The Go-Slow Government

NBN: Delivering On Their Promise To Make It 'Shit'

I've come to the conclusion this government likes to go slowly on things because too late or too little is better than nothing, but would never - ever - look progressive. And so, they came to power promising to cut the NBN so shreds, and now that they are 22months into government, they've delivered on that promise mightily.

The Singaporean company named as one of Telstra's biggest worries by its outgoing chief executive David Thodey has labelled parts of the $41 billion national broadband network as "shit" as it prepares to launch services in Australia. 

MyRepublic is a Singaporean internet start-up led by co-founder Malcolm Rodrigues that offers unlimited broadband at super-fast speeds for low prices. When asked about competition during his exit interviews, Mr Thodey said it was tier-three disrupters including MyRepublic that the company worried about more than TPG or Optus.

Now the disrupter is coming to Australia, having previously launched in New Zealand and Indonesia. Mr Rodrigues told Fairfax Media that MyRepublic will build a local team this year and launch services by mid-2016 with the goal of shaking up the entire broadband market. 

"We've kind of re-engineered the economics of telcos and this is what David Thodey was talking about," he said. "We're going to come in with an unlimited 100 megabit per second offer at the $80-$90 per month range. 

"We acquire customers at a fraction of the cost of incumbents, we [provide] service [to] those customers at a fraction of the cost and we don't churn."

Seriously! Who could have imagined that? But no, it sure wasn't this government that decided to dumb down and slow down the NBN to the point of being described as shit. Or was it?

Mr Rodrigues said he "loved the NBN" but that it had lost its way by moving onto fibre-to-the-node technology, which partly relies on slower copper phone lines to cut costs and save time. His company benefits from networks that operate on one foundation technology. 

The Coalition ordered the change after Labor's NBN rollout hit major construction problems and delays. But Mr Rodrigues claimed FTTN reliance on copper would see it deliver slower speeds than promised – a claim the government strongly denies. 

"I don't know what [the government] is doing on the other policy fronts but on this they've completely stuffed it," he said. "More and more Australians will leave the country looking for jobs and you'll continue to be a resource based economy – the hope of building IT jobs and a digital economy will kind of be more difficult to achieve. 

"On FTTN we'll market 100Mbps and when people come over we'll say 'sorry, thank your government [because] you're on a shit network and the most you can get is 20-30Mbps, but we will continue to lobby your government to turn it into a fibre-to-the-home one and as soon as you get there we'll get you a free upgrade to fibre'."
Mr Rodrigues said the NBN was clearly gaining momentum and would eventually find its way. But he was also adamant that Australia would fall behind if 50Mbps by 2020 was used as the national internet benchmark. 

"We want to turn Indonesia into a digital nation – I want to start stealing jobs from Australia and have people come do it out of that market," he said. 

He said the Federal Government would've been better off focussing on key markets and extending the timeline for building the NBN, which has been underway since 2009. 

"What they should've said is that this would be a 20 year rollout rather than a 10 year rollout and focussed on building FTTH into the key markets and continued to push that," he said. "I'd even be okay with the current approach if they said this was phase 1 and that phase 2 would be to move the FTTN guys to FTTH [as part of the plan]."

The mind boggles at just how big a stuff up this has been - all because Tony Abbott and the Slow-a-lition wanted to gut the NBN to help their crony friends at Telstra when it fact doing so did not help their long term competitiveness in the least bit. You never would have guessed the NBN was the crucial policy element in the last Federal election but people obviously missed it and voted for the guy determined to make it a shittier network. I guess now they got what they wanted.

Our Emission Reductions Will Go Slower Than Yours

And here is the dreaded announcement involving the emissions target. The PM of dumb says we're aiming for a 26% reduction by 2030.

The highly anticipated target based on 2005 levels would leave Australia trailing the international pack on emissions cuts beyond 2020, despite being among the worst greenhouse gas polluters per capita in the Western world.

The proposed figure of 26 to 28 per cent is well below the more ambitious effort climate experts say is needed to limit warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avert the worst climate changes.

However Mr Abbott said the government's focus was always on growth and jobs, and the pledge was a "good, solid economically responsible, environmentally responsible target".  

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who will lead the Australian delegation at the crucial Paris climate talks this year, said the target was ambitious and the nation was "doing our bit".

Sure thing Jules! Sure thing Greg! Sure we're doing our bit if you count jogging on the spot and working a sweat as getting to the destination. It's more accurate to say, we're going as slow as we can on this so that we look like we're going something, but we're doing the bare minimum by which we could be judged to be doing something. Anything less and really, we'd be doing nothing at all.

