There seems to be a significant chance that the election will produce a Labor government depending on Green votes in the Reps to provide a lead over the Coalition, and in the Senate to pass legislation. I find it hard to believe that the process we’ve just been through could produce such an outcome, not only matching my preferences but reflecting those expressed by the majority of voters, but that’s what some of the papers are saying is likely. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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John Quiggin 
@Jim Rose
Doubtless. One reads all manner of silliness on our side of politics. It is tempting, if one doesn’t control the cards, to play the cards one is dealt. Many think that if you are going to cop the disadvantages, you should at least trade on the advantages.
I don’t share that view because I am interested quirte as much in empowering working people through good process as achieving good ends. Getting stuff done through chicanery is a recipe for having it reversed.
That said, your laundry list is full of strawmen or wrong.
@Jim Rose
Even allowing that this were true, so what? We are talking about how Abbott got as close as he did to toppling Gillard, rather than who started doing what 18 years ago. His campaign was dishonest and no basis for a mandate (see above) and certainly not a rationale for concuding anything about what kinds of politics are acceptable.
@Jim Rose
JR – when you say “the left” as you do fairly often ….do you mean the Green left, the labor left, the academic left, the public sector left, the agrarian socialist left in the Coalition party or just the left out?
I amused at that large bucket you carry with you.
@billie
Billie – Katter is right. he says we are now importing more food than we are exporting. This is ridiculous. Its not as if we have a huge population to feed here. We are just sitting watching our stable food production over 200 years now just get ripped up by the likes of Coles and Woolies who are laughing all the way to the bank with the profitable (for them only) destruction they are reaping on country towns and farming families across Australia. Its a damn disgrace and the fact that these idiot city dwelling liberals sign up to globalisation and free trade and talk about “isnt it good how cheap DVD players are now”… really have completely lost the plot.
In our last drought – watching farmers trying to sell their dwindling sheep and lamb stock (because they couldnt afford to feed them) at the stock yards while Mr Coles’s buyer and Mr Woolies buyer prowled the yards buying the stock for a pittance while slugging the consumers at outrageous prices made me want to see both their buyers summarily executed.
Give me two boat people allowed in for every Coles and Woolies stock buying manager I can put back in that boat and turn it around… GDP would rise.
@Marginal Notes
I get your point Marginal Notes but do you see much difference to the protection being afforded to Coles and Woolies now in the form of a truly hands off approach to regulation and our so called toothless ACCC and no tariffs than the protection once afforded to farmers by agricultural protection?
The whole “no protection” argument is just a “protection shift” from the many who actually added productively to our GDP (farming communitioes) to a duopoly that has now become extraordinarily wealthy and doesnt add much relatively (preferring to sequester their profits elsewhere, minimise their tax responsibilities, play predatory pricing games with any competition, pay farmers peanuts, and pay kids kids wages run their stores).
Marginal notes – if more of the damn profit stays here give the protection to our farmers. If it halts the decimation of our food industry and gives me lower prices that arent the result of price fixing and gouging by Coles and Woolies and if it helps the unemployment rate rise in country towns and sees job opportunities spread over a wider area than our congested cities…
Then I dont care to protect Coles and Woolies any longer in the name of “no protection”.
sorry above should read “and if it helps the unemployment rate fall in country towns”
“he says we are now importing more food than we are exporting. This is ridiculous.”
Why?
“made me want to see both their buyers summarily executed. ”
Because they were buying cheap and selling dear? Your executioner is going to be busy, Alice Vissarionovich, after the workers’ and farmers’ revolution.
Looks like Terje Petersen has been able to convince 235 voters to vote for him. Not a bad effort considering his politics.
Alice @#2/2 – Now you are starting to rant like Bob Katter! Broadacre agricultural production continues to grow and to be largely export-oriented. If consumers also like imported foods in addition to the wheat, beef, and mutton we produce and export, what would you have governments do about that? The decline in smaller rural towns (and growth of regional towns) is part of a much larger process that anything buyers from Coles and Woolies could bring about.
@Marginal Notes
I have always maintained that Alice is an ex-DLP voter.
Jim @ #9 – Bob Katter and Bob Santamaria have/had a lot in common!
@Alice
the most important protection for Coles and Woolies is foreign investment rules that stop overseas new entrants buying and holding land in anticipation of building a supermarket chain a few years later when these local areas have enough population growth to support a store.
@Alice
who are the left? the old left, new left and the left over left, many of whom are greens or self-described progressives.
