121 thoughts on “Monday Message Board (on Tuesday)”

  2. Then check this out.

    Will the IPA go with “this is entirely consistent with libertarian tax policy because shut up leftists!” or, “Liberal Party has best intentions but must make more effort next semester”?

  3. And, for those who’ve seen the pounding “The Australian” has meted out to Clive Palmer for an alleged mis-use of $12 million bucks, read this story about the supreme court throwing the case out. Seems he didn’t mis-use the funds after all that. That national newspaper has a penchant for digging dirt on politicians it opposes, only for the dirt to turn into fairy dust.

  4. If posting Monday Message Boards a day late is a problem, you could always try posting them six days early (n.b., watch out for the subtlety here).

  6. @Donald Oats

    I liked the way CITIC dismissed the decision as being based on a “technicality”.

    Yes, the money wasn’t technically held on any kind of trust. Which was the core of their case.

  7. “But neither party escaped criticism.
    The Justice found that Mr Palmer knew the payments, $10 million to Cosmo Developments and just over $2 million to Media Circus, were not “authorised” payments but found it was not necessary to rule on the allegations of dishonesty put forward by CITIC.”
    “While Justice Jackson said it was not necessary to rule on allegations of dishonesty by Mr Palmer, the Palmer United Party leader did cop some criticism for attempting to cover his tracks about the transfer of the money by “manufacturing evidence” through the creation of written contract after the fact.
    “There is circumstantial evidence to support the finding by inference, which I make, that the first defendant [Mr Palmer] knew that the payments were made in breach of Mineralogy’s promises to pay only the authorised costs and reimbursements under clause five of the facilities deed,” he said.
    Justice Jackson found Mr Palmer knew that the $10 million payment to Cosmo Development (one of Mr Palmer’s companies) and $2 million to advertising agency Media Circus, were not authorised payments. He also noted Mr Palmer’s legal defence had changed many times during the case.”
    “Justice Jackson said that until November 26 last year, Mr Palmer and his company, Cosmo Developments, “had persisted in an apparently unsustainable and possibly deliberately false plea” that the payments were made under an oral contract between the tycoon’s companies for port management services.

    Justice Jackson said the allegations of fraudulent conduct that were levelled against Mr Palmer had a reasonable basis for being made, adding “although it has not been necessary to decide some of them”.”

    Surely these findings against a leader of a (very small) Australian political party, and a sitting MP, deserve more attention than they’re getting? Do we have to wait till Leigh Sales gets Palmer on camera again?

  8. For Victorian readers and commenters, John Quiggin has been too modest to mention it but he will be presenting a talk in Melbourne next Monday on Economic Policy For The 21st Century

    “Current discussion of economic policy in Australia is backward looking, dominated by the policy issues of the late 20th century, and in particular the microeconomic reform agenda of the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, policy problems and opportunities that have arisen in the 21st century, including climate change and the Global Financial Crisis, are barely considered.

    In this lecture, the implications of these issues for economic analysis will be discussed, and a policy response will be outlined.

    This lecture will be presented by Professor John Quiggin, Australian Laureate Fellow in Economics at the University of Queensland”

    http://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/5139-freebairn-lecture-in-public-policy-economic-policy-for-the-21st?utm_campaign=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_source=subscription

  9. Christine Milne resigns as Greens Leader.

    Any information about what’s going on?

    Are they going to go further into ALP-lite mode, or move back to a more genuinely alternative to the duopoly?

  11. From Milne’s statement this morning, I’m inclined to accept that she simply decided to retire from parliament at the end of her senate term, and made the announcement in plenty of time to allow the party to establish the new leader before the next election.

    I don’t know what Bandt is supposed to have to do with it, but if anything was planned it doesn’t look like it has worked out!

    New leader is Di Natale and “co-deputy leaders” are Waters and Ludlam.

  12. Megan :
    I don’t know what Bandt is supposed to have to do with it, but if anything was planned it doesn’t look like it has worked out!

