Tag Archives: Australia

The manifest ignorance of Joe Stiglitz

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I have just caught up with the article written by Joe Stiglitz on the Australian economy, American Delusions Down Under. I have had serious doubts whether he understands his own economy given his Keynesian orientation, but that he has no idea about Australia is manifest.

What matters more for long-term growth are investments in the future – including crucial public investments in education, technology, and infrastructure. Such investments ensure that all citizens, no matter how poor their parents, can live up to their potential. . . .

To be sure, given its abundance of natural resources, Australia should have far greater equality than it does. After all, a country’s natural resources should belong to all of its people, and the “rents” that they generate provide a source of revenue that could be used to reduce inequality. And taxing natural-resource rents at high rates does not cause the adverse consequences that follow from taxing savings or work (reserves of iron ore and natural gas cannot move to another country to avoid taxation). But Australia’s Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, is one-third higher than that of Norway, a resource-rich country that has done a particularly good job of managing its wealth for the benefit of all citizens.

Well I see fit to comment on the American economy although I live here, so he is welcome to comment on ours even though he is out of his depth on everything he says. But it is a wonder that he doesn’t stop to think about his own empty rhetoric when we find in between the above two paras these two paras:

There is something deeply ironic about Abbott’s reverence for the American model in defending many of his government’s proposed “reforms.” After all, America’s economic model has not been working for most Americans. Median income in the US is lower today than it was a quarter-century ago – not because productivity has been stagnating, but because wages have.

The Australian model has performed far better. Indeed, Australia is one of the few commodity-based economies that has not suffered from the natural-resource curse. Prosperity has been relatively widely shared. Median household income has grown at an average annual rate above 3% in the last decades – almost twice the OECD average.

Most of that growth he discusses was under a Coalition government that made it a matter of policy to balance the budget and contain its spending. That is the Australian model from which the US, and Joe Stiglitz, might learn something he is apparently clueless about.

Shocked and disgusted and outraged

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An illegal migrant was killed during a riot at the detention centre at Manus Island. Why were they rioting? They have found a safe haven from the repression they say they had experienced; in fact, surely they had that safe haven in Indonesia but I don’t know the details. But here is the story as told by the ABC, picked up at Andrew Bolt:

Thousands of people have held candlelight vigils around Australia for slain asylum seeker Reza Berati, who died in violence at the Manus Island detention centre last Monday.

A crowd of 5,000 people gathered in Melbourne’s Federation Square while 4,000 more rallied at Sydney’s town hall, with candles lit for the 23-year-old man.

And why the vigil:

I suppose what this represents is a catalyst or a flash point which has mobilised people all round Australia who are shocked and disgusted and outraged at the events that have led to this.

This seems very political to me since, as Andrew writes, these same people did not seem to worry so much about the at least 1100 people who drowned in trying to reach Australia by boat. And does anyone know what marketable skills Reza brought with him to Australia and whether he could even speak English?

It can happen here

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My reaction on reading this at Instapundit was that it wouldn’t happen in Australia:

Has anyone ever helped pop my bag up into the overhead compartment? Nope. Have I seen any other woman helped? Nope.

This week, an engineer in his 50s just stood there in the aisle, his hands clasped, as I played Olympic weight-lifting with my suitcase right in front of him. Just stood there, looking intently at the sticky carpet. Probably afraid to chip a nail or something.

Has the women’s liberation movement really scared the bejesus out of men this much?

When did it become chivalrous to steadfastly look away and not bother to help?

If a 6am flight is anything to go by, you’d think the concept of a gentleman was well and truly dead.

I promise you, I won’t get angry or defensive or give you attitude, I’ll in fact be super-grateful and flash you an extra-big smile despite the lack of sleep.

Turns out, this was taken from The Age in an article titled, Quit hitting on me and help me out. I guess it could happen in Australia after all.

Australia the best place to live and work in the world

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melbourne

From The Guardian whereof there is no source more authoritative:

Australia is rated best place to live and work for third year running

UK comes 10th in OECD index, behind US and Scandinavian countries but ahead of France and Germany

Only don’t know why they used a picture of Sydney in their story which is only the seventh most livable city in the world.

[My thanks to Beatrix for sending this along.]

Wasted moments

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Australia is in the midst of the greatest teaching moment on global warming possibly since this entire business began. Our team of scientists getting frost bite while frozen in, even with technologies today that did not exist a century ago when Douglas Mawson made the same journey. Yet this is not the way it is being reported, although I was pleased to see that Andrew Bolt has made it onto Powerline Picks. But the deep deep scandal, that ought to be one of the most instructive moments in this long and sad saga, is going to waste. And it is worse that I could have thought.

