Shirtfront And Strange

The Prevalence Of Psychopathy In Politics?

Peter Hartcher concluded his 5 parts series on the Abbot Government today. Just as Sarah Ferguson's documentary about the Rudd-Gillard ALP government was painful in retelling every turn of that story, the narrative never giving us respite from the misery, Hartcher's account sinks us into pondering some fairly basic human problems. Namely, just what kind of people are we sending to Canberra to represent us? Try this section for size:

Turnbull commonly told colleagues that Abbott's capacity for self-delusion, his lack of comprehension for the feelings of those around him, showed that he was "basically a psychopath". 

Turnbull had been described by an earlier Liberal leader, Brendan Nelson, as suffering "narcissistic personality disorder". Now it seemed the narcissist was calling the psychopath crazy

It makes you wonder just what kind of people our democracy selects to rule us. Accepting Brendan Nelson's diagnosis of NPD for Malcolm Turnbull requires a grain of salt. It's the kind of diagnosis he might have read about, but it's hard to imagine his clinical experience dealing with and diagnosing people with this condition. Similarly, Malcolm Turnbull's diagnosis of Tony Abbott as a psychopath is equally - if not even more so - suspect. If we are to believe such diagnoses, then combined with the account at one point that had Kevin Rudd was a psychopath as well, 4 out of the last 5 Prime Minsters would have to have been pathological.

Again, if we are to believe such armchair diagnoses, that is.

Still, one does wonder about the mental health of some of these people. The hardened heads and hearts of the likes of Bronwyn Bishop, Eric Abetz, and Kevin Andrews ; the utterly outlandish Cory Bernardi; the moral permeability of Philip Ruddock; and the cloud-cuckoo climate change denialism of Barnaby Joyce; all of these people make you wonder about their mental health. They look clinical. Yet there they are, sitting in government. None of it looks too far from the British version of the 'House of Cards' on the crazy stakes. It's understandable then that even though Julia Gillard cut a whole bunch of areas, she boosted mental health expenditure. She probably had a look around her and thought it best.

As you can see, it's easy to bandy about easy labels and pretend the other person is wilfully wrong-headed because they're somehow clinically crazy. The truth is, it's a lot more complicated than that, and you can have seamless high-functioning psychopaths and socially inept non-psychopaths alike, though it has to be said the political options for the latter are severely limited. If Tony Abbott was indeed a high-functioning psychopath - like a Gordon Gecko type, - it appears that we're not talking about a terribly high ceiling for the "high"part of high-functioning. After all his tack record is what it is: not very good with a side order of shit. If indeed Malcolm Turnbull is NPD, it appears his government is starkly lacking in the kind of drama queen moments that usually surround NPD people. As tempting as it is, it would be quite the overreach to be branding these people with these diagnoses.

Still, Occam's Razor says the easier explanation for these people and their behaviour would be that they're completely bonkers.

Looking For A Comeback? That's Insanity

Tones is still in parliament. Which in some minds means he's still around if anybody needs him to have another shot.

Abbott's now celebrated attendance at one of Peter Dutton's "Monkey Pod" lunches, replete with a cake baked by "Peta", suddenly makes sense in this light. It suggests the ex-PM's confidant remains utterly pivotal to his future in politics. 

It's Peta who is "keeping Tony in the game", says a sympathetic MP. "She believes he can make a come-back probably more than him and is pushing him to it."

How crazy is that? How insane would that be? Consider this for a moment: Kevin Rudd was able to contemplate a comeback exactly because he was one of the most popular Prime Ministers of all time. He could appeal to the electorate. Malcolm Turnbull was able to consider staying on and eventually coming back against Tony Abbott because he was enormously popular - exactly in the way Tony Abbott was not. Tony Abbott's unpopularity was of such historic magnitude, the nation was quite glad to be rid of him. The nation is still asking itself how it got itself into such a compromising situation the way married men who attend bucks nights ask themselves afterwards. It was equal parts tawdry, seedy and sad.

You could argue that after their demises, the nation and its electorate missed both Rudd AND Turnbull, so much so it fuelled their comebacks. The only people to miss Gillard are a certain brand of Leftists that need lots of badges to describe: unionist, Catholic, female. The people who saw industrial laws as more important than the ETS, the people who while voting for the ALP didn't want marriage equality and professional academic feminists. Similarly, the only people who miss Tony Abbott are a certain brand of the right that also need lots of badges to describe: anti-unionist, Protestant, white-male-entitled. The people who see the destruction of the working class bargaining power as being more important than actual economic policy, the people who hate gays and don't want them to be normalised into mainstream society, and a certain kind of entitled white male reactionary that thinks they're a persecuted minority.

The roughly two years of Tony Abbott's time as Prime Minister was an anomaly where a candidate for the hard right was able to wrest control of enough points of leverage to thrust himself into the middle of politics. He was nobody's idea of an ideal candidate except for the small minority on the hard right that wants to live in a world of Victorian era prejudices. There were simply too many compromises to put him in the middle in the first place, and so it unravelled with each and every stupid decision, each and every stupid gesture, each and every stupid move.

If Peta Credlin thinks the Abbott souffle is going to rise once more, she's got rocks in her head. Then again, she sounds like a mental health case too.

My Pet Theory About Tony Abbot's Mental Health

I know I've said this before but it's brain damage from his Oxford Blue boxing days.

He didn't guard, he flailed. And got hit a lot. He looks pretty concussed to me, as in he looks like somebody who took a lot of punches to the head.

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.

View From The Couch - 15/Sep/2015

Oops We Did It Again

For the 5th time in 5 years we have a new Prime Minister! It was like I was in delirium, only to wake up as the action began to unfold on the TV. Before I go into that one, I just want to describe to you my past few days.

The Backstory

On Friday I contracted a Flu. Call it "Flu Strain 2015". As you may recall I only recently got out of under the Norovirus thing, so my immune system was not ready for this event. By 10pm on Friday night I was running a fever, my nose was running like a waterfall, and all the joints in my body were aching. I think I blacked out for most of the next 48hours. If you asked me where I was I could only tell you that I was at the fevered gates of hell trying to solve mathematical puzzles about logistical problems that didn't exist, while writhing and groaning in pain trying to find a comfortable position to rest. When you're like this, the bed becomes too soft, the floor is too hard, the couch is too cool, the bed is too hot; and around and around you go, twisting and turning and labouring under a head splitting headache, just trying to find a modicum of comfort that does not exist.

You think about dying and 1919.

The back hurts because you've been lying on it too much and your shoulders hurt because you've been lying your side trying to avoid lying on your painful back. The head thing was great. I felt like I'd caught a falling piano with my skull. I managed to lose a substantial amount of muscle mass in mere days, and now I can hardly get up, let alone eat anything. I went through 14 bottles of water and still felt dehydrated, crunched through and swallowed 50 Vitamin C tabs in that time. Now I'm on a course of antibiotics to stop secondary bacterial infections moving into my lungs.
Pretty happy scene over here.

Did I mention the fact that I stopped drinking coffee during this time? Well, that happened not out of choice but because I couldn't stomach anything - but it also meant I added the caffeine-withdrawal headaches into the equation. On Monday, I finally ate a scoop of ice-cream, a cob of corn and a wafer cracker as I hunkered down to watch some 'Daredevil'. This is the virtue of binge-watching on Netflix. You don't have to think about what you're going tow watch next. There's always more good content, it just keeps coming. You could be semi-comatose like I was and still get through the day, let time flow in a way that doesn't leave you thinking about dying and 1919 straight through the agony.

Anyway, around 4pm, I got bored, and switched over to ABC24, just to catch the beginning of the drama, with Malcolm Turnbull fronting the microphones, announcing he was challenging Tony Abbott for the leadership. It was on! And that meant I lay there sprawled on the sofa watching the whole damn thing - which was mostly commentators conjecturing and editorialising and parsing statements made by politicians. It's funny how irrelevant all this looks when you've just spent 48hours in a fevered hell.

