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Abbott admits he’s wasting 4.3 million taxpayer dollars

Tony Abbott “continues to make the most astounding, cringe-worthy gaffes that stretch all credulity” writes Jennifer Wilson.

This, today from a Prime Minister who spends 4.3 million of taxpayer dollars monitoring social media, and employing spin doctors to “offer strategic communications advice” from the information gleaned:

I’ll leave social media to its own devices [said Abbott today]. Social media is kind of like electronic graffiti and I think that in the media, you make a big mistake to pay too much attention to social media,” Mr Abbott said. You wouldn’t report what’s sprayed up on the walls of buildings…

In spite of that 4.3 million taxpayer dollars’ worth of strategic communication advice, in spite of the iron control reportedly exerted over the PM by Chief of Staff Peta Credlin, Abbott continues to make the most astounding, cringe-worthy gaffes that stretch all credulity, and nobody wants him anywhere near them.

So it would seem the spin doctors and Ms Credlin are catastrophically useless at their jobs, because just when you think Abbott can’t get anymore bizarre, he goes and smashes all his previous records of stupid.

If Credlin and the strategic communications advisors were employed by anyone other than the LNP government they’d be sacked. I wonder how any of them will ever find alternative employment, given their unbroken record of spectacular failure with the Prime Minister.

Please do leave social media to its own devices, Mr Abbott, and stop wasting our money on monitoring it to see what it’s saying about you. It’s never anything good, you can be sure of that. How many millions of our dollars do you need to spend to find out what an absolute fool we think you are?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. No matter how many dollars and spin doctors  you throw at it, you just can’t. A pig’s ear is a pig’s ear and right now, on Australia Day 2015, we have a pig’s ear in charge.

(I suppose I should say sorry to pigs, who are really pretty smart animals.)

(Which Tony Abbott is not. A smart animal, that is.)

Image from noplaceforsheep

Image from noplaceforsheep

 

This article was first publish on No Place For Sheep.

How to pay for a war

The Treasurer said if Mr Shorten was “honest” about his promise of bi-partisan support for Australia’s mission in Iraq, he would pass budget measures currently stalled in Parliament.  Is he suggesting that sick people, pensioners, students and the unemployed should fund the war?

I have a suggestion.

When Joe Hockey produced his first fiscal statement in December last year, the deficit over the forward estimates had grown from $54.6 billion in August’s PEFO to $123 billion.

Part of this was due to Joe spending an extra $11 billion in his first 100 days as Treasurer, the most significant payment being the unasked for $8.8 billion gift to the RBA.

But the greatest increases to the deficit (and future debt) came from just changing forecasts. Hockey told us that Labor’s predicitions were unrealistically optimistic, despite the independent PEFO coming up with the same figures.

In almost every parameter, Hockey lowered PEFO forecasts, often dramatically, for the performance of the Australian economy . He insisted on the worst possible forecasts in order to exaggerate the “mess” he inherited.

Real GDP forecasts from PEFO were 2.5% and 3%, written down in MYEFO to 2.5% and 2.5% for the years 2013-14 and 2014-15.

The quarterly national accounts figures show the trend annual real GDP growth of 3.2% which is right on the 25-year average and significantly higher than predicted in either PEFO or MYEFO.

The IMF expects the Australian economy to grow by 2.8 per cent in 2014 and 2.9 per cent in 2015.

As for nominal GDP, PEFO predicted 3.75% and 4.5% – Hockey’s MYEFO 3.5% and 3.5%.

He decreased nominal GDP forecasts to their lowest level since the global financial crisis. This has a massive impact on revenues, which are very sensitive to changes in nominal GDP growth. This had the effect of reducing projected revenue over the forward estimates to $51 billion less than projected in PEFO.

In fact our annual nominal GDP rose by 4%. This is less than the 25-year average of 6.1% but once again, significantly higher than predicted by Hockey and even higher than PEFO.

Joe’s predictions about construction were even worse.

In MYEFO, housing construction growth was reduced to only 3% rather than 5% as forecast in PEFO.

Private dwelling investment actually increased 3.2% in the June quarter and 9.5% in the past year, the strongest pace of growth recorded in the Housing Industry Association Performance of Construction Index nine-year history.

As these few examples have shown, and as was muttered at the time (or shouted loudly by some of us), Hockey’s predictions were unnecessarily pessimistic in an obvious attempt to artificially create the debt and deficit disaster you have when you aren’t having a debt and deficit disaster.

Change a couple of assumptions and hey presto, we’re rolling in money. Bombs away.

Speaking of which, did you hear that the ADF just threw away $400 million worth of missiles that don’t fit their new planes?

You wanna talk waste, start with a group who plan that badly.

GP Co-Payment: Policy Analysis

Even Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey seem confused about their Great. Big. New. Tax on doctor’s visits, as announced in their horror budget two weeks ago. It’s still not clear exactly how this policy will be applied and who it will be applied to. While the government who introduced the tax go back to the drawing board to try to work out how it actually works, I thought it might be useful to do some policy analysis of my own, by interviewing my brother-in-law. I know this is a radical idea and one Abbott and his government clearly haven’t considered, but let’s throw in some facts from an expert. My brother-in-law can provide these facts in an expert manner since he is a GP:

Peter Dutton has said he decided the government should introduce the Medicare co-payment while visiting his doctor. Dutton explained that people should contribute to visits to a GP because this would make the health care system more financially sustainable. This doesn’t strike me as a consultative policy analysis process. If Dutton had chosen to investigate the effect of this policy in a more consultative way, who should he have spoken to?

Changes to the Medicare architecture should be undertaken through liaison between the Department of Health, the AMA [Australian Medical Association], the College of General Practice and State Health Departments.

As a practicing GP, what is your opinion of the Abbott government’s proposed Medicare $7 GP co-payment policy?

The proposed Medicare co-payment and its associated changes to Medicare have the potential to be very destructive to patient care for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it will deter people from discussing minor symptoms that they have with their GP, which often are a warning sign of more serious illness.  This can lead to patients presenting with more advanced or severe disease, which may ultimately present a higher cost burden for the government.

Secondly, the capacity for general practices to be flexible in their billing to patients with limited financial resources is significantly reduced under the proposed changes.

Thirdly, hospital emergency departments will see a major increase in the volume of people with minor ailments presenting for care. Already, approximately 30% of patients presenting to an emergency department are non-urgent or semi-urgent conditions that could be managed in a GP setting. I suspect this proportion will increase significantly after the introduction of the co-payment.

Finally, the co-payment may influence doctors to manage their patients in a less-than-ideal manner, as GP’s may try to protect their patient from additional fees. For example, the GP may not undertake a planned review of an infected wound the next day to see if the antibiotics are helping.  Or the GP may defer referring the patient for pathology tests that might have picked up the serious electrolyte abnormality. There is a significant potential for the quality of care to deteriorate.

What influence will the $7 Medicare GP co-payment have on the total price GPs will need to charge their patients rather than bulk-billing? Will there be an administration fee charged on top of the $7 fee?

This will vary depending on the way the practice currently bills.  Some practices charge all patients a fee with a gap. The proposed Medicare changes will reduce the amount that patients get as a rebate and they will therefore have a larger gap (however, the co-payment per-se won’t be paid).

It is practices that bulk-bill patients who will see the most impact. For example, a general practitioner that chooses to bulk-bill a pensioner for a standard consult will have a 24% decrease in their income for that patient, and if they charge the co-payment without an additional fee on top, then their income will drop by 11%.

For example, here is the current situation where a standard consult for a pensioner is conducted:

Medicare Rebate ($36.30) + bulk-billing incentive ($6.60) = $42.90

And here are the proposed changes:

If no co-payment is charged then total income for consult is:

Medicare rebate ($31.30) = $31.30

If co-payment is charged:

Medicare rebate ($31.30) and low-gap incentive ($6.60) and co-payment ($2.00) = $39.90

As a general practitioner who runs a small business, these reductions in income have the potential to make the business unviable. My practice is considering its options but it is likely that we will simply have to charge concessional patients a gap of approximately $11 to maintain business viability (this will essentially keep our income stable). We are exploring other options such as reducing the duration of consults from 15 minutes to 12 minutes or reducing the number of supporting staff, but these options all have a negative impact on patient care.

What types of patients will this co-payment affect the most? Do you expect certain types of patients to visit their doctor less often?

This will have the most impact on patients who have chronic illness. In particular; the elderly, those with mental illness, diabetes, high blood pressure and children with recurrent infections. The impact will depend on how the medical profession and medical practices change their fee structure after the changes are introduced. It is unclear whether the large bulk-billing organisations such as Primary Health Care will continue to bulk-bill or whether they will charge the co-payment. I suspect that the overall impact of these changes will be much more severe than expected as many general practices like mine will change from conducting ‘mixed-billing’ (bulk-billing concessional patients and charging gap for non-concessional patients) to conducting private (gap) billing for all patients.

What types of illnesses and conditions will people suffer from more severely if they don’t see their GP as often?

Chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma, heart disease and those with mental illness are likely to be the hardest hit.

I also expect that some diseases will be picked up later. For example, a woman with a minor breast symptom who delays having it checked and it ultimately is found to be a breast cancer.

Another example is that if a patient reports an unusual mole early and it is excised and found to be an early melanoma, there is very little risk of the cancer spreading and cure is usual. However, if the melanoma is diagnosed after spreading, it is generally regarded as incurable and the costs of newer chemotherapies for melanoma are astronomical in comparison.

What affect do you think the GP co-payments will have on the overall health of the community and on the health budget bottom line?

There is likely to be a negative effect on general health in the community. I suspect that we will see some diseases that have been declining in severity, such as heart attacks or advanced breast cancer, either plateau or even increase in frequency.

