Life Under Covid, Year 3

Unpacking Domicron Perrottet's Fateful Decision 

The conservative (small c here) thing to have done  with respect to the pandemic as it stood, coming out of lockdown in NSW would have been to maintain some of the controls in place. This isn't a controversial thing to say. After all, the whole point of the response to the pandemic carried out by governments has been to mitigate risks of infections spreading. All this talk of needing to "flatten the curve" back in 2020 as well as the QR codes used to track the comings and goings of citizens (and in the process the citizens giving up their privacy in exchange) as well as restricting numbers of people at indoor events and so on was to ensure the pandemic did not go out of control. It seems crazy to have to write this out, but the reason I have to say small-c conservative is because the capital-C Conservative leaders of NSW then let go of controls.

Ever since the fateful decision on15 December 2021, the pandemic has been out of control. Having no controls in place immediately led to the explosion of numbers as well as long queues at PCR testing sites. By the end of the week Rapid Antigen Testing kits were sold out everywhere. Just about every place anybody went to for food pharmaceuticals would lead to a belated alert days later that they might have been exposed to COVID-19. For 8 days the NSW government let the virus have its way with its population.

And the mind boggles as to why people claiming to be conservative in nature and practice would want to do such a thing. The only explanation is that they were not conservative at all, and were in fact libertarians. Perhaps they may even be capital-l Libertarians of the variety we might abhor - for it is hard to recall an election whereby we voted in a Libertarian government. This then, was the moment the nut job far right libertarians of NSW had finally obtained controls to the levers of government. What they did with it was tear a gaping hole in the fabric of society and then pretend this was some kind of state of natural law. 

It is deplorable and abhorrent - but it seems to be what we are living with. As such I wish to exercise my libertarian choices right back at them and no longer pay any taxes. What's the point of paying into a government that doesn't look after you in a time of crisis at all? 

How My Christmas And New Years Went Down

Thanks to Perrotet and Hazzard-the-Buzzard I was too leery to go watch the one movie I had been waiting for all year, 'Spider-Man: No Way Home'. I still haven't watched it. I hear the cinemas are still packed - which sounds like infection clusters waiting to explode. 

At close to midnight on Christmas my better half got a notification that she was in contact with somebody who was positive, only 3 days before. So on early Boxing Day we decided to go get a PCR test even though we were asymptomatic, only to find the queue to the local testing clinic a mile long. Sensibly - I must say - we decided we shouldn't wait for a PCR test when we were likely not going to test positive, which was a call I made based on common sense and the dread of sitting in a car inching towards a PCR test for 3-4 hours. Instead, we opted to go to the local pharmacy to see if they had RAT kits and of course, they were sold out. In the 1 minute I was there to ascertain they didn't have them and everybody was sold out, I would get a notification 3 days later. 

Naturally as the regulations would have it, we sat in self isolation monitoring our non-existent symptoms for 7 days, and watched a lot of TV. I think we got to the end of Season 6 of 'Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.',  a show we had been watching on and off for some months. We even got through the final 10 episodes of Vikings Season 6 and then New Years came rolling in. 

We only staggered out on the 3rd January to get some meat at the butchers - because hey supermarkets have run out. I did manage to get my Moderna booster shot that day, with was a highlight. No side effects, so that was good. On the 4th I visited my sister's place to learn about managing quails. Later that night we got pinged with a notification again for that visit to the butcher. That meant we were still monitoring symptoms until the 10th and really only got out that night. I fed some quails that night. 

It's been real, y'all.  

'Personal Responsibility' Says The Guy Who Takes None

Amid this turmoil in NSW which has now led to the turmoil of all Australia, we had the personally irresponsible Prime Minister Scomo the Lame-o declare it was all a matter of personal responsibility now. It sounds good, but it would have helped to have made taking that responsibility a feasible thing. As it is, the RAT kits are nowhere to be found and when you can get them, the price gouging is pretty steep. 

The way taking personal responsibility has worked out for me is to essentially go back into lockdown on my own account to the extent that is permissible and sustainable. I feel sorry for people who cannot avoid going out to work, and I'm completely basking the luxury of being able to self isolate as much as I can. Yet, to be told by this incompetent Prime Minister that it's all on my responsibility ledger now is a bit rich. 

This is the same Prime Minister who ran off to Hawaii during the 2019 bushfire crisis. 

I don't see these coalition governments - Federal and NSW - surviving the next election, but I felt the same way in 2019, so I don't know what to think any more. Clearly I live in a country with an idiot electorate. We've got to vote out these jokers. 

Speaking of Jokers

This business of Novak Djokovic and his no-vax ways is to put it mildly, a sick joke. 

First, he's a champion that not many people have warmed to because he's a Serbian asshole. To make things worse, while he's a great player but he is also an anti-vaxer. The second part sort of rules him out of visiting Australia during the pandemic - because that's the law. Then, he gets some kind of exemption because he's a tennis champ and really, the Australian Open really needs its drawcards right now. But Scomo and Border Force are natural born cunts so he gets pinged like some refugee (hilarious). He goes and stays in the quarantine facility with real refugees while his case is heard in court. The judge is a tennis fan and says he can stay, and that Border Force were out of line. And yet somehow the Minister in charge of border bullies Alex Hawke has the option to send him packing. Will he or won't he? Stay tuned. *gag*

The twists and turns are like a bad soap opera. Nobody except Serbian Anti-vaxers seem to like this guy - but people still want him to hit the ball at the Australian Open. It's a mystery who we're supposed to root for in this miserable story. That, in a nutshell is life during the pandemic in Australia, year 3.   

Scomo Goes To Hawaii II

 He's Not The One Holding The Hose, Mate

When Greta Thunberg went to the UN and told the leaders their houses were on fire, Morrison's response was to patronise and downplay the fear of the young. The fact that he thought that was the appropriate response beggars belief. Couldn't he see it from the young person's side? That they're going to inherit a planet largely fucked up by people who refused to let anybody fix things? 