I don't buy the Turnbull contention that Bill Shorten would be a catastrophic choice for Prime Minister should he win against Tony Abbott, any more than I buy the contention that this is a good or solid government as argued by the likes of Hockey, Abetz and Kevin-Bloody-Andrews. The pundits who are brought on for right wing balance sounded even more detached from reality than some of the fevered nightmares I was having earlier.

Still, the "Told-You-So" moment is resonating big in me because I did predict Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership wouldn't make October.

"Not The ALP"

Tony Abbott made his statement and his pitch was essentially, "we're better than them. If you replace me, we're no better than them. Do you really want to be them?" The interesting thing about that rhetorical construction is that by the time he's asking it, it's too damn late - your party has already become the enemy you so despise. Which is not surprising because these kinds of hatreds embody projections and misjudgments coloured by one's own prejudices. I for one just can't get into the mindset of conservatives who think Tony Abbott was doing such a bang up job.

It's also symptomatic of Tony Abbott's gaffe-prone leadership in as much as he opens his mouth, simple un-nuanced sentences come out, the meaning is parsed and misinterpreted, and results in a backlash. Malcolm Turnbull of course has a wonderful faculty of language where he speaks in full conjugated sentences and can convey nuanced arguments with varying shades of grey distinctions. It's really no match - but it explains the hostility of the rusted-on conservatives towards Turnbull. They just don't understand him. Because they're idiots.

If you had to put some finer point on Tony Abbott's failure as a leader. it was that he was not a terribly deep thinker. And as a trivial thinker, his worst mistake was that he hardly knew himself, but presumed to know the world. It's extraordinary in a man so traveled and educated and in such high office, but the man simply could not figure out the logical inconsistency of his platforms. Which effectively made him look like a functional idiot. And of course - as Machiavelli noted - once contempt sets in against a leader it is corrosive to the point of destruction. I am hoping today is the last entry wherein I tag my entry with both 'Tony Abbott' and 'Stupidity'. It is best for all sides to just out that Tony Abbott Prime Ministership into the record books and move right along.

And so it came to pass that Malcolm Turnbull finally ousted Tony Abbott.

Let's Not Get Carried Away, Their Politics Still Suck

I've written in the past what I think of Malcolm Turnbull as the alternative. I'm not so high on him as some on the left are. I think he's going to do the expedient thing to stay in power for as long as possible, which means he won't be putting through legislation for gay marriage or shut down the Nauru and Manus Island concentration camps. He is, above and beyond Tony Abbott himself, a candidate for the big end of town.

The marginal improvement will be that he won't be so beholden to particular people on the lunar right like Tony Abbott was to Gina Rinehardt. Instead, you can count on him to be deeply in cahoots with the Telco oligopoly, the Banking oligopoly, the Supermarket oligopoly the Mining oligopoly, and whatever else links he might have with boards of the ASX200. In other words it would look less like crony capitalism without executions - but when they talk about reforms to increase productivity, they're still talking about whacking out penalty rates and weekend rates.

As Tanya Plibersek blurted out this morning, it's the same package, different salesman. People are reading way too much in to the apparent socially-progressive-ness of Malcolm Turnbull. If he looks socially progressive, it's only because he wants a Republic, believes in climate science and climate change, and supports Gay Marriage. He's still into regressive taxation and $100,000 uni degrees, and dressing these things as "opportunity".

The Meaning Of Five In Five

Why has our polity been beset with the kind of ructions that result in 5 Prime Ministers in 5 years? This is the topic that will be studied for years to come. Antony Green, ABC election analyst offered up the view that our two major parties are now too rigid. The fact that in other parliamentary democracies, voting with the party is not enforced so vigorously, it gives rise to vote with the conscience. The flip-side of that is if a faction wants something their way, they have to install a leader who sees things completely their way. And this explains the tremendous amount of rope Julia Gillard got from the unions as well as the carte blanche destruction Tony Abbott was asked to wreak upon the renewables sector in this country by the climate sceptics in his party.

Is our democracy somehow broken? Tony Abbott blamed the media in his final speech as Prime Minister, but it seems what has happened is that the population has learned to hit the polity hard through polls. They voted in Tony Abbott because they didn't like the ALP. Then they realised they liked Tony Abbott less, and so they kept sending messages to Canberra. Eventually the party power structure took notice and swapped out the Prime Minister. The frenetic polling is in a sense, the substitute for voting - but it got the job done. Seems to me the people got what they wanted so democracy must be working quite fine.

The other notable phenomenon is that Australia has become incredibly diverse. The views held by the electorate - and let's remember there's compulsory voting so everybody's thinking counts - has become equally diverse. In many instances, the combined political views are simply too diverse to be put under 2 major parties all the time. There is no comfortable middle. There is just the frenetic movement of the opinion needle and polls, poking their displeasure at the politicians for not being as diverse as the public it serves.

The years Tony Abbott was Leader of Opposition and then Prime Minister represent 6 years in which the lunar right of the Liberal Party got a hold of the agenda to push it as far as it could take it. Naturally the public objected and so the lunar right's 'man' has been pushed out of the driver's seat. Democracy is still functioning.

The Demographic Long Game

The instalment of Malcolm Turnbull by the Liberal Party also marks a decided move to fight history. It is the conservative way. If the future comes knocking, they do their best to lock the doors and turn out the lights, and make like nobody's home. It's actually a pitched attempt to dig in with the Baby Boomer generation and up, one last time. If the current group of Libs lose to the ALP and Greens in the coming election,they would have to go through a generational change, and then it will be Generation X on leadership in both sides of the house. For the Boomer demographic, this is possibly the last or next to last stretch in which the demographic weight associated with the Baby Boomers can call the shots.

The move to Turnbull shows the Boomers are not going out with a fight - and this has interesting implications. If Bill Shorten is ousted and the ALP look for an alternative leader, they might settle upon Anthony Albanese who was the runner up at the last contest for ALP Leader. He's a Boomer. So  the picture becomes Turnbull versus Albanese, Boomer versus Boomer, locking in an entrenched position. If Malcolm Turnbull's should turn into a lengthy government, then we'll be holding off Gen-X for a long while yet, in which case the conservatives win big time.

It stands to reason. All the forces with the invested capital betting one way and one way alone on fossil fuels are not, will not, cannot just give in to the upcoming generation change. They have to delay it as long as they can to suck the most money out of the system to pay for their retirements. This is the core of the conservative cause, which used to be the grey power block in the votes. The fight is to entrench the interests of the elderly - which nobody disputes is important - but as economic growth has stalled globally, this has meant it comes at the expensive younger generations; something that 'the young' do not yet understand if some of them intend to vote for Malcolm Turnbull.

Yet the conservative cause in this country knows full well where the lines drawn because Joe Hockey's moving of the retirement age up to 70 starts with Generation-X, deftly keeping entitlements in place for the last of the Boomers. It also explains the $100,000 degrees, and a great deal of other unfair things in the 1st Hockey budget.

The trick is, when the following generation comes through, they might not look upon the entitlements as necessary as the current generation of politicians. I've long predicted that Generation X will be forced to not pay those debts because there will be other debts that have to be paid, and this is going to be a social fault line. Everybody knows this, so the game plan is lock in the entitlements now so it becomes impossible to lock-pick. And to that end, the conservatives needed somebody who can feasibly hold office a lot longer than Tony Abbott. Faced with being wiped out, and then seeing a rising Gen-X leadership of the ALP taking over, the conservatives must have figured they can't go down without firing their best weapon.

Speechless

More Stupid Than We Ever Could Have Imagined

Just when you thought this government couldn't get any lower, any dumber, any deeper into the poo, along comes yesterday's gem of a cockup, Border Force. Lenore Taylor has the shortest, sharpest knockout here so let's defer to her for moment.