First there was the headline on Drudge, “‘Global Warming’ Intensifies”. So I went into the story which turned out to be from The Telegraph in London. And there, right at the start of the story, was this about Australia. But it’s not about what you might have thought:

As the planet marked its fourth hottest year on record, a study published in the journal Nature found increasing levels of carbon dioxide will lead to thinner ocean clouds and reduce their cooling impact, causing temperature rises of at least 5.6F (3C) over the course of the century.

The team of scientists said the findings show some climate models have been too ‘optimistic’ and previous estimates of a minimum temperature rise of only 2.7F (1.5C) could now be discounted. The optimistic models did not properly assess the impact of water evaporation, which sometimes rises only a short distance into the atmosphere and causes updraughts that reduce cloud cover, the study found.

‘These models have been predicting a lower climate sensitivity but we believe they’re incorrect,’ Professor Steven Sherwood, from the University of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.

‘The net effect of [climate change] is you have less cloud cover.’

The study comes amid a controversy in Australia over claims by Maurice Newman, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser, who said the world had been taken “hostage to climate change madness”.

Mr Newman said the climate change establishment, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, remained ‘intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money’.

‘The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,’ he wrote in The Australian. ‘Global temperatures have gone nowhere for 17 years… If the IPCC were your financial adviser, you would have sacked it long ago.’

Mr Newman, a former chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange, was criticised by the opposition and pilloried by scientists, who said he was expressing “flat earth” views and should be sacked.

‘His piece is a mix of common climate change myths, misinformation and ideology,’ said Professor David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne, in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald.

‘I would not choose a person who believes that the Earth is flat to advise Australian shipping or airline businesses on how to plan routes to travel around the world. It is clearly not sensible to have a person who believes that climate change science is a delusion as leader of the prime minister’s Business Advisory Council.’

Mr Abbott, who is something of a climate change sceptic, once claimed that ‘climate change is “absolute crap”,’ though he later said he accepts it is ‘real’.

Since winning a federal election last September, he has moved to scrap Labor’s tax on carbon emissions and instead proposes to address climate change by paying polluters to reduce emissions, though critics say the plan is underfunded and will not achieve its reduction targets.

The debate comes as Australia in 2013 marked its hottest year since reliable recordings began in 1910. The world’s driest continent also recorded its hottest day, hottest month, hottest winter’s day and hottest summer.

The run of warmer weather began late in 2012 and was so great that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology last year changed its official weather forecasting map to include new colours – deep purple and pink – for areas with temperatures above 50C (122F).

So let me return to Andrew Bolt one more time. This is on Professional warmist attacks amateur sceptic for being on the take:

David Karoly’s salary depends on him being a warmist. He is Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Climate Change Authority.

Today he attacks sceptic Maurice Newman, the former ABC chairman and now head of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, who is paid not a cent to point out – correctly – that the world has not warmed as alarmists predicted and the carbon tax wouldn’t prevent it anyway. Says Karoly of Newman:

As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Is Karoly at all aware of how stupid he looks?

Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t, but to tell the truth, he could not care less.

Fixing messes

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Quiet diplomacy seems to work. The story deals with issues on two fronts, not just spying but the live cattle trade, both of which had been botched by Labor but are now on the road to being repaired by the Coalition. First the “spying” which is dated, please note, 2009:

INDONESIA has accepted Tony Abbott’s explanation of the 2009 spying scandal but says the bilateral relationship will not fully resume until a new ‘protocol and code of ethical conduct’ is agreed and implemented between the two countries.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono extended the olive branch to Australia last night after a special cabinet meeting, signalling the end of the worst diplomatic crisis between Australia and Indonesia since 1999.

However, Dr Yudhoyono made clear that the relationship would not be fully resumed – including military and police cooperation on people smuggling – until the code of conduct he and the Prime Minister had signed was ‘fully implemented’.

The boats aren’t coming anyway which I can tell because they are never mentioned in The Age or on the ABC. But the story goes onto another front in our relationship with Indonesia:

Indonesia was not considering any reimposition of quotas on Australian live cattle, citing ‘the need to maintain stability of prices’. Indonesia has issued permits for an additional 120,000 head of Australian cattle to be imported during the current quarter, as the government battles to drive down market prices for beef from near-record levels.

Maintaining the stability of prices is another way of saying that Australia is the cheapest and most reliable supplier of beef to the Indonesian economy.

We are not alone

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From The Guardian, of all places. This is the headline:

Warsaw climate talks: nearly 3 in 10 countries not sending ministers

Australia is not alone in its failure to send a minister to the UN climate negotiations in Poland, reports RTCC

And while the previous government made a fetish about leading the way, it is actually Tony Abbott who is doing the leading. Again from this same story:

Australia recently attracted attention by its refusal to send either its environment minister Greg Hunt or foreign minister Julie Bishop to the negotiations.