I suspect the health budget will largely be unchanged, as while there will be a reduced number of general practice consultations and pathology/imaging rebates, there will be an increase in the number of more advanced diseases. There will probably be some cost-shifting as the more advanced cancers and heart disease will be cared for through the hospital system, whereas there will be less costs coming from general practice.

Do you think it was responsible of the Abbott government to use the revenue from the GP co-payment to build a future fund to fund scientific health research?

Increased funding for research is sorely needed. If there is a co-payment then I would support its proceeds going to research, however, I believe this funding should go to non-corporate research such as through the CSIRO or universities.  I am concerned that corporate grants will be given for research by pharmaceutical companies that do not need government support.

The funding to the states for the provision of hospital care should also be increased if the co-payment is introduced as the further demand will outstrip already limited services in our public hospitals.

So there we have it. Not only some much needed facts, but clear analysis that shows the government haven’t thought through this policy. Either that, or they have and they don’t care about the detrimental impacts on our community. Sigh.

[twitter-follow screen_name=’Vic_Rollison’ show_count=’yes’]

Do your job, Malcolm Turnbull, it’s what we pay you for

Image courtesy of abc.net.au

Image courtesy of abc.net.au

I had a robust set-to with Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Twitter this morning, after he arrogantly informed a regionally based small business owner that if she wanted reliable internet connections she ought to have bought her house in a different area.

Vaucluse, maybe?

Perhaps I was exceptionally irritated by this comment because it reminded me of when my entire family went missing for a week in a Mexican hurricane, & Alexander Downer remarked that it was their own fault for living in a hurricane-prone place.

I didn’t argue with Turnbull about the government’s plans (I use the word reservedly) for our future communications. I argued with him because every response he made to me referred not to the issues, but to the deficiencies of the ALP when in government. No matter how consistently I pointed out to him that his tactic of attempting to deflect a questioner from her concerns by arguing that “the ALP started it and were worse than us” only serves to convince me that the government fears its own policies aren’t worthy of mention, the man would not cease his epic struggle to gain a political point.

“You’re winning no support trying to avoid questions by point scoring,” I tweeted. ” You’re in charge, govern, in our best interests.” To which the Communications Minister replied” “So it’s shameful to tell the truth is it? Or is it that you are ashamed of the mess Labor left us to clean up?” And so on. The battle is still going on as I write this, though Malcolm retreated a couple of hours ago. I obviously struck a nerve: there are a lot of people wanting governance from this lot, and increasingly fed up with them behaving as if they are still in opposition.

What the Abbott government and their advisers are apparently unable to grasp is that every time they attempt to deflect the focus from their policies onto a critique of the ALP, they reinforce the impression many of us have that their policies either don’t exist, or are too inadequate to be discussed, leaving them obliged to resort to employing critique of the former government as their only narrative. This is not governing the country.

It’s a serious abrogation of responsibility.

The Abbott government seems to me exceptionally disregarding of the future. This causes me great concern for the well-being of my grandchildren and their peers. Surely it is a government’s job to do everything possible to ensure the best for our young, now and as they become adults.

The Abbott government must understand that governing a country is not a game: it is the most profoundly serious enterprise anyone can undertake, it affects the lives and futures of millions of people, and arrogance and point scoring will not cut it.

You won the election, Mr Turnbull. Get governing, or get out.

This article was first published on Jennifer’s blog No Place For Sheep and has been reproduced with permission.

History. And why our grandchildren should be paying off debt!

  1. Victoria. Kennett has been elected, and his main platform was that the State was “broke” and that we were in so much debt that our grandchildren would be paying it off.

Slash, burn, cut the public service! INCREASE taxes – not because he wanted to, but because it was necessary. You see, Labor enjoys increasing taxes so we should criticise every single increase or new taxes, but Liberals only do it out NECESSITY. Some argue that Kennett didn’t have to move so quickly. Some find his cuts to services while spending money on improving the dining in Parliament House or bringing “Sunset Boulevard” to Melbourne offensive.

But whether Kennett moved too quickly or cut too deeply, he DID pay off Victoria’s debt. And it doesn’t take several generations. It takes less than the seven years he’s in office.

Of course, the asset sales and the lower interest rates probably helped, but the point is: Whatever was said before he was elected, our great-grandchildren weren’t paying for the debt. Neither, for that matter, were our children.

Although, it could be argued that these ARE the people who paid for the debt. The ones who missed out on educational opportunities. Or the people who died waiting for an ambulance – although it was considered bad form to try to make political capital out of that, unlike these days when the Liberals suggest that Labor have blood on their hands over the Pink Batts. (“Should have been more regulated! Because private industry needs regulation, although once we’re in power we can cut red tape because as with the economy, it’ll all be ok then!”) And of course, the generations who are told that power prices have to go up because the private companies that Kennett sold our assets to haven’t spent money on infrastructure and that the public transport system can’t be improved because the private companies can’t afford to.

Liberals are fond of using household budgets as an analogy, and I suspect that my son would rather be left with a small mortgage on a house that was safe for him to live in than being debt free but homeless. That’s the thing with debt, it’s always relative to assets. The Australian Government – or the taxpayer – may be $300 billion in debt, but servicing that debt is only costing $2 a week for every working Australian (my source is a Murdoch paper!) And as for assets, well the $300 billion is less than a quarter of our Superannuation. Or about equivalent to what the Government spends in a year.

Basically, the debt isn’t that bad. We can pay it back over ten years by just a small increase in tax.

Or we can say it’s out of control. Sack half the public service. Cause a recession. And spend the next ten years blaming Labor for our inability to deliver a surplus. The Kennett option isn’t possible because there’s nothing left to sell. Apart from Medibank Private.

 

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The Art of Hypocrisy

By James Moore  

There are only 1500 people living in Brooklyn, Iowa, situated along the old transcontinental route of U.S. Highway 6 and north of Interstate 80, east of Des Moines. Calling itself a “community of flags,” Brooklyn does not have a profile that might suggest violent crime. Mollie Tibbetts certainly would have had no fear when she went out for a jog on the humid summer evening of July 18, 2018. The University of Iowa student and former cross country runner for her high school, she had been watching dogs while staying at her boyfriend’s brother’s house. Mollie Tibbetts did not return from her run.

Her body was not discovered until a month later in a nearby cornfield. She had been stabbed nine times, including once in the head, and was covered with cornstalks. A reward fund for information on her whereabouts had quickly grown to $400,000 but a surveillance video turned up evidence that led to an undocumented worker named Cristhian Bahena Rivera.

Prior to the arrest, Vice President Mike Pence met with Tibbetts’ family during an event in Des Moines and publicly said, “I just want Mollie’s family to know: You’re on the hearts of every American.” Pence was not publicly heard from subsequent to the discovery of Mollies’ body or the reporting that her killer had been in the country illegally and working on farms in Iowa.

 

Mollie Tibbetts

 

As her disappearance became a national story, Mollie Tibbetts’ family had to suffer her persona being dragged through the political grinder as a victim of a mismanaged border that enabled Rivera’s entry into the U.S. The Trump administration, determined to take advantage of the tragedy, saw a “political gold mine” in the young woman’s slaying. In fact, Trump incited a rally in West Virginia on immigration after learning Tibbetts’ killer was an undocumented worker. While he called national immigration laws a disgrace, he made no mention of crimes committed by his former campaign manager Paul Manafort or his political fixer Michael Cohen. Manafort had been convicted that day and Cohen had entered a guilty plea just hours earlier.

Even members of Tibbetts’ family pushed back against demonizing all immigrants through the actions of a few. Her aunt pointed out that “evil comes in all colors,” and even the libertarian Cato Institute resisted Republican efforts to make the victim’s life a touchstone for political goals on immigration. “This terrible murder is already feeding into a political firestorm,” the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh wrote. “People with a political axe to grind, those who want to distract from the recent conviction of Paul Manafort and plea deal for Michael Cohen, want to convict all illegal immigrants of this murder in the court of public opinion, not just the actual murderer.”

Trump was not just distracting from the crimes of his administration that were reported that day, but he was seeking more public support for his border wall fantasy. Mexico’s refusal to pay for it and the resultant cost in billions for American taxpayers was a consistent reminder that, while in office, he was busily breaking another campaign promise regarding immigration. In fact, Trump’s hundreds of executive orders on the issue, according to the Migration Policy Institute, were not even remotely close to the impact he had predicted on immigration, and he was concluding his term of office with little to show as an accomplishment.

“But as the Trump tenure nears its end, analysis of immigration data shows that, despite public perception to the contrary, the administration’s policies have not led to a marked drop in the number of permanent immigrants, temporary foreign workers, international students, and those receiving asylum in the United States – at least not yet. In other words, with the exception of refugee admissions, there has not been a dramatic, across-the-board “Trump effect” attributable either to the administration’s policies or rhetoric on immigration levels.”

Out of office, the Trump party does not hesitate to continue turning tragedy to potential political leverage. The family of Laken Riley also regrets the way their daughter’s murder has been used to foment anger over the question of immigration. The 22-year-old nursing student, like Mollie Tibbetts, was out for a jog on campus when she was kidnapped and murdered by an undocumented immigrant. Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan who had entered the country illegally near El Paso, had a previous arrest record in New York City, and was also arrested in the Georgia murder through the use of surveillance video. Riley’s name, which has been attached to a 2024 immigration bill, has become another flashpoint on the issue as Trump’s followers use her as an example of Biden’s failures on the border. Her father, Jason Riley, told NBC that he regrets the posturing to help the Republicans.

“I think it’s being used politically to get those votes,” he said. “It makes me angry. I feel like, you know, they’re just using my daughter’s name for that. And she was much better than that, and she should be raised up for the person that she is. She was an angel.”

