Sometimes, it's quite OK to not understand

Millard Fillmore's Bathtub has noted this letter from the Financial Times:

From Mr. K N Al-Sabah.
Sir,
Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad!
Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi.
But Gulf states are pro-Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood!
Iran is pro-Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood!
Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the US!
Gulf states are pro-US. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro-Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi.  And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states!
Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day.
K N Al-Sabah
London EC4, UK

Which is a relief.  I mean, my lack of knowledge of the geo-political significance of this civil war is now fully justified as being one of those things just a handful of my fellow citizens probably understand.  (And note, the letter doesn't even mention Russia backing Assad.)  

History to drink to

Gin and tonic kept the British Empire healthy: The drink’s quinine powder was vital for stopping the spread of malaria. - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise the full extent of quinine's historical importance:

Quinine powder quickly became critical to the health of the empire. By the 1840s British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. Quinine powder kept the troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted a stable (though surprisingly small) British population to prosper in Britain’s tropical colonies. Quinine was so bitter, though, that British officials stationed in India and other tropical posts took to mixing the powder with soda and sugar. “Tonic water,” of a sort, was born.

Still, tonic water was basically a home brew until an enterprising Brit named Erasmus Bond introduced the first commercial tonic water in 1858—perhaps not coincidentally, the very same year the British government ousted the East India Co. and took over direct control of India, following the so-called Sepoy Mutiny, a violent rebellion and counterattack. 

Bond’s new tonic was soon followed by Schweppes’ introduction, in 1870, of “Indian Quinine Tonic,” a product specifically aimed at the growing market of overseas British who, every day, had to take a preventative dose of quinine. Schweppes and other commercial tonics proliferated both in the colonies and, eventually, back in Britain itself.

And another bit of quirky history from the article:

Quinine proved as critical to the battle over the Pacific in the second world war as it had to the struggle over India. As Amy Stewart notes in her new book, The Drunken Botanist, Japan seized Java, the home of huge cinchona plantations, from the Dutch in 1942, cutting off nearly all of the Allied supply of quinine. The last American plane to fly out of the Philippines before it fell to the Japanese carried some 4 million quinine seeds. Unfortunately, the effort was largely in vain: The trees grew too slowly to provide sufficient quinine to the Allied war effort. 

Some more skepticism needed

Abbott to hit business with hikes

Apart from Colebatch's column linked above, there seems to be little in the way of commentary about on whom the Coalition's claimed savings are falling.

In fact, there seems to be little skepticism about the claim that the Paid Parental Leave plan would actually save money in the long run.  To give just one example, I'm pretty sure that in the summary Hockey provided,  it made mention of savings from double dipping being reduced in State public service schemes.  How does that work?  Why is a saving to a State budget being credited to a Federal bottom line? 

But back to Colebatch:

The Coalition will pay for its campaign promises by raising taxes on business, cutting support for middle-income and low-income earners, and cutting environmental programs, under the list of savings given out by shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey and shadow finance minister Andrew Robb....

The decision to hit business - mostly small business - with $4.6 billion of tax hikes was politically shrewd. Not one business lobby came forward on Wednesday to criticise the Coalition's new taxes on its members. They would have screamed had Labor done the same.

The Coalition made its riskiest cuts known long ago, and they don't seem to have hurt it.
The savings claimed are surprisingly large - $4.6 billion from axing the Schoolkids' Bonus, $3.7 billion from scrapping superannuation contributions for low-income earners and $5.2 billion from cutting 12,000 public service jobs.

These claimed savings are higher than previous estimates, even by the Coalition. It was a surprise to learn that the Coalition will over-fund its controversial paid parental leave scheme by $1.1 billion in its first two years. The policy it released two weeks ago made no such claim.

There are some errors in Hockey's costings. Innovation Minister Kim Carr pointed out that the Coalition could not claw back the $680 million it claims from axing two business programs without breaking contracts: the money it already committed.

And on another matter of flakey Abbott policy - why is the "Green Army" attracting so little attention?

It's an absolute bit of trivia and typical of Abbott's terrible judgement on environmental issues that he is determined to stop the Clean Energy Finance Corporation - which is specifically about making returns on lending, a point the Coalition does not want people to know - but proceed with his own silly idea.

Save a bit of money now, pay more later

Can Australia afford the Coalition’s NBN?

No doubt the writer is biased, but this article does set out in pretty good detail the reasons I have read elsewhere why the Coalition's planned revision to the NBN is not technically or financially a good idea.

