View From The Couch - 13/Dec/2015

Deporting Permanent Residents Has Got To Stop

This is a new kind of human rights abuse - except they tried this shit ten years ago and it backfired.

Mr Bolvaran, who turned 42 on Thursday, came to Australia as a one-year-old when his family fled the Pinochet regime in 1974 and lived in the country since.

During his time in Australia he met and fell in love with Rachel Delucia, with whom he has three sons, two of them under the age of 10.

But his life in Australia was not always so idyllic, as Mr Bolvaran freely admitted.
He fell into the wrong crowd, racking up a petty criminal rap sheet that included drug possession and stealing.

Unfortunately for Mr Bolvaran, who lived in Brisbane on a permanent resident visa, he got caught up in changes to the Migration Act that saw visas cancelled if the holders were sentenced to 12 months or more in prison. 

Those legislative changes have proven to be a sore point between New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, given the number of Kiwis affected. 

Mr Bolvaran, who could only speak limited Spanish and had no family support network in Chile, was deported last month. 

"I miss my kids … It's my birthday and I miss the hell out of my boys and my partner," he said.
"I'm so far away from her and everyone. This is where I was born, but I'm lost here. I don't know what to do with myself." 

Mr Bolvaran was jailed in July after he pleaded guilty to a string of offences, including drug possession, possession of a knife in public and receiving tainted property.
After serving time in the Brisbane Correctional Centre at Wacol, Mr Bolvaran was transferred to Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney to await deportation.

It's terrible policy. First of all, it metes out a second punishment to the time served. Obviously the punishment doesn't apply to a citizen, so it means there are de facto two sets of laws for the people of Australia: one for the citizen and another that is far more destructive and punitive for permanent residents.

It also makes the Criminal Justice system merely a partial criminal justice system and the Department of Immigration gets to punish somebody for the same crime, a second time (i.e. forget "double jeopardy") just based on their visa status.  You wonder how the esteemed judges feel about that, should it ever be brought in front of them. If a government body that wasn't the judges handing out legal punishments, you'd think judges might "take a very dim view of that sort of thing". I'm sure it violates something called "the Separation of Powers". Hmm... let me think now.., yes, yes it would.

If the punishment is meant to be a deterrent for crime, it's not going to work because it targets a socio-economic group that is likely not to come in contact with the information. None of the cases that have been reported on the issue show that such legislation has any deterrent for criminality. It's imaginary, and prejudicial.

What's worrying is that the ALP are saying they're in lockstep with the government when it comes to this astoundingly stupid legislation. This make you wonder just how good a mind these idiot politicians have, when even a legal novice like this blogger can spot the obvious legal problem with enforcing such bad laws. So much for Shadow AG Dreyfus being such a legal eagle. The thing that make your citizens and permanent residents really lose faith in government as an institution, is when it gives bipartisan support for bad laws.

This is a bad law. Somebody needs to challenge it.

Wrapping It Up In Paris

It would appear that Paris meetings to deal with climate change ended successfully. Maybe 6 years of even more extreme weather events persuaded more governments. In some subtle way, this is what has happened in Australia over the last decade. There are holdouts who still believe that climate change is not real or a UN conspiracy, or has stopped, but in most part the middle of the electorate thinks it is real enough and needs to be dealt with.

Of course, the Paris Summit and its global climate agreement has nothing in it that is binding or demands accountability, so it is a little bit like everybody agreeing to a wishlist for Santa, and if everybody's good, we'll get global warming under control.

When you think about what happened at Copenhagen in 2009, and how it led to the demise of Kevin Rudd, followed by massive infighting in the ALP government, and the subsequent denialist stupidocracy of the Abbott Government, only to see the return of Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party mere 3 months ago - and therefore offering some hope of serious climate policy - it's been a terrible, terrifying, 6 years.

It's 6 years of missed opportunities; it's 6 years of stalled investments; it's 6 years of more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere that could have been restrained; and 6 years of having to live with people who have utterly unscientific views about climate science and having to argue with them as if they had a leg to stand on or had any intellectual merit. The 6 years of extra arguments, extra discussions, extra politicking, extra effort, all makes me feel faint when I reflection it. And this agreement merely gets us to a starting line that might help us get on top of the challenge.

And with Greg Hunt as the minister for the environment still, I have to say I have absolutely no faith that we'll get anything done.

