News That's Fit To Punt - 07/Apr/2015

RBA Doesn't Cut Interest Rates

It's amazing how a non-news makes the news. The RBA did not cut official interest rates and so the share market went into a bit of a spin. You can read the statement they issued but a non-change should mean no news, but here we are.

Fear of fuelling the Sydney and Melbourne real estate markets appears to have trumped hope for job-seekers and borrowers across the nation with the Reserve Bank leaving the official cash rate on hold in April rather than opting for cheaper credit to spark a new round of hiring. 

But a rate cut has now become almost certain in May - just before the federal budget - after the RBA listed the pre-conditions and backed specific efforts through tougher regulation designed to "contain" house price growth being inflated by prospective landlords. 

"Growth in lending to investors in housing assets is stronger than to owner-occupiers," RBA governor Glenn Steven said in his monthly statement. 

"Dwelling prices continue to rise strongly in Sydney, though trends have been more varied in a number of other cities. The bank is working with other regulators to assess and contain risks that may arise from the housing market."

The unemployed go a mention in there. It's this traditional thing where if unemployment is too high, they cut rates in the opes that it promotes businesses to hiring people. You get the feeling that they're not hiring at 2.25%, would they necessarily hire more if the rates gets down to 2.00%? And keep in mind, at such historic lows, what kind of fragile business would it be to need 2.00% interest rates to decide, "hey, we'll hire more peeps!"?

On the other hand, the correlation between lowering interest rates and more investors entering the market is more direct; I mean, there is no cushion of business sentiment, it's straight up maths. So the equally blunt question is, what kind of investor gets into property on the basis that interest rates are at 2.00% but it's too hard at 2.25%? Equally weird as the business that can only hire at when interest rates are at 2.00% - but not necessarily symmetrical. I would dare say the investor balking at the border of 2.25% is far dogdier than the employer balking at the borderline of 2.00% and 2.25%.   

Either way, the unemployed person is like the garni du jour next to the sandwich. They can't get a job because god only knows why and until they do, they can't get into property and even then it's doubtful that they can without shouldering greater risk or higher interest rates. It simply doesn't help them in the near-, mid-, or long-term that interest rates are cut, and it can hurt them when they go up. That's a tough spot. I was thinking as I was reading the article that the CPI under-reporting has doubly hurt the unemployed because they get less dollar value from the dole than they used to, and they're further away from ever owning any assets so they're locked into being poor in the medium term if not right out to the end of their lives. 

Well done RBA! 

Ideology Gives Rise To The Thought Police

I was doing the St. Johns ambulance First Aid course last week. Every time it came to dealing with the upper torso and the inner thigh, the male instructor would lay down the fact that it would be better to find a female person to do it than doing it as a male. I get it. It might be misconstrued. So, the First Aid instructor might have had a few brushes with the gender politic thing and came off second  best, or maybe he witnessed the results of being misconstrue, but it was made absolutely clear there's a gender divide. Personally, I'd do exactly as instructed. I sure as hell wouldn't do anything that could be misconstrued and that would mean I would go look for a woman to deal with a female injured person. Vital minutes could be lost, but - fuck that - I'd rather not be misconstrued either. 

The point is, you still have to think of gender in an emergency. Why the hell would sexism ever disappear? This led me to think that even when the final bastion of sexism is destroyed, it would just get reinvented as this kind double-think. On that note, I present to you this stupid article:

Labor's health spokeswoman Catherine King attacked Senator Leyonhjelm for another of his posts in which she said he trivialised the serious issue that is breast cancer.

Under a Catallaxy Files article titled "Feel a boob day", "DavidLeyonhjelm" wrote "It's not enough to perve. Detecting breast cancer requires palpation." 

"One of the best ways to do this is to bet a woman 20 cents you can make her tits wobble without touching them. After a minute or so of close up staring at them, you grab them with both hands and make them wobble. Of course you then give her the 20 cents. It's a small price to pay for reducing breast cancer." 

Senator Leyonhjelm admitted making the second comment, saying this was a "longstanding joke" between him and his wife as it had actually happened to her in real life and urged others to see the humour. 

"At the time a guy actually did it to her, she giggled but I think I found it more amusing than she did," he said.
"Have you ever heard of FTITCTAJ? F--- Them If They Can't Take A Joke," he said. But Ms King said it was no laughing matter.