Hint to Kevin Rudd No2

Kevin, a politician who has a video in circulation containing what seems like 5 minutes of swearing to the camera and room in frustration at not being as good at something as you thought you were should not talk about the poor temperament of your opponent.

The way to attack Tony Abbott on how he would conduct foreign affairs is to note that he's never shown much interest in the topic, as Peter Costello said about him with respect to economics; he would take over-simplified lines with no nuance ("Go Israel!" would be the guiding principle for anything to do with the Middle East, just as it is with the Tea Party), and he keeps putting his foot in his mouth with odd comments on all matters.  (What was that line about "maybe you shouldn't be there" in reference to being king hit in Kings Cross at 2 am all about?)

Well, that's odd

I could have sworn I heard Judith Sloan on the Drum last week saying something about how she was writing a column about all the ways she considered the Coalition's Paid Parental Leave scheme a bad idea.

So what do we get today?  A Sloan column that boosts the suggestion that the PPL will not actually cost any money to the budget at all!  So, does that mean you actually like the policy now, Judith?  One could be excused for thinking so.  (And by the way, you caused a bit of a stir a year or two ago amongst Labor types by talking about how it probably made sense to increase unemployment benefits.  I haven't seen that mentioned in an Australian column for a long time - or did it ever appear there?)

The headline to her column, which she presumably did not come up with personally, is of the "Ha! Take that Rudd!" variety, which is very, very popular at the Australian at the moment.

If a photo like this was real, the Murdoch headlines would be:

Looks familiar

Record-breaking floods in Russia force thousands to evacuate - ABC News

The story carries this photo, which looks remarkably like much of Australia in 2011:

Actually, the long buildings also put me in mind of the scenery in the zombie infected world of DayZ, which I have played a bit with my son in the last 6 months.  I've never written an appreciation of that game - I should do so one day.

Some good Krugman

This Age of Bubbles - NYTimes.com

I've been forgetting to check in on Paul Krugman.  (How I wish he lived here for some clear and erudite commentary on what passes for economic policy in the Coalition now!)

The column at the link above notes the renewed economic worries in India and Brazil.  He doesn't think it will cause a world meltdown, but sounds slightly nervous.  (He expressed worries about China recently too.  From a lay man's point of view, the publicity that it has recently had with its "ghost" empty cities has certainly made me think - surely this is a bad sign.)

But he writes with common sense on most topics he touches.  Have a look at his post on Microsoft and Apple, for example.  I feel pretty much the same.

He's also taken delight in noting that changes to Singaporean health system  will no longer make it the free market poster child for health that US Republicans used to claim it was.

As for his summary of the current state of American politics:

If you haven’t been reading the political blogs much — say, Greg Sargent — you may not have a sense of just how dire the political environment is. But here’s the situation. You have a Republican base that truly believes that guaranteed health insurance is the work of the devil. Meanwhile, there’s a Republican majority in the House that owes its position not to broad popular support — Democrats actually got more votes in 2012 — but to a district map that concentrates Democrats in a minority of districts, which in turn means that most Rs are more afraid of Tea Party challengers than outraged independents.

And the debt ceiling looms, with many ideologues assuring the base that Obama can be bullied into gutting his main achievement, which he won’t.

Everyone seems to assume that this will be worked out somehow, but nobody has even a halfway plausible story about how this will be done. Default looks like a real risk.

How depressing...

Hint to Kevin Rudd

Stop announcing things that appear to be, or are, all your own idea.  

That was the problem with you the first time around.  

You must emphasise the consultative process by which you came to a policy or initiative.  Assuming you did consult.

And if you didn't consult with more than Bruce Hawker or your daughter or son - do not announce the policy or initiative at all.

Piffle

Why Abbott is right to abandon surplus promise

Geoffrey Garrett is saying Tony Abbott is doing the right thing in abandoning a promise to get the budget back into surplus in a few years.

What piffle.

Everyone knows that the "budget emergency" will be declared worse than they thought, and that greater public service and spending cuts than claimed will be made in all of the areas a large slab of the Coalition thinks it is having a "cultural war" with - climate change, science generally, education - in particular.

Abbott should be given credit for shifting on nothing in the run up to this election.

Yurt thoughts

I am having the strongest feeling that I should be designing an "urban yurt", a bit like the "urban sombrero" from Seinfeld...

I think it's an idea I could "sell" to Clive Palmer.  

A tired genre considered

Why does live-action fantasy fail at the movies?

I've never been keen on the fantasy story genre, and this is not a bad discussion about why so many of them fail as movies.

