News That's Fit To Punt - 07/Mar/2016

A Snapshot Of Sweden And Refugees

Here's a rather scary article about how Sweden is doing with its refugees. What's scary about it is that it flies in the face of the picture of tolerance and open-mindedness as being the absolute norm in Sweden. The demographic breakdown in the article goes into some depth, but I found this little bit of the interview a little startling:

ET: So why is all this happening? We have seen this dire situation unfold over many years, and yet the government seems intent in doubling down, bringing in even more immigration in recent years. The majority of the Swedish population even seems to be supportive of this policy.

TS: That’s actually not true. We have a biased media here that likes to portray the situation as you described, but we have serious scientific polls that clearly state that the majority or plurality of Swedes support reducing refugee immigration, even going back as far as the 1980s. There has always been more saying that Sweden should take in less refugees and this number has probably skyrocketed in recent months.
One recent poll I have seen, and it excludes the past months, shows very high opposition: only 8% said we are not taking enough immigrants, where 58% said we are taking too many. It’s the elite opinion that forms the consensus that Sweden should take many more immigrants – it’s almost like a religion, but it is not the popular view. 

ET: But that consensus correlates with election voting right? There is only one party that is openly against immigration and they scored very low in the last election. 

TS: Yes, it’s because that party has its roots in racism and it was taboo to vote for them. Despite that they went from 3% around ten years ago to perhaps 20% now. What’s also happening in the last few months is that the right wing moderate party, the Swedish “Tories” if you like, has shifted to the right on immigration very rapidly. You know in Sweden things shift very rapidly, it’s a consensus society. Now they are saying close the borders, deport a large number of migrants, very vociferously. The Liberals and the Christian Democrats are following suit. And even the Social Democrats, the ruling party, closed the borders in the end.

The picture we get from this interaction is that Swedish society reached some kind of saturation point whereby immigration policy overwhelmed the social capacity for Sweden to take in the refugees. Correspondingly, the vote for the far right leapt from 3% to 20% tells us that this issue is adding fuel to the rise of the far right. The tide the discourse has overwhelmed the polity to the point that Sweden has all but closed its borders to refugees. For the Swedes, as it is the case in Australia, the incredulity became, "what are they coming all the way to Sweden?"

ET: There is a huge number of male migrants that went to Sweden last year, vastly more than women. We read that the demographic imbalance in Sweden is now even worse than China. Is this correct? 

TS: Maybe in some age group, but not in overall terms of course. Some 92% of those unaccompanied migrants were male last year… 

ET: … Wait a minute, 92% of them are male? 

TS: Yes, there is definitely something strange going on. More than half of the world’s refugees are women. In World War II, when Sweden took refugees from Finland, they were children and 90% were below the age of 10. But now almost all of them are late teenagers – supposedly; we know many are older for a fact. When other countries age test it turns out that the majority are not children. And when there are crimes committed and the age is investigated, often we get these absurd reports where some of these guys are older than 30 and yet the government puts them with other real minors in schools or housing, and this is creating a lot of anger now. The media created this taboo where because they are officially supposed to be children we can’t question it, and you are fascist if you do. Yet most people can see that many are adults.
Now I’m not moralizing this. If you have an open door policy and you are incentivizing Afghans to take advantage of the system, can you really blame them? But it is an idiocy to equate anyone who questions the claim of being a minor with being a fascist.
You know, it’s really funny that the tale about the emperor having no clothes is a Scandinavian tale. Everybody can see many are not children, but then the political and media consensus will fire or at the very least censor the people who point out this plainly obvious fact. Because how can you question children running from war, using circular reasoning that anyone who claims to be a child escaping war is one and cannot be questioned. You know, a self-reported 70% are not even coming from Afghanistan but safer countries like Iran, seeking a better life.

And there you have it, the gnawing suspicion by Swedes that Sweden's good nature is being taken advantage thereof. I dare say these 92% male asylum seekers who are actually economic migrants are hoping to catch on with some nice Swedish blonde and live happily ever after on Swedish social security. I mean, heck, if I'd got thrown out of my country and had nowhere to go on the planet, I'd probably want to claim asylum in Scandinavia - it's not that hard to imagine why that number is skewed the way it is. 

In a way, it was easy for Sweden to be tolerant and preach tolerance because Sweden was - for quite some time - mostly homogenous in culture. The sorts of problems that arise from intolerance were geographically distant. It was easy for Swedish society to be progressive in the context of its own population being homogenous because it never had to be tested. The moment it became overwhelming, the society shut its doors. When confronted with the reality of what that tolerance actually meant in the wider world, the country had second thoughts. 

This is a scenario that will likely repeat itself in the rest of Scandinavia. it may well repeat itself in Germany as Merkel's policy of taking in 800,000 asylum seekers turns into a kind of social demographic bomb. The argument that the first world can afford to take on any number of refugees is never really put under the scrutiny. 