    Well, reports are that he only found out about it through the media like the rest of us so… yeah… doesn’t sound like there’s a myriad of dots to join there…

  13. The Greens is replete with very competent, very intelligent people, several of whom could lead the party, no problems. Contrast that with the two major parties, and it is telling.

    I don’t know where our political system is going to lead us, but if the Greens keep growing in popularity, that support is at the expense of the more moderate ALP members, and the progressive liberals for the LNP; the net effect would be to hollow out the two major parties, and leave them with their more extreme elements.

    As the Greens are the only party in Australia who understand that economic growth which causes the sixth global extinction event is a tad short-sighted, they get my vote.

  14. SHOCK HORROR !!
    venison uses caps? hell no, something even more earthshaking…
    major upset in alberta provincial election threatens to make canada interesting.
    alberta election result is in & its a majority government for the ndp under leader rachel notley !!!! 54 out of 87 seats – conservatives not even official opposition. progressive conservative reign broken after 44 years continuous power (1971-2015). npd becomes the 3rd political party to govern alberta since social credit (1935-1971). albertans 44 years old & younger experience change of government for the first time in their lives. this is extraordinary news with many implications. big oil must now deal with “a left-of-centre premier and ruling party that have been among its harshest critics on issues of royalties, taxes and environmental policy (globe & mail).” i hasten to add, a left-of-centre premier with a ruling party that is not likely to remove her if she upsets big oil over royalties. (long-time denizens will note my idee fixe here, this is the idee fixe thread, no?). it will flow on into the federal election alter this year where thomas mulcair’s ndp will be fighting its first general election from official opposition since their upset result in 2011.
    i’m giddy with anticipation. -yrs, alf.
    http://albertapolitics.ca/2015/05/pinch-me-am-i-dreaming-canadas-most-conservative-province-elects-an-ndp-majority/

  15. @alfred venison

    Even our own inimitable Antony Green noted that historical event today (on Twitter).

    Hopefully this is indicative of the turning of the tide against fascists the world over.

  16. @Megan

    Having the title ‘leader’ isn’t as big a thing in our party as in others. The parliamentary team works as a kind of committee/collective.

  17. @Donald Oats
    The Party welcomes you to its loving embrace!

    More seriously, all the usual suspects have been getting all breathless about the Greens’ leadership change. There are a couple of lessons for them which they’ll certainly ignore.

    The first is that it’s possible for a party to organise its succession planning without any blood on the floor, and without leaking it to Laurie Oakes.

    The second is that sometimes polticians tell the truth (eg, Bandt’s incipient child).

    A few people (mostly not party members) are complaining that the Greens don’t have a mambers’ ballot for the leadership. We all saw how well that piece of theatre worked out for the ALP, given that the members’ choice was not Bleeb Snerton. I think the Dems had members’ election for party leader, and for all sorts of other things, and it didn’t do them a blind bit of good in the long run.

  19. @alfred venison

    Alberta seems to be the “Queensland” of Canada. After all, how long did Joh and the “Nasha-Nulls” hold power in Qld? Joh for 19 years and the Nasha-Nulls for well over 20 years. They were preceded by a very troglodyte Labor Party. (Is Troglodyte Labor a tautology?). Alberta is a primary industry (mining, oil, gas, agriculture) state just like Qld. Qld is the deep north. Alberta is the deep mid-west/north. Climate is different of course. I actually prefer Alberta’s climate in many ways. Qld’s is becoming totally insufferable.

  20. @Fran Barlow

    I have a question (open to other Greens members too).

    Nauru, reportedly at the behest of the Australian government, has shut down facebook – they used the excuse of stopping ‘pron’, but the real reason is probably because refugees in our concentration camp and in exile on Nauru use it to communicate their plight to the outside world.

    It took me about 30 seconds to type this and it might take twice that long to write a press release condemning this totalitarian action and to spread it on the net..

