that, Bill Shorten sounds like a measured, controlled, proper leader. Of course, we don't know if this turns into votes in country that is persuaded mightily to treat asylum seekers in the shabbiest of manners possible.

I'm not holding my breath - but if this electorate votes this Coalition back in, I think I'll go on a bender.

The Unpredictability Of Climate Change

Some time in the last decade, NSW was in the middle of a drought so bad it saw the Warragamba dam water level down in the 30% level. It was so bad, there were water restrictions and people were killing each other in suburban streets over the use of water. It led to NSW Premier of the late 2000s, Morris Iemma green lighting a desalination plant which now looks to be a white elephant of sorts - but you can't rule anything out in the future. I say that because this week it is at 98% and with more rain falling, it may well spill over.

Both the drought and this excessive rain came about because of climate change. This is what it means to live in volatile weather conditions.

This kind of leads me to the Pleiades mailbag today.

From The Pleiades Mailbag

Here's a scary article about the runway melting of the polar caps.

Wadhams: “A whole series of consequences, which are all unfortunately rather serious. Firstly, the retreat of the sea ice or the loss of the ice will mean that global warming will increase because you are changing a large area of white to dark, reducing the average albedo [reflection] of the planet… Secondly, there will be an acceleration of sea level rise because warm air that lies over the open water in the Arctic Ocean moves over to Greenland and gives you surface melt at the Greenland ice sheet [equals 23’ of sea level rise] to an extent that didn’t used to happen. We found in 2012, for instance, the entire surface of the Greenland ice sheet was starting to melt for a period in the summer, and this is completely new, and this means that sea level rise will be accelerated because that melt water runs off into the ocean… Possibly one of the most severe threats is the that the shallow waters off the Arctic coast, especially the Siberian coast, are very wide continental shelves, only about 50 to 100 meters of water. That water could warm up during the summer months because the area is ice-free now already, and this will give you positive temperatures on the seabed which will start to thaw out the seabed permafrost which has been sitting there frozen since the last Ice Age. This has never happened before because the sea ice never retreated very much in the summer and the water temperature could not rise above zero because of the ice cover… The permafrost is acting as a cap for a very large amount of methane (CH4), which is sitting in the sediments underneath in the form of methane hydrates. You release the pressure by removing that permafrost and methane comes out as huge bubble plumes. It’s already happening; it’s been detected by scientists all over the Russian Arctic and most recently by a Swedish expedition and by various U.S./Russian expeditions. Each time they go there’s more and more bubbles coming out, and the fear is that there’ll be a general release of methane trapped under those sediments, which could cause a very rapid rise in the rate of sea level. We calculated it could give you 0.6 C warming of the planet in five years. That’s a big boost because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas.”

As for rapidity of climate change, Dr. Wadhams says that the situation is already getting very serious, and brand new feedback processes are coming into play. Accordingly, that’s what is most worrying, extra feedbacks from what global warming itself produces. It’s like AI with a “will of its own.”

If that doesn't sound apocalyptic enough, you should check out Peter. Wadhams' lectures on Youtube:


...and here's a scary article about what Hillary Clinton would like to do as President. The funny thing is the US policy think tanks seems be making up scenarios for 2050 when in fact climate change might make the world totally uninhabitable. There might not be a world worth dominating in 2050.

View From The Couch - 18/Jun/2016

This Damned Election - This week's Edition

Sometime last year I reported that a bunch of academic types wanted to vote Green and they abandoned the ALP. I decided to see if that were still the case, and it turns out that it is not still the case. A lot of them have headed back to the ALP. I asked why they switched back and they said it was because Bill Shorten was making a better case for himself with the policies he's put up, and back then the ALP were being very coy about their policies that it drove them to despair. Now, they do not despair so much - which goes to show political support is indeed ephemeral.

I'm certain that the Coalition are terrible managers of the economy. So it goes without saying that the ALP should get the nod over the Coalition. If anything the purgatory for the ALP seems to have been too short to be in such a good position so soon after the defeating 2013. After all, they did make a big hash government. What's troubling is that people like Tony Burke who were instrumental in making a hash of it, are still around and bound to become a minister should the ALP win. That into say, even if the ALP win, this is going to be tough-to-stomach in the new government. Should the Coalition win, then well, we know it's going to be three more years of this unimaginable, unmitigated disaster that is government by stupidity ("of the, for the...stupid").

If there's one thing that's becoming clearer in this election, it is that we really aren't given a greatest setoff choices - and this lack of a good choice is necessarily so because we've made so many people who are undeserving of office into politicians. These professional politicians exist because politics has been seized upon as a career to have. This careerism in turn is precluding the depth and breadth of thinking required to really build this nation. Instead, we have the kind of people who think it's pretty damn cool to cash in long held government assets through privatisation, trying to find ever more silver to sell off. To what purpose? - we're told it is to cut the deficit.
You know, at a certain point incredulity kicks in. Which is sort of where we find ourselves.

Shintaro Ishihara Writes About Kakuei Tanaka

Shintaro Ishihara is the rightwing conservative everybody thinks Shinzo Abe is. Let's clear about this: there are people in China and South Korea who carry on like Shinzo Abe is going to re-militarise Japan into the war machine it once was, and start invading the peninsula and continent. It' a crock of shit because in the years Abe has been Prime Minister this time around, he's barely increased the JSDF budget. When you consider the oldImperial Army and Navy combined took 70% of the budget, 1% seems like not much an attempt to re-militarise.