It sort of amazes me just how much of an empathy deficit Scott Morrison possesses and somehow still managed to become leader of the Liberal Party, let alone Prime Minster of this country. It is like that expression about blind squirrels getting lucky once in a while in finding a nut. In his case he was surrounded by even more demented sociopaths like Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor - he was the least objectionable sociopath in the room after they all decided to stab Turnbull in the back lest he do something about the climate.

I do wonder if Scott Morrison wonders about how the planet will be in say, 10 years' time when his daughters will be pushing out babies. I imagine his daughters are so brainwashed that they would do all kinds of mental gymnastics to push out of their minds that their father - once the Prime Minister of Australia - opted to wave a lump of coal around Parliament and make like Global Warming wasn't a thing. They're beyond hope, in all likelihood. But maybe the arrival of grandkids might make him think just a little bit about where things went so wrong and his part in making sure it went wrong. I wonder, as the prognosis towards 2050 worsens significantly, whether he might ever have just a twinge of regret that he spent his time in government as a minister selling down the future of his grandkids just so he could get votes in the 2010s. I mean, that's what the exchange that he made, right there. The rest of us voting chumps were powerless once he was in office. Nobody forced him to be this awful. He simply volunteered himself for the task. 

It is terrible enough that his government goes from rape scandal to AG-is-a-rapist-scandal, then failure to disaster to catastrophe, but this has been going for nearly a decade. Every minute spent by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government denying Global Warming was an issue, stole something from the future.  Things might have been better if he'd just stayed in Hawai and never come back. 

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Christian Porter's Spot of Bother, Part 2

He's Most Probably Guilty

So a few days ago Christian Porter one on the offensive and claimed he didn't commit an act of rape and he's only met the woman when she was 16 and he was 17. He made a few other ambit claims which at the time seemed neither here nor there so in my naiveté I thought it was prudent to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. 

All of that was predicated on not having read what the actual allegations are, and if we were being strictly principled about it, we would not form opinions without knowing what the allegations were. Quite simply he had denied the rape and then pointed to the presumption of innocence that is standard in the court of law. 

Well, Crikey has come out with an article overnight which details a good deal of what the allegations are, and how they might relate to Christian Porter. The article was penned before Porter's presser so the minister is referred to as 'John Doe'. The woman is described as Jane Doe. Here is a section that contradicts Christian Porter's press conference comments. 

The pair first met in 1986 and again in 1987 in Adelaide when Jane was 15 at a national school competition. The group of students travelling together became close friends, socialising, dancing and studying together.

While the group was close, one friend told Crikey that John Doe had an “arrogant” side to him and as competitions intensified he would become mean.

“[Jane] talked about how she was shocked because she’d imagine that everyone was friendly, and yet the way that [John] was behaving towards it was not as a friend would behave,” she said.

“I think that was the first inkling she had that he was not what she had thought that he was.”

John would make callous remarks at women, Jane wrote. She recalled him saying she didn’t “have the tits” to wear a bikini, and joking that the alfalfa sprouts on her salad made it look like she was “eating sperm”.

But later he would flatter Jane, complimenting her — and himself. According to Jane’s statement, he asked her to iron a shirt he wanted to wear.

“You would make a wonderful wife one day,” he said. He called her “so smart and so pretty”, capable of doing “all the good housewife things”.

At the press conference, Porter made it out that he only met the woman once at the debating competition. He explained that the line comes from the fact that this 'Jane Doe' knew how to iron a shirt and he didn't. It's interesting how he used his own inept male chauvinism at 17 as his defence there, - but it contradicted greatly by what is being described. He knew her, he liked her more than just friends. He knew her enough that he wanted to marry her, - which is to say he wanted to have sexual relations with her - at least that's what is being related. Chalk that one up to motive. 

After dancing in Kings Cross, Jane — who said she was in a dissociative state — agreed to a non-penetrative sex act propositioned by John. Jane wrote that she agreed to the act because she had been hurt by John’s comments about her body. 

He then allegedly violently forced Jane into performing oral sex on him despite her saying no. Jane said he kicked her to the ground and wrapped his hands around her neck.
Later, she said he bathed her thoroughly, dressed her and comforted her as she fell asleep telling her it was “all a bad dream”. 

She said she woke to John anally raping her. He allegedly raped her twice without a condom.
“The only thing that I remember [John] saying to me was that was ‘I don’t want to get you pregnant’,” Jane wrote. 

The next day, Jane said John joked about how the night “might have been different” if he had a condom before referring to his “good Catholic girlfriend” back home.

Great. So he had access to this woman, and therefore the means. This allegation also completely contradicts Porter's own press conference statement where he denied he knew her any more than the realm of the debating competition.   

The description in this allegation is is like something out of 'American Psycho'. It's completely alien to most people with common sense and judgment. 17 year olds with common sense and judgment don't go around getting women drunk and anally raping them. Porter essentially made an appeal to the empathy of most people to imagine themselves at 17, not even remotely likely to rape, and then asked them to take their good judgment and common sense as his own. It's so sickening that he would run that manipulation on the people of this country. 

You can't be asking for presumption of innocence at the same time running a gaslighting operation. We're not taking about what we would have done. We're talking about what he most likely did. 

The crux of it comes down to the believability of the allegation. 

Jane lived with the allegation for 30 years. Feelings of shame and guilt are common in survivors; 57% of victims experience anxiety and fear in the year after the assault.

One male friend, who met her around six months after the alleged assault said Jane spoke about experiencing a “serious and traumatic event” which he assumed to be a form of sexual assault.

“For many years, we’ve had many discussions around many aspects of her being assaulted and the damage that it did without her identifying who it was,” he said.

“At no occasion did she ever contradict herself or was she ever inconsistent.”

