Swan v Hockey Debate

wayne starts off with a recounting of the govt. economic record. starts
in on the deficit, [which hockey will no doubt bang on at length].
[public speaking is not wayne's strong suit. fair enough, bloody good
treasurer though.] points out how coalition crap [repeated at length by
know-nothings] that we would be in deficit for decades!!!111 is in fact
crap. points out that debt level is equal to someone on a 100k salary
borrowing 6k. [good point, people seem to forget how to count when you
talk billions. wayne's hitting his stride.]

hockey starts off with some stuff about being positive about australia.
we've suffered by being far from the world [continental drift?]. asia is growing, world is
now divided into timezones not trading blocks [?]. internet. children. the world
wants what we have. the world wants our stability. they want to know we
are stable [geologically?] tony abbott robb and hockey have 20 years of
experience! they have put together budgets, labor debt. labor debt.
incompetence. australia's bounty. blah blah. [where is the point joe? are
you going to get to it?] work for welfare again. paid parental leave -
the one tony was ideolocially opposed to. over 50s off welfare and back
to work. [at 5.1% unemployment you might have to choose between young or
old welfare to work, where will these jobs come from if you cut the spending required to create them?]. tax reform - the libs are the party of tax reform. [other than the gst, what tax reform did the liberals deliver in 11.5 years of govt.?]

question time
chris uuuuuuuulmahn (moderator) - don't the world want our economic position?

Joe - it's because we had a surplus. our competion is asia, not the use. [er joe, do
you know what the OECD is?] asia has lower costs of production [they have
slaves joe, I don't think we can compete with them on that]. debt debt debt. interest rates, govt. will borrow all the available money! [lol.]

wayne - we are 6 v 96 percent debt compared to everyone else. joe pretends the gfc didn't happen.
won't tell us how he would have got through it without a debt. they
opposed the second stimulus package. [wayne wass a uni lecturer welcome to school joe.] hits him for raising company tax, how does that make us competitive?

aap - joe you said you are making truthy promises. economists say you lie
about paid maternity leave. can you guarantee it? wayne, do you think
it's crap?

joe - yes. guarantees it as it stands. blathers on about debt. still
won't submit policies for costing.

wayne - joe pretends there wouldn't be a deficit he he was in power.
where would the money have come from? their plan requires a tax on
groceries and magical thinking on un-costed promises

smh - wayne you say the coalition would have caused unemployment. can
you prove this? joe, if we did what you said we'd
still be in debt.

wayne - the libs opposed the second stimulus package. we had to go past
them to pass it. joe tries to have it both ways. quotes joe. 'the
stimulus package doesn't work!!!1111' he was wrong. occasionally they
pretended to support some stimulus. points out that small, ineffective
stimulus would be worse than none at all.

joe - [tries to have it both ways.] libs put in a bill to raise aged pension (whaaaa?) they then tried to reduce the stimulus. goes on about the now discredited waste campaign. pink batts. [sigh.] pink batts pink batts. shows he knows nothing about the reserve bank or interest rates. [dear god.]

wayne - tell us how much debt you'd accept joe? quotes reserve bank
gov. who agrees with with wayne

joe - govt. is addicted to tax. [I hear long term tax addiction can stunt growth and impair one's fashion sense, ask j-howard]

the opposition orifice [the australian] - uren? what else will you do re: tax reform in a
second term?

wayne - cut company tax, use resource tax to offset, spend on
infrastructure. libs want to jack up the company rate.

joe - accuses the govt. of thinking increasing tax equals efficiency
[whaa?] vote us in and we'll tell you what we'll do.

uuuuuuuuhlman - why no mining tax joe? big money! many shells!

joe - i love miners, they don't want to give us more money so they
shouldn't have to. They are delicate petals and if we hurt their feelings they may take to their yachts and sulk terribly. talks about fast runners and how everyone should be able to
run like in the field of our economy and we don't slow the fastest runner [bloody oath we do if they're making off with the silverware joe!] or some crap.

Question from someone - housing, you've crated a market only for investors, massive tax breaks
for landlords, nothing for first home buyers how will you fix this mess I pretend to care about despite probably having a few investment properties of my own?

wayne - dodges question, dances, pretending he worked to increase
housing supply. passes buck to previous govt. coag will fix everything
and you can rent for life. Studiously avoids henry review's findings on negative gearing. [long story short. till the speculators die, you're screwed, young folk!]

joe - blames the states. cost of supply for builders, can't get finance
and it's so expensive (joe, you know interest rates are at record
lows?). claims if you dich negative gearing rent will go up. [what the
fuuu? get out joe. just get right out.] claims that rates were lower
under coalition. [lol]

wayne - it's all bullshit. the rba agrees with me.

joe, blames labor for banks raising rates to cover liquidity crisis. [holy crap. this is your alternative treasurer australia!]

wayne - interest rates at record lows? tell me what it was when you left office? - forces joe to look up the figures

joe - looks it up 8.something. it's now 7. but it's going to go up! [really? does andrew robb read palms now? - epic fail.]

wayne - joe pretends the govt. controls interest rates.

joe - pretends inflation was low under libs. switches horses midstream and claims inflation was higher under labor instread [by a quarter percent I think. 11.5 year average vs 3.75 year average = statistics fail
]
their abc - what will australia be manufacturing?

wayne - talks about 2 speed economy and effects on currency rate. Talks about pro business stimulus already. talks about infrastructure, nbn. points out libs oppose it. [gee wayne, what if we had a renewable energy industry to talk about?] also tax cuts for business.