This is going to be rather unpopular to even question this but I've often wondered about the validity of somebody who makes their way to Scandinavia or Australia hoping for asylum when there actually are other safe countries along the way. If you ran from Syria to Turkey and Turkey gives you safe asylum, is it really valid to then travel to Scandinavia (or Australia) in hopes of a better deal? Understandably, everybody wants the better deal, but does that make it into a human right? 

Peter Costello - Tax And Spend Liberal

Here's something for you to ponder. Peter Costello thinks he should have taxed the internet. 

I'm not quite sure how he would have done it. 

Speaking to Fairfax Media in his new role as chairman of free-to-air broadcaster Nine Entertainment Co, Mr Costello recalled sitting in his Parliamentary office in the 1990s in the early days of the web, and pondering the vast future revenue such a levy could generate.

"I was Treasurer at the time. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, by the way, for governments around the world to have put a charge on the internet. It wouldn't have had to be very big but it would have raised a motza," said Mr Costello. 

"Governments would all have to agree together to do it, and the OECD was looking it at the time. It would have been hard to police but once (former US President) Bill Clinton came out and said the internet would be free that was it. Once the Americans said the internet was going to be free, the rest of the world was going to follow suit." 

Mr Costello, Australia's longest-serving treasurer, who went on to introduce the goods and services tax with then-prime minister John Howard, said an internet access tax "could have been a fraction of a cent a year and it would have raised governments' unbelievable amounts of money".

We've got to be happy that crappy plan never came to fruition.

When Even Peter Reith Calls You Out

Peter Reith was an awful minister in the Howard Government. He had the charm of a dyspeptic shark and the compassion of a broken bottle of single malt scotch. All teeth-gnashing and ideological gumboots and all. Since his retirement from Federal politics, he's turned into a sometime columnist for the SMH, and forms a rather unappealing Tory-Tag-Team duo with Amanda Vanstone. I've noted before Amanda Vanstone has written a piece telling Tony Abbott to go disappear into the night. Now Peter Reith has penned his own version.

The next election is just around the corner. Abbott is not about to win back the leadership. The only issue now is who wins the next election. And one big issue is whether the Coalition can erase Labor's claim that the Coalition lacks unity. 

The first thing Abbott has to do is to shut down his handful of supporters in the Parliament and the Turnbull haters in the media. And, by the way, it wouldn't do any harm for Turnbull to try talking to Hadley, Jones and Bolt, just to even up the conversation. 

If Abbott cannot or will not stop the destabilisation, it could be a bad result for the Coalition and more importantly very bad for Australia if Labor were able to return to the government benches.
The only other option is for Abbott to leave Parliament before the election, and to stay out of the campaign.

What I don't understand is why some people who were exasperated by Abbott's paid parental leave and its new tax, his support for changes to the Constitution, his captain's picks and many other shocking decisions now want him back, with Credlin and all.

It's because they're stupid, Peter, but then that would be a concept you would not countenance. Unfortunately for Peter Reith, this brand of stupid is particularly pervasive in the Coalition ranks. It's the special brand of stupid that forms from the fermentation of entitlement & smugness.

Quick Shots - 03/Feb/2016

If They Stop Talking About The GST

It doesn't look like this government has the balls to really try and raise the GST.
It would be good if this Federal Government stopped making noises about raising the GST.
Paul Keating for one thinks it is a crap idea. More importantly, there are better things to reform in the tax code than simply raising the GST.

The biggest economic boost would come not from a switch from income tax to GST but from a switch from stamp duty to land tax. To get it the Commonwealth would have to knock together the heads of a few state premiers, but according to the the discussion paper that kicked off the tax reform process, it's where the big gains lie. 

Capital gains are taxed at only half the rate of income earned from interest in bank accounts. The discussion paper asks whether that's appropriate and talks about taxing all income from saving at the same (discounted) rate. 

Fringe benefits tax, employee deductions, business deductions, dividend imputation and the role of the family home all come under the microscope in the discussion paper. Getting the GST off the table would allow the government to focus on fixing what's really broken.

That sounds about right. 

Asylum Seeker Politics Is Toxic?

Tanya Plibersek says that asylum seeker politics is toxic since 2011. You get the point that it is nothing but unrelenting ugliness when it comes to news about Nauru or Manus Island with their detention centres. We find - in subjective terms - what happens and is happening on those islands to be morally wanting, but the High Court has ruled that it is all legal. This is actually a lot more delicate than personal moral reasoning. The political class of this nation has taken a mostly bipartisan approach in saying that the people smuggling business is culpable for the boats, and the casualties that come with. As such, the current policy seeks to shutdown the product the people smugglers are peddling, which is arrival in Australia. 

