Troppo – your portal to the best in blog reading

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Want to save time and identify the best in Australian blogosphere writing?  See these features built into the recently re-designed Troppo front page. If you can’t find several excellent articles every day of the week among that lot, you’re very hard to please:

  • “Blog reading selections” at the top of the sidebar links to various human-curated “best of” features, both blog and twitter-based.
  • A bit further down the sidebar is “Missing Link on Twitter”, Don Arthur’s continually updated “best of” service.  Someone else on Twitter recently rated it as the best source for locating excellent blog writing.
  • Blogroll (now updated) – also in sidebar.
  • Bottom of front page – RSS feeds to what I regard as the 12 consistently best Australian blogs.  They cover politics, law, economics and culture/arts.

Missing Link Friday – The War on Whinging

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With low unemployment, low inflation and 20 straight years of economic growth, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Jessica Irvine is astounded at how so many Australians are carrying on as if they live in a debt-wracked European basket case. Younger Australians have never seen a recession, she says, and many older people seem to have forgotten what one looks like.

So why do people carry on like this? "There can be only one answer", says Irvine, "we are, as a nation, chucking a full-on, all-screaming, all-door-slamming teenage temper tantrum." Voters and business are like petulant teenagers and the government is like a weak-willed parent desperate for affection.

Irvine’s column was the talk of Twitter this morning. "Fantastic piece on what a pack of whingers Australians are", tweeted Bernard Keane while Aleta describes Irvine as "a breath of sensible in a world of stupid". Trent Driver writes: "Best piece I have read in a long time. Wish you could hear the debate by the teenage girls in my ecos classes. :)"

Others were less convinced. "I don’t understand why people like that Jess Irvine thing" said Jason Wilson. "More pundits telling the people they’re spoilt children."

Liam Hogan commented "three things missing from that piece: price of housing, major city rental vacancy rate, homelessness index." Sarah Toohey from Australians for Affordable Housing agreed, "Nice points Liam. Overall econ good, lots quite comfortable, but some have really difficult lives b/c of hsg."

Arriving just after the ACTU conference, Irvine’s column runs into their campaign on insecure work. Jason Wilson asked: "Haven’t we just heard at the ACTU congress that ppl feel chronically insecure?"

According to the ACTU’s Ged Kearney, millions of Australians are in casual jobs, contract jobs and labour hire work. "On top of low wages, and a lack of conditions like sick leave and holiday pay, there is a huge amount of uncertainty about when and how much people will work."

Matt Cowgill and Keiran McCarron took issue with Irvine’s claim that Australia’s welfare state is bloated. Cowgill wrote: "I disagree that our welfare system is ‘bloated’ (unless you include tax expenditures in your definition)" while McCarron tweeted: "I didn’t read your article. But if you’re calling a welfare system smaller than the US’s "bloated" you’re just politicking."

Irvine isn’t the only one arguing that Australians are complaining too much. The Australian newspaper’s George Megalogenis has pledged a "war on whinging". And that’s just where twitter user truckie is filing the piece, under #waronwhinging. Megalogenis says he might pitch a ‘war on whinging’ show to the ABC. Fake Paul Keating tweets: "if you get a show, @Jess_Irvine is in the stop whinging camp, and lot more photogenic than you".

A student’s lament

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The twitterverse erupted in response to this story in yesterday’s papers about a student suing her former school Geelong Grammar for compensation, saying that it provided inadequate support to enable her to do sufficiently well on her final exams to be accepted to study law at Sydney Uni:

Seeking compensation in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, she said her final secondary school score was too low to study law at the University of Sydney.

Of her time at Geelong Grammar, she said: ”I didn’t ever feel I was getting the support I needed to really excel.”

Ms Ashton-Weir boarded at the school in 2008 and 2009 but finished her secondary studies at a TAFE college in Sydney. She is in the first year of a double degree in arts and sciences at the University of Sydney.

Her mother, Elizabeth Weir, is also suing the school for lost income and other expenses.

She said she gave up her chocolate fortune cookie business – which she had expected to make $450,000 over three years – because her daughter moved from Geelong to live with her in New South Wales.

Some might cynically observe that some lawyers in hindsight might have preferred to miss out on the ‘benefits’ of this career, but generally there have been pretty harsh assessments of the idea of litigating a school over this sort of issue.  I can’t resist pointing out that someone alerted the media to this story, and my bet is that it was the girl or her parents.  Given the response, I wonder whether she now considers that was a good decision?

