Category Archives: Politics – Australian

The man with no pluses is now PM for the second time

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I have no time for either Gillard or Rudd. Both are nasty pieces of work with no serious ideas about how to make Australia a better place. Both think that their own shallow ideas are a match for individuals running their own lives in their own way with governments doing little more than setting the required political structures in place. Welfare and assistance, sure, which every government of every persuasion has done, but never to replace either the individual will or to remove the need for those individuals to act on their own behalf.

Yesterday I came home just in time to catch the 10:30 news and I immediately switched off at the first sighting of Rudd not more than five sentences into whatever he was saying. Gillard was incompetent and clueless. All of her instincts were the deepest red. She had no solutions that did not involve giving power and money to her friends and depriving those she classed as her enemies of the means for their own support. She clearly cannot bear people who run our businesses. And yet I found her resilience admirable. The cover of the Women’s Weekly merely shows that had things been different she could have been Australia’s Margaret Thatcher instead of being a federal version of Joan Kirner.

But Rudd has no pluses. There is no part of him that I would describe as admirable. The phrase low cunning doesn’t work because he has no cunning. He has a personality that shows positive in the media but I think this time we will see through him and very quickly. He has risen in the polls to 49 against Abbott’s 51 but I imagine that will be a high water mark. The Libs will pull him back but he will pull himself back even more.

Democracy does remain the worst form of government except for all the others that are tried from time to time. But Rudd along with Obama reminds you of just how bad democracy can be.

Trading one disaster for another

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rudd v capitalism

I sometimes think that our economic problems are the least of the troubles we face but they are pretty bad and getting worse. Labor, having wrecked the place, is getting out just in time. No doubt they will have much to criticise from the Opposition benches as the efforts to repair what they have ruined gets into full swing.

The uselessness of the media is never better highlighted than their light touch on leftist governments which are allowed to go well beyond reasonable bounds because criticisms of anyone with a socialist halo is verboten. So what we have is an economy crashing in many directions and from a multitude of directions. Prudence is a great virtue in economic management, a characteristic those with a socialist time perspective never seem to have.

This “QE dries up” from a front page story in the AFR which is part of a headline that also reads “Shares, $A plunge”. This is followed inside with “China credit data fuels doom-mongers’ fears”. We are becoming collectively poorer by the day and our ability to trade our way out of the debt and deficits being left behind is becoming a more gigantic task with each fresh decision by the party with the Parliamentary majority.

Meanwhile, those guys in the media, and that includes the likes of Laura Tingle and etc, you don’t do either the Labor Party or the rest of us any good by not having raked them over the coals for being the Beyond Stupid Party it has become. Unless you personally agree with the range of policies that are ruining us, then it is not just your duty as journalists but your duty as friends to these socialist cretins that you let them understand the nature of the dangers they run. And if you couldn’t see it coming yourselves, then what good are your opinions anyway?

Meanwhile Kevin Rudd is the apparent answer if the only aim is to rid ourselves of Julia Gillard. But as a reminder of how we would be trading one disaster for another, let me dredge up an article I wrote for Quadrant in April 2009 just after Kevin wrote his attack in The Monthly on what he chose to call neo-liberalism. It is titled, “Reflections of a Neo-Liberal“. The PM referred to is of course Kevin Rudd but I suspect it would just as easily apply to his successor. But if you wish to be reminded of the true nature of our once and future PM, these ought to be all the warning you need.

So to the Prime Minister’s article. Here we find a polemic on the evils of the capitalist system as it exists today. It is an imaginary system, bearing little reality to the world in which we actually live.

The article is 7700 words long. No précis can give any more than a taste of how extreme the language is and how misconceived the thoughts. He has invented a villain, the neo-liberal, whose demise is now the mission the Prime Minister intends to hasten. The Prime Minister apparently believes that those on the other side of the political fence, the neo-liberals of his imagination, “fundamentally despise” the state and its role. He apparently believes that in the view of such neo-liberals, “government activity should be … ultimately replaced, by market forces”. He takes it as read that these neo-liberals have “sought, wherever possible, to dismantle all aspects of the social-democratic state”.

