View From The Couch - 28/Feb/2017

Oscars Mix Up

I don't really have anything to add to the chaos that resulted from the wrong movie being announced as winner. I just want to say it's just a fuck up and nobody was killed or injured. It'll pass.
In the mean time, congrats to all the winners. It feels all so faraway, really.

I just noticed 'Piper' won Best Animated Short. I feel very happy for Adrian Belew who did the score for that short film. He's been posting updates on the progress of that project on Facebook and I know what it means to him, so congratulations are definitely in order there.

Clean Coal? The Banks Don't Think So

This is one of those funny things that happen because the politics is so retrograde and politicians so inept in this country - APRA is saying banks can't be allowing investment into 'clean coal' projects because they have every chance of being a stranded asset in the future. That's basically the banks telling the party of the banks to get their policy on renewable energies and emissions control sorted out properly.

What's amazed about the intransigence and the grandstanding about not doing anything to control emissions except Direct (in)Action by the Coalition Government is that given the vagaries of a two party system, if they don't control the policies to do with climate change, it's going to fall upon the ALP and the Greens to devise an ETS and renewable targets; and when that happens, it won't be as favourable to the business sector as the one they could devise on their own.

I can't believe I'm arguing for it, but essentially, the Liberals and Nationals need to get their shit together and sort out a proper set of policies if they don't want to be consigned to the waste basket of history. Which, is not a bad thing for me, but it boggles the mind that these politicians can't figure out the ramification of their own political snafu into which they've snookered themselves.

But Of Course Policy Isn't Their Strong Suite

Peter Hartcher thinks this lot are so inept, they're missing oral the sitters that could easily be dispatched and be good policy.

Australia's need for more power plants, roads, rail, bridges, ports and airports is dire. Ken Henry, former secretary of the Treasury and now chair of National Australia Bank, made the point about Australia's failure forcefully this week: 

"We do not have the infrastructure capacity to support today's population, far less the population of the future," he told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia on Thursday. 

"On the basis of official projections of Australia's population growth, our governments could be calling tenders for the design of a brand new city for two million people every five years; or a brand new city the size of Sydney or Melbourne every decade; or a brand new city the size of Newcastle or Canberra every year. Every year.
"But that's not what they are doing. Instead, they have decided that another

3 million people will be tacked onto Sydney and another 4 million onto Melbourne over the next 40 years ... 

"And even if we do manage to stuff an additional 7 million people into those cities what are we going to do with the other 9 million who will be added to the Australian population in that same period of time? Have you ever heard a political leader addressing that question? Do you think anybody has a clue? At the very least, we are going to have to find radical new approaches for infrastructure planning, funding and construction." 

Without sensible solutions to hand, politicians are turning to extreme ones. Tony Abbott's speech on Thursday night is an example. He proposed cutting the immigration intake to take pressure off housing prices: "Why not say to the people of Australia," posed Abbott, "we'll cut immigration to make housing more affordable?"

This is remarkable. This is a former prime minister who presided over Australia's normal, relatively large immigration intake who now calls for it to be cut.

Yeah sounds about right.

Coming To Think Of It, Neither Is Mathematics

Part of the problem is that Malcolm Turnbull is so hamstrung that he can't really make policies that could save his neck, get past his own party. This is compounded by the odd politicking of Tony Abbott to destroy polling figures for Turnbull but also offer idiotic advice for which nobody asked.

There's even rampant speculation that the Right wing of the Liberal Party might head for a spill and install Peter Dutton as Malcolm Turnbull's replacement. The joke is out of the bag and is getting ridiculed soundly.

Here's the thing. Let's say they do this and remove Malcolm Turnbull.
Will Malcolm Turnbull have any reason left to stay in politics? Likely not, seeing that it's unlikely he'll ever be PM again.
What happens if a pissed-off Malcolm Turnbull then resigns on the spot to spite the party and the government loses its 1 seat majority right there. The new PM - presuming it's Peter Dutton, but it doesn't really matter who - immediately has to go to the GG and say he doesn't have the numbers;  so it's election time all over again and the electorate will punish them for the shenanigans.

That the Coalition would have to be sub-75 IQ to attempt the switch was my first guess but... you never know your luck in the asylum called Parliament House. These people can't seem to count how many seats they have.

Back To The Moon

SpaceX have announced, some time next year they're going to send 2 people around the orbit of the Moon.

"This will be a private mission to a paying customer," said company Chief Executive Elon Musk. 

"This should be incredibly exciting."

He declined to identify the individuals, or say how much they would pay for the weeklong mission, except to say that it was "nobody from Hollywood".

Musk said the two prospective tourists knew each other.

The flight would last about a week, circle the moon and head out deeper into space before returning to Earth. 

"Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration," the company said in a statement.

"Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest, and we expect more to follow. Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results."

All I can say is that if I had the kind of success Elon Musk has had, he's doing exactly what I would want to do. Actually Ido have one more thing to say, and that is this: in his fiction, Robert Heinlein predicted that private enterprise would get us to the moon. Even though he lived to see NASA do it, his concept was always along the lines a maverick, enterprising business person putting together the project on his own and getting it done. Elon Musk is like a character straight out of 'The Moon Is A  Harsh Mistress'. That's somewhat exciting. Maybe there will be more things to grok in the near future.

Quick Shots - 07/Feb/2017

More On the Liberal Party Split Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grexit Again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He accused leading European negotiators of lying. 

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

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

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

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

News That's Fit To Punt - 24/Jan/2017

New Premier, Same Old Song

Gladys Berejiklian is our new Premier in NSW. The most interesting thing she said today might have been the fact that she considers housing affordability to be her top priority but she's not willing to consider replacing Stamp Duty with a Land Tax, and that her principle method of making housing  more affordable was to increase supply. It sounded like somebody insisting that flapping their arms harder will accomplish flight.

The best thing about Berejiklian becoming Premier might be that Alan Jones didn't want it "in a million light years". I guess that's already happened twelve parsecs ago.

More On (Moron?) Housing Affordability

SWTE Scott Morrison is off to London of all places to see what he can learn about making housing affordable. It's a bit like a heroin addict visiting a crack addict how to beat addiction.

Asking the Liberal Party to tackle this problem is a little like asking arsonists to join the fire department because they understand fires really well. The Liberal Party represents the investor class more than anybody else, and so they're hardly likely going to be able to bring themselves to do anything that would put the investors at a disadvantage. For the same reason Gladys Berejiklian won't look at replacing the Stamp Duty with a Land Tax, Scott Morrison isn't going to wind back Negative Gearing.

