My imagined thoughts seem likely to be accurate, given the way he tweeted recently:
Monday, September 09, 2013
Uncle Rupert's election thoughts
My imagined thoughts seem likely to be accurate, given the way he tweeted recently:
Not bad, Jack
I've been looking through some of the comments at John Quiggin's blog, and note that Jack Strocchi's seems pretty reasonable. I'll extract two bits from it:
The sixth point to make is that there is a paradox at the heart of the AUS polity: the public appear to despise the Centre-Left’s psephologically whilst broadly agreeing with the Centre-Left ideologically. Thus the Centre-Left has been wiped out at both state and federal levels, yet there is no great public enthusiasm for austerity or Hewson “Fightback” program. This is demonstrated by Abbott’s Big Government me-tooism on the subjects of Gonski education, national disability and some kind of national broadband program. He is also reluctant to revisit industrial relations, a traditional favorite of the L/NP Right. ...
The tenth and final point to make is that the ALP did not really deserve to lose this election. going by the its performance, politicians and policies. Its economic administration was competent, there were no appalling ministerial scandals (apart from leadership tussles which were finally settled), its headline policies were broadly popular. At some basic level the electorate has made a bad decision – especially given that revoking the carbon and mineral taxes will empower the oligarchy. I draw this conclusion reluctantly as I am a fervent populist. I can only hope that the electorate comes to their senses in due course. In the meantime the ALP must work overtime to make themselves fit for government, as they did after the 1975-77 disasters.
Sunday, September 08, 2013
Everyone's a winner, baby*
I didn't see all of the election coverage last night: we were having a meal at an Italian restaurant where the family next to us had a few kids who probably had a combined count of 5 vomits during their stay, with the last one being particularly spectacular. (The youngest toddler would vomit, then cause the older kids to get sick in sympathy. I felt sorry for the parents, but nonetheless was happy to see them leave...)
Anyhow, I was home in time to see the Rudd "victory in defeat" speech, which did go on a bit, to put it mildly; and caused tension by making Labor sympathizing viewers wonder if he was ever going to get around to saying he wouldn't lead the party in Opposition.
The Abbott speech was pretty lame, I thought, and the optics of it most noteworthy for the way in which it seemed that election victory was finally deemed good enough reason for the jettison of his barnacle-like daughters. (And yes, one was still dressed like Sporty Spice. Odd.) From the ABC coverage, the family started heading up the stairs to the stage to join him at the end, only to find he had already descended into the crowd. Good on ya, Tone, way to keep a look out for what's going on with the family. I assume the young guy who then gatecrashed the family together on stage happened later - it didn't appear on the ABC.
One good thing about this election result is that I don't think anyone can plausibly claim to be puzzled by it - there really should be a lot less of this journalistic guff about Party X having lost its way and having to have a 12 month period of navel gazing to work out what went wrong (which happens now whenever Party X loses an election.) We all know exactly what went wrong - basically, Kevin Rudd and the fractious internal politics of the last 4 years.
At about 34% of the primary vote, this is low for Labor, but who doesn't just mentally tack on the Greens to get a true picture of combined Left leaning vote? At 8.5%, the Greens are no doubt suffering from the replacement of the cheerful Bob Brown with a woman who naturally looks and sounds perpetually unhappy. But the combined 42.2% is not that far from the combined Coalition vote which looks like 45.3%. (As to where to position the Palmer vote - God knows. I suspect it is just a generic protest vote against politics, and neither side can take much comfort from it.)
It was therefore hard to be depressed with the result, because there was the feeling that everyone could claim to be a winner, in one way or another:
# There were enough seats in Western Sydney and Queensland saved for Rudd to plausibly argue he had helped the party after all.
# Julia Gillard was gracious in the off stage support for Labor, and her "captain's pick" of Nova Peris worked out after all.
# The Labor Party won by Kevin giving up the leadership.
# Mad Clive gets to create what will probably be some wildly unpredictable and theatrical political stories for the next couple of years at least before he has some physical or mental breakdown.