The reaction to the announcement has been negative in the same way that a chorus of disapproval erupts when you ask people to make a sacrifice for very little return. It's not morally or ethically sound, it's not even economically sound, but Tony Abbott & Co. are busily strapping the future Australia on the mast of the good ship coal industry as it sails into the worst commodity storm this century. Yeah, it's more foolhardy than brave, but that's the idiot we've got handling the boat.

The headline here looks hysterical except, the circumstances themselves are hysterical, so I don't think it's worth grousing about the hysteria. It's true, Tony Abbott is going to have to apologise to his children for not doing enough. But in some ways the problem is already here and unfolding quicker thane can say "carbon dioxide emissions", so there's not much point haranguing the Prime Minister. He knows he's fucking it up, and fucking it up big time at that. The truth is, he doesn't fucking care, so, there!

Sign Of The Times

I Didn't Know They Had It In Them

The last thing I expected was for the Coalition to head for a spill. I honestly thought that it wasn't in their culture to spill on an actual Prime Minister, as opposed to merely an opposition leader. I guess you learn something new every day and these Liberals really are no different to the ALP they so despise - or claim to at any rate - when it comes to reading polls and trying to keep a job.
So, yes, I was wrong. These guys really are generic as the ALP politicians.

This has got me to thinking that the news cycle is so fast and furious it has become impossible to have a Prime Minister go for long. Japan hit that point early in the 2000s and kept changing Prime Ministers every year. Italy had been that way since the 1970s until Silvio Berlusconi came along, but essentially he controlled the media. Politics has become so fractious it has made the voting public volatile. The instant gratification offered by polling and sending a message has resulted in a kind of feedback loop that enforces an anxiety about poll figures over actual policy.

And so in the last decade we went from the tired old John Howard to the immensely popular Kevin Rudd to the immensely divisive Julia Gillard and back to Kevin Rudd, only to end up with the immensely unpopular Tony Abbott who having dislodged the ALP has managed to dislodge himself. As Julie Bishop is reported have said, he is indeed his own worst enemy and thank goodness we might be rid of him within the week.

What it says about the electorate is much worse.

Blaming It On Peta Credlin

The enforced myopia of the media makes us overly familiar with the Prime Minister whose mug is on TV or newspapers or everywhere on the interwebs 24/7/365 so we forget how lofty an office it really is. A backbencher really has to prove their worth before having any real concrete input into policy and maybe if they're lucky they might see time as a fringe minister. It's almost understandable that their access to the PM's office is limited and narrow and that chief of staff of the PM's office is a great obstacle.

Which highlights the problem of having Peta Credlin as this figurehead of the Prime Minister's office who controls the flow of meetings and is known Australia wide as wielding this kind of centralised power. The un-democratic nature of her power was bound to be an issue in a Parliament that is operating under the Westminster system. An unelected figure who wields such power has more in common with the Secretary General of the old USSR (read: Stalin) or North Korea (read: Kim Dynasty) than a democratic state. Although nominal communist,those regimes were (and are) essentially totalitarian nightmares. All the same it is kind of interesting that the right side party fell into that Totalitarian trap.

The irony may be that it was the Liberal Party that succumbed to this bit of micro-fascism infestation, but then again it's not surprising given how Tony Abbott has never shied away from his own fascist impulses. When he made his speech on Monday and made the case for him to continue, he was essentially quoting Hitler and the Nazi's fuhrerprinzip. No joke. Paraphrased, he was saying "I'm the leader. We all have to unite behind the leader. Only the leader can decide. We must not become a rabble."

The only thing missing were the "Zieg Heil" chorus. I have to say at least the unelected skullduggery of Paul Howes in his time as Union boss didn't succumb to this kind of rhetoric. He might have thought it but he didn't quite say that.

The backbench unrest is entirely understandable (but not necessarily admirable). It's their meal tickets being threatened by an uncaring Prime Minister. If you threaten enough meal tickets, they'll come at you like a mob. This is why most things end badly in politics.

So Now It's Time To Think Of An Alternative

This is the hard bit because they're all a bunch of brain-damaged emotionally-stunted intellectually-crippled, mentally-deficient cunts. And then there's Malcolm Turnbull who is not any of that but mercurial and relatively environmentally-friendly-sounding which makes him the Left's favourite pick. But the Right hate him so much for the very fact that the Left likes him and he's environmentally-friendly-sounding. He might not be environmentally friendly at all, but he's suspected of the crime because he's the boss of the Australian Republican Movement.
It's ironic the knighting of Phil the Greek has brought this all out.

I always ping him on 'Utegate' and the Godwin Grech phoney email and the glaring absence of judgment in that entire episode, but it has to be said Australian politics is about comebacks and maybe Turnbull is due his own. Lazarus had a quadruple bypass, maybe you can flog a dead horse to life.

