There's No Money II

No Time Left, Not Enough Money

The most shameful thing in the aftermath - and there were many shameful things about and during the Black Summer fires - is how the government played their usual bureaucratic games to avoid paying out the money it promised. 

There has been little transparency over the funds, the Per Capita report commissioned by GetUp found, with some allegedly delivered based on political opportunity over community need. Report author Matt Lloyd-Cape noted there were few checks on how state governments spent the allocated funds.

"We spent around three months tracking down data for this project, when really the government should be ensuring that the general public, and more importantly bushfire survivors, know exactly what is happening with the funds allocated to the recovery," Mr Lloyd Cape said.

Only 42 per cent of the $565 million emergency payments have been paid to communities burned out by the fires. A year on, too many families are still waiting for support, says GetUp national director Paul Oosting.

"Scott Morrison must explain to the families still living in tents and caravans, a year after losing their homes, his government's painstakingly slow response," Mr Oosting said.

"There is clear evidence of multiple process failures to allocate funds directly to survivors."

I don't know if it's a conservative person thing to suspect everybody who comes to the government for money is somehow a freeloader to be despised or some shonky charlatan. It's something I noticed way back when I would go to try and get funding for projects, and the government would put up form after form to be filled and then deflect your request int a bottomless pit of other requests that were not met. Even this business of getting a vaccination certificate from MyGov is fraught with this kind of going around in circles of links across umpteen webpages. This government knows how to frustrate people in such a way as to deny them their needs. 

The desire for small government is such that it makes it nearly impossible to pin the government down on its responsibilities - but it's happy to chase you around for yours. Heck they chase people around for imaginary debts with robocalls. It's enough to drive people to the areas of conspiracist nut jobs. 

And it's proud of it too, this government. Which is pretty freaking awful. 

Anyway, I really feel for the people who are now in the second year after their houses burned down, still trying to get some help from the government. It's pretty fucking shameful is what it is. You would not want to be in their shoes.  

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Barnaby's A Bit Slow II

Here We Are Again...

Barnaby Joyce is awful. That is all. 

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Scomo Goes To Hawaii II

 He's Not The One Holding The Hose, Mate

When Greta Thunberg went to the UN and told the leaders their houses were on fire, Morrison's response was to patronise and downplay the fear of the young. The fact that he thought that was the appropriate response beggars belief. Couldn't he see it from the young person's side? That they're going to inherit a planet largely fucked up by people who refused to let anybody fix things? 

It sort of amazes me just how much of an empathy deficit Scott Morrison possesses and somehow still managed to become leader of the Liberal Party, let alone Prime Minster of this country. It is like that expression about blind squirrels getting lucky once in a while in finding a nut. In his case he was surrounded by even more demented sociopaths like Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor - he was the least objectionable sociopath in the room after they all decided to stab Turnbull in the back lest he do something about the climate.

I do wonder if Scott Morrison wonders about how the planet will be in say, 10 years' time when his daughters will be pushing out babies. I imagine his daughters are so brainwashed that they would do all kinds of mental gymnastics to push out of their minds that their father - once the Prime Minister of Australia - opted to wave a lump of coal around Parliament and make like Global Warming wasn't a thing. They're beyond hope, in all likelihood. But maybe the arrival of grandkids might make him think just a little bit about where things went so wrong and his part in making sure it went wrong. I wonder, as the prognosis towards 2050 worsens significantly, whether he might ever have just a twinge of regret that he spent his time in government as a minister selling down the future of his grandkids just so he could get votes in the 2010s. I mean, that's what the exchange that he made, right there. The rest of us voting chumps were powerless once he was in office. Nobody forced him to be this awful. He simply volunteered himself for the task. 

It is terrible enough that his government goes from rape scandal to AG-is-a-rapist-scandal, then failure to disaster to catastrophe, but this has been going for nearly a decade. Every minute spent by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government denying Global Warming was an issue, stole something from the future.  Things might have been better if he'd just stayed in Hawai and never come back. 

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Screams Of Burning Koalas II

"What Is This Shit?"

Thanks to this lousy pandemic 2 years has felt like a long time. We're all sitting around for things to get back to normal even though that might not really be on the cards. All the same, 2019 feels like a long way back. There was that lousy election that Scomo won in May that year, weird recriminations about the ALP losing the unlosable election and then there were the Black Summer bushfires. 

In late 2019 I was working on a bunch of songs where I was experimenting with modes and hiding the key centre. As usual I was struggling for material for, lyrics so I was writing them off headlines of news articles - when in doubt, 3 act story across 3 verses, chorus to bang home the main sentiment, a bridge to offer commentary, stick in the obligatory guitar solo for kicks - Bob's your song-writing uncle. 

Then I had a 2 week bout of some weird bowel infection. Maybe it was salmonella from bad chicken. I don't know. I think I was on the can more or less for 2 straight weeks. It was so bad I couldn't sleep at night because I had to get up and sit on the can and let the brown liquid pour out of my backside. The trickle never seemed to end. The bushfires that went totally out of control were already flooding Sydney with this orange smoke. As I sat late nights/early morning on the toilet with the window open, breathing in the fumes of my own diarrhoea and the smoke from the worst bushfire I had seen, wondering if I was just going to die on the toilet seat... something snapped. I couldn't take it any more. 

New Years came and went. The Pandemic was starting up in China with suspicions that it had already snuck into Sydney. And then I saw the images of just what the people of Mallacoota had endured. It was beyond alarming and utterly appalling. People had spent the night in the ocean off the pier looking up at the burning night skies. Ash fell like snowflakes from the angry red skies. Their homes went up in the hellfire. From the treetops they could hear the screams of burning koalas. That account left me devastated. What were my problems with breathing in the smoke fumes and suffering from that 2 week diarrhoea next to their suffering?

So the next thing I knew, I abandoned that project I had been working on, and did these songs about the bushfires and global warming and how colossally, irredeemably, comprehensively, stupide are our political leaders. 

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Gladys The Koala Killer II

What Does It Take To Cut Emissions Here?

One of the things that the people-against-doing-anything-about-Global-Warming complain about is the cost of cutting emissions. What's it going to cost? What's it going to cost me? It's the general line of questioning they trot out like somehow the costs of Global Warming are insignificant. If there's one thing that's become evident in the pandemic it's that there are a whole cabal of people who think any social restriction or imposition on their lifestyle in order to preserve the society in which we want to live, is just too much. Masks? No. Social distancing? No. Restricting movements? Hell no. Vaccines? No way. And on and on it goes. Let's face it, they're literally sociopaths. 

Let us then subtract the sociopathic out of the discussion and address the reasonable question of cost - i.e. what's it going to take to seriously cut down emissions in Australia? Turns out, not a whole lot. 

The general idea is to replace technologies that still run on combustion with alternatives that run on renewable electricity: swap petrol cars for electric vehicles (EVs) and gas heaters with reverse-cycle air conditioners.

