Quick Shots - 28 Feb 2019

Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell, Pederast

I've not blogged anything serious in a long while and the main reason for that is I got burnt out by the stupidity of politics. There's only so much Tony Abbott and climate change denialism and rank class warfare one can take, beyond which came the presidency of Donald Trump. After all of that was the spectacle of various Royal Commissions that laid bare how morally bankrupt our society had become, when it came to making money and getting away with illicit crimes.

Yet, today of all days kind of moved me to blog this date in history. For today is the day Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell finds himself in prison for having molested choirboys in the 1990s, while he negotiated away the issue of the Catholic Church's culpability in protecting pederast priests. The irony is simply too much. And if that weren't enough, the Ex-Cardinal got himself excellent character references from two former Prime Minsters of this land.

I am not a wowser. If anything I hate wowsers, so I find myself pleasantly delighted that a man who was the arch-wowser of our times was found out to be exactly the sort of sinner he excoriated from his bully pulpit. The irony is simply too beautiful not to go without being remarked upon. As obvious it is - like the sun in broad day light, really, - this was one man who ought not to have - pardon the phrase - pontificated on the ills of homosexuality when he himself was sticking his penis into the mouths of boys. And I don't for even a single moment mean to suggest it would have somehow been better had he had stuck his dick into the mouths of girls, no, no, no!

And Pell (which is a contraction for Pederast in hell) still insists he is innocent and that he intends to appeal. His lawyer sought a lighter sentence on the grounds that it was a 'vanilla' kind of transgression. Clearly the good counsel has not heard the joke about fucking one goat. It doesn't matter that it only lasted six minutes long, you get judged on the act itself for a reason.

A Father Brennan sought to cast doubt on the judgment itself by suggesting it was impossible to get a penis out to stick it into the mouth of a choirboy from under a Cardinal's robes. It's quite funny because the defence amounts to the same as the idiotic joke wherein it is claimed rapes are impossible because men with trousers around their ankles cannot run after women with the skirts up. It is as if the Catholic Church fraternity have learnt absolutely nothing from the Royal Commission, or the trial and verdict of George Fucking Pell. Creating plausible deniability is hardly the way into the Kingdom of God, Father Brennan.

Two Arseholes in Search of (De-)Meaning

That brings me to the two idiots, the Dishonourable John Howard and Despicable Tony Abbott.

As for the two former Prime Minsters who provided character references, it suggests more about them than it endorses the character of George Fucking Pell. After all, how can they claim their opinions of the man are unchanged in spite of the verdict? Are they thumbing their noses at the court? Are they casting doubt on the system of justice that leans upon jurors? Are they oblivious to the cries of the victims of sexual abuse? Or are they simply dirty old white men circling the wagons around their fellow white man with a conservative weasel mind and a willingness to forgive the errant penis?
In short, have they no embarrassment that they are endorsing a man who shoved his penis down the maws of thirteen year old boys entrusted in his care?

And the answer is clearly not; not, one, bit.

Here's the thing about these men Abbott and Howard. They created the Australia that needed these Royal Commissions. The Royal Commission into banking and insurance had to be done because both of their governments underfunded ASIC and APRA, and came up with terms by which they couldn't go after the most egregious offenders. The Royal Commission in to child abuse by institutions came up because both men presided over governments that privatised out foster care to religious organs, and never looked too hard into the problems when they were Prime Minster. Even the current Royal Commission into Aged Care emerges from the cutting health care budgets and privatising out care for profiteers. The Royal Commission to come on Disability Patients will show the same issue - that successive governments have privatised care out to private profiteers without accountability, and this has resulted in terrible abuse of the most vulnerable.

In fact, these two men contributed greatly to the environment where the Royal Commission were needed because of their polarising politics. The continued cultural wars waged by these two men made it impossible to govern the country in any sensible way. This meant government oversight was limited, understanding dim, knowledge scanty, and mostly blind to abuses in all these areas. All of this was done in the name of fiscal responsibility and tight budgets with a surplus, damn the consequences. Well, the consequences have come home to roost, and none of these Royal Commissions have painted a positive picture of the Federal Government as run by the Coalition.

Really, these men ought to have their platforms taken away in the same way Kevin Spacey had his taken away. They have nothing positive to contribute in public life if what they want to do with their platform is to endorse George Fucking Pell's character.  In most parts of our society, you don't get to claim to have character once you've been convicted of pedophilia.

Even Ray Hadlee thought it was a bit much. And I think Ray Hadlee is a bit much - but that's another rant entirely.

The 121st Day In Sodom

The other ironic thing is that all these people wanted Pier Pasolini's 'Salo' banned. Howard, Abbott, Pell, and Hadlee. Fuck freedom of speech, let's just censor a film based on the Marquis de Sade's big opus, they said. Isn't power to control what other people se or watch corrosive? Probably more than the things they seek to ban.

If you've read '120 Days of Sodom', you would know that a Mayor, a banker, a judged and a bishop get together and create their own little sadistic sex slave haven, and a lot of times spent sexually abusing minors. It's a terrible book, really, except for one thing: it shows us the relationship between the ability of power to corrupt and the libido itself. De Sade wrote this stuff a good half century before Freud, and Co. really nailed his targets. So much so they had his book banned and had De Sade locked up in the Bastille.

It's especially funny to think upon this because if anybody was the highest priest of the land, it was George Fucking Pell, and he turned out to be exactly the kind of monster De Sade said he would be. John Howard is singularly without insight so he is too stupid to understand how it might have happened that his good friend George Fucking Pell turned out to be a monster. Tony Abbott, I suspect knows better, for I suspect Tony Abbott himself is psychosexually perverted by power, and that is why he has remained in Parliament. Being in Parliament being Tony Abbott the wrecker, fuels his libido. It helps him bang Peta Credlin better.

In any case, we now understand better who these men are, thanks to the Marquis de Sade. Don't ever tell me banning his works is a good idea.

How Can Catholics Stay Catholics In This Country After This?

Look, I always bag out religion because I think they're all suspect. That being said, I don't know how Catholics in this country can stay Catholics after a Cardinal has been found to have not only protected pedophile priests, minimised financial pay outs to victims of pedophile priests, and removed the church itself from being sued for damages by those it abused, but also personally abused choir boys in his care?

How can you be okay going back to this church and confessing in the booth to a bunch of people you can no longer trust? Logically, one would look for a personal connection to God that doesn't involve going through priests, and of course that's exactly how the Reformation began. That's just logic, though.

If I were in the Vatican looking at all this, I'd be more than little worried about where Catholicism can go in Australia after this. I guess bullshit is eternal, and I need not worry about the emotional well-being of Catholics, but it has to be said, going back to Church on Sunday would be misconstrued by the rest of society as tacitly supporting these arsehole priests who would protect pedophiles in their ranks.

I mean, are you really going to be okay with that? If so, how fucking low are you willing to go as a society? I'll tell you how low I'm willing to go. From now on, I'm not going to hesitate to ask any Catholic priest how many pedophiles they personally know about and whom they're protecting.

The World Is Stupider Than You Hope

I just want to note Donald Trump is in Hanoi talking to Kim Jong-Un in hopes of reaching a nuclear detente. It won't happen because they're too far apart. All the while Trump's former lawyer who flipped on him was bagging him out in Congress. If you thought that whole scenario wasn't crazy enough, India and Pakistan have started a shooting war without actually calling it a war. Imran Khan was on TV asking to meet the Indian Prime Minister. Who knows if that would work. It would be ironic if World War III started over Kashmir between India and Pakistan exactly while the more likely culprits in Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un were busy trying to defuse the bomb they made.