Jane had been a high achiever. School captain. Dux. She was incredibly smart, being accepted to school teams earlier than most students and was the “brightest star” out of the school team, friends said.

But Jane struggled, suffering from mental illness and substance abuse which intensified as she went into university. In one study, 45% of survivors of sexual assault reported having a drinking problem in the year before the survey.

“She did go on to experience real challenges with her mental health,” one friend said. They added that Jane believed her mental health issues were linked to her alleged assault. While Jane still worked and studied, friends say she never had a career of longevity or finished her PhD.

After seeking counselling from both a psychologist and a psychiatrist in 2019, Jane decided to make her allegations public. She reached out to friends who were around her in 1988. These messages, sent between 2018 and 2019, have been seen by Crikey. The three friends Crikey spoke to reject the idea that the memory could be false.

“The level of ancillary detail … the sidebars and the interpersonal things that she commented on, some of them I know to be true and some of them ring very true,” one friend said.

The three friends Crikey spoke to said Jane was determined and resolved in telling her story. Her parents reportedly only found out about the allegation in 2019 and they do not believe that it is true.

For what it is worth, I believe her. I completely believe this account. If it's Christian Porter's words against the words of this woman, I take the latter. And I do not take kindly to Porter's intimation that her account was not right because somehow she suffered a mental health issue (all while himself begged off work for a couple of weeks to regain his mental health ... p'uh-lease!). That was a cheap shot. 

I think Porter's press conference was good enough to buy a few days' worth of grace while we processed what was being discussed. What has come out contradicts Porter's own statements so greatly, one has to wonder if there's any truth to the denial itself. I kind of think he perjured himself in the court of public opinion by feigning that he hardly knew the woman. This was simply not true by the account of not just the woman, but the people who knew them back then. One can't lie about this fact and then make one's denial stand. 

My opinions here don't really matter. It doesn't affect anything. I just blog to keep track of my own thinking on things. All the same if you're asking me what I think, I think he did it. 

What Now?

As I said in my last entry, ministers have lost their jobs for less. If one is in the Prime Minster's shoes l- hate him or loathe him - he has no choice but to jettison this toxic mess. This is doubly so when there is the other business of Brittany Higgins going on, ensnaring Linda Reynolds with her 'Lying Cow' remark. When you think about it, Reynolds is not the rapist, merely the boss of the victim, who tried to minimise the allegation for political reasons - and she is in as deep trouble as she is. Porter's position is worse in that he is the accused perpetrator of a crime who cannot come close to proving his innocence; worse still, the more we learn of the allegations, the more we're convinced he likely did rape the woman when he was 17. Can Scott Morrison really countenance having this man as his top law official? 

The problem of course is the Morrison is sitting on a one seat majority, with the departure of climate-change-denying-Anti-vax-Anti-mask-Trumpist-nutjob Craig Kelly from the Liberal Party. The election that brought this sorry government back was May 2019, so we're looking at latest May 2021 as the election date. Presumably Morrison's play is to make it to later this year and use the COVID-19 vaccine and management of the pandemic in Australia as his ticket for reelection but you have to wonder if he's going to make it that far. So like it or not we're marching into an election year with a lot to process. A lot of it is exactly the women problem the Liberal Party has.

If you conducted a vox pop on any street in Australia today, how many people would be able to tell you the name of Australia’s Minister for Women? Just about nobody. Because Marise Payne has done just about nothing. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Even after these torrid and shocking weeks with accusations of rape against a Liberal staff member and a Liberal cabinet minister, senior Liberal men do not think their grip on power is under threat. These controversies might increase the Labor Party’s winning margins in seats they already hold, but are not powerful enough to cost the Coalition any of their seats, they assert.

This has the whiff of hubris. It’s true that Scott Morrison’s approval rating is strong, in the 60s. This is a result of his handling of the pandemic and the recession. But it’s also true that nothing has budged the critical measure – voting intentions.

The voting intentions have not moved. The electorate is split roughly 50-50. So maybe Morrison intends to just ride it all out, pretend nothing's happened. Except right now, Morrison seems to be presiding over a Land of Rape. Things are absolutely, decidedly totally not fine - the house is on fire when it comes to topic of women's safety, and right now the fire is burning down the authority in the House of Representatives. If he doesn't do anything, Morrison may as well be anointing himself rapist-in-chief. 

The thing is, as of now, Christian Porter can just fuck off. There's no upside to the man in terms of policy, politics or legislature. There's no coming back from this allegation. He can't have moral authority as the top law official of Australia while the allegation remains - and it will remain by dint of the woman's suicide. Luckily for Porter he won't see the inside of Prison. 

So he's done. The only questions are how soon will Scomo wake up to this dire reality and how far will he be punting Porter. 

That Time When...

...Scomo Went To Hawaii

It's been well over a year and a part of me finds it still way too hard to forgive Scomo's abandonment of his country to go on a family holiday during the worst fire season in recorded history. The country was ablaze, he was on vacation - because it had been arranged with his family months ago, allegedly - and whole communities had been burnt to the ground.

It was a bit like FDR going on a vacation to the Bahamas the week after WWII landed on his desk. Except, FDR did no such thing, and here was our Prime Minister sipping Pina Coladas by the sea in Hawaii. I mean, come on. How do you spin that, you PR hack Scomo? 

After which he kind of hid behind his kids and took his lumps in the press and looked like yesterday's burnt toast util of course another disaster came along in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, he was quick off the mark to do things.  You sort of wonder if he would have been as quick had he not had to eat so much humble pie over the bushfire response and his holiday to Hawaii. 

His Prime Ministerial performance has picked up somewhat since then, probably because he finally connected in his head that what he does in his office matters to everybody in the country. All I can say is let us hope he gets voted out as soon as possible.

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"Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Humans!"