By electrifying everything that can be electrified, Australia could cut its emissions by 80 per cent by 2035, according to credible estimates.

And it wouldn't need to invent any new technology to do this.

"It is an easy slam dunk," Dr Griffith said.

"It's not even particularly invasive to our quality of life.

"For every other country, including America, it's much harder and the economics are not as good."

            <...> 

Dr Griffith estimates the acquisitions would cost about $100,000 per household.

Multiplying that by Australia's 10 million households equals $ 1 trillion.

But a lot of this is money that households would have spent anyway to replace cars, heaters and so on, Dr Griffith points out.

The only difference is they're buying an electrical version.

"We need to make sure that the next time every one of those machines is replaced, it's replaced with a better electric," he said.

Most households buy a new car about every 10 years.

Big appliances like hot water heaters can last 20-30 years, but households may be encouraged to switch earlier by considering the savings generated by using cheaper electricity over gas.

"If you started replacing those machines in 10 million houses and you took until 2030 to do it — so roughly a million houses a year — by about 2024, every household that's done that will be saving a few thousand dollars a year," Dr Griffith said.

"By 2030, 100 per cent of homes would be saving [$5,000 or $6,000) a year on their current costs of owning cars and powering their house."

The one country that could just reap the benefits of lots of sunshine and wind is refusing to make the transition because the fossil fuel lobby donates so much money to the political establishment, making out this transition is much too onerous. I guess they're desperately defending their meal ticket but come on, we don't want to feed them at the expense of our lives. 

Here's the thing: We don't even need to move over to hydrogen fuels stored in Ammonia and Magnesium Hydrides. We just plug ourselves into the naturally abundant renewables. It's not onerous at all. Australia is uniquely well placed to just electrify stuff and reap tremendous emission control dividends. 

You could say it's a no-brainer but of course our political leaders are without brains. They want a gas-led transition. You can't make up this stuff. The writing is on the wall and these idiots are claiming there are hidden messages in that writing saying gas is a good idea. 

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Lucky Country II

What Happened To Them?

So the big news this week is that Murdoch Media outlets are going to start pushing for zero emissions.  

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year. 

Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions. 

The unrelenting negative publicity peaked in global outlets such as The New York Times and Financial Times during Australia’s deadly bushfires almost two years ago, which triggered a comment from Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, who publicly denounced the outlets’ “ongoing denial” of climate change. Mr Murdoch quit the News Corp board last August, citing concerns about its editorial stance.

I don't know how that is going to work in practical terms. It's a global organisation that's dedicated itself to denying the simple reality of Global Warming, applying as much pressure as it can on conservatives and progressives alike so as not to enact any policies for mitigating the effects of Global Warming. By the time they were behind Tony Abbott calling the Emissions Trading Scheme a 'tax on carbon' you knew they weren't even market rationalists. They were just deranged. It's almost as if they wanted Global Warming to have its full impact so they would never run out of headlines about natural disasters. But now they're changing their tune, they say. 

As the contemporary internet meme-parlance like to spell it, "wut?"

I imagine it's a bit like the Pope pushing for birth control and priests having to toe that line or US police force unions donating money to BLM from now on and promising to pay to raise the orphans created by their police brutality or something. It's a bit like a wild fox promising not to stalk the henhouse and will now bring the chooks their daily feed - they are Fox News after all. Yeah right. I guess we're going to have to see it to believe it.

The switch in editorial position will likely attract global attention, particularly in America, where Murdoch’s media outlets, such as Fox News, have also been accused by Republican politicians of undermining global efforts on climate change. Mr Murdoch, now 90, also remains an influential figure in British politics, mainly through his newspapers, The Sun and The Times. But his eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, who is the co-executive chairman of News Corp, is more involved in the newspaper business than his father.

The article goes on to claim the shift is because of the big powwow wherein Australia is pretty much going to have its arm twisted by other OECD nations and as such it would hurt the Coalition brand if it ended up being attacked by News Corp as well as the ALP as they go headlong into the next election. Frankly, it's not like News Corp don't know on which side the bread is buttered. If they hamstring the Coalition so much that they cannot enact any policies on emissions, there might come a day when the Coalition might be un-electable (Dare I say they ought to be considered un-electable today but heck they've won the last 3 Federal elections on no climate policy so who am I to judge?).   

It might sound a bit cynical even to suggest this - not that News Corp is anything but cynical themselves - but the likely tone they will take on all this is that we should mitigate our response to the climate threat. Which is to say they will likely weasel-word their way into a position that says "yes, Global Warming is here but maybe we don't have to do the hysterical maximum to combat its effect. What we need to do is the reasonable minimum so we don't harm the economy." Which would still very much be a denial stance - just one that seems to barely accomodate the reality of Global Warming. A bit like acknowledging a dancing drunk elephant in a tiny room. 

Eesh. That's going to be just as spew-worthy as what they're doing today and of no help whatsoever. Let's just say unlike a leopard, a fox can't change its spots because it never had spots to begin with. 

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Fuck You Adani II

The Physical Limits To Growth 

If there's one thing the current pandemic shows us is that we're in some kind of weird hiatus from civilisation as we struggle to find a way back to business-as-usual. The very pandemic and its murky origins tells us that we've reached some limit to our economic growth, but there are the usual insane Murdoch-media-influence denials of this very simple fact. 

The Coronavirus has been around for many a millennia. It has been living in the part of the ecosystem involving either bats or pangolins, which is distant to the part of the ecosystem involving homo sapiens. It is only through our unnecessary intrusion into the bat/pangolin inhabited parts of the ecosystem that has brought about this massive invasion from this virus. 

The virus for its part has been involved with whatever host animal for a long time, as it seems to have evolved interesting mechanisms to bypass the immune system mammals. This is in turn limiting the effectiveness of our vaccine as the virus evolves further means to evade our immune systems. We may never know from which group this virus emerged because the communist party leadership in China will continue to resist any probe to determine its origins, but one thing is certain - we wouldn't have come across this thing if we didn't push into places we didn't need to go. We just can't be eating bat soup and pangolin pies. 

And that in a nutshell of our modern global economy hitting a physical limit. Global Warming is another. If we keep on digging up fossil fuels to be burnt for energy, we will fuck up the atmosphere so much it will be like we moved to Venus. Heck, maybe there used to be Venusians. And the Venusians had their own civilisation and culture and industries and entertainment and diversions, only for it to produce too much greenhouse gasses. Maybe they even had a Venusian Murdoch Press that tried to deny it all. In any case the way Venus is today is exactly where we're headed if we don't change how we go about things with our civilisation. You can stick that into your objectivity pipe and smoke it. 

It's daft to be opening up a coal mine in this part of world history.