And of course, Tony Abbott gets to hesitate his way on national TV as PM instead of mere Opposition Leader. For the reasons I have been outlining for years, I don't expect he will do well, and he and his Party have faked their way into government. We now get to see if my Peter Principle diagnosis of him gets to be confirmed from the loftier position of PM. (Regardless of what the public thinks, it's already been confirmed to my satisfaction.)
As for my feeling on the Labor leadership - Bill Shorten performed well on his television appearances during the campaign, I thought. Before that, over the last year or two, I felt he has often seemed too stressed and grumpy, but his professional and personal life has been unusually difficult over the same period. I still think he is the most appealing of the possible candidates.
* families, particularly those on low income receiving top up superannuation and assistance with school expenses excepted, of course. As well as those who rely on penalty rates, public servants in Canberra, companies that wanted to decide on long term electricity investments within the next 12 months, car manufacturers and their employees, genuine refugees hoping for family reunion, environmentalists, etc. Apart from those, the future's looking fine and dandy.
Anyhow, I was home in time to see the Rudd "victory in defeat" speech, which did go on a bit, to put it mildly; and caused tension by making Labor sympathizing viewers wonder if he was ever going to get around to saying he wouldn't lead the party in Opposition.
The Abbott speech was pretty lame, I thought, and the optics of it most noteworthy for the way in which it seemed that election victory was finally deemed good enough reason for the jettison of his barnacle-like daughters. (And yes, one was still dressed like Sporty Spice. Odd.) From the ABC coverage, the family started heading up the stairs to the stage to join him at the end, only to find he had already descended into the crowd. Good on ya, Tone, way to keep a look out for what's going on with the family. I assume the young guy who then gatecrashed the family together on stage happened later - it didn't appear on the ABC.
One good thing about this election result is that I don't think anyone can plausibly claim to be puzzled by it - there really should be a lot less of this journalistic guff about Party X having lost its way and having to have a 12 month period of navel gazing to work out what went wrong (which happens now whenever Party X loses an election.) We all know exactly what went wrong - basically, Kevin Rudd and the fractious internal politics of the last 4 years.
At about 34% of the primary vote, this is low for Labor, but who doesn't just mentally tack on the Greens to get a true picture of combined Left leaning vote? At 8.5%, the Greens are no doubt suffering from the replacement of the cheerful Bob Brown with a woman who naturally looks and sounds perpetually unhappy. But the combined 42.2% is not that far from the combined Coalition vote which looks like 45.3%. (As to where to position the Palmer vote - God knows. I suspect it is just a generic protest vote against politics, and neither side can take much comfort from it.)
It was therefore hard to be depressed with the result, because there was the feeling that everyone could claim to be a winner, in one way or another:
# There were enough seats in Western Sydney and Queensland saved for Rudd to plausibly argue he had helped the party after all.
# Julia Gillard was gracious in the off stage support for Labor, and her "captain's pick" of Nova Peris worked out after all.
# The Labor Party won by Kevin giving up the leadership.
# Mad Clive gets to create what will probably be some wildly unpredictable and theatrical political stories for the next couple of years at least before he has some physical or mental breakdown.
And of course, Tony Abbott gets to hesitate his way on national TV as PM instead of mere Opposition Leader. For the reasons I have been outlining for years, I don't expect he will do well, and he and his Party have faked their way into government. We now get to see if my Peter Principle diagnosis of him gets to be confirmed from the loftier position of PM. (Regardless of what the public thinks, it's already been confirmed to my satisfaction.)
As for my feeling on the Labor leadership - Bill Shorten performed well on his television appearances during the campaign, I thought. Before that, over the last year or two, I felt he has often seemed too stressed and grumpy, but his professional and personal life has been unusually difficult over the same period. I still think he is the most appealing of the possible candidates.
* families, particularly those on low income receiving top up superannuation and assistance with school expenses excepted, of course. As well as those who rely on penalty rates, public servants in Canberra, companies that wanted to decide on long term electricity investments within the next 12 months, car manufacturers and their employees, genuine refugees hoping for family reunion, environmentalists, etc. Apart from those, the future's looking fine and dandy.
Saturday, September 07, 2013
Pre-election post election commentary
The polls certainly look bad for Labor. Or should I say, for Kevin Rudd, given the almost presidential style of this campaign.
