Tony Abbott got away with his howler on the effects of carbon taxes on electricity prices. But, in a piece of poetic justice, he’s now been tripped up by his ignorance of the technical issues underlying his broadband policy, not nearly as bad a piece of intellectual laziness, in my view, but enough to cement the (correct) impression that he is not across the details of key policy issues. To be fair, he doesn’t pretend to be: he offers simplistic slogans to the voters because that’s all he is capable of understanding. In the US, such self-confessed ignorance is a pre-requisite for political success, at least on the right. It seems we are heading the same way.
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John Quiggin 
I caught the ABC Midday Report with Tony Abbott and entourage near the Coorong (Murray mouth) in South Australia. Try and see the replay not so much for Abbott as the pained look on the face of Barnaby Joyce. Unless he was unwell it appeared he was incensed at the boss announcing yet another major water buyback. Without claiming to mind read I suspect Joyce was wondering why farmers for 99% of the length of the river upstream have to make sacrifices for last 1%. The Coalition may be more fragile than we think.
Both sides of politics are offering slogans rather than discussion. Moreover both Gillard and Abbott are both better than this – when they didn’t have top jobs they both perforned better.
The NBN does seem very expensive. About $2000/head – or $8000/$10000 per household and there is reasonable suspicion that the telcos (and their paid lackeys) are pushing the government scheme because the taxpayer will foot the bill and the risk of the NBN.
Is our current broadband system so bad? I’ve switched largely to mobile provision via Telstra’s 3G and I really wonder about the value of the proposed massive fixed wire investment. To you really want to service 97% of Australia with such extravagance?
Abbott is not a technical expert – nothing wrong in admitting that – but is he less wise than the Labor minister who claimed the pro-private sector moves of the Coalition would take Australia back to the “broadband dark ages”. What exaggerated rubbish.
Labor is great at spending other people’s money and its supporters when confronted with the massively self-evident waste evade the issue of inefficiency by simply saying that the economy needed a stimulus and one form of waste avoided another. On this basis who needs budgets – just throw the money away!
@hc
Expecting political leaders to be masters of everything and latter day polyglots does not make for good public policy.
Rudd tried to do everything by himself and it led to chaos and defeat.
Hawke was a master of detail – this just blew the press gallery away. That did not tempt Hawke to try to run the country by himself, like Rudd did to his eventual ruin.
Hawke focused on making his other even greater strengths productive and which were more important to being PM, which was getting his talented team to run the country in pursuit of a common social democratic vision.
@hc
So assuming the worst case scenario costs ($43bn) and amortisation over 40 years, the real cost per head per year is about $50 per head, (not allowing for the fact that between 2018 and 2058 the population is likely to grow to more than 40 million).
Gosh, how will we ever afford it? How will we recover $50 per person per year of value out of it?
The other day, it was claimed that 20% of Australians have an alcohol problem. I am going to guess that costs each of them and the community more than $250 per year each. I recall a figure of $3.5 bn per year on the cost to the community of alcohol abuse. Yet somehow, we muddle through.
This obsessive and morbid preoccupation with debt is amusing.
It’s certainly true that Labor is running on slogans as well. But your suggestion regarding the telcos and the NBN seems way off the mark to me. The taxpayer will run the risk, but will also receive the profits.
I’m using Telstra 3G right now, and it is slow, but just adequate, for web browsing. On the other hand, video calls using Skype are pretty painful, and I’m sure that does not exhaust the potential demands of the next century or so. And given what I’m paying for 3G, $10 000 a household (say a capital servicing cost of $400/year real interest + $500 amortization – I think Fran is a little over-optimistic) for a service many times faster looks pretty good to me.
hc, I’m very confident that 97 percent of Australians will not consider 100mbit an ‘extravagance’ in fifteen years.
Perhaps I was optimistic, PrQ, but my point is that it is nothing like the lead in the saddlebags implied.
Those subs Australia is buying run out at $25-40bn and they are absolutely going to be useless. There are whole squadrons of fighter aircraft that again, we simply aren’t going to use — and indeed we say we hope we will never use them. That JSF was up around $16bn IIRC — and said to be a rubbish aircraft. What are they spending right here right now supporting troops in Afghanistan? $50 per Aussie per year? Almost certainly. Those off shore proceessing centres? At least as much again. Defence and “border security” of course are sacrosanct.