Scott Morrison on the other hand is a textbook example of the sort of brain-damaged emotionally-stunted intellectually-crippled, mentally-deficient cunt the Liberal Party breeds, so he might lead them the way they want, but over a cliff. Coming to think of it, that's exactly what Tony Abbott's done so why would they want to do that again? Oh I forget that they are brain-damaged emotionally-stunted intellectually-crippled, mentally-deficient cunts.

Which means that the time might have finally arrived for Julie Bishop, star of 'Seven Years A Deputy'. I could write a nasty sentence or two about her career in law and the kinds of bastards and shills she defended but no. It would smack of misogyny to do so. "Pass".

The other wonderful news is that the Budget is due in 3 months. And they don't really have a candidate for Treasurer to replace The Worst Treasurer Ever Joe Hockey, mostly for fear that they might uncover somebody who is actually - to fudge a word - "Worst-er".
We sure live in interesting times.

Comedy In The Making

All You Need Is The Canned Laughter

We would say, "this stuff writes itself" when we find a good vein of comedy gold. I've been saying this for a few days now since Tony Abbott knighted HRH Phil husband of Royal Betty II. The ridicule and the disarray in the Liberal ranks, while unseen to us on the streets, has been enough to hit the front pages every day with a juicy bit of morsel.

Although it did get me thinking a bit, as to what Buckingham Palace might have made of Tony Abbott handing out a gong to Prince Philip. The problem is that having fought so hard against Republicanism in Australia, he put Republicanism right back on the map by drawing attention to the Royals in Australian political life. One would (and could) well imagine this might have prompted a phone call to Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove from the Palace, asking him just what in the name of all that is good, is going on Down Under.

The short reply might be that we Australians have elected themselves a brain-damaged entity who is doing some crazy shit in the driver's seat of government. And the Palace may well tell Sir Peter to sort it out. Not wanting to be a second Kerr, Sir Peter himself might be working the phones of the Liberals to remove Tony Abbott.

I jest.
Although Peter Hatcher is not kidding when he says the ray of light for Abbott is that he has no immediate rival.

Still, when you read that the Liberal backbenchers have appealed to Mal Brough to raise his hand in a spill because Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull have said no, you get the feeling that the Liberal Party is possibly in some kind of rush to remove Tony Abbott, and anybody will do. Right now, more than the electorate itself, they want to vote for "Not-Tony-Abbott". The cabinet minsters are allegedly circling the wagons but if you are a backbencher in a marginal seat, every bit of errata generated by Tony Abbott would be votes being driven away from your name. You'd get pretty nervous and right now there maybe even more nervous-nelly-Liberals in Queensland, following on from Victoria.

Yes, the other blowhard idiot from the right, Campbell Newman is getting voted out tonight. He's even going to lose his seat, much like John Howard did. You'd think this phenomenon would lend itself to the vision of a one-term-only Coalition Government in Canberra. The seeming success of the 2013 election was in fact no kind of success at all except the Steven Bradbury variety. The Liberal backbenchers in marginal seats are right to be very antsy. Tony Abbott is giving them nothing but turd balls to take back to their electorates as the fruits of their labour.

It's all deliriously funny. I am now getting an insight into how the Liberals must have felt between 2010 and 2013 as the ALP underwent its civil war between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and kept getting smashed the polls. The delightful titter of Schadenfreude, the poisonous laugh of the cynic, the ticklish mirth of watching the misfortunes of the other, are all here in plain sight. It must've been a wonderful laugh for them and that totally blinded them to the fact that in reality Tony Abbott was a terrible candidate to be pushing as leader and then Prime Minister.  If there's one thing worse than a politician that is full of bullshit, it is a politician who believes his own bullshit and acts accordingly regardless of consequences. That's their man Tony to a tee.

They say History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then comedy. I think we're watching is the funniest show in Australian politics right now. It's the 'House of Larfs'. Where's the canned laughter?

News That's Fit To Punt - 29/Jan/2015

Everybody Has Advice For The PM

If you screw things up as knottily as Tony Abbott has done in his short tenure as Prime Minister, it becomes something of a sport to offer up advice. The best one for laughs I have seen to date is from Rupert Murdoch tweeting that Abbott should sacrificially sack Peta Credlin as his chief of staff. In other words, in a partnership of a brain and the mouthpiece, the mouthpiece should sack the brain. I guess if Abbott just took calls directly from Rupert all the time, it would save having to talk through Credlin, presumably.

Oddly enough Bill Shorten defended Peta Credlin. Then again, I would too if the opponent is about to sack its worst tactical liability.

Andrew Bolt thought the 'Knightmare' was so bad, it was possibly fatal for Abbott's prime ministership. Of course, on a long enough timeline, all prime Minsters fail and leave office in one way or another, so something will remove Tony Abbott eventually. Perhaps ridicule is more powerful than the sycophantic support of rightwing nut job radio broadcasters. If so, hooray for ridicule!