 

Laken Riley

 

Trump can hardly be expected to perceive his tsunami of hypocrisies and contradictions when nothing exists in his consciousness other than his putative greatness. His crimes, readily apparent to Americans, are, to him, persecutions. Immigrant crime is a horror, he argues; political crime does not exist other than in the form of witch hunts, which, history proves, sometimes find witches. Despite the great sadnesses of the Tibbetts and Riley murders and their stories being used as an immigration whipping post, there has never been any indication that migrant crime is worse than that of naturalized citizens. A study released last year by Ran Abramitzky and Stanford University reveals that first-generation immigrants are not more likely to be incarcerated for crimes than U.S. born citizens, and that has been the case for the past 140 years. In fact, they are 30 percent less likely to be imprisoned than American citizens, and when compared to often unfairly prosecuted Blacks, immigrants are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated.

“From Henry Cabot Lodge in the late 19th century to Donald Trump, anti-immigration politicians have repeatedly tried to link immigrants to crime, but our research confirms that this is a myth and not based on fact,” Abramitzky, the report’s author said.

Facts tend to have nothing to do with U.S. politics in 2024, however. When the current American president entered the congressional chambers to present his State of the Union message, he was confronted by a Georgia congresswoman wearing a Trump MAGA hat and a tee shirt bearing the command, “Say her name,” a reference to Laken Riley. There are continuing and fumbling attempts to place the blame for Riley’s death at the foot of the president and his policies. The accusers remain oblivious to the fatalities and sustaining harms done by Trump’s policies and his acolytes, who remember only those they consider worth recall. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who hopes to become head of Homeland Security if Trump is reelected, has yet to publicly speak the name of the soldiers or immigrants who have died as a result of his border circus known as Operation Lone Star.

A 20-year-old Texan, Specialist Demtrio Torres, used his service weapon to kill himself in October of 2022. The Texas Military Department took two days to release his name, and Abbott still has not spoken it, nor has he mentioned the four previous suicides, or any of the other accidental deaths. In fact, Abbott refused to even confirm that Torres was deployed to Operation Lone Star, undoubtedly hoping the public might assume he was on some other mission. A total of ten troops have died in the border fiasco and Abbott has offered them only anonymity, not honor. Five of the dead have turned their own hand against themselves and committed suicide. Troops are increasingly overcome with an open-ended deployment that leaves them with no clues as to when they will return to their families, jobs, and normal lives. Those five found another way to end their angst. Regardless, no state flags have ever been lowered to half staff nor has the governor made any graveside appearance to offer respect and comfort to families. Instead, he goes on social media and unabashedly blames President Biden for the death of Laken Riley.

Pfc. Joshua Cortez, meanwhile, was denied a waiver of his involuntary call up, which led to tragedy. Cortez had been offered what he described as a “lifetime job” with one of the nation’s largest insurance companies. According to the Army Times, his senior commander refused to relieve Cortez of his duty, and 36 hours later he was found dead inside of his car in a parking lot in Northwest San Antonio.   

 

Pfc. Joshua Cortez

 

The first casualty was Sgt. Jose L. De Hoyos, discovered dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound in Laredo. He had been a member of the 949th Brigade Support Battalion’s headquarters company. First Sgt. John Crutcher, meanwhile, had been on a temporary hardship waiver to help his wife deal with a disabled brother who was in a wheelchair. She had undergone surgery and was incapacitated, and Crutcher was seeking an extension on his waiver until the household situation could be stabilized. Overcome when he, too, was denied, the top NCO for B Company, 3rd Battalion, 144th infantry, killed himself. One of the platoon leaders under Crutcher’s command, 1st Lieutenant Charles Williams, was on a pass a month later when his death at home was ruled a suicide. Four guard suicides occurred in an eight-week cluster.

 

First Sgt. John “Kenny” Crutcher

 

The other casualties happened when a soldier cleaning a gun had it accidentally discharge and kill a fellow guard member; there was a fatal motorcycle accident in Laredo, a blood clot that killed a service member after a long security posting in a record heat wave, and a drowning when Spc. Bishop Evans jumped into the Rio Grande to save two struggling immigrants. His death was largely a consequence of Abbott’s failure to provide the leadership to properly equip the people he has put at risk. Evans had no flotation device and can fairly be described as a victim of a hastily planned deployment and inexplicably delayed requisitions.

Guardsmen were supposed to be provided with ropes and ring buoys to save people in trouble, and themselves, but the equipment had been delayed and was not yet supplied when Evans, an artilleryman, jumped into the Rio Grande to save two lives. Instead, he drowned, and his body was not recovered until four days later downstream. According to the Army Times, the essential gear for water safety was not requested until 11 months after the launch of Operation Lone Star. Prior to the Evans tragedy, no flotation devices or water rescue training were offered to troops, even though they were put in a position of having to almost daily extract people from the Rio Grande.

Texas troops, however, are not the only souls lost to anonymous death as a consequence of the militarization of the Mexican frontier. Racial profiling by law enforcement along the border prompted high speed chases that killed at least 74 people and injured another 129 during a 29-month period. Just three months ago, Human Rights Watch, using Department of Public Safety Data, released a study that showed unnecessary vehicle chases increased by more than 1000 percent since the launch of Greg Abbott’s border exhibition. The study cited cases involving 7 bystanders becoming fatalities as law officers chased drivers for minor moving violations. One of the dead was 7-year-old Emilia Tambunga, who was with her grandmother, Maria, as they were going out for ice cream. A vehicle being pursued by a Crockett County Sheriff’s deputy ran a red light and rammed into them. Neither Trump nor Abbott have said her name because they either do not know it or do not care.

The situation is likely to get worse. The Abbott and Trump controlled Texas legislature passed a law to give state and local officers the power to arrest illegal immigrants. How to know if someone with brown skin is in the country without proper documents is not clear. Not being White and living on the border, which is more than 90 percent of the population, becomes an even greater liability. In some cases, however, migrants can be charged with felonies, and law enforcement can take them to the border for return to Mexico. The measure abridges the powers of the federal government and the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, which is empowered by the Constitution to manage immigration and border protection. A legal challenge to the Texas immigration law is being heard in a conservative federal court, and, even though it is abundantly clear Texas has superseded national law, the appeals court has a record of rulings that are compliant with radically conservative thinking. Mexico has said, however, it will not accept any immigrants back to its soil unless they are citizens of Mexico, which will certainly increase international tensions with America’s largest trading partner.

American politicians continue to create more problems than they solve.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”

 

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Peter Dutton’s New Clear Vision…Oh, Sorry Nuclear Fission!

Peter Dutton has a vision for our energy future. Personally, I think that’s great. One should have a vision particularly if one is a political leader…

Like Jeff Kennett. Being a Victorian, I clearly remember how Jeff shared his vision of a privatised energy market where choice and the market would bring down prices and lead to the sort of efficiencies that would mean that we could be confident that power prices would be lower but unfortunately it didn’t work out like that. Still, one shouldn’t hold it against him that his vision didn’t work out quite as he described it; one should only get stuck into Labor leaders when they promise that electricity prices will come down by $275 by 2025 even if we’re still in 2024… Or in the case of Tony “Marty McFly” Abbott stuck in the 1950s!

Pete was very clear. The sun doesn’t shine at night, wind turbines at sea are likely to interfere with nature and he’s always been keen on nature, and batteries haven’t been invented yet. Yes, he actually said words to that effect. On the other hand, we can put a small, modular nuclear reactor in lots and lots of places just as soon as someone invents one and we find the several billion dollars to pay for it…

Don’t get me wrong, I think that it’s good that Dutton is thinking long term! Far too often leaders only worry about the short term and I sort of find it inspiring that Peter is so optimistic about the future when any reasonable analysis of the Dunkley by-election would have the party changing leaders before anybody had time to count the numbers.

“Let’s elect the new guy from Cook.”

“Simon Kennedy?”
“Yeah. He has to be better and the public don’t know him yet!” 

I should point out that the Liberal candidate for Cook hasn’t actually been elected yet, but that didn’t stop News.com.au from declaring him the winner. I mean, I know there’s pressure on to be the first media outlet to declare an election win, but I’m old-fashioned enough to think that we should wait until after the electorate have voted. Still, he did win in spite of the fact that the moderate faction wanted a woman, as did John Howard, but that’s a whole other story. Anyway, he’s a winner because he managed to defeat the moderate faction which shows he should fit in quite nicely in the Canberra party room. And he also defeated John Howard which is pretty easy to do, given he’s the only living PM to lose his seat in a general election.

Of course, Peter Dutton’s new clear fission… sorry nuclear vision… has a few hurdles to get over.

The first is that someone is bound to ask for more detail. Naturally, he can say that we’re just outlining the general idea and we can work out the detail later. This should be enough because, after all, it’s not like the Voice to Parliament because it’s his idea so surely we shouldn’t ask for any more than the broad strokes.

The second is that once he starts to become specific about where to locate the plants, then we’ll undoubtedly see the NIMBYs coming out, and while Dutton supports farmers who don’t want powerlines in their back yard, this is different. It’s sort of like fracking where people should just suck it up… Not the gas. That wouldn’t be good. This problem might be solved by only putting reactor in Labor electorates, but then it makes it hard to win government because they have more electorates than he does.

The third is that, while it’s good to have the vision thing, it doesn’t actually solve the immediate problem. After all, if you’re sleeping in your car, you don’t appreciate being told that the solution to this is a new government initiative where you’ll be trained in building and given a low-cost loan, tools and a free block of land to build your own home, even if it would potentially solve your long term accomodation problem. Similarly, while my solar panels have made me ok with my electricity consumption, I find my gas bill annoyingly high and I’m not going to say, “Nuclear in ten years time. Wow, thanks Pete, I’ll just have cold showers till then, but I hear that’s likely to extend my life… at the very least, it’ll seem longer.”

So let’s have three cheers for Peter:

  1. One for having a longterm vision
  2. Two for his optimism in thinking that he’ll be leader by the time the next election comes around. (I’m presuming that News.com.au is right and we already have the winner of Cook. I’m also presuming he lasts that long, so one cheer for me here too!)
  3. And, finally, for actually being the first Opposition Liberal leader to announce a policy.

