News That's Fit To Punt - 06/feb/2017

Australian Kakistocrats

A long time ago, Don Chipp defected from the Liberals to form the Australian Democrats, a party that was eventually brought to ruin by its own careerist apparatchik Natasha Stott-Despoja. Anyway, we are finding out today that careerist, right-wing-nutter, Senator Cory Bernardi is splitting from the Liberal Party to form his own right wing party.

Cory Bernardi is set to upend centre-right politics in Australia and announce on Tuesday that he is resigning from the Liberal Party to head his own conservative movement in a stunning move that will rock the Turnbull government as Parliament returns for the new political year. 

Fairfax Media has learnt that in recent days Senator Bernardi informed his staff of his decision to defect from the party he has represented in the Senate for a decade. He will join the crossbench as an independent conservative senator for South Australia, fearing that populist parties will continue to rise if right-wing voters aren't given a viable alternative.

That's all very interesting as a rationale. He's indicating that there is a crowd of deplorable people out there that need a Fuhrer, so to speak, and he's nominating himself. Its interesting how fascists always think alike that way.

It would be interesting to see if Fatuous George goes with him from the Queensland LNP. It would be a party of pretty awful kinds of reactionary fascists wanting to attract the worst elements of society. I think the term to describe that is 'Kakistocracy'. So it would be appropriate to call themselves the Australian Kakistocrats.

What Aussies Want (But Won't Get)

Pleiades alerted me to this one today. This one is an interesting bit of polling.

In a survey covering dozens of hot-button issues put to a representative sample of Australian voters, a desire to rely less on imports and to manufacture more at home stood out as the number one thing most people agreed on.

In the aftermath of Mr Trump's US election victory, where he strongly advocated reviving that nation's manufacturing industry, nearly 83 per cent of surveyed Australian said they strongly agreed (42 per cent) or agreed (40.5 per cent) with the notion we are too reliant on foreign imports. Only 6 per cent disagreed.

Support for an expansion of Australia's manufacturing sector was robust regardless of age, gender, income or locality.

This striking finding comes from the Political Persona Project, one of the most comprehensive attempts ever made to profile different types of Australians based on their lifestyles, social values and politics. Conducted by Fairfax Media in collaboration with the Australian National University and Netherlands-based political research enterprise Kieskompas, the project revealed seven types of Australians, representative of the seven most dominant patterns of thinking in Australian society.

I hate to break it to people, but this is not what the future holds. Manufacturing jobs are disappearing, even in China. Even Foxconn, the famed manufacturer that produces stuff for Apple sacked their workers and replaced them with robots. Even over in America, Elon Musk's Gigafactory opened and it is entirely 'staffed' by robots. The assembly line jobs are not coming back to Australia or America if they're being lost even in China. In fact the trend has prompted Elon Musk to declare that Universal Basic Income will become the future because he sees no other way giving enough people, enough jobs.

Thus our politicians can posture all they like, but those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. In fact, even the service sector jobs will also be under threat, and basically humans are going to be superfluous to the economy with the vast majority not being beneficiaries of the said economy.  In the past, the work ethic was used to compel people to work the boring jobs, but if those jobs won't exist, it's going to be harder to sustain a culture on work and valued labour. The near future will be the government flogging people for not getting work that doesn't exist... which of course is what Centrelink is doing already.

More importantly, China is trying to re-gear its economy so that domestic consumption can sustain its own manufacturing behemoth as the combination of automation and rising wages eats into the long standing competitiveness of the Chinese exports. China is going to be hard pressed to keep its manufacturing as time goes on, and then they will have the same question of just what kind of industries are meant to emerge to keep people employed. Against that context, it's hard to imagine manufacturing making a big come back in Australia. If it ever comes back, it will come back as robots.

It's amazing that neither political party is spelling it out, because not being honest with the public is what is going to give rise to the Deplorables who vote for Brexit, Trump and ... well, Abbott.

The Crazy Is Everywhere (Please Don't Go Encouraging It)

I have to say, Paulin Hanson is the herpes infection of Australian politics, a despised, socially embarrassing irritation that keeps coming back.

Senator Hanson told Sunrise on Channel 7 on Monday she was thrilled with the strong performance of One Nation and even speculated that one day she could be Prime Minister.

"To be PM, what an honour that would be. It is a privilege to be the leader of the nation. But it is a tough position and I can understand that you can't please everyone all the time," she said. 

"My job now is to represent the people of Queensland and to build the party. Maybe one day, let down the track, in 15 or 20 years time, who knows what will happen."

It's cloud-cuckoo-land, that conversation where Pauline Hanson is casting herself as a Prime Minister. I guess our society is dumbing down and the more and more of the worst elements are getting their way, but if it ever turns out that One Nation is producing a Prime Minister for this country, it is the end.