“what would you have governments do about that?”
She’d probably have the importers killed, going by previous comments.
jarrah says “Because they were buying cheap and selling dear? ”
Thats woolies and Coles Jarrah is talking about in the drought down at the stockyards (buying dirt cheap from desperate farmers) and selling dear (to us – the consumers Woolies and Coles doesnt give a damn about because of their cosy duopoly).
So Jarrah – Talk to me more about the miracle of competition from deregulated markets and how it makes our groceries cheaper from Mr Woolies and Mr Coles? Im still waiting but the prices have gone through the ceiling and now there are a lot more unemployed country people without farms here in Australia.
Gee Jarrah – if I didnt look around me I could almost fall for your libertopian view of deregulated markets….but not quite. You see…its the prices Jarrah. They just arent behaving like you city liberals promised the rest of the country.
What happens when a whole lot of people lose the faith Jarrah? Do they turn Green?
Alice #14 – the real crime about importing food is on several levels
1. The energy required in transporting food from around the world and thus the impact on the CO2 levels.
2. That the people from the exporting nation may be producing goods for export which leaves them hungry and their soils depleted producing luxury good like chocolate which was recently revealed as relying on slave labor.
3. The lack of controls on hygiene
4. The lack of controls over freshness
5. The undermining of our own horticultural and agricultural sector
6. The use of pesticides (although this can be worse in Australia)
The trouble with deregulation is that the standard of the food can be quite low without consumers being any the wiser. The supermarkets currently push imported food to the detriment of our own producers and consumers. Personally I prefer IGA because of the range of local food that is available including fresh fruit and veg locally grown in season.
It is interesting that Bob Katter could make this kind of argument a make or break for support in the parliament.
“Talk to me more about the miracle of competition from deregulated markets and how it makes our groceries cheaper from Mr Woolies and Mr Coles? Im still waiting but the prices have gone through the ceiling and now there are a lot more unemployed country people without farms here in Australia.”
Competition in the supermarket sector isn’t cutthroat, but it does exist and is reasonably healthy. Methods of improving competition have been proposed, but you wouldn’t like them – they generally involve deregulation in other areas.
The increase in prices is a global phenomenon, and has more to do with international factors than local ones. Remember, according to you we import more food than we export (and you still haven’t told us why that’s a bad thing).
The facts don’t support your case, Alice. But then I suppose you’re used to that.
It is amazing that the election hasn’t been decided and yet it still has to sink into Coalition psyches that they didn’t win despite their heavily funded, negative campaign. All of the focus in the media has been on the Labor Party needing to do some soul searching – which is well worth it if they can avoid making it all very public (dirty linen is not something to share). There should be equal focus on how a cashed up campaign supported by the news media has not been accepted by a majority. Obviously money talks but not to everyone.
@Jarrah
Jarrah you say with some authority
“Competition in the supermarket sector isn’t cutthroat, but it does exist and is reasonably healthy. Methods of improving competition have been proposed, but you wouldn’t like them – they generally involve deregulation in other areas.The increase in prices is a global phenomenon, and has more to do with international factors than local ones…
Ive heard all this before Jarrah and somehow I just cant bring myself to keep the faith in the freedoms of Coles and Woolies…at the expense of our farmers livelihoods who managed to live quite sustainably for a long time before Coles and Woolies grew so free.
So its the “international factors and various global phenomenon” that have caused increased prices on the shelves in Coles and Woolies here in Australia…. and our farmers to commit suicide at rates unheard of before agrarian de-regulation (werent we all supposed to be better off?)…do you have a few examples of these international factors Jarrah?
@Jill Rush
This election result is actually the best thing to happen for a long time in Australia….now both major parties have to deal with people they have been ignoring for decades. People like the Greens and the Nationals. There is a certain poetic justice in this hung parliament.
If I was religious I would say it was an act of divine intervention. Hey its nice the right (both right majors) actually have to consult and consider the left who like public transport and governments who can build infrastructure like decent transport systems and provide services publicly like education, or the national broadband network, as well as consider all those agrarian socialists that live in the country and their needs for a sustainable life.
If it makes the I, me, mine mindset look around more at who else lives here then that is a huge plus.
@Alice
Still can’t count. Progressives pride themselves on their better knowledge and intellectual superiority, and calm attention to the facts, but can’t count past two.
You say that there is a Coles and Woolies duopoly. A duopoly is a market with 2 sellers, 2 sellers! No more, no less. Just like a monopoly means one seller. One and no more!