Tony Abbott's standing is so low, he's been asked not to go up to Queensland for the state election,  by the incumbent LNP Premier himself; I might add it is a premier who is in danger of losing his own seat, and he still doesn't want any 'help' from the Federal branch of his own party. It's so bad NSW ALP strategists think Tony Abbott alone is worth 3-4 seats coming off Mike Baird's Liberal Party majority. The Liberal Party strategists think it's more like 6 seats.

And so, the latest scuttlebutt is that yes-maybe-probably the Liberals are considering alternatives and this is rounding on the usual suspects of Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull. It's so transparent that bookies are taking bets. The problem with all this is of course the Right wing (of a largely right wing party, which is like saying the "glans of the dickhead") won't tolerate Malcolm Turnbull and well, Julie Bishop is - Margaret Thatcher's fine fascist career notwithstanding - a woman, and such a stunt as to installing a woman as a Liberal Party Prime Minister and one not by election at that, is just too Gillard-ian for their own tastes. Let's face it, Malcolm Turnbull probably still hasn't developed any judgment and is liable to run the party into the ground in his own way, the way he did with Ute-gate; and Julie Bishop's best attributes are still the death-stare-denial-of-reality and the moral nihilism that allowed her to defend James Hardie and Big Tobacco together with the strategically acquired Claire Underwood hairdo.

Be that as it may, the cat is surely out of the bag and working the phones, canvasing for votes. Do I bet on equities, bonds, derivatives, horses or do I bet on who will replace Tony Abbott? It's a tough choice. Here's my advice to the PM: If I were Tony Abbott, I would march in to the party room before any spill and announce a Double Dissolution and go to the polls.

Quick Shots - 30/Nov/2014

What's The Mood Like In Victoria?

I was down in Melbourne for a day and it so happened that it was the State election. The funny thing about Melbourne is that customer service people really want to talk to you and find out what you think (This is unheard of in Sydney). This resulted in repeated conversations where I was asked whether I had voted already ("No, I'm from Sydney. I'm just here for the day") and their volunteering the information that they had voted already, and had enthusiastically voted for the ALP because they hated Tony Abbott so much.

"You know you're voting in the State election and not Federal right?" I pointed out, possibly in a cynical Sydney sort of way. In each instance I was told they didn't care, they had to send a message.

So, just in case Tony Abbott hasn't got the message, here it is loud and clear: the shop assistants of Melbourne loathe you and are willing to vote against the Coalition especially because it would be against your interests to do so. The ALP could have run Daffy Duck - Dr. Napthine wasn't going to win thanks to his Federal colleagues and the Prime Minister.

I bet that looks mighty fine in the Liberal Party room tomorrow.

The Claire Underwood 'Do' Is Like Aspiring To Charles Manson

Julie Bishop is aspiring to all kinds of crazy lately. Just how psycho is Julie Bishop? She just reopened the nuclear debate in Australia. This is rather ironic given that the world is browning off the notion of nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. Angela Merkel no less declared if the Japanese can't make this work, nobody can make it work, and started decommissioning Germany's own nuclear reactors.

Uranium spot prices are collapsing, making some of our oldest uranium mines face closure. This naturally leads one to suspect that perhaps Julie Bishop is the uranium mine lobby's poster girl. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the lawyer who defended James Hardie in the asbestos case was in the pockets of such an unpopular lobby.

The weirdest thing about Ms. Bishop's reopening of the nuclear debate is that she wants us to consider having nuclear power stations because of the need to combat emissions with this marvellous zero-emissions technology. How could we have been so amiss in not considering nukes! Silly us! So maybe the foreign minster at least is not a climate change denialista. Otherwise the premise to her argument would make no bloody sense. One wonders if this is part of Tony Abbott's change of stance in the wake of the Brisbane G-20 ambush where just about everybody except Vladimir Putin shirtfronted Tony Abbott to face up to the reality of climate change.

It's a funny world, really. Until we build a nuclear power station and it melts down.

View From The Couch - 02/Sep/2014

The Rot Sets In

This really is a crappy government, and nothing can cover it up. Amazingly they don't even try to cover it up, which is even more astounding - and by astounding I mean in the negative direction, like one might describe an abcessed tooth.  A better word might be excruciating, for that is the word Evelyn Waugh gave to Sebastian Flyte in 'Brideshead Revisited' to describe his toothache. We have a federal government that is a deep, throbbing, incapacitating pain that simply will not go away. In a sign that time really does fly, it is nearing one year since last year's terrible Federal election that installed this government of entitled intellectual runts (and other things that rhyme with runts), and in that time they have managed to kick a good half-dozen own-goals.