But let someone spend money on something useful and suddenly every bean counter wants to compare it with every other thing that nobody is proposing having anyway to see if dollar for dollar it stacks up, even when the assumptions are pretty dodgy.
You could just about defend this deal simply on the grounds that Telstra was being stripped of its monopoly position.
@wilful
or even in five years.
The toll road thing is an obvious comparison. Before toll roads are put up, people say … “nobody will pay enough” to make them worthwhile, because it seems expensive.
No sooner do they go up than people crowd onto them paying the fee to drive along them in their cars at 20kph from houses they built at the end of them. Build them and they will come*.
If 100Mb is available, people will want it and find apps to make use of it. Business certainly will.
(*This is not an argument for more toll roads, but an observation).
The new electronic appliances that have appeared in the last 5 years are driving consumer demand for broadband and some consumers are quite possibly being choked by their down-link rates on current broadband offerings – not all the time but after dinner, for instance.
There has been an absolutely massive growth in mass storage capacities – I have 1 to 2TB (Terabytes = 1000 Gigabytes = 1,000,000 Megabytes, etc) just sitting around, and I know of people with much, much more than that. On 100Mbps downlink, 10MB takes about one second, since 100Mbps = 100 Megabits/sec = 10 Megabytes/sec, roughly speaking. So a movie of 2GB takes 200 seconds, say 3 minutes, which is not too bad. A TB is around 100,000 seconds, a bit more than a day. We’re hungry for well over 100Mbps 🙂
Only Labor are offering anything remotely resembling an appreciation of the growth rates in terms of technology and the services, and of the applications made possible. Even Labor are IMO a bit optimistic concerning 100Mbps as being sufficient. The Liberal announcement – I cringe even to blandish it with that much validity – was a sorry exercise in dissembling. They must be able to offer better than that, they have people who know a thing or two on the subject, so why put up Tony Abbott or Andrew Robb to mangle it so badly?
The $8000 per household is a complete waste of taxpayers money.
I can get if I want at my place right now 42.88 Mbit/s on Optus’ DOCSIS 3.0-based internet service for $69 per month (high speed cable. In the near future it could be upgraded to 100+Mbit/s by tripling the channels. Just by utilising Abbotts proposed fibre optic backbone network.
Labors broadband network will be obsolete by the time they put it in.
http://personal.optus.com.au/web/ocaportal.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=Template_woRHS&FP=/personal/bundles/broadbandhomephonem&site=personal&SID=BBAFeat5:Must:OSC:BUN:OCA:BBHP:28072010#faq_5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Features
A lot of the computers in peoples homes today are not up to the task of handling the high speeds.
For that package, Optus says:
So you’d be paying almost $8000 over 6 years anyway, and not end up with the better system.
I don’t think there is any point in replying to Tony G on matters of arithmetic. He still hasn’t fessed up to his gullibility in accepting the “$40 carbon tax = doubling of electricity prices” line. And that’s only the latest in a string of silly talking points he’s pushed here.
Fran:” this…obsession with debt is amusing”.
Not after watching Insight last night. Beleive me, if the average Australianis as pitiful as some on that show, its actually saddening.
There is no doubt that if we only go back ten years that the technology wasn’t even imagined that we are currently using. I remember prophets saying that minitiarisation was at its limits and yet the devices being developed are far smaller. The Liberal Coalition are luddites who fail to see investment in the network requires government intervention unless key regional areas are to be excluded. The NBN offers far more support into the future than the Liberals poor offering. It was embarrassing to watch Tony Abbott on the 7.30 report last evening as not only did he have no idea about what the NBN was about but he didn’t understand the Liberal policy either.
Is the NBN going to be laid out with the same efficiency and attention to waste as the home insulation and school construction programs? Was the NBN dreamt up by a bunch of Labor ideologues who have never assessed the commercial viability of a project in their life? People who have never had a job outside of a trade union or being a political hack in the ALP.
It is a serious question. I’d have much more confidence if this was a project delivered (at least in part) by a private operator who could not fall back on the public purse if the whole thing goes pear-shaped. By an operator who needed to be sure the thing would make money.
I assume the confidence of Jill and Fran reflects their political biases because they have delivered no justification for this expense.
Its a massive cost even if you do capitalise the costs. Will the Coalition policy deliver 80% of the benefits at 1/7th the cost? To deliver high speed to metropolitan regions and, as makes sense, deliver slower speeds to more remote areas where the cost of providing a service vastly outweighs benefits of doing so.
