View From The Couch - 27/Aug/2015

Norovirus

I've come down with some weird lurgy this week. It's giving me nausea and acid reflux. I burp like a baby and can't seem to keep food down. My joints ache, moving around is a pain, and all the old sports injuries are barking. We grow old, we grow old and all that; but you really get to feel it when the joints hurt. Judging from the symptoms, my best guess is that it's the Norovirus. I've been going to work because it's not like I've got a fever or I'm totally incapacitated, but today I was just overwhelmed by this thing. It's a weird thing wanting to vomit and not wanting to vomit at the same time. There are few bodily functions where you simultaneously want to do it and you don't. Ejaculation comes to mind, but that's about it, and it's worlds apart from vomiting in the unpleasantness stakes.

Anyway. Let's really have a spew!

Markets Are Up!

I guess the predictions for a global meltdown were misplaced after all because share markets are up today. Sydney was up yesterday, defying global trends towards the financial apocalypse. This was possibly because going any lower would have made valuations totally 'under', on too many stocks. Jokes aside, BTFD ("buy-the-fucken-dips") is a legit strategy until you find yourself cresting on a bubble like the markets in China. The ASX on the other hand hadn't bubbled at all in comparison to some of these other changes around the globe, and so had less to fall. For all the screaming headlines of "$60 billion lost in a day!", that was roughly a 2.5% drop or so and much of that has recovered. If you bought in on "the-fucken-dip", then you would've done alright.

A lot of commentators are saying this was no Lehman Moment. Maybe that's true, but having experienced the original Lehman Moment, I don't think anybody wanted to chance it, which explains just how much things got oversold in markets outside of China on Monday. Michael Pascoe even had a column yesterday crowing about how he was going to BTFD. Like I said, if you bought in on "the-fucken-dip" this week, then you would've done alright.

The mid to long term is much, much murkier. I'm not the grizzliest of Market Bears, but China still scares the hell out of me. There's still a lot of drama to be played out in response to the share market bubble popping, especially when the people decide what they need to do is string up the market boss. It might be the case that there aren't that many shareholders in China, it's also true that they would have lost a bundle if they were leveraged up to their eyeballs leading up to the share bubble popping. There's still all that Property Bubble out there in China, with all the empty cities, leveraged shadow banking using commodities as collateral, and the commodity prices have bottomed out so you know there are margin calls going on. None of that has changed. There's no reason to think that we're out of the woods with all this China mess business.

Hockey's CYA Republicanism

Out of the blue, WTE Joe Hockey says he wants Australia to become a Republic. It's kind of weird, but I guess it's one way to rebrand yourself as "I'm not with Tony Abbott, I'm not on that team of suck". Uh, WTE Joe, oh-but-yes-your-are!

The other possibility I thought of was that Joe fears the incompetence of this government so much, he even fears the Governor General sacking Abbott's government. In which case, moving to a republic would kind of cover his ass. Perhaps I shouldn't try to guess the motives of the Worst Treasurer Ever.

The Republican debate is one of those interesting things that bring out all sorts of spurious arguments of identity. Admittedly, when Paul Keating was pushing for it, I thought the notion was totally logical and the conservative forces allayed against an Australian Republic were doing so out of zombie loyalties to a crown of a distant land who cared so little about any of us to the point of mutual irrelevance. And while that may be true, in the years since the referendum was lost I've had some time to read and think about all this.

One of the more disturbing things about a Republic - with a President - separate to the Parliament/Congress assembly is that you have to begin asking who gets to call the shots on the military. In America, this is the President and since some time around Lyndon Johnson, has been able to go to war without the approval of Congress. This is a big issue because hidden in it is the possibility of an exacerbated conflict between the Presidency and Parliament. It hasn't come to blows in the USA, but the track record of Republics around the globe are pretty telling. This problem happens far more often than not, and on a long enough timescale, it seems to happen inevitably.

It is such a woeful record that so many Republics fail, and give rise to military juntas that it is worth reflecting on whether the Republican model of any stripe can forestall this problem. Some argue that Australia's democracy is more mature so it won't happen. Yet I have it on good authority that during the Dismissal crisis in 1975 a trade unionist suggested to Gough Whitlam that he order the Army to remove  the Governor General. Gough laughed off the idea as lacking in common sense - but Australia's maturity as a democracy hinged on Gough Whitlam's good common sense. These things that inform good common sense are razor thin, and hardly robust at all.