That's how deeply in the clutches of stupidity we have ended. Way to go world!
Hey don't look at me. I didn't make it like this.

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. 

China Versus Crown Resorts

The Business End Of The Stick Meets The Sticky End Of The Business

I've been wondering for sometime just what on earth is going with Crown Resorts. First of all, they don't perform well for shareholders. Generally speaking, in a two horse race kind of way, had you held shares in Echo Entertainment/Star City over the last few years, you would've made more money than with Crown. The other thing that makes you wonder is that James Packer's gone and put all of Crown's eggs in to a basket that targets Chinese high-rollers. Which, of course when you think about it can only lead you to the conclusion that Crown intends to be the money launderer of choice for corrupt Chinese officials on the mainland. Which is pretty extraordinary. Imagine another business model based on targeting criminals and helping them launder money somehow and see if you think that is sustainable. Unless you're big corporations doing the elaborate international tax dodging, it's pretty hard to spot the opportunities, let alone the sustainability of such a venture.

It's a bit like parking a cruise ship casino off the shores of say, Columbia, in the hopes that the big drug lords come and gamble away millions in your casino using it as money laundering service. There's something fundamentally crooked and wrong about the arrangement. Yet, there was Mr. Packer the Junior, right at the door step of mainland China with his casino on Macau, and a sales team targeting 'whales'. How long could that have lasted? It assumes the Chinese authorities don't care when they say they do care. I presumes that corruption and its ill-gotten gains are monies that can be taken away and out of China, and really, how can that be a sustainable business model?

Turns out the communist Chinese weren't going to sit around and play patty cake when they could reach for the bat and play hardball.

Crown Resorts employees including three top Australian executives have been held incommunicado since Chinese police executed a series of late-night raids at their homes across several mainland cities on Thursday. 

The company, consular officials and distraught families have been unable to establish contact with the group.

Shanghai-based Crown employee Jiang Ling answered her door at midnight on Thursday to find five plain-clothed police officers outside her apartment. 

"I kept saying ... 'Why are you here?'. They kept repeating 'Oh, your wife knows' and she didn't obviously… they finally said 'gambling'," Ms Jiang's husband, American expatriate Jeff Sikkema told Fairfax Media. 

"The main thing that I understood ... they wanted to know was who her boss was and some of her other colleagues, just looking for names."

That sounds like they mean business, doesn't it? It impacted share prices on casino operators.

The Chinese foreign ministry confirmed over the weekend the Australians detained on suspicion of committing "gambling crimes", without specifying how many. It said the case remained under investigation. 

Shares in other casino operators in the region fell in response to the arrests
Crown's largest Australian competitor, The Star, did not escape the fallout - its share price fell more than 5 per cent but closed down 3.66 per cent. 

Hong Kong-listed Sands China fell as much as 5.4 per cent, while Galaxy Entertainment Group Ltd. lost as much as 4.7 per cent on Monday. 

South Korea's largest operator of casinos for foreigners Paradise fell as much as 0.7 per cent in Seoul trading, while fellow Korean casino operator Grand Korea Leisure Co. declined as much as 0.9 percent. Melco Crown Philippines Resorts
Corp lost as much as 1.6 percent in Manila. 

"This is a clearer signal to all casino operators and junkets in the region, that the Chinese government doesn't like gambling and will continue the crackdown on the industry and capital outflow," said Tony Tong, founder of Hong Kong-based risk management consulting firm Pacific Financial Services Ltd.

Ouch. Crown itself lost 13.9%, down to $11.15 per share. Apparently that is half a billion dollars of Mr Packer the Minor's worth down the gurgler; that'd suck quite a bit. 

It's arguable whether it is the gambling the communist Chinese brass dislike so much, or the very real  ease with which money floods out of China through the casinos. As I said above, if you're on their doorstep and your business plan is to hoover up the escaping money from the mainland, it's no surprise the Chinese government is going to pick a fight with you. 

I understood the reasoning when Mr. Packer the Junior, sold out of Channel Nine and the TV business in order to get into the gambling business, but even allowing for the decline in the free-to-air TV business, it seemed a little drastic to want to go all in on Casinos, and ones with Chinese VIPs as the main targets at that. He's ignored all the noises from China that they're trying to stem the flow of money outwards since the GFC. It's not like this is a surprising development. I won't slam Packer on the morality stakes of wanting to be in the gambling business, but it does seem incredibly blinkered to not have seen this sort of development coming. 

The things is, if there's one thing it brings to mind, it is the One.Tel debacle over which Mr. Packer the Diminutive and his pal Wee Lockie Murdoch presided. In that instance they were proceeding with a business model that was hardly sustainable (nor made any sense) in a bid for more customers, only to find the gravity of their situation was enough to suck the entire venture down. As with that instance, Mr. Packer the Lesser, has found an unsustainable business model and stuck with it in the face of reality. He may have inherited a fortune but it seems abundantly clear that he doesn't know what he's doing with it. He is beginning to look like that joke where a man puts out a book "How I Came to be Worth $1million" You open the book and it tells you how the man inherited $1billion and squandered most of it. 

Politcal Donations Are The New Inefficiency

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

It's kind of laughable that the first casualty of this Parliament is an ALP Senator, but that's what we've got with Sam Dastyari stepping down as manager Opposition business in the Senate and shadow spokesperson for consumer affairs - and, really, rightfully so.

"In the past week, it's clear that the ongoing examination of my behaviour is taking attention away from bigger issues facing Australia and Australians. Yesterday, I called a press conference and answered questions. Today, I have reflected on that and decided that wasn't enough. It's clear to me now that this has become a distraction. 

"I made a mistake and I'm paying the price. For that mistake...I will continue to serve with pride as a senator for New South Wales and I look forward to serving a Labor Party government in the near future in whatever capacity I can."

...and so that went. To be frank about it, I'd say Senator Dastyari fucked it up well and good, and looked terrible when he went and defended the Chinese position in the South China Sea even before it was evident that he was on the take from the Chinese. The moment you end up mouthing propaganda for another sovereign government, you disqualify yourself from your own. The bit where you took money for it only lessens your character. The propagandising for others is a form of treason.

Political donations will continue to be a topic that never gets fixed; a little like Negative Gearing and Asylum Seekers stuck in off shore detention centres. It's an issue but our government has no spine to fix it. Really, Sam Dastyari's case is being looked at in the wrong way. It's not just that he peddled influence for another government for a measly sum of $1600-odd. It's that other entities can buy influence of MPs for the same measly amount of money and it passes their own scrutiny. That is to say, it's okay for Barnaby Joyce to court the donations from Gina Rinehart, because she's an Australian citizen and hat she wants is conservative policy - according to Barnaby. Make no mistake, our politicians are for sale.

The truth is, there's a whole, bunch of people with way too much lobbying power through the weight of money, and so if it's not straight out corruption of access through money or policy formation through lobbying with money, it's going to be junkets an trinkets and wining and dining to put a point across forcefully. Otherwise, how does one explain the extraordinary influence of the mining lobby in Canberra? The Coalition obsess over the relationship between the unions and the ALP, but equally suspect is the relationship between the business lobby and the Liberal Party. That being the case, it's no surprise John Howard doesn't want the donations rules to be changed.

