156 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  1. Last Monday, the ABC’s “The Business” ran this report on the Government’s potential changes to Labor’s Financial Advice reforms that were implemented to protect investors from losing their retirement investments from advice that’s provided that’s not in the interests of the investor.
    If the financial sector has this much lobbying power, I truly worry about where this government can take us [sigh]

  2. I preferred “Post comments on any topi”, as it read in the announcement email, no doubt before proofreading. “Topi”, or “topee” in older spellings, is a loanword from India for a hat (or helmet, e.g. a moti topi is a motorcycle helmet, and you probably know what a solar topee is – a sturdy sun helmet, typically made of lightweight pith).

    I am sure other readers could tell you more about the topi.

  4. This year and the next couple will mark the 20th anniversaries of various affairs in Australian intellectual and cultural life in the mid-1990s. To mark the anniversaries, Helen Garner, Virginia Trioli and Jenna Mead have combined their literary talents to produce Leave No Turn Unstoned, a rivetting and revealing account of how Helen Demidenko earned the Order of Lenin for her role in the sexual harassment scandal that engulfed the Quadrant Editorial Committee.

  5. Arithmetic: 2+2=4.

    Pragmatism: 2+2=4 works so it must be true.

    Durkheimianism: 2+2=4 is functional.

    Karl Popper: The hypothesis that 2+2=4 has yet to be falsified.

    Karl Marx: The slave mode of production gives us II+II=IV, the capitalist mode of production gives us 2+2=4, under socialism 2+2 will still equal 4 but in the higher stage of communist society the achievement of absolute material abundance will render arithmetic unnecessary.

    Joseph Stalin: 2+2=5.

    Friedrich Hayek: the correct value of 2+2 will be determined by the unhindered operation of free market forces and attempts by governments to direct that 2+2=4 will inevitably end in Communist totalitarianism.

    Climate change deniers: 2+2=3.

    Postmodernists: 2+2=whatever you like.

    Tony Abbott: Under a Coalition government 2+2 will always be lower than under Labor.

    Bill Shorten: One extreme in this debate says that 2+2=3 while the other extreme says that 2+2=4, therefore Labor takes a responsible moderate position between these extremes and says that 2+2=3.5.

    Green Left Weekly: The US armed forces and the Israeli Defence Force use arithmetic, therefore 2+2=5 is a legitimate form of resistance to Zionism and imperialism and a model for the left everywhere.

  8. Climate change deniers: 2+2=3

    Dunno… Can Climate change deniers get a rational number from adding 2 rational numbers?

  9. Climate change deniers: the value of 2+2 has not increased since 1998. However, if the value of 2+2 has increased since 1998, there’s nothing we can do about. (Also, the surface area of the Earth = Pi * [the radius of the Earth] squared).

  10. @Tristan Ewins

    Bolt is not interested in understanding anything. His game is telling lies for self-interest and personal gain. There are many kinds of conmen. Some are shonky used car dealers. Some sell you unnecessary house cladding or dodgy roof painting. And some knowingly write huge lies in newspapers and blogs and do so for pay from the plutocrat.

  12. Prof. Quiggin

    You have previously said:

    Can full employment be restored?… I have argued that a return to full employment (conservatively define to mean an unemployment rate of 3 per cent) is both feasible and desirable. The central thrust of our argument is that unemployment is ultimately … the result of constraints on public expenditure…

    Do you still believe that full employment (conservatively defined to mean an unemployment rate of 3 per cent) is feasible and desirable?

    Thank you for your time.

    Kind regards,

    Senexx

  13. @Tim Macknay

    If the Earth were a perfect sphere that would be the area of any circle formed by slicing through an axis of symmetry. Of course the Earth is an oblate spheroid, so that complicates matters.

  14. Why does Tony Abbott state that aluminium industry is hurt by the carbon tax, when Alcoa made a hefty profit by trading carbon credits, i.e. excess to requirements permits granted to it under the ALP ETS transition? Why, when he claims something along these lines in parliament, does the opposition let it go unchallenged, and then go onto other questions?

