The tip of the iceberg

John Quiggin10 Comments

The pursuit of wrongdoing by unions and union officials by the Abbott-Turnbull government has been highly successful in producing evidence of wrongdoing. The problem is that the wrongdoing has been that of the pursuers, not the pursued. Some examples

* The forced resignation of Australian Building and Construction Commission chairman Nigel Hadkiss, after he was found to have breached the Act he was supposed to be enforcing

* Two separate cases in which the Australian Federal Police were forced to compensate the CFMEU and its officials for unlawful seizure of documents, wrongful arrest and other offences

* A string of failed prosecutions of union officials, many of them obviously involving an abuse of process. The classic was one dismissed by the judge in which an official was charged for “having a cup of tea with a mate”

* The forced resignation of Michaela Cash’s senior media ­adviser David De Garis over an improper tipoff to the media regarding an equally improper AFP raid on the AWU

* The finding that Trade Union Royal Commission star witness Kathy Jackson misappropriated union funds, the very offence for which she had previously appeared as a whistleblower

But this is just, as Commissioner Dyson Heydon might say, the tip of the iceberg. It’s pretty clear that a more comprehensive inquiry would reveal extensive wrongdoing by senior ministers, and just about everyone involved in the Commission.

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Alphabet soup of denialism

John Quiggin27 Comments

In the last week we’ve had reports on the future of the electricity system from the ACCC, AEMO and ESB.  These acronymic bodies all share in the responsibility for the mess we find ourselves in today. Their reports are not only inconsistent with each other in critical respects, but internally incoherent.

The one thing they have in common is that they all assume that Australia should do nothing more about climate change. In this, they are reflecting the Trumpist views of our  government, restated more elegantly by its vapid frontman, Malcolm Turnbull.

The idea that these denialist policies could somehow represent a solution to the dispute over energy policy in Australia is bizarre. When and if the Trumpists are defeated, we will need a radical increase in ambition. A carbon price should be part of this, but the policy disasters of the last five years mean that much more drastic action will be needed.

The only benefit of the last week’s output is to remind us that the entire alphabet soup of bodies running our failing energy season needs to be tipped down the drain and replaced with a publicly owned grid, and a radical transformation of electricity generation, phasing out coal as rapidly as possible.

Some big news …

John Quiggin5 Comments

… least for me. Princeton University Press has agreed to publish my book, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work and Why they can Fail so Badly. I’ve been working on it for seven years, but it’s finally done. It should be published in the first half of 2019.

Stay tuned for news on a possible Australian edition.

What I’ve been writing in the last seven years or so (Part 1)

John Quiggin2 Comments

Now that I’ve finished a draft manuscript of my book, Economics in Two Lessons, I’m getting around to jobs I’ve been putting off for a long time (I started the book in 2011), such as updating my CV. At the moment, I’m working on publications in Internet outlets such as Aeon, The Conversation and the ABC’s (sadly departed now), The Drum.  I’ve listed  a bunch over the fold. The titles are mostly self-explanatory, so please take a look at any that seem likely to be interesting. If you’re so inclined, please comment.

There are plenty more to come, as and when I get free time and the inclination.

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Ghosts of privatisations past … and future?

John Quiggin12 Comments

Most people won’t recognise the name “Leo Hielscher” unless they regularly cross the eponymous* bridge (better known by its original name, the Gateway). But he is a figure of great consequence in Queensland, responsible for the downfall of two governments. Hielscher ran the state’s finances for decades, and was the architect of the Bjelke-Petersen strategy of an extractive economy based low taxes, low services and low skill. His proudest boast was the state’s AAA credit rating

The low point of his career was probably the leadup to the 2009 election when Anna Bligh announced that, rather than cut infrastructure spending or sell assets in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, she would allow the state’s credit rating to be reduced to AA+. Bligh was re-elected, and promptly announced a massive program of asset sales. This was one of the rare instances where I was directly involved in the policy process, providing advice to the Queensland Council of Unions, and in this capacity I got to observe Hielscher in action. He was very effective in pushing the (economically spurious) case for asset sales and the need to regain the AAA rating.

Bligh, and her Treasurer, Andrew Fraser pushed through the asset sales and pushed the Labor government off a cliff, being reduced to seven members at the 2012 election. Of course, Bligh landed on her feet, ending up as CEO of the Australian Bankers Association. I didn’t get such a ringside view of the process that led Campbell Newman and Tim Nicholls to adopt their catastrophic “Strong Choices” asset sales campaign, but I have no doubt that Hielscher played a significant role in the background. Both Campbell and Nicholls have duly been consigned to well-deserved political oblivion.

Now the rightwing Australian Institute of Progress has staged a reunion.

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When is a record not a record?

John Quiggin20 Comments

It’s been  cold here in Brisbane for the last few days, at least by our subtropical standards, with overnight minimums of 6 degrees in the city, and negative temperatures in  towns like Stanthorpe in the nearby Granite Belt. That occasioned lots of news coverage, with the observation that this was the coldest temperature we’ve had since 2014 and one of the coldest since 2000. The same was true for much of Eastern Australia. Melbourne had its coldest morning in several years, and  a couple of towns in NSW had the lowest minimum for several decades.

All of these are “records” in the trivial sense that we record the temperature every day, but none of them are records in the commonly used sense of “lowest (or highest) value in the relevant record”. That didn’t stop the usual denialist suspects claiming a RECORD (all caps in original) and evidence of global cooling. The Daily Mail  claimed “Australia’s east coast shivers through its coldest EVER morning” even though the sub-headlines made it clear this wasn’t true.

What’s striking here is that the same people who are willing to claim that the Bureau of Meteorology is part of a world-wide warmist conspiracy to doctor climate records are eagerly credulous about any piece of data that suits their case. Next time we get record heat, the conspiracy theories will be wheeled out again, but for now the Bureau is an unquestionable source of scientific evidence.

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Grattan goes denialist

John Quiggin19 Comments

Reading the reactions to the incoherent report on electricity pricing from the ACCC, I was struck by this quote from Tony Wood of the Grattan Institute, writing in the Oz 

Australians need energy policy that is driven by neither green evangelism for renewables nor a deep-seated fear to protect the role of coal for baseload power.

“Green evangelism” is rhetoric straight out of the denialist camp, associated with the bogus claim that climate change is not science but a religion   The content of the piece bears this out. Wood opposes any form of subsidy for renewables and (by omission) any price on carbon emissions. He advocates a policy that is “the policy is indifferent to the tech­nology mix, whether new-build or the extension of the operating life of an existing, newer coal-fired plant.”

This is centrism at its worst. Faced with a choice between an evidence-based response to climate change and culture-war proposals to actively subsidise the destruction of the global environment, Grattan has gone for the “middle course” of doing nothing whatsoever about climate change.