It's a bit of a joke because Mr. Huang who has donated over a million for both sides of politics thinks the Chinese get a bum deal because for all the money they've donated, the politicians of this country simply don't do as Mr. Huang says. If that bit of mumbling doesn't tell you what the expectation is for those who donate money, you'd be sticking your head in the sand, ostrich-wise. I guess the good news is that the needs of Australia still outweigh the needs of China in the eyes of our politicians, but even so the Sam Dastrayi thing together with Barnaby Joyce' contention reveals just how blasé these politicians have become about these donations. It certainly explains NSW politics, it would be a fool to think it's not affecting national politics.

I've mentioned before how vested interests ate out the prosperity of Japan. The same thing is happening here, but nobody is doing anything about it.

Movie Doubles - 'Spotlight' & 'The Big Short'

American Tragedies

It's cool when stars get together and appear in a morally righteous movie. The omnibus casting in both of these films is something to behold. The All-Star lineup in 'Spotlight' makes for an interesting ensemble while the split narrative of 'The Big Short' demands a distribution of war power across three narrative threads.

Both these films deal with a tragedy that came about because nobody thought to question a big institution. People had way too much faith in the Catholic Church, and they had too much trust in banks. Both the Catholic Church and the banks ended up making a lot of people look very foolish for their faith and trust; and delivered devastating consequences for that misplaced faith and trust.

We live in amazing times when you think about it. The revelation that the Catholic Church was covering up for paedophile priests was an apocryphal joke for a long time. The fact that we got any proper investigation that has led to global uncovering of such activities would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Similarly, the notion that banks through their greed and stupidity could manufacture the condition for the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was unthinkable right up until it happened. Both topics deserve some kind of narrative reconstruction to get a sense of how these things came about. These stories are at their core, remarkably alike.

And so... here's the usual spoiler alert. Don't read on if you hate spoilers.



The Tradition Of Investigation

Both these films have long roots that reach out from beyond the screen. 'Spotlight' actually has many echoes of the other great newspaper movie, 'All The President's Men' where Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodford and Bernstein went in hard against the authoritarian Nixon Administration which was trying to cover up its criminal tracks. Similarly, 'Spotlight' shows four news reporters going after the Catholic Church that indulges in systematic coverup of paedophile priests. If you are into even more interesting connections between these two films, the editor at The Washington Post who backed Woodford and Bernstein during the Watergate investigations was Ben Bradlee. The editor at The Boston Globe presiding over the Spotlight investigations into the Catholic Church was his son Ben Bradlee Jr. Rachel McAdam follows her performance from 'State of Play', another film that tried to capture the newspaper news room dynamic.

'The Big Short' is actually based on the book of the same title by Michael Lewis. Lewis was able to navigate the complex world of Wall Street banking because he himself was once a Wall Street banker and penned the great tome 'Liar's Poker' which explained the invention of mortgage bonds. We are enlightened of the strangeness and incongruous opacity of banking terminology thanks to Lewis' abilities as an investigative writer and part-insider to the world of Wall Street investment banking. The pedigree of this film carries previous Michael Lewis adaptations which include 'The Blind Side' and 'Moneyball', and we even have Brad Pitt playing a role in one of the narratives.

Both these films are thus built on accounts and testimonies from the very frontline of fact-collecting.  Because both these films go to great lengths to explain the problems of exposing or capitalising on the issue at hand, we are given tremendous insight into America as an immensely complicated society.

Too Big To Scrutinise

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, we were made to understand the term "too big to fail". It was a terrible thing that we had to suffer the GFC because of these big institutions. Once the crisis as underway, we discovered that they had racked such astronomical sums of money in debt, had we let them fail it would have taken the world economy with them. And so we let these bastards continue to just be these very same bastards. As it turns out in the telling of 'The Big Short', an alarming few people scrutinised the situation where there was a combination of subprime mortgage bonds, a property bubble, credit-rating agencies that simply rubber-stamped credit ratings, and very greedy and stupid people throwing money around.

The Catholic Church too is a monolithic entity. The closer one's faith resides with the Catholic Church, the more moral authority the church takes on to the point here it has absolute control over the discourse. This allows conditions of absolute unilateral power to be exercised against the faithful when needed - something that dates back to medieval thinking on authority - but also silence issues. Again, investigations revealed that the church had known it had a problem with paedophile priests as early as 1962, but opted to suppress the information and with it the scrutiny.

In both instances the lack of third party scrutiny allowed the problem to snowball. The lack of scrutiny came from the fact that the institutions - the Church and Financial institutions - were deemed too big to tackle. In most instances that would be factually correct, but also place these institutions in a space of utter moral hazard because of it. The fraudulence of the church covering up paedophile priests is in fact the same fraudulence of selling subprime outage bonds rubber-stamped as AAA. They're doing it because they can pull the wool over the average punter's eyes, and comes from a space of contempt so deep it's hard to contemplate the depth of that evil.

The Pompous Appeal To Normalcy

It's also interesting that in both films, the institutions resepctively resort to what can only be called the 'pompous defence'. When the Catholic Church is challenged and the defenders of the Church try to convince the investigators to drop the story, they mount a particularly pompous defence trying to categorise the victim's accusations as somehow a minor irritant or a minority crank position. At every turn, the people who want it not to be true put on the air that because the Catholic Church is too important an institution, the allegations can't possibly be credible.

Similarly, at the climactic moment of the Bears Sterns collapse during the GFC, a banker gets up at a conference and says everything is fine and any attempt to categorise the critical situation as exactly that, is somehow misguided and a crank. Of course in one of the great ironies, Bears Sterns bank collapsed that very day as he was speaking. In both instances the pompous appeal is made to the public to present and pretend that everything going on is normal.

Perhaps these responses are natural. It's a bit like being confronted by bad news and you go into the grief cycle. Given the horrible evidence presented, some go straight to the denial stage - and when doing so, do look stupid and pompous defending the indefensible in public. For the Church the allegations turned out to be all too real with repercussions around the world, and for banking too the repercussions became the Global Financial Crisis. Maybe when the scale of the problem is so huge, people have to pretend the threat is nothing and thus the pomposity comes to the fore.

Institutional Evil Is Institutional Stupidity

In each instance the films reveal something very interesting about institutional malfeasance, and it is that it relies greatly on the stupidity others not to notice what is going on. The people who uncover the great mass of subprime mortgages that are fed into high end mortgage bonds were the people who actually undertook proper due diligence. In a sense, the great fraud of the mortgage bonds based subprime loans relied on the stupidity of people not to admit they did not know what was going on and to go looking for facts. It seems simple enough, yet so many bankers and lawyers let these mortgage bonds written in complicated language, make them stupid and not do due diligence.

Equally, the Roman Catholic Church had insiders warning the Church for decades and instead of heeding the warnings, opted to go for the cover up. Once again, the coverup relied on people opting to be stupid by not noticing a pattern that was carried out in the roster of priests. The evidence was right there on public record if people could put the pieces together. Equally, the press failed to follow up when given evidence earlier because they too opted to be stupid and not look into the evidence being presented. The deep regret from the press in 'Spotlight' is the acknowledgment that it too forms part of the circle of institutional stupid that allowed the institutional evil to flourish.

The pairing of institutional stupidity with institutional evil is right around us. Take Australia's stance on asylum seekers. It relies entirely on making sure that people cannot carry out due diligence to make sure human rights are not violated. In the face of many allegations Peter Dutton pompously pretends that nothing untoward is going in places like Manus Island and Nauru. The middle part of the electorate is now opting to go with stupid silence and back both major parties because it cannot exercise the due diligence an discover the problems going on. Thus we're setting up the scenes for The Great Embarrassment that will surely follow the events on Manus Island and Nauru.