On the up side: the broader Australian public have finally joined me in disdain for Rudd as a politician. Took them long enough: I was there in 2006.
On the downside: seems a fair few people over 35 have started to sort of like Tony Abbott. I refer to the age factor in this because it seems there is hardly an under 30 year old in the land who he doesn't creep out. As with Rudd, I predict his popularity, even with the dag demographic, will be but a fleeting thing. There is every reason to believe he will not keep spending promises, will have some trouble on the international stage (I don't expect him to go over a treat in Indonesia especially), and even (I've been reading around) have some early ministerial scandals. Some people have said we may be looking at something like the Fraser government after Whitlam, and there might be something in that, but I expect Abbott to be worse.
There is much speculation going on about how the Senate might pan out. The arcane system there seems to make it impossible to predict these days. Last night on the ABC there was talk that the balance of power might be with three odd bods: the creepy Victorian SenatorJohn Lithgow John Madigan; Bob Katter mate, country and western singer James Blundell, and Nick Xenophon. (I don't really know what to make of Xenophon - he certainly came across as an unsually lonely character on his appearance on Kitchen Cabinet earlier this year.)
What a worry.
I'm going to be voting below the line to try to ensure as limited accidental preferences as I can.
On the up side: the broader Australian public have finally joined me in disdain for Rudd as a politician. Took them long enough: I was there in 2006.
On the downside: seems a fair few people over 35 have started to sort of like Tony Abbott. I refer to the age factor in this because it seems there is hardly an under 30 year old in the land who he doesn't creep out. As with Rudd, I predict his popularity, even with the dag demographic, will be but a fleeting thing. There is every reason to believe he will not keep spending promises, will have some trouble on the international stage (I don't expect him to go over a treat in Indonesia especially), and even (I've been reading around) have some early ministerial scandals. Some people have said we may be looking at something like the Fraser government after Whitlam, and there might be something in that, but I expect Abbott to be worse.
There is much speculation going on about how the Senate might pan out. The arcane system there seems to make it impossible to predict these days. Last night on the ABC there was talk that the balance of power might be with three odd bods: the creepy Victorian Senator
What a worry.
I'm going to be voting below the line to try to ensure as limited accidental preferences as I can.
Friday, September 06, 2013
For those who want to go prepared
senate.io — Australian senate below the line ballot paper tool
This looks like a handy tool. Instead of pondering for 20 minutes in the local school hall (if it's a nice one, it was probably built by Labor, by the way) whether to put the Legalise Marijuana Party above or below the Climate Idiots Party, you can work it all out at home and print out your personal "how to vote under the line" card.
Neat.
This looks like a handy tool. Instead of pondering for 20 minutes in the local school hall (if it's a nice one, it was probably built by Labor, by the way) whether to put the Legalise Marijuana Party above or below the Climate Idiots Party, you can work it all out at home and print out your personal "how to vote under the line" card.
Neat.
Waste of cyberspace
My. What a home for aging, bloviating, wannabe culture war warriors Catallaxy has become.
(Have a look at this comment by someone about foreign aid cutbacks, too. I won't even link to the comment about all males over 12 in Syria should be killed.)
Keeps all the wingnuts in one location, though, so it serves a purpose, I guess.
(Have a look at this comment by someone about foreign aid cutbacks, too. I won't even link to the comment about all males over 12 in Syria should be killed.)
Keeps all the wingnuts in one location, though, so it serves a purpose, I guess.
The Coalition and research
Futile research or stealthy censorship?
Ian Musgrave puts the boot into the Coalition's populist stab at research funding yesterday:
Ian Musgrave puts the boot into the Coalition's populist stab at research funding yesterday:
Yes, that’s a good idea. We could set up a committee of experts to examine all grants in detail, and get them checked by external experts as well, before deciding on who to give money to.But this part is most telling:
Oh wait a second, we do that already, it’s called the Australian Research Council.
Now, I’ve been both an applicant and a reviewer of ARC grants, so I can tell you personally that the grant process is no cake run. The competition is fierce and the amount of grant money available is limited. The review process is exhaustive and more than a little harrowing. Only around 20% of all grants get funded, and you have to be exceptionally good for your grant to get up.
