Quick Shots - 07/Feb/2017

More On the Liberal Party Split Thing

As it turns out, there's more about Cory Bernardi that's worth knowing. We could have guessed it, but it bears pointing out:

Bernardi first sensed a problem in 2009, when during a heated and divisive partyroom debate on whether the Coalition should support Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme, one of his colleagues, the now deceased West Australian MP Don Randall, rose to his feet and said: "I don't give a stuff about the national interest, I want to get re-elected and this needs to go away." 

Bernardi went back to his Senate office and wrote down the quote. He never forgot it. It was the beginning of the end.

I don't know how else to put it but that right there is the mocking gun that these Liberal Party politicians are nothing but hacks sucking on the pubic teat. As if Bronwyn Bishop and Sussan Ley weren't enough proof, here in the segment above is the distilled essence of how these bastards think. 

The late WA MP Don Randall said he doesn't give a stuff about the national interest, he just wants to get re-elected. It begs the question why the hell we need to re-elect such a person; as it turned out, he died shortly before the recent election and truth be told, judging from the quote, it was probably a good thing too, because he certainly had no intention of serving the national interest. It's easily arguable that the most he served the national interest was when he died, thus depriving himself of more opportunities to suck at the public teat. 

That Cory Bernardi thought the quip was worth writing down as quote to which he is going to make his political credo, tells us well enough that he too doesn't think much about the national interest - he too is all about getting re-elected. It's strange that he thinks he has a better chance not as the Liberal Party's No. 2 on the SouthAustralian Senate ticket but as an independent. Maybe there's more money in being a leader of a party of one. It's hard to figure how the dollars an cents work out, but it would be remiss of the media if it didn't investigate this strictly pecuniary angle. After all, the man's motto amounts to, stuff the national interest, he's only in it for himself.

If I may offer a bit of gratuitous advice to Corgi BurntNazi, it is that the ALP have found "Disunity Is Death". Leaving a major party that would put you in as a senator is likely the dumbest move he's made in politics. 

Grexit Again?

If there's one thing that really puts the fear in the markets the world all over, it's the notion that Greece will default on its debts. That being said, the narrative to date has been, the Euro Zone won't let that happen, and the Greeks have to eat a lot of humiliation not to be allowed to default or leave the Euro. This has resulted in the ECB cycling through a lot of money that pays off the debt for Greece in exchange for Greece making immense cuts to its expenditure - some of which might have been reasonable but others that have resulted in terrible cuts to services. There doesn't even seem to be any coherent link between the cuts demanded by the Euro Troika and how the money is spent seeing that most of the money goes to paying off the bonds. And as the Greek economy shrinks and shrivels, it loses any chance paying off the debt.

With that in mind, here's something from Yanis Varoufakis, the ex-finance minister of Greece.

“This two-pronged preparation is the only way to prevent another excruciating retreat by the prime minister in the short term and [German Finance Minister Wolfgang] Schaeuble’s plan in the long term,” Varoufakis wrote. 

In his article, Varoufakis suggested that Schaeuble’s strategy is to lead Greeks to the point of exhaustion so they ask to leave the euro themselves. 

Noting that the “parallel payment system was already designed in 2014”, Varoufakis stresses that Tsipras had “two delusions” that led the government to the current impasse:

• a. that on the night of the referendum, the dilemma was between Schaeuble’s Grexit Plan and the 3. bailout
• b. that the obedience to the 3.bailout could be political manageable through a parallel, society-friendly program.

Both of these “working assumptions” were based only on autosuggestion, the ex finance minister stresses adding that he tried to explained this to the Prime Minister on the night of the referendum 

“In reality there was never a basis for hope that the toxic 3 bailout would be gradually rationalized, in terms that the European Commission would support Athens so that the austerity and anti-social IMF measures would relax, the IMF would force Berlin to accept debt restructuring and lower primary surpluses, the ECB would include Greece in the bond purchase program (QE),” Varoufakis wrote 

He accused leading European negotiators of lying. 

“That Moscovici [EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner], Coerer [ECB] and Sapen [French finance minister] might have given such promises was not an excuse.
Since May 2015 we were fully aware that these gentlemen know how to lie and fail to deliver on their promises when they do not lie.”

Greece remains the thin end of the wedge. If Greece goes, then, the dominoes are in play for the rest of the PIIGS, and will lead to the destruction of the Euro. While it stays in the Euro Zone, the world can live with the fiction that everything is okay, except there is the glaring issue of Brexit, whereby cozy assumptions about the health of the Euro Zone can't be ignored. If the UK can leave, then it offers a practical blueprint for Greece to leave.

The weird thing is that the UK need not ought to have voted to leave, while Greece needs to leave if it wants any semblance of control over its finances. The horror show of bluff and intimidation made by the Troika to keep Greece in the fold and to keep taking the austerity medicine in a sense informed the UK public as to the failings of not having control. Even more ironic may be the case that the UK already had kept its pound sterling as opposed to adopting the Euro, so in a sense it was the state with the least problems of losing control to the Euro Zone. thus if the UK still seems it fit to leave the Euro Zone, then it follows that perhaps Greece needs to reconsider its desire to stay.