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No More Time II

2 Years On From The Fires

One thing that is encouraging is the news that there actually is a similar level of support for climate policy action in rural Australia as there is in urban areas. For years there has been a gap, and the Nationals have been able to make mileage from that gap claiming Green policies were some kind of urban fantasy that does not suit the needs of the bush. Of course as I have wondered out loud for years on this very blog, you wonder when the rural electorate comes to the reckoning that Global Warming is indeed coming for them, and may impact their wallets harder than the latte-sipping-trendy-lefties dwelling in the cities. After all, your farm could go up in flames but it's hard for bushfires to burn down a 2 bedroom flat in the inner city. 

With the IPCC report that came out, governments around the world have been served notice that we are simply on the last stretch. The Coalition government might try to dress up its language to assuage the denialists amongst their own constituency, but not taking significant action is no longer an option. If the Australian government does not do something serious to mitigate Australia's emissions, the governments around the world will take the opportunity to tax Australian exports at the border. In other words, we will be paying for somebody else's carbon tax coffers rather than our own. And if that simple I-Me-Mine sort of sentiment does not persuade the Coalition, perhaps the recent sceneries of flooding in NYC in the wake of Hurricane Ida might persuade them that the future repair bills for our cities affected by Global Warming will likely have to come from somewhere - and that somewhere is most likely going to be from carbon pricing. 

Not to mention the insurance business not being able to offer insurance for ever increasing parts of Australia might finally persuade rural Nationals voters that maybe denialism and head in the sand-ism of the National Party has to come to an end. We'll see. 

One thing we know for sure is that we have run out of time for inaction.  Something's going to break. It may very well be party politics.

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Barnaby's A Bit Slow

Is There Any Other Way To Put It?

Maybe it's because he insists on being on the outer reaches of ideological extremism, it's easy to confuse Barnaby Joyce with somebody who might have a clue about what is good for the country. He's convinced he's a good man, trying to good by his country but his skewed ideology takes him to places where stupid cohabitates with insanity. 

That's really all there is to it. 

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There's No Money

There's Never Any Money

Some time after those terrible fires, it got to rebuilding, and affected people went looking around for reconstruction/support money from the government. At the time, announcements were made that there was 2 billion dollars to go around but months later it was found out that there was no such fund as announced. People found it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy to be heard by the Federal Government. Arguably, the Federal Government put in wear plugs and sat in the maze in order to make it inaccessible A little like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22 when he says he will only take meetings when he is not in his office.  

People affected by the fires went into the winter of 2020 with the pandemic going, without having rebuilt anything. It should have been a bigger scandal but of course this Covid-19 pandemic has been such a monster of sorts it ate up all the airspace for the message to get out. 

I kind of imagine that Scomo, having been snubbed pretty hard in his attempt to PR and Spin his way out of the deep ditch he had dug himself, decided these people would get punished through the power of bureaucracy. The ABC was reporting people still living in tents in the middle of winter. This is a terrible state of affairs. 

All of which got me thinking that we do terrible things to one another. I didn't vote in this terrible government but somebody did, and those people knew full well what kind of crackpot policies would be put into place or left to die through inaction and omission. And now that people in the south end of the continent were facing this terrible plight, there were people in Queensland who were quite smug that they got the government for which they had hoped. The absence of empathy is psychopathic. It's a horrible thought, really when part of the populace abandons another to depredation and neglect. We used to be better than this. Really, we were, once upon a long time ago. 

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End of An Era For Stupid?

As The Time of Trump Draws Near The End

When it gets right down to it, I'm a sore loser. It didn't seem to matter no matter how much I offered up my opinions and pontificating over here. It was just howling into the wind. The world was stupid enough to be persuaded by the Murdoch papers and TV to vote Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson and Donald Trump into power, solely to give tax cuts for the rich and hold off doing anything about Global Warming, what is the damn point of writing a word more about any of this? Have we not crashed into the Twilight of Civilisation? 

Not only did progressives not win, they could not stave off the onslaught of Stupid that ensued those losses. The English speaking world led by the USA, UK and Australia collectively lost its common sense and went with the worst kind of idiotic rhetoric as substitute for substantive policy. How is one to discuss what ensued those losses with any kind of sense?

So I stopped writing here. Why expend the energy? I can't beat Rupert Murdoch and his mighty minions of mendacity. Besides which, was it really my job to care? After all I have no kids. There is no generation I have to worry about. My friends with kids worry about the future, sure. I have had the odd luxury of not having to worry about that. In one sense, the stupidity that transpired because of those losses affected me less than it did my friends and their families. 

Yet it has been a terrible. 7 years of Liberal Party rule in Australia, 6 years of Brexit politics in the UK, and 5 years of Donald Trump politics has put a huge dent in the credibility of the English speaking world. Nations that would look to the democratic leadership of Washington DC and London got an eyeful of miserable, partisan, anti-intellectual, pseudo-scientific brouhaha that passed for politics in these three countries - all of which share the intoxicating poison of stupidity that is the Murdoch press. 

And so in the days following the Putsch upon Capitol Hill by pro-Trump idiots, we are left in the odd position of waiting to see if this horrible period in history will come to a close, at least in America. Will the Republicans finally wake up in the Senate as to just how untenable Trumpism has been for the GOP? Or will they aid and abet the worst President of all time, one last time? Brexit finally limped over the line in late December so as bad as the outcome is, that little drama has come to the end of its run. All that is left is living with the consequences. As for Australia, there is a good deal of time left before the next election. I don't know if the ALP will ever gets act together in time to oust Scomo and his squad of awful human beings. Also offers me little confidence. It appears that Bill Shorten's loss in 2019 was a spectacularly bad election to lose for the ALP, let alone Australia - but that is all a rant for another day.

If anything, the 2010s were a disappointing decade. It didn't really even have any form. People just scrapped for a living thanks to the GFC, and then it was done.  

The Dying of People

In the intervening years I did not write here, I found some of my friends began dropping like flies. Death is always somewhat surprising, even though you come to realise that you have walked into the age group where death is not so surprising. Plenty of people have died at ages younger than what I am today. I feel a far cry from the person that started blogging back in 2003. And people really do die. I'm deeply saddened by the passing of Geoff Murphy, Brian Burgess, and Michael Jacob. They're all of a certain generation, and they all passed away during the years I did not write here. 

I lost a friend to liver cancer; and I've lost one to COVID-19. If you spend your 30 year adult life drinking a lot, dying of liver cancer is unsurprising. If you are a touring musician in the USA, and Donald Trump is your president, then it is unsurprising that you contract COVID-19 and die. Some famous people have died form COVID-19. Countless animals perished in the mega fires of 2019. Death is all around us. death brought about by stupidity of others, is surprisingly common. 

Death is a thing, in case you were lulled into not thinking about it as a factor in one's decision making. 

Ambivalence Grows

The other thing I want to report from my self-imposed exile from writing on this blog, is that I've become even more ambivalent about how I feel about many things. One becomes less certain as one piles the age on to one's being. One becomes more discerning, but one also becomes less decisive. 

