Will It Never End?

No, Really, Is This The Way We'll Be Forever?

When I cast my mind back to the events that led to Kevin Rudd's Removal, I'm led back to the chain of events involving the ETS. In late 2009, the ALP Government worked hard to get an agreement at Copenhagen, and of course that fell to bits. In the wake of Copenhagen ending up in smithereens without an agreement in sight, it suddenly put into sharp focus the likelihood that Australia was going to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme that was tailored for a world in which there had been an agreement in Copenhagen. And this whole fiasco triggered the sequence of events culminating in The Removal (I'm putting in caps so we can understand it like we understand The Dismissal).

In short, Julia Gillard - a good union stalwart that she is - opposed the ETS. It was too soon in her opinion and best buried. So on her advice, and Wayne Swan's advice, Kevin Rudd postponed it indefinitely to the never-never. This led to his polls collapsing. Then he tried to jump start his polls by doing the mining tax and that led to a mining industry backlash campaign, which further damaged his standings in the poll. And so it was time to do a bit of damage control, remove Kevin Rudd, soothe the public, and go to an election to shore up the ALP position. Of course we know what happened then: Julia Gillard campaigned on not having an ETS or a Carbon Price and ended up with a hung Parliament. To form government, she then had to do a fateful backflip and team up with the Greens who made it conditional to have a Carbon price followed by an ETS.

Consequently any time she claimed the carbon price was a good thing, she sort of looked like a real wally because it was difficult to imagine a person who fought and politicked against it twice - knifing a Prime Minister in the process - going on to sell something she clearly didn't put as great an emphasis upon, unlike the man who said it was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Yes, the very same PM she knifed. Power-hungry psychopath he may have been; a chaotic screaming control-freak he might have been; but at least he clearly wanted to do the ETS and do it right.

During the Gillard years I often got asked by ALP supporters why I still wanted Kevin Rudd to come back and I had to explain the above from scratch, each and every time. Put simply, Rudd was the guy who was willing to do the right thing. Gillard was the party hack that made sure it didn't happen until it became incumbent upon her to make it happen. You see, she's never been a conviction politician as far as the track record tells you. She's been an apparatchik, stayed an apparatchik, and her Prime Minster-ship was marked by moments she declared her position very much like an elevated apparatchik. ("I am not a social democrat."- great one, lady, just great!)

It's all water under the bridge now because Clive Palmer helped Tony Abbott get what he wanted, by repealing the carbon 'tax', which also involved a circus double act involving Al Gore of all people.(My head still spins when I think of that moment) Thus, one would think that all of this is so far in the rear view mirror of Australian politics except Julia Gillard is now trying to sell a book about all this form her point of view. No wonder she's been in the headlines a lot in the last week.

Why would she want to sell a book now? She's made for life, she's never going to starve or want for anything material. It's only been a year since she's been ousted. Why now? Why the money grab now? Is she dying of cancer? Is she migrating to England or somewhere, leaving us all behind? The last thing we need right now is a detailed rendition of her account in print. Really - we need that like we need a hole in our heads.

Naturally, Kevin Rudd thinks her account is fiction. It's fair to say he is being provoked.

On Wednesday, Mr Rudd fired back at the woman who knifed him politically and took over the nation's top political job in June, 2010. 

"Consistent with the past, Mr Rudd has no substantive comment to make on Ms Gillard's latest contribution to Australian fiction," Mr Rudd said through a spokesman. "The Australian people have long reached their own conclusions about Ms Gillard's relationship with the truth – from the coup to the carbon tax." 

"They have also reached their own conclusions on Ms Gillard's continuing efforts to reconstruct a justification after the event for her actions in June 2010 by trying to dress up personal political ambition as some higher purpose for the party and the government."  

Mr Rudd's former deputy prime minister, Anthony Albanese, moved to shut down discussion about the damaging political split that ultimately cost Labor government after just six years, during a National Press Club speech on Wednesday. 