With Great Power Comes Great Corruption

At the end of the day both major institutions were avaricious to the point of disaster. The Roman Catholic Church sought to limit the financial damages as much as possible. The pattern we see in 'Spotlight' where they paid off people who alleged these crimes and sent them away with tens of thousands instead of incurring millions in damages was repeated elsewhere around the globe. We know this from the recent Royal Commission that Cardinal Pell himself was part of the institutional evil by playing the institutional stupid card very hard to secure his own promotion. In the mean time they sewed up the mouths of victims and lawyers with confidentiality clauses in these private settlements. Those in the public who sought public redress received a great amount of harassment and vitriol - another pattern that was repeated around the globe.

Banking, equally brought itself to the knees through excessive greed. Yet, the most telling part in 'The Big Short' is when Mark Baum realises that the banks knew fun well they would be bailed out because they were too big to fail, And so the moral hazard had always been there right form the beginning. The collusive nature of those who investigate banks and those who work for banks also made it very hard to stop the endemic fraudulence. And the scale of the fraudulence being so endemic was such that it looked like this situation was normal to many onlookers. This is the genuinely crazy part of the story. People like the Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke couldn't see the GFC coming. US Treasurer - and former Goldman Sachs banker - Hank Paulson couldn't understand what was unfolding and why. It gave rise to the massive effort known as Quantitative Easing to shore up asset prices, just to save the bacon of so many ordinary investors.

Worse still, in the wake of the GFC, none of the remedial actions had taken place and so it is clear we have set ourselves up for yet another GFC if only we could sell these subprime-pimped mortgage loans to a greater fool, for it is the greater fool who gives rise to the great power to corrupt so greatly.

As for the Vatican, things seem to have moved towards reforming their practices under Pope Francis; yet, if celibacy gives rise to 6% paedophile priests and only 50% who actually manage to practice the celibacy, then the biggest reform they could carry out might be to acknowledge celibacy is bullshit.

News That's Fit To Punt - 18/Apr/2016

The End Of The Road For Bronwyn Bishop

It's minor news but I love it anyway. Bronwyn Bishop has lost her preselection for her seat of McKellar. She had long overstayed her welcome in Australian politics and she really won't be missed by the middle Australia that had no influence over her pre-selection. The more interesting aspect of her demise as a political figure might be that her ideological lovechild Tony Abbott had a hand in unseating her.

Tony Abbott has publicly praised Bronwyn Bishop amid anger in sections of the Liberal Party that the former prime minister urged his supporters in Mackellar to end Mrs Bishop's political career in Saturday's preselection vote. 

A bloc of 12 votes for Walter Villatora, a member of the hard right who was backed by Mr Abbott, became instrumental in Mrs Bishop's defeat by Jason Falinksi. 

Mr Falinksi is a member of the Liberal left - the moderate faction - and it is highly-unusual for the hard right to work towards the ascendancy of a moderate in a seat previously held by a conservative like Mrs Bishop. 

The 73 year-old former Speaker retained the backing of the centre-right in NSW despite loud public calls for her retirement and agreement in the senior ranks of the Turnbull Government that her time was up.

Members of the hard right were playing down talk of an official deal on Sunday. "There was no deal done, this one was free of charge," said a source. 

But the centre-right is convinced that the hard right planned the hit on Mrs Bishop in collusion with the left and that Mr Abbott had been "hitting the phones hard" to ensure that outcome.

It doesn't really matter. The woman was an ideological nut job that foreshadowed the Tea Party style partisan politics coming to Australia. She was also responsible for running up a huge bill on the public purse, flying around in helicopters on private business, while her resume shows she didn't really do much except be a big noise on behalf of the hard right. 

She really was a terrible human being before being an awful member of Parliament and even an awful Speaker of the House to boot. Together with Sophie Mirabella, it is best we consign her to the dustbin of history as soon as possible.

Double Dissolution Coming Down The Pike

Malcolm Turnbull recalled parliament early to debate that ABCC bill for three weeks. The Senate voted it down in a day. That now activated the 2 July date for a Federal election.

The sanguine news for both major parties is that the polls are pretty even.

The latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend put support for the Coalition and Labor across the country on a knife-edge at 50-50, assuming an allocation of preferences similar to those at the last election.

The national survey of 1402 electors was conducted between April 14-16 and showed support for the Coalition had dropped by a statistically significant 3 percentage points since the March poll. 

This equates to a 3.5 per cent swing away from the Coalition's share of the vote achieved at the September 2013 election, raising the prospect the election could produce a government with a wafer-thin majority or even another hung Parliament.

The only thing the Coalition have got going is that Malcolm Turnbull is far more popular than Bill Shorten. It's not much to go on if you're a backbencher looking to be wiped out in a 3.5-4.0% swing, but Bob Hawke with his personal popularity won on the back of such numbers in incumbency so it's not like they're toast just yet.

I'm sure I'll get plenty of opportunities to bitch even moe and louder about this truly horrible Coalition Government in the coming weeks so I'll just leave that bit for now. Stay tuned, I shall be whinging with all my might.

Meanwhile The NSW Government Wants To Go Orwellian On Our Sorry Butts

This is just awful, and it's flying under the radar.

On March 22, 2016, a set of bills was introduced to the New South Wales Parliament by Deputy Premier and Minister for Justice and Police Troy Grant that included the Serious Crime Prevention Orders Bill and Criminal Legislation Amendment (Organised Crime and Public Safety) Bill. 

The acts upon which this amendment is based are shockingly outdated bases for common law. Most date back to the early 90s and one was written in 1900, a time when the faces of both crime and civil liberties were starkly different than they are today. This would be one matter if the intent of the amendment had been to more clearly define violent crimes--such as differentiating hate crimes from others--but instead, the amendment's stated purpose was to "recast the offence of dealing with property suspected of being proceeds of crime so as to adopt certain provisions of the corresponding offence in the Criminal Code of the Commonwealth."

As another site puts it:

The bill would grant police the power to cut off your internet, terminate you from your job, tell you who can associate with, and where you can go if they think you have some association with a “serious” crime. 

These “serious crimes” can range from anything as minor as theft, possession of a cannabis plant or illegal gambling to major offences like homicide, kidnapping and extortion.

They are essentially the same laws used for a terror suspect, but they can be applied to any innocent person in New South Wales without their chance at a proper criminal trial. 

Why should you be worried?
If the police, who are often wrong, believe you were in some way connected to a crime, they can impose all of these restrictions on your life without having to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. 

One of the most concerning parts of the legislation is that it can apply to a range of potentially completely innocent people.

As the NSW Bar Association explained, it’s not just for people convicted of the crime – it’s anyone that’s seen to “facilitate” it, which is a very vague term.

You could even get done for simply lending your phone or car to a friend who uses it for a criminal act.

What’s even more sinister is that there’s also basically no reasonable way to appeal the control order once you cop it.

You can only prove it by way of ‘legal error’, which means it’s not a matter of proving whether you’re innocent or not, you have to prove the police didn’t apply the procedure properly.

Pre-crime here we come! It's sinister in that it tries to set up a zone where a person is not innocent because they're suspected of something, which would overturn the principle of innocent until proven otherwise. The government has minimal onus to present its case in any detail, is enabled into malicious prosecutions, and can't be stopped unless they happen to trip up on procedure. Keep in mind, we have no 'Miranda Rights' made explicit in this country, so procedural errors of the police are less likely to be spotted by the legal profession. This is like a leap back to the18th century. 

The terrible irony course is that the party wanting to do this is called the 'Liberal' Party. The party that supposedly values individual freedoms.  