It's also a little disturbing when you read back stuff written by people who died at an age younger than you are right now. This is one of those things that happen. You get perspective on your own life and existence in a  way that you just can't buy into the framework of thought and ideology that is invested in a book. I used to think Soseki Natsume was a giant of literature. He died at age 49 and suddenly when you re-read his work as somebody older, you get this weird cognitive dissonance that maybe you really could rhetorically beat up on the literary giant if he only were around today - hey, I even have a cat these days Mr Natsume! 

Same with Jack Kerouac who died at 47. F Scott Fitzgerald at 44. Jane Austen, 41. Raymond Radiguet, 20. Or the notion that for all his entire, massive, output, everything Frank Zappa ever did was as a person younger than you are today. Ditto Glenn Gould who died at 50. It's all a little unsettling - and this adds to this ambivalence. Everything looks like it has 10 sides to the argument, and it's exhausting.  

So What Are You Gonna Do, Art Neuro?

I'm going to pop in more often this year. Stay tuned. 

View From The Couch - 28/Feb/2017

Oscars Mix Up

I don't really have anything to add to the chaos that resulted from the wrong movie being announced as winner. I just want to say it's just a fuck up and nobody was killed or injured. It'll pass.
In the mean time, congrats to all the winners. It feels all so faraway, really.

I just noticed 'Piper' won Best Animated Short. I feel very happy for Adrian Belew who did the score for that short film. He's been posting updates on the progress of that project on Facebook and I know what it means to him, so congratulations are definitely in order there.

Clean Coal? The Banks Don't Think So

This is one of those funny things that happen because the politics is so retrograde and politicians so inept in this country - APRA is saying banks can't be allowing investment into 'clean coal' projects because they have every chance of being a stranded asset in the future. That's basically the banks telling the party of the banks to get their policy on renewable energies and emissions control sorted out properly.

What's amazed about the intransigence and the grandstanding about not doing anything to control emissions except Direct (in)Action by the Coalition Government is that given the vagaries of a two party system, if they don't control the policies to do with climate change, it's going to fall upon the ALP and the Greens to devise an ETS and renewable targets; and when that happens, it won't be as favourable to the business sector as the one they could devise on their own.

I can't believe I'm arguing for it, but essentially, the Liberals and Nationals need to get their shit together and sort out a proper set of policies if they don't want to be consigned to the waste basket of history. Which, is not a bad thing for me, but it boggles the mind that these politicians can't figure out the ramification of their own political snafu into which they've snookered themselves.

But Of Course Policy Isn't Their Strong Suite

Peter Hartcher thinks this lot are so inept, they're missing oral the sitters that could easily be dispatched and be good policy.

Australia's need for more power plants, roads, rail, bridges, ports and airports is dire. Ken Henry, former secretary of the Treasury and now chair of National Australia Bank, made the point about Australia's failure forcefully this week: 

"We do not have the infrastructure capacity to support today's population, far less the population of the future," he told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia on Thursday. 

"On the basis of official projections of Australia's population growth, our governments could be calling tenders for the design of a brand new city for two million people every five years; or a brand new city the size of Sydney or Melbourne every decade; or a brand new city the size of Newcastle or Canberra every year. Every year.
"But that's not what they are doing. Instead, they have decided that another

3 million people will be tacked onto Sydney and another 4 million onto Melbourne over the next 40 years ... 

"And even if we do manage to stuff an additional 7 million people into those cities what are we going to do with the other 9 million who will be added to the Australian population in that same period of time? Have you ever heard a political leader addressing that question? Do you think anybody has a clue? At the very least, we are going to have to find radical new approaches for infrastructure planning, funding and construction." 

Without sensible solutions to hand, politicians are turning to extreme ones. Tony Abbott's speech on Thursday night is an example. He proposed cutting the immigration intake to take pressure off housing prices: "Why not say to the people of Australia," posed Abbott, "we'll cut immigration to make housing more affordable?"

This is remarkable. This is a former prime minister who presided over Australia's normal, relatively large immigration intake who now calls for it to be cut.

Yeah sounds about right.

Coming To Think Of It, Neither Is Mathematics

Part of the problem is that Malcolm Turnbull is so hamstrung that he can't really make policies that could save his neck, get past his own party. This is compounded by the odd politicking of Tony Abbott to destroy polling figures for Turnbull but also offer idiotic advice for which nobody asked.

There's even rampant speculation that the Right wing of the Liberal Party might head for a spill and install Peter Dutton as Malcolm Turnbull's replacement. The joke is out of the bag and is getting ridiculed soundly.

Here's the thing. Let's say they do this and remove Malcolm Turnbull.
Will Malcolm Turnbull have any reason left to stay in politics? Likely not, seeing that it's unlikely he'll ever be PM again.
What happens if a pissed-off Malcolm Turnbull then resigns on the spot to spite the party and the government loses its 1 seat majority right there. The new PM - presuming it's Peter Dutton, but it doesn't really matter who - immediately has to go to the GG and say he doesn't have the numbers;  so it's election time all over again and the electorate will punish them for the shenanigans.

That the Coalition would have to be sub-75 IQ to attempt the switch was my first guess but... you never know your luck in the asylum called Parliament House. These people can't seem to count how many seats they have.

Back To The Moon

SpaceX have announced, some time next year they're going to send 2 people around the orbit of the Moon.

"This will be a private mission to a paying customer," said company Chief Executive Elon Musk. 

"This should be incredibly exciting."

He declined to identify the individuals, or say how much they would pay for the weeklong mission, except to say that it was "nobody from Hollywood".

Musk said the two prospective tourists knew each other.

The flight would last about a week, circle the moon and head out deeper into space before returning to Earth. 

"Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration," the company said in a statement.

"Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest, and we expect more to follow. Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results."

All I can say is that if I had the kind of success Elon Musk has had, he's doing exactly what I would want to do. Actually Ido have one more thing to say, and that is this: in his fiction, Robert Heinlein predicted that private enterprise would get us to the moon. Even though he lived to see NASA do it, his concept was always along the lines a maverick, enterprising business person putting together the project on his own and getting it done. Elon Musk is like a character straight out of 'The Moon Is A  Harsh Mistress'. That's somewhat exciting. Maybe there will be more things to grok in the near future.

News That's Fit To Punt - 13/Feb/2017

The Weekend From (The Hottest Part Of) Hell

Goodness, we survived that one. It was nice to be forewarned about how awful it was going to be. It's only the middle of February and apparently we've smashed heat records for February. We've smashed number of days over 35 degrees in a summer, and we've simply not seen heatwave like this. The news tonight is that there will be more on the way.

It was good then to see our idiot Treasurer Scott Morrison wave around a lump of coal telling us coal was the future when clearly the future was here and it was a furnace-like summer, just as predicted by the science over 30years ago. It's not much fun being vindicated but there you have it. And it's staggering to note the Coalition still want to carry on with their pantomime of pretending none of theses going on, and that somehow doing more of the same is going to improve things.