As a centre-left-voting-pinko-pseudo-intellectual, it's tempting to remove the Queen, let the ancien regime be damned. Yet the historian and nascent political scientist in me says this is a dreadful risk to be imposing on this nation. I'm not as gung-ho as I used to be in the 90's about a move to a Republic. Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm just sick and tired of an abstract debate when we have actual, real-world difficult problems lying ahead of us. Malcolm Turnbull might ride again as the standard-bearer for the movement, putting in the good fight once more but that alone won't do it for me. I'm so leery of this topic, I don't even want to change the flag.

Speaking Of Our Real World Problems...

Former head of treasury Martin Parkinson says the Abbott Government is sleep walking its way into a recession. If things stay the course under this go-slow, do-nothing, collect-the-rorts Government, we would lose 5% of GDP in the next decade, which would be a pretty serious recession.
Pretty sobering, no? He wasn't the only one pointing out the problems we've got. Try this bit:

Economic modeller Janine Dixon from Victoria University had told the summit the Treasury's Intergenerational Report had painted a "rosy" picture of the future, projecting average growth in real income per person of 1.4 per cent, meaning that by 2055 Australians would enjoy real incomes 75 per cent higher. 

Her own modelling had real incomes growing by less than 1 per cent per year, meaning that by 2055 incomes would be only 44 per cent higher.

Put another way, it would take an extra 20 years to reach the income forecast in the Intergenerational Report for 2055," she said. 

Her modelling has productivity growing at only half the pace assumed by the Treasury, whose assumption was based on the unusually high decade of productivity growth that followed the economic reforms of the early 1990s. 

Melbourne University economist Ross Garnaut said if her estimates turned out to be correct, the budget would "never get back to surplus". 

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said Australia's economic growth rate had mostly started with a "two" instead of a "three", "despite the lowest interest rates in our lifetimes". 

Dr Parkinson said if economic growth remained nearer to 2.5 per cent than 3 per cent, as much as 5 percentage points of gross domestic product would be lost over the next decade. 

"If this is not happening because our population growth is slow, it means willingly accepting the impact of a recession," he said. 

"The loss of GDP from a recession is about 5 or 6 percentage points."
Without acting we would be "sleepwalking into a real mess".

Just as an aside, I don't know what to make of this new trend of one-sentence-pragarphs being written at the Sydney Morning Herald. It's like ADHD Journalism. Complaints about style aside, that's like a who's who of economic boffins saying - nay, shouting - to the government "LIFT YOUR GAME!". And my question to these esteemed boffins is, "WHAT IF THEY ARE SIMPLY INCAPABLE OF LIFTING ANY GAME THEY MIGHT HAVE, WHATSOEVER?!"

I guess we'll be kissing away that 5% in GDP. Still want to talk about Republics? I just want the Governor General we have now to sack this lot, pronto. Maybe it's not Norovirus that's making me want to vomit but simply living under this nauseating excuse for a government.

One More Plea From The RBA

So, at this conference going on, Glenn Stevens, he of the Reserve Bank of Australia had a few choice advice for this government.

Ordinary Australians don't relate to calls for reform emanating from politicians but they do want economic growth to create new jobs, grow prosperity, and provide long-term financial security for their families, Glenn Stevens has told policy makers in Sydney. 

However the Reserve Bank governor acknowledged that focusing on growth was no populist option and would mean squaring up to the kind of hard political challenges that both the current government and the opposition have shown no appetite for.

The call for growth came as Mr Stevens repeated his concerns that the Australian economy had entered a long-term plateau, in which trend growth is significantly lower than Treasury and therefore government forecasts assume.

In arguably the most significant contribution to the National Reform Summit, which has brought together business, union, community, and policy leaders, from around the country, the central banker said for economic restructuring to be embraced by voters it needed to be framed in terms of its end-stream benefits for people. 

To that end, he told the high-powered gathering that "the general public is much more likely to grasp, intuitively, a conversation about growth".

I don't know about you, but I take that to read, "do your jobs properly you stupid intellectual runts". And I think it applies equally to the Opposition as it does to the addled minds that are in power this minute. Collectively, this political caste has to stop playing too much politics, gaming the ideology stakes, and get on with the job of addressing the real issues.

Heydon Hanging On

You get a guy who is biased pretending to be unbiased. He subsequently gets busted for being biased. Yet the same biased guy gets to decide if his bias is a problem. He had last weekend to think it over and said he couldn't. Now that the week's dragged on to Thursday he says he still can't decide whether his bias is a problem in being a Commissioner for a Royal Commission. He says he'll tell us Friday.  In the mean time, the ACTU says not only did the guy biased, he misled everybody. That's being euphemistic - what I think they want to say is that he lied.

