Federal Election Night 2022

And It Finally Ended

Jeez. It took 9 years but this government of miscreants that started with the Idiot Abbott, is finally put out to pasture. Now that he is headed for the door, Scomo sure was a weird Prime Minister, as much as Malcolm Turnbull sandwiched in-between was redundant. It's hard to believe such a government went 3 terms, as clearly it was in turmoil as it had 3 Prime Ministers in 3 terms. That's weird too. 

The rise of the 'teal' candidacy is probably a historic inevitability given how far to the right the Liberals swung and left urbane ideas behind. A bunch of highly educated professional women with Liberal Party pedigrees running as independents in deeply entrenched inner city Liberal seats obviously did the trick. The Sydney North Shore, Northern Beaches together with the Eastern Suburbs has gone 'teal'. Gone are Trent Zimmerman, Jason Falinski, and David Sharma. All I can say is, what took them so long? The great mystery to me has been all these well-educated, well-heeled women toeing the party line against their own personal interests. It's about time they woke up and went their own way. They're not my political friends, but I applaud them for wanting out at long last. It's a divorce that's been a long time coming.

Losing these women also raises the question where the Liberal Party is going to go. Amazingly, you saw no urgency about this existential threat from the Coalition in the weeks leading up to the vote, and arguably Scomo didn't address any of it in his concession speech. Again, he's a weird guy - but more on that later. He and his cohorts in government had plenty off opportunities to do something, even if just symbols to address the grievances of women in general - but they chose to do nothing. They couldn't possibly wonder how this election resulted in them getting kicked out by people who were once close to them. For now, we can see that the Liberal Party has been deserted by its women-folk, and that's kind of interesting. 

Climate Change As A Priority Issue

Maybe - just maybe - Climate Change (read GLOBAL WARMING) can stop being treated like a back burner as a result of this election. I remember thinking that when Kevin Rudd won, but, no, that didn't work out quite that way. Tony Abbott came storming back on the climate-denial vote. That said if you look at the 11 cross benchers in the lower house, all of whom who ran on Climate as a leading issue, you would expect that perhaps Albo has a shot at getting something concrete done. It would be nice if once and for all if the Coalition could get up to speed and just accept that it's a bloody big issue instead of trying to bury it for political posturing purposes. 

The rise of teal candidates tell you one thing - all the carping from the Murdoch press could not dissuade these electorates from the need to vote out the Liberals and get some action happening on the Global Warming problem.  

Up to now, there's been this weird dynamic where you were often incredulous as to whether the Coalition acted against having any kind of serious climate policies because they just didn't believe it as fact; or didn't want to believe it because of profit motive; or whether they did in fact believe it but were told to act like they didn't to preserve a voting block. If it was the last, then it sure didn't work out for the Coalition at all. If it was the former, two they need to go get an education and get their heads on straight in the coming years because the electorate has pretty much rejected climate change denialism. 

Boutique Retail Politics

You heard the phrase "all politics is local" a lot in the coverage on the ABC. You get the feeling that politicians say this to themselves in order not address the elephant in the room like China's ambitions in the region or the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Instead we're treated to a kind of car-salesman like pitch about costs of living. While costs of living is important, you'd want to vote on more than just that issue alone, and not acknowledging that point as a politician is kind of retrograde. Anybody can argue for self interest. It takes a better candidate to argue for the interest of the community, the area, the state and the nation. 

In light of that the fragmentation of the electorate is a little irksome. The teal candidates are to retail politics what custom made branded goods are to retail goods. There's a hint of neo-liberal personalisation of politics that seems to have happened in the era of social media, and we are given a stronger sense of proximity to our candidates. In turn, the successful candidates are photogenic or long on social-media-savvy. A quick glance at the teal candidates gives you the distinct sense that this is a very personalised kind of body politic expressing itself. 

Is this good? Who knows? Yet it does open the door to the massively populist, lowest common denominator politics. So we should ask in the same breath was, say Trump good? Is Boris Johnson any good? As per the Gillard minority government before it, the new ALP government has its work cut out for it. 

The Old Codgers Died

The other aspect of all this that springs to mind is that the old codgers who were stubbornly conservative passed away between 2019 and 2022. The rich suburbs got inherited by their children, and these children are a lot more worldly than their parochially conservative parents. I mean, it must hurt the pride of those educated and conservative that they had to toe the line that Climate Change wasn't happening, or that we needed to keep doing fossil fuels at the expense of the planet because money talks and bullshit walks, or  simply play dumb like climate change is a non-issue. And if the climate wasn't the only thing where they had to play dumb to be nice, then surely the corruption and pork barrelling was hard to justify and defend and most certainly trying to defend a government that had a total disregard for women's issue must have been galling. 

Given how Queensland went in 2019, it's a bit surprising that the inner city of Brisbane got eaten out by the Greens, and chances are, it wouldn't have happened if the old codgers were still around to vote for the Coalition. There's a message in there for Anastasia Paluszczuk (I have to look up that spelling every single fucking time!). Maybe she can be a bit more confident and tell Adani to fuck off with their coal mine.

