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.  

View From The Couch - 02/Nov/2015

World Series Game 5

Well, that was tense, and then it all blew out in the top of the 12th. The most contentious thing about this loss is that going into the 9th, the Mets were winning 2-1. Matt Harvey was pitching a gem; Collins had his closer up and suddenly there was this shuffle of whether to pull Harvey or not. Harvey apparently instead on going out in the 9th, walked the first guy and then gave up a double. Collins pulled Harvey only then, but it was too late, that was enough for the Royals to tie the game, thus setting up a duel of bullpens. 3 innings later, the Mets blinked, and by blink we might mean completely shut their eyes because the Royals poured on 5 runs. Davis came in to strike out the side and that was all she wrote for 2015.

Collins is going to get grilled about that 9th inning choice for the rest of his career. Had it been Joe Torre, he would have pulled any one of his starters for Mariano Rivera, so as a Yankees fan, it's a little hard to understand how Collins could even flip one way and let Harvey go back out in the 9th. Even Joe Girardi would have sent out Dellin Betances or Andrew Miller, and before Miller, David Robertson and or Mo. It reminds one of Grady Little sticking with Pedro Martinez a little too long in 2003.

The top of the 12th featured yet another error for Daniel Murphy. Daniel Murphy got didley-squat to hit in the World Series - the Royals pitched around him as if he were peak Barry Bonds so Murphy ended up drawing a bunch of walks. the real shame was how everybody else was very quiet with the bats. When it really got down to it, the Royals really could hit bullpen arms like nobody's business, and there was no stopping these guys.

Still, 30years is a long time between World Series wins for the Royals. That goes equally for the Mets who last won it in 1986.

The GST Scuttlebutt

One shouldn't be surprised that the GST debate is back on the agenda as the Federal Government seeks to raise the GST. The old arguments against putting in the GST in the first place have resurfaced, pointing out how regressive a tax it is, but in many ways the Federal government can't restructure taxation in this country without addressing the GST.

The curious thing about the GST is that in its original guise, it was meant to usher in a reform of taxes back in the late 1990s, but of course nearly two decades later the government finds itself short of cash again, and so we must contemplate the GST once more. You really wonder where all the money got squandered.

The original version of the GST skipped food, health and education. It appears part of this exemption has come back on the table for reconsideration. This gives rise to a four way grid between keeping the GST at 10% or raising to 15%, with or without the exemption of food, Health & Education. One imagines the Libs would like to raise the GST to 15% while keeping the exemption while the ALP would like to keep the GST at 10% even if it meant losing the exemption. Put more bluntly, the rich bastards who send their kids to expensive private schools would much rather have a 15% GST and keep the private school fees off the GST discussion. If you saw them yourself, you'd understand why.

The ALP has far less of a worthy position on it. The last three times there have been discussions on the GST, whether it was Keating's 'Option C' in 1985 or John Hewson's Fightback, or John Howard finally bringing us the GST, it's not really had a economically credible position in opposing it except to say it was regressive and they were against it. When it finally came in, they said they wouldn't repeal it, and such has been the ALP's rather wishy-washy position on it.

Of course, there isn't a good position on it. It's all going to cost the average punter more; that's the point of all this tax review and shoring up government income. Either way it goes, we know the GST price rise is coming and there's probably very little we can do to stop it. The states simply need that money.

Couldn't Stand The Weather

The news today is that this October was the hottest on record in 106years.

"The extreme monthly anomalies were a result of exceptional early-season warmth at the start of the month and persistence of above-average temperatures throughout the month as a whole," the bureau said. 

Compared with the previous warmest October in 1988, last month was 0.7 degrees warmer. 

"Certainly it's an October that was hotter than most Novembers," Karl Braganza, head of climate monitoring at the bureau. The national mean temperature came in at 25.6 degrees.

Make of that what you will.