Quick Shots - 10/Apr/2016

Torrie the Superb Parrot - (?-2016)

Look, I know this is kind of weird if you're not one for pets, but our Superb Parrot passed away. She was very old. well over 25years, so it wasn't surprising. She was very frail towards the end so it was even less surprising, but grief is grief. It's knocked me around for the last few days.

We got this parrot at a specialist shop out in Smithfield. She was already well mature and never really tame. God only knows how long she had been in the small cage because she really was freaked out about our larger cage when she moved in. I never thought I'd end up being in the caged bird thing, but things happen in your life, and suddenly that's where you find yourself - looking after an animal that is safer in a cage. At the moment an animal needs your help, the ideological thing tends to take a back seat. It's not a good excuse, but it is what happens.

I don't know who's idea it was to name Polytelis Swainsonii the 'Superb Parrot', but they really are wonderful company. Torrie was a funny thing. She was haughty and shy, regal and proud to the end. She had so may expressions that would keep you watching, and she would watch you right back, ever observant. I remember the one time she made the 'happy face' of excitement. It was the time I took her outside in the big cage for the first time, early one morning. The sun light hit her face directly and she lit up with elation - her pupils constricted and her head feathers stood on end. Majestic, she spread her wings and stood tall on her perch for a moment. Then the moment passed and she went back to being her cool self.

Anyway, having Torrie made me think of a lot of issues surrounding the species and the environment in which they live. That you can't just hope to save the species if you don't look after the whole habitat. You can't just save an animal here and there or a tree or even a river. You have to save the whole damn lot; The bush, the waters, the land, the oceans, the atmosphere, the Great Barrier Reef, all of it connected. In an anthropocentric civilisation it's easy to think of it as being about us. But for many a moment I sat and pondered the depth of the whole connection centred around the Superb Parrot.

I'm really going to miss the old bird. She was unique and profound as any sentient soul I'd ever met. Anyway, I share this because I don't know what to do with the grief today.

Of Course They Can Sort It Out (If They Wanted To)

Speaking of things climate change, here's this article. The Grattan Institute thinks that there is a workable bipartisan position on Global Warming and Climate Change by developing existing mechanisms.

A bipartisan approach to tackling climate change is still possible if Labor and the Coalition can get past their "policy bonfire" and develop existing mechanisms to curb carbon emissions, a Grattan Institute report finds. 

While an economy-wide carbon price remains "the ideal preferred future climate policy", the political reality excludes that prospect winning bipartisan support for now. Still, sufficient flexibility exists within the major parties' platforms that a "sustainable policy phoenix can yet arise", the report argues. 

The longer big parties threaten to dismantle their opponent's policy once in office, the less likely companies will have the confidence to fund long-term investments in low-emissions technology, making it harder for Australia to meet its carbon goals. 

"We know we'll all pay eventually, whether it comes from the left pocket or the right pocket," Tony Wood, the report's lead author and director of Grattan's energy program, said.

Common ground to build on includes the remaining bipartisan goal to meet a 5 per cent reduction on 2000 levels by 2020. That target is likely to be reached in part because of favourable accounting but also because of some success in the government's purchase of emissions reductions, cheaper than the carbon tax, he said.

God, would it were so. It's hard to imagine the LNP even admitting to itself that there is an issue that needs to be dealt with. The way they carry on about what a positive thing it was to dismantle the carbon tax merely emphasises the point that deep down they don't believe it's going on or that anything really needs to be done. The mining sector is in denial about it because a big chunk of the mining sector is into fossil fuels so turning away from fossil fuel is literally about losing their meal ticket. The energy sector is equally into it up to their eyeballs but they too just want prolong things before they have to shell out on the capital investment to switch out of fossil fuels and - unsurprisingly - their present is still tied up with the fossil fuel companies that are fighting to keep their meal ticket going as long as possible. The banks are tepid and feigning neutrality, but they too have too much money and derivatives exposure to the mining companies.

It's all too easy to keep denying and putting off doing things, whether it be the corporate chiefs or the governments. It's what happens when you let the major parties play politics with the important policy areas. 

Unaoil AND Panama Papers

Here's a Doozy.

It was only a matter of time before the Panama Papers controversy and the Unaoil bribery scandal overlapped. 

Leaked emails obtained by Fairfax Media show the owners of oil industry bribe master Unaoil, the Ahsani family, used the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca – just like thousands of other super-rich around the world – to establish companies in tax haven locations. 

As the fallout from 2016's two biggest international finance stories continues to reverberate, Fairfax Media can also reveal that one of the biggest donors of Britain's ruling Tory party, property tycoon Javad Marandi​, was involved in Unaoil's Azerbaijan affairs and also a Mossack Fonseca client. 

In 2008 and 2009, Unaoil's finance unit exchanged a series of emails with Mossack Fonseca's Panama office regarding the power of attorney arrangements between Unaoil founder Ata Ahsani and the company's two top executives, his sons Cyrus and Saman Ahsani. 

The emails related to Unaoil companies established in the Caribbean tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. It is not illegal to use tax havens to create companies or hold accounts.

That's unsurprising, isn't it? That people capable of bribes around the world would use Mossack and Fonseca to move bribe money around and with it avoid paying taxes? Really, lots of heads should roll. David Cameron really should lose his job as PM. The ATO should be jumping all over these things. I could rant on about it tonight, but I won't. You'd think this should end with more resignations and admissions of culpability.

View From The Couch - 27/Mar/2016

Propaganda And Nothing But Propaganda

Some days you just don't know what to make of the government's views on the arts and entertainment industry. Other days, it's pretty damn clear what they want from its workers. And so today we find that the immigration department dropped $6million to make a Telemovie about what a bad idea it is to be an asylum seeker from Afghanistan or Pakistan, hoping to trek to Australia by water.

Government tender documents reveal the Department of Immigration and Border protection paid the Sydney-based Put It Out There Pictures $4.34 million to produce the movie. It paid a company called Lapis Communications a further $1.63 million for to promote and advertise it, bringing the total to $5.97 million. 

By contrast, Priscilla cost less than $2 million, Wolf Creek about $1 million and The Castle just $750,000. Even adjusted for inflation, the total budget of all three films works out at about $5.8 million in today's terms. 

Filmed across three countries, the ninety-minute drama tells the story of a small group of Afghan asylum seekers trying to get to Australia by boat. A trailer available on YouTube – which has about 1000 views – shows scenes of asylum seekers talking, arguing and crying in Afghanistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I guess the obvious thing about this is that this government views propaganda films as being more important than any film that gets made with government assistance through Screen Australia. When the government has a point to put across through film, it actually has a bit of financial wherewithal to make its point forcefully. 

I know it wasn't intended but there probably isn't a bigger insult to the film makers of this country than a production where the budget provided by the government is bigger than anything it would normally hand out to a local production; where the content is purely political; the funding came out of a department that has zero involvement with the arts and entertainment sector, and the production money went out to a foreign production entity. 

One would think - rather cheekily - that the department of Immigration should have been forced to go through the process every other producer has to go through to secure government funding, and tried to set up its own distribution deals overseas. 

The production also brings up some interesting issue like, who in Australia might have undertaken such a project. I'd imagine the vast majority of film makers are pinkos. Some are even heavily Regressive Left types. There would be a lot of people who would object to this project for being propaganda and for such nefarious intent. All you have to remind people is 'Leni Riefenstahl', and they would've run screaming. As such, the government would have had immense trouble getting any kind of creatives going on in Australia. It kind of illustrates just why it was made out in Afghanistan:

Put It Out There company director Trudi-Ann Tierney declined to be interviewed. However she has in the past had some interesting things to say about her own work, describing her films as "propaganda". 