More Budget Cuts To Come

We are - on the whole - way too complacent about the Australian economy. Especially with the collapse in commodity prices for iron ore, nickel, and oil, a lot of our major export earners are suddenly hitting the wall where they can't be profitable digging stuff up form the ground. If you wanted proof the mining boom was well and truly over, then look no further. BHP of course is taking a double punch because of the dam bursting in Brazil, so its shares have slid down from $25 to $17. The resources sector has been in a two year retreat, but lately it's becoming a nosedive.

Clive Palmer is suddenly running around looking for line of credit to keep his nickel refinery going, and that's obviously because of the collapse in nickel prices. All of this decline in income has now shown up with diminishing revenue for the government. This in turn is going to mean the Coalition Government's favourite thing, more budget cuts.

The Treasurer's task of finding spending offsets will be made more difficult by a sharply worse picture on the revenue side of the budget, which has been hammered by plunging commodity prices and stagnant wage growth. 

Leading economists believe the government will be forced to reveal a worsening of the budget deficit of between $33 billion and $39 billion over the next four years. 

The grim picture was a focus of Mr Turnbull's talks with state and territory leaders on Friday. The Council of Australian Governments' joint communique warned of "emerging budgetary pressures across all levels of government, particularly in the health sector".
On Sunday, Mr Morrison said MYEFO update key forecasts to present a "realistic outlook for economic conditions moving forward". 

"As was demonstrated by the recent National Accounts data, our economy is transitioning from resource investment led growth towards broader based growth," he said. 

"Part of this transition involves dealing with the challenges of lower commodity prices and a declining terms of trade from their historic peaks in the wake of the mining investment boom. 

"The government will continue to restore the budget by controlling expenditure and supporting policies that grow the economy. The budget will not be restored by increasing the overall tax burden on Australians."

So says ScoMo. A lot of this stuff killing revenue is outside of the government's control. Yet the fixation with budget deficits will mean there will be a fresh round of razor gang activity but really, they'll probably find they have to spend the money anyway. It's like the domestic violence thing. The Abbott Government cut $300m out of domestic violence related expenditures. Turnbull has had to go back out and spend $100m. When it's all said and done, he'll probably have to spend the other $200m anyway, because there were probably very good reasons that $300m was earmarked for the program.

If you think it through from a historic perspective, at this point in time these razor gang exercises in austerity are redundant, if not futile. Certainly since the second budget of the Gillard government, there's been significant cuts to government programs. Add 2 of the Coalition's own efforts and you'd have to say 4 years of cuts would have been pretty deep. It's very visible that the Federal Government is running pretty lean these days. What the government has to do is get more serious about tax reform. 

The problem is, it's not a government that likes wage rises, seeing that they represent the employers' lobby. All the talk of raising revenue has been around raising the GST, another regressive bit of policy-talk. In that sense it's a government of vested interests that won't talk its own constituents down from their fighting-a-class-war posture. It would rather just hand over the bill to the wider community and be proud they're trying to balance the books. It's only 3 months or so of Malcolm-In-The-Hot-Seat but this government is looking sclerotic already. When the slowdown hits the wider electorate, and it will, I doubt Malcolm Turnbull is going to stay so popular.  

News That's Fit To Punt- 26/May/2015

The Future's So Dim I Need Those New LED Flashlights

We're spending less on science and research in this country. This astonishing fact drew this article from the SMH:

"Having this reliance on the bottom end of the economy, like small businesses, is a short-term fix," said Andrew Hughes, a lecturer at the college of business and economics at Australian National University. "Cutting back on research is insanity."

Every country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has a plan to grow its scientific enterprise and aid its translation into technology, innovation and development, bar Australia, Chief Scientist Ian Chubb said.

"For 20 years, we have presided over declining levels of participation in science and mathematics" while the country assured itself that students will be fine with calculators, Chubb wrote this month in an article on his website. "I think about the sort of jobs a child in school today might want to do in 10, 20, 50 years. And I wonder, which of those jobs will not require an understanding of science?"

Australian school students underperform in science and mathematics tests compared with every other high-income economy in Asia apart from New Zealand, according to a report issued this month by the 34-nation OECD.

"We're already losing our power in the brains market because we're up against China, India, Japan and South Korea who spend so much more on research and development," Hughes said. "We need to think long-term."