Treasurer Scott Moronson's Plan 9 From Outer Space

I keep insisting I'm not the only one calling this Coalition Government stupid. Really, they are saying and doing things that are so stupid, it invites the accurate observation:

Mr Morrison told a gathering in Sydney yesterdaythat households carrying large amounts of debt should take some comfort from rising asset prices, including house prices.
Investment expert Roger Montgomery, who manages more than $1 billion worth of funds, did not hold back in his criticism.

"I think that is one of the most inane and stupid things I have ever heard," he said.
Mr Montgomery argued the very reason for the rise in asset prices is due to the debt used to buy it. 

He said it would not take much for highly indebted Australians to be caught out, unable to service their financial commitments. 

"The reality is that firstly, if house prices are elevated because of debt, there should be no comfort in the price of a house — it's elevated simply because of the debt," he said.
"When interest rates start going up — and they will as soon as, in some cases February for some of the banks — investors are going to find they won't have a tenant, or they won't have a tenant and they'll have higher interest rates to pay, and that debt will come home to roost."

I've been blogging here for years and I tell you, I can't recall a time before 2013 when the Federal government appeared so inept and stupidity was the near-daily dose. Commentators and journalists never called out the government for being outright stupid before then with the regularity with which they do it now.

That's not to say just because everybody is doing it must be true or that it's okay (as per Kant, thank you very much moral categorical imperatives), but you have to stop and wonder when exactly the Coalition made stupidity their central modus operandi for policy.

There are things the Federal Government can do to take the pressure out of the Bubble that is driving up household debt. The fact that it won't is because those policies hurt the investor class whom they have always represented. Just as it is impossible to convince a person who's job it is to be paid to be unconvinced, Scott Morrison is in the pockets of the investor lobby who want more of the Property Bubble, not less. So on a very simple level, it is in Scott Morrison's personal best interests to keep ignoring things that tell him to implement policies for the greater good in favour of his electoral base, - and by extension - in order keep his cushy job as treasurer.

So yeah. We have a crisis of thinking at the top of this country that is being funded by vested interests. The problem of course is that the baseline operational brief of any government is utilitarian. That is to say, the line from Mr. Spock in 'Star Trek: Wrath of Khan', "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", should be standard operating procedure. Any government that can't discharge this responsibility is acting against the interests of its own population. Even Machiavelli states in 'The Discourses' the point of good government is to provide stable governance AND to maximise the benefits to as many people in the polity possible. (A lot of people only go by the first dictum and assume Machiavelli would support military juntas. It's not true because military juntas inevitably fail the latter half of that dictum).

The fact that this government wants to have the needs of the vested interests outweigh the needs of most Australian is essentially where the stupidity starts. It's amazing to think these people have expensive private school educations and they can't seem to assess the fundamental problem that makes them say and do such stupid things. There's really no telling where the money went. I guess it went into lobbying politicians into spreading the stupid.
Schools lobbying politicians to spread the stupid. Who'd a thunk it?

Quick Shots - 27/Aug/2016

Balancing Books On The Backs Of The Poor

Scott Morrison is an ideologue, even under the heavy makeup he wears pretending to be pragmatic. Otherwise it's hard to understand the meaning of his speeches and how they connect to what he does as the Treasurer.

Heading into its fourth year in office, the Coalition government is again warning of a complacency in Australian politico-economic discourse, which blithely accepts rolling budget deficits as normal. 

Tilling the soil for a looming budget savings battle when Parliament resumes, Scott Morrison notes that most Australians have not experienced a recession in their adult lives and thus don't appreciate how terrible they can be. 

This insouciance has allowed for long-run operating shortfalls, and worse, an electorate-wide failure to realise that being structurally in the red is no way to go into a sharp global downturn, even if deficit financing is the obvious response once one occurs. 

Reworking Joe Hockey's infamous age of entitlement message with its notorious "lifters and leaners" dichotomy, Morrison believes too many people pay no tax effectively, and that the country is in danger of sleep-walking into economic distress because of a lack of imagination. And past political will.

And to that extent what he will do is start by cutting the dole. This is while the rich end o town still get to keep their superannuation perks. In other words, he is putting the poorest of Australians first into the firing line in a bid to fix the bottom line of the government. It's a novel idea if you don't really understand what that would mean, and it's an absurd idea if you do understand the ramification of such a course of action. Yet, this is the man.

Just as a contrast, the previous Conservative PM of Britain David Cameron - he of the Brexit vote and other calamities such as austerity - once said during the GFC that one thing his government would not do would be to balance the books of the government on the backs of the poor. Whether he meant it or not, or was able to do as he stated or not, I do not know. However, as positioning statements go, it's a lot better than "lifters and leaners" or "Taxed and Taxed-nots". I guess if you're the party that insists on conserving the class system, it pays to show some class sometimes. Seeing that we live in a class-less society according to the blue bloods, it is not that surprising to find conservatives in this country show no class whatsoever.

For whatever it's worth, this pic was doing the rounds from Get Up!:

He Doesn't Understand The Problem

On a related topic, there's this interesting defence of the Prime Minister's $5 for the homeless person.

This week the Prime Minister spoke with a homeless guy in Melbourne and put $5 in his begging cup. Our mainstream media followed accusations that the PM was "stingy". This story – and picture of the Malcolm and the man with his cup – was reported around the country and was even reported in the New York Times. Now I never tell anyone to vote for any political party and I don't mind when people criticise government policy or lack thereof, but to call Malcolm Turnbull "stingy" is an outrage.

I don't know if it is an outrage. His government just cut $4.00 per week of dole money. If you looked at the $5 charity, it's like he's giving one person a one-off compensation for a shitty cut to benefits while he gives the middle finger to the rest. It's not that the Prime Minister is stingy so much as he doesn't understand that he's part of the problem that keeps the man homeless and on the street.

Malcolm has been here many times, sometimes with cameras and many times without. As the Bible says, good deeds should be in secret. 