News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Sep/2015

ZIRP Didn't End Today

After months of threatening to lift interest rates, the US Fed decided not to raise interest rates today. Which is pretty damn amazing really because it does nothing but punch a hole in the credibility of the US Fed when it talks about how it sees its own policy. Think out it for a moment. If it were the RBA and Glenn Stevens, it would be unthinkable for him to spell putsch a move for 9 months of the year, only to squib on the threat when you were supposed to do it.

As it is, the RBA has us on a strange parallel world to ZIRP with our very own TWIRP, which is causing its own havoc. Interesting then that the constraints of the US Fed running ZIRP forcesAustralia to adopt its TWIRP and so Glenn Stevens wants to urge Janet Yellen to just get on with it.  Of course if the US Fed does raise it even 0.25%, about a trillion dollars worth of derivative contracts go up in smoke. but this is the thing about derivative contracts: they're only tangentially related to the real world economy.

Of course, the reason the US Fed didn't raise their interest rates according to Janet Yellen's statement is that they are concerned about China's economy - Something both Glenn Stevens and Michael Pascoe think are over-stated as being problematic. And yet, you have to wonder what the US Fed knows about China.

The Wild Wishcasting Phase

Those conservative chumps in the Coalition must be dreaming big, now that albatross Tony has been sent packing, and the poll bounce shows they would demolish a Bill Shorten-led ALP if there were an election held today. They haven't had numbers like since the days of Julia Gillard and even then Tony Abbott himself had terrible poll numbers. They might have to go back to 2010 just before Kevin Rudd got knifed by Julia Gillard to a time when they had a commanding lead in the polls.
Which is to say, at least for this week they've got it good.

They're probably starting to think big about how this might translate into votes, but really we need to put a big caveat on Malcolm Turnbull's alleged popularity. For a start if your predecessor is Tony Abbott, even a pile of dog dung is bound to come up smelling roses. This electorate was dying for something much better than Tony Abbott, so naturally there would be a poll bounce.

But here's the thing, if Malcolm Turnbull is really going to capture votes from the Left, he's seriously going to have to do something that even the hardest credential-ed lefty is going to admit is good, and that means having to do something the right hates, and there's simply no leeway in Malcolm Turnbull to do any such thing. And that being the case, it won't be long before the stench of old Liberal and National Party policy positions will stink like the dead fish that they are, and bring Malcolm Turnbull's popularity down to their level.

In turn, the smart advice going for Lefties is for them not to get too excited.

Not All That Dies Old Is Bad, Not All That's Young And Remaining Is Good

I haven't paid much attention to the Canning by-election brought on by the death of Don Randall. Don Randall of course tabled to motion for a spill back in February and was founded in his car not long after that. If this were a mafia movie, you'd draw your own conclusions - but it is not, they say he died of a heart attack in his car. It's hard to tell what sort of MP he was, but if he thought enough to urge his party members to dump Tony Abbott, there was probably a decent man right there.

Andrew Hastie is the man running for the coalition in his place and he's an ex-SAS man. This sort of candidacy makes my skin crawl because those guys lead a pretty narrow life with a narrow world view and they might have a world of experience in the extremes of a combat zone, they're not guys known for a deep and compassionate outlook on their fellow man.

Andrew Hastie has accused the ALP of not supporting our troops in the Afghanistan based on his personal experience. It seems like a really crass thing to say in your run up to your polls, and really shows you the sort of grubby candidate that he is. It's pretty bleak that a sensible elder dies to be replaced by some narrow-core one-eyed zealot. Our polity is doing really badly right there.

Ragging On Bill Shorten

You can count me as one of the people who got very hot under the collar about Bill Shorten's role in bringing down Kevin Rudd in 2010. I'm still not that crash hot about how that all went down as you know; but then, I wasn't exactly crazy about the whole ALP way before Kevin Rudd even became Leader back in 2007. For a better part of 24months while the Abbottoir reigned, Bill Shorten's stint as Opposition leader has looked at times like a very contrived, stage-managed wave to *his* people, a knowing wink that he was just going to sit pretty and be a small target - even though Tony Abbott made things simple.