The Weirdness of Scomo

Scomo, in his time as PM has shown himself to be an utterly mendacious, lazy, selfish partisan git. But just as how we might describe somebody having a mean streak, I would say Scomo had a weird streak of decency over his mendacious, lazy, selfish, partisan git-tish ways. He stood by the importance of democracy (in spite of undermining its institutions through under-funding them) and he talked a good game for Australia's prospects (which have not diminished, have grown in his time, but has also reduced Australia to a quarry).

He is also, Australia's first Generation-X Prime Minister and goes into his post-political career at the tender age of 54. He was an MP for a mere 12 years before becoming PM, 15 years total to date. It is a meteoric career in once sense, that also came with controversies and a certain obliviousness to the nuances of anything. He was a stick-in-the-mud middle class dufus from Sutherland Shire. He characterised himself as a bulldozer towards the end of this campaign, but he was more bull-in-a-china-shop. He moved fast and broke things much as the motto goes at Facebook/Meta - it is not a good motto. 

As we go back to a Babyboomer PM in Anthony Albanese, the sheer anomalousness of Scomo's time in the Lodge sticks out. One certainly wouldn't have expected the Coalition to move to a Gen-X leader faster than the progressives. At this stage the ALP front bench looks like deeper veterans than the outgoing Prime Minister. 

I guess the circumstances of his rise to the office was weird as well. The Liberals had the choice of Julie Bishop, Peter Dutton, and Scott Morrison. For some reason only known to the deepest darkest recesses of the sexist collective mind of the Liberal party room, Julie Bishop in spite of all her experience was rejected in favour of Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. Having disposed of their one credible female leadership candidate, the Liberals decided Peter Dutton was a bit too gauche and rightwing, so they they picked Scomo as a compromise. That turn of events is so weird it is not likely to be duplicated in future. 

All this has led to the incoming Albo Government to look almost nondescript and plain vanilla. I guess when you consider the abject anti-intellectualism of Tony Abbott at the start of the 3 terms, maybe it is not surprising that it ends with this chaotic, mendacious, lazy, whimper.   

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.

Come Join the Fun!

No News on Facebook (For Australia)

"No News For You Australia!"

Nobody thought it would happen, they said - but it did. On Thursday morning, Facebook pulled all the news feeds from its services in Australia. A lot of other services were taken out in the big purge, but most importantly, Facebook thumbed its nose at the Federal Government with its gun-to-the-head legislation. 

Since then there has been much scuttlebutt about what this means, and some of it is just hilarious. 

The move was made in response to the government’s media bargaining code, which is designed to force it and Google to pay publishers for news content.

Facebook executives - in consultation with founder Mark Zuckerberg, vice- president of global partnerships, business and corporate development Marne Levine and head of global news partnerships Campbell Brown - were weighing up what to do for weeks.

The tech platform made its intentions to remove news content from its main platform clear last September, after a draft form of the media bargaining code was made public.

Even Simon Milner, Facebook’s director of policy for the Asia-Pacific region, wasn’t sure if Facebook would follow through with the threat when he fronted up at a parliamentary inquiry in late January. In fact nobody was certain until the eleventh hour, when the Facebook’s most senior executives saw the final bill to be debated in parliament and decided to pull the trigger.

Under the direction of Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, major shareholder and most powerful figure, the company pushed through tweaks to its algorithm to restrict news content for Australians.

What's sidesplittingly funny is that the government thought this was a shock move. Since then we've heard admonitions from Josh Frydenberg that somehow this would reflect badly on Facebook, and Greg Hunt telling us that without the news Facebook will be filled with fake news and misinformation. 

The joke is the government was going to rely on Facebook to get its word out about the COVID-19 vaccination programme - starting next Monday - and suddenly that channel had disappeared. You can't make this stuff up. And so they took to the airwaves on old media to wag their index fingers, telling Facebook its reputation would suffer, the news needed to go back on, and Facebook had to go negotiate these contracts with Seven West and Nine-Fairfax and the Truly-Evil-News-Corporation. 

I mean, I'm no fan of Zuckerberg but come on - a five year old can figure out if he doesn't want to do something, he can just say no. And if he had to give up 4% of his Australian business, so be it. 

Ryan Stokes of Seven West Media wants Facebook to put the new back on, and pay Seven West like Google acquiesced. 

“Their decision to ban legitimate news and information … makes them seem more like a publisher than than just a digital platform,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

“I think the government’s commitment to pushing the code through and legislation through is a really important position and being resolute in that and not responding to these types of interim steps and decisions, I think is really important. And then I think it’s going to be up to Facebook. And frankly, I think it’s in their interest to get the information back on their platform, because that’s what their users want.”

You gotta laugh. Ryan Stokes sounds like he just missed out on a multi-million dollar deal with Facebook who simply declined and walked away. What a loser. 