All right number 3 may be a little unfair because Tony did have two policies: The first was to undo everything that Labor had done and the second was a rolled, gold paid parental leave scheme.

Whatever. Here we go: Three cheers, hip, hip…

Oh, that’s not very nice. You should be ashamed of yourself.

 

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Peter Dutton’s Unequivocal Position!

Apparently, we should all be shocked: There is a liar in the Lodge!

Now, I know that some of you are thinking that – after the years from Abbott to Morrison – it’d be a much bigger shock to find that there wasn’t a liar in the Lodge, but that’s not what I’m finding so perplexing about the latest attempt by the Coalition to gain some political traction.

It’s the fact that they want us to be so shocked about it when they’ve just spent the past couple of years telling us that we couldn’t trust Labor and that Anthony Albanese lied to the Australian people because he told us 295 times that power bills would come down by $97… Or was it the other way around.

And, of course, there was the broken promise not to touch superannuation and then Labor increased the tax on superannuation accounts worth more than $3,000,000, making it harder than ever for those on the minimum wage to pay their fair share of tax.

Not to mention all the other broken promises…

And yet, now we’re supposed to be shocked. It’s almost as if the Coalition weren’t serious about all the other times they said that Albanese was lying.

Of course we all know that there are times when it’s ok to break an election promise. Here are some examples:

  • Tony Abbott’s no cuts to the ABC, Health or Education
  • Tony Abbott’s maternity leave scheme was completely affordable in Opposition but too expensive in government
  • Scott Morrison’s promise that the Budget was back in surplus next year
  • John Howard’s non-core promises
  • Abandoning the net zero commitment would have been just fine and some Coalition MPs have been urging the government to do that
  • Similar, it was a terrible mistake for Albanese to hold the Voice Referendum even though that too was an election promise.

The list is potentially much larger but you get the idea.

Anyway now that the government has abandoned the Stage 3 tax cuts we’re discovering some remarkable things. For example, while it was wrong to change them, the changes are terrible because they don’t come into effect until July 1 and people need help now. This is like saying we didn’t think that you should call an ambulance for Jerry but now that the ambulance is on its way, aren’t you concerned that he’ll have to wait in the emergency room and shouldn’t you have fixed the hospital system first!

We’re also told by Peter Dutton that the changes are “bad policy” but he’s going to support them because the Coalition “won’t stand in the way of families doing it tough”, even if it’s “bad policy”. And they won’t be reversing the changes in government but they’re not “absolutely not” walking away from the “principles of Stage 3”. So to paraphrase, we’re completely committed to something that we’re not going to do in government and not going to oppose in opposition. For some reason this makes me wonder why I never watch “Married At First Sight”…

He told us: “We had stage 3 there, which was fully funded … they have taken the money from the stage 3 tax cuts and they have applied it to their own policy.” Their own policy being giving more of it to people earning less than $150k. How dare they!

I’m still unsure about what “fully funded” means when one is talking about tax cuts. I mean if you’re talking about a plan for something like nearly a billion dollars for a rail upgrade in a seat facing a by-election, fully funded means we’ve put aside money from the budget to pay for it. And the revenue from the budget comes from taxes. But when you fully fund a tax cut, does that mean you’ve put aside the money that you were going to spend on something like say Health or Education?

And if there’s any serious criticism that can be mounted about the changes it’s that they don’t go far enough with the redistribution. People earning less than $100k probably need more assistance than they’re getting, and even some up to $150k may be finding it harder than a year ago, but that’s not a criticism that you can make while being “committed” to the principles of Stage 3, which was politicians like us earning more than $200k a year should get a whopping pay cut and bugger anyone not paying enough that they can donate to our re-election fund.

Dutton went on to remind us that when someone is a one-hit wonder that pretty much means that no public appearance can finish without them trying an encore of that hit. He suggested that, even though the Referendum on The Voice was last October, the detail that Albanese had promised was still not forthcoming… Now maybe it’s just me, but I would have seriously doubted the Prime Minister’s sanity if he’d stood up and said, “Here’s the detail of the legislation that we’re not proposing owing to the Voice being defeated. We’d like you to examine this before we don’t vote on it in Parliament. There are several pages outlining who won’t be eligible to part of the Voice which are now irrelevant because, owing to its defeat, nobody is eligible to be part of the non-existent body, but please read this anyway as we’ve spent quite a lot of time and energy working on it so it’s a shame if people just ignore it.”

Whatever, the tax cuts are going to be waved through because the Liberal Party are the party of lower taxes and they have to vote for this broken promise because if they don’t then Labor would be the party of lower taxes but now that they’re voting for the Labor change, then the Liberals are still the party of lower taxes… Not sure where this puts the National Party.

 

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Zombie Policy Apocalypse Part 2: Cruel Britannia

UK PM Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman

Continued from Part 1

From Cruel Britannia, Land of Grope and Tory – a scandal-ridden post Brexit economic basket-case, The Sick Man of Europe, or gaga but stable as described in Colin Hay’s “catastrophic equilibrium”, a simultaneous failure and stability, comes news of a new probe into old allegations against former party Whip, Chris Pincher, MP for Tamworth, who now sits as an independent while The Australian Solution to asylum-seekers offers no quick fix at a time when City puppet Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is preparing another set of cuts to spending and tax increases which will do nothing to ease stagflation or the long-term damage caused by George Osborne’s austerity measures in his first budget in 2010.

Chris Pincher is to be investigated. Revisiting “Pestminster” is the last thing Rishi Sunak needs. The oxymoronic office of the UK Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Stone OBE, opens the investigation on 20 October, into “actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the House as a whole, or of its members generally”. 

There’d be a horde of Tories ducking for cover under this rubric – notorious serial sex pest, Chris Pincher is the fifth in three months – but Johnson whose regime is a string of scandals since 2019, promotes a known abuser, normalising abuse by describing Pincher as “handsy” and referring to him as “Pincher by name and Pincher by nature”. 

All of which speaks volumes about Tory sleaze-baggery and locker room culture; while for Johnson, his trivialising of Pincher’s sexual offending means his lies must find him out.

Pincher allegedly, sexually assaulted two men at the elite, members-only, Carlton Club, a Tory political incubator. Battling to keep the lid on the Tory dumpster-fire, is poor little rich kid, billionaire PM Rishi Sunak, another City of London catspaw, who rues the day he re-instated failed Home Secretary, Cruella Braverman, rewarding her support in his bid to be PM. 

Crazy Braverman breaks Home Office security rules six times, whilst ignoring legal advice on catastrophic overcrowding in Manton, a former RAF base in Kent, where four thousand men, women and children are crammed into a facility designed for a thousand.  

Children’s hands reach out through chain mesh and tarpaulin covers. Hungry youngsters huddle together under a thin blanket on the plywood floor of a marquee. Such highly visible reminders of policy failure and the public spectacle of an ineffectual and rogue Home Secretary, are already casting doubt on Sunak’s political judgement.

There’s a fabulous plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda but that’s run into a legal hitch.

Johnson’s government cancels its first deportation flight in June when the European Court of Human Rights rules that the stunt carries “a real risk of irreversible harm.”

The scheme is now being tried in the UK’s High Court. But there’s no shortage of support from the arse-end of the earth from a former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister who tells The Weekend Australian,[paywalled] he’s set his sights on becoming the next Lord Mayor of Adelaide.

“Put them onto stable craft and drive them back to France – that’s the simple solution and would destroy the smugglers’ business model in a week,” Alexander Downer chortles. 

“Short of that, [make] sure they can’t settle in the UK under any circumstances – the [agreement the] government negotiated with Rwanda – is a good solution as well.”

Sound familiar? The eternally vigilant Liberal Party’s elder statesmen never sleep.

“Suppository of all wisdom”, Tony Abbott hawked his boat-stopping to former Tory governments, even though asylum seekers boats had stopped under his predecessor, Labor’s Kevin Rudd, 19 July 2013, two months before the election.. It’s become Liberal Party dogma; a xenophobic, cynically opportunistic, contempt for international law and human decency, not merely inhumane but gratuitously cruel. When you sell someone else your barbarism, it makes your own monstrous indifference to others; your squalid moral bankruptcy; your poverty of mind and spirit seem less abhorrent.

Somehow. 

Downer always seems to be able to go lower. In February, former Johnson regime unparalleled failure, Home Secretary Priti Patel invited him on to her Rwanda committee – bugger-human-rights-and-international-convention-send-them-on a one way journey to a Central African nation with a bad human rights record. He’s into it like a rat up a drainpipe. 

Now Big Al or Bunty as he’s fondly known at home, a patrician fop with a lordly sense of entitlement honks out the heartless xenophobia that has worked so well for MPs here. 

Drive asylum seekers back to France from whence they come like moths to a flame? Or shivering from hypothermia, drenched to the bone, exhausted, in leaky, overloaded rowboats, navigating only by eye toward the white chalk cliffs of Dover. 

Over 35,500 asylum-seekers cross the channel this year; up from 28,000 in 2021.

Dozens have drowned in the attempt.

All hands to the bilge pump to dispel the “southern invasion” of Albanian economic migrants as asylum-seekers in small boats are misrepresented in The Daily Fail and by Home Secretary, raving Cruella Braverman. 

The Home Office worries that the make-up of people on small boats is changing. From January 2018 to June 2022, it claims that Iranian (28%) and Iraqi (20%) nationals represented nearly half of all small boat arrivals. In the first six months of 2022, over half (51%) of small boat arrivals were from three nationalities – Albanian (18%), Afghan (18%) and Iranian (15%). These figures are unverified.

From May to September 2022 Albanian nationals alone comprised 42% of small boat crossings, with 11,102 Albanians arriving by small boat in those five months.

