Tony Abbott is not the enemy.
A note to my colleagues on the right
Reply
Category Archives: Politics – Australian
Sickened by 18c
We need to become a civil society in the precise meaning of the term. So we should stop specifically identifying people by their personal affiliations and use a code known to all but not personal. So, for example, the group that the following person is a member of, whatever it might be, would be called, let us say, 18c.
Then you could go around saying that you are disgusted by 18c and the kind of things they do and no one would be offended any more.
Contrasting migration policies
This is the United States, as noted at Drudge:
PAPER: Hundreds of dead border-crossers in single Texas county…
Rancher shares grotesque photos…
House passes bill…
Gutierrez in Spanish Remarks: GOP ‘Want to Punish Our Community’…
DEM: ‘Immigration Reform Not About Enforcement’…
Detention Center Has Hair Salon, Child Care, Basketball Courts, Gym, Soccer Field…
SUITES WITH FLAT-SCREEN TVS…
Immigrants’ ‘unfamiliarity with bathroom facilities’ causes problems…
REPORT: Transgender Raped…
Illegal charged in beating death of Chinese college student in LA…
UPDATE: TB, Scabies Spreading…
Feds Fly Illegals to Alaska…
TX Law Enforcement Volunteer To Form ‘Border Brotherhood’…
Ready to rumble: Activists to raid congressional town hall meetings…
Obama: ‘I’m Going To Have To Act Alone’…
Meanwhile in Australia:
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison takes hard line: 157 sent to Nauru
From which we read:
ALL the 157 people, including 50 children, who left India almost six weeks ago on a people-smuggler’s boat will arrive at the Nauru asylum-seeker camp today from the Curtin detention centre in Western Australia after refusing to see Indian consular officials.
The Abbott government decided to send all those from the boat late yesterday to the Pacific nation’s detention centre because they decided not to meet Indian government officials after receiving advice from refugee advocates.
The boatload of people, mainly Tamils who had fled Sri Lanka to India, now face months on Nauru while their asylum claims are processed and the prospect of being sent back to Sri Lanka if they fail to qualify as refugees.
A self-selected program of migration is not the way this can ever work. The contrast between the US and Australia is astonishing, but you would be hard pressed to say the US has it right and Australia has it wrong.
A new idea: helping the environment while not clobbering the economy
It’s across the front page of The Age and presumably The SMH but it is also posted at Drudge under the heading, Aussie Prime Minister seeks alliance to ‘dismantle’ Obama’s climate policy…. On Drudge it comes with an accompanying story, about icebergs on Lake Superior in June! (see the picture above). This is from the SMH, editorially assisted by myself to balance the editorial charaterisation posted by Mark Kenny as part of his story:
Tony Abbott is seeking a conservative alliance among “like-minded” countries, aiming to dismantle global moves to introduce carbon pricing, and undermine a push by [far-left] US President Barack Obama to push the case for action through forums such as the G20.
It’s not as if ruining your economies through actions to contain global warming is necessarily a left-right thing, it just turned out that way. Helping the poor by creating so many more of them is not my idea of policy genius. This is more my sort of thing:
[Mr Abbott] said it was important that policies to address output did not “clobber the economy” while not helping the environment.
The comments were immediately backed up by Canada with Mr Harper declaring there was no chance of any country acting for the planet if it involved costs to its economy.“It’s not that we don’t seek to deal with climate change,” he said.
“We seek to deal with it in a way that enhances our ability to create jobs and growth, this is their position.
“No country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately harm jobs and growth in their country, we are just a bit more frank about that than other countries.”
The uncompromising attitude of both leaders suggests neither is inclined to yield to pressure from the US to revive the issue of climate change ahead of next years’ climate summit, nor back any international coordination such as additional regulations or a trading scheme.
Politics is politics. Icebergs in June at the start of summer but half the world is worried about global warming so you gotta say what you gotta say. But you must also do what you must also do. One more reason why bringing Labor back would be a step into the dark ages, in more ways than one.