He's put on an apron or sometimes just sat and spoken with homeless people in our community. Many times since those days when we were on the brink, the Turnbulls have helped us with breathtaking generosity. 

I happen to know that the help we've received is just the tip of their charitable iceberg. "Stingy" is not a word I'd ever use to describe our PM. 

Imagine the story in the media if the PM had put $100 in the cup? Our culture will be crippled and miserable when we become incapable of seeing an act of compassion.

It would still be myopic of the prime Minister tithing he's doing any good. It's pretty simple. He's the Prime Minister - he should be able to devise policy so there is minimal level housing available to the homeless, if people's homelessness really worried him. And if he can't it can only because he's too stupid or too incompetent or too unwilling to do just that; honestly the problem isn't whether the Prime Minister is stingy or not.

Gosh you know what? You never used to see homeless people in Sydney before '96. Certainly not in the numbers we're seeing today. People could be down and out and downright unemployable but the dole was there to make sure they could afford a place to live. It's not surprising that since John Howard won in 1996, Australia has somehow managed to create a class of misery out there all the while enjoying 20-odd years of economic growth. It just doesn't make sense that this is what has become of our nation. This is all a product of Neo-Liberalism. 

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. 

View From The Couch - 16/Dec/2015

ScoMo Is A Different Kind Of Economic Animal

The MYEFO has come out and well, Scott Morrison isn't exactly cutting everything in sight. Yes, he's cutting some things, but he's vowing not to chase the fall in revenue down. 

Scott Morrison has learnt well from Joe Hockey, Chris Bowen and Wayne Swan.

The best thing to do when revenue is collapsing is to let it, lest it bring the economy down with it. 

As he put it: extreme measures would have placed "a hand brake on household consumption and business investment growth" and unnecessarily threatened emerging signs of economic momentum.

That's pretty contrary to the Coalition diatribe about debt only months ago, and as enacted in two disastrous budgets under WTE Joe Hockey. It must be that at heart, we're all Keynesians now, as the saying goes. 

It also shows that the Turnbull Government really is a different beast to the Abbott Government, at least on an operational level. A simple question of "what would Tony have done?" yields images of a cigar-chomping, axe-wielding WTE Joe. Instead, he's telling us it's not going to be austerity all the way down. I don't want to praise Scott Morrison in the least freaking bit but you have to hand it to him, he's not reacting as one would have imagined from his turn as minister for turning back boats. 

I have to admit, I'm a little surprised. On another level, I think I can see we're heading towards ZIRP a lot more than raising interest rates. As it turns out, it's really hard to get the market off the easing bias. Who'd a thunk it? 

Which leads me to the next thing... 

When The US Fed Dons Wolf's Clothing

This is weird when you reflect back to the utter chaos of the GFC at its height in August 2008. The US Fed is about to raise interest rates by 25bps sometime this week or early next year. Indeed, the speculation is that they have to do it this month because there are no more months beyond December and they committed to doing it before the year was out. So, logically, it's this month. The countervailing view is that the situation is so dire and the High Yield bond market is collapsing so fast, the Federal Reserve Bank would have to be crazy to pull the trigger. 

The fact of the matter is, they didn't pull the trigger when it was benign back in October, so we were left asking the question, if not then, when? If things get precarious enough, the FRB is going to have to think about easing again in no time, which means they'll back at ZIRP in a matter months. It is as if Wall Street is permanently addicted to having cheap indefinite credit and anything else makes it fatal to the whole financial system of the planet. In other words, nothing structural has been fixed since the GFC, that caused the GFC. The risk factors are right back up to where they were on the eve of the meltdown. 

And still, the language from Janet Yellen has been that they're going to raise rates because things are going so much better now. Goodness, it's hard to think all the way back to Paul Volcker in the 1980s. Would he have hesitated? No not a chance. 

On a more local note, the anticipation of the move has created ructions in our own equity market in Australia. It's very strange:

"Amazingly enough it hasn't been priced in. It really is quite extraordinary," he said. "Perversely we may see markets rallying on the back of it once we have some certainty about what the central bank is doing in the US." 

"It's all around these issues regarding sustainable, stable commodity prices and whether we get a decision out of the US Federal Reserve," said Mr Lakos.
Chris Conway, head of research at the Australian Stock Report said while some traders were dipping back into beaten down stocks, the overarching vibe was one of caution. 

"We don't expect any large moves ahead of the US Fed decision on Thursday morning (Australian time), with no-one ... willing to take on too much risk or place any big bets despite the outcome being largely expected," he said. 

"We also expect some volatility immediately after the decision but hopefully, once everyone has processed the result, markets calm and we rally into the end of the year."

So shares got oversold in the last 48hours because everybody suddenly remembered that Janet Yellen was possibly/probably going to go for it with the interest rate hike. Which means that if and when it gets announced, shares are likely to bounce back from 2.5year lows. Like I said, this is really weird. 

China Crisis On The Brew

Nobody's really talking about it in the mainstream news but, China's economy's actually on the ropes. How do we know this? Pretty simple. When China was going great guns, commodity prices were up. For commodity prices to hit the skids this low, this hard and for this long, means China's really run out of puff and can't turn the commodities into economic growth. The collapse in demand for iron ore and coking coal is more than telling, it's both a white flag from China and a red flag for the Australian economy.

In that spirit, here's a story that you might find explains a lot of things.

Several local officials in China's Northeast region sought to explain dramatic economic drops in their areas by admitting they had faked economic data in the past few years to show highgrowth when the real numbers were much lower, Xinhua News Agency reported on Friday. 

"If the past data had not been inflated, the current growth figures would not show such a precipitous fall," one official was quoted as saying. 

The report cited several officials in the region who acknowledged they had significantly overstated data ranging from fiscal revenue and household income to GDP. 