Let's face it, the laws were written to target Facebook sharing news. If Facebook does not share the news, it's not breaking the planned law. The government looks stupid for passing a law against something that is not happening. It can't then demand Facebook break the law so it can un-break the law by signing a deal it doesn't want to sign. It's easier not to infringe the law and not pay the fine.  Everybody understands Facebook was put in the situation by the Australian government. Nobody thinks worse of Facebook than they already do by any of this. 

It's just too funny. 

Why Are You On Facebook Anyway?

It's worth pondering for a moment. There was a time when the news wasn't on Facebook and dare I say it was better then. The intrusion of news made the Facebook experience a lot more convoluted. It's not like Facebook is without its faults. The rise of trump and Trumpism, the proliferation of Flat-Earth-Anti-Vaxx-Committed Stupid can be squarely put upon Facebook. Yet a lot of that came about because Facebook allowed itself to be a conduit of all news and views.  

The reason I am these is because my friends who live in distant places are there. I guess I could call them on the phone instead, but there is something useful about quickly conveying a thought through Facebook. And that's it. If I never get to see an article from Politico or Rolling Stone or the Sydney Morning Herald or ABC..net.au through Facebook, I couldn't really care less. 

Does Facebook have a responsibility to carry the news? Surely not. 

Does Facebook need to carry the news, from the user's point of view? No. 

Is Facebook worse as an experience without the news? Not at all. 

So I think most people will stay on, The commentary saying this would drive people away fro Facebook and that some other platform will take over, are premature. Surely they have not seen what has happened with Parker in the wake of the US elections, the Capitol Insurrection, the banning of Trump and the avowed move to Parler made by many Trumpty-Dumb-pties. It's hard to find an alternative to Facebook that everybody can agree.

About Fires and Emergencies Services Getting Blocked

By the way, the panel on Q&A looked really stupid. 

It's a bit rich that the government that presided over the worst bush fires in the history of modern Australia can complain that people can't access news regarding Fires and Emergencies through Facebook. The government came out swinging like Little-leaguers on red cordial saying Facebook shouldn't switch off emergency services but when you think about it, it's not Facebook's internet. Facebook didn't switch off the internet for those services. They just decided not to carry that social responsibility ion it makes them liable to the proposed laws. The Communication Minister arguing like Facebook made those services inaccessible makes him look like a moron. 

The sites complaining that Facebook doesn't carry them any more are right to complain but at no point did the government make it official that Facebook should be the place where messages like that should be pushed out. It was the free and unfettered market that decided that. The government should take responsibility that it has intervened in the market and there were unforeseen outcomes because of that intervention.  

In some weird way I'd like to see talks break down so much that Google and Facebook both leave Australia and we all get to see what the hell the landscape looks like then. I'd imagine it would be pretty fun and wild. 

Who Do You Hate More?

What all this comes down to for the consumer is no just who do they hold responsible, but also who do they blame for the perceived disruption. I already don't like Zuck, I don't like Facebook even though I'm there. I don't like Scomo and his moron-minion Josh-boi, I don't like the Coalition, but I live here in Australia. People say I can't remove Zuck from FB and that's an issue, but I can't seem to vote out Scomo any more than I can vote out Zuck. 

So it really comes down to who do you hate more? I've realised I hate Scomo and Josh just a little bit more than I hate Zuck-the Fuck. I think we all learned something through this experience, and that is what I have learned. I hate odious idiots far more than I hate odious smart-alecs.

The politicians are trying to posture that they have the high ground. There is no high ground at the bottom of a hole you dug. It's entirely laughable. 

Blues In The Key Of 18C

'The Right To Be A Bigot' Politics Truly Sucks

I don't mean to write a lot about politics or economics. It just ends up that way. I couldn't imagine being a real life political correspondent covering the comings and going in Canberra. I imagine it would be quite insular and tedious to begin with, but made worse by the rhetorical games and the not-answering-your-question-but-shoving-my-agenda thing that politicians do that makes bullshit out of important subjects and perhaps does more to obfuscate things rather than reveal.

The modern cadre of journo covering politics would have the added horror of having to follow politicians through social media as well as having to translate the politi-speak employed by the politicians into plain English. It's not an enviable job. Back in the day when Peter Smark, Peter Ellingsen and Alan Ramsey wrote for the Fairfax, you never got the feeling that they got too exasperated even when the going got silly or for that matter violent as it did in Tiananmen Square.

Then again, they didn't come up against the wall of bullshit that gets erected daily by our contemporary politicians. The wall of bullshit can get so high, it can get a man with no idea and no policies of merit, get voted in to become Prime Minister of the land. That's some steep bullshit.

I can't really imagine what it's like to be Katherine Murphy or Laura Tingle who have had to work the press gallery in Canberra during the Abbott Government, because some of what they've written lately betrays a quiet disillusion with government, politics and what politics can achieve in this country, given the calibre of people we've voted in. I mean, it's bad enough blogging this stuff. Doing it for work would suck.