To capture as least some of the rhetorical overdrive, I reproduce the two insert quotes displayed in large print across the page. The first:

The great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed … the emperor has no clothes. Neo-liberalism, and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy.[ellipses in the original]

And then there’s this:

The stakes are high: there are the social costs of long-term unemployment; poverty once again expanding its grim reach across the developing world; and the impact on long-term power structures within the existing international political and strategic order. Success is not optional. Too much now rides on our ability to prevail.

We are here not discussing whether some policy or another might make the economic system work more effectively. This is not about whether there ought to be a stimulus package and if so, how it ought to be structured. This is beyond the technical side of economics and into the realm of good and evil. It is a psycho-drama in which Frodo and his mates take on Gollum in a bid to save the world.

We only elect these people so that they can raid the cookie jar. Well, the cookie jar is now well and truly empty and then some. Back to the people who will hopefully fill it up again although if the only aim is to raid it once again some time in the future it is hard to really see the point.

This is not a distraction

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From the AFR of Wednesday the 19th:

Not wanting any distractions between now and the September 14 federal election – the same day the referendum will be held – Mr Abbott some weeks ago committed the Coaltion to back the yes case, but almost every liberal opposes the referendum proposal. [My bolding]

This is not a distraction. It is the most vivid possible reminder that everything that Labor does is poison. How this could lose the Coalition votes is beyond me. A no vote is a no vote for a Labor proposal that would harm our federal structures and undermine the states. If there is to be a disparity in funding for the two sides then all bets should be off and Coalition members free to make their views known to the rest of us before it’s too late.

On wind farms we are less crazy than the rest

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James Delingpole, this time on wind farms. You do try to work out which part of elite opinion is the craziest but what a contest. Anyway, we in Australia are recognised as the least crazy, at least so far as wind farms go:

So the anti-wind backlash has begun, of that there’s no doubt. In Australia, where resistance is especially strong, they’re holding a rally in the next few hours in Canberra to protest against an industry described by Alby Schultz MP as “the biggest government sponsored fraud in the history of our country”, so rife with “manipulation, intimidation, lies and cover-up” that there’s enough evidence to justify a royal commission. I wish I could be there at the barricades with my Aussie mates. Sounds like it’s going to be quite an occasion.

It’s not gender that matters

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It is repulsive to find that not only is Julia Gillard arguing that only a woman as Prime Minister can protect that rights of women but that there are actually women who find that a persuasive argument. On my side of the political divide, there have been extremely competent women who have risen to very high levels and have been supported by men and to be very particular, have been supported by me.

Let me start with Sarah Palin about whom I wrote about here. That she would make a better president than Obama is beyond question to me. That she would make a better president than just about anyone else in the US, male or female, is equally beyond question to me. She won’t be president, but the idea that I or anyone else might make our political decisions based on gender is a typical example of lying on the left.

My other example is Margaret Thatcher about whom I wrote about here. The title of the post was, “The Greatest Woman of the Twentieth Century”. That she most definitely was and on our side of the political divide who would doubt it?

Gillard is a small woman, with constricted ideas and no vision. She is filled with venom and hatreds. She is standard issue socialist which I associate with limited intelligence and a failure to grow up.

The fix is in – Gillard’s going to go

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Reading across the papers todahy and watching my one bit of weekly television the virtual certainty that Gillard will be replaced by Rudd before the next election seems evident. The issue is not the virtual certainty that she will be replaced but when.

Even now, within the hundred days, there is still too much time for the rest of us to remember the kind of PM Rudd had actually been and why so many of us were pleased to see him go. In a policy sense, everything that is wrong with Gillard Rudd has as well but with an apparently poisonous personality that makes him anathema to his colleagues. That many of them had decided their preference to go down with the current captain in charge was only a vague distress call pointing to just how awful working with Rudd must actually be.