Great, now we have a bunch of auditors telling researchers what their priorities should be, that’s going to work out just fine. Not to mention the cost of having this team doing the re-prioritising. Anyone willing to bet that the amount of money saved by shuffling around grants with funny names that politicians don’t understand will be more than gobbled up by the Commission of Audit team?It reminds me of the Howard government's poor judgement in stopping small funding for Australian contribution to dangerous asteroid hunting.
Oh, and the funds clawed back from these “wasteful” projects to will be put into “new medical research programs for dementia, diabetes and tropical disease”. Yeah, except that isn’t the ARC’s role at all, that’s a completely different funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council or the NH&MRC.
I suppose it would be too much to expect that the Coalition would actually understand how research is funded in Australia.
This is hard to see as anything other a cynical attempt to defund topics the Coalition doesn’t like.
I am curious (yellow)
What scientists can see in your pee
Quite a lot, as it turns out, and it's all on line now:
Quite a lot, as it turns out, and it's all on line now:
"Urine is an incredibly complex biofluid. We had no idea there could be so many different compounds going into our toilets," noted David Wishart, the senior scientist on the project.
Wishart's research team used state-of-the-art analytical chemistry techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography to systematically identify and quantify hundreds of compounds from a wide range of human urine samples.
To help supplement their experimental results, they also used computer-based data mining techniques to scour more than 100 years of published scientific literature about human urine. This chemical inventory—which includes chemical names, synonyms, descriptions, structures, concentrations and disease associations for thousands of urinary metabolites—is housed in a freely available database called the Urine Metabolome Database, or UMDB. The UMDB is a worldwide reference resource to facilitate clinical, drug and environmental urinalysis. The UMDB is maintained by The Metabolomics Innovation Centre, Canada's national metabolomics core facility.
Looking back at the history of improving health
Life expectancy history: Public health and medical advances that lead to long lives. - Slate Magazine
It looks like this is the start of a series of posts about this fascinating topic. Some of the things mentioned you would have heard before, but it's always interested to see snippets of information showing how the popular imagination about something is really quite inaccurate. Like this:
It looks like this is the start of a series of posts about this fascinating topic. Some of the things mentioned you would have heard before, but it's always interested to see snippets of information showing how the popular imagination about something is really quite inaccurate. Like this:
One of the best tours of how people died in the past is The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America by Gerald Grob. It’s a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the Little House on the Prairie books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!
Jericho as with Pascoe
Coalition costings: we finally get them and they're just political fluff | Business | theguardian.com
Greg Jericho makes a very similar assessment to Michael Pascoe's about the Coalition's costings:
It's all pretty ludicrous.
Update: by the way, surely the re-assigning of rail money to road construction indicates a pretty ad hoc approach to working out which infrastructure project is most beneficial? I have complained about this a few times recently - everyone's saying it's important to put money into the "right" form of infrastructure, but making a trip to work, say, 15 minutes faster would seem something pretty hard to assess for its economic consequences.
Update 2: John Quiggin sounds the warning about the "commission of audit".
Greg Jericho makes a very similar assessment to Michael Pascoe's about the Coalition's costings:
Six billion dollars over four years. Or, given the total revenue over that time will be about $1,657bn, that’s about 0.36% of the budget over those years. Not a lot of room for error.
But they were about attacking waste. There was oodles of it, don’t you know. So how did they end up $6bn better off?
Well, today Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, in a laughable 22-minute press conference, announced they will be cutting the growth of the foreign aid budget by $4.5bn, rephasing the water buyback scheme from over four years to over six years (a saving of $650m over four years) and a further 0.25% efficiency dividend for the public service to get $428m.
Those three measures account for 92% of the improvement of the Liberal party’s budget bottom line.
Talk about taking the tough choices. Cutting the growth in foreign aid. Who knew that was the biggest waste in government spending!As Jericho then points out, the ridiculous thing is that Abbott is also trying to straddle the fence of whether or not the "commission of audit" will mean further cuts.