If all things are equal, the next time the Grexit show hits the road and world markets panic over the possibility of Greece leaving the Euro Zone, it might be better to put your money on the likelihood that it does leave, and that it's a good thing.

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.

View From The Couch - 04/Mar/2016

Conservatives Infighting

It has come to this. Donald Trump swept Super Tuesday and has put himself firmly on the map to become the Republican nominee for US President.  This has put the Republicans into turmoil. Id imagine it would be hard to countenance Donald Trump as any kind of Republican candidate based on previously professed Republican positions. He has flip-flopped on abortion and gun laws, he's from New York and doesn't look to be terribly religious, he's on to his third wife, the third wife once posed nude in a magazine, and so his 'family' credentials are beyond tarnished, they're atomised. About the only thing he has in common with the Republican establishment might be that he inherited money and he's a white guy playing what he think is a 'white' identity card - which of course works out to be racist. On that last point, he's even garnered support from David Duke, formerly of the KKK, and the current incarnation of the KKK have also endorsed Trump. So by default Trump is not only the Republican front runner, he's the racists' front runner as well.

The enthusiastic endorsement of Trump is quite disturbing because it essentially proves what liberals in America have accused the Republicans all along, that they harbour racists and lend them an air of credibility. It's been going on for some time, but the fact that Trump is their frontrunner candidate reveals that the charges laid by the small-l liberal set are indeed true.

Conservatives remain loath to acknowledge the obvious, but the liberal critique of their politics is correct, and it took the Donald Trump juggernaut to wake them up to it. Indeed, the fact that liberals had a more accurate read on conservative politics than most professional conservatives seems to bother many conservatives more than the substance of the critique itself.

“It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years,” Bret Stephens wrote on Monday at the Wall Street Journal. “Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate, he will not win the presidency, but he will help vindicate the left’s ugly indictment.”

So it's that moment once more where the Centre Right has to confront the Far Right, and the question is whether it has it within it to do this and make it decisive for a generation.

The funny thing about conservatism is that you'd think they have fewer and fewer places to plant their flag. From issues ranging to economics through trade, industry, the environment and foreign policy, they don't have a lot of positions based on facts, but rather positions based on vested interests donating a lot of money to their super PACs. And this has been going on for some time. The Republican Party's been peddling the lie that their policies are good for the heartland when in fact they have been aggressive globalists, effectively exposing jobs out of the country. Now that the base has found out it has been sold down the river they're lining up to vote for Trump as a protest vote. 

The problem is, 'they' (as in the Establishment) might have more moral authority in confronting the populist fascism of Donald Trump had they not sold their constituents down the river., because those people are really angry now and voting for Trump to make a point. 

Will This Happen In Australia?

It's arguable that it has already taken place in Australia. If there is a figure like Trump in Australia, it has to be Clive Palmer. Palmer's rise to the Lower House was funded out of his company's pockets. (I'd like to have written his own pockets but this has been shown to be not true), in a populist move that split the conservative vote. Certainly a clever electioneer, Palmer managed to get three Senators, and a loose alliance with Ricky Muir to ostensibly grab the balance of power. Since then of course, two of his Senators have abandoned him and Muir has proven himself to be much more of an independent with policy views not too far from the ALP, but notwithstanding, Clive Palmer represents the same move inside the conservative politics to go populist.

Even the climate change topic has surely split the Nationals Party from its roots. The farming heartland that used to vote for the Nationals is seeing their livelihoods put to increasing risk because of climate change. The drought of the early 2000s really knocked the stuffing out of them after the big El Nino droughts of the 1990s. There are plenty of people in the traditional national Party constituency that can see the ideological opposition to doing anything to deal with climate change is being opposed. The grassroots of the Nationals Party had every reason to run to Palmer United Party just to send a message.

Perhaps the more bitter struggle is going on inside the Liberal Party where Malcolm Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott, who was backed by the 'far right' faction in the Libera; Party - yes, those people with the rather illiberal views on Gay Marriage and safe schools and the such, and also challenge Climate Change as a scientific finding. There are some irreconcilable differences going on in there, and this is leading to policy paralysis of the Coalition government. Malcolm Turnbull's popularity is only as high as the expectation that he will deal with things. The party room that doesn't allow him to do those things might be winning the cultural wars but is going to lose the election.

It's one thing to elevate Malcolm Turnbull because he personally polls much better than Tony Abbott; it's another thing entirely for those very same people to repudiate the retrograde delinquents of their own party like Abbott and Cory Bernardi. Clearly they can't. At the moment the Australian electorate is ambivalent because it fears the turmoil of the ALP in the last government, but at the same time does not like the kinds of changes the Coalition government has proposed one after the other. Malcolm Turnbull may well call that double dissolution election but he is in no way a shoe-in to win. 