It's all very strange how this is likely to turn out because it's already slowing down comic growth because people can't spend money on anything other than their mortgages and rent. The rent-seeking in the real estate market has basically maxed out to capacity and nobody seems able to claw back down from the stand-off.

In the mean time, there is all this private sector debt that's waiting to go off like a time bomb and the Treasurer is more worried about finding bandaid solutions.

If The Russians Love Their Spanking Too

Here's a weird one. The Russians want to 'legalise domestic violence'.

Russia's parliament is this week expected to take a step closer toward decriminalising domestic violence that falls short of serious bodily harm or rape. 

Battery is a criminal offence in Russia, but nearly 20 per cent of Russians openly say they think it is sometimes OK to hit a spouse or a child. 

In a bid to accommodate conservative voters, deputies in the lower house of parliament have given initial approval to a bill eliminating criminal liability for such violence. 

If the measure passes its second reading in the Duma on Wednesday, when the draft can be changed, approval in the third and final reading would be a foregone conclusion.

It's hard to imagine it anywhere else but Russia.  I guess that partially answers Sting's rhetorical question in his lyric whether the Russians love their children too. It appears yes they do, but not quite as much as we do.  

"Alternative Facts"

Great scot, it's only been three days of Trump in da White House and it's been a non-stop parade ridiculous assertions and factually challenged statements. Kellyanne Conway has come forward with an eyebrow-raising explanation that the Trump Administration is in possession of "alternative facts". 

Still more chilling was when the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared on “Meet the Press” on Sunday to assert that Mr. Spicer’s falsehoods were simply “alternative facts.” 

Ms. Conway made no bones about what she thought of the news media’s ability to debunk those “alternative facts” in a way Americans — especially Trump-loving Americans — would believe. 

“You want to talk provable facts?” she said to the moderator, Chuck Todd. “Look — you’ve got a 14 percent approval rating in the media, that you’ve earned. You want to push back on us?” (She appeared to be referring to a Gallup poll figure related to Republicans’ views.) 

And really, there it was: an apparent animating principle of Mr. Trump’s news media strategy since he first began campaigning. That strategy has consistently presumed that low public opinion of mainstream journalism (which Mr. Trump has been only too happy to help stoke) creates an opening to sell the Trump version of reality, no matter its adherence to the facts. 

As Mr. Trump and his supporters regularly note, whatever he did during the campaign, it was successful: He won. His most ardent supporters loved the news media bashing. And the complaints and aggressive fact-checking by the news media played right into his hands. He portrayed it as just so much whining and opposition from yet another overprivileged constituency of the Washington establishment. 

But will tactics that worked in the campaign work in the White House? History is littered with examples of new administrations that quickly found that the techniques that served them well in campaigns did not work well in government. 

And if they do work, what are the long-term costs to government credibility from tactical “wins” that are achieved through the aggressive use of falsehoods? Whatever they are, Mr. Trump should realize that it could hurt his agenda more than anything else.

It's going to be a long 4 years. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 30/Nov/2016

Can't Do Anything Right

It's really strange that it took a Liberal Government to put a light rail link in from scratch. Unsurprisingly, they've done a pretty bad job of it.

The NSW government failed to "effectively plan and procure" Sydney's $2.1 billion inner-city light rail project, resulting in a blowout in costs and reduced benefits. 

In a scathing report released on Wednesday, NSW Auditor-General Margaret Crawford said the government's management of the light rail project "suffered many of the same problems" as found with the $16.8 billion WestConnex motorway and the Albert "Tibby" Cotter bridge at Moore Park."Common problems include tight timeframes without justification, project scope defined too narrowly, underestimated costs and overestimated benefits," her report found.

The 2013 business case for the light rail line from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kensington in the city's east budgeted on the project costing $1.6 billion, but a year later it had blown out to $2.1 billion.

They were in such a hurry to green light major infrastructure, they seem to have literally thrown money at it willy-nilly. As with WasteConnex, they've shot through the budget, but they don't really care. No, no, no. Because when you think about it, all the money wasted goes into the lobby that asked for these infrastructure projects and it's the tax payer who foots the bill. The excesses are simply gravy.

It's amazing how vested interests can control a political party so effectively and the only people complain are those directly impacted. The rest of the polity just lets it happen.

But Do They Have The Balls To Follow Through?

Yes, the Federal government in its time of budget shortfalls finally notices the billions going offshore from Australia in the guise of LNG.

The numbers begged not to be ignored by Canberra. 

LNG revenue was set to mushroom from $5 billion to $60 billion over a decade but PRRT returns would sink from a paltry $1.2 billion to a frankly embarrassing $800 million. 

Currently, the only PRRT payments are coming from mature oil rig operations in Bass Strait. 

Effectively, Australia is giving away 85.5 million tonnes of LNG a year for free. Well, to be sold by fossil fuel companies to Japan, Korea and China. 

It was a dogged group of Tax Justice Network advocates - the same people who launched the corporate tax avoidance research that eventually resulted in the Coalition's diverted profit tax - who saw the scandal in the PRRT. 

TJN spokesman Mark Zirnsak, strategist Anthony Reed and researcher Jason Ward drilled into frightening numbers that contributed to a series of stories acknowledged by shadow treasurer Chris Bowen on Wednesday as having precipitated political action this week. 

Morrison's announcement of a "comprehensive" inquiry led by respected bureaucrat Mike Callaghan was a moment where the fiscal wood has been separated from the trees by Morrison.

So Scott Morrison is going to have a comprehensive inquiry he says. This is the government that killed the Mining Rent Resources Tax, so you wonder how they are going to get their silly little heads around 180 degrees in the opposite direction and actually get revenue from what is rightfully for and of Australia. We'll see how that goes. Lord knows there's enough stupid in Canberra but money is money and this is money just slipping off shore without any discussion, let alone any argument.

Dolly Is Dead

No, not the cloned sheep. It's the printed version of that magazine for young girls that is coming to an end.

In a statement, Bauer said the magazine is "responding to the changing demands of how readers engage with the brand by switching it to an exclusively digital model". 

It said November was the biggest month for online traffic in Dolly's history. 

"It is estimated that Dolly will hit 1.2 million [online] sessions this month," Bauer said. "As a result, Dolly magazine will cease to be published bi-monthly. 