joe - in 2013 our company tax will be lower than labor. [someone should make them give that crystal ball to treasury] the world has 3 timezones. [WTF? this timezones crap is sounding like internet crankery] talks about how his govt. would get into currency hedging to help exporters [jesus christ]. how will the mining industry survive a minor tax hike on profits!? woe! woe!

chan ten - what will your debt reduction taskforce do joe?

joe - it will be run by me and andrew robb and will go through previous govt. programs and tell us all of labor are the dirty, stinky, poopy-head liars they really are. [it will be a political creature designed to provide cover for their cuts by means of an endless witch-hunt]

wayne - no costings, nyah nyah! hidden agenda. they will cut services.

joe - costings, we introduced charter of budget honesty [so why hide from it?] we will do it, sometime.

fin review - joe, your savings, you just said they've dropped to 2.8 billion from 40. what happens if this happens?

joe - keeps whining about submitting for costing. labor will never deliver a surplus, they never will. [WTF? So now they're ideologically opposed to budget surpluses?]. whinges about passport fee increase [this must be such a huge issue on sydney's north shore]. attacks states, it's all their fault.

wayne - we will too put into budget into surplus. pinky-swear

west australian - can you tax mining without damaging the industry? Joe your policies make no sense.

wayne - mining will be fine. They are advertising more than ever now and bringing new projects online [they know what demand is going to do, having ripped us off thanks to the mug punters those profits will disappear overseas and into yachts.]

joe - we have an australia first policy. welfare to work, blah blah. grow the productivity pie.

wayne sums up - good debate come on tony, debate julia again [you should have thought about that before adopting your stupid defensive crouch campaign]. we have a plan for the future. rba agrees with me. stimulus saved jobs and businesses. imagine the waste if businesses had failed and people lost jobs. building on strengths over last years. infrastructure, libs will take us backwards.

joe - wayne wants to stand on record. Debt. Waste. Boats. Pink batts pink batts. dumped kevin.
the coalition has experience, we are facing volatility [good of you to
notice]. bountiful future. we could lose our opportunity to be the best.
the govt. is bad. bad i tell you! vote liberal, give us back a grown up
govt. [we forgive you for voting us out, australia, but now it's time for some make up sex]

this wasn't really a contest. It was a debate between someone with a lot of knowledge and someone with just enough to be dangerous. If I were 20 years older i'd be perfectly happy with the idea of another couple of terms with wayne as treasurer, he'd be excellent for me. But i'm not. Joe on the other hand tries his hardest but is clearly out of his depth and ham-strung by the fact that the coalition have no economic policy to speak of. Cutting taxes is not policy. Politically motivated budget revenge inquisitions are not policy. It's a bit scary that voters are seriously thinking about putting robb and hockey in charge of treasury.

I slept with Big Mining and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Headline in The Australian this morning:

Gillard's $7.5bn gift to miners

Did the Labor powerbrokers who dumped Rudd really think the media would relent in its attacks if they gave the miners everything they wanted?

Bernie Fraser (former Reserve Bank governor) was on the 7.30 Report last night saying, essentially, how amazed he was that Tony Abbott was not political dead meat for opposing a tax that took a justifiable amount of money from an extraordinarily wealthy group of companies making billions of dollars from selling resources that belong to all Australians; a tax that would bring billions of dollars into services and infrastructure for the people in this country:

[It] amazes me, frankly, how any alternative prime minister, alternative government can put the interests, the vested interests of big mining countries ahead of the national interests of this country. It's just incredible to my way of thinking. Whoever has sort of devised that line really has rocks in his or her head.

He painted a portrait of Julia Gillard that was almost as unflattering:

To my way of thinking in her haste to get a deal done on this matter to end up with a headline rate of 30 per cent of what are pretty generous profits, but when you allow for the 25 per cent extraction allowance which reduces that 30 per cent down to 22.5 per cent, that's a sell out to me.

Tony Abbott opposes the tax even in its overly-reduced form, which is incredible in itself, but even more amazing is that he is able to do so and survive with the support of a significant proportion of the Australian population. Enough to put him in the running to oust Labor and become our next Prime Minister (terrifying thought that it is). He shouldn't even be in the race- what are Australians thinking?


As usual, stupidity reigns supreme in Australia.

Jenny does Logan

We just watched Insight on SBS. It was about jobs and the economy and set in Logan, a less well off suburb in Brisbane's south side. A few interesting things cropped up.

The government's economic stimulus package is working how and where they intended it to work, that is in the pockets of regular people. A couple of people who had voted Liberal at the last election expressed nothing but love for Kev for keeping them in work.

There was one woman in particular who'd changed her vote from Liberal to Labor because, "A couple of years ago I was much richer than I am now, and now I'm not." Good to see my suspicions that Liberal voters are either rich people voting in their own interest or any combination of greedy, ignorant and/or selfish.

There were a couple of die-hard, rusted on Feuhrerbunker Libs. One was a small business owner right out of the Liberal election ads who was able to deny that the stimulus package had created any jobs while deriding the people whose jobs had been saved by said package as being personal friends with Labor apparatchiks.