The point is, the infighting between the Centre-Right and the Far Right is inevitable even in Australia. Until now, the Far-Right has not been given much grounds for legitimacy. Yet, as discussions move closer to things that the Far Right just won't countenance, they are going to increasingly try and sabotage the middle. Tony Abbott may have only been the beginning.

The Minds That Hate

I caught this week's Q&A by accident. I try not to watch it because it's too infuriating, and that seems to be its chief purpose: to rile people into being active viewers. The bit I specifically caught was the bit where a woman asked whether gay marriage and the adoption of children by married gay couples will lead to a situation like the Stolen Generation where a government will have to apologise. It was the sort of rhetoric that attempts to mount a position whereby it posits that children adopted by gay couples would be 'taken' from some mother and therefore stand in the same situation as aboriginal children taken into custody by the state. It's a spurious construction likening two totally unlike things.

What really vexes me is that the brazen rhetorical travesty is put out there by some idiot religious woman with a straight face and then the panel has to take it seriously because it has been put to them with a straight face. Worse still, we had to sit through a mealy-mouthed defence of this idiotic position by Lyle Shelton of the Christian Lobby as if the position had any merit. Dr. Keryn Phelps was hyper aggressive in trying to justify the LGBTQ position while Anna Burke argued a legalist line; but really, somebody should have just said, "madam, that is an offensive construction that only you could conjure because you want to offend while trying to look reasonable. It is not reasonable, it is simply offensive."

But no. Tony Jones doesn't say it, nobody says it and instead they go on and on trying not to offend this woman who clearly came to offend with her question. I know, I know. If I don't like it, just turn it off. I did, because I couldn't take it anymore.

News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Sep/2015

ZIRP Didn't End Today

After months of threatening to lift interest rates, the US Fed decided not to raise interest rates today. Which is pretty damn amazing really because it does nothing but punch a hole in the credibility of the US Fed when it talks about how it sees its own policy. Think out it for a moment. If it were the RBA and Glenn Stevens, it would be unthinkable for him to spell putsch a move for 9 months of the year, only to squib on the threat when you were supposed to do it.

As it is, the RBA has us on a strange parallel world to ZIRP with our very own TWIRP, which is causing its own havoc. Interesting then that the constraints of the US Fed running ZIRP forcesAustralia to adopt its TWIRP and so Glenn Stevens wants to urge Janet Yellen to just get on with it.  Of course if the US Fed does raise it even 0.25%, about a trillion dollars worth of derivative contracts go up in smoke. but this is the thing about derivative contracts: they're only tangentially related to the real world economy.

Of course, the reason the US Fed didn't raise their interest rates according to Janet Yellen's statement is that they are concerned about China's economy - Something both Glenn Stevens and Michael Pascoe think are over-stated as being problematic. And yet, you have to wonder what the US Fed knows about China.

The Wild Wishcasting Phase

Those conservative chumps in the Coalition must be dreaming big, now that albatross Tony has been sent packing, and the poll bounce shows they would demolish a Bill Shorten-led ALP if there were an election held today. They haven't had numbers like since the days of Julia Gillard and even then Tony Abbott himself had terrible poll numbers. They might have to go back to 2010 just before Kevin Rudd got knifed by Julia Gillard to a time when they had a commanding lead in the polls.
Which is to say, at least for this week they've got it good.

They're probably starting to think big about how this might translate into votes, but really we need to put a big caveat on Malcolm Turnbull's alleged popularity. For a start if your predecessor is Tony Abbott, even a pile of dog dung is bound to come up smelling roses. This electorate was dying for something much better than Tony Abbott, so naturally there would be a poll bounce.

But here's the thing, if Malcolm Turnbull is really going to capture votes from the Left, he's seriously going to have to do something that even the hardest credential-ed lefty is going to admit is good, and that means having to do something the right hates, and there's simply no leeway in Malcolm Turnbull to do any such thing. And that being the case, it won't be long before the stench of old Liberal and National Party policy positions will stink like the dead fish that they are, and bring Malcolm Turnbull's popularity down to their level.

In turn, the smart advice going for Lefties is for them not to get too excited.

Not All That Dies Old Is Bad, Not All That's Young And Remaining Is Good

I haven't paid much attention to the Canning by-election brought on by the death of Don Randall. Don Randall of course tabled to motion for a spill back in February and was founded in his car not long after that. If this were a mafia movie, you'd draw your own conclusions - but it is not, they say he died of a heart attack in his car. It's hard to tell what sort of MP he was, but if he thought enough to urge his party members to dump Tony Abbott, there was probably a decent man right there.

Andrew Hastie is the man running for the coalition in his place and he's an ex-SAS man. This sort of candidacy makes my skin crawl because those guys lead a pretty narrow life with a narrow world view and they might have a world of experience in the extremes of a combat zone, they're not guys known for a deep and compassionate outlook on their fellow man.