That in a roundabout way brings me to this current brouhaha they are having down in Canberra to do with the Racial Discrimination Act part 18C. The Liberal Party claims with the highest possible ground can muster, that 18C interferes with freedom of expression. To recap, this notion exists because conservative commentator Andrew Bolt got himself into a spot of bother over vilifying somebody for not being Aboriginal enough. It's stretching things. This then gave enough impetus for the Coalition government to try and rewrite this little section that says you can't offend and humiliate people, and George Brandis infamously championed the cause of people's right to be a bigot.

If the great crusade for freedom of expression culminates with the right for people to be bigots, then you have to think maybe you took a wrong turn somewhere. Surely you'd think the moment those words left his lips, George Brandis might have thought, "hang on, maybe I'm giving ammunition to the wrong people?" After all, the first thing that sprang into my mind was the line from 'Catch-22':

"Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.”

If you're arguing for a special, specific spot to protect plain obnoxious assholes from the Racial Discrimination Act, maybe you're arguing too fine a point to be called 'freedom of speech'. If you want a special exemption from the RDA, and that exemption is to be allowed to offend people and humiliate them by calling them words like nigger, kike, wop/wog or spic, (or abo, boong, chink or gook too!), maybe it doesn't say much about the free press or freedom of expression in this country? After all, what kind of press is going to say, refer to Mr. Obama as a nigger and cite freedom of expression to allow it, and by extension, not to cop to the judgment and opprobrium such a description would earn them?

Maybe it just says more about George Brandis and his own tremendous, irrepressible desire to be a bigot? Is it really a win for freedom of speech if the upshot of changing this act is so that Andrew Bolt can use the bully pulpit of his radio microphone to vilify people without much of a voice in our community? Maybe this is simply too hard asking the party of "ditch-the-witch" to consider. Maybe it's just too hard for them to comprehend.

Think of all the things this government doesn't support, like a bill of rights. Or the things it chooses to censor, treating its own citizens like children. It goes after artists for fear their work might be paedophilia; it censors films that point to the corrupt nature of power, like 'Salo'; you can't argue this wowser government is doing everything it possibly can to protect freedom of expression. How can all this fixation and fuss over 18C be anything but the desire to be bigoted and not to be punished for it? One can't possibly take this bunch on their word about this principle.

So here we are, folks - a Parliament busily arguing the imagined merits of rewriting 18C. Read it and weep.

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.

The Tyranny Of Stupid

Age Of Entitlement Is In Full Swing

We kind of knew way back in 2010 that the current crop of Liberal and National Party MPs running for government were intellectually deficient. If that seems like a big claim, then you really need to go back and reread the headline after the same mob got into office after 2013, because it's been gaffe city and the outer-suburbs of loonyville ever since. The most symbolic bit of rhetoric might have been WTE - that's Worst Treasurer Ever! - Joe Hockey made the remark that the age of entitlement was over, and proceeded to cut welfare. In an era when wealth inequality was increasing at an ever accelerating rate and when the well-heeled scions - the most entitled people with the most entitlements society confers upon them - start cutting at welfare in the name of ending entitlement, no amount of double-think is going to get you over the line of acceptability. Accept that, and you may as we'll get a lobotomy.

On the whole, it is unsurprising then that Tony Abbott's time in the Lodge was shorter even than Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd, and that Joe Hockey would be dispatched right out of Parliament in the dumpster fire purge that followed. We should pay attention to The Hon. WTE Joe Hockey because now, he's the ambassador to Washington as well as pulling down his MP superannuation. Entitlements and double-dipping much Joe? This mentality of sticking their hands deep into the public purse for personal gain seems to be ingrained in the Coalition MPs.

Now, it appears it is all coming to light. Susan Ley this month is the first casualty of the war in Turnbull's cabinet. Bronwyn Bishop - she of helicopter-gate notoriety - blamed to socialists, which garnered her a new round of ridicule, and today Julie Bishop is being scrutinised for her polo trip on the public purse.

The thing that is striking about all this is that they really don't care how this looks to the world. Whether it is Susan Ley or Bronwyn Bishop, they put up a front saying they're allowed to be spending public money on expensive personal jaunts, and as such the scrutiny itself is unwarranted. It's staggering how they can't put the two together and see how bad they look. You wonder how we got to this point, but maybe it was simply always thus. But it doesn't help to have such stupid people fronting for the government.

The Dearth Of Thinking Talent

I know I keep writing about this, but not a week goes by without making itself apparent in the public discourse, so here I go again...

One of the problems with any long running group is that it get sclerotic. The most notable feature of the current LNP Coalition government lineup is just how lacking in intellectual firepower they are. There is not a single one of them who won't come out with some neo-liberal ideological cant as their substitute for actual thinking. It used to serve them well until the GFC happened, but the GFC has opened up a problem for the neo-liberal ideology that it has proven itself to be entirely self-serving for the wealthy investor classes. Worse still, many of the current problems arise out of the long pursuit of neo-liberalism since John Hewson's manifesto Fightback. Doing more of the same is clearly not going to solve those very same problems.