"Breast cancer is a tragic disease which takes a terrible toll on Australian women," said Ms King. 

"Every day in Australia, on average, 40 women are diagnosed with breast cancer, and 8 women will die of this disease. 

"I cannot comprehend how anyone could make light of this in such a degrading, and juvenile fashion.

Argh. It gives me a headache that they're arguing this in the Senate. If there's one thing worse than the doublethink necessitated by the political correctness, it's the unreconstructed sexism of older men who make no attempt to re-examne their position. 

And wowsers. 

Go On Joe, Bite The Hand That Feeds You

Down in Eden-Monaro, a famously swinging electorate, the voters have been polled and they say they are angry with tax avoidance by big corporations and are anxious about penalty rates. 

Polling obtained by Fairfax Media found more than nine out of 10 people in the NSW bellwether federal seat of Eden Monaro believe the government is not doing enough to ensure large companies pay their fair share of tax. 

The issue will take centre stage this week with the first public hearings of the Senate inquiry into tax avoidance. Representatives of Google, Apple, Microsoft, News Corp and miner Glencore are due to appear in front of the committee.

Almost 75 per cent of 707 people polled in Eden Monaro said big companies paid too little tax, while just 3 per cent said they paid too much. In launching the tax white paper process, Treasurer Joe Hockey flagged the need for a corporate tax cut to make the Australian business environment more internationally competitive.

You wonder if this message is getting to WTE Joe. After all, given how much the international miners  donated to the Coalition, you'll never be sure that the Coalition isn't a puppet for these interests.  WTE Joe is allegedly trying to get more tax out of these companies through a 'Google Tax' but it wouldn't mean much unless it was getting everybody - and by that we include Rupert Murdoch, whose Australian operations shipped 4.5billion out of Australia before tax. Will WTE have the fortitude to tax the biggest media benefactor for the Coalition. Or will he do what he did last year and go after the small fry harder while letting the big fish swim away with billions? Because being even handed with this would mean going after the very hand that feeds him and his party. 

The Passing Of Malcolm Fraser

The Missing Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Ramsay pretty much nails it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gender Card

Julia Gillard, Feminist Superstar

You have to admit, the world moves in mysterious ways. Overnight, Tony Abbott became an international laughing stock as  result of Julia Gillard's big rant.

The most enthusiastic praise came from US women's site Jezebel, which described Ms Gillard as "one badass mother----er".

"In an impassioned 15-minute smackdown in front of the House of Representatives, the country's first female leader gave a scathing speech calling out opposition leader Tony Abbott's extremely misogynistic comments, actions, views on abortion and single women, all while pointing in his face."

Jezebel also highlighted some of her "choice quotes" including:
- "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the house of representatives, he needs a mirror.
- "I was very offended personally the Leader of the Opposition said abortion is the easy way out."
- "I was offended when he stood next to a sign that described me as a 'man's bitch.'"

Online political magazine Salon said US politicians such as Todd Akin, who said "legitimate rape" did not result in pregnancy, and Allen West, who was blasted after telling a Democrat she was "not a lady", could learn something from Ms Gillard.

"If only the US could borrow Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to take on Congress's misogynist caucus," Salon said.
"We wonder if Gillard takes requests: Todd Akin, R.-Mo., and Allen West, R.- Fla., to name just a couple, could certainly use a similar treatment."

And so it went. Germaine Greer, eat your heart out, the world has a new poster-child for Feminism. And yes, Tony Abbott looked a right git toward the end of Gillard's rant.

Shut Up 'n' Take Yer Medicine Tony

Of course today, Tony Abbott's trying to come back at the rant, trying to characterise it as 'playing the gender card'.

Mr Abbott said today he would not retreat from his criticism of the Prime Minister.
He called on Labor to stop playing the gender card.
''Just because the Prime Minister has sometimes been the victim of unfair criticism doesn't mean she can dismiss any criticism as sexism or she can dismiss any criticism on gender grounds,'' Mr Abbott said.

The staggering chutzpah of Tony Abbott is that he nary shows that he has to acknowledge he got beat by his own cudgel yesterday, good and proper. Maybe this kind of chutzpah is something admirable to a certain kind of conservative mindset, but I wonder if he's going to ever overcome the international PR damage of being 'that guy who had to sit there and take that 15minute rant from the first female Prime Minister of Australia'.