Three years ago Liaoning province's GDP growth was reported at 9.5 percent, but its current figure－over the first three quarters of this year－is just 2.7 percent. Jilin's growth was reported at 12 percent three years ago, but its current rate is 6.3 percent in the same period.

That right there is your confirmation. The Chinese figures have been worse than rubbery, they've been fraudulent. Not only is the commodity boom over, we're in uncharted waters as to exactly what the hell is going to happen next in China when all the debt racked up to fake the demand to fake the growth comes home to roost. So if you're inclined to believe this week's offical statement about strong industrial production and retail sales in China... sure why not? Let's all take that blue pill from Morpheus' hand. 

View From The Couch - 13/Dec/2015

Deporting Permanent Residents Has Got To Stop

This is a new kind of human rights abuse - except they tried this shit ten years ago and it backfired.

Mr Bolvaran, who turned 42 on Thursday, came to Australia as a one-year-old when his family fled the Pinochet regime in 1974 and lived in the country since.

During his time in Australia he met and fell in love with Rachel Delucia, with whom he has three sons, two of them under the age of 10.

But his life in Australia was not always so idyllic, as Mr Bolvaran freely admitted.
He fell into the wrong crowd, racking up a petty criminal rap sheet that included drug possession and stealing.

Unfortunately for Mr Bolvaran, who lived in Brisbane on a permanent resident visa, he got caught up in changes to the Migration Act that saw visas cancelled if the holders were sentenced to 12 months or more in prison. 

Those legislative changes have proven to be a sore point between New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, given the number of Kiwis affected. 

Mr Bolvaran, who could only speak limited Spanish and had no family support network in Chile, was deported last month. 

"I miss my kids … It's my birthday and I miss the hell out of my boys and my partner," he said.
"I'm so far away from her and everyone. This is where I was born, but I'm lost here. I don't know what to do with myself." 

Mr Bolvaran was jailed in July after he pleaded guilty to a string of offences, including drug possession, possession of a knife in public and receiving tainted property.
After serving time in the Brisbane Correctional Centre at Wacol, Mr Bolvaran was transferred to Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney to await deportation.

It's terrible policy. First of all, it metes out a second punishment to the time served. Obviously the punishment doesn't apply to a citizen, so it means there are de facto two sets of laws for the people of Australia: one for the citizen and another that is far more destructive and punitive for permanent residents.

It also makes the Criminal Justice system merely a partial criminal justice system and the Department of Immigration gets to punish somebody for the same crime, a second time (i.e. forget "double jeopardy") just based on their visa status.  You wonder how the esteemed judges feel about that, should it ever be brought in front of them. If a government body that wasn't the judges handing out legal punishments, you'd think judges might "take a very dim view of that sort of thing". I'm sure it violates something called "the Separation of Powers". Hmm... let me think now.., yes, yes it would.

If the punishment is meant to be a deterrent for crime, it's not going to work because it targets a socio-economic group that is likely not to come in contact with the information. None of the cases that have been reported on the issue show that such legislation has any deterrent for criminality. It's imaginary, and prejudicial.

What's worrying is that the ALP are saying they're in lockstep with the government when it comes to this astoundingly stupid legislation. This make you wonder just how good a mind these idiot politicians have, when even a legal novice like this blogger can spot the obvious legal problem with enforcing such bad laws. So much for Shadow AG Dreyfus being such a legal eagle. The thing that make your citizens and permanent residents really lose faith in government as an institution, is when it gives bipartisan support for bad laws.

This is a bad law. Somebody needs to challenge it.

Wrapping It Up In Paris

It would appear that Paris meetings to deal with climate change ended successfully. Maybe 6 years of even more extreme weather events persuaded more governments. In some subtle way, this is what has happened in Australia over the last decade. There are holdouts who still believe that climate change is not real or a UN conspiracy, or has stopped, but in most part the middle of the electorate thinks it is real enough and needs to be dealt with.

Of course, the Paris Summit and its global climate agreement has nothing in it that is binding or demands accountability, so it is a little bit like everybody agreeing to a wishlist for Santa, and if everybody's good, we'll get global warming under control.

When you think about what happened at Copenhagen in 2009, and how it led to the demise of Kevin Rudd, followed by massive infighting in the ALP government, and the subsequent denialist stupidocracy of the Abbott Government, only to see the return of Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party mere 3 months ago - and therefore offering some hope of serious climate policy - it's been a terrible, terrifying, 6 years.

It's 6 years of missed opportunities; it's 6 years of stalled investments; it's 6 years of more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere that could have been restrained; and 6 years of having to live with people who have utterly unscientific views about climate science and having to argue with them as if they had a leg to stand on or had any intellectual merit. The 6 years of extra arguments, extra discussions, extra politicking, extra effort, all makes me feel faint when I reflection it. And this agreement merely gets us to a starting line that might help us get on top of the challenge.

And with Greg Hunt as the minister for the environment still, I have to say I have absolutely no faith that we'll get anything done.

More Budget Cuts To Come

We are - on the whole - way too complacent about the Australian economy. Especially with the collapse in commodity prices for iron ore, nickel, and oil, a lot of our major export earners are suddenly hitting the wall where they can't be profitable digging stuff up form the ground. If you wanted proof the mining boom was well and truly over, then look no further. BHP of course is taking a double punch because of the dam bursting in Brazil, so its shares have slid down from $25 to $17. The resources sector has been in a two year retreat, but lately it's becoming a nosedive.

Clive Palmer is suddenly running around looking for line of credit to keep his nickel refinery going, and that's obviously because of the collapse in nickel prices. All of this decline in income has now shown up with diminishing revenue for the government. This in turn is going to mean the Coalition Government's favourite thing, more budget cuts.

The Treasurer's task of finding spending offsets will be made more difficult by a sharply worse picture on the revenue side of the budget, which has been hammered by plunging commodity prices and stagnant wage growth. 