(And despite the success of a few movie series in the genre, the article notes that those are based on already fabulously popular novels, thus helping ensure their audience on screen.  I still say Lord of the Rings is boring, though, in book or on screen.)

Free campaign advice

1.  Kevin Rudd:  stop going to childcare centres and talking to children about infrastructure projects:

ASHLEY HALL: Playing with building blocks offered him the chance to share a campaign slogan.

KEVIN RUDD: We're just going to keep building up, because we've got to build things up, haven't we? Making sure we are building and building for the future.

Oh please...

2.  Tony Abbott:  stop bringing up sex appeal when talking to or about women:



On second thoughts, Tony:  please, keep talking to women about how great it is to be women in a workplace dominated by men.   I'm really interested, as are the women of Australia.

Good summary

Why We Should Not Trust Tony Abbott | Tim Colebatch

In short: it's complicated

Improving the scientific foundations for estimating health risks from the Fukushima incident

The article points out the complications with trying to work out the risk from radioactive fallout on humans.  It seems to be written by someone mostly concerned that risk  is probably always being over-estimated, but it does end with a call for some hard work to be put in on the issue.

In any event, if you are a parent with kids in an area around Fukushima, of course you are going to lean towards the side of caution.

NBN talk

I noticed this blog a few weeks ago, that takes a very technical and detailed look at the NBN and the Coalition's alternative, and falls very heavily in favour of fibre to the premises and hence the NBN.

I've always been unsure whether the NBN was really worth it.  But the fact is, it seems hard to find people with detailed knowledge in IT and communications who doubt that the NBN is a good investment that will last many, many decades.

On this basis, I've stopped worrying about it.

And now for something completely different (well, not really) - some anti-Coalition stories

1.  Lenore Taylor has a great explanation of the obviously calculated Abbott bulldust that he's the guy who's trying to rise above tawdry politics:

For three years he conducted a relentless, deliberate and effective negative campaign against the Gillard government, a campaign at times so aggressive that many on his own side were deeply concerned it was causing irreparable damage to voter perceptions of Abbott himself.

But with negative views of Labor’s record apparently entrenched – aided, it must be said, by Labor’s own self-destructive leadership saga – Abbott is flipping to positive just in time.

Slowly but surely his personal approval ratings are improving. He has toned down the attacks. His colleagues and his daughters talk about his “authenticity” as a community member and a family man. They label Rudd a “fake”.

And all the while Abbott refuses to deviate from his strategy of claiming to have a “real plan” without setting out what it is and how it will be paid for in anything like the detail provided by previous oppositions.

And, as I have noted before, the tactics being used against Rudd this time are those he used against Howard:

The last time we saw “the flip” exercised with such confidence and dexterity was in Rudd’s campaign launch speech in 2007, when he managed to flip the economic management debate to one where John Howard, who had just presided over 11 years of consecutive growth and record low unemployment, was on the defensive over the economy.

Rudd had made $45bn in spending promises during the formal campaign, just $5bn less than Howard's $50bn in campaign promises, but when Rudd told the party faithful “this reckless spending must stop” he looked like the competent and frugal economic manager.

2.  Lenore also had a good column a few days ago about the Coalition's deliberate delays to disclose funding for policies:

.... while oppositions of both persuasions have tried to game the formal costings processes, individual policies have almost always been released with their full price tags detailed over four years.

The Coalition's health policy, released on Thursday, had one line under costings which read: "The Coalition's policy to support Australia's health system will cost $340m over the forward estimates." Some of that – we were told on "background" – would come from cuts inside the health portfolio, and some from "elsewhere". In other words: they'll get back to us.

The "PBO has still got our homework" schtick has also worn thin since the Coalition has been telling us for months they already have everything fully costed and figured out.

The "Labor is running a scare campaign" excuse worked for a little while – aided by the ALP's silly insistence on using the $70bn figure for the Coalition's costings black hole, which by a quick reckoning is clearly overstated.

3.  Abbott's mysteriously unanalysed by Rupert's papers "let's go to Indonesia and buy boats!' scheme has apparently not gone over well in that country:

The buyback plan has met with heavy resistance in Jakarta, with a senior member of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's ruling coalition saying it showed Mr Abbott lacked understanding of Indonesia, and the broader asylum-seeker problem.

Mahfudz Siddiq, the head of Indonesia's parliamentary commission for foreign affairs, said on Monday that it was Mr Abbott's right to suggest the policy but warned that it had broader implications for the relationship between Jakarta and Australia.

"It's an unfriendly idea coming from a candidate who wants to be Australian leader," Mr Siddiq said.