Joshua Gans makes a good point.
http://economics.com.au/?p=6052
Someone like Goldman Sachs could do it, I’m sure, just the same way that they helped make housing affordable in the US without any wastage, and without requiring any fallback on the US public purse.
Well, no, it isn’t. Tony G’s favorite Optus plan costs that much over six years, and anyway both you and Tony G are assuming the worst case cost for the NBN.
I can’t imagine why you would say something like this. You’re presumably in a better position than they are to put a proper argument on economic grounds, but you’ve chosen not to do so, instead relying on the dodgy BS in your first paragraph.
As usual Simon you are insulting but don’t add anything. Goldman Sachs could not deliver it and 4% of GDP is a large cost when a program delivering most benefits can be provided at a fraction of the costs. The claim that we do not need a Rolls Royce service that is compulsory for all is not my claim alone. You might want to read the Gans link. Try TM or anger management.
Now, that’s just weird.
Do you know what projection is ?
I did read it, in fact, even before you linked to it.
I’ve got no idea why you think it says something supportive of your whining.
@hc
Which government presided over the sale of the telecommunications monopoly? That incompetent move has left Australia without proper competition in the market and without a government controlled utility to provide vital infrastructure. This will do much more long term damage to Australia’s future than any of Labor’s stimulus package “waste”. If you are a Telstra broadband customer then I seriously doubt your ability to make rational decisions or even add numbers together.
Pr Q said:
I predict Pr Q will go broke underestimating the intelligence of the AUS electorate. I am fairly confident that the ALP will win comfortably on 21 AUG 2010. Even if the majoirty don’t vote for the ALP, it won’t be because of any love for dumbed down L/NP policy. It will be because of public disapproval of the ALP’s nasty political machinations.
Its worth noting that, in their 11 years of government, the L/NP changed the personnel in the three top jobs of PM, Treasurer and Foreign minister precisely zero times. So the ALP will have no one else but themselves to blame if they lose.
Michael, I don’t suffer great pain in using Australian broadband. I use a combination of providers and find the Telstra 3G mobile broadband a bit expensive but very good. That doesn’t mean I support the great march from monopoly to duopoly or for the Telstra monopoly over the wire network.
Isn’t the Coalition policy about providing some competition to facilitate the development of an efficient broadband network? I agree the previous privatization didn’t work out well.
Broadband isn’t a public good – people can elect different levels of service without having a uniform standard imposed by government. And it might be that more than 3% of Australian might have to do without the highest speeds because it’s too expensive to provide people with that.
SJ@12
“So you’d be paying almost $8000 over 6 years anyway, and not end up with the better system.”
The ISP is going to let you hook up for free are they? I doubt it;
Optus is still going to charge you $7641 over 6 years. And the the government is going to borrow an additional $8000 per household to build a new network that is only going to make a marginal difference to the 42.88 Mbit/s service that is already available now to 90% of customers.
The NBH is a $42 billion white elephant and with the rate the switching technology is improving for other technologies, the NBH will be obsolete by the time they install it.
JQ @13
It will double the electricity prices and it won’t stop carbon increasing in the atmosphere at the rate of 1.5ppm per year.
Your flawed carbon price modelling includes a credit based on the rest of the world agreeing to have an ETS to offset our extra carbon costs. Until an international ETS eventuates, your modelling is crap and electricity prices will double.
In the late 1990s I was involved in a project to provide internet connectivity to NSW councils and public libraries. We were successful in getting funding from “Networking the Nation” for some of this. NTN was money from the first tranche of the Telstra sell off & it followed this patchwork, piecemeal strategy proposed by the Libs that allowed politicians to delude themselves into thinking they were creating a national network. Same old sameold
What frustrates me on this current debater is the focus on cost. The true benefit of the NBN are that it will break Telstra’s last mile monopoly and be much more akin to large rail and road projects as opposed to giving x amount of bandwith to a particular customer.
On the matter of plumping for one technology (fibre) & the “governement picking winners” schtick, my understanding of fibre is that the cables will stay the same & if we want to ramp up to gigabit or terrabit speeds in the future, it will be a matter of replacing switch gear & routers and such like – a little like resealing or widening portions of the Pacific Highway.
Its very disappointing that the commentariate are letting Abbott get away with howler after howler notwithstanding electricity costs rising which he subtly attributed to federal labor last night – which is purely a state and regulator issue.