Naturally, the government got a pasting from Lenore Taylor in the Guardian over the weekend.
Katherine Murphy was equally pointed about the Coalition Government's antics. Her headline read:

Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this?

I know I keep bringing it up but Machiavelli wrote that the moment a government allows itself to be held in contempt, that's when it really loses. This is true of Princes and Democracies according to the man who had ample opportunity to witness both modes of government. Here, we have a government that finds new depths of stupidity and wonders why its polls are so devastatingly bad.

At this point in history it is clear that the Coalition Government is bankrupt of ideas. For all this talk about being the economic managers, three years into this government, it's looking like they haven't got a grip the economy, they're trying to claw back non-existent monies from the poor on welfare, and they're helpless in the face of the sheer force of nature unleashing a historic heatwave. They can't talk about it, because it exposes them to the fact that they dismantled what little policy was in place to combat it, and that they have spent the last decade fighting very hard not to do anything about the existential threat of our times. All they can do is muster up some blame game on to the ALP - of whom it must be said were also reluctant in bringing in the ETS, which in turn got them voted out.

Ten years on from the election Kevin Rudd won trying to combat climate change, went have a government that has steadfastly refused to do anything worth doing.

Still, it's quite the sight to see these Coalition frontbenchers hyukking it up with lump of coal between them as if they've made a point. Most of Australia with an understanding of climate science were looking at that as the moment the Coalition refused to pull their collective ostrich heads out of the air conditioned holes in the ground. I don't know how to say this politely, but what they are doing is criminal negligence.

Of course over the weekend, a township went up in smoke and fire fighters were out there in conditions labeled 'catastrophic' as they fought blazes across the state. The contrast couldn't have been starker, the irony deeper. Scott Morrison and the coalition are going to regret that stunt.

UPDATE: Nick Xenophon blocked the 4bn bill to cut welfare to fund the NDIS. he labelled it "dumb policy and dumb politics". As you do with such policy and politics.

Liars' Scissors

The revenue is shrinking, mostly thanks to tanked commodity prices and the sluggish demand for iron ore and coal from China. The Australian establishment is a bit in denial about China with its clockwork 6-7% annual GDP growth. The closest thing to the string of 6-7% figures China has been posting in the last decade - in the face of the GFC and post-GFC era no less - was the run of steady 7% returns Bernie Madoff's Ponzi fund was allegedly delivering for its members. Think about that for a moment.

Anyway, the point is, the deficit is growing, so the natural thing the Coalition Government wants to do is make cuts. The plan this week is to cut welfare and give it to the NDIS. Yes, the NDIS was a great idea that was put in to place by Julia Gillard's ALP government, and everybody knew the time it was unfunded, but it was so important it had to be done. Now that the Coalition arena government, they've decided that the way they'll fund it is by cutting welfare. The kinds of money they're talking about is $3billion, with the full funding for the NDIS clocking in at $21billion with about half of that coming from the Commonwealth, the rest coming from other disability sector. It all feels like robbing Peter and Paul to pay Mary with the shaky hand.

Here's the thing. This government is letting $50billion slip through their fingers just this year while they do this little ugly shuffle. Yes, and that's just the Gas multinationals walking away without paying tax. I kid you not, this is the level of incompetence this government has sunk to in order not to have the big end of town pay its fair share. But it wants to claw back imaginary debts from welfare recipients, cut their welfare and use that money to fund the NDIS. It's so low, you can't but help call it what it is: depraved.

It's a bit like the Titanic is going down not because it hit the iceberg but because the captain opened the Kingston valve, letting the water in. Then they're rushing to shuffle beds in the sick bay. But they want you to believe they're the better managers of the ship's affairs.

A Repressed Bastard

People really thought Malcolm Turnbull was going to be something different. With the departure of Cory Bernardi and the string of bad news his government has had over the summer, this is just not going to happen. In fact, I came across this little bit with this worthy quote:

(It is true that Mr Turnbull is very rich. Just last year he gave the Liberal Party $1.75 million; an unthinkably large sum, probably even nearly enough to buy a two-bedroom flat in Sydney. And it is equally true that Bill Shorten hangs out with billionaires. It's just that neither man much likes to be reminded of either truth.) 

"This is what people miss about Malcolm," one colleague observed happily after the spray. 

"They think he's a repressed social moderate. Actually, he's a repressed bastard."

It's nice to see people spell it out. You don't get to be Malcolm-Turnbull-rich being a social moderate. You get there by being a bastard. He got to be Prime Minster by being a bastard. Let's not kid ourselves that he's anything but the 100%, genuine, full-hide, shameless, bastard we expect the 1%-ers to be.

Listen up folks, he is the class enemy no. 1.

"Oh The Stupidity"

Yeah. Just thought I'd put that there.

Politics of Stupor

Twenty Years Of 'Big Stupid' In The Making

For some time now, our polity has been beset by the idiocy, mendacity and disingenuous hypocrisy on all sides. How long does this go back? It may go all the way back to 1996 when we elected the Howard Government when the seeds for all this stupidity - The Big Stupid - were sown. In twenty years we have come a winding tortured road in climate policy where on the one hand we have made commitments to control our carbon emissions, but on a domestic policy level, failed to implement policies to make that happen. If that were the only area we would be in a position to argue, "okay, let's fix that", but we are not; for we seem to have a legion of linked ideological snares that have been set loose upon our nation and try as we might, we cannot seem to untangle the mess.

Case in point might be the desire not to tax the super profits of mining concerns, or the desire to open ever more coal mines like the Adani mine in Queensland, or the fact that the mind ignores the signs that fossil fuel use for energy generation may steeply decline. What's alarming is that the Australian government has had 20 solid years to do something about it and the break down of how we spent that time goes like this:

1. 11 and a half years under John Howard denying it was a problem, being 'sceptical'. Why he opted to be sceptical of scientific findings but not those of armchair conspiracy theorists is unexplained.  
2. 3years under Kevin Rudd trying to implement Carbon Pricing, whereupon the Greens refused to put it through the Senate because it wasn't their version. 
3. The Rudd government worked to implement as many climate sensitive policies as possible and became a major actor at Copenhagen where emissions talks fell apart. 
4. This prompted a retreat and a simultaneous drop in Rudd's support which led to Julia Gillard's ascendancy.
5. Julia Gillard called an election promising not to put in a Carbon Tax. The election resulted in a hung Parliament, and so in order to form government with the help of the teens, she acceded to their wishes and put in Carbon Pricing. 
6. That led to Tony Abbott's opposition claiming that Gillard broke an election promise and promising to remove the aid 'Carbon Tax'. 
7. 3 years of a Gillard Government and the Opposition attacks on its emissions policy led to a complete breakdown in consensus for carbon policy within the Coalition. 
8. When the Coalition won Government, it dismantled the carbon pricing mechanism and replaced it with Direct Action, which is less efficient and is not working to rein in emissions. 
9. 2years of as utterly retrograde and disastrous government-by-tabloid-headline Abbott government, they replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull who, having a reputation for having an understanding of the policy area, completely does an about-face and continues with the disastrous policies of his predecessor. 
10. Turnbull goes to an election, and he too gets his own hung Parliament, and so the numbers dictate he continues with the disastrous an stupid policy he would personally not endorse. 