  15. Baffling that the opposition is so noticeably missing in action. Abbott’s shameless whoppers delivered daily are reported, then silence. Is Shorten neutered by forces unknown? Not without significance than John Roskam of the wretched IPA is one of his best mates. Talk about sleeping with the enemy…..

  17. @Donald Oats

    Because stupid Labor implemented the weak as micturition carbon tax and over-compensated rich corporations for polluting so they could make windfall profits out of it. Labor would parade their own stupidity and guilt in trying to hold Abbott to account. Of course, Abbott should be held to account but as Labor are completely compromised they cannot do so. Labor and LNP are both right-wing, neoliberal parties in the pockets of the capitalist corporations. Forget about them, they are so last century.

  18. TerjeP,

    He has suggested that electricity privatisation has failed – but, in my view, not substantiated that argument. Many of his criticisms of the NEM relate to the process of corporatisation and (in some states) privatisation but to my mind those are public choice problems, not a critique of how actual markets could or should operate.

    That’s a nice no-true-scotsman from Sinclair.

  20. Was that Windschuttle sexually harrassing Morris Newman, or vice versa?@Paul Norton . The obvious loser in all of this was Demidenko, who sank from being ( to some tastes )a writer, to a lawyer.

  23. Meanwhile, a slightly implausible but nonetheless amusing Newspoll has the Federal government taking a bath in pig manure, with a primary vote of 39% and a TPP of 46.

  24. At the refugee rally in Brisbane on Friday night there was an impromptu address from a lady from “Labor for Refugees”.

    The crowd was too polite to throw things or ‘boo’, but the faces and cast aside eyes said it all. The half-hearted slow fairy-clap applause afterward was a stark contrast to the genuinely emotional and honest cheers and applause when another speaker referred to the fact that ALP/LNP are identical on the issue of this inhumane treatment of refugees.

    Apparently ‘Labor for Refugees’ started in 2001 in response to Kim Beasley’s piss-weak folding on the Tampa election and allowing Howard to demonise refugees for political advantage. They say they are devout ALP supporters who have been trying ever since to get the ALP to have a decent and humane approach to refugees.

    That has obviously been a failure at best and produced an even worse outcome for refugees than under Howard at worst.

    How can anybody who cares about this issue vote ALP?

    And I would remind people that the “Abbott would be worse” campaign didn’t really work out so well – especially since the policies that have caused the most recent atrocities are ALP policies and the transnational corporations running the joint were granted their multi-billion dollar contracts by the ALP.

  25. Fran @13, when the peasants measure the surface of the Earth properly with their wooden triangles, they find that your mate Trotsky’s scientific method is always wrong.

  27. @Megan

    I alsways find the “Labor for Refugees” folk quite good people at a purely personal level. They do however somewhat remind me of those people who’d try to persist in conning children to buy the Santa myth “so as to preserve childhood”. Not an entirely unreasonable sentiment, but somehow, deeply flawed.

    These people really would like to persuade people for hom ethics are subject to partisan damage control/advantage that they can have both of thesed in the here and now, when plainly they can’t.

    In the here and now, the ALP must utterly repudiate pretty much everything they’ve said on the matter since 2001 — maybe since 1993 and give an account of how they got it so wrong and expressly criticise those responsible. Only then will the road to recovery be open to them. Then they have to carry this critique to their community.

    That will be messy, but they have two years. I don’t see them doing this.

  28. @Fran Barlow

    I don’t see them doing this.

    Neither do I.

    And I can’t understand the depth of ‘true-belief’ required to continue to advocate electoral support for a party so clearly determined NOT to do those things you mention. And especially so when the party knows it can literally take their support for granted.