As I pointed out a couple days ago, the verdict is in and this government isn't very good at managing anything. If Tony Abbott's time did anything, it was to put the Australian economy in full reverse. When you add up all the information out there, you get the picture that this government actually hasn't got the faintest clue as to what to do. Worse still, they don't exactly have the next John Hewson to give them a blueprint. What they have is more of the same guff being generated from the IPA, which in turn is just reciting article of the neo-liberal faith.

There's simply nobody doing proper thinking worth spit on the conservative side of politics. Worse still, because they don't do any thinking, they enter the arena without much thought, and are incapable of creating the kind of solutions to problems that don't first kowtow to ideology. We are at the point in history where whatever worked for Reagan and Thatcher and by extension Howard, Blair and Clinton are not going to work any more. Yet there is simply a dearth of thinking that actually is going to serve the greater good, coming form the right. Instead it's the usual user-pay, trickle-down, privatise-the-lot, tax less, cut-welfare, - see how it has become a self-parody? - policies they trot out as if that is some kind of panacea. As if the problem with the ALP government under Rudd and Gillard was that they couldn't do neo-liberalist economics properly.

You wish politics hadn't become so idiotic, and surely the Left have made their own contributions to the general stupidity going around, but it is surely the intellectual failings of the Right that have turned our economy around from surprising success to doldrum failures. And there's only more of the same to come from whence that came.

I Didn't Expect This

This is utter hearsay but here goes...
Years ago, somebody told me they once had dealings with Malcolm Turnbull, and they came to the conclusion that he was a crook. I don't know on what basis this was said to me, or what Malcolm Turnbull might have done to earn such scorn, but basically, the advice being offered was, "if you have a choice to vote for Malcolm Turnbull to be Prime Minister, don't".

He lamented on the day Malcolm Turnbull became opposition leader the first time and said, if Australia ever elected Malcolm Turnbull, it would rue the day. And then the Godwin Grech thing happened and  this person was relieved that Malcolm Turnbull would leave politics. Of course subsequent events have gone entirely in the opposite direction and he is now our Prime Minster, has been for a year and we still don't know what the hell he stands for.

We think he stands for Malcolm Turnbull being Prime Minister and not much else. I know it's hard having a Parliament with a 1 seat majority, but it's not like the Turnbull Government is setting the place on fire, getting stuff done, or for that matter passing sensible legislation. It's not as if he's doing anything that he hinted he might want to do, should he ever become Prime Minister; it's more like he just sits around basking in the warm glow of the office of Prime Minister, swanning around going to the cricket or whatever. It sure doesn't look like a government with a solid agenda, certainly no more than the "Jobs & Growth" slogan it took to the election, and even allowing for the alarming banality of that slogan which it is underperforming immensely, his government doesn't even seem to be even about that. (Judging by his cabinet ministers it seems to be about shoving public monies into their purses as quickly as possible)

I think Turnbull is just going to try to ride out as long as possible, and then when they do finally oust him, he's going to enjoy the reckoning that the Liberals have nobody with a brain with whom they will replace him. If people had high expectations for Malcolm Turnbull, he's sure not living up to them, but more to the point, he's incredibly pleased and satisfied that he does't have to live up to expectations. He is Prime Minister. He will always have been a Prime Minister, an exclusive club that he can forever flaunt to his dying day. He will be in the history books forever, his name is immortal.

It's a pity the rest of us are the ones who have to pay for such indulgences. 

Maybe we should take solace in the fact that he's not completely fucking up the very institutions our country while he swans about being Prime Minister of Malcolm-ness. Maybe this is all there is to the man, and the most important thing about him is still, that he is not Tony Abbott. 

View From The Couch - 9/Jan/2017

"The Government Totally Sucks"

Song of the day (again)!



Yeah I know it sounds totally gratuitous to say that the government totally sucks, but hey, we actually have a government that's stinking it up pretty badly.

Here's something from Pleiades as a followup, coming off the pages of Crikey:

The latest global economic news is mostly excellent, though better for some countries. We now have figures on most of the world’s economies for the last quarter of the 2015-16 financial year. This enables comparisons with earlier periods, including Australia’s last three years (almost) of Coalition rule with the previous administration.
For the entire period 2009 to 2013 Australia’s economy was the best performed in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Alone in that club of 34 wealthy democracies, Australia maintained positive growth, kept most workers employed and increased productivity, incomes and wealth. Australia was the toast of the economic world. 

Three years later, Australia is the stand-out economy again, but for the opposite reason. Australia is the only OECD member not to record improvement over the last three years in any of the six key indicators of economic health.

And the article tells us our jobs are down; our wages are rising the weakest of the group; our trade is in a disastrous slump thanks to the commodities tanking; the budget deficit is ballooning; our gross debt is climbing when other nations are cutting theirs; and our GDP growth is merely okay.