"People have their critics but the fact is that Julia Gillard is a friend of mine, she remains a friend of mine; Kevin Rudd is a friend of mine, he remains a friend of mine. I'm about looking towards the future," he said. "If the entire caucus was concentrating on the needs of the Labor government rather than internals every day then I might be here without shadow before my portfolio."

At this point I want the both of them to fade back into history instead of trying to get their version out. It doesn't matter any more. Between the both of them, they managed to screw the pooch.  The both of them need to make a sanguine appraisal of that bit of history and their lousy part in it. We, on the other hand, have the immensely ugly and hopelessly difficult task of living under the utterly insane Abbott Government - a disaster they played great part in ushering in.

News That's Fit To Punt - 03/Sep/2014

Why? Because Fuck You

Everything this Federal Government does is tainted by a sort of grubby conflict of interest. Of course that's not confined to the Federal Government, because the greater conflict of interest might actually be Clive Palmer who owns a dirty big mining company, gets to make deals where a tax like the mining tax can get repealed. It's hard to imagine a more egregious and gratuitous case of helping yourself because you can.

The deal has meant that the government will halt the rise of superannuation. Naturally, with the sensibility of a cheesy movie villain, Tony Abbott tried to sell this as more cash in hand for employees which, frankly made me choke on my lunch. I'm sorry to tell you Mr. Prime Minister, but that's money that'll stay in the pockets of companies. Paul Keating has lambasted the government but honestly, if he wanted to still have a meaningful voice, he should've stayed on in parliament after 1996.

The repeal of the Mining Tax was of course one of the platforms of the Coalition so we ought not be surprised, but really, it is pretty disgusting how the Coalition are totally happy to sell out Australian citizens in favour of a gaggle of mining billionaires - Clive Palmer among them - and try to sell it as being good for the worker. Can it get any worse?

Yes it can. Here's how.

An Inconvenient Ruse

The emissions for energy generation jumped the most in eight years, since the end of the carbon tax.

So much for Al Gore coming to lend a hand in fighting the good fight against global warming. Thanks to the repeal, polluters have gone back to a kind of burn-baby-burn mentality and now it's out of control. Of course the plan by this government is also to smash the renewables industry, and directly pay these polluters to stop polluting.

It's like government by stupidity. You'd never have guessed thing would get this bad. No sane mind would have guess it would get this bad. But this unrelenting awfulness - "Operation Ongoing Enormous Clusterfuck" according to FDOM - was their platform! Grin and bear it.

Pink Batts Coming Home To Roost

Pleiades swung this one at me today. The best bit of news might be how the Royal Commission into the Pink Batts has yielded interesting results. In as much as it was a blatant witch hunt, it looks like it delivered a result that was assumed by the proponents of the Commission. Here's something from Crikey which is behind a pay wall:

 

First, Hanger found the training regime and regulations at the time of the first of four fatalities in October 2009 to have been seriously inadequate:
"With the exception of South Australia, which had a licensing regime for insulation installers, there was no insulation-industry specific regulation beyond the generally applicable occupational health and safety regulation."
But here’s the thing: then-minister for the environment Peter Garrett and his staff had spent most of 2009 tightening regulations and procedures. Hanger listed more than 40 interventions to address safety deficiencies -- all completed before October. So if the safety framework was still deficient by then, it must have been woefully, if not criminally, inadequate prior to 2008. Having presided over industry growth to the level of about 200,000 new and existing houses insulated annually, the previous Coalition government cannot escape culpability.

Secondly, Hanger opened wide the door to those wanting compensation for the program’s sudden termination:
"I find as follows:
"... the effect of the losses was to devastate many long-standing businesses ... and to cause as well personal financial collapse and severe despair and emotional harm;
"that harm and such circumstances justifies pre-existing businesses being compensated."
If compensation is won, it will be the Abbott government scrambling to find the funds.
This has a certain rough justice about it, of course. There is an argument that the scheme was not intrinsically dangerous and was not failing, rather that it suffered from extreme misreporting from the outset, by both Coalition MPs and a feral media.