That's the line the political classes holding to, because if they break there, the boat arrivals will be on for young and old. The boats are spectacular as an image - so much so the words 'refugee' and 'asylum seeker' have become largely interchangeable. The problem for both sides of politics is that the boat arrivals upend not one, but two parts of sovereign borders. First is the notion of immigration policy, and the other is actual physical transgression of our borders. There's a certain level of commitment to these things that if the government were to simply forego these things, they may as well pack up shop and go home. 

So the problem isn't that the politics is toxic; it is that all discussion of the policy is burdened with the raison d'être of the state itself. The reductio ad absurdum of this 'argument' expresses itself with the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. It's unpleasant, but business of the state is always tinged with this unpleasantness on one level or another. It's not surprising the High Court threw out the case it did. Inadvertently, our whole political system is hitched to the 'Stop The Boats' slogan. 

It's not like Tanya Plibersek has a workable alternative. 

Syria Is The Apocalypse

'Reductio Ad Absurdum' Of State Power

The modern state monopolises power, and with it the capacity for violence. Yes it's true that in the USA there is an ardent belief that their constitution allows citizens to bear arms in order to confront this monopoly of power and violence, but strangely enough the kinds of people who subscribe to this view are also the most likely to support the kind of state power being exercised against minorities. That is to say, we would believe the protestations of the NRA more about the Second Amendment, if they were jumping up and down in support of black people getting shot by the police, and not the police. Still, this entry is not about that topic.

The ultimate state control of monopolised power is the modern military junta. Military juntas exist as proof that a stable state is not necessarily democratic or pleasant. People go on about stability ("vote Tony Abbott for Stability," the SMH said! Ha!) Many military juntas come into being at the end of civil strife, and enforce the military power as policing in order to keep a lid on the civil strife. This is true of Franco as it was of Pinochet, Saddam Hussein's or Bashar Assad's regimes. We in the democratised 'developed' world view these political arrangements with a great deal of contempt, but as the experience of Iraq has demonstrated, there are far worse things than the stability assured by a military junta.

Similarly, Syria is turning out to be the second recent case whereby our own idealism for democracy has brought to an end a stable junta government. In writing that sentence, I am overcome with a cultural revulsion, for I - in no way in hell - support military juntas anywhere on this planet. It is hard for me to write a sentence that even vaguely validates their existence. Yet the historic evidence is pretty clear that some of these juntas are sitting on great fissure lines of civil conflict and once unleashed, the state cannot even survive. This is a terrible state of affairs, where on one extreme you have the Orwellian regime and Room 101 and the torture never stops; and when we remove this horrible state that keeps the populace in a social stasis of uncomfortable peace, we end up with Bosnia and Kosovo, the battle of Fallujah, or the Islamic State which is an attempt to reconstruct a state, but around religious laws instead of common laws.

All of which is to say, military juntas come into being to stave off a slide into complete chaos, but then overstay their welcome as it goes through its own paranoia phase, torturing and killing people to maintain this uncomfortable stability. Again, I'm not writing this in praise of these horrible arrangements; I'm simply pointing out that in the absence of strong democratic credentials and traditions, a military junta ends up being the compromise arrangement to keep civil peace. You have to think of Tito's Yugoslavia as the shining example - but all these nasty regimes exist because of necessity. Nobody likes this stuff. And when they fail, they tend to fail spectacularly as they descend into chaos.

The refugee exodus of Syria isn't just an issue of Assad and his brutal regime or the fact that Vladimir Putin will not give-up his ally facing the Mediterranean Sea. To that end, Putin has now stationed his own warplanes in Syria. In the mean time we have Tony Abbott trying to engineer a 'request' from the President of the USA to enter into bombing runs on ISIL-held positions in Syria. Not only is Tony Abbott exacerbating the problems inside Syria which is already a war-torn post-apocalyptic landscape, he is adding to the reasons for residents to flee as refugees, while risking coming to blows with Russian warplanes. The people are running because civilisation has collapsed around them. Their civilisation collapsed because it was held together by the military might of the state, and then the state wasn't there any more - just the violence. And we want to ad to the violence.

The Syrian Collapse

Syria came to this collapse because of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring of course was prompted by high commodity prices, which led to staple foods being too expensive to buy. Not even the long-standing regime of Muamar Gaddafi could hold on in the face of the high commodity prices. Similarly, in Egypt, the high commodity prices drove people into the streets to protest and that brought down Mubarak's regime which had stood solid since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The irony is that the commodity prices surged because oil prices surged, and the oil prices surged because these very same OPEC regimes opted to make a killing out of surging oil prices thereby creating the conditions for their own demise. Oh the irony!

All the same, what is not well known is that Syria underwent a crippling drought between 2006 and 2011. This was such an historic drought that it decimated longstanding farming operations and communities. The drought pushed whole populations into urban areas without any means of survival. And the military junta remained locked in its rigid "maintain-order-at-all-costs" sort of thinking, which made things worse. The historic drought was most likely (nobody ever gets to prove these things) due to Global Warming and Climate Change. Again, these countries that export oil for combustion created the conditions whereby they strangled themselves. Oh the double irony!!