It's all pretty ludicrous.
Update: by the way, surely the re-assigning of rail money to road construction indicates a pretty ad hoc approach to working out which infrastructure project is most beneficial? I have complained about this a few times recently - everyone's saying it's important to put money into the "right" form of infrastructure, but making a trip to work, say, 15 minutes faster would seem something pretty hard to assess for its economic consequences.
Update 2: John Quiggin sounds the warning about the "commission of audit".
Pretty accurate, Waleed
Abbott's adoptive strategy on policy
Waleed Aly goes through the remarkable list of Labor policies and initiatives which the Coalition has come to endorse. He concludes:
Waleed Aly goes through the remarkable list of Labor policies and initiatives which the Coalition has come to endorse. He concludes:
All this is a testament to the brutal efficiency of Abbott's opposition. He's quite prepared to bludgeon the government with an argument he later rejects. It's shameless, but it works because he does it with confidence and a straight face.
Thursday, September 05, 2013
Kevin's turn
Kevin Rudd with Annabel Crabb tonight was clearly more relaxed and comfortable than "Hah.Hah.Hah" Abbott, especially in the first half of the show. There's no doubt that, despite his terrible reputation for being a difficult boss, he is close to his family, and there is no reason to question his assessment that he considers them his closest friends. His daughter seemed, quite frankly, smarter than the Abbott daughters. (For one thing, she doesn't dress like Sporty Spice all the time, like one of Tony's daughter does, where ever she is.*) And he has a nice dog: seeing him interact with it was definitely a humanising touch.
But in the "one on one" with Crabb, there were plenty of flashes of the old fakery and over calculation in answers, and there is every reason to suspect he would still be a boss capable of making people very, very nervous. It strains credulity to believe that he is felt worse about losing his 1996 campaign to become an MP than he did about the 2010 loss of leadership. (Then again, maybe he was spectacularly emotionally immature in 1996, and had improved in that regard by 2010. Who knows - he's a very hard man to judge on his self-reportage of his emotional state.)
I think he is obviously significantly smarter than Abbott, and can judge better who to take advice from. On the other hand, it would seem his problem has always been over confidence in his own abilities, and it is very difficult to know how much more carefully he would listen to advice before making decisions if he were to be PM again. He certainly failed to give a good impression of change in the way he came up with what appeared to be (even if they weren't) ad hoc ideas in the course of the campaign. I really think it was the way he announced these, without any explanation of how they had been decided upon, which started his leakage in the polls.
But tonight, overall, he came out better than I expected. I particularly liked his daughter's story about there being a good chance he would be sitting up reading a book at 4 am she arrived home as a teenager: it confirmed his nerdiness, but also made him seem a bit more human. I think he probably would be a better PM this time around (in the unlikely event he wins government) as a result of his time on the backbench. Keeping in check the old urge to make decisions quickly on the assumption that he is the smartest person in the room may be his burden for the rest of his life, though.
* Too bitchy? :)
But in the "one on one" with Crabb, there were plenty of flashes of the old fakery and over calculation in answers, and there is every reason to suspect he would still be a boss capable of making people very, very nervous. It strains credulity to believe that he is felt worse about losing his 1996 campaign to become an MP than he did about the 2010 loss of leadership. (Then again, maybe he was spectacularly emotionally immature in 1996, and had improved in that regard by 2010. Who knows - he's a very hard man to judge on his self-reportage of his emotional state.)
I think he is obviously significantly smarter than Abbott, and can judge better who to take advice from. On the other hand, it would seem his problem has always been over confidence in his own abilities, and it is very difficult to know how much more carefully he would listen to advice before making decisions if he were to be PM again. He certainly failed to give a good impression of change in the way he came up with what appeared to be (even if they weren't) ad hoc ideas in the course of the campaign. I really think it was the way he announced these, without any explanation of how they had been decided upon, which started his leakage in the polls.
But tonight, overall, he came out better than I expected. I particularly liked his daughter's story about there being a good chance he would be sitting up reading a book at 4 am she arrived home as a teenager: it confirmed his nerdiness, but also made him seem a bit more human. I think he probably would be a better PM this time around (in the unlikely event he wins government) as a result of his time on the backbench. Keeping in check the old urge to make decisions quickly on the assumption that he is the smartest person in the room may be his burden for the rest of his life, though.