The Home Office claims that Albanians don’t need asylum because they come from a “safe” country. The data suggests otherwise. In the year ending this June, 53% of Albanian claimants were granted asylum, or other forms of leave to stay in the UK, on first decision, and a higher proportion on appeal. 

Dressed to kill, in Top Gun pilot’s helmet and flak jacket, Braverman commandeers a Chinook military helicopter which “can lift anything and go anywhere” to travel thirty kilometres from Dover to an overcrowded migrant gulag at Manston. Is Suella morphing into android or super hero mode? What’s clear is she will fight them on the beaches in her own chauvinistic Churchillian movie, acting her socks off as a loyal defender of the realm.

But don’t sell her short. Ruthless Rishi’s record sprint to the top job means he’s done deals all over the shop. Crazy Ms Braverman who is unlikely to outlast a Tesco tomato, owes her unholy resurrection to a Sunak deal. Who knows whom else he owes? Virtual political Mayfly, Truss, a fifty-one day dud, is a well-grubbed Tufton Street mole. 

Is the fast-tracked Sunak human? A bot, programmed, like the Tory Party itself, to self-extinguish? The political knackers’ yard beckons the new PM, even without his Infosys slave-trading gig or his “brave” deal to reinstate Leaky Sue, (Send them) Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Tory arch bigot and anti-immigration dog-whistling xenophobe.

“Either he appointed a home secretary with a vicious demagogic streak knowing she is useless, in which case he has wilfully sabotaged one of the most important departments in Whitehall for no obvious gain, or he did it because he is blind to Braverman’s deficiencies, in which case he shares them,” writes The Guardian UK’s Rafael Behr.

On the third hand, it’s certain that the tabloid-orchestrated chorus of xenophobia – an “invasion on our southern coast” according to Sue, is the Sun and others running distraction for a Tory regime that’s a vortex of ineptitude, bad policy and worse PR.

What possessed Sunak to boast to Tunbridge Wells’ Tories he was Robin Hood in reverse; that he had diverted public funds from “deprived urban areas” to “areas like this”?

Sunak has blood on his hands. As BoJo’s Chancellor, Sunak’s £850 million “eat out to help out” meal and drink subsidy stunt drove new COVID-19 infections up by between 8 and 17% in the second wave of the pandemic in 2020.

Sunak, like BoJo or our ScoMo, doesn’t consult any experts. 

It’s all part of our postmodern, post truth, faux-populist, global right-wing politics’ anti-intellectualism. Why would Chancellor Rishi Sunak consult public health experts before inflicting his ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ stunt in the UK Summer of 2020? 

What would they know about a healthy economy? The £10 discount scheme, which provides cheaper meals to diners going out to their local curry house, restaurant or Pizza Express, (plus a bonus free COVID exposure), is “epidemiologically illiterate” sniff experts interviewed by The Institute for Government (IfG) for its report – a formal indictment of the cloud of unknowing at the heart of Torydom from BoJo to ScoMo. 

“At times it was very unclear, outside the inner circles, just who would be involved, how decisions were taken and on what basis.”

Similarly self-harming are Sunak’s vows to stop crops of solar panels popping up in fields; or halt onshore wind farms, pledges aimed to attract party carbonari during his summer campaign failure to outbid Tufton Street muppet, Libertarian crash test dummy Liz Truss. 

His emotional bypass may suggest Rishi’s a robot – as with Liz, but it’s not true. They’re zombie economics fanatics who will do whatever it takes to make the rich even richer. 

So, too will LNP serial dud, Peter Dutton, another political Loaded Dog who claims “tax cuts boost economic activity” but who shows he doesn’t know his Yeppen from his Yeppoon, a gaffe which Coalition women try to bury by accusing Albo of bullying Michelle Landry.

Truss believes that if you just make the rich richer, (an imperative in an era of record profit, off-shoring and price-gouging), through tax cuts, subsidies and deregulation, it creates a virtual Niagara Falls of wealth for everyone else. 

Oddly, no-one has ever seen it. In reality, wealth tends to trickle-up. Yet this is to miss its true function. Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist explains,

“The power of trickle-down economics has never been its economic logic but rather its political logic. Thatcher created a suite of rhetorical and policy tools that consistently united middle-class and high-income voters in the belief that the lower their taxes, the better their country would be. 

The genius wasn’t selling the direct benefits of tax cuts to those who would get the cash, it was arguing that helping the rich was actually the best way to help the poor. And so “compassionate conservatism” was born.”

Truss is a rusted-on devotee of the IEA, a “”cell of Libertarian extremists which styles itself as “an educational research group which furthers the dissemination of free-market thinking” but like our IPA, won’t disclose its donors. 

What you don’t know can’t hurt you? Spoiler alert, ExxonMobil gave Policy Exchange $30,000 in 2017.

The “think tank” went on to recommend the creation of a new anti-protest law targeting the likes of Extinction Rebellion, which led to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Protesters can be banned from future protest, be fitted with tracking devices and worse.

Labour peer Lord Hain sees the law as “the biggest threat to the right to dissent and the right to protest in my lifetime.” It would have “throttled” protests by the suffragettes, he adds. Suella Braverman says it is not a human right to vandalise property.

Or not pay their power bills. E.ON, a German-owned energy giant which forecasts a profit of £3.6bn in global pre-tax earnings for 2022 spent its last summer lobbying Kwasi Karteng against capping of energy bills and also warning about what it sees as an “existential” risk posed by campaigners who threaten to stop paying their gas and power.

Also clear is the link between fossil fuel industries and the IEA; Truss’ mother-ship. The American Friends of the IEA pocketed a $50,000 gift from ExxonMobil in 2004, while the UK branch HQ of the IEA has received donations from BP every year since 1967.

OpenDemocracy reports, ‘Truss is particularly close to the IEA, having founded its parliamentary wing FREER in 2011 and hired its former communications director Ruth Porter to run her campaign, later rewarding her by making her deputy chief of staff’.

Tim Montgomerie, a former Johnson advisor, tells Twitter the Truss budget is a “massive moment for the IEA”. “They’ve been advocating these policies for years. They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory.” Director General Mark Littlewood is said to be distraught over how the market repudiated his group’s free-market experiment.

Some Trickle-downers trace their faith to a Will Rogers joke or a sketch on the back of a table napkin in the 1980s, the Laffer Curve, drawn by Reagan era economist Arthur Laffer, who also argues that government spending depresses the economy. 

In reality, cutting taxes to increase prosperity is David Hume’s idea in his 1756 essay Of Taxes, as University of Newcastle economist Professor Bill Mitchell patiently points out. 

It defies all evidence. Especially historical. In the 1940s and the 1970s in the US top rates were anywhere between seventy and ninety-four percent, yet the nation posted record growth in GDP. After the 1980s, top rates began to come down yet GDP never recovered Iits post war boom. In reality, the rich tend to hang on to a tax windfall or spend extra funds buying back shares in their own company boosting its market value. 

Zombie economics get another run in the UK. Coined by economist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman it’s the free market gospel that somehow comes back from the dead to despatch the hapless Truss. It helped turn the US into the world’s biggest creditor nation into the world’s biggest debtor nation in Reagan’s two terms in office. 

Frydenberg’s stage three tax cuts are a brazen, unfunded, unnecessary bribe to its donor class to vote for the Liberal Party, wrecking a progressive tax system and promoting inequality.

Labor promises to keep the cuts – who wants to get wedged in an election campaign? -but now Lucky Jim Chalmers calculates that the cuts will cost $254 billion over ten years, meaning so much less to spend on schools, hospitals, or the NDIS just to benefit a wealthy elite who already have the means to access tax minimisation schemes and don’t need it baked into the system.  

Bank CEOs, surgeons, and federal politicians will get a windfall tax cut of $9075, while aged care workers, disability carers and those on minimum wages will get nothing.

Despite all her policy nonsense, it is chilling just how quickly Truss is trounced, bounced and hounded into resignation by the 1922 committee of hacks or backbenchers the Conservative Party keeps under the counter for just such emergencies. 

It was only yesterday that Tory “grandees” were praising the new PM for her refreshing iconoclasm. Her show of blithe unconcern as to where the money was coming from? Too much. A volatile market was spooked and it cost the Bank of England at least $65 billion in a bond buy- back as it frantically- and far from convincingly – tried to calm the farm.

Her resignation speech mirrors her premiership or footage of Truss being received by the Queen at Windsor “haphazard, uncomfortable to watch, and almost comically short.”

Will the myth of trickle-down also be laid to rest? Not with Jeremy Hunt at the helm. Brought on by Truss to replace Chancellor Kwasi Karteng, with just a little prompting from Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, who hints of a glass of whisky and a revolver, is Jeremy Hunt who caused a stir when he set up arms sales to the Saudis, worth at least $20 billion since 2015. 

The issue is not how quickly Truss is undone but how she became PM at all. And how quickly and cruelly she is disabused of her delusions. Johnson’s, prank candidate, Libertarian free-marketeer and Maths whiz, Liz- as she prefers to be known-goes into a dizzy downward spiral of U-turn after U-turn, desperately trying to dodge a barrage of opposition to her mini-budget’s rejection by the market – only to be bullied into resignation. Humiliated as Jeremy Hunt publicly, sadistically, undoes every strand of her £460 billion bold new plan.

A plan not to raise corporation tax, and a plan to cap energy bills without resorting to a windfall tax on energy company profits. It ends with us having none of these things, writes Loughborough University, London’s Dr Gerhard Schnyder who notes that the battle was not between good and bad economics but which bad prevailed over worse.

Luckily, austerity is well in hand. In two weeks, rhyming slang Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and his PM will collude in ruining the lower orders with “fiscal tightening”, a fertile formula for the ruling elite, which involves cutting government services for the masses, raising interest rates, just as gas and electricity corporations price three quarters of households out of the market while a quarter must buy groceries on their credit cards.