The former Australian TV executive and actress moved to Kabul to manage a bar but fell into the local TV industry and found herself producing a highly popular soapie, which she wrote about in her book Making Soapies in Kabul. 

In the book she said she was ostensibly head of drama "but in truth I was nothing more than a propaganda merchant". She also says her work was part of the "psychological operations" NATO and its allies used to influence the values and behaviour of its Afghan audience in a way that supported the war effort.

It's all about the war effort boys and girls! There's always more money for that. 

Rejoice, It's Joyce Season

The interesting news is that the "vengeful micro parties" are going after Barnaby Joyce. 

The Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is to be targeted by "far right wing" micro parties directing preferences against him in the seat of New England, according to the preference expert Glenn Druery. 

Mr Joyce holds the seat by 19.6 per cent but the micro parties revenge for being bundled out of the Senate is expected to greatly enhance independent Tony Windsor's campaign to retake New England. 

Mr Druery said on Friday the right wing micro party candidates would also direct preference against sitting Coalition members in at least 10 marginal seats.

The fun part of the news is that these are "far right wing" micro parties. These micro-parties are presumably for people to whom the current Coalition is not right wing enough. That's right, more right wing than the climate-change-denying', Coal-seam-gassin', asylum-seeker-hatin', gay-marriage-equality-resistin', Johnny-Depp-baitin', cockamamie Barnaby Joyce.

You wonder what the world has come to when a right ole rightwing nut like Barnaby can't rely on the far right wing nut vote.

A House For This Sinodinos

It's truly strange how political operators go about doing things and how money seems to swirl around the things they do.

Key Liberal fundraisers sounded out major donors to the party about chipping in to buy a house for Senator Arthur Sinodinos after the collapse of a potentially lucrative money-making venture. 

The audacious plan originated in early 2013 after Senator Sinodinos relinquished a 5 per cent stake in Australian Water Holdings, a company that later became the focus of a landmark corruption inquiry. 

Fairfax Media had earlier revealed Senator Sinodinos' shareholding in a company that employed Eddie Obeid jnr, the son of controversial Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.
At the time Senator Sinodonis said that although his shareholding was recorded on his parliamentary pecuniary interest declaration it was not publicly registered with the corporate regulator "because it was on a gentleman's agreement".

How does that even work? Could, say, Terri Butler the current ALP shadow cabinet secretary go to the unions and ask for them to find money to buy her a house? Wouldn't Malcolm Turnbull and his ABCC bill jump up and down and point to such shenanigans as exactly how the unions and the ALP were corrupt? Isn't that what Sinodinos is being accused at this moment? This is some really weird stuff - especially because you see names like Obeid thrown in there, and we know "Obeid" can only mean "corruption" in this part of the English speaking world.

At some point they have to just 'fess up and admit that corruption is corruption is corruption.
And then there's this:

How Deep Does This Rabbit Hole Go?

Here's a doozy. The same ICAC inquiry that dug up the dirt on Sinodinos has also dug up the name of Peta Credlin. Yes, they tried to suppress that name, but it's out in the open now.

The documents were suppressed last week by the head of the Independent Commission Against Corruption after lawyers acting for Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos raised concerns they could be subject to parliamentary privilege. 

But the suppression order was lifted on Monday after the speaker of the House of Representatives, Bronwyn Bishop, advised the commission that no claim for privilege would be made. 

The emails reveal that, in March 2011, while the Coalition was in opposition, Ms Credlin used a major donor to the Liberal Party, Brickworks, as part of Tony Abbott's campaign against the carbon tax.

Oh doesn't that look like a bucket of writhing corrupt worms right there? Turns out Lindsay Partridge of Brickworks - who classifies as a Developer - was donating "illicit money" (The Sydney Morning Herald's words not mine BTW) to the NSW Liberals and Federal Liberal Party through back channels. The emails leave a trail of totally awful illustration of how money buys you so much access you get to put words into the mouth of a Prime Minister. 

Frankly, it's ugly and despicable that this is politics in this country, and how we in the electorate simply have to take it. All we do get is to vote for some person who may or may not get into Parliament, and may or may not represent our interests in that Parliament.It's really vague what the vote gets the ordinary citizen. 

The rich on the other hand, clearly get to dictate terms on a daily basis. 

Meanwhile In New South Wales (Where Common Sense Goes To Die)

The Creeping Authoritarianism In Australia Hits NSW

Say what you might about Greenies who chain themselves to trees or people who o marching for cause, outside of voting and lobbying, there aren't that many options to make  political point, short of violent revolution. You might - out of some class prejudice - dislike or disrespect dreadlocked tattooed grungy greenies marching to protest coal seam gas mining but you need the dreadlocked tattooed grungy greenies marching to protest coal seam gas mining to ensure governments get the message. The right to free assembly is an important component in our society because it's what allows political parties to exist.

Thus, the laws against protesters gathering actually strikes at the foundations of our rather fragile democracy.

NSW's harsh and unnecessary new anti-protest laws are the latest example of an alarming and unmistakeable trend. Governments across Australia are eroding some of the vital foundations of our democracy, from protest rights to press freedom, to entrench their own power and that of vested business interests. 

The NSW laws give police excessive new powers to stop, search and detain protesters and seize property as well as to shut down peaceful protests that obstruct traffic. They expand the offence of "interfering" with a mine, which carries a penalty of up to seven years' jail, to cover coal seam gas exploration and extraction sites. 

They also create a tenfold increase in the penalty applying to unlawful entry to enclosed land (basically any public or private land surrounded by a fence) if the person "interferes" or "intends to interfere" with a business there. At the same time as ratcheting up this penalty for individuals who protest, recent changes made by the NSW government mean that resource companies that illegally mine can receive a $5000 penalty notice instead of a potential $1.1 million fine. 

Disturbingly, these laws aren't isolated.

Tasmania last year targeted environmental protest with broad and vague new offences including "hindering" access to business premises or "obstructing" business operations, with penalties of up to $10,000 and four years' imprisonment. In Western Australia, proposed legislation contains extremely broad new offences of "physically preventing a lawful activity" and "possessing a thing for the purpose of preventing a lawful activity" with proposed penalties of up to two years in prison and fines of up to $24,000.
Common to these anti-protest laws are harsher penalties, excessive police powers and the prioritisation of business interests (particularly mining and forestry operations) over the rights of Australians to gather together and protest about issues they care deeply about.

We've been so distracted by how dastardly and woeful the Federal Government under the Coalition has been, it's allowed the State Government - also run by the same parties - to fly under the radar with their crappy authoritarian moves. These anti-protest laws are entirely the bidding of lobbies that pay into the coffers of the Liberal and National parties. These parties are brazenly shutting down democracy in order to appease their political donors. Just because the transaction can't be pinned down to individuals, it is no less corrupt than the Obeids who sought to influence matters of state to suit private interests (albeit their own).

Further to the point, the NSW police still have the APEC powers which are also anti-democratic. These came in at the time of the 2007 APEC meeting, and have not been rescinded. The current NSW government is essentially giving licence for the NSW police to brutalise those who would protest against mining or logging interests where the media is less likely to be there to offer coverage. In a year that the NSW police issued an apology for the brutal treatment it dished out to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras of the late 1970s, it seems like they're setting themselves up for more future apologies to protest groups.

Governments across Australia are deliberately using a range of funding levers to suppress advocacy by NGOs including gag clauses, targeted funding cuts and threats to the ability of environmental organisations to receive tax deductible donations from supporters – a tax status which is often critical to financial sustainability. 