The biggest of these own goals might be the budget, which was announced at the beginning of May as all budgets are, but has since failed to pass the senate. In the four months since the budget was unveiled, it has demolished the credbility of Joe Hockey as Treasurer as well as eaten into the meagre genuine support the Coalition had at the Federal election. The truth is nobody outside of the regular conservative set wanted an Abbot Government; they just wanted the naked-ego freakshow that was the Rudd/Gillard ALP Government to end. Not even the properly educated ranks of the conservatives liked Tony Abbott. Let us remind ourselves that Malcolm Fraser quit the Liberal Party because he just couldn't take the Abbott leadership. Let's be clear, it wasn't that he couldn't take it seriously, but that having been forced to take it seriously, he refused to comply and support it.

Not even his own side think Tony Abbott as Prime Minister is a serious proposition. And so we have conservative commentators in recent weeks pimping for the next leader. Peter Reith picked Julie Bishop. There is momentum building. Peter Hartcher wrote a favorable article praising her efforts in the Ukraine MH17 incident. You would think the very fact that the weather balloons are going up is a bad sign, but nobody is seriously making supporting noises for Julie Bishop. Julie Bishop is an interesting politician in that she served Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott as deputy leader of the Liberal Party, so presumably the party think very highly of her ability. It's just that their stupid sexism has prevented them from installing her as the leader in the quick succession of changes. If the response to the weather balloon may well change things. I do wonder if this government could get better if it were run by Julie Bishop and not Tony Abbott. It's all a bit of a quandary wondering who you would hate less as Prime Minister.

Still, there is a possibility Tony Abbott's personal standing in the polls never rises above the levels plumbed by Julia Gillard before him, which would suggest the party room will get restless. It might not happen tomorrow or next month, but if Tony stays as bad for as long as Julia Gillard did, then it might be time for the Liberal Party faithful to do their own bait-and-switch months before the next election, and install Julie Bishop as Prime Minister. I'd imagine it's on the cards given how much smoke there is coming out of the media. Let's then say she gets installed and wins the next election. That would be roughly 4 prime ministers in 4 terms, 3 of whom did not finish their first full term. That's 12years of Australian Federal politics being booted around by people who are essentially playing musical chairs. The lousy thing is that it would represent 12years wasted experimenting with ever more extreme policies to not much good effect.

While it hasn't quite happened that way yet, all it would take might be a few more bad polls and the budget not getting through.

Climate Change Deniers In Power

It's also a truly awful thing when a government ignores the overwhelming science and installs a climate change denier on to a panel to shepherd a statement that says we should do less for the environment. The Appointment to Dick Warburton to review climate change was a bit like putting a sociopath with no empathy to review child abuse cases in the Church. Then again, that's exactly what the Catholic Church did by making Cardinal George Pell to that role, so maybe there's a certain kind of thinking that the worst possible person would bring in the most politically expedient result. Warburton's report says the government should just give up on saving the environment and instead just do as little as possible. That's not proper policy - that's just letting the vested interests have their way. It's a travesty, really.

View From The Couch - 29/Jul/2014

Who Asked You, Peter Reith?

It's interesting Peter Reith has taken this moment to tell us he thinks the future Liberal Party leader has to be Julie Bishop. Peter Reith, an awful character at the best of times, did have a big mouth so it's not surprising he's chosen to speak out of turn; and yet he's basically sending up a weather balloon to see what happens when he nominates Julie Bishop. It's weird because it's hard to think of an equivalent happening right now where maybe a retired former minster like say Lindsay Tanner randomly nominating Tanya Plibersek to be the next Labor leader. Its hard to get my head around. basically, he's answering a question that hasn't been asked with an answer that probably isn't wanted by anybody. It might be true that Joe Hockey isn't the next best candidate after Tony Abbott - but why are we even talking about this now, when Tony is making his best impression as an international statesman?

I am not saying there is likely to be any leadership change in Tony Abbott's first term or even his second term. Gillard's knifing of Rudd with the support of Bill Shorten and others is not about to be replicated by the Coalition. However, of Australia's 28 prime ministers, only seven have been in office for more than four years so it's not unreasonable to suggest that after Abbott has had the job for at least four years or more, anything could happen.

Really now, Mr. Reith? Do tell!

We're Not Talking About The Band Severed Heads Here

The headline reads: Sydney man pictured with severed heads. It sounds like the guy is having a whale of a time.

However, a friend of the pair told Fairfax Media they have no intention of ever returning.
"They say they've never lived a better life than what they’re living now and 'you don't know what youse are missing out on, especially with the turn of events happening now [with the establishment of a caliphate in Iraq]," said the friend, who didn't want to be identified.

"People say they're worried these guys will come back but they understand that if they leave the country to go to Syria or Iraq they're not coming back. They're after two things - victory for Islam or martyrdom."

But the Attorney-General emphasised that home-grown terrorism remains a significant domestic threat.