An even then I have enough perspective and patience to say, the ALP need to let Bill Shorten do his thing, what ever it is. There isn't an easy road to government; there isn't a short cut.

In the wake of the Turnbull seizing the day, Shorten's approval rating has sunk to 24% and there are now grumbles in the electorate about his 'performance' already. This is galling because it's from the very same people who wanted Malcolm Turnbull over Tony Abbott but vote only for the ALP anyway.
Folks, you need to grow up and grow a brain.

Mind you I had a chance to chat to somebody who told me they were one of these ALP voters who wanted Malcolm Turnbull and their reasoning was that independent of sides, Abbott *had* to go for the good of Australia (which is hard to dispute) and that it was now time for the ALP to step up and put in their best leader to square off against the best the coalition has brought to the table. I enquired of them who they thought the better leader would be and they answered in a heartbeat, "Albo!"

When I expressed incredulity, they replied that Tanya Plibersek would make a better leader than Bill Shorten. I just want to point out that the ALP haven't contested a single Federal Election with Bill Shorten as leader. Do you think there might be a problem with the Australian political culture precisely because the electorate is already so bloodthirsty? These politicians are only reflecting our choppy-changey electorate.

It's not shopping for shoes or the next sugar hit at the candy store. It's political leadership we're talking here. ALP supporters would be out of their fucking minds to want to start jockeying for replacing Shorten.

View From The Couch - 15/Sep/2015

Oops We Did It Again

For the 5th time in 5 years we have a new Prime Minister! It was like I was in delirium, only to wake up as the action began to unfold on the TV. Before I go into that one, I just want to describe to you my past few days.

The Backstory

On Friday I contracted a Flu. Call it "Flu Strain 2015". As you may recall I only recently got out of under the Norovirus thing, so my immune system was not ready for this event. By 10pm on Friday night I was running a fever, my nose was running like a waterfall, and all the joints in my body were aching. I think I blacked out for most of the next 48hours. If you asked me where I was I could only tell you that I was at the fevered gates of hell trying to solve mathematical puzzles about logistical problems that didn't exist, while writhing and groaning in pain trying to find a comfortable position to rest. When you're like this, the bed becomes too soft, the floor is too hard, the couch is too cool, the bed is too hot; and around and around you go, twisting and turning and labouring under a head splitting headache, just trying to find a modicum of comfort that does not exist.

You think about dying and 1919.

The back hurts because you've been lying on it too much and your shoulders hurt because you've been lying your side trying to avoid lying on your painful back. The head thing was great. I felt like I'd caught a falling piano with my skull. I managed to lose a substantial amount of muscle mass in mere days, and now I can hardly get up, let alone eat anything. I went through 14 bottles of water and still felt dehydrated, crunched through and swallowed 50 Vitamin C tabs in that time. Now I'm on a course of antibiotics to stop secondary bacterial infections moving into my lungs.
Pretty happy scene over here.

Did I mention the fact that I stopped drinking coffee during this time? Well, that happened not out of choice but because I couldn't stomach anything - but it also meant I added the caffeine-withdrawal headaches into the equation. On Monday, I finally ate a scoop of ice-cream, a cob of corn and a wafer cracker as I hunkered down to watch some 'Daredevil'. This is the virtue of binge-watching on Netflix. You don't have to think about what you're going tow watch next. There's always more good content, it just keeps coming. You could be semi-comatose like I was and still get through the day, let time flow in a way that doesn't leave you thinking about dying and 1919 straight through the agony.

Anyway, around 4pm, I got bored, and switched over to ABC24, just to catch the beginning of the drama, with Malcolm Turnbull fronting the microphones, announcing he was challenging Tony Abbott for the leadership. It was on! And that meant I lay there sprawled on the sofa watching the whole damn thing - which was mostly commentators conjecturing and editorialising and parsing statements made by politicians. It's funny how irrelevant all this looks when you've just spent 48hours in a fevered hell.