The point is, Shintaro Ishihara, was the politician who would love to go back to a strong Japan. He certainly was right up until the moment he retired. After all, he wrote the book "The Japan That Can Say No". Anyway... Shintaro Ishihara came to political prominence back in the late 70s as being anti-corruption and therefore anti-Kakuei Tanaka within the LDP of Japan. Now he has a bestseller that is a novel about Tanaka, but written in the fist person. A sort of imaginary auto-biography. The title is 'Genius'. In it, he goes into loving detail of Kakuei and his convictions.

It's a slight volume and covers the terrain we all know very well. If anything we don't learn much from it except for the fact that Ishihara seems to have turned the corner on his appreciation for, and appraisal of his old political foe. He really means it without irony when he calls Kakuei Tanaka, a  kind of political genius and visionary. Which is pretty strange.

Kakuei was a card, and did have a big-picture view of Japan. I don't know if that qualifies him as a genius - but the book certainly is interesting. As an attempt at polishing a turd goes, it showed Ishihara has quite the intellectual stamina for such a task.

In case you might have forgotten the kind of character Kakuei Tanaka was, here's my entry on how he advised his runners to deliver bribes.

We Live In A Banana Republic

Yes That Moment Has Arrived

Memorably, Paul Keating once said we were headed towards being a Banana Republic if parliament wouldn'btput through his reforms - whatever they were at the time. I can't even remember which reforms he was talking about because my politics radar wasn't exactly tuned in at the time. I think I caught the phrase Banana Republic because I was a Woody Allen fan even back then and one of his early funny ones was 'Bananas', about  Banana Republic. If you asked me what the hallmarks of a Banana Republic might be, I'd have say it was the rampant abuse of power carried out by the party in power, in order to stay in power.

That might ring strange or lame, but when you think of all of those Banana Republic dictators and juntas in Latin America during the 50s, 60s and 70s, it is clear that those regimes were not shy about getting the police to do they regime's dirty work.

And so we have tonight's breaking news:

The Australian Federal Police are raiding Labor Party offices in Melbourne over the alleged leak of documents from the National Broadband Network.

In an explosive development in the middle of a federal election campaign, the Treasury Place office of former communications minister Stephen Conroy was searched.

Two staffers for Labor's communications spokesman Jason Clare, one of whom is a former staffer to Senator Conroy, are believed to also be targeted by the raids. One of the staffers is a key operative in Labor Party campaign headquarters. 

Labor confirmed the raids on Thursday, shadow finance spokesman Tony Burke saying they were in relation to allegations about documents which revealed that the NBN roll-out was slower and more expensive under the Coalition than under Labor.

Mr Burke said the revelations about the NBN had caused "immense damage" to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as former communications minister and questioned the timing of the raids. 

It's also understood that up to 20 NBN Co employees have been interviewed by the AFP over the leak.

So there we have it. In order not to lose the election, the Coalition go and sic the AFP on to the ALP staffers to screw up their election campaign. Irrefutable proof that our government is behaving very much like some Latin American Banana Republic. It's a highly powered Nixon-ian act of rat fucking but that's what's going on here. I guess we're beginning to see the true colours of the much-admired Malcolm Turnbull now. He's a cornered rat given the tight polls so naturally it's time for some rat fucking. 

View From The Couch - 12/May/2016

What Is It With This Interns Thing?

The worst of American ideas has somehow crept into the Australian labour landscape, audit's perniciously worked its way up to Canberra to the point where they've turned the utterly useless 'Work-for-the-Dole' scheme in to an 'PaTH Internship' programme. This lousy idea is in fact the centrepiece of Malcolm Turnbull's re-election campaign.

It really is a nutty programme because it pays employers $1000 to have an intern around, and then pays the same employe $10,000 when they hire that sam intern. As part of an incentive for the long term unemployed who will become the said intern, their $263 per week money will rise to a mere $364 a week in exchange for 25hours a week of work. This is why you're seeing the figure $4 an hour.

Now it turns out the legal advice is that this can't actually be legal given our laws.

The $840 million program forms a central plank of the Turnbull government's jobs and growth package.It features generous $1000 incentive payments to employers in the intern phase and $10,000 employer payments in the hire phase, raising concerns of a perverse incentive for employers to churn through interns. 

But if the legal advice is correct, the program is not legally sound in its current form and would necessitate changes to the Fair Work Act, or have its subsidies increased to meet minimum wage rates, adding hundreds of millions to its cost.

Illustration: Ron Tandberg

While concerns of exploitation and systemic abuse have been raised by unions and the group Interns Australia, the advice from the firm Maurice Blackburn is the first authoritative argument that it is technically illegal. 

The ACTU argues it "would require new legislation to legalise a second-class category of $4-per-hour workers and remove those employees' basic rights under the Fair Work Act". 

It says fixing the problem to bring interns's pay up to the legal minimum would "blow out" the cost of the PaTH program by $478 million.

It's interesting how the Federal government can't seem to do basic maths in figuring out how the incentives line up. 

• If you're an unethical company, you employ the intern for the required X weeks of free labour and cash in the $1000. 
• The free labour at 25hours is let's say worth the minimum $20.00/hr to round it off = 500/week x12weeks = $6000.
• Then you employ the intern and collect the $10,000.
• If you then sack the person within the first 6months of employment, preferably the first month, there's no recourse for unfair dismissal by the employee so at worst you're going to pay a month of low wages so subtract $2500 from the $17000= $15000 free money from the government.