That's the potted history that brings us up to date. Apart form the years the ALP were in government, the Coalition has done very little to even wrestle with the problem. They've done far more damage than any good and any credible observer would have give them negative marks for not trying and active resistance. Worse still, their constituency applauds this rearguard action for the petrochemical industry and fossil fuel interests.

The ugly prognosis is that it's not going get better any time soon. Worse still the Coalition government can't do better because it is in the pockets of these interests and basically would lie through their teeth to keep the idiotic status quo of climate change denial. It's staggering to think that something so important could be left to blow up in our faces because in the minds of these politicians, the interests of the lobby outweigh the interests of the public.

They can argue about it, but they're not really going to give up the money from the special interests.

No Power, No Glory, Just The Big Stupid Please

Australian kids are falling behind in the education stakes. It's not surprising that this is the case given the numbers of people voting for the Coalition. It would appear that the proportion of truly stupid people has increased exponentially, as evinced by the rise of support for One Nation.
In case you missed it, here's an time on what One Nation thinks should be climate policy.

"We are being controlled by the UN and these agreements that have been done for people's self interest and where they are driving our nation as a sovereignty and the economics of the whole lot," Hanson told the gathered media.

Wheee!
Anyway. Signs of a lack of education are here too:

People regularly cite Australia's economic strength and our egalitarianism as reasons why emotion-driven, fact-free and angry populism will not flourish here as it is flourishing in other Western democracies. 

But research recently published by a University of Melbourne academic, Roberto Stefan Foa, and his former Harvard colleague Yascha Mounk, shows that our democratic consensus is fragile too. 

The pair has been researching the attitudes of people in so-called "consolidated" democracies, to the conventions and institutions that comprise those democracies.
They have found a disturbing trend – over time, in all the liberal democracies including Australia, open-ness to the idea of military rule has grown, the number of people who think a democratic system is "bad" has grown, support for the concept of civil rights is less, and fewer people express an interest in politics. This trend is especially pronounced in young people, so-called Millennials. 

In these conditions, populist politicians gain traction by appealing to emotion and bypassing fact altogether. 

These politicians outrage the "elites", precisely because they don't adhere to the values of liberal democracy, which roll all the way back to the Enlightenment. They are playing "our" game but they won't accept the rules we wrote. They don't value rationalism over emotion. They don't abide by the norms so many of us thought (or hoped) were settled, and in this sense they are radical. 

And when you have a Prime Minister who refuses facts as squarely as Turnbull did this week, despite being educated, intelligent and on record as knowing those facts better than most people, we are edging towards the land of the radical, where policy-making is as fantastical as a go-nowhere boat trip over a bleached-out coral reef.

In other words, the Big Stupid is like a genie unleashed from a bottle already trampling across fairly fundamental philosophical positions upon which things like public discourse and democracy are built.
As George Lucas joked in his script for 'American Graffiti', Rome indeed wasn't burnt in a day.

The funny thing is that the headlines tell us our education system is underperforming. That because of this, our economy is suffering. We already know what we should be doing, - fund the full Gonski - but we have a government that won't.

not educating the populace suits oligarchical interests of the country in as much as more ignorance seems to directly correlate with voting Coalition. If one were of an academic mindset, such readily-made correlations would be embarrassing but that discounts the fact that this bunch of Coalition politicians know no shame. They just want power for the pay-check. It's quite extraordinary how such a situation came about, it is far easier understand that as Trump noted, the conservatives of any land would "love" the 'poorly educated'. Not, not the un-educated, but the poorly educated - which clearly means those who not only weren't left alone to come to stupid choices, but those who were educated so poorly they were given more wrong answers than right ones, and are definitely more inclined to vote for the conservatives. The cynicism involving education beggars belief.

The Stupid wants more Stupidity. It needs more Stupidity to sustain itself - nay, grow - and so Stupidity begets the Big Stupid that we have come to.

Interest Rates, Property, Banking, Greed, And Fear

The ticking time bomb is the housing affordability crisis and the Property Bubble.
The long and short of it is that all our banks have committed vast sums of money into private sector debt. It can't afford for the asset values to fall, or else all those big loans will go bad and wipe out the banks. Our society is too reliant on the four banks and Macquarie Bank because they are too big to fail. And so in order not make things harder for them or their mortgage customers, the RBA has eased interest rates to historic lows, just to keep the soufflé going. Will the Bubble pop? Over the dead body of the RBA.

And it's been going like this for 8 years going on 9 since the GFC. It has gotten so big, nobody can contemplate what a correction would look like.We don't even know what might trigger such a correction. It's bit like living the shadow of a very big object that is precariously balanced, but we marvel at the engineering that has so far kept it from toppling.

The Federal Government knows what it has to do. It has to wind back Negative Gearing. It has to implement rules to limit investors, it has to scrutinise foreign investors more, and it has to provide more supply, and more infrastructure. It's not exactly doing any of these things. The Federal government under the Coalition has argued that retaining the AAA credit rating is necessary in order to keep interest rates low. Except, they're already low enough. All that the low interest rates accomplish is help investors take more risks in the market.

It's not surprising then that nothing gets done. Nobody wants to fix it. So one of these days, there will be something that triggers a collapse and then we'll se how many people get out of the market ahead. but the long this goes, the bigger the impact is going to be and more people will get wiped out. It's like the Coalition government is committing Australians to play chicken with the biggest purchase of their lives.

That Infrastructure Issue

What little infrastructure they're building, the Federal government is for of building the wrong ones. This is because they are in the pockets of the general construction lobby and this lobby likes to build unless toll roads. Of course, they're so careful not to lose the AAA credit rating, they're not investing in much else, and this has led to a contraction in the economy this quarter.

Economic growth over the year to September was just 1.8 per cent, a big comedown from 3.1 per cent over the year to June, which was itself revised down from 3.3 per cent. 

"This is the second-worst economic growth result in 25 years," Labor treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said. "It's only the fourth negative quarter since 1991, and on the only other occasions there were good reasons. In 2011 it was dealing with Cyclone Yasi in Queensland, in 2009 it was the greatest international downturn since the Great Depression, and in 2000 it was the aftermath of the Sydney Olympics. It is also the case that this figure is worse than 2011, worse than 2000, and comparable with 2009, in the middle of the global financial crisis."

Mr Morrison said the unexpected result would be incorporated in the mid-year budget update to be delivered on December 19.
The government itself was responsible for some of the decline in GDP, with a wind-back in its spending accounting for 0.1 percentage points of the 0.5 per cent drop.