It began with a morning press release, announcing proudly that our new “border force” – a revamped and armed version of the frontline activities of immigration and the customs service that began operations in July – would be part of a big “crime crackdown” in Melbourne on the weekend. 

“ABF officers will be positioned at various locations around the CBD speaking with any individual we cross paths with,” said the border force regional commander in Victoria and Tasmania, Don Smith. 

“You need to be aware of the conditions of your visa; if you commit visa fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you’re caught out.” 

Immediately apparent to pretty much everyone except Smith, or whoever writes his press releases, was that this would require border force to “profile” who they questioned, or else uselessly question an awful lot of people out having fun on a Saturday night, that it would mean they were asking for documentation without any real reason to think the person had committed an offence and that – given all the pre-warning – anyone who really had a problem with their visa would probably be elsewhere. 

It was also pretty obvious this was border force establishing its paramilitary credentials as a law enforcer (it can now carry arms, detain people and gather intelligence) with a remit far beyond our borders.

Turns out there is a good reason to follow proper process when it comes to paramilitary and law enforcement type things – the kind of processes the actual military and police force often have.

By the time I heard about it on the ABC radio at midday, it was all ablaze. Public fury grew and by mid afternoon the goons had to back down. And so now we're picking up the pieces of the aftermath trying to figure out what kind mentation led to this escapade/fiasco.

It's most likely the fact that the Abbott Government can't come up with anything that wins the support of voters except banging on about security - so presumably they thought if they could bring that tough stance on immigration and terrorists and death cults like ISIS/ISIL to the street level, then people might be impressed. That they chose to unleash the stupidity in Melbourne CBD goes to show how tone deaf they are about just who might be impressed and who might be objecting. The last I looked, where they staged this 'Operation' is in the middle of Adam Bandt's seat - arguably the Urban Green Left hipster bastion of Australia outside Marrickville Council. Like, uh, hello is there anybody in there Mr. Abbott?

Others have dissected fully just how misguided and terrible this action was, so I won't go into it too deeply but I will suggest that this desperate stunt is surely a sign that Tony Abbott's time as Prime Minister is terminal. Surely the Coalition can't keep going with this; surely the Liberal Party cannot keep going with this; because the Australian public sure can't keep going with this stupidity. And if they can't replace him in a spill, the Governor General needs to step in and sack this government.

View From The Couch - 27/Aug/2015

Norovirus

I've come down with some weird lurgy this week. It's giving me nausea and acid reflux. I burp like a baby and can't seem to keep food down. My joints ache, moving around is a pain, and all the old sports injuries are barking. We grow old, we grow old and all that; but you really get to feel it when the joints hurt. Judging from the symptoms, my best guess is that it's the Norovirus. I've been going to work because it's not like I've got a fever or I'm totally incapacitated, but today I was just overwhelmed by this thing. It's a weird thing wanting to vomit and not wanting to vomit at the same time. There are few bodily functions where you simultaneously want to do it and you don't. Ejaculation comes to mind, but that's about it, and it's worlds apart from vomiting in the unpleasantness stakes.

Anyway. Let's really have a spew!

Markets Are Up!

I guess the predictions for a global meltdown were misplaced after all because share markets are up today. Sydney was up yesterday, defying global trends towards the financial apocalypse. This was possibly because going any lower would have made valuations totally 'under', on too many stocks. Jokes aside, BTFD ("buy-the-fucken-dips") is a legit strategy until you find yourself cresting on a bubble like the markets in China. The ASX on the other hand hadn't bubbled at all in comparison to some of these other changes around the globe, and so had less to fall. For all the screaming headlines of "$60 billion lost in a day!", that was roughly a 2.5% drop or so and much of that has recovered. If you bought in on "the-fucken-dip", then you would've done alright.

A lot of commentators are saying this was no Lehman Moment. Maybe that's true, but having experienced the original Lehman Moment, I don't think anybody wanted to chance it, which explains just how much things got oversold in markets outside of China on Monday. Michael Pascoe even had a column yesterday crowing about how he was going to BTFD. Like I said, if you bought in on "the-fucken-dip" this week, then you would've done alright.

The mid to long term is much, much murkier. I'm not the grizzliest of Market Bears, but China still scares the hell out of me. There's still a lot of drama to be played out in response to the share market bubble popping, especially when the people decide what they need to do is string up the market boss. It might be the case that there aren't that many shareholders in China, it's also true that they would have lost a bundle if they were leveraged up to their eyeballs leading up to the share bubble popping. There's still all that Property Bubble out there in China, with all the empty cities, leveraged shadow banking using commodities as collateral, and the commodity prices have bottomed out so you know there are margin calls going on. None of that has changed. There's no reason to think that we're out of the woods with all this China mess business.

Hockey's CYA Republicanism

Out of the blue, WTE Joe Hockey says he wants Australia to become a Republic. It's kind of weird, but I guess it's one way to rebrand yourself as "I'm not with Tony Abbott, I'm not on that team of suck". Uh, WTE Joe, oh-but-yes-your-are!

The other possibility I thought of was that Joe fears the incompetence of this government so much, he even fears the Governor General sacking Abbott's government. In which case, moving to a republic would kind of cover his ass. Perhaps I shouldn't try to guess the motives of the Worst Treasurer Ever.

The Republican debate is one of those interesting things that bring out all sorts of spurious arguments of identity. Admittedly, when Paul Keating was pushing for it, I thought the notion was totally logical and the conservative forces allayed against an Australian Republic were doing so out of zombie loyalties to a crown of a distant land who cared so little about any of us to the point of mutual irrelevance. And while that may be true, in the years since the referendum was lost I've had some time to read and think about all this.

One of the more disturbing things about a Republic - with a President - separate to the Parliament/Congress assembly is that you have to begin asking who gets to call the shots on the military. In America, this is the President and since some time around Lyndon Johnson, has been able to go to war without the approval of Congress. This is a big issue because hidden in it is the possibility of an exacerbated conflict between the Presidency and Parliament. It hasn't come to blows in the USA, but the track record of Republics around the globe are pretty telling. This problem happens far more often than not, and on a long enough timescale, it seems to happen inevitably.

It is such a woeful record that so many Republics fail, and give rise to military juntas that it is worth reflecting on whether the Republican model of any stripe can forestall this problem. Some argue that Australia's democracy is more mature so it won't happen. Yet I have it on good authority that during the Dismissal crisis in 1975 a trade unionist suggested to Gough Whitlam that he order the Army to remove  the Governor General. Gough laughed off the idea as lacking in common sense - but Australia's maturity as a democracy hinged on Gough Whitlam's good common sense. These things that inform good common sense are razor thin, and hardly robust at all.

As a centre-left-voting-pinko-pseudo-intellectual, it's tempting to remove the Queen, let the ancien regime be damned. Yet the historian and nascent political scientist in me says this is a dreadful risk to be imposing on this nation. I'm not as gung-ho as I used to be in the 90's about a move to a Republic. Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm just sick and tired of an abstract debate when we have actual, real-world difficult problems lying ahead of us. Malcolm Turnbull might ride again as the standard-bearer for the movement, putting in the good fight once more but that alone won't do it for me. I'm so leery of this topic, I don't even want to change the flag.

Speaking Of Our Real World Problems...

Former head of treasury Martin Parkinson says the Abbott Government is sleep walking its way into a recession. If things stay the course under this go-slow, do-nothing, collect-the-rorts Government, we would lose 5% of GDP in the next decade, which would be a pretty serious recession.
Pretty sobering, no? He wasn't the only one pointing out the problems we've got. Try this bit:

Economic modeller Janine Dixon from Victoria University had told the summit the Treasury's Intergenerational Report had painted a "rosy" picture of the future, projecting average growth in real income per person of 1.4 per cent, meaning that by 2055 Australians would enjoy real incomes 75 per cent higher. 

Her own modelling had real incomes growing by less than 1 per cent per year, meaning that by 2055 incomes would be only 44 per cent higher.