Today, Bashar Assad is in charge of his military, but Syria itself has collapsed as a civilisation. It is every bit like a failed state - much like Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and on the same trajectory as Iraq and Afghanistan. As Global Warming and Climate Change continue, there will be more and more places that succumb to its effects. There will be more refugees from failed states. The wave of refugees coming from these places are people who want to remain civilised. It's time we accepted this simple fact. We could do much worse than to take in these people.

Syria today therefore offers us a glimpse into the post-apocalyptic future we ought to fear. The fragile, brittle state collapses as result of economic and environmental chaos, there's nowhere to run. We can't go around assuming this is stuff that only happens in far away lands.

How Many Refugees?

Before the recent surge of Syrian refugees, I did a quick search on Google and found that in 2015, the refugee count according to the UN was 60 million people. Out of the 195 or so UN member nations, let's hypothetically say 100 are up to receiving refugees. The other 95 are candidates to send out more, rather than receive, but we'll leave that issue for a moment. I know this is a gross oversimplification, but I want to lead you through this so you understand the scale of numbers. That would make it 600,000 per nation to take in from the refugees that exist right now. If we said the realistic number of nations that are able to take refugees was more like 50, we're talking about 1,200,000 per nation.

That's a big number, but it goes to show that Germany is doing pretty well when Angela Merkel says they will take 800,000 people. It's effectively saying they'll add 1% to their population with refugees. In any case, 800,000 is not entirely out of the order of magnitude that sits between 600,000 and 1,200,000 people.

Australia on the other hand, says it will take 20,000 this year. It's an amazingly paltry figure, really. It's a whole order of magnitude out from the problem as it exists. If it were left to Australia, it would take 60years' worth of refugee visas before it took in its share of 1,200,000. So one wonders just what on earth Peter Dutton is asking "what can Australia do to help?" when the mathematics are very simple - Australia needs to up its refugee intake to about 240,000 before it can claim it's punching its weight.

More to the point, that 1% rise in German population is probably going to add a whole bunch to GDP growth in the coming years. Think about all the new whitegoods and TVs and demand on real estate that will arise out of the arrival of these people. Its not a half-dumb move to be taking these people in. Australia's economy could do a lot worse than adding 240,000 people straight off the plane from Syria.

The Same Old Shi-ite

Gina, If You Don't Like The Business, Get Out

Gina Rinehart is complaining mining projects cost too much in Australia.

"You know if Australia doesn't export, someone else will," Mrs Rinehart told Fairfax Media on the sidelines of the Global Iron Ore & Steel Forecast conference, in Perth, on Wednesday. 

Mrs Rinehart, who is estimated by BRW to have a $20 billion fortune, said it was high costs, rather than low iron ore prices that affected her Roy Hill project. 

"What affects the project is high costs," Mrs Rinehart said. "As I have said so many times it is really important government cost burdens are lowered. We have regulations; be it approval processes, be it permits, be it licences, be it the checks that have to go on after those compliances." 

She said governments needed to take regulatory costs seriously.
"They have to cut these government cost burdens because our costs are incredible," Mrs Rinehart said.

And there you have it. It costs money to do business in Australia and the governments at both State and Federal level want a piece of the action. This, from the woman who famously complained that African workers are willing to work for $2 a day, why couldn't Australian workers do the same? It was a stupid rhetorical question that completely ignored the absence of choice involved in people getting exploited at $2 a day. 

But of course, Australian workers want a lifestyle and this is not acceptable to Gina who on the same occasion opined the average Australian was bone lazy and undeserving of the opportunities on offer - completely oblivious to the $2-a-day condition she wanted to have here.

It strikes me that if all these things really are such dreadful things, she should get out. God knows she has enough money, she doesn't need to do more. If it's not going to make money, fit's not going to break even, then stop doing it. It's not like we're putting a gun to her head to do this stuff. 

Because Bog-Off Really Means Bog-Off

Tony Abbott's really in some kind of warped zone where logic disappears and strange chains of thoughts manifest as utterances and complaints. He's certainly not about winning friends at the international level. 

In the correspondence, Australia told the UN it "sincerely regrets" missing by almost a year the 180-day deadline to respond to the committee's July 2013 ruling, which called for the refugees to be released and compensated. 

But the government's eventual response, made in December last year but not public before now, gives no ground to the UN committee finding that Australia was "inflicting serious psychological harm" on the refugees in indefinite detention.
The government said prompt medical treatment is provided and "Australia is committed to minimising the factors that contribute to mental health deteriorations of individuals in immigration detention". 

The majority of the refugees with negative assessments are detained at a Broadmeadows detention centre in Melbourne's north, where a spate of suicide and self-harm attempts have taken place. 