  29. PS: Coincidentally I just read a piece on “Overland” titled “Labor in vain: a new direction for refugee rights?”

    The author argues that LNP will never budge on refugees and that rather than target LNP all effort/protest/actions should be directed against the ALP in an effort to get them to change their policy.

    As I understand it, around 2002 the Parliamentary Labor Party took on an anti-refugee policy which was against the ALP constitution because their National Conference had voted for a humane policy. I’m not an ALP supporter so I may have some of the terminology wrong – but basically the faceless men dictated a policy the opposite of what delegates had democratically agreed.

    I’m not confident ALP members/supporters can get their party back, the infiltration appears too deep and the acceptance of that situation seems too entrenched.

  30. @Fran Barlow

    Labor are irredeemable. I would centre what few hopes I have on a true left party. We need the Greens, Green Left or International Socialists (or all three) to step up. People are afraid or too blind yet to admit that capitalism is a morally corrupt system which is destroying our society and our planet. Soon, historically speaking, the evidence will become too obvious to deny. Whether we can overcome the damaging empire dynamic inherent in civilization is another question. I have serious doubts. (See my post 5 in the sandpit, after I gave up trying to interest people in Australia’s fuel situation.)

  31. @megan

    I’m not confident ALP members/supporters can get their party back, the infiltration appears too deep and the acceptance of that situation seems too entrenched.

    Nor I. I paricipate over at Pollbludger, which is a hang out for people who are tribally ALP with a handful of coalition trolls and a few who are Greens or at least sympathetic to humanity. Very few of the ALP-identifying posters would support a change to a humane policy, albeit that some are embarrassed by it but cry “but what can we do? I think we need to accept we’ve lost this one”. Some are extremely critical of us Greens for not supporting the “Malaysian solution” even though this would have gone directly against both our party’s policy and what people who vote for us expect.

    Everything is cast in terms of winning the news cycle and for those who see themselves as deeper, the next election. Principle simply doesn’t get a look in, expcept perhaps as a damned nuisance. Inevitably, someone quotes Whitlam from 1967 to the Victorian SL faction on “purity” and “impotence”. Not one of his finer moments.

    I challenged them over there to reflect on how different the debate on asylum seekers would be if they all looked like potential extras in Australian advertising for beer, breakfast food, air freshener or family cars. None of them could offer a plausible response, and few bothered trying. One played victim — “yea right Fran — when in doubt reach for racism — I expected better”. His name is Adam Carr, an electoral officer to Senator Feeney and generally regarded in the blog as the unofficial spokesperson for the ALP right, and certainly someone with a detailed knowledge of ALP history. He posts there as “Psephos” due to his primary interest in matters electoral.

    Actually, I hadn’t mentioned racism, but he gave the game away with his admission. Yet it wasn’t quite right. While it’s not hard to find racism amongst those opposing the boats, my suspicion is that there’s a much more general dissonance towards the poor more generally. It’s not that most opposed to the boats hate them — they just don’t care what happens to them or they do, in a broad sense, but don’t want to think about it presumably because it would make it harder to feel good about their privileges here, or given them scope to complain about the lack of them. That attitude too is a kind of racism — a desire to continue to be a wealthy first world country, if needs be, at the expense of non-first world countries. One hears very little about MDGs on the site either.

    Ikon

    We need the Greens, Green Left or International Socialists (or all three) to step up. People are afraid or too blind yet to admit that capitalism is a morally corrupt system which is destroying our society and our planet.

    Well I’m not much into “morals” (hate the term — it sounds so Fred Nile-ish) but certainly, it’s clear that capitalism can’t pass any reasonable test of social justice or equity or inclusion or even ecological sustainability. It’s a world where 87 rich people have the same worth as 3.5bn poor others. It’s simply impossible to believe all people are equal when the interests of one person are as significant as the interests of 40 million others. At least one of those claims has to be discarded. These 87 can laugh at the penury of most of the “1%” and probably do.