Austerity is calculated to line the pockets of pawnbrokers, loan sharks, usurers, banks and other money lenders while energy corporations jack up the price of gas and electricity (elevenfold since 2019), leaving the poor to starve in the cold and dark as winter approaches. UK natural gas prices rose nearly 96% in the year to July.

The Conservative Party itself is riddled with corruption far more toxic beyond Johnson’s faux populism, his vainglorious loutishness or his malignant narcissism, making it more of a push of spivs than an outfit seeking to revive life as it was in 1922, only with a personal hedge fund manager, a peerage for beer money and a personally curated concierge service.

Revelations of dark money contributions and paid lobbying abound in conservative parties worldwide, although UK Tories have an edge. Even its honours system is up for sale. 

Fifteen out of 16 Tory party treasurers in the past seven years donated £3 million to the Tory party. Every one of them is offered a peerage. The sublimely named Peter Cruddas, a former Conservative Party treasurer, donated £30 million over ten years only to give the Tories £500,000 three days after taking his seat in the House of Lords in February 2021. Cruddas was busted soliciting cash for access to David Cameron, ten years earlier, a process now streamlined into a club named The Advisory Board run by Tory entrepreneur Ben Elliott.

Elliot, who sees himself as a “willing slave to the stars”, a luxury lifestyle consultant made his name running Quintessentially, a “concierge” company and aristocrat life support ecosystem that caters to the caprices of the rich, from shipping a dozen albino peacocks to a party for Jennifer Lopez to airlifting elm tea bags to Madonna. 

All in a day’s work, the 45-year-old Etonian and son-in-law of rock star Steve Winwood tells the Financial Times in 2011. Securing services for his wealthy clients is all about “knowing the right people to contact for the right favour.”

Elliot has the right connections. The nephew of Camilla, he was once accused of offering access to then Prince Charles in exchange for a lucrative Quintessentially membership.

But there’s more. With wealth comes power and with both comes The Advisory Board. Businessman and Tory donor, Mohamed Amersi tells The Guardian that Elliott’s Advisory Board Conservative club is “like the very elite Quintessentially clients’ membership: one needs to cough up £250,000 per annum or be a friend of Ben.”

Elliot has made the Advisory Board the number one club in the Conservative Party. Members got monthly access to Johnson or then chancellor Rishi Sunak, say insiders. 

Tory Warlords claim the Advisory Board evolved before Boris took power, but won’t say when. Nor is it named in any party literature. A senior minister in David Cameron’s administration says: “I’ve never heard of it.”

Interviewed by The Guardian UK, Labour party chair Anneliese Dodds is blunt: 

“This appears to be less of an advisory board than a means for a select group of elite donors to gain privileged access to the prime minister and the chancellor.”

Above all, the seeds of Brexit bear bitter fruit. Leaving the EU helps create division and instability while conferring none of the riches its advocates promised. Gone is instant EU access, exporters now face thirty days’ delay. The bureaucracy of the EU is now replaced by UK officialdom. Trickle-down Trussonomics builds on Brexiteers’ magical thinking; blending a defiance of expert consensus and the market with contempt for Britain’s partners. 

Brexit has proved an unmitigated disaster to the UK economy, according to a wide range of commentators from academics and left-leaning journalists to growing numbers of bankers such as Citibank’s Chief Economist, Benjamin Nabarro.

But rotten as it may be, the party has its elite stormtroopers who move like a wolf on the fold when self interest is at stake. The party that pays lip service to liberty calls in its own Bank of England stooge, Jeremy Hunt, when the market panics at rising interest rates fuelled by a Trussian October Revolution of unfunded tax cuts, fuel subsidies and state spending.

Truss’ vision of an agile, lightly-regulated, innovative, entrepreneurial Britain with a Melbourne Cup field of “investment zones”  where can-do capitalism can knock itself out free of red tape (or green) would not be out of place in a Malcolm Turnbull speech and is cut from the same international think-tank boiler plate. Build it and they will come. Especially with favourable tax and planning approval. It is more Singapore on Thames, critics sniff, than a practical solution to Britain’s real economic challenges of under investment, inflation, spiralling inequality and recession.  

Others point out that it’s handing a blank cheque to businesses who’d have to force themselves to have a ten year tax holiday at the government’s expense. In the meantime, the government still has to pay to keep its projects afloat.

Pet projects grow into white elephants. Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 pumped Hydro pipe dream with subsidies boondoggle – a bargain at $2 billion in its initial “under-cooked” quote – is  now estimated to cost at least $10 billion and  could be on stream by 2028 at the earliest.

It’s a snip compared with Inland Rail, the Nationals holy grail, which experts advise the Senate will cost at least $20 billion and counting. 

Lean green machines, they are not. Utopia’s Rob Sitch, says the grid as it stands means that “pumped hydro is like trying to charge a Tesla with a diesel generator.”

Liz is a fizza but shadow lenders, unregulated, unaccountable and untouchable, increasingly deal themselves into the high-stakes poker of the biggest game in town.

The Tory Party’s abrupt reversion to orthodox, austerity economics is testament to the power of the old guard at the City of London to dictate economic policy. 

Or is it a last-ditch attempt to dictate government economic policy by the unelected BoE board? As our Reserve Bank is currently making. Unfortunately, full steam astern will only lead the nation deeper into recession.

But it will be cruel Britannia all the way with all the help that tabloid media can supply about the need for a nation to take its medicine – and not to fuss itself over the prescription. The Bank of England Bank Governor and his pliant board will raise interest rates on household mortgages to halt inflation caused by corporate price gouging at the supermarket, the privatised supply of gas and electricity and the economic disruption of Russia’s War on Ukraine.

If that sounds like our own charismatic dynamo, Philip Lowe that ‘s because he’s reading from the same zombie apocalypse script. It will help protect the fortunes of the ruling elite but it will be the average wage earner who is forced to pay for it all.

 

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The Liberals Have A Clear Position On Scott Morrison And Just About Everything…

The Coalition have been getting quite a lot of advice recently. This always happens when you lose and it’s good to listen to advice. Listening to advice, however, doesn’t mean that it’s not completely within your rights to ignore it when it doesn’t suit the narrative you wish to spin.

So let me be quite clear about the position the Liberals and the Nationals are taking with regard to Scott Morrison and the current predicament they find themselves in.

  1. Losing the election was a mistake. If it hadn’t been for losing the election, nobody would have needed to know that Scott Morrison had taken on a plethora of portfolios without telling anyone.
  2. Scott did a lot of good things too. We’d rather concentrate on them and it’s all very well to use hindsight to say that he shouldn’t have had those secret ministries. He was just trying to keep Australia safe and he took on more jobs to do that, but let’s not forget that he didn’t do anything in any of them apart from telling the Resources Minister that he didn’t have the power to make a decision. All the other ministers could keep making decisions because they were making the correct ones which Scott approved. To paraphrase Churchill: “Never has one man done so little with so many jobs.”
  3. Barnaby Joyce told Insiders that he was informed about Scott Morrison holding the ministry with Keith Pitt but he was told over time so it was quite clear when he knew and he wasn’t told by anyone specifically on any specific date but was told “over time” so it wasn’t something that he could… And look, he couldn’t be any clearer. Keith Pitt was still the minister even if he wasn’t the minister that made the decisions and if Barnaby, as leader, had pointed out that this breached the Coalition agreement then Scott would have just taken away all the ministries that they weren’t entitled to and it’s better to have a ministry that you have no control over than to lose it because you’ve got more than you’re entitled to. Not to mention the extra staff that you weren’t entitled to. The age of entitlement might be over, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get more than you’re entitled to if you just go along with the PM. And no, David, Mr Morrison  didn’t say that but be real, you know what he’s like!
  4. The whole Scott Morrison thing is in the past and Labor is just trying to use it for political gain and we should be talking about the current problems and trying to find solutions. After all, we haven’t mentioned pink batts and Labor’s debt for a good couple of weeks now, so it’s really time to move on and talk about cost of living and skills shortages.
  5. Of course, when we say talk about, we don’t mean sit people down and have something like a jobs summit because that’s just a stunt so we won’t be taking part in that… Oh… David Littleproud is but that’s his right because he won’t be a prop like unions and business. As Sussan Ley said there’s a danger that big business could be used by Labor to make it look like they’re actually achieving something when we all know that this summit won’t achieve anything.
  6. Labor are trying to ruin the weekend again by raising fuel emission standards in line with most of the developed world. This means that car companies won’t be able to dump high-emitting vehicles here and this will drive up the price of a Hi-Lux from $54,000 driveaway to a price so high that pensioners won’t be able to pay for it with their franking credits and they’ll actually need to sell some of their shares or dip into their superannuation. This is part of the plot to force us all to drive electric vehicles which aren’t suitable in Australia because they have to be re-charged after 600ks and we can drive our petrol cars from Melbourne to Sydney without the need for re-fuelling or a break for a meal.
  7. Let’s not forget energy prices. They’re going up and we should be concentrating on them instead of something that we all agree Scott shouldn’t have done. Jane Hume thinks that whatever he’s done in the past is behind and we should be moving on and not turning this into some sort of “witch-hunt” and she’s accusing Labor of “pearl-clutching” and she wants to keep her pearls to herself.
  8. We need to have solutions to the pain people are feeling now and the solution to energy prices is nuclear energy which should be on the table because it’s perfectly safe, even for the table. There’s a lot of hysteria and we’re already behind in the race to build modular reactors, according to Barnaby, who doesn’t remember that he was Deputy PM just a few weeks ago. Why he didn’t raise this when he was in power, was possibly because he was afraid that it was outside his portfolio and Scott would take away his staff and Barnaby hated to think of his staff losing their job because he’s a man who loves his staff.

Yep, I think that about covers it. Ignore the past, don’t have talkfests to talk about the future, act without consulting, build nuclear reactors to bring prices and emissions down sometime before 2050.