Leading economists believe the government will be forced to reveal a worsening of the budget deficit of between $33 billion and $39 billion over the next four years. 

The grim picture was a focus of Mr Turnbull's talks with state and territory leaders on Friday. The Council of Australian Governments' joint communique warned of "emerging budgetary pressures across all levels of government, particularly in the health sector".
On Sunday, Mr Morrison said MYEFO update key forecasts to present a "realistic outlook for economic conditions moving forward". 

"As was demonstrated by the recent National Accounts data, our economy is transitioning from resource investment led growth towards broader based growth," he said. 

"Part of this transition involves dealing with the challenges of lower commodity prices and a declining terms of trade from their historic peaks in the wake of the mining investment boom. 

"The government will continue to restore the budget by controlling expenditure and supporting policies that grow the economy. The budget will not be restored by increasing the overall tax burden on Australians."

So says ScoMo. A lot of this stuff killing revenue is outside of the government's control. Yet the fixation with budget deficits will mean there will be a fresh round of razor gang activity but really, they'll probably find they have to spend the money anyway. It's like the domestic violence thing. The Abbott Government cut $300m out of domestic violence related expenditures. Turnbull has had to go back out and spend $100m. When it's all said and done, he'll probably have to spend the other $200m anyway, because there were probably very good reasons that $300m was earmarked for the program.

If you think it through from a historic perspective, at this point in time these razor gang exercises in austerity are redundant, if not futile. Certainly since the second budget of the Gillard government, there's been significant cuts to government programs. Add 2 of the Coalition's own efforts and you'd have to say 4 years of cuts would have been pretty deep. It's very visible that the Federal Government is running pretty lean these days. What the government has to do is get more serious about tax reform. 

The problem is, it's not a government that likes wage rises, seeing that they represent the employers' lobby. All the talk of raising revenue has been around raising the GST, another regressive bit of policy-talk. In that sense it's a government of vested interests that won't talk its own constituents down from their fighting-a-class-war posture. It would rather just hand over the bill to the wider community and be proud they're trying to balance the books. It's only 3 months or so of Malcolm-In-The-Hot-Seat but this government is looking sclerotic already. When the slowdown hits the wider electorate, and it will, I doubt Malcolm Turnbull is going to stay so popular.  

Sign Of The Times

I Didn't Know They Had It In Them

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

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

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

What it says about the electorate is much worse.

Blaming It On Peta Credlin

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

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

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

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

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

So Now It's Time To Think Of An Alternative

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

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

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

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

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

Pathetic In Parliament

Pyne Begs Abbott

It turns out Christopher Pyne wasn't running some deep Machiavellian plot when he ran a petition to save the ABC production facility in Adelaide. Now we learn he's begging the Prime Minister for a rethink. All because he is not polling well in his own electorate and if he had to explain how he lost the production facility from Adelaide, it's hard to see how he doesn't get humiliated at every doorstep in his electorate. That's the funny thing about democracy - your constituent's opinions count for something some of the time.

To save the bit on his turf, Christopher Pyne is arguing that the ABC should be made to spend some of the money in regional production, which would save Adelaide's production facility. In other words, he's arguing for jobs protections for his constituency as being an exception. You'd think he was - god forbid - in favour of regulation as opposed to the rampant deregulation for things in his own portfolio.

Quite apart from the total departure from the regular Liberal Party economic rationalist patter, he wants to save his turf at the expense of somebody else's turf. As you can see it's unprincipled on at least three levels but I guess you try anything when it comes to trying to save your own skin.

Malcolm Fraser Thinks They Suck

Live long enough, you see lots of strange things. Perhaps principle amongst my list of strange things is the sight of Malcolm Fraser attacking the Liberal Party from the outside over the asylum seeker issue.

Mr Fraser says migration legislation passed last week has given Immigration Minister Scott Morrison "dictatorial, tyrannical powers" over the lives of asylum seekers and "destroyed the rule of law as we know it". 

He has accused the crossbench senators who supported the legislation, on the basis of concessions they negotiated with Mr Morrison, of committing "a political error of fundamental proportions".

Well Mr Fraser, we are talking about Scott Morrison here. You can't expect much better from that man on the best of days.

All the same, it's a very vexed topic where there is much electoral support to punish the asylum seekers. It's a weird thing, this impulse to punish the asylum seekers, but there are some clues as to the thinking out there.

A long while back, Sam told me about his qualms about asylum seekers arriving in boats. "It's a bit like if I tried to drown myself in a swimming pool in the Eastern Suburbs and they rescue me. And I tell them that people are trying to kill me in the Western Suburbs so I had to come to Vaucluse; and the only way I could think of making you take me in was if I tried to drown myself in your swimming pool. Now you have to let me live in your house."

Now, just to be clear, Sam was joking.
Sam went on to say that of course Australia is much nicer than wherever the hell the people come from, much as Vaucluse is much nicer than say, St. Marys. So if you're picking and choosing, you would pick Vaucluse as the place to pull your stunt rather than anywhere in between. Once you decide you don't want to live where you live, then it's time to shop and people are shopping for Australia as a destination. If we all had the choice, maybe we'd all choose to live in Vaucluse, in which case who would be left to live in the poor suburbs to work as garbage collectors and plumbers?

But if you're a resident of Vaucluse, should you take this choice seriously? Isn't it obvious that the people in Vaucluse would ring the police and have the intruder removed or arrested for trespassing? And that is essentially what Manus and Nauru and Christmas Island detention Islands are - prisons for trespassing. Naturally the people who believe in Manus and Naura (or Cambodia!) as a 'solution' believe that the prison system is a fine deterrent to crime. If you bought that, Sam also had a boat ticket for you to buy.
And so the analogy went. It was all a bit 'Down And Out In Beverly Hills'.