The two largest Australian chains account for about 80% of the market, so there are other sellers. To be precise:
• Coles over 700 supermarkets (including BiLo)
• Woolworths has around 780 (including Safeway)
• ALDI has recently opened its 200th store and has announced plans to expand much further, up to 700 supermarkets in due course, which would put it on a par with Coles.
• Costco is entering Australia with its first warehouse in Melbourne and plans to open more in NSW
• Independents including IGA supermarkets, Franklins, Foodworks and Supabarn are also tough, and in some cases expanding, competitors
The main constraint on competition is town planning. Foreign investment rule now allow new entrants to own land for 5 years in, for example, anticipation of building when the local population reaches the critical level.
Your hypothesis is Costco and ALDi do not exist, nor do Independents including IGA supermarkets, Franklins, Foodworks and Supabarn!!!
A market with a major new entrant with 200 new supermarkets cannot be a cosy Coles and Woolies duopoly.
Foodworks is buying 45 supermarkets from Coles, and it too now has over 700 stores! Why would a duopolist sell stores to a smaller established rival that does not exist under your hyopothesis that there is is a duopoly?
p.s. I assume you will answer with an ad hoc adjustment to your hypothesis to protect it from falsifaction by restated the allegation as dynamic limit pricing. they always do.
@Jim Rose
Well what do you call our political party system Jim – a duopoly exists when two firms control the majority of the marketshare. So Aldi has 200 out of 1800 stores. Costco has one in planning and the independents like Aldi and the rest make up what JR – 15% or less?
As far as I can see despite your promises its still a duopoly.
@Jim Rose
JR also wants me to only look at level one on the company scale (the superficial store name). What about the parent companies JR?. Have a closer look at our grocery industry
http://www.ethical.org.au/issues/?issue=16
If Julia scrapes over the line Abbott and Murdoch-empire will spend the next 3 years bashing the “unelected government” illegitimately appointed by a corrupt Labor mother-in-law Governor General with a conflict of interest – the meme is already starting to spread
“do you have a few examples of these international factors Jarrah?”
I don’t know where you picked up the creepy politician’s habit of constantly repeating the other person’s name, but I wish you’d stop. Also, you continually refer to “Coles and Woolies” when they only have 50% of the fresh produce market, haven’t increased their market share over the last decade, and it’s competitors like Foodworks and Aldi that are doing all the expansion.
International factors? Try high demand, and increased costs of production (in particular those driven by higher input costs associated with fuel and fertilisers). And locally, there’s the rolling drought.
“at the expense of our farmers livelihoods who managed to live quite sustainably for a long time before Coles and Woolies grew so free”
You have to realise that the sustainability was a mirage based on constant subsidies by food consumers and urban taxpayers.
@Jarrah
Jarrah – you need to hear the reality about your free trade and what its doing. Why arent the liberals listening to people like Bob Katter…its all gone a bridge too far here in Australia Jarrah especially when the agricultural sector in many other comparable countries enjoys subsidies equivalent to 49 cents in the dollar. We are now net importers of fruit and vegetables, fish, pork, sugar has been lost, dairy has been lost.
We need to wake up. Agriculture is declining at a rapid rate. Manufacturing is dead. What else is it going to destroy here Jarrah?
Not only that, the only reason, the liberals have enjoyed pushing this de-regulation to the extent they have is because of the dominance in government enjoyed by Howard.
Never again I hope. Thats the problem when one group gets too much power Jarrah. We lose real democracy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSytQODXzkI
Have a real listen to this Jarrah.
What was the informal vote in the same seat?
@Jarrah
Excuse politicians habit – must have been watching too much election coverage on Murdoch lately.
@Chris Warren
Chris – how could you be so cruel?. We havent heard from Terje since the election.
Well, Alice, I shouldn’t be surprised that you have addressed precisely zero of my specific criticisms. I’ll go and listen to your YouTube link. Will you listen and respond to any remarks I have on it?
@Alice
so the first Australian ALDI store opened in January 2001, 200 have been built more, and you still did not notice them them nor did ALDI stores collapse under the pressures of 9 long years of predatory pricing “to stamp out smaller independent retailers”.
like all good progressives, you:
1. claim to be able to tell a good monopoly from a bad monopoly; and
2. wish to protect consumers from the scourge of lower prices.
@Chris Warren
I laughed at your comment, but I do also appreciate that Terje gave it a shot which takes some guts. Whatever the politics.