Police were called to the centre as recently as December and laid mattresses on the ground after a Burmese man spent a night on the roof threatening to jump.
The government also disagreed with the committee's interpretation of "arbitrary" detention and "arrest" that Australia has accepted under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 

Professor Saul said the UN committee – an expert panel elected for four-year terms to act as independent legal experts – is the closest the world has to a human rights court.
In a written submission to the committee he described the government's response as "wholly unacceptable". 

"The key legal point is the government is completely rejecting the committee's authority to interpret and apply human rights standards in the convention, which Australia has agreed they should do," Professor Saul said. 

"It is really giving the two-fingered salute to the world."

Well, no surprises anywhere there. It's like he's going for broke in the Pan-Galactic Interstellar Dickhead Stakes. In his case, it really is a lifestyle choice. 

Youthful Stupidities

White Jihadi From Oz

There's nothing more depressing than reading about somebody who is on the path to becoming the next Jihadi John or David Hicks. What kind of thing happens to youths who decide the causes are for them? There's something disturbed about people who would want to join a cause that espouses medievalist virtues and sensibilities. Most normal people would be browned off at the decapitations of prisoners or the mass rape or the slave trade in which ISIL is indulging; but those are apparently not negative-points enough for some.

It's hard to find much compassion in the misplaced enthusiasms of youth if upon deep research and thinking, your conclusions lead you to join ISIL. The day he is captured by the US Navy SEALS, he'll be off to G'itmo for torture as night follows day - and then we'll be in that stupid legal limbo again trying to get him back. And he'll probably want an apology out of the government like Hicks wants.

Speaking of which, I was offered an insight about David Hicks which was interesting. In his youth, Hicks must have seen 'Rambo 3' and was deeply moved to sympathise with the Mujihadeen. He probably aspired to being Rambo, a white man amongst the natives, fighting alongside them against a great state - and somehow this teenage fantasy congealed into the actions that led him to Afghanistan.  Hence that famous photo with the grenade launcher.

You look at it to this day and you still think, what a moron. You can add Jake Bilardi to that growing list of idiots, the league of morons.

Can People Really Change? And Does It Matter To Politicians? 

The pathetic legal soap opera that is the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Skukumaran continues.

Sukumaran told Schou in May last year he did not hate those that handed him the death penalty. 

"No. I accept what I did was wrong. I know that I should be punished for it, But I do think that the death penalty is too excessive and I should be given a chance ... 

"I think I can do a lot of good in the outside if I ever go free ... I would want to do stuff like work and make good stuff and help people. That's what I would be hoping to do."

It's pretty depressing just reading that. They were young dumb and full of stupid notions about the world and got themselves into this jam. Now that they've outgrown that youthful stupidity, they are about to pay the ultimate price for those very same stupidities. You really wouldn't wish this on your worst enemy.

I guess there is some irony in being executed at the order of a guy who's name is Joke-O. Sort of rhymes with Yoko. As in, Yoko Ono.

Meanwhile some people remain stupid, well into their old age.

The former Navy chief, who is a controversial political figure in Indonesia, said Australia was trying to pressure Indonesia into cancelling the executions by raising the issue of its $1 billion in Boxing Day tsunami aid and discouraging visitors to Bali.

He reminded Australia that Jakarta had been working hard to prevent asylum seekers attempting to travel to Australia in boats. 

"If Canberra keeps doing things that displease Indonesia, Jakarta will surely let the illegal immigrants go to Australia," Mr Tedjo said on Metro TV. "There are more than 10,000 [asylum seekers] in Indonesia today. If they are let go to Australia, it will be like a human tsunami."

Very unedifying. You can't go around accusing people mixing up issues when you then go on to to do exactly that. No? I guess this is the kind of stupidity we're up against. We shan't prevail.

News That's Fit To Punt - 09/Mar/2015

He Said WHAT!?

There are days where you simply don't have words to describe the acute surprise, the acute embarrassment, and the acute pain of having this idiot:

...as our Prime Minister. Today is one of those days.

In extraordinary comments on Monday afternoon, Mr Abbott attacked the UN and said its representatives would "have a lot more credibility if they were to give some credit to the Australian government" for stopping boat arrivals.

"I really think Australians are sick of being lectured to by the United Nations, particularly, particularly given that we have stopped the boats, and by stopping the boats, we have ended the deaths at sea," Mr Abbott said. 

"The most humanitarian, the most decent, the most compassionate thing you can do is stop these boats because hundreds, we think about 1200 in fact, drowned at sea during the flourishing of the people smuggling trade under the former government."

The un-ironic stupidity is breathtaking. The boats being "stopped" only happened because of the deterrence offered by the Manus Island detention centre being a terrible place to end up. So even the "stopping the boats" he wants credit for, rests on the fruits of what the UN would term torture. Which means he can't get credit for that.