Put another way, it would take an extra 20 years to reach the income forecast in the Intergenerational Report for 2055," she said. 

Her modelling has productivity growing at only half the pace assumed by the Treasury, whose assumption was based on the unusually high decade of productivity growth that followed the economic reforms of the early 1990s. 

Melbourne University economist Ross Garnaut said if her estimates turned out to be correct, the budget would "never get back to surplus". 

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said Australia's economic growth rate had mostly started with a "two" instead of a "three", "despite the lowest interest rates in our lifetimes". 

Dr Parkinson said if economic growth remained nearer to 2.5 per cent than 3 per cent, as much as 5 percentage points of gross domestic product would be lost over the next decade. 

"If this is not happening because our population growth is slow, it means willingly accepting the impact of a recession," he said. 

"The loss of GDP from a recession is about 5 or 6 percentage points."
Without acting we would be "sleepwalking into a real mess".

Just as an aside, I don't know what to make of this new trend of one-sentence-pragarphs being written at the Sydney Morning Herald. It's like ADHD Journalism. Complaints about style aside, that's like a who's who of economic boffins saying - nay, shouting - to the government "LIFT YOUR GAME!". And my question to these esteemed boffins is, "WHAT IF THEY ARE SIMPLY INCAPABLE OF LIFTING ANY GAME THEY MIGHT HAVE, WHATSOEVER?!"

I guess we'll be kissing away that 5% in GDP. Still want to talk about Republics? I just want the Governor General we have now to sack this lot, pronto. Maybe it's not Norovirus that's making me want to vomit but simply living under this nauseating excuse for a government.

One More Plea From The RBA

So, at this conference going on, Glenn Stevens, he of the Reserve Bank of Australia had a few choice advice for this government.

Ordinary Australians don't relate to calls for reform emanating from politicians but they do want economic growth to create new jobs, grow prosperity, and provide long-term financial security for their families, Glenn Stevens has told policy makers in Sydney. 

However the Reserve Bank governor acknowledged that focusing on growth was no populist option and would mean squaring up to the kind of hard political challenges that both the current government and the opposition have shown no appetite for.

The call for growth came as Mr Stevens repeated his concerns that the Australian economy had entered a long-term plateau, in which trend growth is significantly lower than Treasury and therefore government forecasts assume.

In arguably the most significant contribution to the National Reform Summit, which has brought together business, union, community, and policy leaders, from around the country, the central banker said for economic restructuring to be embraced by voters it needed to be framed in terms of its end-stream benefits for people. 

To that end, he told the high-powered gathering that "the general public is much more likely to grasp, intuitively, a conversation about growth".

I don't know about you, but I take that to read, "do your jobs properly you stupid intellectual runts". And I think it applies equally to the Opposition as it does to the addled minds that are in power this minute. Collectively, this political caste has to stop playing too much politics, gaming the ideology stakes, and get on with the job of addressing the real issues.

Heydon Hanging On

You get a guy who is biased pretending to be unbiased. He subsequently gets busted for being biased. Yet the same biased guy gets to decide if his bias is a problem. He had last weekend to think it over and said he couldn't. Now that the week's dragged on to Thursday he says he still can't decide whether his bias is a problem in being a Commissioner for a Royal Commission. He says he'll tell us Friday.  In the mean time, the ACTU says not only did the guy biased, he misled everybody. That's being euphemistic - what I think they want to say is that he lied.

It just doesn't look good. So why would he opt to keep twisting the breeze any longer than he needs to? Imaginer's misplaced professional pride, but every minute he stays on runs through whatever professional credibility he has left. So he must be hanging on for some other reason right? Like... money, perhaps?

I guess it's just another thing going on in another ring in Abbott's Three Ring Circus Government.
I think it's time for me to give into this overwhelming desire to go puke. Good night!

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2015

When You Are Crap, The World Craps On You

167 bad polls in a row, would tell you something, most likely that you're not loved and you're not going to win.

Inside the Prime Minister's inner circle, they tell themselves that they can win the next election because Bill Shorten is so hopeless. 

They've told themselves that 166 times in a row; that's the number of consecutive polls since the government was ahead in any of them.That's counting all the surveys conducted by all six national pollsters, according to the research consultant John Stirton. 

With today's Fairfax Ipsos poll, they'll have to tell themselves once again, whistling past the graveyard for the 167th time. 

You have to go back 16 months, to a Newspoll in April 2014, to find any survey that put the government ahead. 

"I think the government is essentially stuck" in its long losing rut, says the Ipsos director, Fairfax pollster Jess Elgood. 

The closest Abbott came to breaking into winning territory was with its second budget, in May this year. 

The Coalition levelled with Labor on 50:50, on the election-deciding two-party preferred measure. 

"Its second budget was well received and its polling bumped up," says Elgood.

But three months on, we see that the budget was not an elevator to a higher level of support but a momentary appreciation. 

The electorate doesn't disagree with the Liberals' assessment of Shorten. The Labor leader's approval rating consistently has a minus sign in front of it. It's just that the people think Tony Abbott is even more hopeless. 

The really interesting thing there might be the run of one sentence paragraphs. Gotta love these subeditors out in New Zealand. :)

More seriously... it should be obvious by now that Abbott didn't really win in 2013 on any merit whatsoever except for the single fact that he wasn't from the ALP. It's getting to the point where Abbott's doing serious harm to the country. He might be doing things pleasing to the nut job right wing of the Coalition, but the more they insist on their crappy agenda, the more it locks the entire government into the electorally hated zone. And let's make no mistake, even the long-time Liberal voters in blue-ribbon seats hate Tony Abbott. They only vote Liberal because it's religion (and there's really no cure for that variety of stupid).

Of course, the obvious man with electoral appeal is exactly the man the right wing of the Coalition cannot abide, Malcolm Turnbull; which essentially duplicates - in mirror image - the problem of the Gillard Prime Ministership wherein the factional heads loved Julia Gillard, but she had minimal appeal outside of her base supporters. This allowed Kevin Rudd to stalk her leadership all the way - but the faction leaders hated Rudd too much to have the good sense to go back to him. And so, the right wing powerbrokers of the Liberal Party who continue to back Abbott might end up losing their seats. Worse still, it's threatening to take down swathes of rookie Liberal and National MPs who came to Canberra on Tony Abbott's coattails. These backbench will get restless about that sort of projection. It's the same calculations that brought about the Gillard downfall. It's hard to defy the gravity of 167 losing polls.

The worst thing then, might be to pretend that polls go up and polls go down. In the case of Tony Abbott, they've never gone up enough call 'up'.

More On Dyson Heydon, Partisan Warrior

Not that I was ever close to the possibility of becoming a Rhodes Scholar back in my day at Uni, the notion of becoming a Rhodes Scholar does carry a certain gravitas with it. Well, it did, until I got up closed personal with some of the people who became Rhodes Scholars and quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't on the basis of the kind of merit or character that normal, ordinary people would call merit or character. Certainly my day, which was the second half of the 1980s, it was abundantly clear that it was more a case of smarm than smarts, charm than marks, connections and patronage than merit or character. I won't name names - it would be boring to do so - but I will say I lost faith in the title long ago.

That Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar gets bandied about as if he were an ace guy on campus. I don't know. He was a decade before my time so it's hard to say for sure but I've long suspected that by the time Tony was handed his, this fine institution had been rendered weak-chinned-and-neutered. Today we find out that none other than Dyson Heydon was on the panel that handed Tony Abbott his Rhodes Scholarship.

Mr Heydon was part of the seven-member Rhodes Trust selection committee in NSW that in 1980 handed the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to the future prime minister, then a 23 year-old student politician at Sydney University.

Tony Abbott, some time before his fateful boxing match that damaged his brain

According to documents seen by Fairfax Media at the NSW state archives on Monday, the selection committee was chaired by former NSW Governor, Sir Roden Cutler and "Professor JD Heydon" was a member.