"That idea shows how he sees things as [an] Australian politician on Indonesia regarding people smuggling. Don't look at us, Indonesia, like we want this people smuggling.

"This is really a crazy idea, unfriendly, derogatory and it shows lack of understanding in this matter."

4.  Quentin Dempster makes a good point:  if the Coalition is going to make big changes to the ABC, they should be up front about it now.  And let's face it, everyone knows that an Abbott government will find an even worse budget emergency crisis than the terrible disaster of an emergency budget crisis that they have already been warning us about [/sarc], and the urgent need to commercialise the ABC will be justified as a cost saving.  

Quick! Send us money! These cigars don't buy themselves, you know...

Interesting report at The Age on Sunday about the IPA.

For a "think tank" (using the term loosely) whose executive and members get a lot of screen time on the ABC and columns in the Murdoch press and elsewhere, it's always handy to read how they're viewed more broadly.  Their mere ubiquity gives an impression of credibility. 

The main point of the article, though,  is that it seems many prominent corporations who used to support them no longer will, because they recognise that it devotes a lot of effort to running a nutty extremist climate change denying line.

At the same time, they are doing very well financially due to a recent surge in donations.  We still don't know who the corporate donors are, although it is openly acknowledged that Gina Rinehart helps fund it.  (That's no surprise: their "we think everyone should be on a level playing field, except when it comes to those parts of Australian our favourite billionaire Gina Rinehart invests in" policy made that obvious.)

The article says British Tobacco was (or is still - it's not clear)  a donor.   That's not news, really, but it's worthwhile reminding people when you get IPA mouthpieces like Chris Berg rubbishing cigarette plain packaging in the media.  Mind you, Chris Berg was also writing in 2010 that internet material for terrorist bomb making was not really worth worrying about:

When they're not utterly stupid, they are oddly banal. Another Inspire recommendation is to shoot up lunch spots that are popular with government workers. So in a decade, al-Qaeda has gone from targeting the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - the two symbolic organs of American power - to threatening Starbucks outlets one at a time.

Then there is ''Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom'', which suggests repurposing a home pressure cooker to become an explosive device. Such a device is weak, apparently, so the magazine recommends it is placed ''close to the intended targets''.

It is surprisingly hard to detonate explosives successfully.

That was, of course, before the Boston bombings killed 3 people and maimed and injured 264 others.

You don't have to be wrong about terrorism, climate change, stagflation, the health effect of wind turbines, and tobacco plain packaging to work for/be associated with the IPA, but it certainly helps.

In any event, it's amusing to read the reaction Andrew Bolt  which I will now paraphrase as follows:

"Look!  The Age says the IPA are corporate shills, but then admits that more money comes from donations!   Stand up, everyone,  and be proud that the IPA has become a mutual support club for climate change nutters, and for people like me who do lousy research on aboriginal issues and then get taken to court and lose and want to act like a martyr for the next 2 years. 

And send money - more money!  The price of freedom, especially my freedom to do lousy research via Google and ridicule people based on mistake, is not cheap!"

What Andrew doesn't address is how much more money the place needs.  I see that, after a fairly lengthy delay, the IPA financials for 2011/12 are finally available (I have been checking for them for the last year or so.) 

They indicate that in 2011, it received $562,000 in donations; in 2012: $2,612,000.  How much of that is loose change from Gina's deep pockets is not clear.  (And seriously, Andrew Bolt, do you think a donation from any body controlled by Gina should not be counted as effectively coming from a corporate interest?)

Total income went from $2.4 million to $4 million.

The current year income surplus after expenses went from $217,000 to $313,000, with a total retained surplus of $1.544 million.  

And yet,  Andrew Bolt and Sinclair Davidson have been big on asking for donations over the last year or so, and there is no doubt that the martyrdom of Andrew Bolt played big with his fanbase.

So, yeah, the anti-mooching "think tank" is very big on panhandling. Even though I would have expected the cigars for the board meetings are free....*

And Tony Abbott says that the IPA "...has supported capitalism, but capitalism with a conscience."

Yeah, sure.  To put it at its most charitable, Abbott is living in the past.

To be less charitable, and more realistic:  he's a dill who doesn't know who to listen to....

* reliable details from John Roskam to dissuade me of how I like to imagine meetings there are welcome.  I wonder how many ex smokers are on staff too. 