Worse still, the asylum seekers are being sent to Manus Island because the ALP choice of Malaysia was disqualified because Malaysia wasn't a signatory to the UN convention on refugees. And thanks to Tony Abbott's own drama-queen efforts as the opposition leader, they could not be brought to Australia, and had to be sent to Manus Island as a last resort. There's nothing in this that isn't somehow Tony Abbott's own damn fault.

As Paul Keating said, "God help us all, God help us all."

The Mental Health System Is About To Break

"Big" works in Mental Health and he is always full of stories about how the system is stretched to breaking point, and then they halve the resources. Or stop replacing broken fluoro tubes in the building. Or stop fixing broken toilets. And stop cleaners' contracts. Alas, making the situation even more miserable to the outside eyes, the mental health workers are with the HSU. Yes, that same union that had that Craig Thomson guy spend fantastic plastic money on hookers and had Kathy Jackson and Michael Williamson and all kinds of characters that had the smack of corruption about them. Having ended up in court in the wake of the Craig Thomson affair (and never was the use of the word 'affair' been more accurate as double entendre), ensnared by their own bizarre politics and rorting, the HSU became the least effective representation for its union members. 

Worse still, the mental health workers have had a gag order placed upon them as a term of their employment. Not only are they sewn up with medical confidentiality, they're specifically not allowed to talk about their conditions at work to the media lest they get terminated. When you consider there aren't may private sector posts for mental health workers, you can see the New South Wales government has been gagging an entire sector of workers. 

Finally, the Sydney Morning Herald has put a slit into the curtain of silence. But they're only getting the doctors' side of the story. 

For years doctors have complained about the serious underfunding of mental health services. The reason? Most people think it's because performing more surgeries and cutting waiting times in emergency departments wins elections, while making sure someone with schizophrenia is properly supported and medicated in the community doesn't. 

Today Fairfax Media revealed that the situation is reaching crisis point. 

Doctors around the state cheered when the government, just after it was elected, allowed local health authorities more control over health services in their area. But the downside of the decision was that some areas with particularly stretched budgets have looked to mental health services to find savings. It's almost impossible to close a hospital bed without serious political ramifications, doctors say. But leaving a community health worker position unfilled? That's much easier to get away with.

All of the charts might be correct but it's only scratching the surface of the problems in funding, and worse still, it hasn't even gotten down to the day-to-day people who handle all the mentally ill people who live out in the community. There are horror stories to tell there. 

Consider this fact. When Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan were making cuts in their last budget, one of the two places to get an increase in funding was Mental Health. It hasn't been nearly enough to cover for the shortfall in funding; and WTE Joe Hockey has been trying to cut even that funding. 

Politicians are really fucking this up badly. There simply is no other interpretation. 

Screen Australia - Abnormal Business Practices

Pleiades sent in this link.

Companies associated with actor and film producer Claudia Karvan were paid $10.5 million by Screen Australia last year. Karvan is on the board of Screen Australia. 

Companies associated with fellow director Joan Peters, a media and entertainment lawyer, received just under $14.8 million in production grants, consultancy fees, travel grants and assorted transactions with Screen Australia.

Companies associated with actor and film producer Claudia Karvan were paid $10.5 million by Screen Australia last year. Karvan is on the board of Screen Australia. 

Companies associated with fellow director Joan Peters, a media and entertainment lawyer, received just under $14.8 million in production grants, consultancy fees, travel grants and assorted transactions with Screen Australia.

Companies associated with fellow director Joan Peters, a media and entertainment lawyer, received just under $14.8 Companies associated with director and film producer Rosemary Blight picked up $2.2 million in production grants and travel to the Toronto Film Festival. 

Payments of $1.5 million were made to companies associated with filmmaker Rachel Perkins and for a project in which a "close family" member of Perkins was involved.
Payments were also made to companies associated with the former chairman of Screen Australia, Glen Boreham, companies associated with deputy chair Deanne Weir and companies associated with another director, Richard Keddie. 

There is no suggestion of anything amiss. The transactions are duly recorded in the notes to Screen Australia's financial statements and the website features a conflict of interest policy. One can't help wondering though – as normal procedure on conflicts is for a director to leave the boardroom when a related party transaction is being discussed – that Screen Australia board meetings must resemble more a game of musical chairs than a traditional, boring old board meeting, as members excuse themselves. 

In two decades of digging around company accounts, this reporter has never seen anything quite like it; no less than five pages of related party transactions. 

"Screen Australia is fortunate to have an expert industry board ensuring decisions are well informed with an industry perspective. The agency adheres to a strict conflict of interest policy that ensures fairness and accountability," a spokeswoman said. 

We had stumbled on this quite by accident, in the process of researching a story on why the Australian film industry was not living up to its potential.

Are we surprised? It's a freaking rort. That it's all nepotism and paying one's spouses out of the public purse is as rife as it is, as costly as it is?

Need I say any more?

What Can You Do At This Point?

These Are The Intellectual Runts We've Got In Government

Okay, first up is Barnaby Joyce who admits his staff changed the Hansard Records.