Andrew Hastie has accused the ALP of not supporting our troops in the Afghanistan based on his personal experience. It seems like a really crass thing to say in your run up to your polls, and really shows you the sort of grubby candidate that he is. It's pretty bleak that a sensible elder dies to be replaced by some narrow-core one-eyed zealot. Our polity is doing really badly right there.

Ragging On Bill Shorten

You can count me as one of the people who got very hot under the collar about Bill Shorten's role in bringing down Kevin Rudd in 2010. I'm still not that crash hot about how that all went down as you know; but then, I wasn't exactly crazy about the whole ALP way before Kevin Rudd even became Leader back in 2007. For a better part of 24months while the Abbottoir reigned, Bill Shorten's stint as Opposition leader has looked at times like a very contrived, stage-managed wave to *his* people, a knowing wink that he was just going to sit pretty and be a small target - even though Tony Abbott made things simple.

An even then I have enough perspective and patience to say, the ALP need to let Bill Shorten do his thing, what ever it is. There isn't an easy road to government; there isn't a short cut.

In the wake of the Turnbull seizing the day, Shorten's approval rating has sunk to 24% and there are now grumbles in the electorate about his 'performance' already. This is galling because it's from the very same people who wanted Malcolm Turnbull over Tony Abbott but vote only for the ALP anyway.
Folks, you need to grow up and grow a brain.

Mind you I had a chance to chat to somebody who told me they were one of these ALP voters who wanted Malcolm Turnbull and their reasoning was that independent of sides, Abbott *had* to go for the good of Australia (which is hard to dispute) and that it was now time for the ALP to step up and put in their best leader to square off against the best the coalition has brought to the table. I enquired of them who they thought the better leader would be and they answered in a heartbeat, "Albo!"

When I expressed incredulity, they replied that Tanya Plibersek would make a better leader than Bill Shorten. I just want to point out that the ALP haven't contested a single Federal Election with Bill Shorten as leader. Do you think there might be a problem with the Australian political culture precisely because the electorate is already so bloodthirsty? These politicians are only reflecting our choppy-changey electorate.

It's not shopping for shoes or the next sugar hit at the candy store. It's political leadership we're talking here. ALP supporters would be out of their fucking minds to want to start jockeying for replacing Shorten.

Fifty Shades Of Stupidity

Sedition? Is That A Moron I See Before Me?

Ever since the recent episode of 'Q&A' aired, this government has been up on its hustings denouncing the ABC as well as the show itself. At the heart of it of course is one Zaky Mallah who was on the show and made particularly pointed comment at a Federal minister. Since then it's been a bit of a free-for-all with the commentary and it's been hard to keep track of just what it all means. At the core of it is this notion that Zaky Mallah saying what he said:

"The Liberals have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the community tonight to leave and go to Syria and join ISIL because of ministers like him,"

... was a form of sedition.

Sedition is actually relatively old term, dating back to Shakespeare's time. It's the kind of crime Kings accuse of subjects who talk defiantly of the power of the throne. In a post-modern world where we recognise Freedom of Speech as normal (and normative), it is an outdated and quaint term - just as bringing it back was sort of historically retrograde. Worse still, Kim Beazley waved it through as Opposition Leader so we're stuck with these head-scratchingly stupid laws, but hey, this too is the Australia we have wrought.

If you look at Mr. Mallah's statement, he doesn't actually incite people to go join ISIL, he says should people do so, they would have justification because of ministers like Steve Ciobo. That's a description, not an incitement. Especially in light of what Mr. Ciobo was saying about revoking people's citizenship:

Queensland Liberal and panel member Steve Ciobo was unapologetic, saying he believed the only reason Mr Mallah was acquitted of terrorism was that the terrorist offences "weren't retrospective in application", and that he would be glad to see Mr Mallah sent out of the country. 

"I'd be pleased to be part of a government that would say you're out of the country," he said.

*Ugh*. That made my head hurt.
So, not only is Mr. Ciobo's understanding of human rights somewhat faulty, he can't quite hide he's a fascist who believes in a kind of unilateral vindictive justice. It's easily argued that Mr. Mallah was provoked into saying extreme things.

Be that as it may, the Stupid expanded greatly when Alex Hawke said:

"It's almost as if the ABC is engaged in some form of sedition," he said. 

"They have utterly no regard for what they are doing on this show and the people who will suffer the most is the moderate Islamic community in Australia," he said. 

"If you're going to get someone to say the citizenship laws are questionable and invalid but why would you pick someone who has threatened to kill Commonwealth officials?"

So there we have it. The whole ABC is now seditious. Really? Or is it more sensible to understand it as these conservatives just wanting to not have to face the fringe opinions of their own society? Or as Guy Rundle put it succinctly:

As soon as right-wingers are exposed to real debate they flail, ham-fists flying all over the place. Steven Ciobo should have welcomed the opportunity to enunciate his principles in the face of real challenge to them — because a challenge is an opportunity to make your ideas clearer, better, win people over. But he would have had to be competent to do that. In reality he’s just another faceless mook who’s come up through the entrenched machine of the party, which, like Labor, is a quasi-state apparatus, embedded by compulsory preferential voting and public funding.