Following the path of most resistance
Whenever I worry about the Government only getting it right about three-quarters of the time, I am reminded of just how bad things could be if the other mob took over again. As is said, for every problem there is a solution that is neat, plausible and wrong. Labor seems to have a lock on every one of these solutions as does its cheer squad in the media.
GDP rises more rapidly than expected. Good news, yes? Don’t you worry about that, there’s always a leaden cloud around on even the sunniest days. The first para from the Business Editor of the SMH:
The imbalance in the Australian economy was highlighted further on Wednesday, with the mining industry contributing around 80 per cent of the jump in growth.
Well if it’s imbalances you’re after, let me then suggest this:
The new national minimum will be $640.90 per week, or $16.87 per hour. It amounts to a 50 cents per hour increase to the hourly rate.
The 50 cents per hour is there no doubt to trivialise the amount. I-spit-on-your-50-cents-an-hour kind of thing. Really, why mention it unless you are trying to show how minimal the increase actually was. But 50 cents an hour or not, it comes to $33,333 per year. Do you see that? No one in this country, no matter how minimal their skills and experience, may by law be paid less that $33,333 per year. And then try to employ someone for the weekend or nights. Don’t forget the super and workers’ comp. We are a high wage economy trying to deal with low productivity growth.
This is a hard row to hoe for business. It’s not easy to find that kind of money. If you are running a coffee shop, you need to sell 9523 cups of coffee over the course of a year at $3.50 and that’s before the on-costs get counted in. What a good idea it must also have been to raise the cost of energy as well through the carbon tax.
Labor, and its Labor-lite supporters you can find in the oddest places, love the populist bits. But the reason Labor is not the permanent government of this country, in spite of all of the populist stuff they peddle, is because they drain the country of its economic energy. Tony and company are doing what they can in the face of massive resistance since in each person’s own world, there is no reason they can see why they can’t have more of what’s going for less effort in actually helping to produce.
I can only say I wish them well in trying to fix things up, because there really is a lot to fix.
Did you think everyone was going to love the budget on sight?
In the news this morning, Coalition to step up budget sales pitch, as MPs voice concerns.
FINANCE Minister Mathias Cormann has flagged a new taxpayer-funded advertising campaign to market the budget, amid backbench frustration over cabinet’s sales pitch.
It’s not just the cabinet that’s a frustrated. You were elected to keep Labor out of the Lodge for six years and maybe nine. There were many things that needed to be done, with fixing 18C a low priority and getting the economy right second from the top, just after stopping the boats. The boats have been stopped, but by 2016, even Shorten will work out what he has to say. I won’t believe him, but that’s not the point since millions will.
But it’s the economy, stupid. The great political genius of Labor was to store the spending outside the forward estimates so that the don’t immediately show up. I think I know that, but if it’s true, I only just know it and I am paying attention.
You have done a hopeless job of selling anything. If you have a message, I don’t know what it is. If you stand for anything other than that you are better economic managers than Labor, I don’t know what it is? Think then about how strange this is:
Tony Abbott last night hosted a private dinner for a large group of backbenchers ahead of the meeting to personally reassure MPs and provide further information about the budget.
Only now they are giving information about the budget to the backbench?!? This is bizarre and pathetic. And how bout this:
Some Coalition MPs are frustrated about directives from the Prime Minister’s office that limited the media exposure of senior Coalition figures ahead of the budget, allowing Labor to fill the void with criticism of budget measures.
Well, at least from here you have nowhere to go but up.
Her indignant right to the income of others
Gloria (in excelsis), the telephone sex worker (wink, wink), has her say in today’s Age, having been “seething for weeks”:
She has a range of illnesses, including emphysema, and was particularly incensed about the proposed $7 GP visit fee.
It is probably ungracious for me to mention it but you can go to a doctor three times for the price of a pack of smokes, or perhaps we could say, for the return on 14 minutes of telephone sex. Why does anyone think free medicine is a right?