The Hansard record had been changed to correct an error Joyce made on Monday 20 October regarding the government’s drought assistance package. In the speech, Joyce referred to “over” 4,000 people applying for drought assistance. His office changed that to read “nearly” 4,000. They also added a qualifier line that wasn’t originally in the speech, saying that “recipient[s] of the Interim Farm Household Allowance” would also receive the assistance. 

Joyce set the record straight in parliament after question time on Monday, saying the “minor edits were made to Hansard by my staff without my knowledge. My staff have been counselled. Consistent with standing orders, I have asked that the changes requested by my office be removed from Hansard before Hansard is finalised.”
It’s not unusual for Hansard records to be submitted to MPs’ offices so staff can check names, spelling and other small facts. But the manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, said the changes went beyond the normal alterations made by politicians and their staff members. 

“Of all the things that you can do in this parliament that carry a penalty, the greatest gravity is reserved for deliberately misleading the house,” Burke said. “Whether it was him or his office, somebody appears to have deliberately doctored the official record of what was said in parliament.” 

The matter has been referred to the powerful privileges committee.

Of course, the Privileges Committee feature one Bronwyn Bishop, Speaker of the House who is the most one-sided, partial Speaker in the history of Speakers dating back to the British Parliament. And there have been a whole bunch of Speakers in that Parliament. In other words, we are asking one set of shameless people to adjudicate on another bunch of shameless people about shameful acts. How's that going to work out for us?

Are we vomiting yet?

This Guy Doesn't Care About The Law, He Thinks He's Above It

Scott Morrison seems to just do what suits his own rhetorical position. It's crazy, but true. He ignored departmental advice and refused permanent visas for boat arrivals found to be refugees.

The minister for immigration personally ordered protection visa numbers be capped for 2014 – to avoid granting permanent protection to any boat arrivals – before his action was ruled unlawful by the full bench of the high court. 

Overruled by the judiciary, Morrison has since employed a previously unused “national interest” clause in the Migration Act to issue unchallengeable “conclusive certificates” to refuse visas, but this is also being contested in court. 

Lawyers for the minister are back in court in December. 

Documents before the high court show Morrison was told on 15 January, in a brief from his department, that his policy objective of never granting permanent protection to boat arrivals could not be achieved “in the medium to long term” but that he could “delay being forced to grant” visas in the short term. 

The departmental brief is confidential, but sections of it are reproduced in submissions before the high court. 

Talk about crash or crash through. Just imagine Sir Humphrey Appleby getting ignored in 'Yes Minister' after offering his expert advice. I don't know if Sir Humphrey had any more superlative-ironic descriptors than "courageous". It's worse than Dutch Courage or something worked up in the trenches with the help of alcohol; we're talking about the kind of courage that lets people bungy jump with a faulty cord or skydive without checking their kit.

It makes you wonder if Scott Morrison ever watched a single episode of 'Yes Minister'. And if not, why the hell is he a minister-of-anything in the English-Speaking world? Incredulity aside, when in the hell is justice going to prevail and send this guy to prison? Shouldn't there be an arrest warrant for this man at this point? Or is there some kind of Parliamentary privilege for breaking the law? 

Laugh Of The Day

Without reference, I offer you this:

"That is my hope," he told Parliament, "that just for once it might be possible for us in this Parliament, one side and the other, the national government and the state and territory governments to have a mature debate rather than a screaming match."

That would be our Prime Minister Tony Abbott speaking. 

To which even Mark Kenny said this.

The man who coined such high-rotation gems in the political lexicon as "python squeeze" and "wrecking ball" and "hammer blow" in relation to the carbon tax is hardly well placed to expect meek co-operation now that he's in office himself.

Yes, it does seem rather hypocritical to be treated like an adult after you've behaved like a five year old for five years. As Moon Zappa famously intoned, "gag me with a spoon!"

News That's Fit To Punt - 05/Jul/2014

Semaphore Of Sociopaths

It's all about the message, and what message we're allegedly sending to people smugglers. So goes the theory in the continuing shit-storm that is the Coalition 'policy' towards asylum seekers.but sometimes we're not even sure that's where the message is going to or whether it's being received properly. It's a mystery as to how this government thinks communication theory functions.

The latest corker episode appears to be Scott Morrison ordering Tamil asylum seekers  from India, to Sri Lanka, In all honesty it's hard to fathom the depths of the kind of morally deficient mind as Scott Morrison who would surrender the said Tamils to the Sri Lankan authorities. It's a bit like happily offering up Jewish refugees from say, Sweden and repatriating them to Germany in 1944 or something. He's certainly not talking about what exactly was done and this government is hiding behind its usual "oh, this is a military operation so we need more secrecy" routine. Which is to say Scott Morrison is offering up the moral tenacity of a Sergeant Schultz who always insists he "knows nothing".