The other was some nutbar from the Institute for Public Affairs, a loony bin think tank. This 'person' told people who'd talked about how the package had helped them feed their families that they shouldn't have gotten it. To their faces, though she didn't have the courage to look at them. At the end she was asked to provide an alternate solution. Before she started speaking I said "cut taxes" and yup, that was the solution because 'the private sector is the main animator of the economy'. An actual professor of economics told her she was wrong and the private sector has never been the main driver (of any economy anywhere, except places like Somalia and Afghanistan, where I suspect their views on property rights and ownership do not coincide with ours). Only the truly, deeply mad still support Reaganomics. I'm amazed that she wasn't lynched on the spot. Shame on you Loganites! Embarrassingly Jenny Brockie joined in, implying that people who had a job thanks to govt. hand outs were somehow cheating, in the same way that if you have a heart attack and go to a public hospital you've cheated by not waiting for the hidden hand of the market to restart your heart. I think that since the election the cupboard of liberal panel stackers has become increasingly bare, leading to crazier and crazier lunatics being called on to 'balance' out panels.

All in all, most people didn't really seem to get that for the past decade big business has been preparing for times like this by building a 'flexible' workforce of casual employees they can fire at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile the about-to-be-screwed did nothing but enjoy themselves and get into debt. The audience also favoured people over 40, you know, people with assets that they can monetise to stave off hardship. There was very little representation from people who don't have that safety net because they're young and are in similar situations.

Also there was a guy from a community organisation based in Beenleigh who went on about wanting to get hold of a politician to tell them how tough the people he worked with were having it. Rudd held a community cabinet in Beenleigh two weeks ago, I'm pretty sure his organisation attended. Epic fail. The Libs deride community visits like these as media stunts because they hold voters in contempt. They're still in the mindset that the voters made a terrible mistake and if they just look like they were born to rule the voters will come back. Also kudos the Rudd government for doing their best not to cut social spending in a recession. Turnbull would have.

Hating on Gen-Y

I keep seeing stuff in the media going on about how 'gen-y', whatever that means, are a bunch of lazy, indolent, risk taking buggers who've never had it so good and need a good hard recession of hardship to sort them out. I've blogged about this before, but there seems to be another uptick of negative intergenerational communication again, which is to be expected of the previous generation who have only ever blamed someone else, their parents, their kids, everyone but themselves for their failings. As part of the lazy generation (the generation responsible for most retail, hospitality, food industry and trades jobs) I was a little amused to hear about Storm financial and BOQ.

A bunch of home owners, mostly baby boomers, re-mortgaged their houses and stuck the money into a very obvious get rich quick scam run by Storm financial. Pretty much you borrowed and invested in a generic bag of stocks. When these stocks went up, you used the equity to borrow more money to double down. At no point was there any idea of using the profit from a booming stock market to actually pay back the borrowings and invest untethered by debt. It was just debt on more debt and one of the most obvious and stupid scams out there. Many of the people who went in on this scam spent their borrowed money on property speculation and living the high life. Pretty much none of them read what they were signing or had any clue what was actually going on as they lined up to be fleeced again and again on the promise of becoming filthy rich. These people owned their houses and CHOSE to take a risk with their single biggest asset. They then did nothing to minimise the risk, typically putting everything into Storm. If they'd put a little away in term deposits even, they'd have been fine, but the lure of easy wealth was too much to resist. Being in such a situation they chose to gamble their houses out of greed to get rich. Fair enough I say, it ain't pretty but what do you expect?

Predictably enough the cyclic nature of the market won out over their collective boomer experience and things went south and they wound up owing the bank money. They of course took the responsible, adult course of action and cut their losses where they could before continuing to live off other incomes they had planned on before investing and learned a lesson about putting all of one's eggs in one basket. Wrong... They lawyered up! Look what you let me do to myself, BOQ! You should have known I was an irresponsible idiot and shouldn't have lent me money secured against my house! Who better to know how much debt I should go into than a bank? Certainly not the borrower!

Now, they want hard working Gen-Y bank customers and shareholders like ourselves to eat the loss in increased fees and a weaker market position for the bank and bail them out. We've saved hard for every investment we've made, we've never borrowed to get rich quick. We're currently saving for a house too so the idea that there should be no movement in house prices because no one has to sell out of financial hardship is particularly galling. The market should only ever go up for some people, and when it is going up, we can go get stuffed. When it's going down, we should dig in and fork out to keep whiners in their massive McMansions. Why should we take it in the arse to bail out a buch of greedy bastards who gambled and lost? Why don't the media report this as 'The baby boomer generation that wants to borrow against its cake to have 5 more cakes and eat them too'? Probably because they know that Gen-Y doesn't have much use for newspapers other than as budgie cage lining but the point is valid. Why do people my age constantly cop it in the media for a global financial crisis engineered by the generation before us? Why is it somehow our fault that we'll inherit a tattered social contract, a patched together financial system and probably an uninhabitable planet? Could there perhaps be plenty of blame to go around? Surely not.

Instead the media are playing the world's biggest violin for the 'victims' of their own greed. Not a word is breathed about personal responsibility. That sort of talk is reserved for when they want to ram WorkChoices up our arses. As opposed to the irresponsible, risk taking Gen-Y who don't know how good they have it, they were unwitting victims. All they wanted was the Aussie dream of being disgustingly wealthy without having to work, now it's all come falling down and they deserve our help. HELP, that's a good one, reminds me of HECS which I'm currently paying off. Malcolm Turnbull and I do have something in common, we're being effectively taxed at the same rate, except Malcolm only pays 40% on everything after the first couple of hundred grand the government can find. Is there any relief for me? Sympathy for my plight having chosen to attend uni so I can pay more tax over my working life than non uni grads on average? Nope and maybe there's nothing wrong with that, but it should go both ways. Maybe I should get a lawyer. They can also look into why I still haven't received any government payments if they have time left over from their vocational calling to defend the right of greedy people to get rich no matter what stupidities they engage in.