Mr Morrison said the December update would continue to show the budget on a path to return to balance by 2021. But it was possible the trajectory would change, so that the government supported the economy by investing more in infrastructure upfront in return for bigger cutbacks later, as recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

A further slide in business investment knocked another 0.4 points off economic growth, and a partly weather-related slide in construction knocked off 0.3 points.

And so that one went. The thing is, it's not like Australia' economy suddenly found its way into negative growth. It's been a few years now that the mining investment boom was coming off the boil so something had to be done to boost investment. Instead, under Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, the Coalition government went for cuts and destroyed the automobile manufacturing industry as well. It was hard to decipher what those two idiots wanted except maybe for people to lose their jobs but somehow stay off the dole. One ought to give ScoMo the benefit of the doubt, but it's not looking like he's got a good grip on the problem if he thinks tax cuts to businesses is going to do the trick. At this point in time, even the Coalition government ought to know that trickle-down bullshit just doesn't work, and that rhetoric is long past its use by date.

News That's Fit To Punt - 07/Dec/2016

Quick Update

Sorry for the infrequent posts but I've been busy writing a bit. Yes, I'm writing a damn novel. It's about 1984 but not the Orwell novel. It's about what my part of the world looked like that year, before it totally fades away and people think 1984 looked like 'Back to the Future'. I'm getting to the meaty part of it and so I can no longer give it my divided attention so to speak. I have to really knuckle down and weave all the bits together and that has meant less blogging here.

Anyway... today's headlines sort of compelled me to drop what I've been doing and make a few points.

Idiots Will Be Idiots

I think "boys will be Boys" is too general a generalisation. It is more specific to say stupid people will do stupid things, idiots will be idiots. Which brings us to the Coalition government down in Canberra who own a particularly negative distinction for having put in a policy that is not meant to work but looks like it's working because the government throws money at the problem without any accountability, namely the Direct Action plan to control carbon emissions.

Having signed up to the Paris accords, this very same government is meant to do something about carbon gas emissions in this country but it cannot bring itself to even study its own policy's limitations, let alone propose something that sounds like a policy they campaigned hard to pull down.

And so this week we had this fracas:

Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg on Monday launched the long-awaited review - which controversially promises to look at whether to introduce an emissions intensity scheme for electricity generators, which is a type of carbon price - though he emphasised a focus on household electricity prices and energy security.

Energy and business leaders immediately issued a plea to the Coalition and Labor: end a decade of destructive politics and come up with a shared national plan to cut emissions over coming decades, including some sort of carbon price. 

Most were open to that being an emissions intensity scheme, which would set a baseline for how much carbon dioxide a power station could emit for every unit of power generated, penalising those that breached their limit and rewarding cleaner models that emitted less.

You would think that such pleas form their own constituency of businesses would be enough to reconsider their position, wouldn't you. But you would be wrong.

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, freshly returned from three months at the United Nations in New York, said transitioning to an emissions intensity scheme was "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. It is not in the Australian national interest for the government to chase policies that ingratiate it with the Greens.

"To get back on the right economic track, we need the cheapest electricity in the world."
West Australian MP Andrew Hastie said his overriding concern was the cost of living for families and asked: "Why would we unilaterally, economically disarm [by adopting a price on carbon]?" 

South Australian MP Tony Pasin said that given the current economic climate, "the government should be doing all it can to put downward pressure on the cost of electricity generation to reduce the power bills of hard-working Australians". 

NSW MP Craig Kelly said it was fair enough for Mr Frydenberg to leave "everything on the table" as the review was undertaken but then added: "I do not see how any form of carbon trading scheme would put us at a national competitive advantage". 

Another MP, who asked not be named, said he was "scratching his head" why the government had released the review - and opened up a new political fight - just three days after securing year-ending wins in Parliament. 

"There is very real concern among colleagues that this goes down a track we were promised we would not go down."

You can just feel the train crash going on there. There's this myth that somehow Australia's economy needs cheap electricity derived from fossil fuels to be competitive in the world economy. This is from the same government that manoeuvred to shut don the automobile manufacturing industry in this country. We don't have the kind of secondary sector in this country that would benefit from said cheap electricity. Not to mention the fact the countries that do have such secondary industries are moving over to renewables faster than you can say "George Bataille and the Solar Anus".

The broader picture is that because the Coalition turned it into their raison d'être to deny climate change is even real, has made it singularly unable to turn around and deal with the problem. And the joke is on them because they took the junkets to Paris to sign the goddamn piece of paper to say that they would do something serious about it - and they can't blame the Labor Party for that like they do all things. 

So what did our Prime Minister do? Like brave Sir Robin, he quickly ran away. 

Two days after Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg put consideration of an emissions intensity scheme on the table, Mr Turnbull said such a scheme had never been part of the Coalition review of its climate policies. 

"The position is very clear, it is absolutely clear, this review is business as usual . . . The one thing I want to be very clear about, we are not going to take any steps that will increase the already too high cost of energy for Australian families and businesses," Mr Turnbull said.

Well, bravo sir, bravo!




Peak Stupid In Canberra

Some people have asked me, if I'm willing to say name calling didn't exactly help Hillary Clinton's cause, why do I continue to call the Coalition government in Canberra stupid? The short answer to that is that stupid is not a name, it is a description, an adjective. That is to say, if I called them stupid bastards or stupid cunts, then well, I would be name calling - but the important part still wouldn't be that they are bastards and cunts, but rather, that they are stupid.

In that spirit, I want to show it is not me in the wilderness hurling invective and abuse from my blog, it is even the journalists who cover these people firsthand that cannot but describe the way this government behaves as being stupid.

At the end of the political year, the government looks like a bunch of people clinging to their jobs, and doing whatever it takes to keep clinging to them – or if they are not doing that, they are trying to engineer the downfall of others, week after week, issue after issue. 

Sensible people in the government would of course tell you this process of reviewing the manifestly inadequate Direct Action policy was doomed from the start – that it would be impossible to engineer a rational climate policy, one which reduced emissions at the least cost to taxpayers, and steer it successfully through this particular Coalition party room. 

Sensible people would say this process was always going to degenerate into a battle of straw men and a proxy war about leadership. 

They are doubtless correct in that assessment.

This is, after all, the group of people who elevated something as inoffensive as a market-based mechanism to the status of mass moral panic and a national thought crime. 

That’s a collective trance of pure stupid that is very hard to break out of.

 Year ends with Senate roulette and deals spun as grand bargains and cunning plans

Katharine Murphy 

Read more

This is, after all, the group of people who elevated something as inoffensive as a market-based mechanism to the status of mass moral panic and a national thought crime.

That’s a collective trance of pure stupid that is very hard to break out of.

Like I said, it is hard to escape that conclusion. 