The emergence of the Rhodes scholarship connection sets the personal relationship between Mr Abbott and his hand-picked judge to lead the trade union royal commission back decades.

Which all goes to show, it was smarm, charm, connections and patronage.  The men might deny - as they must, and as is their wont - but as any reasonable person could surmise, Tony Abbott was nothing special:

In his 2012 essay Political Animal, journalist David Marr, recounts how Mr Abbott "impressed a panel of worthies chaired by the governor of NSW, Sir Roden Cutler". 

"For Anglophiles and rugby players, the Rho­des was died-and-gone-to-heaven time. Winners must be scholars fond of sport who display "moral force of character and instincts to lead". The award to Abbott came as a surprise, particularly to those who had seen him up close on the SRC. One jibe at the time was, 'second-grade footballer, third-rate academic and fourth-class politician.'," Marr wrote.

Some men know how to cheapen the most impregnable heights of Empire. That's our Tony - everything he touches turns out cheapened; even the Rhodes Scholarship, even the Prime Minister's office. In some ways it is remarkable that a man could be of such low character and not get noticed on the way to the highest of offices. But that's how patronage works - picking out the people who would continue your cultural prejudices. And really, that's the kind of miserable government we've got, thanks largely to Tony Abbott.

As for Dyson Heydon, it seems he was getting his back scratched nicely by getting this appointment to look into corruption in the Unions. A real a snout-in-the-trough appointment by Tony to repay an old debt. Merit and character be damned. 

Mac Bank Boss Calls Out Government, Government Wimps Out

It seems to happen every day these days that the Liberal Party's own supporting lobbies step forward and slam the government for its bad governance and absence of policy worth spit. This time it's Macquarie Bank, which must feel like friendly fire with a howitzer in the back. 

Kevin McCann, the chairman of Macquarie Group, says the state of policy in Canberra is so dispiriting he feels he has to say something, despite his wariness about entering the political debate. 

In rare public criticism of the government of the day, Mr McCann has called on the Abbott government to stop fighting so many policy battles at once and to try to focus on just two or three priority areas.

"I've always been reluctant as chairman of a large company to start lecturing politicians and the community about what they should do, but I think I'm reluctantly changing that," Mr McCann said on Monday.

"With no disrespect to [Treasurer] Joe Hockey or [Assistant Treasurer] Josh Frydenberg, policy seems to have fallen off the table in Canberra."

Which is, neither here nor there, on its own. This bit however is pretty telling:

Mr McCann said on Monday that the Abbott government was failing to take the public with them on crucial policy reform and they desperately need to construct a narrative the public will find believable. 

And he singled out the Commission of Audit report as an example of the way in which the government had bungled its political messaging over the last 12 months. 

"I think it was a mistake to have the Commission of Audit say the country was busted, because the community knew that we weren't busted," Mr McCann said. 

"Surely we've got budget issues, but at the moment the community [feels] 'we're doing okay, why do we have to go through all this pain?' We've got to stop lecturing these people, we've got to have conversations and we've got to build up support," he said.
Mr McCann was speaking at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's business leaders' summit, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. 

He was sharing a panel with Mr Frydenberg whom defended the government's reform efforts, saying it is unfair to say policy has fallen off the table.
"The question [is], how do we get [reforms] through Parliament?" Mr Frydenberg said to the audience. 

"Let's call a spade a spade. The Productivity Commission ... was tasked by us to produce a blueprint for reform in industrial relations. [But] before they had even released their interim report the unions had come out against it. 

"[You should] say to our political opponents, don't run scare campaigns on issues as important as IR before the report has even hit the desk."

Good God Josh Frydenberg! So that awful Productivity Commission report which was a wishlist of crazy rightwing wet dream fantasies was the blueprint, and now that the Unions got up in arms and opposed it, they don't feel like they can get it through? It's not as if it's - God forbid! - a hung Parliament. They have the majority in the Lower House and the Senate has always been the place where negotiations took place. Just because you don't have the skills, patience, brains or stomach to negotiate in good faith, doesn't mean Australia's somehow ungovernable. It means you are insufficient to the task. It means you're not competent, worthy or appropriate for the job. It means you should quit. 

Government By Disaster

...Of The Disastrous, By The Disastrous, For The Disastrous

What a day of pasting. If I were the media advisor for the Abbott Government, I'd suggest quitting while being far behind. It's a bit of a free-for-all in the Fairfax presses, slamming the government's performance every which way.

The first big one was Laura Tingle who is the politcs editor on the AFR, but her article made it on to the SMH website. (By the way, I understand SMH now also stands for "Shake My Head" in internet argot. There's a certain truth to that)

Bombing Syria. Messing with the constitution to get a political outcome on same sex-marriage. These are now the playthings of a prime minister so desperate, so out of control that he is overseeing the complete surrender of proper governance to day-to-day tactics. 

The problem is that it isn't even working for him. Every issue that is running in politics at present is highlighting the bitter divisions, or policy confusion, or both, within the government. Cabinet ministers are publicly brawling over the appropriate legal vehicle, and timing, for deciding the question of same-sex marriage. Attorney-General George Brandis dismissed Scott Morrison's suggestion that there should be a referendum, and was publicly backed by two other senior ministers. Six MPs indicated they would cross the floor to vote in favour of same-sex marriage. 

Coalition MPs recognise that Tony Abbott's suggestion this week that the issue of same-sex marriage issue should go to "the people" was a purely political gambit to get it off the agenda short-term, shore up his support with conservatives in the party room, and bury it all together long-term. 

But the glaring tactical flaws in this idea - the belief it would both stop the debate and could somehow stop same-sex marriage being an election issue - are so spectacular that even some of those close to Abbott are scathing. Then again, the Prime Minister is now at war with his own party. His tactics are as much directed at his colleagues as his political opponents. He was quite happy to allow a party room debate to take place that saw 16 of his ministers argue against his position on same-sex marriage. 

It's not just on issues of social policy, however, where things have gone off the rails. The government continues to announce policies that are long on columns of smoke, large in cost and short in detail.

And there's a good deal more there but the essential point is that this government has lost its way. Not only has it lost its way, it has traveled so far off the map that it can be likened to Whitlam's time in Government. But of course Whitlam's was a busy government trying to do too much at once. This one is exactly the opposite according to Mark Kenny:

Despite what used to be urgent debt and deficit crises, the 44th parliament has become notable more for its absence of urgency, its dearth of pressing business. That, and for being regularly derailed by controversies like Thursday's revelations of inadvertent political fundraising by the hand-picked trade union royal commissioner, Justice Dyson Heydon. 

True, some important legislation has been passed this term and plenty blocked, but hours this week alone, have been devoted to bloated speech-making about deceased former MPs and an uncontested motion commemorating the Gallipoli landings 100 years ago. Notwithstanding that non-government MPs have largely stopped contributing, the Gallipoli commemoration debate has wound on an on, its wordy importance helpfully filling the airy spaces and eating up time.   

So "crucial" is the debate about the 100th anniversary that even when news broke on Thursday, exposing Heydon's extra-curricular activities, Christopher Pyne opposed any suspension of proceedings to discuss it, pretty much on the grounds that the commemoration was of primary importance. 

Perhaps this is apt because this penchant for rear-view romanticism over current business feeds Australia's ongoing self-delusion. 

Indeed, our national character has long been framed by its curiously concocted Anzac legend. We are, we like to believe, a nation of iconoclasts, or as we might prefer to say, larrikins - good natured if disrespectful, egalitarian by instinct, inclined to challenge authority, suspicious of station and wealth, and above all, courageous. 

But how courageous really? And how genuinely egalitarian? The marriage equality challenge has revealed a woeful failure on both scores with fear of the future again emerging as the locomotive 'force majeure'. 

The country that will not consider changing its flag, cannot imagine constituting itself independently, and can no longer even discuss economic reform except by way of wild misrepresentation in the negative – think industrial relations, renewable energy, taxation, and the federation - has lost its bottle for social reform also.