War by other means

Apparently Rudd has delayed the start of the emissions trading scheme and has dropped the price of carbon from $40 to $10. This has pretty much resulted in a ETS that no one can really oppose. It's not enough, but from that point of view there's always the argument that an ETS is better than no ETS and once we have legislation for trading carbon, the government of the day can change prices etc. without having to pass further legislation.

More importantly this seems to be another massive Howard style wedge on Turnbull, who of course has no climate change policy despite having been environment minister under Howard, where the ETS started and having been part of the debate for months. Climate change seems to be an issue that cuts accross party affiliation. Turnbull will be trapped between Liberal moderates who are pro an ETS and Howardites who are anti-anything-Kevin-Rudd.

Also the 'save the world' aspect of climate change and the timing of the legislation, long enough after the last election to avoid election fatigue, to give the government the attractive option of having an issue to take to an early election that isn't the economy. An issue that Labor has control of and that they seem to poll well on. I'm not sure that the govt. would go to a double dissolution, though it might solve a lot of their problems, they should still be able to call an early election and get a similar result if the Liberals play along and look intransigent when it comes to Saving The World (TM). The Greens quite rightly oppose the watering down of the ETS, which I suspect is part of the plan. The idea is to put Turnbull in a hard place and force him to capitulate publicly and ruin him before the next election, or be obstructionist and face annihilation in some sort of emotive issue election of doom. There's no way you can campaign against 'I know it's hard, and I know it's not what everyone wants, but I'm trying to save the world.'

Mortgage Madness

Sarah and I were watching some show on channel 9. It was about some people who were experiencing mortgage stress and the show was basically going to get them out of debt by tarting up and selling their house. Apparently they had a mortgage on their home, inherited some money and then used it to get a second mortgage for another house in an attempt to become a today tonight 'property tycoon'. Obviously this hadn't worked out so well for them and they promptly went deeper and deeper into debt. They then went into their super for more money which of course didn't help. So pretty much out of misguided avarice the decision makers in the family had flown their financial future into the side of a mountain, when they had an opportunity most people can only dream about to secure their own home.

We couldn't help wondering as we watched the show, why couldn't channel 9 have picked a family who were in financial trouble as a result of a lost income or something else, instead of some people who were trying to get rich via property speculation. As someone who doesn't have a house and views actually buying one as a goal so unachievable it's practically pointless planning for it, I guess I don't have much sympathy for people who own one house and, instead of paying off the house, buy another one to try and turn into millions of dollars like they see on TV, making it that much more difficult for people who have no house to get one. I feel that there are far more people who could use that help.

Disclosure: Sarah and I have received neither of the govt's two stimulus packages. We haven't got kids, Sarah is a student but hasn't been on Centrelink for 3 years or so and I started my job last April and so haven't earned enough to qualify for the tax hand out. However it's not like we're starving or anything. We've been lucky enough to have parents able to support us in really vital ways, like providing us with a place to live. I just don't understand why help from the government seems to be based on maintining people's lifestyles regardless of circumstances.

The govt. recently increased the level of support for homeowners who lose their jobs by increasing consumer credit hardship restrictions from $300,000 to $500,000 contract value. I guess you could make the argument that that reflects the increased cost of housing these days but given $300,000 is around the average house price in Australia I'd make the counter argument that if you're unfortunate enough to have lost your job and your mortgage is worth $500,000, you should sell your house and adjust to your new situation. When we went down to living off one youth allowance income, we made adjustments, cut out just about everything that wasn't essential, sold stuff we didn't need and got through it. Perhaps the most galling thing about keeping people in half-million dollar homes is that a lot of people bought the houses they own during the last economic downturn, so that means now, even when there is a downturn houses are still priced out of reach of people like us.

7:30 Report Rant

Tonight on the 7:30 report they had a story in which the small business association said that the consolidation of the big 3 banks has made it harder for small businesses to get loans because the big 3 banks have bought up all the competition. They also alleged that the govt. loan guarantees had now made it even harder for small businesses to obtain loans.

All the big bank consolidation has pretty much occurred in the last decade. The small business association didn't utter a squawk of protest when big banks were buying up every regional bank, credit union and non bank lender they could get their hands on and the former govt. sat and watched. Those pricks praised Howard to the skies even as he created the conditions they deplore today.

I'm not sure how the current government's loan guarantees are making it harder for small businesses to get loans. Perhaps if they didn't guarantee loans and then everyone went into a panic and started calling in their loans it would have made things better, oh, that's right, it fucking well wouldn't have you tools. Apparently businesses that aren't risky in a global economic cluster fuck are still getting credit. It shocks me that banks will only lend money when they are reasonably sure they'll get it back. All this time I'd thought they were big cuddly charities that lent money to people out of the goodness of their hearts. Big banks have tightened up their lending because they think a lot of small businesses will go under. That's because most small businesses depend on discretionary spending. There isn't going to be a big market for pool cleaning and restaurant meals if people are going to be relying on their pools for fresh water (sucks to be you if you went salt water) and eating their pets. In fact there would have been an even smaller market if we'd gotten workchoices which the small business sector broadly supported.

The global credit crunch is the fault of your man's best buddy G W Bush. And so is what should be called the second Bush recession. Indirectly these things are the fault of pin headed ideologues like the small business association. To make things worse the small business association went for workchoices like a crack addict to er, well, crack. Most small businesses depend heavily on discretionary spending and yet the small brain business association championed policies that would have HURT small business by increasing compliance costs, reducing discretionary spending and driving consumers into the arms of big businesses who could maximally exploit the legislation.