Industry and Science Minister Ian Macfarlane in March said the country ranked 81st out of 143 in a global innovation efficiency measure, putting it "close to average in turning ideas to our advantage". The government is spending about $9 billion a year on science in what is "a conservative financial environment", he said.

And so we have it. Even our Science Minister can't do maths. 81st out of 143 nations is not what most people adept at mathematics would call "close to average". Mediocre, and sub-optimal are terms much closer to the mark that spring to mind.

Once upon a time, this was the fourth nation to launch an object into space. Think about that. USSR, USA, UK, then Australia. We were good at science and technology. Heck, we were formidable! And now, we're going to cut back even more than before.

Yet the nation now ranks in the bottom seven countries based on government spending on research and development as a proportion of gross domestic product, the latest OECD scoreboard shows. 

Australia isn't alone in trying to bolster lower-skilled careers as economies look to shore up manufacturing and fill an increasing number of service-oriented jobs. Both Singapore and South Korea have urged students to consider skipping university. 

Singapore, though, committed to increasing its R&D spending by 20 per cent in 2011-15 over the previous five years, while South Korea spent the second-highest proportion of gross domestic product on research among OECD countries in 2013, behind Israel.
The boost for baristas is partly a result of successive governments' failures during the decade-long mining boom to prevent a hollowing out of the manufacturing sector as the currency strengthened and investment flowed to the mines. General Motors, Ford and Toyota plan to quit manufacturing in the country within two years, while Alcoa last year closed an aluminium smelter and two mills. 

Belinda Robinson, chief executive of Universities Australia, said the research cuts announced by Treasurer Joe Hockey in his budget this month will make matters worse.
"Against the backdrop of low commodity prices and the downturn in traditional industries, a prudent approach to stimulating economic renewal is to invest in, not cut, wealth-generating activities like higher education, research and innovation," she said.

Good grief. The worst aspects of conservative thought is that it fears change so much, it thinks nothing of slowing down progress, shutting down developments that might change the status quo (they like to call this 'the social fabric' - it's bullshit). It's all too easy for these idiots to cut science because not only do they not understand it - as evinced by the number who deny climate change - they fear it.

Evidence Our Government Is Even Worse Than We Thought

Pleiades tells me all the time, "you know, these people are completely fucked."
I'm inclined to believe it.

Six members of the Abbott cabinet have risen up against an extraordinary proposal to give a minister the power to strip an Australian of their sole citizenship. 

The idea, proposed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton with the support of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, divided a meeting of the cabinet on Monday night. 

The hour-long debate was described by participants as tense and sometimes heated.
The cabinet members who spoke against the proposal were Defence Minister Kevin Andrews, Foreign Affairs Minister and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop, Attorney-General George Brandis, Agriculture Minister and deputy Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, Education Minister Christopher Pyne and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, according to people present in the room. 

The same plan had divided the cabinet's national security committee.
The idea is that even an Australian-born citizen, without any other citizenship, could be stripped of Australian citizenship at the discretion of the immigration minister alone, without a suspect being charged or facing a court. 

Under the proposal, the only protection against an Australian being rendered stateless is that they must also be eligible to apply for citizenship of another country, even if they do not actually hold that second citizenship. 

Ms Bishop posed to the cabinet meeting this question: if Australia were to strip one of its people of citizenship on suspicion of terrorism, would another country be likely to approve that person's application to become a citizen?
The core objection was that an Australian effectively can be rendered stateless, losing fundamental rights and in violation of international law, without due process.

Bloody hell.
They made laws that joining a terror organisation abroad is against the law. Presumably if somebody returns from ISIS / ISIL /Daesh, they will be arrested and hauled in front of a magistrate. But they hate these people so much they want a special law to render them stateless. The mind boggles at this sensibility, and the fact that it was discussed like it's some kind of legitmiate option.

The lunar right is fixated on this notion of "un-Australian" acts, and keep coming up with novel ways to punish the un-Australian-but-still-Australian-by-citizenship citizen. Rendering people stateless and dumping them on other nations was one of the Howard government's favourite tricks, but it's plain ridiculous. The fact that ten years on, Tony Abbott wants to bring back this kind of idiocy speaks volumes about just what a fuckhead he really is.