But it is not our fault sayeth the media, we are providing what the people want to read or it is the politicians that provide us with distractions to report on.
The Big Fella, many would agree with our host that Abbott is adrift for he continuously claims to be a prodigy of Howard but then changes his tune and falsely claims to be something he isn’t. Furthermore there is no comparison between Abbott the creationist and Turnbull the realist who is very articulate and knowledgable on matters dealing with economics, climate change, global warming, ETS, etc. In my opinion Abbott the creationist doesn’t know whether he is coming or going.
@Michael of Summer Hill
Abbott’s opponents in the labour party must be pretty hopeless if they cannot dispatch someone who, as you say, “doesn’t know whether he is coming or going.”
A lesson from sport and other areas of contest is to be gracious in defeat because every time you say that the winner has no talent, you are saying that those that came second, third and so on even have less talent than the no talent winner.
Be gracious in victory and do not question the reliability and wisdom of the judging process and the judges because it undermines the very legitimacy of your past, present and future victories to do so.
Progressives fail at the ballot box because snipping and campaign tactics such as listen here you dummies, why are you voting for those bigots on the other side. Insults are no what to win some to you side.
People rightly assume that the insults and implied and actual derision show a lack of substance and a lack of any real concern and empathy for those they want to trick into voting for them.
manners cost you nothing and get you a long way.
@Jim Rose
You make the coment “Progressives fail at the ballot box because snipping and campaign tactics such as listen here you dummies, why are you voting for those bigots on the other side. Insults are no what to win some to you side. ”
Pot Kettle is blacker on your side JR. Lets look at some charming (not) gracious (not) Mr Rabbits comments…
“His characterization of supporters of an Australian Republic: “teenagers blowing raspberries at their parents.”
On the suggestion that he should be able to turn up to a nationally televised debate on time: “bullshit.”
On asbestos sufferer and social justice campaigner Bernie Banton: “I know Bernie is very sick, but just because a person is sick doesn’t mean that he is necessarily pure of heart in all things.” He called Banton’s campaign a “stunt.” (In true Abbott style, he later absolved himself by apologizing for his remarks.)
And, of course, according to Abbott, climate change is “absolute crap.” (Later rectified by admission of “a bit of hyperbole.”)
He recently told us that homelessness was a lifestyle choice.
“we just can’t stop people from being homeless if that’s their choice”
and as one blogger commented “Just goes to show you how much of a FW the man actually is.”
Start improving Tony Abbotts manners JR first. He is well known for not having any.
“
@Jim Rose
Oh and Tony Abbott is a sexist misogynist
Try this one
“What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it’s going to go up in price, and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up.” Later, he said it is “more common to see women ironing,” informing us that it’s the way it works in his house.
Later still, he criticized his detractors as “hypersensitive” over this remark.
This electoral contender is a absolute joke, surely?. Its either that or the voters are indeed stupid.
Anyway – I think Tony Abbott is fake. The reason he doesnt know anything about the economy is because he cant be bothered to inform himself. I went to a laughable debate (featuring TA) when Australia went to Iraq. Every other debater had prepared and had access to facts. Tony Abbott got up and gave a hellfire and brimstone talk that was so weird….so unrelated to the Australian position that the audience was really scratching their heads (his rant was truly bizarre)…until…until
The speaker sitting right next to him informed us all he downloaded internet justifications the night before from US right wing redneck websites…she saw the http address at the bottom of his notes along with date and time of printout…
Lazy – (except for his physical individual pursuits).
He doesnt know about the economy and he doesnt care.
It seems odd that Abbott is running with his NBN policy despite admitting that he hasnt the foggiest about such things yet he is apparently able to review the science on climate change and then form a “considered opinion”
@Jim Rose
This is not like a sporting contest where there are a set of rules. This is a contest for the support of the peanut gallery. The winner will be the one who neutralises wins over enough of the peanut gallery in enough places to finish in front.
In doing so, the winner may well claim to be the most “talented” spinmeisters and have the best connections to the channels into the mids of the peanut gallery, but it won’t reflect at all on their worth in policy terms.
It will say even less about the worth of the policies to the working people that ensue from this “election”, if so august a term is warranted, because the boss class will certainly be the winner, whoever finishes in front.
@Fran Barlow
Yes, your note is a good explanation of how labour parties win office. The Left tells the voters what to fear, who the blame, and how to envy and plunder.