It's incredible to me that these people are even allowed to use sharp cutlery, let alone operate businesses. If they can't see their way to protecting their own interests, it's going to be a bumpy recession for them. Take a look at the last stimulus package. You'd think that $1000 burning a hole in the back pocket of every Australian would be something they'd be screaming for and that Turnbull and the deadbeat senate independents would have come under pressure for stonewalling and paring the package back to score political points. Not a chance. Ideology trumps staying in business for some people.

Clutched Pearls

This cat is shocked and appalled the G20 protesters didn't burn the entire London CBD down and start an 'enhanced interrogation' program for finance executives.

I was listening to the news on Friday and heard a news report that basically said that the G20 protests had 'turned violent' which meant that whatever message the vast majority of protesters had, it could be discounted. You know in the same way the media judiciously discounted the message of the US government after it violently invaded a sovereign nation on a lie.

And what, pray tell, was that violence?:

The news came as Scotland Yard vowed to track down and prosecute those who attacked officers and stormed a bank during a day of unrest in the City of London.

Riot police had to be sent in after activists broke into a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

A handful of people with black scarves obscuring their faces and hoods over their heads smashed a hole in the windows with a metal pole and crawled in.

Protesters removed equipment, daubed graffiti on the walls, threw a chair through a window and started a small fire.

I assume that Scotland Yard will get on that right after they've charged the people who've perpetrated the single biggest transfer of wealth in human history, from your pockets to theirs. In an ideal world, the protesters should be given medals, as well as a list of names and vouchers for hemp rope. To tie the suspects up of course, for delivery to the waiting police. All told, considering the scale of the theft and the fact the protests were at the scene of the crime, a few broken windows are simply a sign of how we've become a society of dumb, docile sheep. Completely unaware of how the farm works, we grow thick coats of wool and barely bleat when it's shearing time. The only time we ever take action is to condemn the actions of other sheep when they raise a fuss on the way to the shearing sheds.

Media, still dumb

The media still can't figure out that Kevin Rudd and Australia are bit players in the whole "fix the Bush recession" game. We're acting on behalf of the two countries that are the most fucked, the US and UK, and basically helping them out to convince the EU, Brazil and China that they should give our buddies a break and not ask for too much in return for pulling them out of a hole they've been enthusiastically digging for the past ten years. If John Howard did it, he'd be a lapdog, but because the media can't quite figure it out they're torn between constantly attacking Rudd on meaningless issues that don't resonate with the public and grudgingly acknowledging the aura of statesmanship that has been lent to him by Obama and Brown as he does work on their behalf. The G20 is really an audience for the US and UK to come begging, hat in hand, for concessions from other states who will drive a hard bargain in return for bailing them out. Not being in a position to negotiate, we might finally start to see some movement on the protectionism both states are notorious for, which is hopefully the payoff for Rudd's hard work.

Hypocrisy and Fallacy

What is hypocrisy? Hypocrisy is acting an a manner contrary to the beliefs one professes. This would include things like:

1) Condemning the UN Oil for food programme while failing to lift a finger to hinder, stop or prosecute a govt. run business that was the single biggest violator of the oil for food programme.

2) Enacting a certain regressive tax immediately after professing to never ever do it and to not believe in regressive taxation in general.

3) professing to 'keep Australia strong' while letting in criminals because they paid bribes to your party.

4) Claiming to protect jobs and the economy while championing legislation that you know will lead to job losses and put our economy into a death spiral.

Hypocrisy is not telling someone else that something you have done is bad and they shouldn't do it. That is a common fallacy. So it's entirely consistent for Kevin Rudd, me, you, everyone else to condemn neo-liberal economics and endeavour to reform the system we have despite benefiting from it. When people condemn the Indigenous genocide in this country, this is not inconsistent with the fact that most of us benefited from it. Similarly you can condemn WWII and be greatful for penicillin, airliners and computers.

The inability to realise this is a hallmark of a small mind, bound by ideology. Malcolm Turnbull, being largely defined by his insatiable personal greed, enormous ego and insurmountable arrogance, cannot conceive of a situation where someone can benefit from something, and find that thing should be improved to benefit others. Turnbull's recent article about how Rudd is a hypocrite for opposing the neo-liberalism that he and his wife benefited from is an essay on why he should never, ever become prime minister of this country. I think we've had enough of leaders who are always right no matter what.

VTAY Fixes Brisbane's Transport

1) Building roads won't work. The ubiquitous single person car trip is the least efficient use of transport infrastructure. If you build more roads and they reduce congestion, it increases the catchment area of the road and people will make trips they used to avoid, because there's less congestion, which will increase congestion. If we're going to fix things we have to accept that driving to work must become the last resort.

2) Public transport must be QUICK CLEAN EFFICIENT and COMFORTABLE. It doesn't have to be that cheap. People will pay for a 30 minute commute instead of a 90 minute death march to and from work if they get to sit down and read the paper like a human being instead of huddled in a fetal position in a pool of junkie vomit.

3) Stop building EVERY FUCKING THING in the CBD. Not everyone lives 5km from the CBD, those that do definitely don't want every else to come there and no one else wants to go there. If you live 20km from the cty, why the hell should you have to drive to the city to cross a bridge to get to a place you can see just across the river. Why are only two bridges outside the CBD?

The Gold Coast is only 80km away from the CBD. It should take half an hour to get there. Tops. it doesn't because Queensland hasn't realised that express doesn't mean stopping at every other station. The point of an express train, dear transport minister, is to EXPRESSLY go to a few places which are then linked by slower trains. What that means is that an express train to the Gold Coast will stop at Mt Gravatt, Logan and Beenleigh (then more stops at the GC like Southport and Robina). The rest of the time it'll be somewhere between these stops, going like a cat with its tail on fire. People who wanted to get to other places near by would take something called a CONNECTING train which would CONNECT them to their final destinations. They would go slower, but they'd run more often because they would be going shorter distances.