And there is much more there. Kenny too thinks that the problem is that the government is too scared to face up to the future and so spends its time in abject denial of the changes it cannot control. 

Comparable countries have moved on marriage equality and done so under conservative governments. Think David Cameron's Britain, Stephen Harper's Canada, and John Key's New Zealand, not to mention predominantly Catholic Ireland. 

But not Australia. The famed social laboratory of the 19th and 20th centuries has become the laggard of the 21st. Scared, meek, backward-looking, gripped by polarisation and lumbered with a class of political leaders cowering against change.

They're pretty damning words - and that's just us talking about it as Australians. Turns out Peter Hartcher's been talking to some Kiwis, and they have offered some interesting insights:

The collective analysis of Key and his ministers, which came together over glasses of red that evening in Sydney, was two-fold. First, they saw that the Abbott government had no reform narrative. It had slogans, but no persuasive case.

Second, they concluded that it had no "political architecture" to manage the government. They were "puzzled about the absence of an architecture for conducting the business of government – how to take the backbench along with the executive, how to reach out to the crossbenches, how to connect with key constituencies", says a participant.

A glaring example the Kiwis remarked on – how could a political party whose support base is 50 per cent female have but one female member of cabinet?

In sum, Abbott was not equipped to carry the people or manage the government. These fundamental failures fated the government to fail. 

It was obvious to an experienced overseas leadership team a year and a half ago, and it's now glaringly, distressingly plain to all.

It's a little dramatic of Peter Hatcher to be writing that. Let's face it; if we exercised even a teensy-weensy bit of imagination back in say, - oh, I don't know - September 2013, it was glaringly obvious that Tony Abbott and his team were ill equipped to actually govern this country. Indeed Paul Keating even warned us saying "God help us, God help us all". It was glaringly obvious to most sane human beings of this nation, but not only did the Murdoch presses line up to shove this brain-damaged junkyard dog into the Prime Minsiter's office, most of the editors of the Fairfax Papers wrote they supported a change to this lot led by the brain-damaged ex-Oxofrd-pugilist. 

Since then it's been crappy policy enactments, one after the other; Sadistic treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boats? Sure. Wind back the carbon pricing mechanism that was working so well to cut emissions? Sure thing. Scream about a budget deficit problem like we're the next Greece? Why not? Worse, shittier NBN? Signature policy! Partisan ideologically driven budgets? Glorious! None of these moves are or were supported by the wider electorate - but they did it anyway, and they think they've done a good job.

And they wonder how they got into this mess.

Back to Laura Tingle who closed her piece with this bit:

If you hang around in Canberra long enough, you start to recognise the point where a government has become terminal, where the death spiral is irretrievable. It's got nothing to do with the polls, or leadership rumblings. 

It's the point where the sheer stupidity of its decisions is so obvious, so craven, so contradictory, that everyone involved - ministers, backbenchers, the opposition, the media, voters - just know it can't go on like this. 

Some would argue that most of the Whitlam government's time in office was like that. But the days when Malcolm Fraser warned voters their money was safer under the bed than it would be under a Labor government, the days of forged faxes under the Keating government, the days when John Howard pledged $9 billion of spending in just one campaign speech, when Kevin Rudd announced the moving of the Sydney naval base to Queensland, all smacked of that time when everyone knew all was lost. 

But with the exception of Whitlam, all these things happened with just days or weeks to go before polling day. 

We are as much as 12 months from the next election. Abbott's conservative supporters might not want to abandon him. Scott Morrison is clearly positioning as an alternative conservative candidate. 

But at some point the conservatives - and the Coalition more broadly - will have to decide not just whether they are prepared to lose an election, but whether they are prepared to have the Coalition's reputation for good government become likened in history to that of Whitlam's.

Tony Abbott certainly doesn't want to admit it, but the writing's on the wall. It's "game over" with nothing but the running down of the clock. As Tingle notes, it is amazing that there's 12months to go to the next election from this point in. It feels way more terminal than that. I'd be surprised if Tony Abbott was still Prime Minister in October. Just looking at these journos, it is clear there is a groundswell of a chorus in the community that wants Tony Abbott to go. The Liberal Party just isn't listening. That leaves us with the continued train-wreck-governance to carry on until the next election. 

When they said may you live in interesting times, I sure didn't expect it to be this kind of 'interesting'. 

More Stupidity - 13/Aug/2015

Impartiality? What Impartiality?

Just how stupid are these guys? Tony Abbott's 'front' for nosing around in union business looking for corruption is a point man, Judge Dyson Heydon. Now, without prejudice, here's what is says about being judge in the law books:

"Although active participation in or membership of a political party before appointment would not of itself justify an allegation of judicial bias or an appearance of bias, it is expected that, on appointment, a judge will sever all ties with political parties. An appearance of continuing ties, such as might occur by attendance at political gatherings, political fund raising events or through contributions to a political party, should be avoided."

So with that, we are given the news that Judge Heydon was going to be a keynote speaker at a Liberal Party fundraiser.

Mr Heydon was listed as the keynote speaker at the Sir Garfield Barwick Address on August 26 at the Castlereagh Boutique Hotel in Sydney. 

An invitation written on a Liberal Party letterhead obtained by Fairfax Media says the $80 cost should be made to the Liberal Party of Australia's NSW division. It also calls for donations if people are unable to attend.

"All proceeds from this event will be applied to state election campaigning," the invitation's fine print notes. 

A spokesman for Mr Heydon released a statement shortly before 11.30am saying he would now not deliver the address. 

"As early as 9.23am this morning (and prior to any media enquiry being received) he advised the organisers that 'if there was any possibility that the event could be described as a Liberal Party event he will be unable to give the address, at least whilst he is in the position of royal commissioner'."

Which is just as well, but by then the cat washout of the bag. This is the problem with this government - apart from the repeated acts of stupidity - they seem to have stuffed a lot of cats in lots of bags and they keep getting out. 

This is a remarkable own goal. They set up a commission to bully the unions. They put in a judge who is clearly a party sympathiser in charge (ignoring the conflict of interest). Then they invite him to speak at one of their own fundraiser, thus blowing his cover. What a fiasco. The ALP had no hand in this, and now whatever shred of credibility the stupid Royal Commission was holding on to has been blown away, exposing the naked partisan politics writhing like some exposed worm in the sun. 

You can't make this stuff up. You just can't.

Now the lawyers are saying the union officials who were forced to appear in front of this Royal Commission could sue the government. 

Patrick Keyzer, who's head of La Trobe University's law school, said he respected the former High Court judge, describing him as a "distinguished Australian jurist", but said there would be an obvious difficulty with a royal commissioner agreeing to speak at a fundraiser for the Liberal Party.

Labor and the Greens called for Mr Heydon to be removed as a commissioner. Mr Abbott refused, defending him as "beyond reproach."

"Before now [bias] wouldn't have been faintly arguable, but these circumstances may cause some parties before the commission to head for the books," Professor Keyzer an expert on public law said. 

While there was a "higher threshold" of evidence required to prove a royal commissioner has been biased compared to a sitting judge, Mr Keyzer agreed it was a "real possibility" that witnesses could argue Mr Dyson "has engaged in an activity which creates a reasonable apprehension of bias".

What a joke. I doubt they would sue the Royal Commission, but the mere fact that it could be suggested has essentially robbed the Royal Commission of any claims to impartiality. What's even funnier is Tony Abbott defending his judge-friend-partisan-warrior, just as he did with Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker of the House and we all know how that went. Does he have any political capital left to be mounting that defence on the judge's behalf? Will it wash? Does it wash? Does it pass the sniff test? 

Mark Kenny has written a piece saying the question has moved from if the farce willed to when it will end.

For Abbott, it is another decision gone wrong. Just as Bronwyn Bishop's demise was the maturation of a dud call made long before, Heydon's judicial appointment had been aggressively partisan from the beginning. 