It just doesn't look good. So why would he opt to keep twisting the breeze any longer than he needs to? Imaginer's misplaced professional pride, but every minute he stays on runs through whatever professional credibility he has left. So he must be hanging on for some other reason right? Like... money, perhaps?

I guess it's just another thing going on in another ring in Abbott's Three Ring Circus Government.
I think it's time for me to give into this overwhelming desire to go puke. Good night!

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2015

When You Are Crap, The World Craps On You

167 bad polls in a row, would tell you something, most likely that you're not loved and you're not going to win.

Inside the Prime Minister's inner circle, they tell themselves that they can win the next election because Bill Shorten is so hopeless. 

They've told themselves that 166 times in a row; that's the number of consecutive polls since the government was ahead in any of them.That's counting all the surveys conducted by all six national pollsters, according to the research consultant John Stirton. 

With today's Fairfax Ipsos poll, they'll have to tell themselves once again, whistling past the graveyard for the 167th time. 

You have to go back 16 months, to a Newspoll in April 2014, to find any survey that put the government ahead. 

"I think the government is essentially stuck" in its long losing rut, says the Ipsos director, Fairfax pollster Jess Elgood. 

The closest Abbott came to breaking into winning territory was with its second budget, in May this year. 

The Coalition levelled with Labor on 50:50, on the election-deciding two-party preferred measure. 

"Its second budget was well received and its polling bumped up," says Elgood.

But three months on, we see that the budget was not an elevator to a higher level of support but a momentary appreciation. 

The electorate doesn't disagree with the Liberals' assessment of Shorten. The Labor leader's approval rating consistently has a minus sign in front of it. It's just that the people think Tony Abbott is even more hopeless. 

The really interesting thing there might be the run of one sentence paragraphs. Gotta love these subeditors out in New Zealand. :)

More seriously... it should be obvious by now that Abbott didn't really win in 2013 on any merit whatsoever except for the single fact that he wasn't from the ALP. It's getting to the point where Abbott's doing serious harm to the country. He might be doing things pleasing to the nut job right wing of the Coalition, but the more they insist on their crappy agenda, the more it locks the entire government into the electorally hated zone. And let's make no mistake, even the long-time Liberal voters in blue-ribbon seats hate Tony Abbott. They only vote Liberal because it's religion (and there's really no cure for that variety of stupid).

Of course, the obvious man with electoral appeal is exactly the man the right wing of the Coalition cannot abide, Malcolm Turnbull; which essentially duplicates - in mirror image - the problem of the Gillard Prime Ministership wherein the factional heads loved Julia Gillard, but she had minimal appeal outside of her base supporters. This allowed Kevin Rudd to stalk her leadership all the way - but the faction leaders hated Rudd too much to have the good sense to go back to him. And so, the right wing powerbrokers of the Liberal Party who continue to back Abbott might end up losing their seats. Worse still, it's threatening to take down swathes of rookie Liberal and National MPs who came to Canberra on Tony Abbott's coattails. These backbench will get restless about that sort of projection. It's the same calculations that brought about the Gillard downfall. It's hard to defy the gravity of 167 losing polls.

The worst thing then, might be to pretend that polls go up and polls go down. In the case of Tony Abbott, they've never gone up enough call 'up'.

More On Dyson Heydon, Partisan Warrior

Not that I was ever close to the possibility of becoming a Rhodes Scholar back in my day at Uni, the notion of becoming a Rhodes Scholar does carry a certain gravitas with it. Well, it did, until I got up closed personal with some of the people who became Rhodes Scholars and quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't on the basis of the kind of merit or character that normal, ordinary people would call merit or character. Certainly my day, which was the second half of the 1980s, it was abundantly clear that it was more a case of smarm than smarts, charm than marks, connections and patronage than merit or character. I won't name names - it would be boring to do so - but I will say I lost faith in the title long ago.

That Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar gets bandied about as if he were an ace guy on campus. I don't know. He was a decade before my time so it's hard to say for sure but I've long suspected that by the time Tony was handed his, this fine institution had been rendered weak-chinned-and-neutered. Today we find out that none other than Dyson Heydon was on the panel that handed Tony Abbott his Rhodes Scholarship.