I don't buy the Turnbull contention that Bill Shorten would be a catastrophic choice for Prime Minister should he win against Tony Abbott, any more than I buy the contention that this is a good or solid government as argued by the likes of Hockey, Abetz and Kevin-Bloody-Andrews. The pundits who are brought on for right wing balance sounded even more detached from reality than some of the fevered nightmares I was having earlier.

Still, the "Told-You-So" moment is resonating big in me because I did predict Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership wouldn't make October.

"Not The ALP"

Tony Abbott made his statement and his pitch was essentially, "we're better than them. If you replace me, we're no better than them. Do you really want to be them?" The interesting thing about that rhetorical construction is that by the time he's asking it, it's too damn late - your party has already become the enemy you so despise. Which is not surprising because these kinds of hatreds embody projections and misjudgments coloured by one's own prejudices. I for one just can't get into the mindset of conservatives who think Tony Abbott was doing such a bang up job.

It's also symptomatic of Tony Abbott's gaffe-prone leadership in as much as he opens his mouth, simple un-nuanced sentences come out, the meaning is parsed and misinterpreted, and results in a backlash. Malcolm Turnbull of course has a wonderful faculty of language where he speaks in full conjugated sentences and can convey nuanced arguments with varying shades of grey distinctions. It's really no match - but it explains the hostility of the rusted-on conservatives towards Turnbull. They just don't understand him. Because they're idiots.

If you had to put some finer point on Tony Abbott's failure as a leader. it was that he was not a terribly deep thinker. And as a trivial thinker, his worst mistake was that he hardly knew himself, but presumed to know the world. It's extraordinary in a man so traveled and educated and in such high office, but the man simply could not figure out the logical inconsistency of his platforms. Which effectively made him look like a functional idiot. And of course - as Machiavelli noted - once contempt sets in against a leader it is corrosive to the point of destruction. I am hoping today is the last entry wherein I tag my entry with both 'Tony Abbott' and 'Stupidity'. It is best for all sides to just out that Tony Abbott Prime Ministership into the record books and move right along.

And so it came to pass that Malcolm Turnbull finally ousted Tony Abbott.

Let's Not Get Carried Away, Their Politics Still Suck

I've written in the past what I think of Malcolm Turnbull as the alternative. I'm not so high on him as some on the left are. I think he's going to do the expedient thing to stay in power for as long as possible, which means he won't be putting through legislation for gay marriage or shut down the Nauru and Manus Island concentration camps. He is, above and beyond Tony Abbott himself, a candidate for the big end of town.

The marginal improvement will be that he won't be so beholden to particular people on the lunar right like Tony Abbott was to Gina Rinehardt. Instead, you can count on him to be deeply in cahoots with the Telco oligopoly, the Banking oligopoly, the Supermarket oligopoly the Mining oligopoly, and whatever else links he might have with boards of the ASX200. In other words it would look less like crony capitalism without executions - but when they talk about reforms to increase productivity, they're still talking about whacking out penalty rates and weekend rates.

As Tanya Plibersek blurted out this morning, it's the same package, different salesman. People are reading way too much in to the apparent socially-progressive-ness of Malcolm Turnbull. If he looks socially progressive, it's only because he wants a Republic, believes in climate science and climate change, and supports Gay Marriage. He's still into regressive taxation and $100,000 uni degrees, and dressing these things as "opportunity".

The Meaning Of Five In Five

Why has our polity been beset with the kind of ructions that result in 5 Prime Ministers in 5 years? This is the topic that will be studied for years to come. Antony Green, ABC election analyst offered up the view that our two major parties are now too rigid. The fact that in other parliamentary democracies, voting with the party is not enforced so vigorously, it gives rise to vote with the conscience. The flip-side of that is if a faction wants something their way, they have to install a leader who sees things completely their way. And this explains the tremendous amount of rope Julia Gillard got from the unions as well as the carte blanche destruction Tony Abbott was asked to wreak upon the renewables sector in this country by the climate sceptics in his party.