    It’s no accident that the system that predisposes that is using the biosphere as a sewer and tearing through humanity’s capital to feed the insatiable appetite of the wealthy to enslave the rest of humanity. It’s no accident that from every pore in public discourse, a torrent of cant in defence of this system issues forth, clogging the eyes and ears and filling the mouths of even the educated with its poisonous misanthropy.

    We need to work very hard to help our fellows climb out of the mire, and understand the connectedness between broad social arrangements, the disastrous course that humanity is currently taking, and the existential panics du jour — “boats” “drugs” “terrorists” “muslims” etc. We need to show that in the longer run, nothing but an inclusive world in which the burdens and benefits of labour are equitably settled can hope to give humanity what it needs.

  32. Greenwald’s latest on “The Intercept” is good:

    Claims that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in “false flag operations” to discredit targets are often dismissed as conspiracy theories, but these documents leave no doubt they are doing precisely that.

    According to the docs Australia is probably doing it too as a member of 5 eyes.

  33. Ikonoclast

    I would centre what few hopes I have on a true left party.

    This sectarianism does more harm. It is what capitalists want. It is divide and conquer on their part, and political suicide on your part.

    You just end up in yet another Trotskyite trash can.

  37. @Ivor

    And for the record, however practicable it is, “creating a true left party” is the opposite of sectarian. It’s much closer to what has been called, somewhat disparagingly in the past, “a family of the left” approach — by people whom the “family of the left” people accuse of being “sectarian”.

    Slogans like this are fairly arbitrary and don’t really help us distinguish counter-productive from productive approaches to marshalling working humanity to pursue its place in the sun. In the end, one has to evaluate carefully and choose.

  38. @Megan
    Historically, the term ‘faceless men’ was adopted as a jibe at ALP conference delegates who were (or who were thought to be) dictating policy to the ALP parliamentary leadership, who (unlike the conference delegates) were publicly known and recognisable figures who had directly appealed for and received the votes of the Australian people.

    If the parliamentary leadership overrides or ignores the extra-parliamentary party, that’s the opposite situation. Whatever else one may say about them (and their decisions), it is hardly reasonable to describe the parliamentary leadership as ‘faceless’ in the sense of being publicly unknown.

  40. @J-D

    fair point … If anything, it was the delegates who were “faceless”. Really though, that Alan Reid jibe is so 50-years ago. An early Murdochism if I recall correctly …

    Really, its continuing use shows that populism just goes on and on …

  41. To tie the two issues together, I see Asher Wolf has a piece about an ex-ALP pollie who was working for G4S on Manus and has quit and left in disgust at recent events.

    Apparently there is also a story about Manus on Dateline tonight SBS 9:30pm in which it is described as a ‘human experiment’ to demonstrate Australia’s cruelty as a ‘deterrent’. A bi-partisan policy.

  42. Europe and especially Scandinavia should that dedicated Left parties can play an important electoral and cultural role in tandem with Green and mainstream social democratic parties. But if Leftists completely abandon the mainstream there will be no forces to ‘link up’ with closer to the relative centre.

    In absolute terms the mainstream Australian political spectrum has shifted dramatically to the Right over the post 30 years. The ALP today is well to the Right in many respects compared with the Fraser government no less… But all that given – there is ‘convergence’ of the mainstream parties on the relative Centre. But it is the Conservatives who are constructing and defining that “relative centre.’….

    The ALP needs to engage in some soul-searching and take a far more pro-active posture in contesting the meaning of that relative Centre – shifting it to the Left… But the Greens – and hypothetically a Red-Left Party of some sort – could take a far more pro-active role in introducing new ideas, and redeeming old (progressive) ones.

    The bottom line, though, is that they all need each other to construct what Gramsci would call a counter-hegemonic historic bloc – Not to neglect the urgent immediate need of constructing an ELECTORAL bloc.

  45. A think tank question for those Down Under:
    Here in the USA, we have hordes of think tanks, of which many do their best to obfuscate inconvenient science, often having learned the tactics from helping tobacco companies.