The sad (and decidedly ugly) point about the whole Peter Slipper affair is that Peter Slipper was indeed a one time friend of Tony Abbott, who got sold down the river by Tony Abbott. Peter Slipper - for whatever reasons of his own - made his move to accept the role of Speaker of House if for no other reason than the money and prestige. It certainly damaged the Coalition because it went against the overall aim of destabilising the fragile Parliament where the independents held so much power, however it really must be asked whether it was realistic of Tony Abbott and his front benchers to expect the apple of government to fall on their laps like some gift from the gods.

To this - mostly imaginary, partly mirage-like - end, Tony Abbott has bent his considerable effort at portraying the Prime Minster as a lying witch, bitch slut and whatever else, as well as hunted Craig Thomson into a kind of wilderness where he may never get a fair trial should he ever have to face charges. The utter lack of restraint and the most naked of blind ambitions has made him less of a candidate for the highest elected office of Australia.

Now, he might complain and call all this dressing down he got from Julia Gillard as Gillard playing the gender card, but no, no, no, Mr. Abbott, this is just the beginning. It is fairly clear that the polite, protective rubber gloves are off, and Julia Gillard has stainless steel fists.

Why Does Paul Sheehan Even Have A Job At The SMH?

I know he only writes opinion pieces but really, somebody should tell him the tone of his writing is as low as he accuses others of being.

After sending out two attack dogs, Gutter and Sewer, to do the dirty work, after hiding behind two political zombies, Insufferable and Unspeakable, to stay in power, after using the Minister for Innuendo and the Compromise-General to play the gender card, the mask has finally dropped away to reveal the driver of the politics of hate in Australia.

The mask fell at exactly 2.42pm in the House of Representatives. Looking on were the member for Gutter, Anthony Albanese, the member for Sewer, Wayne Swan, the Minister for Innuendo, Tanya Plibersek, and the Compromise-General, Nicola Roxon, and the independents who will do anything to avoid facing their electorates, Mr Insufferable, Robert Oakeshott, and his fellow regional zombie, Mr Unspeakable, Tony Windsor.

Someone had to set Gutter and Sewer loose. Someone directed Innuendo and Compromise to play the gender card. Someone paid the bill for Insufferable and Unspeakable. Someone's authority still rests on the vote of Craig Thomson. And someone had to approve making Peter Slipper the Speaker despite his being manifestly disrespected by either side of the house, a low point of political opportunism.

At 2.42 pm on Tuesday that someone rose to speak. The mask fell away. Julia Gillard came out snarling. The Parliament had before it a great issue, the dignity of the house itself, which had been traduced by the scandal that had attached itself to Slipper.

Instead of directly addressing the issue of a discredited speakership which had become engulfed in an expensive and degrading legal action that did no credit to anyone involved, least of all the Attorney-General, the Prime Minister wasted no timing in using misdirection and personal abuse.

That's all pretty vulgar as he is trying to paint the Prime Minister for daring to point out the blindingly obvious - the reason why the Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott cannot be taken seriously for his motion against Peter Slipper on the basis of misogyny and sexism is that the only way to interpret Tony Abbott's public utterances and prevarications and qualifications and babble-burble-bicker-banter is that he himself is sexist and a misogynist. And no amount of hauling Abbott's wife out into the limelight is going to fix that fact - not perception, but fact on the public record. Similarly, no amount of name-calling and belittling of the Prime Minster (for being a woman, I guess)  is going to add any moral authority to a man who has made hypocrisy a sport all his life and can't even tell when he's doing it.

Paul Sheehan then goes on to argue that Julia Gillard lied about the Carbon Tax.

"Lied"!

Now, regular readers of this blog will well know that I do not approve of Julia Gillard and will not vote for her or the ALP at the next Federal Election. My mind is made up; she cannot persuade me otherwise. This is between me and my political conviction.

All the same, even I know and understand and remember well enough, that what happened with respect to the Carbon Tax was that she had to go ahead with it in order to form government with the one Green MP and the 3 independents. It didn't matter that she campaigned against it and removed Kevin Rudd in order not to have the ETS. It was the hung Parliament that forced her to agree to the Carbon Tax. To argue that she "lied" given these circumstances is stretching the truth way beyond breaking point. It's one thing for idiot pundits like Alan Jones and other shock jocks to call this a lie: They're not smart enough to understand how things went that led up to that point in history. They're intellectual pygmies (and I'm being un-nice to real pygmies when I say that) preaching to the brain-damaged sub-literate morons who cannot read newspapers nor hold a thought long enough to understand history (but alas as citizens have the vote nonetheless).