"Dolly.com.au will continue to cover breaking celebrity news, fashion, beauty and lifestyle content, with popular fixtures such as Dolly Doctor."

A number of staff are expected to be impacted.

It's interesting that Bauer are putting out the line that the magazine is going to continue as an on-line entity, but that's a bit like saying people live on after death as ghosts and this is a good thing for seances. The writing is on the wall. Nobody buys magazines any more least of all those born this side of the Sydney Olympics. You can't sell media to people who are used to getting it for free.

It's amazing because if they're ceasing to print, they're giving up the ad revenue as well. It has got to be a sure sign that the rest of the magazine businesses are on death row. If there is a demographic coming through that doesn't buy magazines, you can see that there are a whole bunch of magazines that cater to the older demographic that will succumb to this generation not buying media as they grow older. When you add that tot he people turning off free-to-air TV, the mainstream media as we knew it is in massive retreat. Dolly quitting is indeed the canary in the coal mine of mainstream media.

You wonder if anybody will be able to do media and make money in the next 20 years.
So, yes, I'm calling it as a very significant moment.

BTW people, click on some ads on this page for me will you? I need to make a living too. :)

Quick Shots - 04/Jul/2016

A Well-Hung Parliament - A Balls-Up By Any Other Name

Oh what strange joy it is to find out we've got a hung parliament again. And I'm not being sarcastic - I'm getting a kick out of it. It was on the cards, and in an interesting mirror image re-run of the 2010 election that took place after Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd, we now have the same outcome with Malcolm Turnbull after he replaced Tony Abbott. There are some - crazy some - who are screaming out in the far right yonder that the Coalition should have stuck with Tony Abbott because he wouldn't have done any worse. That's hard to imagine. By rights, Tony Abbott was looking more like he was going to surrender a landslide so those far-right people are frantically rewriting history right there.

It is being painted as a disastrous outcome for Malcolm Turnbull, but that overstates his impact on the campaign given what he inherited, as well as how much the party tied his hands. The Malcolm Turnbull people thought they were going to get, and the one the Liberal Party allowed him to be were two completely different people. The Coalition are blaming the ALP for the medicare scare campaign but here's the problem with that theory: 1) Who exactly created the social environment where a Medicare cut would be so devastating? the Coalition; 2) how puny were the Coalition's selling points if a mere scare campaign could defeat their proposition; and 3) blaming other for your own mistakes is unbecoming of the party that tells people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
Just sayin'.

We all know the sordid sorry truth: Had they let Malcolm Turnbull properly address the issues that mean so much to the political middle instead of holding him captive to the right wing of the Liberal Party, they would have had a positive proposition to sell to the electorate. What's amazing is that the Liberal Party can't see it at all. They had the biggest election-winning advantage in Malcolm Turnbull's personal popularity, and they managed to squander it by not letting him do the things people expected of Malcolm Turnbull. That the party strategists seemed to think his popularity was somehow separate to the policy positions he espoused in earlier incarnations is quite staggering in its wrong-headed-ness. It is what it is, and what it is, is the height of stupidity.

The ALP medicare scare campaign? I mean, put-lease!

I Thought More Old Codgers Would Have Died Since 2013

I recently attended a funeral of an elderly woman who passed away. The attendance was scant of the elderly. When I enquired I was told most of the deceased's friends had already died or were too senile and demented to attended. It made rethink the Howard-supporting geriatric generation were finally pushing off their mortal coil, moving on into the next world. I mean, let's face it, we've lost some pretty big Baby Boomer musicians this year alone - you'd think the even older were even more dying-er. So in the three years since the 2013 election, one could surmise the ranks of the Howard's grey-power demographic would have shrunk considerably. The hung Parliament sort of shows that maybe this wasn't as big a factor as other things after all.

Of course, I'm told the percentage of the young not enrolled to vote is as high as it's ever been, so perhaps that balanced itself out. Really, we live in difficult times when we need everybody's thinking caps on. It's amazing that this is the moment at which youth apathy has reached pinnacle.

In other sad news, we find Tony Abbott is still alive and well, elected and in office as member of Warringah. Who will ind us of of this meddlesome Abbott?

The Good News

Sophie Mirabella is gone. Miserabella is done as a lower house candidate having now lost twice. With a 3.1% swing against this time and 9.5% swing against last time, she managed to freshly alienate 1/8th of an entire electorate that was once a safe seat for the Coalition. She sure won't be running again - unless of course the Liberal Party is a lot more stupid than we're led to believe.

The Ungovernable Demographics Of Australia

It's no coincidence that the hung Parliament comes so close on the heels of the previous hung Parliament. When you think about how the seats are allocated and distributed, it is pretty clear that over time, seats are becoming more entrenched, not less. The entrenched Liberal seats of the Sydney North Shore, together with Wentworth represents a particular demographic that keeps getting more entrenched, not less. It's hard to imagine any of those seats going to the ALP in the next 10 elections, Maxine McKew's amazing effort in 2007 notwithstanding. The equivalent of those seats in other Australian cities represent the bastion of Liberal Party support. Around those suburbs are the suburbs that are the traditional ALP heartland - and these might get flipped to Liberal as they become wealthier and gentrified, but on the whole the parties are entrenched according to class and income.

If the seats divide up so easily and get entrenched as a result of increasing inequality and disparity, we're going to see a lot more of these hung Parliament scenarios. There's a lot of disillusion going on out there in the deep electorate. It's no coincidence that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation brand have made a comeback, exactly at the moment of maximum uncertainty. The Two Party system funnels everybody's votes into two parties, but people are squirming like mad for another option. Add this altogether and you get a picture of a deeply divided electorate that is suspicious of anything and everything it seems. The hung Parliament isn't a simple dis-endorsement of politics or politicians or the political elite; it's a deeply structural problem manifesting itself in votes.

If the major parties can't pull themselves together they can damn well expect this to keep on happening because the entrenched rigidity of class mobility is only going to increase and reinforce what is already there. People are actively looking for an alternative that is not the major parties. It's only going to get worse for the major parties from here on in, and they themselves are to blame.

The same voter rage that drives support for Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK has taken hold here. Some of it is a perfectly rational response to a political system that is not working for the people it is designed to serve. 

Australian politics broke in December 2009 when the major parties could not reach a consensus on Labor's climate change bills. 