Mr Heydon was part of the seven-member Rhodes Trust selection committee in NSW that in 1980 handed the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to the future prime minister, then a 23 year-old student politician at Sydney University.

Tony Abbott, some time before his fateful boxing match that damaged his brain

According to documents seen by Fairfax Media at the NSW state archives on Monday, the selection committee was chaired by former NSW Governor, Sir Roden Cutler and "Professor JD Heydon" was a member.

The emergence of the Rhodes scholarship connection sets the personal relationship between Mr Abbott and his hand-picked judge to lead the trade union royal commission back decades.

Which all goes to show, it was smarm, charm, connections and patronage.  The men might deny - as they must, and as is their wont - but as any reasonable person could surmise, Tony Abbott was nothing special:

In his 2012 essay Political Animal, journalist David Marr, recounts how Mr Abbott "impressed a panel of worthies chaired by the governor of NSW, Sir Roden Cutler". 

"For Anglophiles and rugby players, the Rho­des was died-and-gone-to-heaven time. Winners must be scholars fond of sport who display "moral force of character and instincts to lead". The award to Abbott came as a surprise, particularly to those who had seen him up close on the SRC. One jibe at the time was, 'second-grade footballer, third-rate academic and fourth-class politician.'," Marr wrote.

Some men know how to cheapen the most impregnable heights of Empire. That's our Tony - everything he touches turns out cheapened; even the Rhodes Scholarship, even the Prime Minister's office. In some ways it is remarkable that a man could be of such low character and not get noticed on the way to the highest of offices. But that's how patronage works - picking out the people who would continue your cultural prejudices. And really, that's the kind of miserable government we've got, thanks largely to Tony Abbott.

As for Dyson Heydon, it seems he was getting his back scratched nicely by getting this appointment to look into corruption in the Unions. A real a snout-in-the-trough appointment by Tony to repay an old debt. Merit and character be damned. 

Mac Bank Boss Calls Out Government, Government Wimps Out

It seems to happen every day these days that the Liberal Party's own supporting lobbies step forward and slam the government for its bad governance and absence of policy worth spit. This time it's Macquarie Bank, which must feel like friendly fire with a howitzer in the back. 

Kevin McCann, the chairman of Macquarie Group, says the state of policy in Canberra is so dispiriting he feels he has to say something, despite his wariness about entering the political debate. 

In rare public criticism of the government of the day, Mr McCann has called on the Abbott government to stop fighting so many policy battles at once and to try to focus on just two or three priority areas.

"I've always been reluctant as chairman of a large company to start lecturing politicians and the community about what they should do, but I think I'm reluctantly changing that," Mr McCann said on Monday.

"With no disrespect to [Treasurer] Joe Hockey or [Assistant Treasurer] Josh Frydenberg, policy seems to have fallen off the table in Canberra."

Which is, neither here nor there, on its own. This bit however is pretty telling:

Mr McCann said on Monday that the Abbott government was failing to take the public with them on crucial policy reform and they desperately need to construct a narrative the public will find believable. 

And he singled out the Commission of Audit report as an example of the way in which the government had bungled its political messaging over the last 12 months. 

"I think it was a mistake to have the Commission of Audit say the country was busted, because the community knew that we weren't busted," Mr McCann said. 

"Surely we've got budget issues, but at the moment the community [feels] 'we're doing okay, why do we have to go through all this pain?' We've got to stop lecturing these people, we've got to have conversations and we've got to build up support," he said.
Mr McCann was speaking at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's business leaders' summit, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. 

He was sharing a panel with Mr Frydenberg whom defended the government's reform efforts, saying it is unfair to say policy has fallen off the table.
"The question [is], how do we get [reforms] through Parliament?" Mr Frydenberg said to the audience. 

"Let's call a spade a spade. The Productivity Commission ... was tasked by us to produce a blueprint for reform in industrial relations. [But] before they had even released their interim report the unions had come out against it. 

"[You should] say to our political opponents, don't run scare campaigns on issues as important as IR before the report has even hit the desk."

Good God Josh Frydenberg! So that awful Productivity Commission report which was a wishlist of crazy rightwing wet dream fantasies was the blueprint, and now that the Unions got up in arms and opposed it, they don't feel like they can get it through? It's not as if it's - God forbid! - a hung Parliament. They have the majority in the Lower House and the Senate has always been the place where negotiations took place. Just because you don't have the skills, patience, brains or stomach to negotiate in good faith, doesn't mean Australia's somehow ungovernable. It means you are insufficient to the task. It means you're not competent, worthy or appropriate for the job. It means you should quit. 