    Any idea why the Greens are absolutely silent on this? (Or, if they are not – and I’ve searched high and low and have had no response from Ludlam or Hanson Young to my tweets – can anyone direct me to their statement or media release).

  21. @Megan
    The relationship between Australia and Nauru increasingly appears to resemble the relationship between Great Britain and Tasmania during the early decades of the 19th century – i.e. it’s a prison colony.

  22. @Megan
    I think you’ll find SH-Y, at least, has been extremely vocal about the lack of access to the Nauruan gulag. She may not have mentioned Crackbook explicitly.

  24. @David Irving (no relation)

    The Greens have been critical of the ALP/LNP duopoly inhumane treatment of refugees, the secrecy around that treatment and they have also been critical of internet censorship.

    That is why I’m asking: “On Nauru’s Australian approved censorship of the internet to ‘disappear’ refugee voices – at the time the IOM is intensifying its work for the government in forcing these people into exile in Cambodia – why the silence?”

  25. try this on, Tim Macknay:- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/06/canada-alberta-elects-leftwing-party-keystone-pipeline
    i think it will have enormous ramifications: the canadian federal election this year; the fate of the federal ndp; the fate of the federal liberals; the stock market; keystone & thereby the american election; paris environment talks, the mind boggles, in a nicely giddy way; its intoxicating, its astounding !

    megan:- i think the fact of this result is itself sign of f@scistic politics already in retreat. e.g.: 20 years ago my brother thought newt gingrich was a great man. today he votes ndp, helps ndp stick their election signs up on his lawn and door knocks his neighbourhood for them. who says people can’t change their politics. it used to be, he said, people put up with the conservatives because they reasoned, well, they’re inevitable, its alberta after all, and at one time, at least, the conservatives seemed to have the ear of big oil. as things have turned out, the conservatives not only don’t have the ear of big oil (if they ever actually did) but its more & more apparent that big oil controls the conservative party to the extent it can have even enormously popular conservative party leaders it doesn’t like removed by the party executive.

    Ikonoclast:- you can have the alberta climate, mate. last night (i’m told), ten hours after polls closed, edmonton’s balmy spring was terminated (temporarily) by a massive snowstorm “of biblical proportions” blanketing every gardener’s green shoots & optimistically laid out seedling planters in a cascade of wet snow driven horizontally by strong winds. people used to say hell would freeze over before albertans would elect an ndp government but this is ridiculous. by the way, edmonton went ndp in every riding. people were right who used to say “they don’t vote in alberta, they stampede”.

  27. @alfred venison

    I spent a week in Alberta (when it hit -35 C) and a few months in Montreal (consistently well below zero) and found the cold weather didn’t bother me at all. Obviously, I had the gear for it. I find extreme cold very invigorating. My physiology seems strangely well adapted to it for some reason. I was clearly born in the wrong country. On the other hand, three months holiday is not living there. Could I live through an entire winter in Edmonton or would I get seasonal affective disordor? Cold, crisp, still days of -35 C are one thing and blizzards and ice storms are another. I didn’t directly endure an ice storm. I did experience a much delayed train/bus journey, Montreal to Niagara Falls, through the aftermath of one.

    Jumping back to the start of my trip, I walked the streets of Vancouver in jeans, hush puppies and a long sleeve shirt when all the locals were already in winter coats. My wife eventually insisted I put a coat on because “all the locals are staring at you”. I think being coatless meant one must be a homeless bum.

  28. @Donald Oats

    I am in favour of stringent means testing for the old age pension where people have significant other income and assets. Old people (I can say this as I am over 60), should get no special treatment and no tax concessions that other people do not get. Superannuants should get no special tax concessions either. They should be on the same tax rate as any other age group. On the other hand, the aged with no other income should get a living pension.