Mr Abbott rose from the ashes of the Coalition leadership spill and so terrified Kevin Rudd that he cut and ran from "the greatest moral challenge of our time". 

That massive breach of trust with the Australian people was compounded by his midnight assassination. It, in turn, fatally wounded Julia Gillard.
The parallels between the two major parties are now eerie. 

Labor dispatches a first term prime minister in 2010 and emerges from an election into a hung parliament. The Coalition did it last year and now faces the same future.

Remember what happened next?

Yes, Tony Abbott ran at the ALP with maximum malice and no intention of governing properly. So the question is whether Bill Shorten is going to pull the same stunt. Arthur Sinodinos seems to think so.

Senator Sinodinos said Mr Shorten's election night speech was "very negative". 

"What comes out of that speech is he's saying the government has lost its mandate. [Mr Shorten] doesn't have a mandate for anything." 

When asked if he meant a re-run of the election, he said: "If Bill Shorten is saying... that he will be frustrating everything the government wants to do. He wants to cut the government down. 

"That is what he is saying. He's saying I've got them on the run, I'm going to cut them down. For what? Is he endorsed on a scare campaign. Is this what this great country has been reduced to?"

Good heavens. Really? Who did the reducing last time? 

Anyway, that's the picture we have of this increasingly unruly electorate. Yay for the unruly electorate, I say.

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.

News That's Fit To Punt - 21/Jan/2016

Dick Smith And Rail

Dick Smith is a character. He's saying he'll run against Bronwyn Bishop if the Liberals preselect her again for the seat of Mackellar. If the Libs pick somebody younger and more open-minded to issues to do with economic growth and controlling population growth.

Mr Smith, who was on a yacht in Bass Strait on Thursday, said there had been a huge response to the news he might run in Mackellar. 

He estimated eight out of 10 people in the northern beaches electorate - where he has lived for decades - are concerned by the prospect of Australia's population rising to 100 million and beyond in coming decades. 

"I live in Terrey Hills and it can take an hour-and-a-half to drive into the city now. People will have to give up driving but there is no plan for a rail line [to the northern beaches]," he said. 

"People want to have backyards and maintain their way of life."

So Dick Smith is -interestingly enough - a conservative who wants a rail service up to the Northern Beaches. The mind kind of boggles at the thought, not because it's impossible but because he's talking about the neck of the woods that would hate having a rail line running through it, even if it were convenient. It's a completely different part of Sydney out there. Even with my North Shore roots I find cultural attitudes up in the Northern Beaches quite strange. It's certainly not helped by the fact that they've kept voting in Bronwyn Bishop to represent them. If there is over 70% electoral support for Bronwyn Bishop in Mackellar as it is, it gives you a picture of just how ideologically whacko they are up there. 

Even if hypothetically Dick Smith runs and beats Bronwyn and goes to Canberra, running a train line out to the Northern Beaches is a state issue. He's going to the wrong place for that particular issue. Certainly if Dick Smith wants rail lines into his neck of the woods (presumably because rail services are convenient and good things), then he should be a lot more vocal and active in supporting rail lines in general, right across Sydney NSW and heck, Australia in general. There are people doing that, working very hard to get things like the Light Rail extension up and running. You don't hear Dick Smith supporting that issue all. 

Dick Smith usually puts his money where his mouth is, as he's done with his line of foods supporting Australian manufacturing, so it's not hard to imagine him actively supporting a good idea. It's just really strange to see him threatening to stand with one of his issues is wanting a rail line. In Mackellar of all places. 

Metaphorical Gun To The Head

The Liberal Party must hate this one. It might even be undemocratic on some level. The Liberal Party putting up Bronwyn Bishop as a candidate for Mackellar again is barely democratic. We all hate her; we think she's a rorter; she's insensitive to the wider electorates' discomfort with her continuing; but she has this crazy support in Mackellar. We don't know if this is because those people would vote for a wooden dummy if it were the Liberal Candidate for Mackellar, or it actually is her singular appeal, even in a blue ribbon seat (I doubt it, but it's possible). 

Nonetheless, the process by which Bronwyn Bishop is retained and preselected as the Liberal Candidate for Mackellar is not any more undemocratic (or, any less democratic in the conventional sense) than most other seats represented by the two major parties.  However if Dick Smith's threat derails Bishop's preselection, then Dick Smith has effectively exercised much great control over the electoral process than any mere single citizen can do. He's basically doing this on the back his wealth and fame, and to that point, he's not that different from Clive Palmer. The Liberal Party has got to hate that.  

Let's say for the moment the Liberal Party backs down and then Dick Smith backs down. That would be a good outcome, but it leaves major question marks about the decision itself being undemocratic. If the Liberal Party pushes ahead with Bronwyn Bishop, and forces Dick Smith to run, it might turn into a proper open race, thus depriving the Coalition of a safe seat. At least that would be more democratic in the proper sense, but the Liberal Party would hate that too. 

The Right Is Wedded To Bad Ideas

The one big thing to come out of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that the Left could no longer be wedded to Marxist economics. That was *it*. 1989 marked the year that the project of 1848 finally came to an end. After that point, you couldn't be a communist because you really only had China and Cuba to offer you intellectual proof of concept, and China was frantically opening itself up for the world to make money. 

One would kind of surmise that the GFC would have done something similar to the Right and disabused them of completely unregulated money markets. Judging from the articles over at Zero Hedge, it seems highly unlikely. That mob is still railing against the command and control model they perceive in the US Fed setting interest rates and carrying out QE exercises to get through the post-GFC era. 

It's this denial that there's a real world problem in not reassessing the framework that characterised Tony Abbott's opposition as well as government. That is to say, the GFC was probably the one time the government had to go in to debt to bail out banks and people's savings, and asset prices. That was the right call to make, if they didn't want the whole economy to spiral into a sequence of margin calls and debts being called in at once and massive liquidation of positions. So with that in some corner of the mind, the Coalition set about complaining about the government debt that essentially bailed them out personally as well as the entire asset-owning class of people in this country. 

With somebody like Bronwyn Bishop, you wonder if she actually understood the problem at all as it unfolded during te GFC, or if she was simply filling out more expense forms for more helicopter joyrides; but that is by the by. Amazingly, there are many people in the electorate who think the complaining-about-the-government-debt was somehow a legitimate intellectual position to hold, and voted for these knuckleheads. 