That leads us to this bit:

Of the 34 developed OECD countries, no fewer than seven have advanced on all six variables. Leading the pack are Germany, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Another six have gained in five areas — Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Italy and, surprisingly, Greece. Seventeen economies have improved in three or four areas, bringing to 30 the countries enjoying the fruits of the current sturdy global recovery.
That leaves just four laggers. Three nations have advanced on only two of the six variables — Chile, Finland and, perhaps another surprise, Canada. Just one country — Australia — has failed to advance on any indicator, keeping GDP growth steady and declining in the other five.
The conclusion thus seems highly probable: Australians have swapped the best economic administrators in the developed world for the worst.
Perhaps the one success the Coalition can claim is that the mainstream media has no desire to report what is actually happening.

So when I say the government sucks, I actually mean, the idiots in power who brought about this dismal, pathetic turn of performance. We always knew this bunch of conservatives were talentless, unprincipled hacks, but when you see their handiwork in numbers, it sure puts the bleak future into sharper focus.

Bromancing The Oil

When it gets down to the cui bono of the alleged Russian tampering of the US elections, and the subsequent good will between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, you would have to say Vladimir got his man, because his man Trump is the most likely to ignore climate science and give Putin's Russia a break from all the sanctions.

Let's face it, Russia's main export is oil. Without it, there's really just arms exports with Russia, something President Obama pointed to. These sanctions are hurting Russia, and so one shouldn't underestimate the motivation to get out from under these sanctions. A Trump Presidency essentially puts it on the table.

It's a scary thought because if Trump lifts the sanctions, then Russia effectively gets away with the Crimea annexation as well as the odd bit of military adventurism into Ukraine. Whatever one thinks of those places, it remains true that Russia simply grabbed hold of those places without contest. If Trump sells out the sanctions, he's effectively selling out NATO - and this would be disturbing in the extreme because it would mean he's at least rolling back America's commitment to keeping security in Europe.

One can indeed conjecture a whole lot about how all this plays out in say, eastern Europe, but the more compelling point might be that for Trump, it's all about money. Effectively the United States has just elected a President who may be willing to sell out on its most important strategic positions - gained over decades of hardworking and sacrifice - just to enrich his own billionaire coffers. It's actually a sick kind of joke that things have turned out the way they have. So, uh, their government is going to totally suck as well.

The Mathematics Of History

There was this interesting article in Wired.

Turchin — a professor at the University of Connecticut — is the driving force behind a field called “cliodynamics,” where scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future. It’s named after Clio, the Greek muse of history. 

These academics have the same goals as other historians — “We start with questions that historians have asked for all of history,” Turchin says. “For example: Why do civilizations collapse?” — but they seek to answer these questions quite differently. They use math rather than mere language, and according to Turchin, the prognosis isn’t that far removed from the empire-crushing predictions laid down by Hari Seldon in the Foundation saga. Unless something changes, he says, we’re due for a wave of widespread violence in about 2020, including riots and terrorism.

You could'a fooled me. Cyclical theories of history are interesting heuristics that come and go. I think the one I read recently - and this is a decade ago - was by a guy called Harry S. Dent Jr. who wrote an extensive book about how the market behaves in different cycles of economic expansion and debt accumulation. In as much as it was empirical in that a whole lot of data went into it, you still had to take it with a grain of salt because even as Dent was predicting all kinds of things, there was the calamitous GFC going on. You could easily argue the events of 2007-2008 were a cyclical thing or a total breakdown of an old system or a restructuring we had to have.

So in that light, let's have a look at what Turchin is offering:

In the simplest of terms, Turchin and his colleagues will build a mathematical model using one data set and then test that model against other historical data sets they’re unfamiliar with. That way, they can see if the model holds. This isn’t exactly the psychohistory described by Isaac Asimov. “For the most part, we don’t predict the future. It’s too far. We can’t wait 200 years to see if something’s right,” Turchin says. “I’m not a prophet.” But cliodynamics moves in that direction — and it’s not science fiction. Though traditional historians are often wary of the practice, others very much see the value. 

“It’s very important to do. It should force traditional historians to respond,” says Yale historian Joseph Manning. “Most people in my field just publish documents and don’t go behind them.”

What Turchin and his colleagues have found is a pattern of social instability. It applies to all agrarian states for which records are available, including Ancient Rome, Dynastic China, Medieval England, France, Russia, and, yes, the United States. Basically, the data shows 100 year waves of instability, and superimposed on each wave — which Turchin calls the “Secular Cycle” — there’s typically an additional 50-year cycle of widespread political violence. The 50-year cycles aren’t universal — they don’t appear in China, for instance. But they do appear in the United States. 

The 100-year Secular Cycles, Turchin believes, are caused by longer-term demographic trends. They occur when a population grows beyond its capacity to be productive, resulting in falling wages, a disproportionately large number of young people in the population, and increased state spending deficits. But there’s a more important factor, one that better predicts instability than population growth. Turchin calls it “elite overproduction.” This refers to a growing class of elites who are competing for a limited number of elite positions, such as political appointments. These conflicts, Turchin says, can destabilize the state. 