    The people in this country getting a really bad deal are the youth, especially unemployed youth and students. This country needs to stop pandering to the “grey whingers” and start doing something for its youth. The selfish grey whingers of baby boom age (I can say this as I am a baby boomer) have had their life and most of it was too good as they climbed an easy ladder and pulled the ladder up behind them, trashing the environment, the climate and the hopes of the next generation while they did it: a very culpable generation who allowed neocon capitalism full sway to wreck the planet and our society.

  29. I see today that Maurice Newman hasn’t changed his spots regarding Climate Change, but I suppose that’s why he’s the PM’s top business adviser.

  30. I wonder how long it will be before our establishment media notice that the real news in the UK election is the record massive gains in Scotland by the SNP.

    They are wiping out Labour with swings around 30%.

    It looks like the SNP has about 60 seats (up from 6!!) out of the 650 in the House of Commons.

    The official BBC/Labour line is, predictably, that a return of a Tory government isn’t Labour’s fault for offering nothing but weasel words and instead they woz robbed by idiots who voted for SNP.

  31. Is this the end of capitalism and of the stimulus theory.

    After having some 200 trillion injected world wide, what is the result? – Zero.

    World growth has budged not one iota, but is predicted by the IMF to lift by a whopping 0.1 of one percent in 2015 – this is a return of a tenth of a cent for every dollar invested.

    So the only way capitalists can maintain their profits is by cutting wages and increasing the gap between the few rich and the may poor.

    IMF data for world growth is:

    3.4% (2013)
    3.4% (2014)
    3.5% (2015) expected

    But the IMF usually downgrades its projections in later releases.

    For 2016 the IMF now projects world growth 3.8%.

    see:

  32. Megan :
    I wonder how long it will be before our establishment media notice that the real news in the UK election is the record massive gains in Scotland by the SNP.

    Well, that was all over the news yesterday on the ABC in the lead up, so it’s probably no surprise.

  33. @Ivor

    We are indeed near the end of growth for capitalism. The reasons are partly due to natural limits to growth, partly due to the neocon-monetarist policies of late stage corporate capitalism and partly due to the general internal contradictions of capitalism. The latter two issues are linked. The internal contradictions of capitalism can only be alleviated or held off by social democracy and welfare. Now that total growth is constrained, capitalist profits can only be maintained by reducing social democracy and welfare for the masses thus tilting wealth accumulation heavily in favour of capital. Of couse, this has a limit in the problem of the over-accumulation of capital and the impossibility of getting a good return on it. Impoverished workers cannot afford to consume all of the potential production. Capacity is under-utilised, manufacture is not run at capacity.

    Things will get a lot worse. The crisis has to become manifest for the majority and impinge heavily on them before they will act. The middle-class has a great capacity to ignore the misery of the bottom 20%. Wait until the crisis hits deep into the middle class which it will do. Then the pressure for change will become enormous.

  34. @Troy Prideaux

    My ABC consumption yesterday was mostly confined to their various radio platforms and it got barely a mention there, almost everything was Labour vs Conservatives as if nobody else was running.

  35. The Maurice Newman thing has been on its way for a while. The LNP was infested with World News Daily thinking years ago, but now it’s leaking out.

  36. Sancho :
    The Maurice Newman thing has been on its way for a while. The LNP was infested with World News Daily thinking years ago, but now it’s leaking out.

    On its way? It’s actually been there in our faces for a while. Not so much from the LNP, but Newman has never held back his views on this.

  37. I don’t know what’s on the radio, but on their websites both the BBC and the ABC (Antony Green is in the UK and live-blogging) are including the SNP gains prominently in their coverage.

    Scotland has 59 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, so the SNP, running candidates only in Scottish seats, could never have won more than that many. So far (according to the BBC) the Conservatives have held their only Scottish seat (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale), Labour has held Edinburgh South, and the Liberal Democrats have held Orkney and Shetland, so the maximum possible total for the SNP is now 56.

    Even if Labour had somehow won every single Scottish seat, it could still not have got anywhere near the Conservative total without doing better south of the Scottish border. It’s arithmetically incontestable that SNP gains have no responsibility for Labour’s failure (or, equivalently, the Tories’ success, depending on how you want to look at it) at the national level, and I haven’t seen anybody suggest otherwise, in the mainstream media or out of it.