The parties on the right have a tougher job winning because they must explain the fatal conceit: that we cannot reshape the world in accordance with our desires. There are just somethings we cannot make better.
The parties on the right must explain that there are unintended consequences, conflicting incentives, large gaps in knowledge, special interest pressures, and unseen and adverse effects to seemingly on the face of it appealing policies.
Parties on the right must overcome a range of biases common among voters such as anti-market bias, make-work bias, anti-foreign bias, and pessimism bias.
Well, Abbott may be adrift but Sky News is blowing a big breeze in his favour, not least through some technology malarky. It seems that the “Sky Stream” streaming video is mysteriously used whenever Sky journalists are covering a Labor announcement outside of Sydney, and it breaks up into pixelated rubbish every time!! On the other hand, Tony Abbott’s announcements outside of Sydney mysteriously get the best that technology can offer. Why the Heck are Sky News going partisan? I don’t know what else to call it, after seeing bits of the Rooty Hill debacle – again – and witnessing it cut to put Abbott in a good light, especially on the NBN and the alternative gastric-banded internet proposed by the opposition. The modern philosopher’s word for that announcement: bulls**t!
Having only just seen the NBN 1Gbps announcement, I laugh at how Sky News used nice, crisp and normal TV picture for Abbott’s gastric-band announcement, while apparently without appreciating the irony SN used a crappy, slow, and continually dropping out streaming internet video to televise the Labor fast NBN announcement in Tasmania. A private enterprise apparently incapable, of delivering a fast NBN announcement, over the current internet! LOLROFL!
BTW: the ABC covered the Labor fast NBN announcement with nice crisp TV. The public broadcaster could do it, so why not a private company? [Rhetorical question.]
@Jim Rose
Fear/Blame: big government, big taxes, people on boats, people who are educated, Chinese, bureaucrats, Muslims, technology, scientists, socialists, atheists …
Plunder: environment, developing world
Envy: Rich people in general
@Fran Barlow
the trouble with socialism is it eventually runs out of other people’s money.
the solutions of the left are some one else should pay, some one else is to blame, and just pass a law and whatever you say can be done by that law will be done.
as for the 3rd world, the Left is of the view that they should be grateful for the crumbs from our ODA tables – wow, all of 0.7% of GDP is the ever so generous aspirational target – but never tariff-free access to our domestic markets nor the opportunity of skilled or unskilled migration.
No Jim, it is the few appropriating the common wealth, regardless of the interests of the rest.
What’s a system based on theft called?
Starts with “c”.
@paul walter
“appropriating the common wealth, regardless of the interests of the rest” requires regulatory privilege. The Left never saw a regulatory barrier to entry that they did not like.
You confuse corporate capitalism with a free market economy. As Friedman noted, “if you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong”. Regulatory privilege and rent-seeking opportunities are minimal, taxes are low, no GST and tariffs are zero.
Regulation creates monopoly power at the expense of smaller competitors and the consumers.
Big businesses favour tariffs and regulation because they fear competition and desire to forge a government-business coalition at the expense of many smaller competitors and many consumers. Self-styled progressive intellectuals such as you are vital propagandists in duping the public into thinking that the suppression of competition is in their interests.
The old left, the new left and the left-over-left are like all progressives – they are junior partners in corporate capitalism, providing not always unwitting rhetorical and political cover for bail-outs and privileges for the established big businesses in return for scraps from the table, tariffs and cross-subsidies for sub-sets of consumers and workers, and jobs for themselves as cogs in the machine.
Life is not all about competition to the exclusion of all else, Jim. Or, maybe your life is, I don’t know.
This is ridiculous Jim, as you place no bounds on regulation: no regulation at all in a free market for a particular sector, say telecomms, might allow monopoly formation and entrenchment. I think that’s the economic argument as to the natural endpoint (monopoly or oligopoly) of a free, unregulated market. If a trivial piece of regulatory practice was placed upon a sector which had been in its “natural” state, perhaps that the sector participants must register with a regulatory body or be fined $100 for example, then that is hardly going to shift a busy competitive market from many participants to an oligopoly or monopoly any faster or more certainly than the unregulated case.
Let’s face it Jim, you are a s**t-stirrer, aren’t you? A bit like John Elliot on Q&A tonight…
@Jim Rose
There’s no such thing as “other people’s money”. There is only everybody’s work, everybodys goods and everybody’s needs and how we resolve these matters to achieve equity.