And while this far from the election the disastrous polling numbers talk of a rout, there are four considerations.

First, the Coalition does not in any way act as if it’s a lay down. They’re the ones who do the polling and they’re the ones in the focus groups. That they have not, for example, come out against either of the referenda makes me think there is a real trap in them for the Coalition. They do not exude any kind of confidence which may just be prudence but it may also reflect a real sense of their own vulnerabilities.

Second, there will be a switch in sentiment the moment the PM, whoever it is, goes to visit the Governor General. Polling results for the moment are mid-term stuff that reflect only a vague dissatisfaction for many. We will only know what the actual situation is when we are inside the real polling period. Most of the social and professional environments I travel in still talk of “the Mad monk” and almost none of these people would consider voting Coalition under any circumstances. These people make me very nervous as they must do the Coalition as well.

Third, if I read the papers right, it is only until the end of the Parliamentary sitting that the transition supposedly can occur. My memory, however, goes back to 1983 when the Hawke-for-Hayden switch came as Malcolm Fraser was off visiting the Governor-General. The less time there is for the Coalition to switch its campaign strategy to Rudd and away from Gillard, the more difficult it will be to mount a proper campaign.

Fourth, if the election is some kind of blow out but the Coalition does not capture the Senate, then nothing of significance can be changed. A double dissolution twelve months later would therefore take place after at least one Coaltion budget in which “austerity” will be the central issue. And this is not austerity as a notional idea but one in which very specific groups of people will have been affected. Meanwhile, the Coalition will have fixed the boat people issue to the extent that it can be fixed. The ALP will therefore be able to campaign with a better budget outcome and with the boats having been stopped assuming they can be.

Following from all that, even if one assumes that Tony Abbott will win the mandatory two elections, they will occur within four years and not six. Meanwhile, the ALP will have “rejuvinated” itself so that by the 2017 election they will not be all that far from government. Their stategy looking forward to 2017 (or 2019) has been relatively evident. Create as many problems for a Coaltion government as possible and then spend the years in Opposition criticising the various attempts to fix the problems the ALP had created.

If only they’d been reading Andrew Bolt

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If they had they would then know that global warming stopped sixteen years ago. And strangely, there are other places they could find this out as well, specially if they really do have an interest in climate change. But like with many other things, they start with what they wish were true and continue from there.

Via Small Dead Animals.

imin2013

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imin gillard

This is taken from Andrew Bolt but as tawdry as it is, this is a direct steal from the Obama campaign last year. If you go to the imin website you will see there is the “Dinner with Julia” ad, an invitation to volunteer and a bit of information requested. It is the information that is the entire point of the process.

Note, that if you fill out the form what they will then know is:

  • your name
  • your likely gender (based on your name – ie Fred or Ginger)
  • your street address
  • your postal code
  • your mobile number with “send me text messages” already ticked
  • your email address with “send me email updates” already ticked

These are bits of data that can be cross referenced with who knows what other information that may have been obtained in no end of other ways (although surely not from the ATO).

I dealt with exactly this in my Quadrant article in January this year, The New Politics of Data-Driven Elections. In it I discussed the data mining and information gathering processes used by Obama last year which is exactly the same as the one now being used by the ALP:

My favourite operation was the $3 donation strategy. It was the ‘win a date with George Clooney or Sarah Jessica Parker’ by donating only $3. Focus groups had shown that no one worried about $3 as a sum of money to spend, but people still felt it to be a meaningful contribution. But in sending in your $3, you also had to provide a considerable amount of information. The money meant next to nothing to the Obama campaign but the information was pure gold.

Now here the same. And because they have your phone and your email address, they can tailor the message just for you. A woman from a working class suburb will be targeted with one set of messages and a male from a more middle class suburb will be getting a different message instead.

The Obama techniques will now be used here and while the ALP will fall short at the election, it will certainly help wind back the Coalition advantage. This is one part of the democratic processes the Libs better get themselves into in a very big way because this is the way of the future.