Reminds me of one election in university days, when a particular candidate received zero votes! Zilch, nada. Whether the candidate chose not to vote, or accidentally voted informally, who can say.
After listening to the various independents, I’m wondering whether a better title for this thread mightn’t be “The Mirage of Democracy.”
I have run as an in elections twice as – Unemployed Workers Union (1978 – ACT House of Assembly) and Nuclear Disarmament Party.
I always received a strong vote, – always enough to get my deposit back, because these campaigns were based on what the public wanted.
Terje is running on what the public hates – anarco-capitalism.
@Jim Rose
JR – Australia has gone further fown the privatisation road and further down the industry de-regulation road than many other countries. If we, with a population of 20 million are now net importers of fruit and vegetables – all I can see is we are fools…the free market Australia experiment.
Lets give it another ten years shall we? Lets see whats left then? If you think Wesfarmers, Metcash and Woolworths having control of everything from groceries, to hardware supplies, to poker machines, to electronics, to service stations (and now they want pharmacies) as well as control of the actual brands on their shelves in store you are crazy. How many small businesses and farmers and small stores and independent service station owners in this country have they already wiped out? In hindsight its horrifying and we are not paying less. We are paying more. For all your groups claim free trade is a benefit – all I see is a whole lot of productive capacity just being destroyed so these large enterprises can reap huge profits (which they do).
The thing that really worries me is that we have now reached the point where people cant recall busy country towns, where people cant recall lots of small shops, where people cant recall being busy and employed all week long, where people cant recall it any other way than the hopeless self destructive direction we are going in.
Oh and I forgot Wesfarmers, Woolworth and Metcash now have control of liquor shops. Is there anything left for them to control. Have they thought about hairdressers?
@Alice
political duopoly is word that conceals more than it reveals.
are australia, the USA and the UK political duopolies?
the UK always had several small parties that made close elections interesting wth minority goverments a possibility.
governments rarely control the senate in australia.
Gore lost to bush because nader’s margin was larger thna gore’s losing margin in several states. about half of nader’s voters would have still voted but for nader and about at a 2:1 ratio for Gore.
Seriously funny (no wonder Malcolm Turnbull kept his seat easily)
Arbib being put on detention by Ms Gillard and not allowed to go on Q and A.
Malcom Turnbull on Q and A making quacking movements with his hand over Mr Arbibs empty seat… saying “oh it was Blighs fault…it was the leaks…”
Maybe the headmistress should really have expelled Arbib and Bitar.
Chris Warren, the informal vote was rather high 5028 (5.8%). I hope it wasn’t because some drongo told voters he was going to leave his papers blank and others followed suit.
Speaking of Bligh, the ABC says that she has had the arrogance to announce, a bare couple of days after the election, (after, that is) an intention to perservere with privatisation.
I’ve seem some examples of ignorance, arrogance and bad faith lately, but this takes the cake!
Boys, last time I looked Coles and Woolworths cornered 70% of the retail dollar, that was a few years ago and despite Aldi’s inroads Woolies has got into hardware, the retail liquor sector is now firmly in their hands.
Costco melbourne, well its difficult to get to, in an area surrounded by single adult households, sells in bulk – not a serious contender.
Interesting to note that Aldi, owned by German brothers, proudly states that 97% of produce is Australian, labels foods as vegan, vegetarian, has shorter supply chain, in English means food is fresher when it hits the shelves etc has been frozen out of shopping centres.
There are no foreign ownership rules controlling the ownership of Australian farms. I believe that Bob Hussian of Indonesian forest burning fame is the largest landholder in the Northern Territory
@billie
Make up your mind.
Market power is about raising prices by restricting output. That is the welfare loss.
Are Coles and woollies expanding their market share by cutting prices or putting them up?
A good rule for assessing if complaints of monopolisation are false is whether they are made by competitors. If the complaints are from market rivals, the claims should be dismissed out of hand as anti-competetive rent-seeking.
If the market leaders are able to profitably put their prices up, their smaller market rivals will quietly follow them up and profit from tacit collusion.