How much would all this cost? Well in the case of the French TGV system (300km/hr trains) the most expensive sections of track work out to $15,000,000 per km. A lot of money? Maybe, that means the 100km from the CBD to the GC would cost $1,500,000,000 (1.5 billion). That works out to a tenth of the QLD govt. proposed infrastructure expenditure and would put the two most populous parts of queensland about 20 minutes apart, linked by a rail system cheaper to operate and maintain than an equivalent length of 8 lane highway. Build another 2 lines north to Caloundra and west to Toowomba and all of a sudden it's a viable option to live all the way out there, work in any of the other locations and never see a car. All for around 1/4 of the proposed spend on pointless roads and tunnels and with the added benefit of jobs building/maintaining the trains and other infrastructure.

There are real solutions out there, it's just that politicians don't have imaginations and voters are the kind of people who'll hear 1.5 billion and think you're mad but happily spend 16 billion to shave 15 minutes off their commute for about a week till everyone else figures out the going is good.

Now you have no money and She's Just Not That Into You

A few months ago I read a novel that had been left behind by some German girls who were residents in our complex last year left to return home. 'Chasing Harry Winston', it was called- I forget who the author was, but it was by the same woman who wrote 'The Devil Wears Prada'. I haven't read the latter, nor seen the movie, but the cover informed me that this was the case.

The novel was about a bunch of really irritating, vapid, shallow women living in New York. Poetic license, you'd think, not really reflective of any real live New York women. No?

This piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks back made me rethink that assumption. Women who date guys in finance: a more vapid, pathetic, gold-digging bunch you would be hard-pressed to find. They put the book's characters to shame.

Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. “One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s not what I signed up for.”

Wow, she sounds like she really gives a shit about her husband's mental health, huh?

They shared their sad stories the other night at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say, the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day, as it did on Sept. 29.

In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”

Who expects to get a shopping 'allowance' from their husband or boyfriend? Is this guy your daddy, doling out pocket money, or your life partner in a relationship of equals?

Answer:

Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled.

Wow. So that's why some women aspire to be nothing more than a pathetic, poorer version of Carrie Bradshaw, like a beauty writer, until someone rich who ticks all the boxes that allow them to keep up with a particular social circle, comes along to sweep them off their feet. They aspire to be trophy wives, i.e. nothing more than a certain class of prostitute.

Some women in the group said the men in their lives had gone from being aloof and unattainable to unattractively needy and clinging.

So your partner goes through an incredibly tough time at work, people being fired left, right and centre- it may be him next- and you complain when he needs emotional support. Oh, I forgot- that's not what you signed up for...

Another, though, seemed chagrined, after her boyfriend told her to “grow up” and stop “complaining about vacations and dinner” since he had to “fire 20 people by the end of the week.”

Shallow, inconsiderate, greedy, lacking in empathy and perspective.

Then again, what does this say about the guys who choose to date these bimbos? Talk about a wake-up call for some of them...

Liberal Party Makes Bid for Darwin Award

Apparently the Liberals are going to stand in the way of every Australian man, woman, child and koala getting $1000 come April. Apparently students and even those of us unblessed by the 50 IQ points and encylopaedic knowledge that comes with having a child will be getting some scratch. They're also getting in the way of billions of dollars in school funding and other stuff, but let's not pretend anyone's interested in that, least of all Malcolm, whose kids all attended Silvertail High.

I'm just struggling to see how the Liberal party can spin one of Australia's richest men saying that Shane the Tradie (I'm trying a Palinesque everyman, work with me) can't have $1000 because times are tight. Who exactly is he selling this to? The people who desperately want the money? The business community that desperately wants them to spend it? Hare Krishnas? Jesuit Monks? How are they going to sell it?

"I'm Malcolm Turnbull, no one knows more than I do about the horrors of having more money. I'm here to tell you why you don't really want thousands of dollars."

I'm not sure they've thought this through. He seems to be making the kind of finely nuanced explanation that totally appeals to people when you're trying to convince them that they really don't want that pile of money. It goes:

1. The stimulus package is a bad, irresponsible idea.
2. The stimulus package should be half the size it is now. Then it will be half as bad and irresponsible and we can support it.
3. The previous stimulus package didn't work because it only did most of what it was meant to.
4. The govt. should bring the permanent tax cuts (the ones we can't afford now) forward and by 2010 you will be $1700 better off if your family earns $80,000. This way we will be in deficit for the same amount through a drop in tax revenue, but will see none of the effects of one off cash payments. [delete this]I will then win the next election, cake for everyone! (except Peter Costello)[delete this]

Also I saw Family First senator Steve Fielding telling the media that if they pass this budget, we might not have any money left. Apparently an Australian senator thinks that there is a big jar of coins behind Kevin Rudd's chair and if we spend it all, there won't be any left. I know you don't have to be smart to be a senator, but don't you need to at least have some vague idea of how the economy you're going to be senating works?

Xenomorph on the other hand looked like a rabbit in the headlights and is no doubt working frantically to get himself out of the way of the voters while maximising media exposure. Maybe a joint statement/proposal with the Greens?

Did He Really Mean To Say That?

No, the video isn't funny at all.

"Neo-liberalism and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy. And, ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself."