He will seek to introduce legislation to parliament to make it an offence to encourage terrorism.

"One thing no one should think is that this is a problem on the other side of the world," said Brandis. "This is a problem that exists and germinates within our suburbs."

Argh. It's hard to tell who has the lower IQ - the guy who uses the plural of you as 'youse', or the Attorney General of this land - "Champion of Bigots" George Brandis - who thinks he can write a law to prohibit encouraging terrorism; especially when you consider the reason he wants to champion bigots is in the name of free speech and freedom of expression. The contradiction of his position had me in stitches of laughter until I realised he's going to try it anyway and waste everybody's time and money.

It's not good that there's some angry Arab-Australian running around chopping heads in Syria, but it seems the horse has bolted. The guy doesn't want to come back anyway. Meanwhile the rest of ISIS/ISIL is busy getting medieval on people's asses. They're placing decapitated heads on spikes. I mean, that's Vlad-Tepes-Krazy.

Work For The Dole Is A Kind Of Employment, No?

I don't get the conservative mental fixation about the imagined dole-bludgers. It's like they don't understand that at a certain point some people are not employable. That could be a point in time, or a point in the person's life, but being employable in the broadest sense, narrows so much that people cannot make the grade. They might be too old to do what is necessary; they might just be too inexperienced; or dare I say too stupid to do anything of value; and then there are some who are a combination of all sort of elements that make a person unemployable.

And at a certain point, society is better off just paying these people off in some way so they don't turn to a life of petty crime or become destitute and turn to a life of violent crime. It's not a difficult concept to understand but you keep meeting people who say, "but it's our tax money being wasted" as if how that money was spent was their decision to make (it's not, it's the government's) and ignores the fact that the money spent staves off enough desperation it probably is doing a lot of social good. This is why our society came up with a safety net in the first place. it really isn't a whole lot of money, and anybody living on it, isn't having a wonderful life unless of course they live at home with wealthy parents.  And yes, such people exist - I know a couple myself - but you still wouldn't want to be them. It seems stupidly ungenerous to want to begrudge them the pittance and punish the long-term unemployed or the young unemployed with "work for the dole schemes".

A burning question that ought to be raised is "do they work?" According to people who have made a study, they don't.

But Professor Jeff Borland from the University of Melbourne - who conducted the only empirical study of the Howard government's work for the dole scheme - says years of research show such schemes are unlikely to help people find jobs.

''The international evidence is overwhelming,'' he said. ''It's hard to believe that the government couldn't understand that this isn't the best way to improve people's employability.

''I guess you have to conclude that there are other reasons for wanting to expand the program, and the title of the scheme [work for the dole] suggests it's being done for political reasons.''

Labor has warned businesses will face a deluge of fake job applications under the government's measures.

Employment Minister Eric Abetz said that could be a fair criticism.

''We as a government do not want box-ticking to take place,'' he told ABC TV. ''We don't want red tape and inconvenience to employers, but what we do want is a genuine attempt by the job seeker to obtain employment."

No box ticking! It's going to be hell from next year when all these companies are going to get their inboxes of their emails stuffed with resumes from people who don't really want a job but are forced to put on a very good show of pretending to want a job. You wouldn't want to employ any of them, and they don't really want to be employed. The charade is going to be unbearable. And what good does the government think it's going to achieve? Especially when we know it doesn't do anything tangibly beneficial.

It's just bullying by the government. If this business of having to apply for 40jobs per month for 6 months before they get the dole comes into play, it's going to be unwanted-resume-hell for every company out there. It totally ignores the reality of the marketplace.

Double Standards

It's That Kind Of Day

The reports in the news sites say that Australia really swung behind getting a meaningful resolution out of the UN, in the aftermath of the MH17 event.  The SMH is really giving our diplomats a pat on the back - seems to me they're just finally earning their keep after years of cushy livin' in New York on the public purse! Besides, suddenly beset with Julie Bishop's death stare, how could the unsuspecting people of the world say no?

Of course jokes about Julie Bishop's death stare aside, the dynamic diplomatic deal-making does stand in stark contrast to the way this government minces words and tries to parse interpretations that do not exist (let alone be supported) from our commitment to the UN Charter on Human Rights and how we treat refugees. On that score, we're one of the worst violators but we keep on coming up with legal fictions as to why it's okay to run concentration camps on Manus Island and Nauru. Millions have been displaced by civil wars in places like Syria, and our government is buys telling them they can't come. 37 Australians die in a plane hit by a Russian missile an we're all over it at the UN. No mater how you look at it, it's a kind of double standard.

In the mean time, PUP senator Jacqui Lambie has made international press on the back of an interview where she claimed her ideal man would be rich and well hung.

