Category: #Ozfail

Lies and silly errors in The Australian

Tweet trouble

John Quiggin29 Comments

According to Chris Mitchell at the Oz (paywalled, I think), I’m the mastermind (or at least a mastermind) behind the original version of Emma Alberici’s now-rewritten analysis of company tax cuts. Here’s Mitchell

In Alberici’s case a lot of weight was given to left-wing academic John Quiggin and economist Saul Eslake, a prominent commentator whose position on the central question — do corporate tax cuts eventually trickle down as increased wages? — seems to have changed over the years.

It’s nice to be so influential, but there’s just one problem. In Alberici’s original article (here), I don’t get a mention.

But maybe Alberici is presenting my ideas second-hand. Sadly, the arguments I’ve put forward on the topic don’t get a run either. Here’s the summary of my piece in Crikey (also paywalled, I fear)

Optimistic tax models put the average Australian at being 0.1% better off under the proposed company tax cuts. And the good news is they’ll only have to wait 25 years for that tiny benefit to appear!

Alberici doesn’t mention this.

So how did I get top billing? The villain, as usual, is social media. Twitter user (tweep?) Matt K asked me whether there were any mistakes in the Alberici piece and I said no. Apart from a couple of replies to further questions, that was my entire contribution, as you can see from the thread of the conversation. But, as they say nowadays, it went viral, at least insofar as a comment on tax policy can go viral.

Before I knew it, I was being attacked from all directions. Helen Razer said I was a bogus “leftist”, while Aaron Patrick at the Fin hit me from the right because I mentioned Marx and Engels in the draft introduction to my book. To be fair, Razer wrote to explain her position. By contrast, Patrick’s whole technique is verballing and out-of-context gotchas’, so I don’t expect that to change.

I do get a passing mention in the revised column, but since my name is mis-spelt, I think it’s safe to assume that I’m not a primary source. Obviously, Mitchell didn’t get around to reading the original (maybe the research skillz of Newscorp aren’t up to locating it) and assumed that I was quoted there.

While I’m on the subject, Mitchell had an amazing piece a while back (not worth linking, since Paul Kelly and Mark Latham have already trodden this ground many times) about the end of freedom of speech in Australia. The burden of it is that decent, ordinary Australians like Mitchell and Andrew Bolt, limited as they are to major national newspapers and broadcast media, can’t say what they think about Muslims, lefties and so on any more without people on Twitter saying what they think about Mitchell and Bolt. As Tim Dunlop says in a similar context, any less self-reflection and they’d be vampires.

“White, heterosexual Christian” isn’t an identity?

John Quiggin24 Comments

At the Oz, Paul Kelly has a piece headlined’ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/paul-kelly/donald-trumps-election-a-rejection-of-identity-politics/news-story/147b11c08b64702d3f9be1821416cb72. This is bizarre, given that Trump’s appeal was obviously directed at white, heterosexual Christians upset that the US is no longer being run entirely by and for people like them.

In a sense, it now is. Trump’s Cabinet, like the Republican party as a whole, is overwhelmingly reflective of the identity politics of a former majority unwilling to adjust to the reality that it is now a minority. The vagaries and the biases of the electoral system have given this minority a lot of power, but it is fragile and tenuous. It’s precisely this fragility that is giving Trump’s brand of identity politics its ferocity.

Of course, Kelly’s unstated premise is that “white, heterosexual Christian” isn’t an identity, it’s just the norm against which deviant identities are defined. This is on a level with the kind of low-grade bigot who uses the term “ethnics” to describe people of all ethnicities other than Anglo-Celtic.

Campbell Newman: the gift that keeps on taking

John Quiggin7 Comments

A little while ago, it was revealed that the Queensland taxpayers were picking up the bill for Campbell Newman’s indefensible defence in a defamation action brought against him and Jarrod Bleijie (aka Boy Wonder) for accusing two Gold Coast lawyers of being bikie criminals, apparently on the sole basis that they were fulfilling the professional obligation of providing some bikies with a defence. The bill amounted to $0.5 million, and was greatly increased because Newman and Bleijie refused to mitigate the damages by apologising.