It is then perhaps a great irony to see China - yes, that still ostensibly communist nation - hit a big road bump in its economic development, and for Australian export revenues to collapse, leaving this Coalition government with ever-diminishing revenue. Even at this juncture, the treasurer Scott Morrison is insisting there won't be a hike on taxes, just more cuts. This low taxation mantra too is looking like one of those bad ideas. Misreading the world going towards renewable energies and insisting on making coal the future of Australia is another one. The climate change denial to stick to that already bad idea of selling coal, is another one of those bad ideas. Other nations have committed to reducing carbon emissions by creating market mechanisms for it. Our nation has decided to go with "direct action" while w try and sell as much coal; 'Direct Action' is costly, inefficient and quite probably ineffective and it's another bad idea they're wedded to, because they argued so vehemently against the market mechanism - the ETS - which of course was a mechanism they themselves proposed when they were in with the Howard Government, so they couldn't back away from it once they had to have some kind of policy.

These interlocking set of bad ideas the Right is wedded to, can only be described as a Clusterfuck. Yes, we're living in a nation of one big Clusterfuck. 

Why Do Climate Change Deniers Still Even Exist?

Because denying it's happening makes them feel more certain in an uncertain world. 

The Breaking Of The Middle

...And The Disintegrating Centre

I was at a party surrounded by many active thinkers and writers. You could say they were the best minds of this generation once upon time ago, who had gone on to do their respective important things in their lives. It's almost humiliating to be the guy who didn't do much except this blog here, but hey, that's life. Not everybody gets what they want in their life.

Most were academics and teachers, and those that weren't were owners of white-collar businesses and authors of note. What was interesting with this crowd is how they were once centre-left moderates on University of Sydney's campus a few decades ago, and until very recently had stayed moderate and centre-left, but had decidedly turned to the hard Left in the last 2 years. They're now telling me they were going to vote for the Greens at the next election. They're abandoning the ALP.

I listened to what they had to say and it boiled down to a no confidence motion towards the entire ALP as it stands today. Bill Shorten wasn't cutting it as their leader. It's not surprising given the brain power of the people at this party - Bill Shorten isn't impressing them any one bit. Shorten's mumbled position of small-target-until-election-time isn't going to strike a cord with these intellectuals. The Gillard government essentially burned through their patience with the ALP already, so Shorten was essentially getting no leash from these people. The vision they had was for the Greens under Dr. DiNatale to step forward as the senior partner of a Broad Left alliance with the ALP reduced to a junior role. They said they couldn't wait for the ALP to reform while there were pressing issues. They needed a Leftist party with which they could throw their lot in.

They're not growing conservative with old age, this lot. They were strengthening in their conviction, as they decided to move to the left, abandoning the ALP. And these were the people who grabbed me back in my youth and took me to the Centre-left in the first place. They've now vacated that spot and decamped further away leaving me sort of holding the ALP bag. Basically it looks like the ALP lost the campus and intellectuals to the Greens.

What this means is that the centre is being vacated by the left, while the ALP itself is left stranded without its traditional base. The ALP might end up fading and disappearing.

Bob Ellis Thinks The Liberals Will Disintegrate

Bob Ellis thinks there won't even be a Liberal Party by 2020. What's interesting about his post is that he seems to think the centre is crumbling for the Liberal Party as well, as they too shift, but further to the political right. As the great brains trust was explaining to me at the party, if Christopher Pyne and George Brandis represent the moderates in the Liberal Party, then the right end of the Liberal Party are nutjob rightwing fascists. The stupidity of the fascist position is being played out daily with the incessant appeals to fear through beating the drum of the security issues. Quite simply, the Liberal Party has long vacated the middle and gone to the right, and that should be leaving the middle the the ALP. Yet the ALP has been so inept it is losing its base as it occupies the middle.

Demographically speaking, the Pre-Boomers who support the conservatives are dying out. That vision of Australia is vanishing daily with the elderly checking out of Life Hotel. In its stead are the Baby Boomers heading into retirement, but they haven't changed their politics a great deal. There's a large chunk of them who are still on the political left, and so the demographic certainty that the Coalition had during the Howard years where they could rely on the passive grey vote, is not likely to hold in the near future. This leaves the decidedly ideologically right fascists - and this explains the scary three ring circus that is the Coalition government today, where the motivated members of the political machine on the right are not conservative in the older sense but ideological fascists.

Naturally one wonder just how much fascism can appeal to wider Australian electoral sentiments. One Nation with its clocked Bogan moron-o-cratic ideas indicates that it can be dressed up in jingoism and sold to a portion of the population. Yet One Nation never really made inroads into the middle enough to last. Independent senator David Leyonhjelm is a 'Liberal Democrat' in name but is essentially running a radical libertarian line - and I don't think he's having any more of an impact than Brain Harradine did in his day. This leads one to suspect that if the Liberal Party does fade or disintegrate due to demographics, then we will be seeing a particular vision of and for Australia, passing into history.

All Of This Is Very France In The 1930s

I like to remind people of Jean-Paul Sartre's book 'Age of Reason' in such instances. In the context where fascism was rising in Spain, the main character Mathieu is approached to joining the left in the Spanish Civil War. Mathieu turns them down because he judges it to be not yet his own war. And until the war come to his doorstep, it is not for him to take up arms.

The hardening of the fascist position in Australia is only in its second phase at this point in time. There arena weapons and signs of armed conflict. Yet if this is enough to provoke the Centre-Left moderates to move to the Greens, then we're seeing a replay of that dynamic. What concerns me the most is that all of these people moving to the left know how student politics played out in the late 1970s and they are totally cognisant of the players involved in that event, now being in Parliament. They are not taking chances. So while we may not descend into a civil war, we may descend into utter chaos when the middle ground totally dries up and there is only the hard right and hard left.
And frankly, this is now possibly on the cards for Australian politics.

NSW Goes To The Polls And The Incumbent Wins

Less Polemical, More Brouhaha

Oh well. You know how it goes, you get up early in the morning after a rough night and trudge down to the booth to cast your vote. The Lower House is a short ballot with like 6 names on it while the Upper House is like a beach towel. The good thing about the NSW electoral process is you just have to put in a 1 for  1 box forth your voting. Given that this is an era of micro-parties trading preferences, the Upper House places demands upon you to either go through the whole damn ballot or pick a rough guesstimate and just vote '1' there.