In exchange for gifting companies $15000, the unemployed person who goes through the 12week internship and then 1month of employment then gets the $2500+12 weeks of 100 dollars =$3700 (minus PAYG on the $2500). If you consider how much more employable the unemployed person is at the end of the cycle - not much - then it's eminently clear that the system favours the unethical employer 4times more than the intern/worker ... Unless of course this is exactly what the Coalition government wants to do - gift free money to companies under the guise of trying to help the unemployed in which case I don't think we've ever seen a conservative government so cynical. 

If there really is $12200 cash to throw around for every unemployed person, there must be a better way of spending it than that. For a start they could hire the same person for 3months directly and give them a government job with real government job experience. 

The Dishonesty Of Governments About Employment

I just want to go over that last bit again. The Liberals and Nationals always say they want smaller government, less taxation. They say this because it appeals to the notion that governments don't do anything well and so any money given to them would be less inefficient in the economy. This construction masks a greater greed motive whereby if a government business or venture actually is any good, they're the same people who want that same service privatised - and of course that means ripping off form the government the bits that actually work and then leaving behind the bits that are less efficient and then blaming the leftover bits for being inefficient. This construction only serves those who construct the argument - a true hallmark of an ideologically loads argument. 

The government can - and probably should - employ more people to do more things. Especially in the context where aggregate demand is flagging so badly and the RBA is reaching near the Zero-bound, which means the private sector can't seem to generate the jobs or profits to power aggregate demand. Governments of both ALP and LNP hues have overseen growing globalisation which has resulted in an overall growth at the expense of giving up secondary industry. You won't hear it from the ALP but basically globalisation has worked its magic in reducing unionised jobs in this country, so it's not like they aren't party to the problem of structural unemployment. 

What is really galling about all this is that unemployment isn't a uniform 5.7% across the country. There are pockets where plenty of people are unemployed, and int those places the government runs these work-for-the-dole schemes far less whole-heartedly than they do in major cities and their suburbs. The administration of Centrelink in such places is effectively a work-for-the-dole scheme; that is to say, working as a Centrelink officer in those regions is an elaborate work-for-the-dole scheme given that there isn work outside of that job. 

At the  centre of all this is the grand delusion that everybody has to be working in a way that maximises productivity and profitability all the time.  Yet the physical reality of space and materials and capital and people demonstrate this is patently impossible. 

I know. It's a weird thing to say but it needs to be said that how we conceive of work in the industrial world was driven by the development of capitalism. The history of labour movements and unions and such come out of the need to humanise this demand and many countries on the planet have found different balancing points to do with what work is in our waking hours. All this stuff of commuting and schlepping and touring and driving and desk-jockeying and lifting and filing and doing stuff for your pay cheque, came about out of industrialisation. And as we head increasingly into a post-industrialised world, it's well worth asking if this schema of 'work', and the 'work ethic' that bolsters the entire culture of it, is sustainable or frankly, meaningful. 

And if the employed people situation looks somewhat untenable, then the ranks of the unemployed look even less tenable. 

We can't distribute work evenly now. 

We can't grow work readily now without significantly high education and training - which costs money. Money which the Coalition Government doesn't exactly want to spend. 

We can't encourage employers to hire people they don't need without gifting them money - which is in fact simply less effective than giving that money to the people that need it. 

Not to mention the obvious fact that we can't just shoot/exterminate unemployed people. 

The thing is, it's the government's job to think about this stuff and figure out what to do. The fact that our election is mired in the same kinds of conversations we've had since at least 2004 suggests we've not advanced in the least bit while the world has moved in to a more precarious period, and we do need to start thinking about all these things. Both our major parties really need to reassess what the hell we're talking about when we say 'work' and how that 'work' is being rewarded. 

View From The Couch - 10/May/2016

This Low Growth Thing

It's been accepted for a long time that as economies mature, you hit lower growth. The explanation even for this phenomenon is that as economies mature, the scope for growth diminishes. It makes sense mathematically that a jump from 1 to 2 is 100% but 2 to 3 is 50% and 3 to 4 is 33.3% and 4 to 5 is 20%. If you expand this out to the entire economy and include everybody within it, then GDP growth is naturally diminishing in returns. Conversely if you start with little, there is greater scope for growth so we find the later starting developing economies grow at higher rates.

That being said, the first world has been a good 30years where growth has been low single digits and the funding for this growth has been done through credit. We know this because countless data shows wages growth has been relatively stagnant in the same time span. As economies grow to the vanguard of development, they become increasingly like zero-sum games. If there was away of pocketing the growth, you win - and so we've seen in the stagnant wages growth, 30years of the wealthier 1% pocketing the growth.

Not surprisingly we find flagging aggregate demand, which then creates deflation. This is the very thing the governments of the first world are trying to avoid. At this point in history, we have governments that meet at things like APEC and G20, and they try to spur more growth around the globe without necessarily understanding what that would mean. And to date corporate Australia has called for an increase in productivity - which involves things like abolishing overtime penalty rates and so on.

So here's the thing. Productivity gains are strictly to do with supply-side. I'm no economics expert but I can tell you there's nothing in productivity gains that would be applicable to the grand problem of aggregate demand. In the near-zero-sum game of postindustrial economics, the 1% have played hard to win as much of the growth for themselves without actually growing the economic pie at all. It never seems to occur to them the fact that they've cut so much from people's wages has led to the sagging aggregate demand.