Unless Heydon can come up with a compelling explanation for his involvement in the address, then any suggestion that he was unaware that he was participating in a Liberal Party fundraising event when he agreed to speak will be extremely hard to believe - a lot less so in fact than the conclusions and inferences he would be likely to draw from the evidence his inquiry adduces. 

Besides, what does such ignorance say for his inquisitorial prowess, and or for his attention to important administrative detail? 

Liberals worried about their leader's performance this week on same-sex marriage now have another problem to add to the list. 

What was it Abbott told his shell-shocked colleagues in the wake of the Bronwyn Bishop crisis? When we talk about jobs and the economy, we thrive.
Not much talk of that at present.

I'd be surprised if he's still Prime Minister at the end of October. 

The Go-Slow Government

NBN: Delivering On Their Promise To Make It 'Shit'

I've come to the conclusion this government likes to go slowly on things because too late or too little is better than nothing, but would never - ever - look progressive. And so, they came to power promising to cut the NBN so shreds, and now that they are 22months into government, they've delivered on that promise mightily.

The Singaporean company named as one of Telstra's biggest worries by its outgoing chief executive David Thodey has labelled parts of the $41 billion national broadband network as "shit" as it prepares to launch services in Australia. 

MyRepublic is a Singaporean internet start-up led by co-founder Malcolm Rodrigues that offers unlimited broadband at super-fast speeds for low prices. When asked about competition during his exit interviews, Mr Thodey said it was tier-three disrupters including MyRepublic that the company worried about more than TPG or Optus.

Now the disrupter is coming to Australia, having previously launched in New Zealand and Indonesia. Mr Rodrigues told Fairfax Media that MyRepublic will build a local team this year and launch services by mid-2016 with the goal of shaking up the entire broadband market. 

"We've kind of re-engineered the economics of telcos and this is what David Thodey was talking about," he said. "We're going to come in with an unlimited 100 megabit per second offer at the $80-$90 per month range. 

"We acquire customers at a fraction of the cost of incumbents, we [provide] service [to] those customers at a fraction of the cost and we don't churn."

Seriously! Who could have imagined that? But no, it sure wasn't this government that decided to dumb down and slow down the NBN to the point of being described as shit. Or was it?

Mr Rodrigues said he "loved the NBN" but that it had lost its way by moving onto fibre-to-the-node technology, which partly relies on slower copper phone lines to cut costs and save time. His company benefits from networks that operate on one foundation technology. 

The Coalition ordered the change after Labor's NBN rollout hit major construction problems and delays. But Mr Rodrigues claimed FTTN reliance on copper would see it deliver slower speeds than promised – a claim the government strongly denies. 

"I don't know what [the government] is doing on the other policy fronts but on this they've completely stuffed it," he said. "More and more Australians will leave the country looking for jobs and you'll continue to be a resource based economy – the hope of building IT jobs and a digital economy will kind of be more difficult to achieve. 

"On FTTN we'll market 100Mbps and when people come over we'll say 'sorry, thank your government [because] you're on a shit network and the most you can get is 20-30Mbps, but we will continue to lobby your government to turn it into a fibre-to-the-home one and as soon as you get there we'll get you a free upgrade to fibre'."
Mr Rodrigues said the NBN was clearly gaining momentum and would eventually find its way. But he was also adamant that Australia would fall behind if 50Mbps by 2020 was used as the national internet benchmark. 

"We want to turn Indonesia into a digital nation – I want to start stealing jobs from Australia and have people come do it out of that market," he said. 

He said the Federal Government would've been better off focussing on key markets and extending the timeline for building the NBN, which has been underway since 2009. 

"What they should've said is that this would be a 20 year rollout rather than a 10 year rollout and focussed on building FTTH into the key markets and continued to push that," he said. "I'd even be okay with the current approach if they said this was phase 1 and that phase 2 would be to move the FTTN guys to FTTH [as part of the plan]."

The mind boggles at just how big a stuff up this has been - all because Tony Abbott and the Slow-a-lition wanted to gut the NBN to help their crony friends at Telstra when it fact doing so did not help their long term competitiveness in the least bit. You never would have guessed the NBN was the crucial policy element in the last Federal election but people obviously missed it and voted for the guy determined to make it a shittier network. I guess now they got what they wanted.

Our Emission Reductions Will Go Slower Than Yours

And here is the dreaded announcement involving the emissions target. The PM of dumb says we're aiming for a 26% reduction by 2030.

The highly anticipated target based on 2005 levels would leave Australia trailing the international pack on emissions cuts beyond 2020, despite being among the worst greenhouse gas polluters per capita in the Western world.

The proposed figure of 26 to 28 per cent is well below the more ambitious effort climate experts say is needed to limit warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avert the worst climate changes.

However Mr Abbott said the government's focus was always on growth and jobs, and the pledge was a "good, solid economically responsible, environmentally responsible target".  

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who will lead the Australian delegation at the crucial Paris climate talks this year, said the target was ambitious and the nation was "doing our bit".

Sure thing Jules! Sure thing Greg! Sure we're doing our bit if you count jogging on the spot and working a sweat as getting to the destination. It's more accurate to say, we're going as slow as we can on this so that we look like we're going something, but we're doing the bare minimum by which we could be judged to be doing something. Anything less and really, we'd be doing nothing at all.

The reaction to the announcement has been negative in the same way that a chorus of disapproval erupts when you ask people to make a sacrifice for very little return. It's not morally or ethically sound, it's not even economically sound, but Tony Abbott & Co. are busily strapping the future Australia on the mast of the good ship coal industry as it sails into the worst commodity storm this century. Yeah, it's more foolhardy than brave, but that's the idiot we've got handling the boat.

The headline here looks hysterical except, the circumstances themselves are hysterical, so I don't think it's worth grousing about the hysteria. It's true, Tony Abbott is going to have to apologise to his children for not doing enough. But in some ways the problem is already here and unfolding quicker thane can say "carbon dioxide emissions", so there's not much point haranguing the Prime Minister. He knows he's fucking it up, and fucking it up big time at that. The truth is, he doesn't fucking care, so, there!

More Stupidity

Fear & Loathing In Idiotsville

For some time now, every time I blog about the Abbott Government, I inevitably end up tagging the same post with the word 'stupidity'. If you click on the tag, you'll find a whole bunch of entries to do with Tony Abbott and his government. Lately, the tag has become automatic in a way that not even in the darkest days of the Howard Government would I have labelled every government move as a piece of stupidity. Yet this government? Never fails to find a new act of stupidity that cannot go unremarked.

And if you thought I was the only one beating this drum, no, it has become evident that many in the  media are now pointing out just how self-defeating and lacing in basic intelligence this government can be. If Peter Hartcher is asking what is the point of this government, then you can be well assured that the entire media gallery is running with the Abbott-is-an-idiot meme.

The government is so lost, its standing so poor, its members so sick of Abbott's captain's picks, that the party is sullenly contemplating, once again, whether it needs to replace the captain. 

"In February he asked for time," as he pleaded for his job in the party room, says one Liberal MP. "He asked many of us for six months." It's been six months, a deadline that expired this week. 

"The reality is that nothing's changed and nothing's improved. He asked some people to give him to the end of the year. Well, we aren't quite there yet.

"This government is doing some good things. But there isn't anyone who thinks this is a good government." The Abbott government is approaching an existential moment. The existential question: What is the point of the Abbott government?

There is no point, is the answer to the rhetorical question. The problem now is how the Liberal Party goes about replacing Tony Abbott with the aim of winning the election next year; but given the two budgets and the 22month long slog of entrenched low opinion polls, there may be no panacea.

The best thing that could be said of the Abbott Government is that it will end. At some point in history. Beyond that, is anybody's guess as to how and when the historic inevitability happens. Until then we will bask in each and every stupid thing this government does as it fights a pointless rearguard action for the lunar right. 