Anyway... this being NSW politics, nobody was sending Tony Abbott any messages that I could tell. Stark was the contrast where most people just didn't talk about policy - not even the privatisation infer - and simply obliged to their electoral duty of simply voting. No polemical voices, no argy-bargy in the waiting lines like the 2005 Federal election when Mark Latham was running with actual policies. No, this was a snoozer despite the dramatic termination of the one-term coalition governments in Victoria and Queensland.

The local booths at the infants school had 10 people handing out leaflets for our local incumbent MP John Sidoti, with just 1 ALP dude sheepishly handing out his how-to-vote leaflet. The Greens weren't even there. It's tough in NSW where we are still reeling from the days of Eddie's "Morbid Obeidity". It's hard to go back and vote for the ALP as you wonder, have they really reformed enough to not let that crap happen again? Well, the ballot was too awful contemplate reading so I simply put my number 1 on both ballots and shoved them in the boxes as quickly as I could.

Even though Mike Baird is as clean as cleanskins come, the Liberals are still this bunch of conservative prats. He's going to win and he will proceed with the electricity privatisation. Then he'll hand over the proceeds from the sale to a bunch of Nick Greiner cronies to build WasteCONnex.

In the absence of a fundamental difference in what they will do with the WasteCONnex proposal, you have to surmise that the ALP would be doing this by going into debt some more while WasteCONnex is the central reason for privatising electricity in NSW for the Coalition. You sort of wonder if you could have any hope with either major party of junking WasteCONnex and building a metro instead, but no. In this light, it seems incredibly futile to claim democracies solve anything. It's certainly screwing things up in NSW, and it's not even polarised like American politics.

The true shame of this election is that there is no real, pragmatic way to oppose the building of this monster tollway. Even the ALP says it will build the thing (to appease the construction workers and their union) but it won't put the interchange under St Peters - which is like saying he'll put a different shades lipstick on the same pig. But there's really no wiggle room for the ALP. I feel a little for Luke Foley who is now cleaning up the mess left behind John Robertson who mostly exacerbated the mess left behind Kristina Keneally. If you were in his shoes, getting out of the doghouse with the electorate is about as good as you can wing it.

The Passing Of Malcolm Fraser

The Missing Memory

I arrived back in Australia the month Azaria Chamberlain went missing. Previous to that, I was out of the country in the second half of the 70s, living in New York City. I was 14 and not terribly political. In short, I totally missed the high drama of 1975. The place where my family lived for short while was deepest darkest St. Ives; I went to St. Ives High School when the 1980 election took place, not long after. Malcolm Fraser's incumbent Coalition government defeated the ALP led by Bill Hayden.

The next day there was a schoolyard post-mortem of sorts and not knowing what was what, I was able to see most of the kids leaned towards the Liberals except one lanky thin kid with Buddy Holly glasses whose parents voted Labor, who was hounded across the schoolyard by muscular bullies. It was memorable; and when I think of why I dislike Tories in this country, I think of those bullying kids. But St. Ives High School was simply like that: Conservative politics, racism and bullying were just ingrained social graces where for all I knew there was widespread domestic violence, prescription drug abuse and alcoholism.

To a kid who grew up in New York City, the deep Sydney Northshore looked like a cultural wasteland. It was a beautiful tree-lined place with the ugliest of attitudes. And Malcolm Fraser was their man. That left an impression.

All of this is to say, I really didn't feel political until I was 14 and living in Sydney, and I totally missed out on the Dismissal thing so I'm effectively with the people who were too young to remember the Dismissal. So my dislike of Malcolm Fraser was more of a general rejection of the kind of backward - more like redneck - St. Ives self-image of Australia. If they liked it up in St. Ives, surely it was deeply thoroughly flawed, vulgar and detestable. In some ways, this still holds true.

St. Ives was a place where meanness was a virtue in the way that a Jeff Thompson bouncer was mean, but good. Giggles and beer. If the bouncer hit Gordon Greenidge in the head, it was cool because well, that's how you played hard and doubly pleasurable because Greenidge was a black man. More giggles and beer.  Their kids thought this was normal.

There was a graffiti on railway bridge on the lower Northshore, where it read 'Fraser', with the 's' substituted with a swastika. It was already there in 1981 when our family move down to Chatswood - an altogether more progressive area with a rather cosmopolitan school - and I recall the graffiti still being there when I was a operation personnel at the ABC in 1989. By then it was utterly anachronistic, and it wasn't long before we would see Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser make peace.

In between, Fraser lost to Hawke in '83 and shed a tear on the way out. Australia grew up a little bit out of being a parochial post-colonial backwater, although that might have felt that way simply because I was in Chatswood and not St. Ives. I've been assured St. Ives most certainly didn't change.
And that was mostly it.

All of which is to say, for a person whose political consciousness leans to the progressive, I've never been all that angry at Malcolm Fraser the person. In his years after politics, he would often step up to say the decent thing. The Liberal Party on the other hand continued to drift to the right and mostly towards the unintelligent and unintelligible.

Alan Ramsay pretty much nails it.

Whatever you thought of his politics and his seminal role in the vice regal dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government almost 40 years ago, John Malcolm Fraser was, above all else, a genuine liberal in the best sense of the word. Thus he goes to his grave appalled, surely, by the oafs, boofheads and lesser ninnies that not only control the Liberal Party and conservative politics in this country these days, but take their disgrace to the summit of running Australia too. 

How could it have come to this, J.M. Fraser must have wondered, constantly, in more recent years, as political behaviour, state and federal, from top to bottom, in our parliaments and out, and right across the three major parties in our democracy, became uglier, greedier, less inclusive, less civil, less caring, more irresponsible, more ill-mannered, more shrill, more ratbag, and wholly more venal, indeed blighted in any and every way you care to look at what is happening to national political life in this country?

Malcolm Fraser might have well wondered why and how his party became the party of illiberal, intolerant, racist, cultural imbeciles who deny scientific facts and have no eye for the future or the environment. He would have been correct to do so. If I had the opportunity to meet the man and a time machine to do some time travel, I would have shown him the schoolyard of St. Ives 1980 - the Australia in which presided over where the dastardly future was being incubated. The seeds of the eldritch horrors of an Abbott-Government Australia were all there to be seen.