Instead, Australia will send along its climate ambassador Justin Lee as its lead negotiator.

As the world’s top climate officials gather to discuss how to stem emissions and mobilise finance, Hunt will instead be based in the Australian parliament, attempting to fulfill Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s election promise to repeal the country’s carbon tax.

We are setting a precedent and others are taking notice.

Abiding by our way of life

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Let me return to that speech by Rupert Murdoch the other day to pull two other bits from it. First this:

But at the end of the day, the values that define Australia depend on more than good government and strong allies. They depend on sound and vigorous institutions especially private institutions.

You can’t have the rule of law if the courts aren’t free and independent – or if you have lawyers running amok as they do in the American system. We cannot allow the rule of law to become the rule of lawyers!

You can’t have a free democracy if you don’t have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.

If the ALP is wondering why the Murdoch Press was a tad hostile to its re-election, they might wish to dwell on this. And this is not just Rupert Murdoch but a pretty sizeable proportion of the country who believe exactly the same. Who were people the likes of Rudd and Gillard to threaten these long-established traditions of freedom and the media? On that alone they needed to go not to mention the rest.

We are not yet overwhelmed by governments but have been moving rapidly in that direction. Our election may have saved us from even more. All governments want to spend so it will be hard to stop even our present incumbants from supporting their vision with our money. But at least there is the possibility that they will see it as their role to build the civic culture that Murdoch was discussing.

And then, from that same speech, there was this:

But for all this progress, there is still a strand among some parts of Australian society who seem to value every culture except our own. These people are gravely confused about what real multiculturalism is. Multiculturalism is not relativism, and tolerance is not indifference.

Australia has clear values and strong institutions. One key value is an openness to all comers – provided they are willing to abide by our way of life.

Australia is what it is because of who we already are. I have always been struck that we made a Jew our Governor-General in 1930. This is a country open to the talents. But it is not a country into which we can bring strings of takers who do not contribute or who do not wish to embrace the values of an open and tolerant society that have developed on this continent over the past 200 years. Never perfect, but it has always been the ideal.

The Murdoch vision

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Rupert Murdoch gave a speech last night to the Lowy Institute on “Let’s learn to thrive on disruption“. And what he means he says early on:

For Australia is on the cusp of becoming something rare and valuable in this new world: an egalitarian meritocracy, with more than a touch of libertarianism.

But we can’t wait for later.

In the past few years, we have all seen how advances in communications and travel have eliminated the tyranny of distance. The same might be said for size.

Think about Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These are all small places, and hardly blessed with natural resources. Yet not only have they carved out a competitive position in the world because of their free, open and dynamic economies, they have become a source of inspiration for countries around the globe.

Australia can and should do better than all of them.

Australia is the best country in the world because we do have the great English traditions of free institutions, free markets and a willingness to accept and adapt to change. The US was once such a country but isn’t any more or at least may no longer be. We are such a country and are getting better. But what I found most astonishing in the speech was this:

Australia must be the world’s disruptive economy.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter once described the process of ‘creative destruction’ as essential to capitalism. The current fashionable word to capture that sense of creative chaos is ‘disruption’.

As soon as I saw the word “disruption” in the title I went looking for Schumpeter’s name. He is the economist of disruption, who sees that the role of the entrepreneur is not to behave in the way economic theory now teaches, concerned with incremental change with one more unit of some already-existing product leading to a change in revenues and costs. It is about individuals who do new things in new ways. Understanding the role of entrepreneurship is to understand the way in which the world betters itself by a continual introduction of new ideas embodied in wholly different ways of doing things.

It is the vision of people who look forward to the future, who want to engage with change because they know that change is coming, understand that change is often for the better and have introduced institutions that will allow such changes to be introduced, causing disruptions of course, but also with a relatively smooth transition to the new. This is how it has always been in this, the last-ever new frontier society in the world, and I too hope it will continue in just this way, building on our past and on into a future filled with unknown unknowns.

The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism

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Wow! Did Tony Abbott really say that? This is from The Daily Caller and relayed on Drudge:

Australia’s newly elected prime minister pulled no punches when giving his thoughts on the country’s carbon tax, which he says must be abolished as quickly as possible.

‘The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment,’ Abbott told The Washington Post. ‘Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.’

‘If the Labor Party wants to give the people of Australia a Christmas present, they will vote to abolish the carbon tax. It was damaging the economy without helping the environment. It was a stupid tax. A misconceived tax,’ Abbott added.

Using the s-word to describe socialists. We really are in a new world.