Is our democracy somehow broken? Tony Abbott blamed the media in his final speech as Prime Minister, but it seems what has happened is that the population has learned to hit the polity hard through polls. They voted in Tony Abbott because they didn't like the ALP. Then they realised they liked Tony Abbott less, and so they kept sending messages to Canberra. Eventually the party power structure took notice and swapped out the Prime Minister. The frenetic polling is in a sense, the substitute for voting - but it got the job done. Seems to me the people got what they wanted so democracy must be working quite fine.

The other notable phenomenon is that Australia has become incredibly diverse. The views held by the electorate - and let's remember there's compulsory voting so everybody's thinking counts - has become equally diverse. In many instances, the combined political views are simply too diverse to be put under 2 major parties all the time. There is no comfortable middle. There is just the frenetic movement of the opinion needle and polls, poking their displeasure at the politicians for not being as diverse as the public it serves.

The years Tony Abbott was Leader of Opposition and then Prime Minister represent 6 years in which the lunar right of the Liberal Party got a hold of the agenda to push it as far as it could take it. Naturally the public objected and so the lunar right's 'man' has been pushed out of the driver's seat. Democracy is still functioning.

The Demographic Long Game

The instalment of Malcolm Turnbull by the Liberal Party also marks a decided move to fight history. It is the conservative way. If the future comes knocking, they do their best to lock the doors and turn out the lights, and make like nobody's home. It's actually a pitched attempt to dig in with the Baby Boomer generation and up, one last time. If the current group of Libs lose to the ALP and Greens in the coming election,they would have to go through a generational change, and then it will be Generation X on leadership in both sides of the house. For the Boomer demographic, this is possibly the last or next to last stretch in which the demographic weight associated with the Baby Boomers can call the shots.

The move to Turnbull shows the Boomers are not going out with a fight - and this has interesting implications. If Bill Shorten is ousted and the ALP look for an alternative leader, they might settle upon Anthony Albanese who was the runner up at the last contest for ALP Leader. He's a Boomer. So  the picture becomes Turnbull versus Albanese, Boomer versus Boomer, locking in an entrenched position. If Malcolm Turnbull's should turn into a lengthy government, then we'll be holding off Gen-X for a long while yet, in which case the conservatives win big time.

It stands to reason. All the forces with the invested capital betting one way and one way alone on fossil fuels are not, will not, cannot just give in to the upcoming generation change. They have to delay it as long as they can to suck the most money out of the system to pay for their retirements. This is the core of the conservative cause, which used to be the grey power block in the votes. The fight is to entrench the interests of the elderly - which nobody disputes is important - but as economic growth has stalled globally, this has meant it comes at the expensive younger generations; something that 'the young' do not yet understand if some of them intend to vote for Malcolm Turnbull.

Yet the conservative cause in this country knows full well where the lines drawn because Joe Hockey's moving of the retirement age up to 70 starts with Generation-X, deftly keeping entitlements in place for the last of the Boomers. It also explains the $100,000 degrees, and a great deal of other unfair things in the 1st Hockey budget.

The trick is, when the following generation comes through, they might not look upon the entitlements as necessary as the current generation of politicians. I've long predicted that Generation X will be forced to not pay those debts because there will be other debts that have to be paid, and this is going to be a social fault line. Everybody knows this, so the game plan is lock in the entitlements now so it becomes impossible to lock-pick. And to that end, the conservatives needed somebody who can feasibly hold office a lot longer than Tony Abbott. Faced with being wiped out, and then seeing a rising Gen-X leadership of the ALP taking over, the conservatives must have figured they can't go down without firing their best weapon.