The man, after leaving office was much more influential as an opinion leader. The multi-cultural Australia he espoused and gave life to with the inception of SBS stood in stark contrast to the racially tinged, accented-with-xenophobia, bigot-friendly drift to the right that the Liberal Party executed under John Howard. After the 1993 election loss the Liberal Party embarked on a lot of soul-searching and decided upon a course of lurching to the right, most precipitously.  If Fraser had been damned in 1975 of the potential for Australia to turn into some kind of Latin American military junta, then Howard tacitly pushed Australia towards the lukewarm 1984-parody in which we now reside with much praise from the big end of town. After all, there's nothing like a party you pay for, doing your bidding. All kinds of prejudices found a legitimising home in the Liberal Party of the late 90s and early 2000s. Bullies, conks, monarchists, climate change denialists, male chauvinists, xenophobes, homophobes, and the plain old rude congregated under the big tent of stupidity erected by John Howard.

For, it has to be said, those bullying xenophobic, homophobic, sexist, anti-intellectual, culturally backward bullying kids amassed on that St. Ives schoolyard are now the paid up members of the Liberal Party of Australia. Racist and proud of it, mean and proud of it, clinging to the glories of a White Australia. Stop the boats. Stop the witch. Stop the mining tax. Repeal the Carbon Tax! Stop the science funding, stop the education, stop making sense. They never grew up they just confirmed and hardened in their entirely idiotic world view. Malcolm Fraser might not have understood it, but I would have been able to show him from whence came all that crassness, avarice, and intolerance.

And so with his sad passing, well may we say God Save Malcolm Fraser for nothing will ... oh, no, let's not; let's just forget about the punchline for once.
Instead we say, vale Malcolm Fraser.

Hostages To Their Own Bullshit

Chasing Unicorns

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

A very simple explanation can be found here.

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

-------- 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abbott's Stay Of Execution

How Crap Was That?

Pretty crap. Although it seems I was right on some level that the Libs don't have it in themselves to swap out a PM. Like all things this is both good and bad. The good thing is that Tony Abbott is still  an electoral liability even if his own party show support for him. The bad news is that the same engine driver who ran Australia off the rails is going to continue driving the train. As Paul Keating opined long ago, "God help us all, God help us all".

Indeed. The fact that things didn't change means Australia will remain, in Tony Abbott's vernacular, complete crap. Oh the huge manatee. "Will nobody think of the children?" and all that mess.

Anyway, the score line was 61-39 with one abstention. It's amazing how that looks like a good win-loss record of a team, yet straight up, that win percentage looks better than the way things really stands. Especially when you consider his front bench had to vote against the spill which means the back bench count was 20-39. From this we can tell we're talking about a potential loss of those 39 seats to the ALP. Those 39 MPs are feeling the heat from their electorate or are reading the numbers to see if their Senate seat will still be there after an election, and thinking that it likely won't.

Which sounds about right because if the ALP keeps its poll advantage at 54-46 after preferences across the board, it would b a landslide. The SMH was reporting today that this is exactly the result Bill Shorten wanted. A flip back to Turnbull would - allegedly - have been hell for the ALP. It's interesting they say this now because not long ago, the commentators were saying the same thing about the possible Rudd return during the Gillard years, and that didn't exactly shake out that well for the ALP. There's no guarantee that a flip to Malcolm Turnbull today would have changed fortunes enough for the Coalition.

The amusing bit was how Senator Cory Bernardi got up and said Malcolm Turnbull now had to be sacked. The man is a gift to comedy. The spill was defeated, and that should have been the end of story, at least for today. Why make things worse for your party? Why would you rob yourself of the credibility of having Malcolm Turnbull when your own government is sorely lacking in said credibility? Laughable as ever, always on cue with the stupid remark. That's our Cory.

And so Tony Abbott remains our PM, a kind of 19 month lame duck PM.
God help us all, God help us all, amen.

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?

Are We Done Yet?

The Politics of I-Don't-Even-Know-What-Any-More

At the turn of this decade, politics in this country hit a kind of low note. It was deceptive because we simply thought that the low was about as low things would go. That is to say, at the first sign of waning polls, Julia Gillard marched in and removed Kevin Rudd from the office of Prime Minister. Which of course unleashed so much ill will in the electorate that it resulted in a hung Parliament for Julia Gillard who subsequently rushed to the polls. The rest of it is in the history books, but it bears repeating because for some reason we seem to be at a similar impasse.

The only exception I would make is that Tony Abbott has never so much been popular as grudgingly accepted by even those in the Liberal Party, and in a quick 16 months or so has exhausted the support of even his own party through his inability to govern. Predictably - and it was no great shakes predicting this - he has been an awful Prime Minister who has essentially mistaken his winning the election as a big mandate for him to do things that were not asked of the Coalition in government.

We won't go over the tragic decision of repealing the Carbon Pricing or the Mining Tax. but it is also their budget that has been nothing short of a disaster and 9months later is yet to be passed, by a decidedly hostile senate. Everything they've done has either been shit or a mess indiscernible from shit.  It has in most part, been a government of idiots, flailing like an angry mongoloid child having a tantrum in a supermarket aisle. The evident lack of self-knowledge amplified into a rejection of the world as it truly is, but the main protagonist incapable of understanding the intellect-gap and how short they fall.

But weeks after my last denunciation there are now serious murmurs amongst the Coalition ranks that Tony Abbott might have to go, or that Peta Credlin at least must go. Just as it came about with the ALP in 2013, the self-preservation instincts of backbenchers has kicked in. Yes, they really are muttering about who might replace Tony Abbott (who like Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard before him when deposed, is still in his first term). This time the conservative base is very upset with their own man because he flip-flops, and can't sell the message to the electorate.

This is quite noteworthy because it suggests the Coalition's conservative base actually thinks what Tony Abbott tried to push through in the budget and the negotiations since are good ideas worth pursuing. A rather frightening thought. There's basically a goodly portion of the Australian electorate that can't resist its inner fascist and freely let's reign their fear and loathing. There are a lot of delusional nutbars out there voting for the Coalition. That being the case, we have to surmise that Australia is a lot more fractured and diverse than ever before. The diversity includes many hues of righting nut-jobbery. Is it any surprise this 'diversity' gets reflected in the necessarily fractious and disagreeable Senate?