Of course, it would not end there; They decided to play the man as well.

Playing The Man And Not The Ball

It must be one of those moments for the Coalition to feel they're be able to say, "ha! Gotcha' when they can see that a guy wearing a gold cannabis leaf on his flat-brimmed baseball cap says things that cut against the grain of government propaganda. Not only are the racial prejudices of judging the man for being "of middle-eastern appearance" (as the cops like to say), they thought they could pigeonhole him with their own cultural prejudices about what such a man might hold as an opinion.

Thus the Liberal and National Party have basically banged the drum loudly that Zaky Mallah was a convicted terrorist. Surely anybody charged of terrorism under the Anti-Terror laws must be a jihadi right?

It turns out the man's background is much more complicated than that.

Turnbull's portrayal of Zaky Mallah and his views is profoundly misleading. "He had served a term of imprisonment for threatening to kill ASIO officers," he said. 

Well actually, he served two years in solitary in the Goulburn super-max a decade ago, awaiting trial on terrorism charges for which he was acquitted. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of threatening Commonwealth officers and was sentenced to time already served. Which is not, of course, to say that he was not at the time a seriously deluded and dangerous young man. He was 19. 

More recently, Turnbull continued, as though Mallah had not changed his spots in the least, "he had travelled to Syria in the pursuit of what he described as 'jihad' ". 

Mallah did travel to Syria in 2012. The "jihad" he was interested in joining was the fight against the tyrannical government of Bashar al-Assad, and the outfit he joined for a few days – without engaging in any combat, he insists – was the Free Syrian Army. This is the force which the United States is now training and which Australia supports.
As The Australian's Adam Shand reported at the time, the former would-be suicide bomber realised "how misguided his anger towards Australian society had been...'Go to Syria where your brothers are dying for freedom, democracy and the true Islamic way, rights guaranteed in this lucky country,' he says…. 'We Muslims have so much freedom here (in Australia) yet we are causing so much trouble'." 

Since then, Mallah has been outspoken in his condemnation of Islamic State. On Channel Ten's The Project last October he said: "I'm on this program this evening to distance myself from the actions of these individuals, these idiots, these wankers, who are giving Islam and the Muslim world and the Islamic community in Australia a bad name and for those who are considering to join ISIS I hope ASIO is onto you, I hope your passport is refused and I hope you are arrested and locked up." 

In one of numerous video blogs on YouTube, Mallah calls on Australia's Salafist imams to join the fight against extremism: "You need to condemn terrorism. You need to condemn fundamentalism. You need to condemn those who are brainwashing our youth into believing that a group like ISIS is fighting for jihad. They are not fighting for jihad. They are fighting for bulls---."

This claim that the ABC put a jihadist on TV to exhort muslims to go fight for ISIL is therefore inaccurate as it is utterly lacking in substance, let alone having any nuance. Which all goes to show how deeply stupid and unreceptive this bunch of old school closet-racist, proto-fascist dickheads are, in this Abbott Government. The most damning bit from the article is the bit here:

His final, notorious comment was not a call to arms – although it's easy to see how many viewers took it that way. It was, if you watch it again, the comment of an angry young man, a born and bred Australian with no other nationality, who has been trying for some years to counter the lure of Islamic State in his own community, and who had just been told by a member of the government that ideally he should be expelled from the country by ministerial decree.

What they didn't see was a guy who was their ally in the fight against ISIL. They saw a guy who was an enemy to them precisely because of their racial and cultural prejudices - and they then ran around screaming the man shouldn't have received the forum to say what he said. Frankly, it's really rather pathetic, and unbecoming of a government.

But did it end there? No.

Because Somebody Has To Lose A Job For The PM To Be Happy

Tony Abbott decided this was the moment to go all outing attack the ABC and its Leftist sympathies. of course, anything and everything except Hitler and Mussolini would look to the left side Tony Abbott and his anachronistic view the universe, so it's not saying much of anything to be characterised as 'The Left' by Tony Abbott.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has launched a blistering attack on the ABC's Q&A program, asking "whose side are you on?" after an Australian man convicted of threatening Commonwealth officials appeared on the program. 

In comments that reignited the debate within the Coalition government about the role and responsibilities of the national broadcaster, Mr Abbott accused the ABC of effectively giving "a platform to a convicted criminal and terrorist sympathiser - they have given this individual, this disgraceful individual, a platform and in so doing, I believe the national broadcaster has badly let us down".

"I think many, many millions of Australians would feel betrayed by our national broadcaster right now, and I think that the ABC does have to have a long, hard look at itself, and to answer a question which I have posed before - whose side are you on? Whose side are you on here?" Mr Abbott said on Tuesday. 

"We all believe in free speech, but in the end we have to make judgments and I think that the ABC made a very, very serious misjudgment last night."