Maybe The Work Ethic Thing Is Not Universal

The Weird Things You Think Up When You've Got The Flu

I had the flu (again) and was laid out for a couple of weeks. I'm really only recovering my lungs this week and I've had a lot of stuff to think about at work so I haven't been writing much here. Apologies for the break in transmission.

Anyway, in-between the moments of headaches and coughs and general ordinariness, I had this insight that maybe our society putting too much emphasis on the work thing. It sounds crazy, I know, but here's the thing. We've come to the point where our government has so demonised the 'dole bludger'. that they don't want to hand out unemployment benefits to somebody under 30 for 6months while they are unemployed. The work-for-the-dole programs are presented as this great idea where these young long term unemployed people are made to work for their unemployment benefit money.

But when you think about that, you have to ask if that job they're doing is absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, then why isn't the government paying proper money to get that done by proper professionals? It's paradoxical because if the government had that kind of money it wouldn't have to cut the dole. So what you have is the government insisting that some random, context-free 'work' be accomplished when in reality it might not be relevant to the economy except it makes some people feel better that lazy people are being made to work.

What if the point of life isn't work and getting money? Maybe we're looking at unemployment benefits all wrong. Maybe what the dole really is, is a kind of dividend we pay out to members of our society based on the increasing efficiency of our society? Consider for a moment that the rewards for work are not distributed in any kind fair way.

Take Gail Kelly, the retiring CEO of Westpac who reportedly got paid 12.8million dollars this financial year. No wonder she's quitting. That's like winning lotto. With all due respect to her fine acumen as CEO and qualifications, there's no way her efforts were really worth that much. And her effectiveness probably had a lot to do with turfing people out of jobs to make Westpac a more efficient organisation. Which is to say part of her $12.8million remuneration involved putting people on the dole and taking their share of the capitalist money pie.

This sort of distorted sharing of the profits of business is happening all over the place. If there's such a disconnect between work and the rewards, I don't see why we have to pretend that it's all about the effort. Let's face it, somebody can only work so many hours the work-for-the-dole program, as hard as they can, for as long as they can, but nobody is ever going pay that person $12.8million a year. That $12.8million is simply not related to effort or dedication or skill. How can we then pretend that it represents fair value for Gail Kelly's work?

It's more rational to say, at some point there is no connection between work and its rewards. It's just circumstance and chance. So why do we insist that the connection applies to unemployed people all the time? It seems more delusional to think that the merits of the work ethic applies to everything all the time, given the extreme ends of employment and unemployment.

And it's not like the unemployed come from nowhere.

Economic Rationalism Always Kills The Golden Goose

Try this for an example. Imagine a person working for company A, manufacturing product B. Company A decides to move production to China. This is good for the company because the production of B gets cheaper. usually, it's like the fraction a cost, so let's say there's a 75% saving right there.

So let's say they're generous and Company A might pay out a redundancy to the worker which effectively buys them out for length of time until they allegedly find another job. But the person might not find another job because all the companies are moving their manufacturing to China to get that 75% saving. Pretty soon you have all these workers who lost their jobs who can't get another equivalent job, because those jobs disappeared too. Pretty soon, they're the long term unemployed.

Meanwhile, company A has pocketed the 75% saving in manufacturing costs and posted it up as profit. Shareholders lap this up because it represents 'efficiency' and 'productivity'. So in one fell swoop, they've made an unemployed person in their own country and then given that job to somebody halfway around the globe, and pocketed the change. This has more in common with killing  the golden goose; but this kind of thing has been the mainstay of managerial theory for something like three decades. And they keep coming up with reasons why this is somehow going to lead to a better economy while in fact the middle class has collapsed in America and is sinking in Australia. it's clearly self-serving corporate nonsense.

What most governments say when this happens is that these people have got to be re-trained. In reality the retraining programs often fly in the face of what actually happening in the market place for jobs. If a person loses a join the manufacturing sector, then it's cheap and easy to retrain them for something else in the manufacturing sector. If the entire manufacturing sector is shrinking overall, then it's just musical chairs where somebody misses out on the chair each round. At some point the government has to re-train these workers out of their sector which is going to cost more time and money.

The point of all this is to say, corporations regularly export the jobs and collect the difference as profit. They even devise ways to pay taxes by going international and feeding earnings through some weird tax scheme in tax havens like Luxembourg. It seems incredibly inequitable to lump the government with the costs of the unemployment imported from the third world, then complain that the government is spending too much money on welfare. If the business lobby don't like this so much, they should just bring those jobs back and employ people. It always amazes me that the ALP don't just tell the business people this, but instead go on about working with businesses and hand over subsidies which are bribes to stop them killing these golden geese.