And remember that John Howard is always available to promote his book and to remind you that the Liberals believe in the free market so they’re prepared to spend vast amounts of government money to ensure that the free market works effectively.

 

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Morrison reaped what he had sown

Writing this a couple of days after the most important election in Australian history, Australians did finally find their voices, and in no uncertain manner told the neo-liberal jackals who had come storming into public life that they were finished.

Why the most important election? Because Morrison was on a path to Trumpian glory. Surrounded by white evangelicals and emboldened by the sound of acquiescence from his front benchers, he was on a path to immortality. He had no reason to listen, he suffered no self-doubt.

His disdain for conventional behaviour, his seeming inability to act respectfully toward anyone he encountered, his feigned religious conviction all pointed to something deeply wrong about this man, and his government.

He was trashing our institutions daily. He had devalued the truth. He had signed an infernal bargain with his party-room members, whereby even the most hard headed had handed over their autonomy to him. They had sold their souls in the hope that he would lead them to the promised election victory.

I can find no sadness, no sympathy for this man, who has had the grandfather of hidings handed to him. He has been publicly humiliated, and there are no tears for his loss. Morrison is seen as being devoid of feeling, as being so devious and calculating that any instinct for sharing a moment of kindness with him is impossible.

But beyond the human failings, he was on the track to autocracy. He bullied those around him. Julia Banks described him as “menacing, controlling wallpaper”, and it is clear to see in his body language. Images of him leaning forward, fists clenched, jaw jutting conveyed something more than tension.

Cast your minds back to the election campaign. His jeering references to Anthony Albanese’s upbringing, his newly lost weight, his likeability, his new glasses, were all deemed fair game by Morrison.

His dismissal of Albanese as “weak, not up to the job, inexperienced” were classic signs of a bully, which would have had him sacked from any other workplace in Australia. There was an unmistakeable hint of Morrison projecting menace toward a smaller man, but not necessarily a weaker one.

Perhaps it is the missing piece of the puzzle as to why he has been moved on from so many positions in the past. His plan to take over our country was hatched back in 2000. As State Director of the Liberal Party from 2000 – 2004 Morrison put in place the building blocks for his eventual takeover of the Liberals, and he has in the process weakened the party until it is an empty, hollowed-out IPA shell.

Ask yourself why Rupert Murdoch is such a supporter. Ask why John Howard is the talisman of the modern party. Lastly, where would the Petro Georgios and the Ian MacPhees of yesteryear fit within this ruin?

Why Katherine Deves? Because he saw it as the wedge which would empower all the narrow-minded bigots he was trawling for, to speak out in support of his grubby tactic. The only problem was that apart from the crazy anti-everythings no-one was interested.

How did all the other captain’s picks perform? Made by Captain Morrison and his wild-eyed offsider Alex Hawke, they performed as expected – they lost. Morrison’s behaviour in the New South Wales pre-selections was a handy reminder of what we could expect if he won this election.

Morrison’s reputation as a master campaigner and strategist has been blown apart. The best thing is that we woke up in time. The worst is that the entire Liberal Party hierarchy was blind to the totality of the takeover.

The women of the party deserted, because enough of them recognise toxic masculinity when they see it. They read the body language, and they remembered the talking over of Liberal women, the refusal to engage with them, on any meaningful level. Possibly the pivotal moment was when he put on the ‘big baby performance’, when he wasn’t sure if rape was wrong, and he had to check with Jen first.

Women will not be ignored, nor made to feel powerless. His bellowing statement that “she can go” about Christine Holgate was a message that, no matter how successful a woman is, he remained in charge. It was a dog-whistle to every inadequate man in the country that, when the rubber hits the road, men are still in charge. Wrong.

The patriarch and his fellows have been thrown out of the temple. What irony that Tudge and Sukkar might be the last men standing in the suburban Melbourne landscape. Porter gone, Tudge disgraced, Dutton their last remaining hope.

The climate is descending into hell territory. We need a timely intervention, and along comes Albanese, who will be goaded along by a newly invigorated Greens party. Labor kept the seat of Hunter, because the coal industry has read the writing on the wall, and it says “renew now”.

Did no-one ever explain how governments work? How did Morrison spend four years in the highest office in the land, and not know that he and his party, as the government, had sole responsibility for introducing legislation to the parliament? Why did he persist in excusing his failure to deliver a National Integrity Commission as being Labor’s fault? Labor was not the government. Not for nine years.

Many of us felt that there was no escape from the megalomaniac in the Lodge. The opinion polls were sowing doubt, his teflon coating made every day a bright, new day. His promises of billions of dollars, daily, had sapped our ability to resist. His insane energy and imperviousness to shame, had us all bluffed.

People have been dying in record numbers from the pandemic, and yet all Morrison and his group of zombie ministers could talk about was the economy. Memo to the Liberal Party: Put people first.

He and Dutton promised all sorts of lethal weapons for war, while demanding Albanese justify paying aged care workers a living wage. He was also criticised for promising to feed the aged adequately, and asked by the feral media how Labor would pay for it. So it was as if we were living in a parallel universe, where white was black, and vice versa.

So it is with a huge sigh of relief that I laud the Australian sense of right, their internal ability to finally wake up to a charlatan, and hopefully a return to decent, caring government. I couldn’t be more proud of the Australian way, today.

 

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“Labor haven’t released their costings”

I, like millions of others, have already cast my vote at an early polling booth.

As I walked past the many volunteers (and the Liberal and Labor candidates), I politely declined their proffered How to Vote cards saying I knew what I wanted to do.  They just smiled and moved on to the next person – until I got to a very noisy older woman who, when I refused her Liberal HTV, loudly called after me, Vote Liberal.  I smiled and replied not a chance as I joined the line.

Obviously not happy with my answer, she stepped forward to shout “Labor haven’t released their costings”.

When I replied that Tony Abbott did the same when the Liberals were last in Opposition, she said “Tony Abbott?  That’s ancient history.”

As the line was moving forward, and out of respect for someone volunteering their time to be involved, I said no more.  As I moved away, a Greens volunteer gave me a thumbs up and the Labor candidate quietly said “On that note…”, before engaging with another voter about Labor’s plan for aged care.

As I left the booth after voting, another volunteer approached me to express their thanks, saying how that woman had been yelling the same thing at everyone who went past and how annoying it was.

Under different circumstances, there are many things I would have liked to say.

A party that has run up a trillion dollars in debt has no right to ask how are you going to pay for it.

A party that is predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in deficits over the next decade and beyond should not be fixating on Opposition policy costings.

A treasurer whose December fiscal outlook was wrong by $100 billion only a few months later is not to be trusted about projections for the future.

A treasurer who brags about a $100 billion windfall just by changing his guesses, and rather than banking it, then proceeds to spend $70 billion of it (and counting) in more promised spending is not in a position to be pedantic about Labor costings.

The election table is groaning under dead cats as the Liberals look for some traction on the dung heap they built and are rapidly sliding down.

I don’t want to hear any more.

Five more sleeps and we wake up to find out the result of what I think will be the most important election in my lifetime.  A choice between profit or wages, between greed or saving the planet, between transparency or secrecy, between democracy or the cult of Morrison.

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Albanese Slammed For Being A Loose Unit By PM Whose Deputy Is Barnaby Joyce!

Sometimes you just have to lay out what’s being said to sound like you’ve just written a script that sounds like you’re channelling the late John Clarke.

For example, we’re told Anthony Albanese is a risk because he’s never held an economic portfolio. The role of Prime Minister demands a strong economic understanding of economics. But, argue Labor, Anthony Albanese was once Deputy PM. This, according to the Liberals, has nothing to do with economics and it’s only the PM who is involved in the economics of the day,.. along with the economic portfolios ministers which include things like Treasury, Finance, and Trade but not Infrastructure because Albanese held that one.

Of course, the fact that our current Deputy PM is Barnaby Joyce, who rose to such lofty heights at his NPC address this week that he got nose bleed (seriously!), does suggest that it is possible for the Liberals to argue that the Deputy is kept away from economic matters and sharp objects as much as possible.

And of course, this does raise the interesting question of a Peter Dutton led Opposition being unfit for government on the grounds that Petey has also never held an economic ministry. Or will Border Force, Health or Defence all suddenly be economic in nature.

Whatever, we also had the rather strange position of Anne Ruston on Katherine Deves. While I note that this not the only strange position that Liberals have been in, mentioning certain others could leave one open to legal action and I don’t have a spare half million lying around, but let’s stick with Anne for the moment.

I hope nobody is going to take offence for me referring to a federal minister by her first name, but it seems to be what one does when talking about a woman. Scotty does it all the time and, let’s be clear here, Anne is such a warm, caring sort of person that I almost feel like she’s a mate and if you can’t call mates by their first name, well, what’s happening to the Australia I grew up in?

Anne was asked by Patricia Karvelas – or PK, as she’s known to many – about Katherine Deves front page interview in the SMH. Her response… and I may have got this slightly wrong because I’m writing from memory and memory can be faulty, as the PM shows every time he’s asked about some past statement which doesn’t suit his present position, so if I get it slightly wrong, then I never said anything like the thing I said and you just thought that I meant something that I didn’t… Her response was something along the lines of it’s not clear whether Deves had permission to do the interview but whether she did or not, Ruston doesn’t agree with her and she doesn’t have to agree with everything every Liberal candidate says because, people have different opinions and it’s just that we happen to be in the same party and it’s up to her to explain herself but vote Liberal whatever anyone says because even if disagree about some issues when it comes down to it, we’re at least a credible, united government unlike the chaos that could occur if you have independents who’ll all vote as a block and put Albanese into power and then we’ll have interest rate rises.

Which, apparently, is both a problem AND a sign that the economy is doing well and we no longer need the emergency level interest rates.

Yes, whatever one thinks about Albo’s support for a minimum wage rise that keeps pace with inflation, it’s hard to follow the Morrison line that we don’t want people left behind but we can’t afford for them to keep up even though our economy is doing better than anywhere in the world.