Well, it might look like Tony Abbott was arguing something of substance about the 'Q&A' programme if he had his facts straight about Zaky Mallah. The fact that he doesn't makes it even worse, but here it goes any way.

Even if Zaky Mallah were convicted of terrorism, he would still have the right to free speech. As it is, he was charged and the charges didn't stick - And all this is immaterial to the fact that he still has the freedom to express his opinion.  It is an opinion that stands in sharp contrast to that of Tony Abbott, but there's no law against expressing such an opinion anywhere, on air or off, on the streets, or on radio iron internet, or for that matter a discussion show like 'Q&A'. His freedom to express his opinion in this nation is Mr. Mallah's inalienable right, especially as a citizen who was born here.

That being the case, this notion that "many Australians would feel betrayed by the national broadcaster" because Mr. Mallah was there to express his opinion as is his right, does not speak for me at all. On the contrary, many Australians should and would feel betrayed that the Prime Minister of this land would seek to close down freedom of expression - while espousing it as value (perhaps as applying only to him and his wealthy, White, Anglo, peers) - and try to punish the ABC for this perceived injustice, all on the back of his own unmitigated, undiluted racial and cultural prejudice. I feel betrayed he's our Prime Minister and nobody is calling him on this shit.

All the same, totally unreflective of how misguided his position is, Tony Abbott says "heads should roll." The only metaphorical head that should be rolling is Tony Abbott's own head. And clearly Peter Dutton's seeing that he endorses this idiocy (and nice to know these guys want to add to the unemployment queue). This is a ridiculous turn of events based on one remark on one programme. how stupid does this country look right now?

It reminds me a bit of the time Charlie Sheen was totally out of control doing stupid things every day, landing himself on the news page. When asked what he thought he was doing, he replied "Winning!"
I think this government is winning in exactly the same way - deep in delusion, mired in misunderstanding, unable escape its own racial and cultural prejudices.  "Winning!"

Oh, and then there's Christopher Pyne.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne accused Mr Scott of trying to "change the debate to something it isn't", rather than "fessing up" to the ABC's mistake.
"This is typical of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation," he told Channel Nine's Today program. 

"The ABC is trying to pretend this is something to do with free speech. It isn't. It's about what's appropriate and not appropriate at the public broadcaster. 

"They did the wrong thing, they should simply fess up to it and do the right thing next time."

How about this, Mr. Pyne, the ABC did not do the wrong thing, they did the right thing; Zaky Mallah is not who your prejudices say he is; and yes, it is a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of Speech is not an issue only when it suits you. But be my guest, keep dancing in that conga-line of Stupidity.

Hostages To Their Own Bullshit

Chasing Unicorns

There's something fundamentally unhinged about the conservative agenda in this country. First off is the obsession with returning the budget to surplus, which is one of those notions that sound great but don't stand up to scrutiny. If a government returns to surplus, it essentially shifts debt to the private sector off the government's own books.

A very simple explanation can be found here.

There are only so many Australian dollars. If the government taxes more than it spends (a surplus), it is taking more dollars out of the private sector than it is putting in. Assuming exports equal imports those dollars can come from only one place – private domestic savings. Everyone’s surplus is somebody else’s deficit. 

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The arithmetic is very simple. Total net financial assets in Australian dollars is the sum of government assets, plus net private domestic assets (individuals and businesses), plus net foreign assets. If the federal government runs a surplus then the money has to come from one of the other two. Given the government has virtually no control over the foreign component, a surplus will usually be accompanied by a reduction in savings in the domestic private sector (households and businesses) as they pay more in tax than the government is spending into the private economy. 

When the federal government runs a surplus, private debt almost always increases. In other words, the banks create the money to fill the hole left by the government surplus. The much heralded surpluses of the Howard/Costello government were precisely matched by non-government deficits. These budget surpluses were partly supported by trade surpluses (foreign sector deficits) but even so, private debt increased dramatically.

So the call to cut the government deficit is in effect a call to increase private sector debt. At a time when private sector debt combined is at a record high, it seems incredibly abstruse for the Coalition Government to be putting so much emphasis on getting back to a surplus. Yet any time a Coalition member talks about the deficit, they don't say anything much more cogent than "Deficits = Bad".

The reason they say this is because they don't have the ability to communicate the may aspects of a deficit and so they decided long ago to treat the electorate with contempt and instead go with slogans. And the slogans seem to get dumber each election, so at some point we were going to have the kind of problem where we have to ask if the Prime Minister has any core competencies.

Worse still, the electorate eats up this simplified, un-intelligent patter and vote with their prejudices intact. It is then, entirely without surprise that this current government has foundered on the rocks of its own devising, as it tries to somehow put into place its self-destructive policies and wondering why the economy is failing to grow. The self-proclaimed proficiency with managing the economy is mere propaganda, a line of bullshit that they themselves believe. Now that they are hostages to their own bullshit, they are in effect doing a marvellous job of vandalising the economy.