Over the thirty-odd years commerce and the corporate lobby has beaten out labour interests 40-0. The rise of inequality is no accident - it is directly attributable to the trickle-down economics that have cut taxes for the wealthy and apportioned more and more of the cost of government on to the poor. In fact corporations are arguably winning so much they're beating up on governments - but that is another topic. The main point here is that the corporate lobby has already won a lot without giving up much. But in so doing, it has forced out the power of the consumer it so need to sustain itself.

One of the strange outcomes of Abenomics in Japan is that a conservative Prime Minister is running around telling the major corporations to raise wages. This is because the reductio ad absurdum of seeking maximum profits by cutting back on labour costs has gotten to the point where the working poor cannot afford to be the consumers the businesses demand. For the economy to grow again, it needs to "relate"; and to "reflate", the consumer has spend a lot more to power growth. In other words, Abe's government has admitted that chasing productivity is a fool's errand when you're trying to shore up aggregate demand. You have to shore up the spending power of the consumer in a sustained manner.

So here's the thing back in Australia... under this Coalition Government we've heard noises and seen signs that they wanted to raise the GST as well as give states to rights to chart their own income taxes. They've cut back on the welfare spending because that is what all conservative governments do, while tried to figure out a way to cut penalty and overtime awards. None of these things are actually putting confidence in the consumer. None of these things are adding to the spending power of the average Joe; it's not going to help with aggregate demand. Thus it follows that for all the talk about the Coalition being good economic managers, they're really not addressing the real problem of our economy to get it growing again.

Vote Compass

The election is near and so it was time to go and do the Vote Compass test.  As little indicators go, it's a nice little toy for those who want to put a grid to one's own political inclinations and where they might stand. As usual, I landed a bit left of even the Greens, and halfway progressive between the Greens and the ALP, which is much more left and much more progressive than where the Coalition are pitching their policies. Not surprisingly they thought I should vote Greens but of course I'm wary of the ideological bent of the Greens when it comes to their policies outside of the environment. I'm also not happy about the way things played out with the Rudd Government ETS discussions and the Greens' role in that debacle which in effect brought about the terrible sequence of events whereby we now have Direct (in)Action as our carbon emission abatement policy.

The disturbing part of the vote compass survey is that it puts me so far to the left as it does when in fact I don't feel that far to the left. I maybe witnessing the great shift to the right by all parties which has left me stranded to the left of all conversation being had by the political parties in Australia. I'm not terribly radical, I don't even go protesting or marching anymore. I just write this blog here and point at how stupid the major parties are but you couldn't put me so far to the left beyond the Greens. Frankly I'm a little mortified. Where have all the hardcore left people all gone? Those irritating leftwing ideologues back on campus in the 80s? Where the hell are they now?
Probably paying off a mortgage some place.

Maybe we're all kidding ourselves in thinking that we have divergent views. Maybe the tragedy of our contemporary political state is that the views are so convergent there isn't any scope to be different or radical or interesting. Maybe the Coalition and the ALP and The Greens are a lot closer in their positioning than we normally think  all of them bunched around the same old tired bad ideas that leads to this sad stagnation. The illusion is that voting one way or the other is going to make a big difference. I'm beginning to think that might be one of the big lies in our society.

For the record, Antony Green's election calculator says there needs to be a uniform swing of 4.0% to oust the Coalition. I don't know what the historic precedent for that would be for a first term government. But then, this has been a pretty awful government most of its three year term.
Hope springs eternal.

The Budget Comes Home To Roost

This really was a sucky budget so you wonder how the government is hoping to win an election.
First off, whatever consumer sentiment boost that was handed out by the RBA's interest rate cut during the day was blown out of the water by the budget.

ANZ Banking head of Australian economics Felicity Emmett said the budget appeared to have neutralised any sentiment lift from the interest rate cut. 

"While the RBA's cut to the official cash rate last week is likely to have been well received, any positive impact looks to have been somewhat offset by consumers' reaction to the commonwealth budget," she said. 

"According to the polls, the reaction has been largely one of moderate 'disapproval'."
A Fairfax/Ipsos post-budget poll showed that 46 per cent of households disapproved of the budget while only 39 per cent approved. Although not loathed like former treasurer Joe Hockey's ill-fated first budget in 2014, the coalition's latest effort did little to buoy spirits at a difficult time for the Australian economy. 

"While this is a better reaction than the one to the 2014 budget, the lack of traction from [this] budget would be disappointing given the government is now in election mode," Ms Emmett said. 

"With the coalition and Labor running head-to-head in the polls, the government has its work cut out for it to win over the electorate by the 2 July election."

Way to go ScoMo!

If that's not bad enough this government's finding all kinds of problems putting its budget across as good. Take this Q&A thing that happened:

"I've got a disability and a low education, that means I've spent my whole life working for minimum wage. You're gonna lift the tax-free threshold for rich people," he said, addressing federal minister O'Dwyer. 

"If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life," he went on. "That means that I get to say to my little girls, 'Daddy's not broke this weekend. We can go to the pictures'. Rich people don't even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don't I get it? Why do they get it?" 