Also, thank you for clicking on the ads. It's something helpful for a struggling man. :) 

View From The Couch - 04/Oct/2016

Democratised Nonsense

The whole marriage equality 'debate' is rather unfortunate. It's unfortunate in the sense that there really isn't any logical reason to deny marriage equality. The pseudo-arguments being mounted against it by the christian lobby and conservatives of this country are in most part spurious and idiotic, not even worthy of analysis except that we have to pretend to take it seriously for the sake of it looking like there's a debate.

I don't know about you, but I think this is a kind of intellectual malaise. It's the sort of regressive thinking that allows equal airtime to climate change deniers or extreme right wing nutbars who want to loosen the gun laws of this country. Yes democracy means  canvassing all opinions but should the media work so hard to accommodate the unpalatable? Aren't the outlier opinions outlier opinions for a reason? Just as we don't let creationism sneak into science classes, we should not let idiotic ideas receive the spotlight.

Nonetheless the media is full of democratic niceness and gives platforms to these people in order to create more drama and tension where there need not ought to be. A sensible editorial position would be to not let climate change denial have a place in the national discourse. Allowing such topics oxygen subtracts from our polity, not strengthen it, and the inability of the media to discern such distinctions essentially has weakened our democracy.

Of course, a lot of this is harder to do in practice, and there will always be somebody who champions the democratic right of stupid opinions to be aired and disseminated widely, but they do so at the indulgence of better minds, and at the expense of better discourse. As for the plebiscite, it is clear that it is unworkable if it is not binding; and the current government will not make it binding because a significant portion know that a majority will vote in favour of it and that is something they would seek to deny. Given this situation where the government itself is committed to this anti-democratic parlour game, it is worth saying we should not entertain this idea of a plebiscite and we should just push for a vote in parliament instead.

Arguing Against History

It goes without saying that the victimhood posturing made by the Australia Christian Lobby is pretty pathetic. These are the people arguing against legalising gay marriage because doing so would take something away from Christian marriages. Hence the argument they can mount is that the symbolic loss on the part of Christian marriages is something for which the government and the law cannot compensate, and therefore it must be stopped. You know what? Just writing that sentence made my head hurt.

The core of the Christian Lobby's argument is that they don't want it because they don't want it, and all it takes is a little bit of digging to get to the homophobia that resides not too far from the surface of calls for 'religious freedom'. It's a compete and utter joke that this kind of thinking holding up a very simple process which, really should be no skin off tor collective noses, but they carry on as if this is some kind point of principle that cannot be altered. You sort of wonder why these charitable Christians can't find the same passion in protecting the human rights of asylum seekers or the homeless or the drug addicts and mentally ill of this world.

But no, they persist with the deranged notion that somehow this entitled whitbread middle-class is the victim in the process. Pardon me if you think I'm being harsh but this bullshit really ought not to be aired by the media as the counter-argument to marriage equality. It's not an argument, it's a statement of prejudice and an ancient and ugly one at that. (And that's coming from somebody who isn't gay.)
Who would have thought the problems of the Twenty-first Century involved shedding the prejudices of centuries prior to the Twentieth?

The Absence Of Critical Thought Amongst Conservatives

For close to a decade starting from the mid-2000s, we've seen the rise of the late BabyBoomer generation to the ranks of ministers in this country. The Coalition is still firmly in the hands of the Baby Boomers while the ALP has moved on to Gen-X as their front-bench. What is particularly notable about the conservative Baby Boomers is that they are the people who benefited the most from Whitlam making tertiary education free, and then went on to try and raise Tertiary education fees to unprecedented levels. Not only are their policies crap, they seem to be largely unaware of the perception in the community of them as eying the most entitled people putting a wrecking ball to the national consensus.

The fact that things have not improved under Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership is not very surprising given that the paucity of talent amongst the Liberals and Nationals. The paucity of talent is also unsurprising because the kinds of kids who signed up for young Liberals bacon campus were either spoilt brats from Private Schools who never really leaned anything and were protected their parents' money, or people so stupid to think ideology was a good substitute for doing one's own thinking.

Thus the ideologically motivated have become the front-and-centre face of conservatism, and worse still it's an un-reflective, ill-conceived ideology that is masquerading as something more effective than it actually is. This of course gives rise to a Treasurer like WTE Joe Hockey who announces an end to the age of entitlement and proceeds to cut welfare while cutting taxes for the rich. So far Scott Morrison is faring a little better in that he hasn't cut welfare as much as Hockey did, but he too is intent on giving the wealthy a tax-cut because he believes whole-heartedly in the laughable principle of trickle-down economics.It's enough to make you wonder what kind of education these people got - or perhaps what part of their expensive education they heard enough to take away, because there doesn't seem to be much logic or mathematics or economics or sociology involved.

The tremendous electoral success of the neo-liberal agenda based on Milton Friedman has sort of covered up the vast intellectual blackhole at the heart the neo-liberal project. It is no surprise then that after the GFC, the right has scrambled to find a way to explain away the colossal failure of the massively financialised economy and the global banking crisis it brought about. It is even pitiful that some have taken to Ayn Rand as their go-to thinker. It doesn't et more pathetic than that. Even today the reason the Turnbull government struggles to arrive at a compelling narrative is because it can't formulate one from a position of reason. It can only keep playing the ideological position statements as if they can substitute for actual thinking.

But The Problems Are Mounting

The truly compelling global problem is climate change. Somebody is going to have to pay to deal with it and it can't all be put on the general public nor the governments. It's going to have to come from the private sector. The rampant denialism notwithstanding, they're the facts. The added fact that our government can't bring itself to deal with those issues, and instead rolls around in the political mud trying to figure out how to get past marriage equality shows you just how feeble the minds of our politicians have become. Not only are we living in a time of catastrophic climate change, we're living in a time of catastrophic failure of intellect amongst our national leadership.

Another is the issue of the over-financialised world economy which is centred around banking and the issuing of credit to a world awash in debt. If the GFC triggered by the Lehman collapse of 2007 was one thing, we're staring down the barrel with the potential collapse of Deutsche Bank. If Deutsche Bank goes down, so do derivative trades that amount to about the same as the entire world's GDP. Angela Merkel is saying the German government won't be bailing out Deutsche Bank,but when you think about it, DB is the walking talking quacking, waddling exemplar of "too-big-to-fail". Somebody is going to have to dig deep and keep it going or else any number of scenarios that lead to the implosion of the global economy would be on the horizon - just as it was when Lehman bit the dust. Do we hear a peep out of our treasurer in Australia about all this? No. So, once again, not only are we living in a time of catastrophic economic failure, we're living in a time of catastrophic failure of intellect amongst our national leadership.

It's one of the luxuries of living in Australia - we're so far removed from the world's problems. Most of the time, the world's problem don't really affect us that directly. In the past we've sent troops to the Old World just to get ourselves involved in the world's terrible affairs (like WorldWar I!); but in most part we've sat outa great deal of global issues,and that has worked for us. And that's all well and good except with these two problems, we're firmly in orbit of the looming black hole. Honestly, conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. What we're seeing is the process of intellectual foreclosure.