I can see one aspect to the fear is that Australia is in the middle of a housing bubble that is pricing lots of people out of the property market. There is a lot of mortgage stress even if you can get a piece of it. It's not an environment conducive to being generous to the needy when people are seriously worried about keeping their own roofs and backyards. Scott Morrison is obviously playing to this pathetic anxiety, which in turn is at the very core of this pathetic kind of politics we're witnessing in Canberra. However, on a deeper level, people are wanting to reject the asylum seekers because they see the boat-and-drown asylum seekers as gaming the system - and nobody wants to be a schmuck.

The sad thing is that people out there in voter land genuinely don't want to see people on boats drowning on our doorsteps. Their preference is that the charade stops altogether, and the problem simply went away;  but that would entail the dispossessed stop picking the metaphorical Vaucluse as the destination. Vaucluse is kind of nice if it weren't for the people. But it's those people who are saying piss off, don't care what your story is, just go back to St Marys.

I'm pretty sure Malcolm Fraser would be unhappy with this characterisation. It really is pathetic that Tony Abbott counts stopping the boats as an achievement. It would be an achievement if they went home because their homeland improved with our help. The deeper truth is that as a nation, we really don't give a shit about that part of the equation, and that makes us all just as pathetic as the politicians in Parliament.

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.

Quick Shots - 26/Feb/2014

Manus Island Breakout

I've been busy writing a script. Yes. I'm a paid writer at the moment so I've been a little quiet on this front. It doesn't mean I haven't been following the news. This business on Manus Island is turning into something rather awful as messengers keep getting shot. At the crux of the issue is fundamentally how this government actually sees the role of government and how it fits into what we might call a democracy. That's right, we're actually seeing a coalition government that has very little tolerance for what it takes to be a democratic government save for the bit - the election - that got them in.

I guess we ought not to be surprised when the government subcontracts out the detaining of asylum seekers, then it also subcontracts out the security to private firms. And it should not surprise us that such firms might have far less ethical staff or formal procedures when compared to a government organ, and that it should lead to mishandling a population like the detainee asylum seekers. What is worse is perhaps that the minister of immigration Scott Morrison would lie to us about the status of Manus Island and its riot. There is no other way of putting it. He made announcements to effect that were otherwise to information that he had already obtained. This is lying - in spite of Scott Morrison's protestations to be otherwise. Worse still has been the general lack of transparency about the whole handling of asylum seekers, which admittedly not a new problem with this government but a fundamental philosophical one.

All this culminated in ALP Senator Stephen Conroy accusing General Angus Campbell as aiding a cover-up. The furore has been rather telling. Today, the Defence department chief David Hurley came out swinging in defence of Campbell. Now, the Coalition are carrying on as if some great offence has been made by Stephen Conroy. You sort of worry about how the Coalition sees the military because they're essentially using the privilege of the military operations to say "we can't tell you what we're doing." The problem with this is that it places the military out of reach of proper scrutiny. Worse still, the Coalition Government's accountability is taken away with it, so there's really no telling what this government is doing, but no, they're not telling. They are effectively saying the chain of command of the ADF stops at the Prime Minister's office for him to use at his leisure. This should be constitutionally debatable - not that anybody would bother - but it should be debated.

To add insult to injury the same government wants to break custom and break open the cabinet papers from the Rudd Gillard government so there is absolutely no quid pro quo there; worse still, they *only* do things that suit themselves for no good reason other than it suits themselves.  I can't think of a dirtier modus operandi than that, and if that's not anti-democratic, I don't know what is. But I digress.  The more salient thing is that the Coalition Government has adopted the military chain of command and military protocol as its defence for not being held accountable to the Senate of the land. This is a bit like ancient Rome on the eve of the Triumvirates. You could make a cartoon of Senator Publius Conrus in a toga summoning Consul Claudius Morrisus to account on the Senate floor and Claudius Morrisus says he cannot discuss the said matter because it would affect the operations of General Pompei Campbellius in North Africa against the pirates at sea. In fact that's exactly what it is, and what we're seeing is the Coalition Government actively trying to limit the control of military from the Senate.

I can't tell you how disturbing this is, because any time you cut the military loose from government control like this, it sets a precedent. A precedent which will be abused at some point in the future, even if there is not much harm today. I understand David Hurley's protestations but he is *wrong*. This *is* a problem for Australia and Senator Conroy is correct in asking General Campbell whether the ADF is politically in bed with the Liberal National Party to such a degree that it would take such military operations out of the purview of the Australian Senate.  History is full of military operations done outside of government purview that turn into major political disasters. The Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria in the 1930s was such an entity that refused to be accountable to the Diet of Japan. The 1960s CIA is such an organ that created the conditions for the Bay of Pigs and in a roundabout way brought about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The rise of the Triumvirate in ancient Rome was exactly this problem, where the Roman army ended up being a privatised organ of ambitious citizens. It killed their republic - which in fact might jive well with Tony Abbott's anti-Republican position.

Which is to say (and jokes aside), not only is this Coalition Government not very well versed in science, it appears it is not very well versed in history. And where it seems to discount scientific findings with spurious and casual disdain, it would also ignore lessons of history at its peril. In that light, I can't say I'm impressed with Defence Department chief David Hurley or the other indignations hurled at Stephen Conroy for his remarks by Tony Abbott and company.

Now be that as it may, Stephen Conroy is still a nincompoop in my books. It pains me to defend him. But that's the nature of having truth on your side - it's defensible to be truthful. Morrison and his lies are not defensible in any way shape or form. The endorsement that at least Morrison is not a wimp from Tony Abbott, is a bit like claiming the best asset of Maria Sharapova's tennis game is her grunt. It amazes me that the Coalition don't worry about things like the truth or facts; instead they worry about form. They just seem to love it when they can push the envelope of hypocrisy as far as it can be pushed, if it looks good to them and their punters. I really worry about the mental health of people who think this is a good government or for that matter better government than they were getting under the Rudd-Gillard ALP.