After a sympathetic hearing from Goldie, the question came to O'Dwyer, whose answer eventually wound its way through to missing the point of the inquiry almost entirely - with Mr Storrar's eyes all but popping out of his head at the minister's assurance that when it came to budgetary tax measures: "It's all about balance."
On the contrary, minister. 

"To rich people it is a Coke and a milkshake or whatever," Mr Storrar said of tax breaks for higher income earners. 

"To me it changes my children's life … People who make $80,000 a year … well, they don't even notice it, love. We notice that sort of stuff." 

And it was pretty much all downhill from there. 

O'Dwyer helpfully launched into a cheerful monologue about pies - growing the pie, rather than carving it up as the Greens were inclined to do - but the look on Mr Storrar's face suggested the only thing he could smell was waffle. But the minister soldiered on with her pastry metaphors. It was a bit like watching Mary Poppins trill "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" - the thing you say when you have nothing to say; then before you knew it, she'd taken wayward flight to offer a description of her plans as Small Business Minister.

These people damn themselves. One can easily imagine the ire of Malcolm Turnbull as he watched one of his ministers pretty much immolate his cause. Of course, then there was the $6000 toaster write off that Kelly O'Dwyer mentioned. It's a corker! When the SMH is making fun of you at the top of their website you know you've laid a giant turd in public.

UPDATE:
Oh, And Look, More On ZIRP

The race to Zero Interest Rates They Say.

News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Sep/2015

ZIRP Didn't End Today

After months of threatening to lift interest rates, the US Fed decided not to raise interest rates today. Which is pretty damn amazing really because it does nothing but punch a hole in the credibility of the US Fed when it talks about how it sees its own policy. Think out it for a moment. If it were the RBA and Glenn Stevens, it would be unthinkable for him to spell putsch a move for 9 months of the year, only to squib on the threat when you were supposed to do it.

As it is, the RBA has us on a strange parallel world to ZIRP with our very own TWIRP, which is causing its own havoc. Interesting then that the constraints of the US Fed running ZIRP forcesAustralia to adopt its TWIRP and so Glenn Stevens wants to urge Janet Yellen to just get on with it.  Of course if the US Fed does raise it even 0.25%, about a trillion dollars worth of derivative contracts go up in smoke. but this is the thing about derivative contracts: they're only tangentially related to the real world economy.

Of course, the reason the US Fed didn't raise their interest rates according to Janet Yellen's statement is that they are concerned about China's economy - Something both Glenn Stevens and Michael Pascoe think are over-stated as being problematic. And yet, you have to wonder what the US Fed knows about China.

The Wild Wishcasting Phase

Those conservative chumps in the Coalition must be dreaming big, now that albatross Tony has been sent packing, and the poll bounce shows they would demolish a Bill Shorten-led ALP if there were an election held today. They haven't had numbers like since the days of Julia Gillard and even then Tony Abbott himself had terrible poll numbers. They might have to go back to 2010 just before Kevin Rudd got knifed by Julia Gillard to a time when they had a commanding lead in the polls.
Which is to say, at least for this week they've got it good.

They're probably starting to think big about how this might translate into votes, but really we need to put a big caveat on Malcolm Turnbull's alleged popularity. For a start if your predecessor is Tony Abbott, even a pile of dog dung is bound to come up smelling roses. This electorate was dying for something much better than Tony Abbott, so naturally there would be a poll bounce.

But here's the thing, if Malcolm Turnbull is really going to capture votes from the Left, he's seriously going to have to do something that even the hardest credential-ed lefty is going to admit is good, and that means having to do something the right hates, and there's simply no leeway in Malcolm Turnbull to do any such thing. And that being the case, it won't be long before the stench of old Liberal and National Party policy positions will stink like the dead fish that they are, and bring Malcolm Turnbull's popularity down to their level.

In turn, the smart advice going for Lefties is for them not to get too excited.

Not All That Dies Old Is Bad, Not All That's Young And Remaining Is Good

I haven't paid much attention to the Canning by-election brought on by the death of Don Randall. Don Randall of course tabled to motion for a spill back in February and was founded in his car not long after that. If this were a mafia movie, you'd draw your own conclusions - but it is not, they say he died of a heart attack in his car. It's hard to tell what sort of MP he was, but if he thought enough to urge his party members to dump Tony Abbott, there was probably a decent man right there.

Andrew Hastie is the man running for the coalition in his place and he's an ex-SAS man. This sort of candidacy makes my skin crawl because those guys lead a pretty narrow life with a narrow world view and they might have a world of experience in the extremes of a combat zone, they're not guys known for a deep and compassionate outlook on their fellow man.

Andrew Hastie has accused the ALP of not supporting our troops in the Afghanistan based on his personal experience. It seems like a really crass thing to say in your run up to your polls, and really shows you the sort of grubby candidate that he is. It's pretty bleak that a sensible elder dies to be replaced by some narrow-core one-eyed zealot. Our polity is doing really badly right there.

Ragging On Bill Shorten

You can count me as one of the people who got very hot under the collar about Bill Shorten's role in bringing down Kevin Rudd in 2010. I'm still not that crash hot about how that all went down as you know; but then, I wasn't exactly crazy about the whole ALP way before Kevin Rudd even became Leader back in 2007. For a better part of 24months while the Abbottoir reigned, Bill Shorten's stint as Opposition leader has looked at times like a very contrived, stage-managed wave to *his* people, a knowing wink that he was just going to sit pretty and be a small target - even though Tony Abbott made things simple.