Many of these issues persist in industrial societies. Although population growth is no longer likely to result in mass starvation, it can push the supply of labor beyond demand, leading to increased unemployment.

And there you have it - the kind of conclusion Harry S. Dent Jr. came up with, which leaves you going, "yeah sure mate". I'm not sure how predictive these kinds of heuristics can be, given the kinds of parameters being lined up. Also, it does seem to have a deterministic underpinning that utterly fails to explain why the 1970 peak was so low, for instance. And while terrorism is indeed way up, lynchings are way down, so you wonder if lynchings is even a relevant term to be including in such an analysis.

One of the best ideas to come out of quantitative analysis of baseball was the notion of "replacement level". That is to say, if you state that something is good, or bad the natural question is "compared to what?" And that leads to the notion of an arbitrary mathematical straw man we can call the replacement level player. In a sense if we're going to put up stats and give them qualitative assertions, we need to at least have a framework of comparison - are 100 murders/riots/terror acts a year good or bad? Compared to what? It's this kind of benchmarking that is completely lacking in these numbers.

Still, I thought some people might be interested in this stuff.

News That's Fit To Punt - 14/Dec/2016

In Case You Missed It, They Really Suck

What can you say? Our Federal Government under the Coalition truly suck at this governing thing.:

Yesterday’s quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth numbers reveal two things with crystal clarity. First, that the international recovery following the global financial crisis (GFC) is well underway and gathering pace. Second, that Australia is the one stand-out economy in the developed world missing out on the strengthening tailwinds.

That bit we knew. If you care to work through the article, you'll see comparisons of just how bad our government has been handling the economy at least since 2013, which happens to be when they took over form Labor.

The take home bit is this bit:

GDP growth — quarterly and annual — are not the only indicators on which Australia is lagging among developed countries. Most countries are also recording steady growth in employment. Australia’s job numbers appear stable, but hours worked per person are declining. 

Australia is one of only seven countries now recording lower real wages, and one of just 13 still increasing gross debt. It is the only OECD economy with the quadrella of declining GDP growth, worsening employment, declining wages and deepening debt. 

There can now be no doubt that, as Crikey tentatively proposed in October, Australians in 2013 exchanged arguably the best economic administrators in the developed world for unarguably the worst.

Yup. They'e doing a terrible job. Who would have guessed? Who?

Did Leanne Call You?

I got a robocall from Leanne today. I picked up the phone and off she went, railing on like some old school friend you never wanted to hear from again, banging on about the pension and her dad who worked hard all his life. Turns out a lot of people got the call.

The robo-call is anonymous, with no authorisation or hint of its origin, but Fairfax Media has confirmed it is the work of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, which has launched an 11th-hour campaign against the January 1 changes.

The Abbott-era reforms, passed with the help of the Greens in 2015, will redistribute some income to needier pensioners while saving $2.4 billion over four years from the wealthy. 

The asset limit will increase substantially, meaning those underneath it will gain an average of $30 a fortnight. But those above the threshold - about 330,000 people - will lose part or all of their pension.

Labor opposed the measure in 2015, but this year pledged not to wind it back. In recent weeks, pensioners have received letters from Centrelink informing them of the imminent changes.
Acting social services minister Mitch Fifield said the changes made the pension more sustainable and the family home would continue to be excluded from the assets test.

"Pensioners and their families should not believe the scare campaign from an organisation not even willing to put their name to their robo-calls," he said.

I don't know. I get that it's an important issue but Leanne was hardly persuasive. 

WasteCONnex Woes

Here's a truly sucky moment. 

A Sydney man whose home was compulsorily acquired by the state government for the WestConnex motorway project is facing Christmas in jail after he was refused bail for allegedly breaking into his former house. 

Van Ngo, 68, was charged with damaging property and entering a premises without a lawful excuse after he allegedly broke into his former home at 84 Campbell Street, in St Peters in Sydney's inner west, hours after being evicted.

Until his eviction and arrest on Friday, Mr Ngo was the last remaining home owner along a strip of houses in Campbell Street that have been acquired by the state government for the $16.8 billion WestConnex motorway project.

On Tuesday, Mr Ngo's bail application was refused in Central Local Court, leaving him facing up to a month in Silverwater prison while his lawyers prepare another bail application in the Supreme Court.

You have to feel for the guy. He probably spent his whole working life paying off that mortgage and in comes the NSW Government building a tollway exchange nobody wants to keep their lobbyists happy. Out on the street got Mr. Ngo for not-enough-on-the-dollar. The people building the White Elephant Tollway are making a killing just on the real estate values even though there's a Bubble going on. These people getting evicted are not getting fair value. You wonder how the Tollway builders and lobbyists live with themselves kicking out other people from their homes.