Later, when a prospective suitor called up the show, Lambie enquired (sic) if 22 year-old Jamie was "well-hung".
This induced great mirth from Kim and Dave (ratings gold!), but just imagine if a male politician had offered a similar opinion, about say, a woman needing to be "really rich and have massive boobs".

It would be a career-ending, resigning offence. Facebook groups would spring up in protest. People would make t-shirts and take to the streets in outrage.

In recent months, Tony Abbott has weathered howling storms for suggesting a Liberal candidate had sex appeal. And for winking when a talk back caller revealed she worked on a sex line.
Clive Palmer has also raised the eyebrow of disapproval for calling female journalists "madam" and "my dear".
And yet, Lambie is sure to stroll away from her Heart appearance and into her next set of public comments with nary a scratch.
Yes, they are lighting up the internet - but only for their "omigawd" value. Not because they might be construed as demeaning and well, sexist.

The thing is, it probably is some kind of double standard that lets Lambie off the hook when if she were a member of another party and a male, she might not have gotten off so lightly. I'm not saying she should be condemned or that this bit of double standard is particularly noteworthy - merely that double standards seems to be the notion of the day.

Obviously there's a fine line between the double standard thing and the deliberate hypocrisy inherent in the double think we are asked to endure with all its cognitive dissonance, but this is a country made up of inherently contradictory ideals. It stands to reason that there's a different rule or standard applied to everything, based on the values of nothing-in-particular.

News That's Fit ToPunt - 06/Nov/2013

Laurie Oakes' Body Slam... Okay, Just Slam.

The doyen of Australian political journalism, Laurie Oakes thinks Tony Abbott's government sucks so far when it comes to transparency.

"They’re busily trying to avoid the media as much as possible and to control the media and so far they’re getting away with it but I don’t think they will get away with it for too long," he said ahead of the release of his new book Remarkable Times: Australian Politics 2010-13.

"You can see the way the story of the expenses rorts is gathering speed, and that horse bolted because Tony Abbott and his Special Minister of State Michael Ronaldson didn’t move to nip it in the bud."They could have killed it off but they’ve got this attitude of not feeding the news cycle so it got away from them."

Other journos have voiced their concerns on the same point.

Since winning office, Abbott has fronted the nation's media just eight times. Calls to his office, and to his ministers, frequently go unanswered or unreturned.

During the week, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop was a star speaker at the Australian Council for International Development conference in Canberra. The two-day event was open to the public, including the media - except for Bishop's speech. It's understood the media was barred at the request of the minister, who is tasked with enforcing the government's $4.5 billion cut to foreign aid over the next four years.

Announcing the government would respond to Australia's ballooning credit card bill by almost doubling the borrowing limit to half a trillion dollars, Treasurer Joe Hockey held a 10-minute press conference and took few questions.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has radically overhauled the approach of his department and others to information about asylum seekers. No longer does Customs issue advice about boats in distress en route to Australia. No longer is information on boats arriving in Australian territorial waters released to the public as soon as it comes to hand. Nor is the rebadged Department of Immigration and Border Protection authorised to provide previously innocuous information about asylum seekers.

So there's a pattern emerging already and it seems that not only are they not willing to defend their decisions or thinking, they'd rather not talk about it; which of course underlines the inherently undemocratic instincts shown by the Coalition in the years since they won in 1996. Thee simple fact is that they don't want to talk about the areas that made much noise about while in opposition because it would show that it was all rhetoric and the Coalition have no better solution for the said problems.  Nobody's really surprised by this any more than we are impressed - we're not!

It's just a little funny watching journalists of the various newspapers complaining about it having supported Tony Abbott's cause on election eve with their stupid editorials. Yes, I'm looking at you Sydney Morning Herald.

It's enough to make you cry if it weren't so ironic.

Whatever It Is He Is Doing, He's Making A Hash Of It!
Then there's this thing here.

The making of effective foreign policy always looks easier than it is. As a result, new governments tend to underestimate the task. The Howard and Rudd/Gillard governments each made tentative starts on the international stage. The current government's diplomatic initiation has been worse. Even allowing for inexperience, the Abbott government appears to be setting a new standard for diplomatic ineptitude. The Prime Minister in particular has lurched from one mistake to another, with each episode more ham-fisted than the last.

Indonesia's sure as heck not happy with the Coalition duo of Abbott and Bishop. Julie Bishop's been doing the denying which strongly suggests that she's been doing the supplying, so to speak. On some level, you expect all embassies to be a hotbed of spying activity. So this emerging all of a sudden as an issue between Australia and Indonesia seems a little contrived.