An even then I have enough perspective and patience to say, the ALP need to let Bill Shorten do his thing, what ever it is. There isn't an easy road to government; there isn't a short cut.

In the wake of the Turnbull seizing the day, Shorten's approval rating has sunk to 24% and there are now grumbles in the electorate about his 'performance' already. This is galling because it's from the very same people who wanted Malcolm Turnbull over Tony Abbott but vote only for the ALP anyway.
Folks, you need to grow up and grow a brain.

Mind you I had a chance to chat to somebody who told me they were one of these ALP voters who wanted Malcolm Turnbull and their reasoning was that independent of sides, Abbott *had* to go for the good of Australia (which is hard to dispute) and that it was now time for the ALP to step up and put in their best leader to square off against the best the coalition has brought to the table. I enquired of them who they thought the better leader would be and they answered in a heartbeat, "Albo!"

When I expressed incredulity, they replied that Tanya Plibersek would make a better leader than Bill Shorten. I just want to point out that the ALP haven't contested a single Federal Election with Bill Shorten as leader. Do you think there might be a problem with the Australian political culture precisely because the electorate is already so bloodthirsty? These politicians are only reflecting our choppy-changey electorate.

It's not shopping for shoes or the next sugar hit at the candy store. It's political leadership we're talking here. ALP supporters would be out of their fucking minds to want to start jockeying for replacing Shorten.

The Breaking Of The Middle

...And The Disintegrating Centre

I was at a party surrounded by many active thinkers and writers. You could say they were the best minds of this generation once upon time ago, who had gone on to do their respective important things in their lives. It's almost humiliating to be the guy who didn't do much except this blog here, but hey, that's life. Not everybody gets what they want in their life.

Most were academics and teachers, and those that weren't were owners of white-collar businesses and authors of note. What was interesting with this crowd is how they were once centre-left moderates on University of Sydney's campus a few decades ago, and until very recently had stayed moderate and centre-left, but had decidedly turned to the hard Left in the last 2 years. They're now telling me they were going to vote for the Greens at the next election. They're abandoning the ALP.

I listened to what they had to say and it boiled down to a no confidence motion towards the entire ALP as it stands today. Bill Shorten wasn't cutting it as their leader. It's not surprising given the brain power of the people at this party - Bill Shorten isn't impressing them any one bit. Shorten's mumbled position of small-target-until-election-time isn't going to strike a cord with these intellectuals. The Gillard government essentially burned through their patience with the ALP already, so Shorten was essentially getting no leash from these people. The vision they had was for the Greens under Dr. DiNatale to step forward as the senior partner of a Broad Left alliance with the ALP reduced to a junior role. They said they couldn't wait for the ALP to reform while there were pressing issues. They needed a Leftist party with which they could throw their lot in.

They're not growing conservative with old age, this lot. They were strengthening in their conviction, as they decided to move to the left, abandoning the ALP. And these were the people who grabbed me back in my youth and took me to the Centre-left in the first place. They've now vacated that spot and decamped further away leaving me sort of holding the ALP bag. Basically it looks like the ALP lost the campus and intellectuals to the Greens.

What this means is that the centre is being vacated by the left, while the ALP itself is left stranded without its traditional base. The ALP might end up fading and disappearing.

Bob Ellis Thinks The Liberals Will Disintegrate

Bob Ellis thinks there won't even be a Liberal Party by 2020. What's interesting about his post is that he seems to think the centre is crumbling for the Liberal Party as well, as they too shift, but further to the political right. As the great brains trust was explaining to me at the party, if Christopher Pyne and George Brandis represent the moderates in the Liberal Party, then the right end of the Liberal Party are nutjob rightwing fascists. The stupidity of the fascist position is being played out daily with the incessant appeals to fear through beating the drum of the security issues. Quite simply, the Liberal Party has long vacated the middle and gone to the right, and that should be leaving the middle the the ALP. Yet the ALP has been so inept it is losing its base as it occupies the middle.

Demographically speaking, the Pre-Boomers who support the conservatives are dying out. That vision of Australia is vanishing daily with the elderly checking out of Life Hotel. In its stead are the Baby Boomers heading into retirement, but they haven't changed their politics a great deal. There's a large chunk of them who are still on the political left, and so the demographic certainty that the Coalition had during the Howard years where they could rely on the passive grey vote, is not likely to hold in the near future. This leaves the decidedly ideologically right fascists - and this explains the scary three ring circus that is the Coalition government today, where the motivated members of the political machine on the right are not conservative in the older sense but ideological fascists.

Naturally one wonder just how much fascism can appeal to wider Australian electoral sentiments. One Nation with its clocked Bogan moron-o-cratic ideas indicates that it can be dressed up in jingoism and sold to a portion of the population. Yet One Nation never really made inroads into the middle enough to last. Independent senator David Leyonhjelm is a 'Liberal Democrat' in name but is essentially running a radical libertarian line - and I don't think he's having any more of an impact than Brain Harradine did in his day. This leads one to suspect that if the Liberal Party does fade or disintegrate due to demographics, then we will be seeing a particular vision of and for Australia, passing into history.

All Of This Is Very France In The 1930s

I like to remind people of Jean-Paul Sartre's book 'Age of Reason' in such instances. In the context where fascism was rising in Spain, the main character Mathieu is approached to joining the left in the Spanish Civil War. Mathieu turns them down because he judges it to be not yet his own war. And until the war come to his doorstep, it is not for him to take up arms.