If the market leaders are cutting their prices, their rivals run to the competition watchdog to ask it to protect consumers from the scourge of lower prices.
p.s. if you can document an actual case of successful below-cost pricing – predatory pricing – priority publication in the top economic journals awaits you.
one or two seats will be decided by a smallest of handfuls of votes.
does anyone know how close the margin has to be before it falls inside the margin covered by the idioits who for reasons known only to the voices in their heads vote several times, and the usual errors in marking off the roll and recording of postal and other votes and so on?
an election will be overturned in a court challenge if multiple votes and other recording errors exceed the winning margin
On the big supermarkets and their predatory practices; wasn’t there a fairly recent expose of this? (ABC?) They don’t so much sell below cost price because they demand the suppliers bear the below-production cost prices for the supermarket’s chosen ‘loss leaders’. If suppliers want longer term deals they have to comply. Suppliers were also advised to rise their prices to others in order to help the acceptance of the very low prices being paid to them – which artificially boosts the big buyer’s competitiveness both ways. For a lot of agricultural producers there is no choice but go along or plow their crops back in at even greater loss. I recall another expose that revealed a big supermarket rapidly dropping prices to beat any local, small retailers who dare to try and undercut them; bananas were the example and in short order each of a series of price cuts initiated by a small greengrocer were promptly undercut, way past the point of being below cost even for the big supermarkets, until the price was so low the big supermarket chose to remove bananas from sale rather than continue. These practices may temporarily give extremely low prices to consumers but at a high cost to our agriculture sector.
what is the National Party?
used to be the agriculture/rural economic/social voice.
and now two seperate voices.
one loudly vociferous claiming mining privelege.
one muted and fighting for it’s life against sell-the-farm economic rationalists
they are going to have to make up their minds or divide .
To get back to the original subject of this thread (“reasons to be cheerful”), I’ve been surprised at how little has been made of Wilson Tuckey’s demise. I know nothing of his replacement, but to be rid of that odious clown from the House of Representatives has to be a good thing, surely.
I am sure that this may have been mentioned elsewhere. You may have seen this article in the Fairfax press yesterday by Paul Sheehan.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/the-yarra-monster-is-killing-us-20100822-13apt.html
This how the article starts:
A great sucking force can be felt around Australia, siphoning resources southwards, down the hungry throat of Melbourne. Australia makes, Melbourne takes.
”Melbourne is a parasite economy,” says Bob Birrell, the doyen of immigration and population studies in Australia. ”Increasingly, the fiscal dividend from Australia’s mineral boom is having to be distributed to Victoria to pay for the needs of Melbourne’s population boom. That’s why the Victorian Premier, John Brumby, is constantly having to go cap-in-hand to the federal government for assistance.”
The article states that the demand is driven by immigration, rather than production. As he states again: “in other words, Melbourne is growing for the sake of growing, racing towards a population of 5 million, using other people’s money.“.
And he finishes:
All of this poses the question, if Melbourne is going to become a city of 5 million people, but only by sucking resources from the rest of the country, what’s in it for the rest of the country?
Nothing. It should not be surprise then, that on Saturday night Victoria, the state so reliant on big government and big immigration, went hard for Labor and a Melbourne Prime Minister.
It wasn’t just parochialism, it was greed.
I find this article a day after the election, where the electorate of Melbourne elected the first ever Green Member of Parliament, and where contrary to other parts of Australia Victoria has swung towards Labor interesting. The states that are ‘productive’ have voted for the coalition while the sucking parasite states that like immigration to boost have voted Labor or heavens above…Green.
The most amazing thing about this election is the self-destruction of the ALP in the past 6 months and how close an ‘unelectable’ Tony Abbott came.
Amazing when you consider that 3 years ago many punters were predicting the death of the liberal party and many years in opposition. Including our host –
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2007/11/25/the-last-liberal/
Andrew, a lot has happened since 2007 but to say JQ was wrong would be incorrect for most pundits were thinking along the same lines. As for the ALP imploding that is total bull. Had you said the L-NP were buying their way into power then I would have said you were wright.
Unfortunately John I don’t think will get a Labor government now. The postal and absentee votes are trending away from the ALP.
Michael that’s what I said – most pundits were thinking along the same lines. JQ was wrong but so were most pundits. That’s my point – amazing that Abbott got so close!
ALP imploding ‘total bull’ – run that by me again!!!!!
Australian politics today is a shambles. The Coalition should be an unelectable rabble, the make-up of a Coalition front bench makes me cringe. The ALP has been taken over by power-brokers who are only interested in power – the ALP has forgotten what it stands for. The Greens are a dysfunctional minority who’ll probably disintegrate back into their 3 separate groupings once Bob Brown moves on (disaffected ALP voters, true-believer environmentalists, marxists).