Bruce Haigh at Crikey recently observed thus:

According to sources close to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) is less than impressed with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. It is said this view was formed before the election, when Abbott, Bishop and now Immigration Minister Scott Morrison talked loud and long about turning around refugee boats and sending them back to Indonesia.
The rumour was confirmed when Abbott turned up late for two important gatherings at APEC where SBY was in the chair, and in case there are some who would to contest this, when the egos of heads of state are on the line the attendance at all meetings of conferences such as APEC are important.

Politicians and other public figures do not live in a vacuum; whatever is said domestically about another government will be reported, with comment, to that government by its embassy, and additionally its foreign ministry will pick up the remarks from wire service reports.

It is a measure of the lack of sophistication and parochial outlook of Abbott and the government he leads that there is an apparent failure to understand the way the world works. Infamously, South African minister of police Jimmy Kruger told a laughing crowd at a 1977 a ruling National Party conference that the death in detention of black activist Steve Biko “left him cold”. That remark haunted his government for years to come.
Some years ago Abbott told an ABC journalist that he sometimes said things he did not mean in order to meet the political imperatives of the moment. This was a rare confession from a politician. It is a pattern of behaviour by Abbott that has been confirmed over the past year, the most recent being the about-turn on his boats policy in Jakarta this month.

“A number of Indonesian specialists were adamant that Indonesia does not believe Abbott’s statements about respecting Indonesian sovereignty.”
According to a long-term Canberra insider, the Indonesians are well aware of Abbott’s propensity for saying whatever he thinks will solve an immediate political problem. They are aware of his bombast, his superficiality and his lack of understanding around the complexities of Indonesian culture and politics. A number of Indonesian specialists were adamant that Indonesia does not believe Abbott’s statements about respecting Indonesian sovereignty. They are also aware of his boasts, in the past, that it was the Howard government that liberated the people of East Timor. They remain concerned that an Abbott-led Coalition government would seek to do the same in West Papua.

The Indonesian elite are not blind to the policies employed in West Papua to keep the province within the republic. They may not like it, but as with Abbott’s approach to refugee policy they see it as necessary, with the use of force the only means to put down the separatist movement. DFAT sources say Abbott’s assertion to the Indonesian President that he admired and respected Indonesia’s policies in West Papua would have been received with scepticism and regarded as patronising.

In sending that stuff to me, Pleiades made the observation that this business of Indonesia could open the floodgates for stuff Indonesia's been holding on to for a rainy day; like say a paedophilia ring run out of DFAT personnel say. This might be just the beginning of where Indonesia unleashes the shit file on us just to humiliate the Abbott Government. I mean, at this point, why wouldn't you? It's not like there's any prospect for proper respect coming from Tony Abbott and his morally-flexible rhetoric.

Denial Is A River That Runs Through Conservativism

We haven't heard much from little Johnny lately, which has been great. when he pops up, he tends to make our days worse. Here, it seems he's been out spruiking the cause of climate change denialism.

London: Former prime minister John Howard has poured scorn on the "alarmist" scientific consensus on global warming in a speech to a gathering of British climate sceptics, comparing those calling for action on climate change to religious zealots.

Mr Howard said he was an "agnostic" on climate science and he preferred to rely on his instinct, which told him that predictions of doom were exaggerated.

He also relied on a book written by a prominent climate sceptic, which scientists have attacked as ignorant and misleading.

And he called on politicians not to be browbeaten into surrendering their role in determining economic policy.Nuclear power – a "very clean source of energy" - shale oil and fracking were solutions to the world's energy needs, Mr Howard said.

Mr Howard's speech in London on Tuesday night was to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank established by Nigel Lawson, one of Britain's most prominent climate change sceptics, former chancellor in the Thatcher government and father of TV chef Nigella.

Mr Howard revealed before the speech that the only book he had read on climate change was Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming, published in 2008.

Mr Howard said he read it twice, once when he was writing his autobiography, when he used it to counter advice for stronger action on climate change given to him by government departments when he had been prime minister.

But the book has been attacked by climate experts.

So, the former Prime Minster of Australia - in his time in office - decided to look into the topic of Global Warming and chose to read one book, and one book alone, written by a climate change denialist. He read it twice to crib notes and mount his own denialist rhetoric, probably because he saw the political problem of climate change as something that needed to be couched in the traditional Left-Right framework regardless of actual facts and figures and projected ramifications. It's a miracle his government got to the point of proposing an ETS! This would be the one Tony Abbott is trying to tear down in the name of repealing the Carbon Tax.

Today, we can understand that both John Howard and Tony Abbott are ferocious, committed climate change deniers with the latter set to wreak havoc on whatever paltry steps we've taken to control the problem. It's hard to fathom how deep this river runs between these two men, but it brims with anti-scientific bullshit. One of the worst things to have happened to the debate is that the deniers keep getting a more than generous equal airtime hearing of their stupid position.

At this moment in time, it is completely accurate to quote Tenacious D: "The Government Totally Sucks".

Oh great.