Secrecy laws and an increasingly aggressive attitude to whistleblowers mean that people who expose even the most serious human rights abuses face unprecedented risks of reprisals, including prosecution and jail. Press freedom is being eroded by new laws and policies jeopardising journalists' ability to maintain the confidentiality of sources and to report on matters of public interest. All the while, in critical areas governments are undermining or sidelining the courts and institutions that were created to keep them in check.

On that note, I thought I should bring this up about any and *all* governments, *everywhere*:

Speaking Of Corruption

The NSW Liberals are under a cloud over donations they can't explain. suspect.

More than $4 million in public funding is being withheld from the NSW Liberals by authorities until the party can prove hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations it received before the 2011 election that swept it into power were not illegal. 

The donations were made by the controversial Free Enterprise Foundation, which the Independent Commission Against Corruption heard had "washed" illegal contributions from property developers before donating them to the NSW Liberals.
More than $690,000 in donations remains unverified. 

The NSW Electoral Commission has said it will withhold reimbursement of expenditure from last year's state election and annual administrative funding totalling $4.3 million until the matter is resolved. 

Failure to secure the funding would potentially leave the NSW division in financial dire straits just months before a federal election.

Good. They deserve the grief.

But Wait There's More

There's also this doing the rounds today.

The New South Wales Government's Upper House whip Peter Phelps has quit the role and says he will cross the floor to vote against the Government's biofuels amendment bill. 

The goal of the bill is to force small retailers to meet the government's 6 per cent ethanol mandate by applying fines of up to $550,000 for business owners who do not comply with requirements to sell E-10 fuel. 

In a fiery speech to Parliament, Peter Phelps described the bill as a "fundamental attack on small businesses", "a joke" and "disgraceful". 

He said the bill went against the Liberal Party's principles.
"We believe in a series of pro-business, pro-individual ideals," Mr Phelps said. 

Mr Phelps said he had fought the bill every step of the way, raising it in the party room and with NSW Premier Mike Baird. 

He then said he could not vote for the legislation, so under Liberal Party rules was resigning as whip as well. 

"For five years now I have enjoyed the golden handcuffs of being the whip ... and as part of that for my extra $20,000 a year I have on occasion had to whore my principles," Mr Phelps said. 

"But this bill, this bill which criminalises people for the purchasing decisions of their customers, is such an egregious breach of the core values of the Liberal Party that I cannot support it. 

"As whip I am supposed to encourage people not to cross the floor, so on that basis, I resign as whip effective immediately."

I don't think Mr. Phelps is about to go Frank Underwood, but it is an interesting spectacle. The government is pandering to lobbyists and a party whip is objecting. The joke is that te bill is set to pass because even the ALP is supporting it. So the lobbyists got to them too. Talk about being disgraceful.

It Would Make Too Much Sense So They Won't Do It

Here's an article by Jessica Irvine on a Land Tax.it's a touchy subject because people who don't move and change houses would suddenly be paying for the privilege of owning a house, in exchange for no stamp duty. 

The McKell paper proposes a broad based land tax levied at 0.75 per cent.
On a median priced Sydney home, the land would be worth around $700,000, meaning an annual tax of $5250. 

Owners of expensive homes would pay more and taxes collected would rise over time with land values, providing a steady stream of income for state governments.
A land tax would also allow state governments to more easily fund new urban infrastructure projects, the paper argues. 

"One of the key factors that increase the value of land is its proximity to public transport and good roads." A new rail or road project, therefore, boosts the value of local homes, providing a windfall to existing landowners. 

"If land values are taxed, then the annual tax bill would increase slightly to reflect the increased value of the land. Therefore those who are receiving a significant windfall from public expenditure would make a small contribution towards the project."

Which is all very nice but you know this NSW government is going to balk at it because its constituents are the older demographic who own lots of property.

There's more on the actual study, penned by the guy who worked on the study here.

For a start, land tax is extremely fair. All landowners would pay the tax annually based on the value of their land, and not on what improvements they have made. This means renovations would not be punished. 

Land tax is also easy to understand and administer, while being nigh-on impossible to avoid. 

Land tax does not disincentivise home owners from moving freely, making it easier for workers to accept jobs where they crop up, providing a boost to the economy. 

Land tax would also encourage more infrastructure spending by making it possible for the government to tax some of the additional value it creates when it builds near homes. A rail line that boosts property prices in a given area, for example, could be partially funded by those whose homes had shot up in value as a result. 

Now this is the point where the hardheads nod sagely and say while all these advantages sound attractive the reality is that any attempt to introduce land tax would be susceptible to the mother of all scare campaigns.

Another argument in favour of putting in a Land Tax is that it likely will take the heat out of the property bubble because people would be disincentivised from speculating through house-flipping. It would also disincentives land banking where people buy property and simply mothball it, taking it out of regular usage. 

Of course it would be hard to convince this NSW Government of doing anything so bold as to abolish Stamp Duty and put in a Land Tax. It would cause enough of a furore to get themselves voted out.
As with all these things, the politics of implementing good policy is going to be difficult and you can see the Coalition government in NSW has no appetite for selling this policy.

Still, given the current problems to do with the Property Bubble are going to significantly impact on future growth, and therefore Stamp Duty revenue, one might think the NSW government might look at this sooner than later and before the Bubble pops.

Sepp Blatter Deservedly Gets His Own

Some Kind Of Justice

This blog's had a very dim view of Sepp Blatter and FIFA for a long time. It goes all the way back to the 2006 World Cup. 28th June 2006 to be exact wherein a crappy ref decision allowed the Italians to slot a goal and go through to the next round of the finals. It was a tough loss on the back of a terrible referee decision, that even Sepp Blatter thought was a bad call. Somewhere along the line I found the disconnect between the obvious problems of refereeing international games, the way the World Cups are selected and staged and how the money flows amounted to one big conflict of interest with Sepp Blatter at its heart. Amazingly, this wasn't (and isn't) some kind of blinding insight, it turned out to have been fairly commonly accepted information about the modus operandi of FIFA.

The thing is, Sepp Blatter looked too comfortable with all these problems. And usually, the best way for me to understand just how bent these practices are, is to imagine the commissioner of the MLB doing the sorts of things Sepp Blatter has been accused of doing and how unseemly that would look. Would Rob Manfred or Bud Selig before him do...? What would that look like and how would the scribes respond? I'm not saying baseball has better administrative practices (although probably does), but unlike the premier Euro and Latin American sport, it is followed by a fairly critical press that parses everything. FIFA an Blatter in most part looked way out of step, even a decade ago.

I think that's about where this blog parted ways with football. There are other entries since, but really, that 2006 World Cup and its aftermath killed me. Even more than the Red Sox comeback in 2004 which also killed me - but not enough to hate baseball. That being said, bad referee calls are part of sport. The road to hell is paved not with good intentions but umpiring decisions. What really browned me off was Sepp Blatter's cavalier take on it, which amounted to how he doesn't care what the punters think in the outer outposts of football fandom. Especially places like Australia. Which is insulting because a lot of people have put tremendous amounts of effort in to make football have a place in country with 2 variant rugby codes and AFL.

The logical retort to that has been to say I will care no longer for the product you are pushing. I have many other more pleasing options for spectator sport without the aggravation of FIFA and its sport. And that's how it went down with me. Next to the Olympic Games, the most ethically vexed sports aren't the one-time steroids-addled baseball or cycling but the ethically bankrupt football.