Thirdly, the Commissioner was scathing about Abbott’s staff in the course of the inquiry:
"The Commonwealth did not suggest one witness that ought to be called. It did not generally volunteer documents that were not the subject of a summons to produce. It did not elicit any evidence of its own volition. All of this is despite the fact that it was the repository of the critical documents and the corporate knowledge of what had transpired."

Not even Peter Garrett copped such a shellacking:
"Furthermore, the Commonwealth hampered the work of those assisting me by the way in which documents were produced ... Other than in response to a specific request from the Commission, there seemed no logic in the order in which documents were produced. The Commission asked that documents be produced chronologically, however the Commonwealth did not oblige."

Finally, the Commissioner made it clear that if the federal government initiated the program, then safety is definitely its problem. Never mind the long history of state responsibility.
"There was much debate about whether workplace health and safety issues were a matter that was of any concern to the Australian Government, or whether it was more properly the concern of the States and Territories. It was said, by a number of federal public servants, that the Australian Government had no regulatory power in the field of workplace health and safety, and therefore that it was not a risk that the Australian Government could control. In my view, this attitude was deplorable."

That means occupational health and safety is now firmly a problem for the Federal Government. Every time somebody dies in an accident, he article suggests a ministerial head is going to roll. Worse still, the responsibility for the failure didn't just get sheeted home to the Rudd Government, it also got sheeted home to the Howard Government, and last I checked Tony Abbott was the health minister in the government. This thing is going to boomerang right back at him.

The Housing Bubble That Isn't But Of Which We Must Be Wary


For months - no make that years! -we've been hearing that Australia does not have a housing bubble problem. All the economists who have come and pointed out the great anomalies of housing prices in Australia have been laughed out of the public discourse while the anomalies only get bigger. As late as last month Glenn Stevens of the RBA was talking down any possibility that what we had on our hands was an actual bubble! No, he simply reiterated that sometimes the property market goes down. This month he's taking a different tack and saying there might be nasty shocks. Included in that link is a bit covering China where he cites a downturn in China might manifest itself as a nasty shock. If that wasn't enough, David Gonski of the ANZ Bank told the Australian British Chamber of Commerce that booming prices cannot possibly continue forever (now there's a brave call).

And lo an behold there's news that China's real estate market is going screwy. Some might even say it is crashing like it was a Global Financial Crisis. Speaking of crashing, the commodities market in China is crashing. I wonder if those things combined would form this so-called 'Nasty Shock' Glenn Stevens is talking about? Or will Sydney's housing prices simply just shrug it off and keep climbing?

Stay tuned for more fun!

 

 

 

 

Where Were These People On Election Day?!

ALP's Early Comeback

Polls are an awful thing really, because they measure results of what people allegedly think when given thoughts they wouldn't ordinarily have by themselves on choices they didn't formulate. If somebody told you the options for managing emissions was a 'carbon tax', an Emissions Trading Scheme', 'Direct Action' and nothing at all, you would be led to thinking this was the be-all and end all of all solutions and answer something out of this bunch of bad choices. Not to mention the inherent hostility of the polled person who can then bag out the incumbent for their incumbency and berate the Opposition for their opposition and so on and so forth.

In that light, I can only shrug at the newest poll showing the ALP have surged ahead of the Coalition.



The graphic says it all - less than 3months since the fateful election, the current Government finds itself in a position it would lose the two-party preferred vote. It didn't take long, and it didn't take much for the dissatisfaction to set in. If these people had exercise a bit of forethought, they might have  avoided the Abbott government altogether. Doesn't it make you sick?

The truly interesting thing might be this bit here:

But in a blow to the Prime Minister's plans, more people like the supposedly ''toxic'' carbon tax than his proposed replacement policy.

An Age-Nielsen poll shows little support for Tony Abbott's proposed carbon tax replacement policy.

Just 12 per cent of voters believe Mr Abbott's ''direct action'' policy of using taxpayer funds to purchase emissions reductions from polluters, and planting trees, is the answer. That amounts to a virtual vote of no-confidence in direct action, which has support 4 percentage points lower than the 16 per cent in favour of keeping a fixed carbon price.