* Too bitchy? :)
The Joke
A pretty devastating assessment by Michael Pascoe of "Hockeynomics":
Remember all the times shadow treasurer Joe Hockey furrowed his brow, shook his jowls and growled that Australia had a budget crisis? Turns out he was only joking.
Either that or his “costings” disclosure is a joke. Or both.
After all the huffing and puffing, Hockeynomics is only proposing a $6 billion improvement in the budget’s cash bottom line over four years. In light of the past four years of hyperbolic fiscal posturing, this is genuinely astounding.
Even if you take year three and four budget projections seriously (and you really can’t, as everyone should now know), that works out to be an average improvement of $1.5 billion a year on a $400 billion budget – all of 0.375 per cent. It’s not even a rounding error. A half-decent Queensland storm can blow that away in half an hour.
By way of comparison, Tony Abbott is blowing $1.8 billion on reviving the novated lease/FBT tax lurk enjoyed by a minority of new car buyers, let alone an even smaller minority of voters. Consider the massive percentage increase in the Coalition’s budget improvement goal that could be obtained by implementing just this one tax policy based on principle and equity instead of subsidising a few salary packaging firms. Hey Joe, do the math.
Thanks for the "so late it's useless" fact checks, Peter
Is Tony Abbott's $350 carbon claim hot air?
It's worth reading anyway. (And watching the video on "can the GST be increased without the States consent". Short answer: yes.)
It's worth reading anyway. (And watching the video on "can the GST be increased without the States consent". Short answer: yes.)
Local intelligence
I cannot explain how, but entirely by accident, in the course of work this morning, I learnt which street, and pretty much which house, in Brisbane barking mad billionaire wannabe politician Clive Palmer lives, and it's only a suburb or so away from me.
Should I drive by his house on election night? Is he having a party I can gatecrash? Does he have a child easily kidnapped? (A joke, a joke, Federal Police! Mind you, he does remind me a bit of the mad furniture shop owner in Raising Arizona, who was willing to forgive on the return of the babies. [Still a joke! Seriously!])
Quite a surprise anyway.
Update: I see by Googling that the street he lives in has been noted in the Courier Mail more than once. My intelligence was less of a coup than I realised.
Should I drive by his house on election night? Is he having a party I can gatecrash? Does he have a child easily kidnapped? (A joke, a joke, Federal Police! Mind you, he does remind me a bit of the mad furniture shop owner in Raising Arizona, who was willing to forgive on the return of the babies. [Still a joke! Seriously!])
Quite a surprise anyway.
Update: I see by Googling that the street he lives in has been noted in the Courier Mail more than once. My intelligence was less of a coup than I realised.
Jericho on costings
Policy costings about more than the final figures - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
A good explanation from Greg Jericho here of the games being played with "costings".
A good explanation from Greg Jericho here of the games being played with "costings".
We need to know the final number, and it's great to know that it is accurate, but we still need to know how they arrived at that number.His explanation of the difference the Parliamentary Budget Office has made is important too, but I won't reproduce that here.
The problem is many editors and news directors have focussed on the number and not the assumptions and parameters that determined the result. The ALP also fell for this old way of thinking when last week they announced that the Liberal Party had a $10 billion black hole.
In reality what the ALP had demonstrated was not that there was a black hole, but that if you used the assumptions and parameters previously announced by the Liberal Party the savings amounted to only $21 billion as opposed to the Liberals' announced $31 billion.
Both numbers are right. But we have no idea why they are different, because we have no idea how the Liberal Party arrived at its final number.
To use the running analogy, at best we know the vague distance they ran, but little else.
The ALP over-egged their case, but when the Treasury and the PBO released statements pointing out that the costings released by the ALP were not the actual costings of the Liberal Party policies, the media for the most part took that as meaning the ALP's $21 billion figure was wrong.
The Treasury and PBO had said no such thing. They had merely announced that the costings depend on assumptions and parameters. Do we know the assumptions or parameters of the Liberal Party's policies?