  38. So the tories have succeeded? The British want more pain eh? Oh well, the Tories will give it to them.

  39. Headline on ‘mirror.co.uk’:

    General Election 2015: The SNP look to have cost Labour the election in Scottish rebellion

  40. @Megan

    Thank you.

    I can’t see that headline on the Mirror website now, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the Mirror got it wrong (not in the way that I would be surprised if I saw the BBC reporting something so demonstrably arithmetically incorrect).

  42. Right now the online Mirror headline reads “Be Very Afraid… The Nightmare on Downing Street is about to Begin” with a photoshopped image of David Cameron as Freddy Kruger.

  43. And running a thoroughly timorous centre-right campaign tailored to neutralising Murdoch’s trolling has obviously worked so well … They got badly beaten and don’t even have self-respect as a defence. They have entrenched Murdoch further.

    I’m not into Schadenfreude, but if I were, I’d be cashing in now.

  44. And really, disavowing in advance an alliance with the SNP and others to oust Cameron? How stupid was that?

    These unprincipled right of centre hacks can’t even play their own game right.

  45. @ZM

    Bad news (for some): I shall be attending. Feel free to suggest anything within the bounds of propriety.

    By the way, that registration site – like this one, for replies though not for totally new comments – has gone in the direction of requiring more than minimal browser functionality (for all sorts of reasons, I prefer to have as much as possible turned off). There are sound design considerations for keeping all special functionality of that sort at the server end.

  46. @J-D

    I can’t find those stats. What is your source?

    I assume their system is “first past the post” in each electorate. So all one can say is that under that system (which all or most voters know is the system), the voters got the Party they wanted more than any other single Party. So yeah, the got what they voted for from a dodgy system they permit to endure via their own apathy.

  47. @Fran Barlow

    Have to agree. UK Labor are a bunch of craven, unprincipled, unimaginative, unintelligent sell-outs and betrayers of the ordinary people just like Australian Labor. They should all go where their hearts and minds really are and join the Tories.

  48. Maurice Newman thinks that climate scientists are all conspiring to create a one world government, when they’re not too busy doing scientificky stuff. He says one load of tommy-rot after another, and yet he couldn’t find two facts to rub together. I’m sorry, but we truly have appalling advisers to this government. Next we’ll be hearing how doctors are all conspiring to create one world government through doctors-without-frontiers. Streuth.

  49. There is, at the least, some basis for the argument that UK Labour lost the election in part because of an attempted scare campaign against SNP.

    The SNP are generally pro-independence. The UK political duopoly and establishment media went all out absolutely feral against Scotland in last year’s narrowly defeated independence referendum. To beat the referendum they mainly used lies, threats and promises. The promises turned to dust after the referendum went the desired way.

    Independence wasn’t a real issue in the UK elections. The big issues the SNP (a social democrat party) ran on – and differentiated from Labour on – were anti-austerity and anti-trident (trident is the UK submarine nuclear ballistic missile system, which the duopoly have promised the military industrial complex they will ‘upgrade’ with about 100 billion pounds of taxpayer’s money).

    Austerity and opposition to the Trident expenditure were the two main differences between Labour and the SNP.

    In the debates before the election, Miliband said:

    “I am not going to sacrifice the future of our country, the unity of our country, I’m not going to give in to SNP demands around Trident, around the deficit, or anything like that.

    “I am not going to have a Labour government if it means deals or coalitions with the SNP.”

    It is, of course, impossible to know how many Labour voters outside Scotland were turned off by those messages, but in the UK system of voluntary voting – and with no real alternative to the duopoly – it is quite probable that many potential Labour votes failed to materialise and therefore several close seats were lost as a result.

    For a social democratic party to so thoroughly annihilate an establishment duopoly party against a virulent media campaign gives me great hope.

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