You have to feel a little bit for the social conservatives of this country because they're on the wrong side of history, but they have to be wedded to the economic hardline ideologues who are also changing this country in a such a way as to disadvantage them. They probably just want change to slow down and for things they took for granted - like being able to be homophobic, racist, class-prejudiced and xenophobic - to not disappear. It's a crappy position to take or be in, but they just want to keep the things that give them a sense of identity - like being able to be homophobic, racist, class-prejudiced and xenophobic - and keep being that way without being ridiculed; but alas history is moving away from that sort of thing. And so they rail against the "politically correct" 'elites' who live in urban centres, but their very own political partners are psychopaths who want to tear down most social institutions so that economically it resembles a game of Monopoly where each man/woman is on their own and winner takes all.

The changes being pushed by the Liberals are going to hurt the bush. It's no wonder Clive Palmer and Bob Katter can see an angle that slants differently to the National Party, and run with it to the extent that they have.

All the same, it's impossible to feel sorry for the Liberals who find themselves in the pickle of having believed their own bullshit (and not, say, climate science); they've now led themselves into a political cul de sac with a monarchist nut job ex-trainee-priest ideologue. That one, is all on them. This current phase in the electoral cycle where they have discovered that none of their ideas are any good and their leader is despised by the majority of Australians, is all of their own making. It makes for much Schadenfreude joy. The shoe really is firmly shoved on to the other foot now. If the defeat of Kevin Rudd in 2013 was inevitable, then so was this descent into the abyss of hostile public opinion. They got there through pursuing a single-minded political unreasonableness and denying basic reality as presented by science and economics. I wouldn't mind seeing them twist in the wind for a while longer for comedy value. They are such idiots.

Some  may say this is no laughing matter; I would contend the LNP Coalition Government is Laughing Matter itself. A pure, distilled essence of Stupid.

It would be curious to see if the Liberals replace Tony Abbott with anybody. I feel they likely won't do any such thing. This is because the Liberals tend not to swap leaders in Government; they tend to swap their leaders more often in Opposition. They didn't try to change mid-stream in the last year of the Howard government to Peter Costello, and they sure didn't change horses at the end of the Fraser government. You have to go all the way back to the post-Menzies era to see the Liberals swapping Prime Ministers and that sort of led to the rise of Gough Whitlam. I'm sure just the thought of that makes them leery.

If they don't replace Tony Abbott, they are likely looking at a one term government. If they do replace Tony Abbott with anybody (Bishop, Turnbull, a sack of catfood, it doesn't matter), they'll be reliving the ALP script. Whilst they are the best friends of the boardroom psychopaths, I do wonder whether they have the sort of gumption to be psychopaths themselves and replace Tony Abbott with a straight face. You know, channel the inner Mark Arbib, or for that matter their inner Bill Shorten.
Somehow I think that is not on the cards. We're going to be in for 18 more months of Tony Abbott as PM. So no, we're far from done yet.

Flip-Flop Tony

Making Sense Of Tony Abbott

One of the things that makes Tony Abbott's government seem terrible in one way (there are many) is the ideological baggage he has carried with him from Opposition into office. In particular has been this histrionic insistence that the Carbon 'Tax' was a terrible burden on the economy and how he has characterised its repeal as a great political victory - which dove tails with his statement that "Climate Change is Complete Crap". The Mining Tax gets a similar sort of, almost idiotic reduction of notions, right across the board where surpluses are categorically good and deficits are categorically bad, and coal is good and industries protected by tariffs are bad and so on. That there isn't a nuanced policy decision that can't be bludgeoned into stupidity with his ideological baggage.

However there is an entirely separate aspect to Tony Abbott's government and in particular Tony Abbott that gets missed is that he flip-flops pretty hard on all these ideologically charged policies. It is is as if he's dedicated to running these dreadful policies up the flagpole at least once, gauging how negatively the electorate responds, and if it's bad enough, he flip-flops away form the position. Case in point is the medicare co-payment that was one o the surprises in the May budget (which of course didn't pass), which he then backed down, only to spring on the $20 reduction for bulk billing, which he also then pulled when the furore reached a crescendo.

Abbott basically wants to hoe into Medicare and universal healthcare for largely ideological reasons - even though he tries to dress it up in fiscal terms - and he's made two runs at it; but in the face of electorate backlash, he's had to pull it both times. This is where we start to see a different kind of politician. Tony Abbott may indeed be a bigger opportunist with no particular beliefs than a committed ideologue. The record is in the public for us to see. Malcolm Turnbull has reported to us that Tony Abbott flip-flopped twice on climate change, going so far auto describe himself as a weathervane. Whatever the strengths of his political persona might be, contrary to the presentation, he's hardly the kind of politician you would call a man of conviction.

What is emerging instead is a man who is rather ad hoc about the issues as they come and how he deals with them; who is also a master at contorting himself into suiting the prevailing winds of public anger. Otherwise it is nigh impossible to make sense of politician who slammed the ALP government for 1 broken promise, but then proceeds to break a dozen of his own promises once in government, and further more flip-flops twice on a point of policy which wasn't even contested at the election only 16 months ago.

When you add it all up, you get the picture of a man who is so much more of an opportunist than any man of conviction. So much so that we might have to take his professed ideological hardline as something he adopted along the way to get ahead; and maybe he doesn't even have those as non-negotiable. He's just been bluffing us really hard into thinking they're non-negotiable.

Indeed, he might very well say anything at any given time on any given topic - and try to pass it off as policy. Which is exactly what he did when he was challenged about his accomplishment as the Minster for Women. It's pretty psychopathic - and perhaps unsurprising because it is more than likely our political process and system rewards a certain kind of - almost pathological - opportunism. In Tony Abbott's case, these traits are very pronounced, and it's getting harder by the day to push the thought out of one's head. More importantly, what we're seeing is a guy who is nowhere near as steadfast as he lets on.

The problem is, if there's one thing worse than a man of conviction with all the wrong convictions, it is a man who has no convictions but is willing to do and say anything to grasp for power and keep it. Australia is in deep trouble under this government which managed to deter investment in renewable energy so much so, there's been an 88% drop in investments into renewables in Australia. That minus 88% tells you this government is not only doing a crappy job of controlling emissions, it's deterring business. The play at ideological purity about not handing out welfare entitlements has amazingly resulted in car manufacturing retreating out of Australia. He's hurting his own constituency for what reason? We could put some positive light on such things if he was going somewhere with this, but all indications are that they are collateral damage in a massive game of bluff he's running on the populace. He's doing all this so we don't find out that the doesn't really believe any of it.

So, if you thought it was terrible living in an Australia run by a terrible conservative ideologue, think again. Because deep down, he seems to have no principles whatsoever.