Nope.
The quiet economists
I have been rather annoyed with the general silence of economists on the issue of the Coalition approach to climate change in the lead up to the election.
As far as I can tell, there is virtually no economist who thinks "direct action" is a better longer term plan for achieving its stated goal than pricing carbon. The evidence is strongly suggestive that the carbon pricing is having an effect already on reducing electricity consumption. The Coalition's Greg Hunt used to champion carbon pricing, until he was told he had to come up and sell with an alternative simply so that Abbott could have a different from policy from Labor. Government seeded clean energy financing has been underway in other countries - I have not heard any economist talk about whether that has been considered successful or not.
As I have argued recently, there is plenty of room to be skeptical of long term economic modelling of the effects of climate change; but shorter scale economics modelling of how to be push society in a cleaner energy direction can be expected to make sense.
So why are the great majority of economists who support carbon pricing sitting on their hands on the topic during the election?
As far as I can tell, there is virtually no economist who thinks "direct action" is a better longer term plan for achieving its stated goal than pricing carbon. The evidence is strongly suggestive that the carbon pricing is having an effect already on reducing electricity consumption. The Coalition's Greg Hunt used to champion carbon pricing, until he was told he had to come up and sell with an alternative simply so that Abbott could have a different from policy from Labor. Government seeded clean energy financing has been underway in other countries - I have not heard any economist talk about whether that has been considered successful or not.
As I have argued recently, there is plenty of room to be skeptical of long term economic modelling of the effects of climate change; but shorter scale economics modelling of how to be push society in a cleaner energy direction can be expected to make sense.
So why are the great majority of economists who support carbon pricing sitting on their hands on the topic during the election?
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Still don't like him
Tony Abbott, and his daughters, were on Kitchen Confidential tonight.
I'm thoroughly sick of the PR use of his daughters throughout this campaign. Transparent as a tactic, I hope this is the last we see of such persistent manipulative use of children in politics.
As for Abbott himself: sad to say, but his psychological make up only came out of the interview as being shallower than expected. He's quite open about not being able to be open any more, confirming my oft stated assessment that he was more likeable as a somewhat contrarian Minister, than as the the um-ing and ah-ing, self censoring, constipated looking Leader that he is now. [And that awkward "hah.hah.hah' laugh - maybe it's natural, but sounds very self aware to me.]
Left the seminary because a mate of his from Uni was getting to travel overseas and sign up really big contracts? I thought souls were meant to be more important than money, but there you go. (Actually, isn't it said that he did not fit into what he considered virtually a "gay" seminary culture, but I suppose it is too much to expect him to be too open about that on national TV.) He made mention of feeling his education (making a specific mention of his Rhodes scholarship) was being wasted. Actually, he has had a career in which his economics qualifications have made little contribution, and his colleagues have said he has no natural interest in the topic. Turns out it was wasted after all...
He re-confirmed his upset at Gillard's misogyny speech, yet once again, he gives not the slightest indication that he recognizes his own provocative echoing of "died of shame", or years of not-so-subtle references to Gillard's childless status. He accepts that he sees more "shades of grey" now than when he was a university conservative hard man. Yet his political message over the last three years has been built around exaggeration and confrontation.
The funny thing about him is that he appears to be an introspective man, yet the explanations that he come up with about himself seem to fall well short of reality.
I hope he loses the election due to his policies, and the interview confirms that there is no particular character reason for the public to regret such loss.
I'm thoroughly sick of the PR use of his daughters throughout this campaign. Transparent as a tactic, I hope this is the last we see of such persistent manipulative use of children in politics.
As for Abbott himself: sad to say, but his psychological make up only came out of the interview as being shallower than expected. He's quite open about not being able to be open any more, confirming my oft stated assessment that he was more likeable as a somewhat contrarian Minister, than as the the um-ing and ah-ing, self censoring, constipated looking Leader that he is now. [And that awkward "hah.hah.hah' laugh - maybe it's natural, but sounds very self aware to me.]