Maybe it’s just me but I found the Liberal’s “There’s a hole in the bucket” ad quite confusing. It was suggesting that Labor wouldn’t be able to pay for its promises and would run deficits. This might be a touch more convincing were it not for the fact that while Labor may not have delivered a surplus for over thirty years, the Liberals haven’t delivered one for over fifteen years and they have no projections that deliver one in the life of the next parliament. So we’re being asked to choose between a Labor deficit and a Liberal deficit. Except the Liberal ad then asserts – even though Labor have consistently ruled it out – that Labor will raise taxes. Leaving aside everything to do with Labor’s promise not raise taxes, doesn’t the fact that they’ll attempt to balance the budget by raising revenue suggest that they’re the more fiscally responsible ones? All right, most people don’t actually want to pay more tax so it’s a populist move to suggest that the other side will make you, but surely it’s irresponsible – when we’ve got deficits and debt – to not worry about balancing the books?

Or are the Liberals planning a massive cut in spending on things like health and education. You know, the things that don’t matter.

Ah, it’s Friday the 13th. I’d stay away from ladders today if I were Scotty from Photo Ops.

 

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Labor needs to get better at answering questions

I have never understood why Richard Marles is deputy leader of the Labor party – a factional payback no doubt – but his performance on Insiders this morning was a lesson on what Labor needs to get better at.

For pity’s sake, stop saying Labor won’t increase taxes. It is bleedingly obvious that revenue will have to increase to pay for an aging population, amongst other things, and categorically rejecting tax reform is madness. Sleep-walking along relying on bracket creep and hoping multinationals will cough up some tax is not what a proactive government planning for a better future should do.

If you are going to announce that all aged care homes will have a registered nurse on premises at all times when there is already a significant shortage of nurses, you need a better plan than just wage rises which are not up to the government to decide anyway.

How will private providers pay for increased staff costs? What is being done to train more nurses and to provide an ongoing career path for those who choose aged care?  How will you attract health workers to regional areas?

Marles answer on public school funding was pathetic. ‘We’ll provide a pathway for them to get what they are supposed to in conjunction with the states’ means to me that they think public school funding is not a priority. That is immeasurably disappointing and short-sighted as public schools cater for the vast majority of the disadvantaged in our society and are hugely underfunded compared to the private sector.

When asked about what job he would like in the new government, Marles looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He could easily have talked up Labor’s wealth of experience and talent – make it about the team rather than individuals – and then segued into the Coalition’s squabbling and poor individual performances.  But he didn’t.  He just spluttered, as he so often does.

Labor needs to stress honesty, accountability and the importance of independent advice. There is a wealth of issues to address there – pork-barrelling, federal ICAC, nepotism in appointments, contracts without tender, infrastructure announced with no business case, scathing auditor general reports, reports not released, enormous cost of consultants, neutering of the public service, attacks on the ABC – the list is endless.

I sincerely hope Labor candidates are well enough informed that they do not endlessly parrot talking points. There is nothing more disingenuous than hearing the same phrase repeated by any number of talking heads.

Do not fall into the Morrison habit of talking in analogies about blank pages or family car trips or whatever other inane rubbish he goes on with.

Be honest about the real problems we are facing and the headwinds coming our way.  Don’t be distracted by the ‘how will you pay for it’ diversion. It’s a ridiculous question from a government that has run up a trillion-dollar debt. The answer should be that there are some things that must be paid for and the times dictate priorities.

Morrison and Frydenberg are cherry-picking a few stats from a moment in time to claim they are good economic managers. Labor needs to be ready to answer that.

Unemployment is going to rise as foreign workers return.  Interest rates are going to go up to curb rising inflation. Housing pressures, both rental and mortgage, will increase.  Action on climate change becomes ever more urgent as the bill for natural disasters skyrockets. Inequality will worsen with a less progressive tax system. Poverty will increase with no changes to income support payments. Debt is rising and so is the interest bill.  And there is no plan for higher wages.

As for national security, Morrison’s arrogant neglect of the Pacific region has opened the door for China. In three short years, he and his backroom buddy Alex Hawke have completely trashed our relationship with both China and our island neighbours. (not to mention what the same pair did to the NSW Liberal Party)

I sure hope Labor get this right because the country, and in fact, the world, cannot afford another three years of Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce – a more short-sighted self-serving pair would be hard to find.

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Modern Monetary Theory and The Great Fraud of Neoliberalism

The time has come to expose the great fraud that has been perpetrated on the West in the last forty years. Once we have even a surface-level understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the great lie that is Neoliberalism will come crashing down.

Now, this has been outlined and discussed in detail by far greater minds than my own; this is not original to me. But I thought it might be useful to offer a brief description of MMT, how it works and then use these basics to expose the great Neoliberal fraud.

MMT, Part One: Currency and Its Relationships

In every economy that has its own currency (Australia, the US, the UK etc), every entity in that economy has one of two relationships to that currency. One is either a user or an issuer. Obviously, the federal government is the monopoly issuer of currency (hence counterfeit money laws). So the government issues the currency, and everyone else (including state and local governments and the citizenry) uses the currency.

Currencies such as the Australian Dollar, the US Dollar, the Pound etc are called Sovereign Currencies or Fiat Currencies. This means that when the government goes to do something, it simply goes to the central bank (the Reserve Bank in Australia or The Federal Reserve in the US) and says ‘we need this amount of money to be created’ and the bank, through several keystrokes, brings that currency into existence. Similarly, the relevant bank accounts of the recipients are also augmented using keystrokes. This may seem counterintuitive, but think about it this way. Consider the recent spending of $3.5b on tanks. Are we to believe that the government went to a physical bank vault filled with stacks of $100 notes? In light of the amount of money spent by the government on the regular, this would be impractical. Government spending is essentially EFTPOS on a grand scale.

MMT, Part Two: Tax Does Not Fund the Government

Since the government simply creates (issues) the currency it uses, government spending is not ‘paid for’ in that sense. It does not need tax to fund its spending since it is spending currency it issued itself. Tax revenue, I say again, does not fund the government. This lays to rest the zombie lie that a government has to ‘live within its means’ or ‘has a budget like a household’. Households do not issue their own currency, so this statement is a lie. Government ‘living within its means’ is naught but a lie designed to justify cutting funding for things neoliberals do not like, such as universal healthcare, education, pensions and generally anything that benefits anyone making less than $250k per year.

I should be clear: taxation does not fund federal government spending. It is true that tax does fund state and local government since these entities are still currency users (recall it is the federal government that issues the currency).

MMT, Part Three: The Purpose of Taxation

A natural follow-up might be to ask

If  tax does not fund [federal] government spending, why have tax at all?

I think the best answer to this was provided in a New Economic Perspectives article

[Another] reason to have taxes is to reduce aggregate demand. If we look at the United States today, the federal government spending is somewhat over 20% of GDP, while tax revenue is somewhat less—say 17%. The net injection coming from the federal government is thus about 3% of GDP. If we eliminated taxes (and held all else constant) the net injection might rise toward 20% of GDP. That is a huge increase of aggregate demand, and could cause inflation

What this seems to mean is that the act of ‘taxing’ a unit of currency serves to eliminate it from the economy. Taxation seems to have the purpose of being a sort of ‘inflation break’, removing a certain amount of currency from the economy to prevent too much currency from flying around which could lead to inflation.

The Other Great Zombie Lie: How Will You Pay For It?

You have doubtless heard some version of this whenever a policy is proposed that would help the peasants. Any talk of, for instance, raising Newstart is met with loud screams of ‘HOWYIGONPAYFRIIIIIIIIIIT’ (how are you going to pay for it) or ‘we cannot afford it’. It is unclear whether those asking making these asinine statements are not aware of the fiat currency the Australian Federal Government uses, or if they are being deliberately deceptive. I leave that decision up to you all individually.

Not only is ‘how will you pay for it’ a ridiculous statement, but its application is also highly selective. Have you ever heard this question, or some variant of it, asked around, say, the military budget (pick your country, but the Americans are the most egregious)? How about corporate subsidies? How about politicians’ own outrageous perks and entitlements?

It is almost like they know that they have a fiat currency and intentionally lie to the people about ‘debt and deficit’ whenever they do not like something, typically for ideological (or corrupt) reasons. Whether it is funding Medicare (consider Mr Morrison’s recent removal of more than 900 items), investment in renewables or anything else the Liberal National Coalition is (in my opinion) paid to oppose, they become penny-pinchers when their ideology gets in the way. Yet hypocritically when it comes to war, corporate looting of the treasury and their own perks, they are reckless. Enough.

Conclusion: The Great Fraud

Since the advent of Reagan and Thatcher, politics in the west has taken a very selfish, individualistic turn. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a popular Neoliberal mantra. Government has to live within its means is another. MMT shows that the very idea that a government has ‘limited means’ has narrow basis in reality. It is a monopoly currency issuer. It is, in a very real sense, not possible for a government with a fiat currency to ‘run out of money’.

I have said this before, but it is worth repeating: When it comes to helping the people, it is not money these sociopaths lack, it is the will to do it.

Governments with fiat currencies have all the money they could ever need. They could do so many wonderful things to improve society in so many ways. Means is not the issue. Conviction is. MMT, with its focus on fiat currencies, helps to expose the great hypocrisy at the core of the Neoliberal disaster of the last four decades. In an economy with a fiat currency, the use of fear-mongering about ‘debt and deficit’ to suppress policies that could help broad swaths of the population is dishonest beyond measure.

Epilogue: Still Learning

I am very much still learning about MMT, and doubtless, I have gotten some things wrong here. I encourage you to check out this podcast for detailed discussion of the theory and its applications. I hope this piece has provided a basic discussion of MMT and given some insight into the rot that is Neoliberalism.

 

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