Another Jericho

Wage rise blowout a figment of Coalition’s imagination | Business | theguardian.com

Another good, clear column from Greg Jericho here, with lots of graphs, and ending with this summary:

For the past six years there has been a lot of hoo-hah said and written about industrial relations. As soon as the ALP moved to change IR legislation, warnings came from the Liberal party and conservative commentators of a wages boom. They also warned that the Fair Work Act would destroy productivity.

It didn’t.

In his campaign launch speech on Sunday, Tony Abbott talked of returning IR to the “sensible centre”. It’s a claim based on the view that unions now have too much power. If that is true, there is scant evidence they have used it to gain excess wage rises which have decoupled earnings from productivity.

When the Liberal party does finally announce its changes to IR after the election, it would be nice if they could keep themselves to fixing problems that actually exist, and not ones that occur only in their imagination.

How's the Murdochcracy going?

It was a stunningly beautiful day in Brisbane today.  The tides were right too, so it was off to Cleveland for some canal fishing for (as it turned out) about 5 hours.  (Small fish caught and thrown back; prawn smell still slightly persisting on everyone's fingers.  Takeaway pizza for dinner.)

So, while I was out, can anyone let me know if the installation of the Murdochcracy has been completed, with the rise to power of his favourite "conviction politician" (ha!), Tony Putin Abbott?*

Seriously, there seems to be a pretty unusually muted response by anyone to the completely over the top editorial line being pursued by the Murdoch papers in this election campaign.

But then, even Insiders was weird today.   Barrie Cassidy started by asking some pointed questions about why Rudd's movements yesterday were so important to the Murdoch press;  Malcolm Farr half fobbed it off, making out that he didn't think what Rudd did was such a sin.   But then by the time Cassidy got to the Rudd interview, he was very aggressive towards him on the matter of the Gillard record   As Cassidy was supposed to be pals with (Gillard's) Tim, I can only assume there was a large element of revenge in this for Rudd's role in her departure.  

Rudd's sin apparently was in not making it clear he was doing Kitchen Confidential (essentially a bit of campaign related work) before having a briefing last night on Syria (done in lieu of some Brisbane campaign thing, I think I read.)  The video of the briefing that took place did look pathetically transparent - but then again, there have been several videos of Tony Abbott pep talks to his shadow caucus team over the last six months which looked every bit as stilted and "for the cameras" as yesterday's effort.  As for appearing on Kitchen Confidential - Abbott has already done his episode. 

So, as far as I can tell, Rudd has every right to be furious with his treatment at the hands of the Murdoch press; but as nearly everyone thinks Rudd was a jerk for the way he undermined Gillard, no one's going to put their job on the line by putting in too much effort into calling out Murdoch.

What a sad state of affairs for someone like me, who has never liked Rudd, but considers that Labor collectively now has a sounder approach on economics and a majority of other issues than the alternative, which is headed by a bloke who has become a disgraceful fence-sitter and increasingly shows himself to be just not very bright.  (Not that you need to be all that bright to be a successful politician.  In fact, being too smart as a politician runs the risk of frequent paralysis.  But you need to have enough smarts to know who to listen to.  Abbott hasn't even got that, if you ask me.)  

And look at the way that Abbott's odd ideas (buying people smuggling boats in Indonesia) are simply not getting any significant coverage in the press.  For God's sake, I saw that quite a few at Catallaxy thought it was a stupid idea on Friday; then phftt; the proposal gets next to no attention while Murdoch's minions come up with the next "Rudd's a disaster!" headline for the following morning.

I haven't read much about the Liberal Policy launch today.  I saw Abbott's daughters front and centre (for God's sake, Tony & Kevin, leave the kids at home like 99% of working people do), and something about defence spending being 2% of GDP in future.  Tying defence spending to GDP was a Romney promise**.  What a surprise.  Mind you, this was an aim to be reached "in a decade".  As irrelevant as Rudd's "aim" to reduce company tax in the Northern Territory if re-elected in 3 years.

And how appropriate that one of the few election commitments was for a big boost in Alzheimer's research.  I wasn't really aware that Australia had any particular expertise there, and would have thought that other areas of biomedical promise might be worth pursuing - but Tony does have his power base to support.

All I can say in conclusion - if you value  press coverage that runs something other than Murdoch's geriatric views, go an and pay for a digital subscription to a Fairfax paper.  I'll be doing it tomorrow.   It would be an appalling state of affairs if Fairfax did not exist.

* Has anyone else called Tony's never ending appearances as fitness he-man his Putin-isation?  I doubt that is an original thought...

** I see that Labor has previously committed to this figure as well, which Alan Kohler calls a nonsense way to determine appropriate defence spending.   At least Labor won't be reminding people of this the election campaign.