However, a man who is paid to write opinion pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald website ought to have a better understanding than calling Julia Gillard a liar. It's willfully stupid and blind to the facts.

If I had Gina Rinehart's money to buy Fairfax, I'd make a point of sacking Paul Sheehan too.

The Lady Deserves A Beating

Sexism? I think Not

Kristina Kenneally may not indeed be the most odious Premier of NSW. It is a point I must concede. After all, Robert Askin sounds like he was as crooked as they come, and Bob Carr seems like one of the most insufferable human beings a man could meet. Nick Greiner left such a slimey impression what with his board memberships on so many dodgy PPPs, and Neville Wran was... Neville Wran.

The point being it is entirely possible she has not been the worst human being to grace the position of Premier of NSW. However, this puff piece had me choking.

During Verity Firth's husband's ecstasy scandal last week, Keneally's staff almost fell over laughing when asked if their boss had dabbled with drugs. She similarly fails to grasp sexual innuendo during office banter, they say.

For all these reasons the Premier is likely to recoil, rightly, at the disturbingly sexist view of her that has arisen in focus groups assembled by the Liberal Party.

A senior Liberal source says a theme has emerged, particularly among male voters, that can be boiled down to: Keneally is the one-night stand who was fun at the time but insisted on hanging around the next morning, even though you wanted her to leave.

It's always hard to know if selected snippets of internal polling like this reflect the true results or, more likely, illuminate one element for damaging effect. But there's no argument that opinion polls showed voters had an immediate attraction to Keneally when she took on the job from Nathan Rees in December 2009.

''It was a flirtation, or some sort of infatuation,'' the senior Liberal said. ''She's obviously attractive but it was more than that; it was a novelty to have an American as premier - an American woman as premier.''

Almost everyone is surprised by how hard and fast Keneally fell in the polls when the love affair ended - to the extent that she now lags the Liberals' Barry O'Farrell by 20 percentage points as preferred premier.

If people believe they've somehow been taken in by Keneally, that's their view, fine. But our first female premier deserves better than being objectified because of her gender.

The last bit  is nuts. What she deserves is the line from 'Unforgiven', "deserve's got nothing to do with it." along with the electoral bullet to put her out of her misery.

But before getting to that point, here are at least 2 problems of Kenneally's own links to scandal that this article glosses over. Number 1 is of course just how deep her dealings with Ron Medich (and the whole corrupt dealing aspect of Medich's empire) actually go, and number 2 is the allegation that the Barangaroo contract for car parks benefits her husband Ben directly. So no, it is not true to say she is scandal free herself.

The four women who marched in to replace Nathan Rees with Kristina Kenneally as Premier, if I recall correctly were Verity Firth, Angela D'Amore, Carmel Tebbutt and Virginia Judge. Of these 4 MPs, Verity Firth's in this drug scandal with her husband even if she had nothing to do with the said pill; Angela D'Amore has since been found to have been corrupt and been kicked out of the ALP; Virginia Judge has been accused of handing out grant money to her mates; which leaves Carmel Tebbutt the only one free of scandals.

I think the electorate has actually been highly supportive of the politically correct/anti-sexist line to the extent that when these women engineered the first female premier of NSW - though unelected she may be - the electorate perhaps was willing to give her a go. Okay, it's true, I made a commitment to never vote for her government - one which I will keep - but other people around me have been umm-ing and aah-ing. They've told me they like the reality of having a female mayor of Sydney, a female Premier of NSW, a female Prime Minister and a female Governor General, plus a Queen.

In other words, sexism isn't what's going to kick Kristina Kenneally out. In all realistic appraisal, when Kristina Kenneally's government does get voted out on 26th of March this year, it would be because of the collective shenanigans of all the NSW ALP members and staffers. That she contributed very little to the parade of scandals is not going to persuade people to keep this NSW government. Any argument mounted in favor of Kenneally's government should face up to that daunting, brutal, frank reality.

In that light, the article was one of the dumbest things I've ever read in the SMH in a long time.