Is it any wonder Tony Abbott is considered the least competent head of government in the western world?

They Sure Hate...

They Hate the Unemployed

Here's an interesting experiment. A WA Greens Senator is attempting to live a week on $35/day.

WA Greens Senator Rachel Siewert is trying to live on $35 a day in a bid to highlight that the meagre dole was causing jobseekers to be sucked into a cycle of poverty.
Rachel Siewert has $12 in her wallet for the rest of the week.
She went shopping on the weekend and bought some basic food items and toilet paper totalling $53, but if she runs out of toothpaste, she will just have to go without.

This week Ms Siewert is living off the average weekly Newstart Allowance payment in a bid to highlight what she says is a system which makes it even more difficult for job seekers to get out of unemployment.

The $244 she started with on Saturday has quickly been taken up by the essentials.
While in reality, she will remain in her four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the northern suburbs, $125 has been deducted from her budget to pay for the one bedroom unit in Bentley or Armadale, which would be all she could afford on Newstart.

Thankfully for her, the amount has been subsidised down from $185 due to the rent assistance that she would be eligible for as a jobseeker.

The rest of it makes for some painful reading on penny-pinching. Clearly this experiment is trying to highlight this figure of $35 per day.

According to a survey of 500 Australians conducted for the Australia Institute, the amount, when averaged, is $454 a week - about $65 a day.

When 500 people in a separate survey were asked how much unemployed Australians should get from Centrelink they settled on $329 a week, or $47 a day.

But the less-impressive truth is the Newstart allowance peaks at $243 a week - $34.70 a day.

''Most Australians have little idea what unemployed Australians actually get,'' the executive director of the Australia Institute, Richard Denniss, said when releasing the survey results. ''They know what their own cost of living is and they think unemployed Australians should get something approaching it, but they would be shocked to find out what a Newstart recipient actually got.''

The $86 gap between Newstart itself and what Australians believe it should be exceeds the $50 increase proposed by a coalition of business, welfare and union organisations led by the Australian Council of Social Service. ACOSS says the increase would cost $1.2 billion a year.

Talk about disconnect. The first paragraph is interesting. People would budget for themselves $18per day more than they would for an abstract stranger. The second paragraph shows that the real figure the government is comfortable with is $12.30 meaner than what the average person dishes out to a stranger. ACOSS then steps up and tells the government it should do something about this gap but it too is $5-6 short of what people think is required.

There are 379 comments under that article, and it is surprising how many people are scornful of the unemployed for being unemployed, as if the unemployed are unemployed by principle. Clearly conservatives hate people they do not know, with as much hatred they can muster.

Think about all this for a moment. What the hell is it to you really if there were 10, 1000, or 10,000 dole bludgers out there, eking their lives out on 35 or 47 or 65 dollars a day? Especially if you are well off? What could it matter?

Now, conservative people? They want them shamed in public, made to work the most humiliating jobs. Why? One can only presume it is because it gives them some kind of sadistic satisfaction. And there's a mainstream party out there who think this sort of thing is great. The really disappointing part is that the ALP ain't doing much better than the sadistic psychos.

They Hate The Young

Amanda Vanstone had this opinion piece last month which was so odious I didn't bother to read it at the time, but seeing that we're talking about this kind of thing today, I thought I'd have a read and bring it up.

I have no quibble with the investment we make in higher education or in students. I just think that, to be fair, they should have to start paying it back sooner.
The full adult pension, including supplement, is about $19,000 a year. The minimum wage is just under $30,000. So why do we say to students, who get a massive loan at no real interest rate, that they do not have to pay back a cent until they are earning just under $45,000?

Now, if I cast my mind not too far, it is obvious to me that Amanda Vanstone is of the generation that got the Free Education from Gough Whitlam's Labor government and didn't have to pay *any* HECS, unlike the Gen-Xers. She writes a whole bunch of personal anecdotes about how some dude driving buggies in Rome taught her a life lesson but seriously, how can a person who didn't have to suffer the HECS repayments ask this?

The comparison to a pensioner is a spurious apples and oranges argument because pensioners tend to already own stuff, while graduates do not, but it is better for the economy if they spent their money on those things, rather than be taxed as if they did.

The time I was repaying my HECS really sucked. I wad fortunate in that I was repaying it with a job I was trained to do, but it still hurt not to have that bit of money. What it taught me was how difficult it is accept one's education as having a concrete dollar value. But be that as it may, it incenses me that somebody who didn't have that experience thinks that these back of the envelope calculations are sufficient justification to make these ambit, loaded political claims.
It's not just in Australia that the old conservatives are trying to scare off the young from education through taxes. here's an article in The Economist.

AS I begin this post, the president is across town buttering up University of Iowa students with promises to keep federal student-loan interest rates low. The College Cost Reduction and Access Act, a measure from 2007 that, among other things, lowered the interest rate on federal student loans from 6.8% to 3.4%, is set to expire in July. Messrs Obama and Romney both have come out in favour of supporting an extension of the subsidy for student-loan debtors.