    I’m aware of IPA, and included them in Familiar Think Tanks Fight For E-cigarettes, but I’m curious:

    a) Are e-cigs being pushed as strongly in Oz as here? (you can see the examples, including gummy bear vaping fluid, with selectable nicotine levels, and for the older target markets, see the video examples.)

    b) Are there other think tanks noticeable in helping out, or is it mainly IPA?

  46. Common ground could be that there is PROGRESS in some form common to all parties…

    These are some ideas I have on possible progress….

    Progress on egalitarian reform of the tax mix, and maybe an expansion in social wage expenditure somewhere around $25 billion to $30 billion a year. (in an economy of maybe $1.6 Trillion or thereabouts) As well as infrastructure expenditure from govt bonds – not PPPs or full privatisation. Including very fast rail, Public Transport expansion, finishing the NBN and keeping it public, massive expansion of public investment in renewable energy…

    It could also mean reviewing ‘modern Awards’ to ensure there really was a ‘no disadvantage test’ with no exceptions – looking back to the old Awards.; and reviewing IR laws to allow political strike action when it is genuine and ‘in good faith’.

    Further reforms could be an expansion of the humanitarian intake. Linking it with skills formation… I prefer a 50,000 figure – but to be realistic maybe 35,000 to begin with.

    Efforts could be made to begin a process culminating in a treaty with indigenous Australia…

    Significant expansion of spending could apply in medical, dental health, mental health; public schooling; more tertiary opportunities for more students; public housing, parks and gardens

    In education there could be reform of the curriculum to have a ‘critical/active’ model… Imparting political literacy and encouraging social activism….

    The mining tax could be restored and used to bankroll the ‘buying back of the farm’ ala Whitlam.

    The ABC and SBS could be maintained – including maintaining a foothold in online media with the aim of promoting a participatory public sphere – in effect participatory democracy….

    A more radical option – Reacquire the Holden brand and form a co-operative enterprise including investment from workers, local communities and government.

  47. @John Mashey

    I have seen them in use in Adelaide in the city. Occurrences are rare enough, I have wondered whether the people using them are paid to do so; in this day and age of the shills, trolls and brand-planters (i.e. paid to wear or mention a brand or product, or to say something provocative, something that is later on in a new TV/social media/web advert), it is hard to be too cynical. I don’t know what our South Australian law has to say about the practice.

  48. Fran Barlow:
    @Ivor
    What specific bit of Marx would that be Ivor?

    Obviously Fran Barlow has a gap in knowledge.

    “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties…They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement…In France the Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats … In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without loosing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements…In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution…In Germany they fight with the bourgeoise whenever it acts in a revolutionary way…In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the unioin and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.”

    In short – the opposite to Trotskyite and leftist sectarianism.

  49. @John Mashey
    John, even the IPA doesn’t appear to be actively promoting e-cigarettes in Australia. At least, no searches on the IPA web site for “e-cigarette”, “electronic cigarette” or “vape” bring up any results. BTW, the IPA link in your article actually links to the British IEA.

    The other major right-wing think tank in Australia, the Centre for Independent Studies, doesn’t seem to promote them either (Local Libertarians seem to be talking them up though, presumably following US prompts as usual).

    E-cigarettes are currently a legal grey area in Australia, as it’s legal to sell (some of) them, as well as flavoured liquids to use in them, but generally illegal to sell nicotine in liquid form, so users have to import it. You may be aware that the tobacco industry in Australia recently lost a major battle with the introduction of plain packaging laws for tobacco products. It may be that the tobacco industry doesn’t think the timing is right for new initiatives over here. There have been recent media reports linking research into the usage patterns and health impacts of e-cigarettes with the potential for them to replace real cigarettes entirely. Perhaps that prospect is causing the tobacco PR flacks to tread cautiously on the issue. It will be interesting to see if the new, more tobacco-friendly government in Australia changes the industry’s approach.

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