Now, thanks to the Oz, we learn how we are paying for the new State Executive Building, which Newman and then-Treasurer Tim Nicholls assured us we would get for nothing as part of a complex land deal. In reality, it turns out Newman left us on the hook for a 15-year lease at above market prices. Of course, the Oz being the Oz, this is presented as the fault of the current Labor government, which denounced the deal at the time and has continued to do so.

Identity crisis (repost from 2014)

John Quiggin17 Comments

When I posted the following piece two years ago, I didn’t suppose it would be enough to kill the absurd idea that “most Australians pay no net tax”. But, given its obvious kinship with Mitt Romney’s disastrous “47 per cent” catchphrase, I felt sure that hardheads on the political right would kill it off before it lined them up on the losing side of a class war.[1] Not for the first time, I was wrong. So, here’s a reprint.

In the latest issue of Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute Quarterly, Adam Creighton, economics correspondent at the Oz, “explains why most Australians pay no net tax”. That’s a striking conclusion, so I checked it out. Creighton has discovered that most Australians get about as much back in transfer payments and public services as they pay in taxation. The poor get a bit more, and the rich a bit less.

To save Creighton some work in future, can I suggest he consider the budget identity constraint “Expenditure = Income”. Since the government spends on services and transfer payments roughly the same amount as it raises in tax revenue[2], it’s obvious that, for the average Australian the same identity must hold, with income renamed as “tax paid” and expenditure as “transfer payments and public services”.

Next up: Why there is no net travel into the CBD

fn1. Romney wasn’t silly enough to push this line in public. He got caught using it at a donors meeting, when someone secretly filmed him.

fn2. Taking account of the seignorage from inflation, returns on assets, intertemporal transfers through debt etc, this rough equality becomes an identity. Please, no arguments about deficits, and especially about MMT. The point of this post is a really simple, and doesn’t need this kind of complication.

The Oz makes the case for higher taxes

John Quiggin13 Comments

A couple of days ago, I was one of fifty signatories to a letter opposing the proposed cut in company tax rate and rejecting the general idea that Australia needs lower taxes. We got excellent coverage from the ABC, Fairfax papers and so on. But by far the most extensive was from The Australian. I counted at least four stories all with a prominent run on the website

* A straight new story, though of course replete with phrases like “the left wing establishment”
* The IPA attacking the signatories as the “fatuous fifty”
* Shorten also attacking the company tax cut as a recipe for “mayhem”
* A front page piece saying a tax increase is a lazy way of solving our problems

Not so long ago, the Oz would have ignored a statement like this (or stuck it in a short story on the inside pages) with the plausible justification that it’s just a bunch of lefties saying what lefties usually say. The fact that they felt the need to reply over and over is revealing, in two ways.

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The Oz melts down in the contest of ideas

John Quiggin144 Comments

It’s been a while since the last time I was the target of an epic meltdown at the #Ozfail (or at least, the last one I noticed). I thought perhaps Chris Mitchell had developed a thicker skin. But, today’s Oz has a full-length editorial responding to a mere tweet about a piece of creationist silliness by one Eric Metaxas, reprinted from Murdoch stablemate, the Wall Street Journal.

We get the usual Oz editorial line about how they aren’t really climate deniers (they just give space to “a couple of contributors who dare to scrutinise the scientific consensus”), creationists (they just think science “can’t explain the universe”), or a rightwing propaganda outfit (they publish Labor lefties like Gary Johns and Graeme Richardson). It’s just that they “love a contest of ideas”.

Moreover, the collection of rightwing delusionists on the opinion pages don’t represent the views of the #Ozfail

Professor, if you ever want to know what the paper thinks or where it stands on any issue, there is only one place you’ll find out. Right here in these editorial columns.

That’s a relief. Having been slagged off in special-purpose opinion pieces, Cut-and-Paste snarks, and various passing comments, I had the feeling the Oz didn’t like me. But the real view, apparently, is that of the anonymous editorialist, who (faintly) praises me as “oft-erudite”.

I do have one small disappointment though. Given the headline “140 characters not the full story” and the protestations of commitment to the contest of ideas, I was expecting the editorial to prove me wrong by inviting me to provide a full-length response to Metaxas’ silliness. Sadly, no.