-Kevin Rudd

Wow, he might as well have started quoting Karl Marx as far as the Australian is concerned. Rupert is probably already on the phone screaming instructions. Let's see if Rudd's intervention and regulation extends to more than handing over tax payer cash to rich losers. It's funny how the riche hate hate hate government interference and intervention, except for when it comes in the form of a bail out for their eminently foreseeable fuck ups. Seeing an Aussie PM amp up the rhetoric against neo-liberalism and Thatcherite Howard-style trickle down economics is, well, like a Swiss politician railing against charging interest.

Now if he could just put some distance between the himself and the cruise-missile left...

Cry me a river, Capitalist pigdog

Last week we were watching Insight's take on the 'financial crisis'. They had a couple on who were in dire straights. Hearken unto their tale of woe. Hubby ran a restaurant while his wife ran a store selling Disney memorabilia she imported from the US. They were worried about being able to keep up with their investment properties because sales of plastic Disney crap were a little soft in the current economic climate. What have things come to when people can't afford to maintain multiple properties they don't live in, but own to gamble on getting rich, off an income generated by selling rubbish made in China, shipped to the US and shipped here?

Just today there was an article in the SMH where baby boomers were yet again trying to pin everything on younger generations. Fucking pathetic, apparently we need a 'jolly good' recession to teach us a lesson. Of course it can't be a recession that harms their investment properties, stymies endless clutching greed or dents the billions of dollars in retirement savings they've gambled on the stock market in the hope of making it big. It should be just big enough to fuck everyone else. After all, everyone knows that the current economic crisis has nothing to do with a dipshit baby boomer who's president of the US, or the procession of boomer PMs we've had that gave them free educations, paid for by the war-generation, and then endless cash handouts, culminating in pensions that their children will have to pay for. It isn't my generation that has endlessly opted for war, greedily despoiled the environment and failed to properly raise their kids. Of course none of this is ever the fault of people who get into this mindset. The problem is always the yoof. Those damn under 30s with all the money they have in the stock market and their paid off houses. They're the ones to blame. Well, thanks for drinking the well dry guys. Keep in mind that people under 30 still have their entire working lives ahead of them, as opposed to people who are about to retire and find that there might not be as much left in the kitty as they thought.

The miserable truth is that the baby boom generation have accomplished little of note in their time running things. The generation before them created workers' rights, universal suffrage and pretty much all of the scientific developments we enjoy today. By contrast boomers just got high and then sold out for money and stuff:

The 1970s: coming to power

Between 1962 and 1972, Australia's adult population leapt by almost three million as the baby boomers reached voting age. For years Australia had been under a conservative government and the radical ideas of baby boomers called for change. A charismatic Labor leader called Gough Whitlam [born 1916, not a boomer] ran for Prime Minister under the slogan 'It's Time' with policies designed to get the baby boomers votes including free university education, withdrawing Australian troops from Vietnam and anti-discrimination laws for Aboriginal people. In his pre-election promise Whitlam declared:

The real answer to the modern malaise of juvenile crime, drugs and vandalism is not repression and moralising. The answer is to involve the creative energies of our children and our youth in a creative, concerned community.
Policy Speech for the Australian Labor Party, delivered by Gough Whitlam at the Blacktown Civic Centre in Sydney, 13 November 1972, Accessed 13 June 2004.

[Obviously they weren't listening]

Not only were Whitlam's politics aligned with young people, but his campaign also had the support of young musicians and artists. When Whitlam was elected Prime Minister it was the first change of government in twenty-three years. Whitlam quickly introduced a lot of changes that had Australia reeling. His reforms saw a record number of Bills introduced into Parliament and a record number of laws enacted (although the Senate also rejected 93 of the Bills introduced). Whitlam's reform package became known as 'the Program' and introduced changes across every field of government including:

• Australia's first federal legislation on human rights, the environment and heritage
• establishment of a Schools Commission and national training and education scheme
• abolition of university tuition fees
• resumption of diplomatic relations with China after a twenty-four year hiatus
• establishment of the Australian Legal Aid Office, a National Film and Television School, the Trade Practices Commission and the Law Reform Commission
• introduction of a substantial regional development program
• establishment of a Royal Commission into Aboriginal land rights that led to the drafting of land rights legislation and the establishment of an elected National Aboriginal Consultative Committee.

Australia's Culture Portal

They then went on to later reverse almost all of these accomplishments. I'm sick of the offensively stupid idea that people who have just begun to participate in a system authored by their parents are responsible for its failings. It's really dumb and pathetic and appeals to the kind of idiot who is responsible for things being this way. Namely people more concerned with their 'property portfolio' and the mindless acquisition of meaningless petty baubles than the kind of world they will leave to their children. These are the same people who blame junk food, TV, video games and teh Internets for the way their children turn out because nothing is fucking ever their fault. Maybe I'm unfairly bashing an entire generation but they have all the votes and all the positions of power and this is a democracy. There are more of them than any generation so why don't they do something about it?

So long, suckers!

I had to share this, just in case anyone missed it. Bloody hilarious.

Andrew Lahde, the hedge-fund manager who quit after posting an 870% gain last year, said farewell to clients in a letter that thanks stupid traders for making him rich and ends with a plea to legalize marijuana.

Lahde, head of Santa Monica, California-based Lahde Capital Management, told investors last month he was returning their cash because the risk of using credit derivatives - his means of betting on the falling value of bonds and loans, including subprime mortgages - was too risky given the weakness of the banks he was trading with.

''I was in this game for money,'' Lahde, 37, wrote in a two-page letter in which he said he had come to hate the hedge-fund business. ''The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.