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This sort of giveaway may be good politics, but it's terrible policy. Extending the programme just one year would cost $6 billion. The measure is promoted as a way of making college more affordable, but it will mainly benefit those well out of school, many of whom are relatively well-to-do, mid-career professionals, such as your indebted correspondent. There is a movement afoot to get the government to forgive student-loan debt entirely, and when compared to this, the cost of the scheme to keep student-loan interest rates low looks quite small. Stilll, it's bad policy for many of the same reasons it would be bad policy to forgive student loans.

Look, maybe they're right and it's bad policy, but here's the thing. Wall Street and the big end of town are getting 0.5% interest charges from the Fed. Why is it even remotely fair that students continue to get slugged with even 3.4%, let alone 6.8% in the current economic climate? What makes the students magically immune from the GFC fallout? It's easily arguable the big end of town are far more capable of dealing with tough times through the high salaries and established assets and savings compared to university students - and they're getting 0.5% interest rates!

You wonder about the brains of these conservatives.

They Hate Foreigners

Here's the latest on Asylum seekers.Ever since the 'Malaysian Solution' melted down thanks to the High Court, it's been weathering the storm of bad press and spin ever since. Even so, if the Liberal Party had any heart, they'd negotiate so that the government can do its proposed Malaysian Solution in exchange for being able to do it Nauru Solution when (I'm pointedly not going to bother saying 'if') they get in power.

But no. Tony Abbott has put his kaibosh on any understanding over the legislation and keeps carping that Julia Gillard's government can't stop the boats. Well, no, she can't because Tony, you won't let her. It gets sillier than that with this:

The Coalition spokesman for border protection, Michael Keenan, welcomed the government's response but said the potential for a repeat of the tragedy remained until people smuggling was stopped.

Good God. Have they no shame? No embarrassment? I know one needs a thick skin to be a politician, but this is breath-taking.

Oh, look, there's another boat!

I'm wracking my brains as to when exactly the Liberal Party started playing dirty pool in divisive race politics. Malcolm Fraser as hated as he was in his heyday didn't stoop to such depth and has since departed the party he led. I don't remember a single moment where Andrew Peacock or John Hewson saying anything that seemed unseemly; it really did start with John Howard and somehow he's entrenched it into the Liberal Party culture that it's okay to play subtle dog-whistle race-baiting. There are days I look at Gladys Berejiklian and I think there's hope yet for the Liberals and their acceptance of ethnicity, but most days I feel like the Liberal Party has allowed itself into the company of xenophobes.

In case you think I'm just talking out of my rear end, here's an article you should look at.

Mr Abbott wants to link in the minds of former Howard battlers the asylum seeker issue with a growing population, tapping into community anxiety about urban congestion and water scarcity.

He’ll run these two arguments in parallel, but invite voters to make their own connection with unauthorised boat arrivals and a growing population.

Shadow Attorney-General George Brandis falsely claimed this week that there has always been bipartisan support for immigration, air-brushing from history John Howard’s shameful effort of 1988 to harvest votes by claiming there was too much Asian immigration.

Senator Brandis went on to say that the Coalition wanted a return to the immigration levels achieved when it was last in power, as if this would lead a lower population figure by 2050 than 35 million.  Yet in the last year of the Howard government, net overseas migration was 232,800 – much higher than the 180,000 per annum assumption that Treasury used in the Intergenerational report in arriving at a projected population of 35 million by 2050.

It's chicken or the egg whether the race-baiting politics of John Howard works because the electorate is racist already, or whether the electorate allows itself to give into their inner xenophobe because there are politicians that enable them. Still, the stench of Xenophobia hasn't gone away from modern conservatism, and you wonder how in their god's name they pretend they can have any moral high ground in any of these kinds of policy areas.

The Partying On The Right

Are Now Partying As The Dumb

Here's something from The Economist.

As for ideas, the Republicans seem to be reducing themselves into exactly what the Democrats say they are: the nasty party of No. They may well lambast Mr Obama for expanding the federal deficit; but it is less impressive when they are unable to suggest alternatives. Paul Ryan, a bright young congressman from Wisconsin, has a plan to restore the budget to balance; it has sunk without a trace. During the row over health care, the right demanded smaller deficits but refused to countenance any cuts in medical spending on the elderly. Cutting back military spending is denounced as surrender to the enemy. Tax rises of any kind (even allowing the unaffordable Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled) are evil.

This lack of coherence extends beyond the deficit. Do Republicans favour state bail-outs for banks or not? If they are against them, as they protest, why are they doing everything they can to sabotage a financial-reform bill that will make them less likely? Is the party of “drill, baby, drill” in favour of tighter regulation of oil companies or not? If not, why is it berating Mr Obama for events a mile beneath the ocean? Many of America’s most prominent business leaders are privately as disappointed by the right as they are by the statist Mr Obama.

Ain't that the truth?