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 - 02/Sep/2016

The Shoe On The Other Foot

There's this old story in Japan called 'Rakuda' - which I've made into a little video you can look up on YouTube. It's about a polite guy who happens to come across the corpse of a gangster, and the gangster's 'Bro' is there to make his day miserable. The Bro sends the mild mannered guy on errands to organise a little wake for the dead gangster, while holdings work tools hostage. Later that night, the two men drink to the dead man. The polite man undertake influence of alcohol turns into a massive bully who returns the bullying spades. Trust me, it's very black but very funny.

Right now, Bill Shorten is that mild mannered man, sticking to the Bro, Malcolm Turnbull. Maybe it's broader, the whole ALP is the polite dude turned drunk and ornery and angry, while the Coalition is the guy who is suddenly on the receiving end of the exact same bullying he dished out.

It's quite the spectacle really, to see a
Government lose a vote in the Lower House. It hasn't happened since 1962 when Menzies had a one set majority, so it's rather telling.

Peter Hartcher has called for Christopher Pyne to get the boot. Pyne has denied it was his fault, which is like the biggest "who farted?" moment in politics I ca remember since... well, I don't know. It is a rather large fart. You'd think the Whip would be in for a bit of whipping from the PM. Even the missing Justice Minister Michael Keenan is trying to dodge blame. Much as I despise Christopher Pyne, I don't think it's on him - it's surely on the Chief Whip for the Liberals. The difficult bit is that it's a woman. Lose her and the Coalition would be told they're dumping the blame on a woman. You can just see it now.

Anyway, it's all come to pass that in the first week the new Parliament sitting, the one seat majority government has already run into an all too predictable ambush. This may be the bit where we're all forced to remember just how well Julia Gillard's government did with two seats. Of course 2 is mathematically 100% better than 1 so this is going to get very interesting very soon.

Or as the raging drunk nice guy says in 'Rakuda', "One thing I learnt is that if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything!"

What's In A Name?

I've been re-reading Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract since I dug up that section on A-Rod, Jeter and Nomar. The most interesting things in life are in the marginalia. There are two MLB baseball players with the name Billy Hamilton. the one I was familiar with was this guy:

Billy R. Hamilton (born September 9, 1990) is an American professional baseball center fielder for the Cincinnati Reds of Major League Baseball. Hamilton holds the Minor League Baseball single-season stolen base record with 155 steals — 10 higher than the previous Minor League record set by Vince Coleman and 25 more than Rickey Henderson's record set on the Major League level. He also holds the Cincinnati Reds record for most stolen bases by a rookie in a season.[1]

The thing to know about this Billy Hamilton is that he's very fast on the base paths.Now, in the 1890s section of Bill james' big book is a name Billy Hamilton  describing him as the best all round player of 1891, but also, the man with the most steals in the 1890s.The earlier Hamilton it turns out, was just as much a speed demon around the bases as the modern Billy Hamilton.

Hamilton broke into the major leagues in the American Association with the Kansas City Cowboys in 1888. He established himself as a star the following season by batting .301 with 144 runs and 111 stolen bases. In 1890, the Cowboys, who were ceasing operations, sold Hamilton to the Philadelphia Phillies. The next year he led the NL in batting average (.340), runs scored (141) and hits (179). For a third consecutive season, Hamilton led the NL in stolen bases. 

In 1892, Hamilton hit both a leadoff and game-ending home run in the same game. Only Vic Power (1957), Darin Erstad (2000), Reed Johnson (2003) and Ian Kinsler (2009) have accomplished the same feat.[4] He hit .380 in 1893, which led the major leagues.
Philadelphia outfielders Hamilton, Sam Thompson, Ed Delahanty and Tuck Turner all hit over .400 in 1894. That year Hamilton set the all-time standard for most runs scored in a season (198); since then, Babe Ruth has come closest to Hamilton in runs scored, with 177 in 1921, setting the American League and modern MLB record. Hamilton also set the record for most stolen bases in one game, with seven on August 31, 1894. He set the record for most consecutive games scoring one or more runs, with 35 runs in 24 games in July–August 1894.[5] 

Hamilton led the league in steals for a fifth time in 1895. In 1896, Hamilton moved to Boston, for whom he played his final six seasons. Although his numbers declined, Hamilton still scored over 100 runs in all but two of those seasons. 

Hamilton retired after the 1901 season. Over his career he compiled 912 (or 937; see Career total discrepancy) stolen bases, a .344 batting average and 1690 runs in 1591 games; he is one of only three players to average more than one run per game played. His .455 career on-base percentage ranks fourth all-time behind Ted Williams, Babe Ruth and John McGraw, and his 912 stolen bases ranks third behind Rickey Henderson and Lou Brock. 

He is the Philadelphia Phillies career leader in batting average (.361), on-base percentage (.468) and stolen bases (508). He holds Phillies single-season records for on-base percentage (.523 in 1894), runs (196 in 1894), stolen bases (111 in 1891) and times on base (355 in 1894).

I know, it's utter trivia. The two men are not immediately related. It's coincidence - if you have 100,000 names, you will get doubles like any set of baseball cards.