Three cheers for Stephen Parker

John Quiggin35 Comments

The last time I heard news of Stephen Parker, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra, he was standing up to the Oz and its editor Chris Mitchell who had threatened to sue journalist and UC academic Julie Posetti for accurately reporting remarks made by a former Oz journalist in a public conference. That episode is worth remembering any time anyone suggests that the Oz is a newspaper (in the traditional sense of the term), let alone an advocate for free speech. It is, as I’ve said many times, a dysfunctional blog that is, for some reason, printed on broadsheet paper.

In this instance, Parker was doing exactly what you would expect of a university leader: defending an academic doing her job from outside interference. Sadly, in Australia these days, that can’t be taken for granted. The rise of managerialism has thrown up a number of VCs (or now, in the US mode, Presidents) who would instinctively side with Chris Mitchell in such a dispute.

That kind of outright betrayal of university values is still not the norm. On the other hand, given the financial pressure under which all universities have been operating for years, it is unsurprising that most VCs have been keen to support proposals for “deregulation” of fees, even though, as is inevitable with this government, they are poorly thought out and certain to be inequitable in practice. The lead, as I mentioned, has been taken by Ian Young of ANU. Others have their doubts, I think, but have kept quiet.

I’m happy to say that Parker has been the first to break ranks on this issue, writing in The Age that

An earlier generation of vice-chancellors would have stood up for students. I say, reject the whole set of proposals, on their behalf, and then let’s talk.

I hope his bravery leads others to follow.

Fools rush in …

John Quiggin11 Comments

Most people misrepresented by the tabloid press have little recourse. Defamation actions are slow, risky and don’t in any case produce a proper retraction. The Press Council and similar bodies are self-defence clubs for the media. And letters to the editor are a waste of time, if they are printed at all.

But if you’re a major celebrity like George Clooney, your response is newsworthy. After the Mail Online published a false claim about his impending marriage, followed by a weaselly apology, Clooney called them out, making it clear that this website (and its associated print version [1]) have the same degree of credibility as the National Inquirer and similar rags.

Of course, anyone who was paying attention already knew that. The Daily Mail runs all kinds of nonsense, from baseless gossip about the famous, to anti-science on all kinds of topics, from antivaxerism to “Frankenfoods” nonsense about GM crops [2], to climate denialism.

My guess is that most readers are aware of this, much like followers of professional wrestling. They enjoy malicious/salacious gossip that panders to their prejudices. If some it is true, so much the better. If not, it’s still entertaining.

Only a fool would actually believe anything printed in this rag. But climate denialism makes fools out of its adherents, who have to believe a nonsense conspiracy theory to make any kind of sense of their position. So, it’s not so surprising that people who would correctly dismiss 90 per cent of what’s published in the Mail credulously reproduce what it prints on climate change.

The leading sucker in this respect is Andrew Bolt (unless he’s in on the joke, too in which case his readers are doubly suckered). But he’s followed by the usual suspects, notably including the Oz, Tim Blair and Miranda Devine.

fn1. Apparently the Mail tries to maintain a multiple branding model in which the print version is supposed to lie only occasionally while the online version lies all the time. I can’t see this working for long.

fn2. As previously discussed, there are plenty of serious issues around GM food. But the kind of nonsense implied by terms like “Frankenfoods” has been thoroughly debunked by now.

Literally, Catallaxy on a bad day

John Quiggin34 Comments

A while back, I commented that the Oz was turning into a dysfunctional group blog, like Catallaxy on a bad day[1]. Now, it appears this piece of mild hyperbole has become literally true. The Oz has turned into a print version of Catallaxy, recycling their posts in support of tobacco industry propaganda. This really is Catallaxy at its predictable worst. The IPA, well represented there, started its career in science denialism with attacks on health scientists and, in particular, denial of the dangers of passive smoking. Like so many other tobacco industry fronts, it diversified into climate denial in the 1990s, using the same tricks and tropes.

I’m not sure if Catallaxy is the only blog source for the new Oz. The papers obsessive coverage of the AWU/Gillard case, which is looking rather quaint given the revelations of much more recent and clear-cut corruption on both sides of politics, seems to be a mixture of in-house stuff and lifts from the various extreme wingnut blogs devoted to the issue. In any case, it’s hard to tell the difference.

fn1. As previously agreed, no personal attacks on Catallaxy members, please.