In case you missed it, the most recent bit of Stupidity-ridden Tony Abbott-ism was his denunciation of the court decision to halt the Adani mine, calling it sabotage. This earned him a quick lesson in the notion Separation of Power from the NSW Bar:

"These comments demonstrate a lack of understanding of the independent role of the courts in our democracy," she said. 

"The courts exist to make decisions according to the law, not to further the interests of particular individuals or organisations, including government. 

"They are an independent arbiter of disputes, and politicians need to understand and respect their non-partisan role." 

Ms Needham said courts were not the servant of the government, and "any such implication is inimical to the basic principle of the separation of powers", which is fundamental to the Westminster system. 

She said it was critical that courts made decisions on the basis of the legislation they were charged to interpret, and the facts of each case before them. 

"Legislation imposes strict conditions on developments such as coal mines, and the courts' task in these circumstances is to scrutinise the executive's actions to ensure that any approvals fall within legislative parameters," she said.

That looks like a resounding verbal thrashing. It's good that the NSW Bar isn't taking the Stupid-is-as-stupid-does sort of approach to such statements.

Still, that's just how things go in the land of the Abbottoir where Captain's Picks turn out arse. 

The Dark Shadow Of Student Politics Of A Generation Ago

Way back in the 1960s and 1970s, way before I hit even tertiary education, Student Politics was big. It was a world wide phenomenon wheretoBay Boomers - rightly - went activist and supported the case of not fighting in Vietnam and reforming various institutions. It gave birth to Feminism and Feminist Theory, as well as usher in the Post-Modernity whereby traditional frameworks for judgment were broken down by a new kind of criticism emanating out of France where the street fights around barricades were the fiercest. 

By the time I got to University, this flame had died down, but not for reasons commonly used to explain it. The radical-ness of student politics in Australia reached an apotheosis whereby it blew it self up on the national stage in 1983. It was acrimonious, pungent, arcane, riddled with misinformation about itself, and then silence followed. The last President of the Australian Union of Students was none other than Julia Gillard. The most active students in demolishing the Union, were Peter Costello and Tony Abbott. These names don't come from nowhere. They came from this very cauldron of ill-will, hate and rancour. 

By 1985 when I arrived on campus, there was just a smouldering ember of it left on campus at the University of Sydney.  The guy who ran for SRC president was Joe Hockey. Again, these names don't come from out of nowhere. They started early at University and made careers out of this kind of thing. The flipside is that if you want proof that these people are nothing but apparatchiks and careerists, well, you only need to look at their history. Make no mistake, the utter absence of substance in Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership is not very surprising given who and what he has been over the years. The incompetence, the gratuitous point-scoring, the rancorous partisanship-over-policy, didn't just evolve out of nowhere and nothing. These people carried it with them from their student politics days and now they are inflicting it on the nation (as they hurriedly draw down their benefits and entitlements). 

All of which is to say, there are days I genuinely regret not involving myself in politics - if but for the adage credited to Socrates where in it is said that those who do not involve themselves with politics are doomed to be ruled by men lesser than themselves. Every time I look at this bunch, I am forced to think of Socrates' line.  

View From The Couch - 05/Aug/2015

Just How Dumb Are These Guys? - Part 1

I've been saying for some time that the competence of this government is seriously under question. The way they bumble along from one dumb decision the next and the way they keep pandering to the donors of their party at the expense of the rest of the country can drive a man to drink. But you sort of expect all governments to have a level of competency that can be measured.

It turns out this might be the worst government for actually doing the governing bit, since Billy McMahon's ill-fated government the 1960s.

To date, the Abbott government has passed just 0.372 acts per day since it came to office, compared to 0.438 for the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments (and Gillard had to contend with minority government), 0.452 during John Howard's tenure, 0.476 for Paul Keating, 0.491 for Bob Hawke's governments, 0.481 for Malcolm Fraser, 0.472 for Gough Whitlam, and 0.436 for McMahon. Barring some unexpected burst of productivity in the latter half of this year, the Abbott government is on track to have the worst record for passing legislation since the late 1960s.

Legislative malaise may help explain why some key statistical indicators relating to health, education, poverty, Indigenous Australians, women's progress and home ownership, show the Abbott government has conspicuously failed to make progress. The Abbott government may have "stopped the boats" and repealed the carbon tax but these are not policy measures that have a demonstrably big impact upon the lives of ordinary Australians. 

The Abbott government's failure to implement so many of its own pre-election promises has contributed to a perception of it as an inefficient government. It has also experienced some very public reversals and botches on policy, including the Medicare co-payment, delaying payments for unemployed young people, cuts to the age pension, race discrimination law, jobseekers applying for 40 jobs a month, deregulation of higher education, and Tony Abbott's signature paid parental leave policy. 

The unexpectedly harsh budget of 2014 is likely go down in Australian political history as the worst received federal budget and especially because, unlike "horror" budgets of the past, all the pain inflicted didn't even achieve what it was intended to do – it didn't reduce the deficit. Gross debt jumped from $59 billion in June 2008 (or 5 per cent of GDP) to about $430 billion by June this year (26.3 per cent of GDP). The Commonwealth's debt-to-GDP ratio is now at the highest level since the ABS's quarterly records began nearly 30 years ago.

There's a term for such performance in sabermetrics. They call it 'below replacement level'; by which they mean there is a threshold above which good performance becomes significant, and below which the performance needs to be replaced by some fungible entity from the freely available pool of talent. In other words, if they sacked Tony Abbott and replaced him with a replacement level backbencher like Wyatt Roy, they may actually do better. 

Just How Dumb Are These Guys? - Part 2

The Abbott Government is trying to force through legislation that allows it to strip a dual national of their Australian citizenship if they are found to be terrorists. It's an ugly can of worms to begin with, and hardly something yucca justify logically; it's more of a "Fuck-you-you-Arab/Leb/Muslim/jiahdist-terrorist" move that attempts to bypass fairly fundamental rights Australian citizens have. Just how awful this bill is, has been revealed, and it makes for some hilarious reading.

Constitutional lawyer George Williams has described the Abbott government’s bill to strip citizenship from dual nationals as “one of the most poorly drafted” he has seen and warned it would catch many Australians who have “nothing to do with terrorism”. 

The bill, which aims to strip citizenship from dual nationals for taking up arms against Australia, removes “natural justice” rights and allows for no public notification for stripping citizenship from dual nationals, he said. 

“The first thing the person may know is when they get a knock on the door and in fact that’s probable if only because the authorities don’t have to alert a person beforehand,” Williams said.

“They may want the person to find out they’ve lost citizenship at the moment they are taken into immigration detention.”

Williams told the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security (PJCIS), which is examining the bill, that due to its poor drafting the Australian Citizenship Amendment was in “no fit state to be passed”.

So, in a rush to write this piece-of-shit bill, they've not done due diligence and thought things through and in the process created more problems for themselves that are not easily solved, nor are they entirely constitutional. 

Williams said while he was mindful of the need to deal with non-state actors involved in terrorism, the bill could revoke citizenship for dual nationals such as:

• a business person travelling to declared area to conduct “innocent business”,
• people who incite violence against other groups on the basis of race, such as those involved in the Cronulla riots,
• people who train others, even if they are unaware how the skills are used, such as computer teachers,
• the Red Cross providing humanitarian assistance in war zones, and
• those involved in minor property crimes such as graffiti artists or protestors “sitting in” on commonwealth property.

Williams said he had already been approached by lawyers asking advice on how dual national bill, introduced prior to the winter recess, could be challenged in the high court.
He said he was confident there was a strong case against bill on three grounds. That is, the “inescapable aspect” of the separation of powers, the removal of voting rights from dual nationals and the fact that the bill renders Australian dual citizens as “aliens” when, in his opinion, the court would not see Australian-born citizens as “aliens”.

 Clearly they can't make this work without taking a giant axe to the rule of law. The fact that they even thought this was viable tells you they're not really the full quid.