Left the seminary because a mate of his from Uni was getting to travel overseas and sign up really big contracts? I thought souls were meant to be more important than money, but there you go. (Actually, isn't it said that he did not fit into what he considered virtually a "gay" seminary culture, but I suppose it is too much to expect him to be too open about that on national TV.) He made mention of feeling his education (making a specific mention of his Rhodes scholarship) was being wasted. Actually, he has had a career in which his economics qualifications have made little contribution, and his colleagues have said he has no natural interest in the topic. Turns out it was wasted after all...
He re-confirmed his upset at Gillard's misogyny speech, yet once again, he gives not the slightest indication that he recognizes his own provocative echoing of "died of shame", or years of not-so-subtle references to Gillard's childless status. He accepts that he sees more "shades of grey" now than when he was a university conservative hard man. Yet his political message over the last three years has been built around exaggeration and confrontation.
The funny thing about him is that he appears to be an introspective man, yet the explanations that he come up with about himself seem to fall well short of reality.
I hope he loses the election due to his policies, and the interview confirms that there is no particular character reason for the public to regret such loss.
Who's that successful and visionary business leader again?
I had to remind myself about Roger Corbett, who is getting a lot of attention for having criticised Rudd and Labor (and praising Tony Abbott) on Lateline last night.
Oh that's right: he would be the Chairman of Fairfax who in 2004, as Eric Beecher told us last year, was confident the company would be the media "envy of the world":
Update: the fact that Corbett worries about the ABC "crowds out" Fairfax, and thinks Workplace laws are holding up the economy, does make him more likely a Coalition sympathiser. At least he does acknowledge a need for greater tax revenue, though. But my real annoyance with him is the inappropriateness of expressing his highly partisan views as member of the Reserve Bank Board in a crucial part of the election campaign cycle.
Update 2: so, he's actually a member of the Liberal Party, but it wasn't mentioned last night? And the story ran this morning without that being mentioned? Great job, media.
Update 3: Actually, it occurs to me that it was also an obvious failing on Kevin Rudd's (or his team's) part too. When asked about it yesterday morning, the first thing Rudd should have said "well he's a member of the Liberal Party, what do you expect him to say about me?"
Oh that's right: he would be the Chairman of Fairfax who in 2004, as Eric Beecher told us last year, was confident the company would be the media "envy of the world":
After listening to my prognosis that the company faced a potential collapse of its traditional business model — I sketched out what I described as a “catastrophe scenario” under which The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age would lose much of their classified advertising in coming years — the Fairfax board studiously ignored my plea to implement overlapping strategies as “insurance” against that possibility.Gina Rinehart.doesn't like him either. How easily I forget these things. I wonder how she feels about him today after last night's performance?
One director, in particular, became quite agitated about what I was saying. “I don’t ever want anyone coming into this boardroom again,” he told his colleagues as he held up a copy of one of Fairfax’s hefty Saturday papers, “and telling us that people will buy houses or cars, or look for jobs, without this”. He then dropped the lump of newsprint onto the boardroom table with a thud.
That board member was Roger Corbett, now the chairman of Fairfax. He spent 40 years as a retailer, never worked in media or journalism, holds a handful of shares in Fairfax, and was paid $412,000 last year by the company. On the day he was appointed Fairfax chairman in 2009, Corbett presented a glowing picture of the way his company was handling its task. “The decisions taken in the last few years by management and the board have, I believe, put Fairfax in a position which is envied by media companies around the world,” he said.
Update: the fact that Corbett worries about the ABC "crowds out" Fairfax, and thinks Workplace laws are holding up the economy, does make him more likely a Coalition sympathiser. At least he does acknowledge a need for greater tax revenue, though. But my real annoyance with him is the inappropriateness of expressing his highly partisan views as member of the Reserve Bank Board in a crucial part of the election campaign cycle.
Update 2: so, he's actually a member of the Liberal Party, but it wasn't mentioned last night? And the story ran this morning without that being mentioned? Great job, media.
Update 3: Actually, it occurs to me that it was also an obvious failing on Kevin Rudd's (or his team's) part too. When asked about it yesterday morning, the first thing Rudd should have said "well he's a member of the Liberal Party, what do you expect him to say about me?"
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