The focus on money is a fantasy which mistakes the instantiation of work for work itself. Work is a social act and money but a manifestation of that act.
Donald Oats Says:
But Jim Rose Says:
Rose is just a perfectly ordinary, run-of-the-mill glibertarian troll, the same as Terje and the rest.
Actually he’s right.
Regulation does create monopoly, because in
Australia in 2010, politicians and business go hand in hand as corporatism, or “soft” fascism if it gets worse.
Feckless creature, that Elliot, also the slithering creature representing big mining, theself made man Shepherd, full of scornful till he’d vented his spleen and the Cracker mayor of Mt.Gambier, who mde me wonder if I wasn’t living in Macon County.
And the politicians.
All Catholic Opus Dei types, altho Morrison might just be your proddy blowhard or even straight secular conservative.
The magnitude of the offence I’ve taken means I can’t place Morrison below the Labor ones, arrogant in their ignorance and ignorant in their depthless arrogance.
Bob Brown and a fine Asian woman, an academic I think they introduced as working in fields involving population, by contrast covered themselves in glory.
Smith’s doco was perhaps necessarily, broad brush, simplistic and incomplete in some ways, perhaps he was relying on the panel to sort out the intricacies and the audience to employ likewise their mental faculties as to population and sustainablity.
@Fran Barlow
You say that “There is only everybody’s work, everybodys goods and everybody’s needs and how we resolve these matters to achieve equity.”
You seem to be unfamiliar with the writings of John Rawls.
Professor Quiggin righty identified Rawls as the starting point for political philosophy of progressives. Rawls was interested in the implications of different institutions of his conception of justice as fairness.
Rawls rightly pointed out that behind the veil of ignorance, people will agree to inequality as long as it is to everyone’s advantage. One reason is people are stripped of envy when behind the veil of ignorance.
Rawls lent qualified support to the idea of a flat-rate consumption tax (see A Theory of Justice pp. 278-79). He said “a proportional expenditure tax may be part of the best scheme” and adding that such a tax “can contain all the usual exemptions”.
The reason why Rawls lent qualified support to the idea of a flat-rate consumption tax was these taxes what people take out of the common store of goods rather than what he or she contributes. Rawls was awake to the power of incentives, you are not.
Rawls also supported negative income taxes and other forms of social insurance. He preferred a proportional expenditure tax over an income tax of any kind (A Theory of Justice, p. 246 – see googe books).
Rawls was a profound thinker and open to different interpretations. It is hard to disagree with his ideas of equal liberty, equal opportunity, and such inequalities that are to everyone’s advantage.
@Donald Oats
No regulation! a strawman argument that the left specialises in because it has no answers to the real questions.
I have previoulsy advocated the uniform regulation of all industries as as way to ensure a non-discriminatory democracy and equality under law.
“What’s a system based on theft called?
Starts with “c”.”
Communism.
@Jim Rose
I’m perfectly familiar with Rawls. I simply don’t accept that you can adduce it against the proposition I made or have it support your rather fetishised view of money.
Like all reactionaries, for you the exercise starts and ends with how to protect the arbitrarily privileged from the claims of everyone else.
@Jarrah
Assumes facts not in evidence. There being no communist system as an exemplar, you can scarcely make the claim. Moreover, even to refer to the collectivist autocracies of the 20th century as engaged in theft makes claims about property that are at best doubtful. While the assertion by a state of eminent domain can be seen as theft by those who reject the state those who support it will deny the legitimacy of the antecedent property claim. When Europeans invaded the Australian landmass, they asserted eminent domain and all of current property here derives from that successful assertion. Indigenes have come to assert that this was theft, so perhaps words starting with “c” to signify theft could be “colonisation” followed by “capitalism”. Can receivers of stolen goods complain about theft? Not really.
Of course, force was decisive in affirming the assertion, which is why European occupation and subsequent capitalist development is not seen as theft.
@Fran Barlow
I am against all privilege. I am for a non-discriminatory democracy.
What is your interpretation of rawl’s difference principle?
Speaking of privilege, are you against tax privileges for super in Oz? Retirement savings should be taxed like any other investment income.
Fran, you’re going to have to start recognising when people are being flippant 🙂
Although, now you bring it up, we don’t need a working example to examine the theoretic underpinnings of communism.