Weirder still, Mr. Morrison, it turns out, is going to Sri Lanka to attend a commissioning ceremony for some boats.  You really wonder how these people live with themselves.

Financial Mischief Writ Large

The business of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia offering up inappropriate financial advice because of its incentive laden program for their sales staff has turned into the eye sore issue for the Australian financial sector. First, there were the whistle-blowers who carefully leaked the secret to the corporate watchdog ASIC. ASIC then sat on its hands for 18months and failed to investigate. After which the anonymous whistle-blowers were forced to come forwards so that ASIC could get off its backside and investigate the mess. If the 18month delay was bad, the Senate hearings into ASIC have shown that ASIC and its personnel are too close to the banking industry it regulates, for it to be a proper watchdog - (which, it must be said was also said of the SEC in America after the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scandal).

So the ALP government drafted up legislation to stop this problem, but then the Coalition government has since watered it down at the behest of the lobby groups on behalf of the big banks. In the aftermath, the minister responsible for this area Mathias Cormann claimed that there were enough safeguards and the industry had changed substantially so that the legislation didn't need the safeguard that required financial advisers to offer responsible advice. He then went on to talk down the situation at the CBA as some kind of temporal anomaly when in fact the Senate investigation had identified the misplaced incentive as a systemic risk.

The upshot is that the CBA will be forced to cough up more money for is victims but it wants to control the process - which is a bit like letting criminals decide their own punishment in court. Once again, you wonder how these people live with themselves.

We Cut Health And Education To Buy These Toys

On of the crappiest investments our government has made over the last decade has been the F-35 JSF project. Not content with the money we've already spent helping to develop these planes, Tony Abbott pledged to actually spend even more to bring these planes over to Australia. The joke, - as it were - is on us because we're about to take delivery of some of these planes that barely work in a matter of weeks, and the whole fleet has been grounded due to engine problems.

The F-35 is like 'The Zap Gun' in Philip K. Dick's novel, where our civilisation comes up with increasingly unlikelier weapons systems to make a show of having come up with new exotic ways to kill and destroy. The paper specs of the F-35 is meant to put the fear of something ferocious into the hearts of America's enemies but the only thing it's really scaring are the bean counters who track the expenditure towards their development.

The nutshell of the problem is that they set out to deign a plane that fulfills the varied needs of the four service branches of America, each with their unique profiles. Some of these requirements were going to be mutually exclusive and contradictory. As it stands it doesn't seem to have passed any of the tests to be commissioned. Not even the US Marines who were most bullish about getting their F-35s commissioned is looking like they will succeed by the end of this year, as they had announced.

Thus I point to the fundamental waste that is the F-35 at a time when there is *allegedly* such need to cut government services. If we should be buying any warplanes, we should be buying the F-22. At least they work, and come in cheaper.

The Christmas Island Breakout

Repeating Pattern In Australian History?

I know there's devastating news going over in the north of Honshu, but the news tonight that caught my attention is this story here about how there was a mass breakout from the detention centre on Christmas Island, with up to 50 people on the loose.

Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul said tension and frustration had been building over delays with processing asylum claims and restrictions placed on movements between compounds on Friday.

"The delays in processing are unforgivable," Mr Rintoul said.

"There are refugees waiting for over 18 months for security clearances after they have been found to be refugees.

"The breakout is reminiscent of the breakouts from Woomera and Port Hedland in the early 2000s as detention conditions became unbearable."

Well, actually if I may be a bit more historical about it, they're also reminiscent of the Cowra breakout during World War II. The POWs in Cowra were also kept in isolation for an extended period of time with virtually no news coming in. The population grew desperate and  restless in the information vacuum, and eventually they decided to take drastic action probably because they felt they couldn't endure the incarceration any more. The next day most of the escapees were rounded up without a problem.

So, Woomera and Port Hedland may be the immediate predecessors, but in my mind it raises the question of how and why this pattern of events keeps recurring in Australia; and perhaps there is something pathological about the polity of this nation.  It's a question that has to be asked. Is there something in our politics that necessitates this kind of detention-and-breakout motif over and over again?

This section here is just as troubling as the above:

"These reports are very disturbing," Senator Hanson-Young said.

"Unfortunately, this isn't a one-off event, it's symptomatic of the desperation these people feel."

Tensions were increasing on Christmas Island, she said.

"It's like a pressure cooker," Hanson-Young said.

It's this kind of report that preceded the breakout in Cowra that went unheeded as well. I think we really should be asking ourselves and our politicians just what in the world we think we're doing with these detention centres. Because right now, they're functioning more like some sadistic state apparatus designed to inflict as much emotional damage to the people inside, while maintaining a Kafka-esque bureaucratic facade to make it more palatable to the public. It's one thing to be putting captured enemy combatants in a war into these places. Asylum seekers on boats is another thing entirely.

If they're going to the bother of shoving these people on Christmas Island, the least they ca do is let them walk free on the Island. This is really, really, really pathetic.