More Stupidity - 13/Aug/2015

Impartiality? What Impartiality?

Just how stupid are these guys? Tony Abbott's 'front' for nosing around in union business looking for corruption is a point man, Judge Dyson Heydon. Now, without prejudice, here's what is says about being judge in the law books:

"Although active participation in or membership of a political party before appointment would not of itself justify an allegation of judicial bias or an appearance of bias, it is expected that, on appointment, a judge will sever all ties with political parties. An appearance of continuing ties, such as might occur by attendance at political gatherings, political fund raising events or through contributions to a political party, should be avoided."

So with that, we are given the news that Judge Heydon was going to be a keynote speaker at a Liberal Party fundraiser.

Mr Heydon was listed as the keynote speaker at the Sir Garfield Barwick Address on August 26 at the Castlereagh Boutique Hotel in Sydney. 

An invitation written on a Liberal Party letterhead obtained by Fairfax Media says the $80 cost should be made to the Liberal Party of Australia's NSW division. It also calls for donations if people are unable to attend.

"All proceeds from this event will be applied to state election campaigning," the invitation's fine print notes. 

A spokesman for Mr Heydon released a statement shortly before 11.30am saying he would now not deliver the address. 

"As early as 9.23am this morning (and prior to any media enquiry being received) he advised the organisers that 'if there was any possibility that the event could be described as a Liberal Party event he will be unable to give the address, at least whilst he is in the position of royal commissioner'."

Which is just as well, but by then the cat washout of the bag. This is the problem with this government - apart from the repeated acts of stupidity - they seem to have stuffed a lot of cats in lots of bags and they keep getting out. 

This is a remarkable own goal. They set up a commission to bully the unions. They put in a judge who is clearly a party sympathiser in charge (ignoring the conflict of interest). Then they invite him to speak at one of their own fundraiser, thus blowing his cover. What a fiasco. The ALP had no hand in this, and now whatever shred of credibility the stupid Royal Commission was holding on to has been blown away, exposing the naked partisan politics writhing like some exposed worm in the sun. 

You can't make this stuff up. You just can't.

Now the lawyers are saying the union officials who were forced to appear in front of this Royal Commission could sue the government. 

Patrick Keyzer, who's head of La Trobe University's law school, said he respected the former High Court judge, describing him as a "distinguished Australian jurist", but said there would be an obvious difficulty with a royal commissioner agreeing to speak at a fundraiser for the Liberal Party.

Labor and the Greens called for Mr Heydon to be removed as a commissioner. Mr Abbott refused, defending him as "beyond reproach."

"Before now [bias] wouldn't have been faintly arguable, but these circumstances may cause some parties before the commission to head for the books," Professor Keyzer an expert on public law said. 

While there was a "higher threshold" of evidence required to prove a royal commissioner has been biased compared to a sitting judge, Mr Keyzer agreed it was a "real possibility" that witnesses could argue Mr Dyson "has engaged in an activity which creates a reasonable apprehension of bias".

What a joke. I doubt they would sue the Royal Commission, but the mere fact that it could be suggested has essentially robbed the Royal Commission of any claims to impartiality. What's even funnier is Tony Abbott defending his judge-friend-partisan-warrior, just as he did with Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker of the House and we all know how that went. Does he have any political capital left to be mounting that defence on the judge's behalf? Will it wash? Does it wash? Does it pass the sniff test? 

Mark Kenny has written a piece saying the question has moved from if the farce willed to when it will end.

For Abbott, it is another decision gone wrong. Just as Bronwyn Bishop's demise was the maturation of a dud call made long before, Heydon's judicial appointment had been aggressively partisan from the beginning. 

Unless Heydon can come up with a compelling explanation for his involvement in the address, then any suggestion that he was unaware that he was participating in a Liberal Party fundraising event when he agreed to speak will be extremely hard to believe - a lot less so in fact than the conclusions and inferences he would be likely to draw from the evidence his inquiry adduces. 

Besides, what does such ignorance say for his inquisitorial prowess, and or for his attention to important administrative detail? 

Liberals worried about their leader's performance this week on same-sex marriage now have another problem to add to the list. 

What was it Abbott told his shell-shocked colleagues in the wake of the Bronwyn Bishop crisis? When we talk about jobs and the economy, we thrive.
Not much talk of that at present.

I'd be surprised if he's still Prime Minister at the end of October.