The hardening of the fascist position in Australia is only in its second phase at this point in time. There arena weapons and signs of armed conflict. Yet if this is enough to provoke the Centre-Left moderates to move to the Greens, then we're seeing a replay of that dynamic. What concerns me the most is that all of these people moving to the left know how student politics played out in the late 1970s and they are totally cognisant of the players involved in that event, now being in Parliament. They are not taking chances. So while we may not descend into a civil war, we may descend into utter chaos when the middle ground totally dries up and there is only the hard right and hard left.
And frankly, this is now possibly on the cards for Australian politics.

Good God, Mark Latham

Take A Chill Pill And Come Back Wittier Please

It's been a weird - mostly losing - month for Mark Latham. He was supposedly penning nasty remarks from a fake/anonymous cyber-identity. In common parlance, he was indulging in some sock-puppetry. When he was found out, he had to part ways with the AFR where he was a columnist. A lot of people are down on Mark Latham for all sorts of reasons so he is not a popular cause to back. You could easily argue (maybe not even argue, rather, simply state) that he was not a great cause even when he was going up against John Howard in 2004. Not only did he lose big in that election, he lost his footing in the world of Federal politics and scurried home to be a stay-at-home dad.

Since then, he's been the go to guy for acerbic take downs of politics-of-the-day. On any given day he would be dishing out commentary on just how awful these people were, regardless of party affiliation. Then he ran into some trouble dealing with feminists and couldn't quite contain himself.

It's quite strange just how much his own side of politics reviles him so much. It's almost unfair. There was time in the late 1990s when John Howard was trouncing both Kim Beasley and Simon Crean that  it was clear that the ALP needed new policy ideas beyond the old protectionist, Union-driven rhetoric. He even fit a kind of ALP identikit. He was university educated, but from the Western Suburbs. He was seamlessly the product of Gough Whitlam's many reforms, and came to Parliament with a lot of ideas. He was part policy wonk and ideological warrior. Long before he became the Go-to-Guy for acerbic take down commentaries, he was the Go-to-Guy for intelligent progressive policy alternatives to the Thatcherism-Lite of John Howard's rule.

That's just a long caveat to say, yes I voted for him, and the ALP in 2004, and I have few regrets for doing so. If anything I'd castigate the electorate who chose to stick with Howard out of fear of the future. It can be a very stupid country with a stupid electorate at some times. Just look at 2013 that gave us the Abbott Government. The point being, there was a time the ALP needed this man. Now that things have gone horribly wrong, they may yet need this man; but he keeps disqualifying himself in the public view, from being that man.

Mr Latham told the audience he had taken pride in researching everything he wrote in the now-defunct column and no error had ever been found. 

"None of these left feminist activists went to the Press Council to complain and seek any correction for anything I said that was inaccurate," he said. 

He said there was now no outer suburban columnists in the Australian media with the last one - himself - now gone. But he said he would continue to express his opinions, but now unfiltered of the niceties of the Financial Review.

He said class politics was alive in Australia and while people had been happy with his past criticism of Labor power brokers, action to kick him off the paper started when he began "rousing the rich girls". 

Mr Latham went on to say the problem with the "left feminist elite" was that criticism was seen as being derogatory. 

"I am such a big misogynist that I decided I am out of politics, I'd stay at home to look after the children and support my wife's law career," Mr Latham said.
Mr Latham's address at the festival was supposed to have been on whether former politicians could write objectively on politics. Later in the talk, as the temperature in the room cooled a little, he spoke more clearly about being a stay at home dad, Tony Abbott and politics more broadly. 

At one point he revealed he had lunch in Liverpool, Sydney with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in early last year to discuss a range of policy issues. He added he helped write some of Mr Shorten's budget reply that year, but there had been no more contact from mid-2014. 

After the event the official Twitter account of the Melbourne Writers Festival said: "We're disappointed in Mark Latham's #MWF15 appearance today. Not the respectful conversation we value."

And more's the shame really. He has a point to make but it is so nuanced it's not getting past the static of the knee-jerk press. The hard left feminists detest Mark Latham for being so blokey, they suspect he is centre-right in political alignment, disguising himself as a leftist. A lot of people are projecting negative notions at Mark Latham and quite honestly, I think they're more revealing of the accusers than the accused.

One imagines that at this point in his life where he's no longer running for office, Mark Latham would rather serve up his contempt unvarnished.  And so it's become a weird media spectacle where people are ganging up on Mark Latham for what he is not - a contrite sensitive new age feminist - instead of the proud bloke with progressive politics from the western suburbs of Sydney. And Mark Latham to his discredit, fires back. His critics decry him for not being smooth like Kevin Rudd or not being a woman like Julia Gillard, or a winner like Paul Keating or political dynast like Kim Beazley. They accuse him of being crass and a misogynist as if these things are defining characteristic of the man. And that's from his own side of politics! 

It's sad that the caricature of Mark Latham has reduced him to some kind of boofhead-of-politics. I'm sure the right in this country take great delight in his fall, because it validates their victory in 2004. A decade on, all it does it prove just how negative is the politics in this country. Put simply, we are far worse off. 

Mark Latham for his part, really needs to go quiet for a while and sort out his PR. This brawling commentary persona simply makes him look worse than he ever needs to. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 12/Jul/2015

Are They Petty? Or Are They Just Bog Stupid?
It turns out all that weird attacking of wind farms calling them ugly, was covering fire to cut investment into wind power in this country.

Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann​ have issued the so-called green bank with a directive to change its investment mandate, prohibiting new wind funding. It's understood the directive was issued without the approval or knowledge of Environment Minister Greg Hunt, angering the minister.  

The decision is another blow for the multibillion-dollar wind industry, which has just started to recover from the uncertainty created by the government's Renewable Energy Target review. Analysts say $8.7 billion is expected to be invested in wind power in the next five years, while the corporation has invested about $300 million in wind projects to date.

And international investors are warning the government's move sends a bad message about how safe it is to do business in Australia.
The directive is just the latest salvo in the government's attacks on the wind industry.

Good grief. So much for "Open for Business". We know they're fighting a rearguard action against the eventual move from fossil fuel to renewables that must inevitably take place so it's not that difficult to see that the top level of this government is deliberately mismanaging an issue to suit their crony-capitalist friends. But then there seems to be a belief in this government that Tony Abbott's own unpopularity gives him carte-blanche to just do what his cronies want because he's never going to be popular for ever doing the right things. If the electorate is not going to reward you for doing the right things, then it seems they're willing to damn the electorate and do their corporate masters' bidding and secure themselves a lucrative after-political-life. 

Which is to say, under Tony Abbott, Australia's polity has become no better than Indonesia. At this point in time, we're Indonesia-without-the executions. This place only looks respectable to people because it's white middle-aged men in suits running these crappy policies up the flagpole. You'd think this was the 1950s - which is exactly what Tony Abbott wants. Tony Abbott only needs look to his own faith to see how far off base he is on the issue, in this day and age when the Pope issues encyclicals about protecting the environment and curbing carbon emissions, slamming corporate greed as the Devil's own Droppings. You sort of wonder how he can sustain his opposition to things like Renewable Energy and kinder treatment of asylum seekers on the basis of his religion and not listen to his Pope. Evidently, it has nothing to do with his faith, it's all to to do with uncompromising cultural prejudices.

Using Federal Money To Tar The Opposition

This lousy circus that is the Royal Commission into union corruption keeps rolling like an unwanted circus caravan, waiting to find its miserable end. Earlier in the piece it was Julia Gillard who fronted the commission to explain her time at Slater and Gordon working as an IR lawyer, wherein she might have been a little irregular with some paperwork. Now it is Bill Shorten in the dock, being asked whether he short-changed his union members to cut a deal with the business sector. It's kind of weird that the Abbott government is asking these questions, seemingly-suddenly-amazingly interested in the welfare of the rank and file union members. We'll put that bizarre irony aside for a moment and ask the simple rhetorical question, what does this look like?

It looks like one of those show trials seen in military juntas and theocratic councils when they put the opposition on trial for being the Opposition. The Kim Dynasty did this a lot (now they just shoot them). Malaysia keeps doing it to Anwar. The Gang of Four in Communist China did this sort of thing to purge the enemies of Maoism and ended up in their own show trial. It goes on in Iran to this day and heck, even South Korea does this to presidents who leave office at the end of term. What all those countries have in common is that they don't have democratically functioning states. Even the ones that purport to be democratic and have elections can't be said to be functioning properly if they're doing show trials of the opposition. 

However, "a loyal opposition" is a difficult concept for a lot of countries that simply don't understand the adversarial system of law that developed in the English speaking world. Its underpinnings are culturally alien to them and so they concoct these kinds of show trials. It's a dead giveaway that they don't get democracy. 

Imagine my grievance and dismay then to see the Opposition Leader of this land, sitting in the dock over this stupid political show trial in Australia; Australia, the once most progressive nation in the English speaking world, reduced to the spectacle of a political show trial. You'd think we were Indonesia-without-the-executions; but no, we're even worse than that because they've stopped doing these for now in a sign that they've begun to get democracy. Clearly, our own political leadership has lost the plot. The exasperation in that photo says it all. 

What Yanis Varoufakis Has To Say About The Debt Deal For Greece

Pleiades sent in this nugget. Yanis Varoufakis has a piece in the Guardian. 

In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent. 

Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks. 

To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well. 

Once the sordid operation was complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while the debt grew larger, forcing creditors to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.

And that's about as succinct as it can be put. In the 9 years since the GFC broke, I've had to think a fair bit about what the bail outs and Quantitative Easing meant. The best explanationI can give you is that it is an attempt to freeze the clock so that the participants in the world's greatest casinos have time to take their chips of the table and walk away without cashing in the losses, while the bill is sent to Joe Q Public. In the aftermath governments ran out of money do their normal government-y things, and so they committed to 'austerity' which further shrunk the economy and made things worse. Iceland, which refused to give the bankers a pass, has recovered nicely, which tells you something about all this glorious QE I II and 4Eva we've seen. 

David Cameron of course did have one standup moment where he declared he would not balance the books of the United Kingdom on the backs of the poor and needy. It's a great line, whether he actually followed through on it or not. It perfectly describes what Germany is doing- balancing its own books on the backs of the poor and needy in Greece. Whether 'Grexit' happens or not, the world's sympathies are with the Greeks on this fact alone. If Grexit should happen, the Greeks at least would have a fighting chance. As for Deutsche Bank that has trillions in derivatives tied to Greek bonds, I don't think we'll give them much sympathy when it all blows up, and Angela Merkel has to clean up that mess.