What comes from listening to your enemies and not your friends
Given the star studded cast here at Catallaxy, I am almost embarrassed to mention that I found my way into The Australian this morning, but there you are. It’s a story by Christian Kerr on the various kites that were flown in advance of the budget [mixed metaphor alert] to test the waters. Here is the relevant passage from the complete story:
An obsession with kite-flying and budget cosmetics has left the government reeling in the wake of the worst received economic statement in two decades, experts say. . . .
RMIT University economist Steve Kates said that hit was harder than it could have been because of “strangely muted” messaging from the government in its first months in power.
“What they needed to do was sit down and talk about the structure of the budget and the looming deficits right away,” Dr Kates said.
He said voters would have understood the need for cuts if they knew about “landmines” left behind by the Gillard government.
“They didn’t make the case about the state of the economy,” he said. “They left themselves extremely vulnerable.”
He said the release of the audit commission report was left too late, meaning its recommendations were lost among budget speculation.
The thing about the budget is that not one person came out and said, “that’s nailed it; just what we needed”. It has been disappointment all round, a gift to Labor. It is a major question where to lay blame for this screw up of a budget. It didn’t go anywhere near addressing the problems that needed to be addressed, it’s a mish mash of policies that are defensible but only barely, and the political side has been atrocious. Reading Martin Parkinson’s comments both yesterday on the budget and today on superannuation reminds me the extent to which Joe Hockey was led around by Treasury. This was Martin Parkinson yesterday:
The Australian public needs to know that the nation faces a challenge and a tough budget was necessary, Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson says.
Dr Parkinson said while it was not his role to comment on specific government policies, Australians “deserve” to know there is a challenge ahead.
“It’s within my responsibility as Treasury secretary to say to the community we do have to actually take this seriously to start to address the issue,” Dr Parkinson told a business lunch in Sydney on Tuesday.
“It is (a challenge) that if we start today to take sensible decisions, particularly those that are essentially structural policy changes that take place over time, we’ll be in a much better situation.
“Otherwise we’re banking the house on 33 years of uninterrupted economic growth and there’s no precedent for that.
“We’re banking on another 10 years of fiscal drag and … that has quite significant regressive impacts.”
Parkinson should have gone on Day One. Instead, a Labor man to his back teeth, he has led this government down a primrose path and into a wilderness of policies only a Keynesian could think would make a significant difference and even then, ones no Labor government would touch. Where were Hockey’s political instincts, never mind his economic judgment, when all this advice was being put to him? Doesn’t Joe read Catallaxy, and if not, why not?
A Double D or not?
This business about a double dissolution is quite a conundrum. On the one hand I do not want the government to lose. The other side is so much worse that comparisons are just not viable in my mind.
And no doubt Labor would like to win. But a DD would take place say in the next six months after not a single measure to fix the economy had gone through the Senate, and after Labor will have run on a campaign of fixing nothing since there’s nothing to fix. Since they know better, this will be a truly poison pill, specially since it will of necessity be an ALP-Greens government. And if things don’t get fixed, they will inherit their own whirlwind of disaster (but, of course, so will we all).
And if the Libs do win, they will be in place to do all of the things they need to do with three clear years to make the politics work for them. And they may wipe out the minor parties in the meantime with only Palmer a possible remaining presence.
And then there are still the boats. What would Labor promise that will hold an ounce of credibility?
Tony may yet turn out to be a better strategist than I have been giving him credit for.
Miss me yet? – well it depends on who you mean
Notice they don’t use a picture of Kevin in our local “Miss Me Yet?” meme. But the absurdity of these people, not only in their lack of originality but in where they take their imagery from, is astounding. Personally, I don’t miss the boats, the debt, the waste, the shrillness or the policies. On the other hand, I do miss George Bush.
UPDATE: Now if ever there were a natural insect repellent, this is it. Uncovered by Sinclair, this can only be a parody:
Law of Markets 