''All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other sides of my trades. God Bless America.''

Lahde, who managed about $US80 million, told clients he'll be content to invest his own money, rather than taking cash from wealthy individuals and institutions and trying to amass a fortune worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

''I do not understand the legacy thing,'' he wrote. ''Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.''

Request for Soros

He said he'd spend his time repairing his health ''as well as my entire life - where I had to compete for spaces at universities, and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management - with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not.''

He also suggested that billionaire George Soros sponsor a forum in which ''great minds'' would come together to create a new system of government, as the current system ''is clearly broken.''

Lahde ended his letter with a plea for the increased use of hemp as an alternative source of food and energy that segued into a call for the legalization of marijuana.

''Hemp has been used for at least 5000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products,'' he wrote. ''Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term.''

'Innocuous Plant'

He added, ''The evil female plant - marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country.''

Lahde said the only reason marijuana remains illegal is because ''Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other addictive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers.''

Here's a link to the letter in its entirety. I highly recommend reading the whole thing- it's hilarious, blunt and very pertinent. Here's another excerpt:

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck.

Finally, here's a link to some predictions Lahde made back in September 2007- 100% likelihood of a recession in the US, anyone?

I honestly don't see Lahde's vision of a government based on meritocracy being achieved, but it's a worthy sentiment. Good on him, and good luck to him.

Putting climate change in perspective

Is this, or is this not, fairly terrifying?

A temperature rise of 2 degrees, which is likely by the second half of this century, would reduce the range of most kangaroo and wallaby species by half, the James Cook University study found.

A 6-degree increase, which is at the extreme end of possible temperature rises predicted for 2070, would lead to the territory where kangaroos can survive reducing by 96 per cent - a level that would cause large-scale marsupial extinctions.

Think about it- Kangaroos are fairly hardy animals. They live in some pretty inhospitable areas of Australia. For their range to be so drastically reduced, things must have to get pretty bad- and it looks like they're going to. Not just for kangaroos, but for people too. It helps the concept of climate change look like more than the hypothetical that the Liberal party and business groups who complain about the 'cost' of a carbon trading scheme would have us believe it is.

The cost of implementing a carbon trading scheme over the next couple of years is nothing compared to what the cost to Australia, and the world, will be if we don't do everything in our power to minimise the damage we cause through climate change.

Just like a Nigerian scam, only in the paper

Yesterday I was looking at the lists of top 5 news stories from various Murdoch rag sites on the Courier Mail homepage.



One story on PerthNow caught my attention with its title:

Getting rich: the basics

An odd time to be flogging 'getting rich' stories, I thought, given that the market tanked last week like it's 1929. I clicked on the link in order to investigate further. Turns out that author John Synott had written the piece back in June. Here's how John suggested we all 'get rich':

Borrow to invest, eh? Oh that's clever! Put money that isn't yours into shares and watch it grow... or shrivel away to half its original worth. Then you not only owe someone else twice as much money as you now have, plus interest on the original amount. Oh happy day! Never mind, I'm sure everyone who followed John's advice knew exactly when to pull their the money they'd borrowed out of the market before their portfolios lost any value.




See, in the short term, investing in the banks probably wasn't such a good idea. It hasn't exactly been a good year for the stock market in general, and the banks have copped the worst of it, yet John Synott saw fit to direct average-Joe PerthNow readers to borrow money to invest in them. It has been obvious for some time that the banks were engaging in bad practices and getting themselves into trouble. The Australian banks have been better behaved than overseas banks, courtesy of government regulations here, but even they were burned after exposing themselves to sub-prime loans and risky lending practices.

It gets better- in step 3, Synott uses the word 'crash' in inverted commas, as if the share price doesn't matter. Does he even realise that if the capital disappears, dividends from a particular stock aren't going to be enough to pay back the money borrowed to invest in it? In step 5, Synott recommends borrowing against the family home in order to buy shares, because it's tax-deductible. Yeah, and if the shit hits the fan, you lose your house. How irresponsible to even suggest such a thing.

So does John Synott still have a job? Are the Murdoch rags still paying him to dispense patently bad advice to their readers? I hope he's hired a food taster and someone to open his mail, because I imagine anyone who took his advice back in June and borrowed money to invest in shares (particularly if they borrowed against their home) is really really pissed off right now.

Land Crisis, not so crisis-y

THE scarcity of residential land that has been blamed for forcing up home prices in southeast Queensland is just a myth, according to a new report.

The report reveals there is plenty of land available to meet housing demand for the next 19 years – but most of it is in the hands of major developers.

And much of the available land is in areas less desired by homebuilders, who mainly want to live near the coast, according to the report by the Local Government Association of Queensland.

Premier Anna Bligh earlier this year called on council to fast-track new developments to improve housing affordability.

CM

I'm sure that'll fix things. Give more land, more quickly to the people hoarding it as an investment. I bet she still can't figure out why she's toast.

From the Invisible Hand of the Market to the Red Hand of Lenin

Isn't it funny how everytime a left-leaning or nationalist leader like Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales nationalises something for the public good the media line up to engage in ritualised 'he's a communist' bashing. When the uber-capitalist leader of an uber-capitalist nation wants to use $1,700,000,000,000,000 of taxpayer money to nationalise bad debt generated by people who knew what they were doing, likely broke several laws and engaged in no action to mitigate the extent of the entirely predictable disaster, it's called a 'rescue package' and it's a sign of how perfect unbridled capitalism is.

That figure represents almost 10% of US GDP, and there are people on TV right now telling us that it's all over. Yeah right.