As for Sepp and his FIFA cronies, they ended up on the FBI's radar after the dodgy World Cup choice of doing one in Russia. Worse still, there was the failed campaign by the FFA to invite the World Cup to Australia that lost to Dubai, which also cost $40million of our tax payers money in what can only be described as bribes. Yes, worse than the IOC and its 100 or so voting members, the FIFA votes comes down to 23 people, and you can't tell me they're not corruptible or collusive. Where exactly does 40-odd million dollars go in lobbying 20-odd people but inevitably into their pockets?

Clearly the US Federal Government thought FIFA was dodgy and has since pursued them mightily, which has resulted in this bit of good news: Sepp Blatter and his head flunky have been banned for 
8years from the game.

ZURICH: Sepp Blatter says he will appeal against his eight-year ban from football to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. 

Blatter also insists that he still views himself as FIFA president despite being banned for eight years by FIFA's ethics committee on Monday. 

Speaking at a news conference, Blatter said: "I fight for me and I will fight for FIFA. Suspended for eight years for what? 

"I'm sorry as president of FIFA I'm this punching ball." 

Blatter and Michel Platini were each banned for eight years by the FIFA ethics committee in a stunning blow for world soccer's most powerful leaders. 

FIFA president Blatter and his one-time protege Platini were kicked out of the sport for conflict of interest and disloyalty to FIFA in a $US2 million ($2.79 million) payment deal that is also the subject of a criminal investigation in Switzerland.
Blatter's FIFA career is ending in disgrace after more than 17 years as president and 40 years in total with the scandal-hit governing body.

Great. He's going to be a rogue President of FIFA. That's like Rob Manfred taking bribes to rig the amateur draft, then getting banned from the sport like Pete Rose but still insisting he's the commissioner. It's that weird. Clearly he didn't resign like he said he would when the FBI started investigating FIFA. Anyway, it's nice to see them get some cold hard justice served up to them.

News That's Fit To Punt - 20/Oct/2015

He Said "Cunt-Struck"

Today's odd little furore is this thing here where one Michael Lawler used the term 'cunt-struck', on Four Corners.

The offending phrase occurred towards the end of a bizarre and damning program examining the relationship between former Health Services Union boss Kathy Jackson and Lawler. 

"I'll be characterised as that scumbag, crook, fraudster, and, at the very best, somebody who's been bewitched by an evil harridan, namely Kathy [Jackson]," Lawler told Caro Meldrum-Hanna. 

"That I'm cunt-struck and that I have been utterly taken in by somebody who's a serious crook," he said.
One person who has been intimately involved in the case from the start reportedly turned to his partner in disbelief and said, 'Tell me he just said 'dumbstruck'."

Ha. No, he did not say dumbstruck at all; and so the wowsers went into top gear and you could hear the whine from where I was down in Kingsgrove. The Macquarie definition for cunt-struck seems to miss the mark as well. It's not that the person who is cunt-struck is "infatuated with a woman", it is the fact that the act of sexual congress with a specific woman has altered their perceptions of reality around them in such a way as to benefit that woman's perspective completely. 

Amazingly there's somebody there who claims to not have heard the term before. I remember when I first heard it - it wasn't long after the film 'Starstruck' came out in the 1980s. Yes, that's right, I heard it way back then, so some of these people really are sheltered. It is a mental state that I have catalogued as one to avoid, but it does make you less pliable in a relationship, and people start referring to you as an evil cynic. 

Just as an aside, I heard a term with which I wasn't familiar, just this last weekend when people were discussing the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' auto-generator. The term was 'Cock Snot'. I'd never heard that term before so I guess I'm pretty sheltered too.  

The Perils Of Student Politicians

While we're on the topic of Kathy Jackson, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey penned by Guy Rundle. It appears Mr. Rundle is very familiar with the student politician career of Kathy Jackson. 

I'm going to be a little naughty and quote a big chunk:

That’s the real story behind the Jackson disaster, and the Craig Thomson affair that preceded it: the utter decadence, the real moral squalor that has infected sections of the Labor Party Right, and that other sections of the Right have failed to address with any seriousness. This moral decline has deep roots and complex causes, but part of it comes down to the collapse of a genuine Right/Left conflict within the party in the 1980s. The factions remained, but the real differences that had made them a rational form of political organisation had vanished. So the Right, always bound up with capital to a greater degree, simply became a machine without content. The unions that formed its base had been steadily amalgamated into super-unions with a dissolved relation to the particular occupations and workers they represented. In the years of full arbitration and centralised wages fixing, they had relatively little scope to make their own deals. When enterprise bargaining took over from awards-and-demarcation system, workers got the worst of both worlds from such unions: they were quasi state-apparatuses, laced into state power to administer labour, and they had a free hand to make deals with major employers. Their heads and officers came not from the floor, but overwhelmingly from student politics, as the first post-student step in a political career. The distance between leaders and led in right-wing Australian unions, always wide, became cavernous. There appears to have developed a real contempt and disdain for the people they represented. 

In the case of the HSU, that disdain is sickening, utterly disgusting. All workers deserve to be properly represented, but there must be a special circle of hell for someone who whacks the plastic to the tune of $1 million-plus from the people who do the grunt work on basic wages, looking after those with chronic illnesses, cancers, and all that flesh is heir to -- work that often demands, even from those furthest from actual medical intervention, a bit or a lot more than many others are asked to give in their jobs. To represent such people should be a privilege and an honour, the cornerstone of a meaningful life. To turn it into a freeloaders’ picnic is not the only example of the decadent and diminished place the Labor Right has come to, but it’s one of the most visible. This is more than just taking a bit off the top. This is the betrayal of a membership -- and of a wider political movement. Labor is soft at the centre because the Right is soft at the centre, a quagmire made by two decades of the cynical politicking and character deformation of which Jackson is an example.

Goodness, look at the density of that text and deep conviction in denouncing Jackson. It sure saps credibility from the union movement, and by extension the ALP and Bill Shorten. It's not just a scandal, it's a fiasco and imbroglio, all rolled into one

Who The Hell Is Heffernan Talking About?

Mr. Fake Pipe Bomb himself, Bill Heffernan thinks that a former PM might be a pedophile. He's just not telling us which one. I know we've had 5 in 5 years, but the living PMs only go so far back to Bob Hawke. realistically, for what he's talking about to matter, he's talking about Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull. 

A former Australian prime minister is on a list of "alleged paedophiles" that Liberal senator Bill Heffernan claims forms part of a police document. 

Senator Heffernan used a Senate estimates committee hearing on Tuesday to discuss the list of 28 people, which he said formed part of police documents that had been "signed off" by Gary Crooke, QC, the former senior counsel assisting NSW's Wood royal commission into police corruption in the 1990s. 

Many of the people on the list and otherwise named in the documents were "prominent", including a former prime minister, he said: "They were delivered to me by a police agency some time ago because no one seems to want to deal with them." 

Every Commonwealth attorney-general since Philip Ruddock had seen the list, Senator Heffernan said.

You could rule out Abbott & Turnbull because they're too recent to fit the description. You can also rule out Howard because Heffernan is a partisan come hell or high water. That leaves the ALP Prime Ministers, of who, you could probably safely rule out Gillard on the grounds that she is a woman, she too is fairly recent, and she's not a NSW politician. That kind of puts the spotlight on Hawke, Keating and Rudd, and again maybe Rudd is too recent, and he too isn't from NSW. 

It's some crazy shit we're even discussing it, and really you suspect Heffernan is flinging mud only because he's protected by parliamentary privilege. That being said, long time readers might recall that years ago, Bob Collins was revealed to have been a pedophile and rapist after he committed suicide. Since then I've taken the view that one shouldn't be surprised by anything that comes to light.