The Age-Nielsen poll of 1400 voters found that Australians overwhelmingly wanted to see Australia meet the nation's commitment to cut emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 based on year 2000 levels.

While both sides of politics have committed to the minimum target, the poll shows voters prefer the policy Labor took to the last election - a switch to an internationally linked emissions trading scheme.

Fully 29 per cent nominated an ETS as the preferred mechanism to combat global warming - well ahead of ''some other policy'' on 24 per cent and 11 per cent who favoured ''no policy at all''.

In other words, the only reason people want the Carbon Tax removed is so they can go to an ETS. That's right, the only tangible reason people want the Carbon Tax gone is because they want the ETS So much for that mandate Tony Abbott's been going on about. Listening to his coded dog-whistling you would have thought Australia's electorate wants to go the way of the Ostrich in any discussion on trying to mitigate Climate Change.

The Drum on ABC 24 featured some Liberal Party apparatchik last Friday who wanted to tell us that the future lie in adapting to climate change, and not mitigating it. If I were a man in possession of inclinations like Elvis Presley I would have shot my TV set. instead I screamed and turned it off. It's like some bad joke from the Easter Bloc of old that Tony Abbott got elected.

Delaying The Carbon Repeal

In another one of those election promises that is being broken by the Coalition, we have the Carbon Tax repeal. They've got it through the Lower House but there's enough resistance in the Senate to shoot down the repeal. The Coalition solution is  therefore to hold off taking it to the Senate until the new Senate sits in July.

The Abbott government has scheduled two weeks of sittings, two for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives.

Usually Parliament stops for the winter break at the end of June, returning for the spring session in mid-August.

In the last 15 years federal Parliament has only sat once during July - for a single week in 2011 - which lends weight to the theory that the Abbott government has deliberately arranged this voting period for the carbon tax repeal.

Leader of the House Christopher Pyne released a schedule of sitting dates on Monday, showing the Senate sitting for a fortnight from Monday, July 7.

Mr Pyne said more sittings provided an opportunity for debate and consideration of the important bills that will come before the Parliament in 2014.

The lower house will sit for a week from Monday, July 14.

It seems the Coalition has twigged to possibility they would lose a Double Dissolution election - which is to say they had no mandate at all like they have claimed. The fact that the new poll has blunted their resolve points to the inherently opportunistic, populist and largely spineless nature of this government. Have they no shame? It appears not. Have they no dignity? No. Clearly, that's why they need the Monarchy to drape them with some (imagined) dignity.

Christopher Pyne has been rather disruptive in other ways.

Mr Pyne told Sky News on Sunday evening that two of the states that had agreed to the Gonski reforms, Victoria and Tasmania, had never signed "final agreements" with the federal Labor government, and neither had the National Catholic Education Commission.

"That isn't a national model, and it's very difficult for us to implement the complicated, confused, very dense model that they came up with because of Labor's predilection for prescription and regulation," he said."We want less regulation, less prescription from Canberra, and that's what I'll set about trying to put in place when we can do that."

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten accused the Coalition of breaking the promise it made before the election that it was on a "unity ticket" with Labor on school funding.

"The weasel words of the government saying before an election they will look after schools and properly fund our children in the future, and ... they now dial forward and say all deals are off, there were no deals."

Well, Bill, the answer is that these people really will do and say anything to get into power, hold power and abuse power. No surprises whatsoever there.

HAP-less In Australia

Household Assistance Package

A few weeks ago I went to a focus group and it turns out it really was the government trying to suss out how to gauge their ads for the Household Assistance Package. I tell you, it was Hilary Hilaroid and the Hilarities; they asked what they thought of various words. When they said 'packages', I told them it reminded me of male genitals. After that, they stopped noting my input. I see that somehow they ended up using the word, in spite of my good advice. :)

At least they say "Millions of Australians... instead of "Six million Australians..." - That was sensible of them.