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Media managing all the way to oblivion . . .

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I’m doing a fortnightly column for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and here is the first column. Of course the thing that’s missing from the column is how I think they should have handled fiscal policy - which would have involved not just more straightforward and confidently assertive communications from them but would also have introduced some independent scrutiny of fiscal policy. Anyway, in writing it I realised how much I enjoy this genre. Like a blog post, but I often slave and sweat over each paragraph just to get the ideas across as briefly as possible, and to make it as much of a pleasure to read as one can.

EVEN as the contrast between left and right fades in mainstream politics, politicians continue ideological warfare like lions eat red meat. But somehow left-leaning politicians have become vegetarians. And they’re being eaten alive by the carnivores of the species.

Deep in the psyche of the electorate, the right is dad and the left is mum. Seriously! The electorate instinctively feels that the right is better with money while the left is better at ”caring” things such as health and education. The left’s desperation to avoid the right’s stereotype of them as feckless spendthrifts sees them continually hamstrung in articulating their case. Seeking to appease our economic anxieties they buy into the right’s way of framing the issues. In the name of managing the news cycle they give up more and more political and ideological ground.

Thus, for instance, to allay electoral fears about rising debt, US President Barack Obama suggested that, since American families and businesses were tightening their belts, the government should do the same. This is nonsense on stilts. By the very logic of his stimulus (and Bush’s cash handouts before him), the whole point of deficit spending was to reverse or counterbalance a temporary lack of private spending. As Paul Krugman argues, one can forgive Obama for compromising on the policy, but not on the truth; not, that is, for casually adopting his opponents’ framing of the issues that gainsaid the whole point of the stimulus in the first place.

Australia’s economic circumstances are different. Partly because our stimulus worked so well and also because of the surging resource sector, our central bank hasn’t needed to cut its cash rate to near zero. So it hasn’t run out of conventional monetary ammunition like the US Fed. So unwinding our fiscal stimulus makes sense.

Yet our left-leaning politicians can’t take credit for their greatest achievement because they’re forever thrusting their little vegetarian heads into the lion’s jaws of their opponents’ framing of the issues.

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Accountant wanted

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This year my accountant got sent accounts which as far as I could see involved writing the totals of a spreadsheet into the tax return and pressing ‘send’. OK, it might have been a bit more than that, I don’t really know, but what bugs me is that the documents she got indicated something like an $8,000 refund and when she drafted the return it had a near zero refund. Was this because she had a better grasp of the tax applicable? No it was because she didn’t transcribe the numbers properly.

For this I got charged $866.25 and that was for my personal return. There’s also the company . . .  In any event, I’m after a new accountant. I don’t want or need anything fancy. Someone who is reasonably diligent and preferably someone who has some ideas from time to time about structuring a small business. If they come from Melbourne that’s well and good, but it’s by no means essential – we have post and email these days, and the person who does the books is in Queensland.

If you’ve got an accountant who’s Just Great, please let me know either in comments or by email on n g r u e n  AT g m a i l DOT c o m

 

Ashamed to be a lawyer?

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Pseudonymous blogging lawyer Private Law Tutor confesses her occasional feelings of “shame” at being a lawyer:

I’ve thought and talked and written about the deep discomfort that ebbs and flows in me with my work. Well, not my work as such, but the work that I do. The industry I work in. The impact we have on lives, as lawyers.

Conflict is normal, and sometimes the people in conflict need help to resolve their disputes. This is what lawyers are primarily engaged in. Dispute prevention and dispute resolution. So our primary purpose is good and honourable. I’m just not always sure that our system and our work meets that standard.

A good friend has asked me a few times now if my discomfort is guilt. I don’t think it is. I think it’s deeper than guilt. After all, guilt can be sorted with an apology. “sorry about that. I made a mistake”. I think my discomfort creeps dangerously close to shame. Shame is a dark shadow that can overtake so much of ourselves. All of us have it lurking somewhere. …

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Why do libertarians support conservative parties?

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In a piece for the Sunday Age, Chris Berg says progressives think conservatives are heartless because they "don’t realise the right has a different and legitimate moral framework." Perhaps so, but what about libertarians?

Berg draws on Jonathan Haidt‘s moral foundations research. Haidt argues that moral judgments are largely intuitive and rest on six foundations – care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation.

Haidt and his colleagues have found that progressives (liberals) rely almost entirely on the first three foundations when making moral judgments. In contrast, conservatives rely on all six.

In many ways libertarians are like progressives. "We found that libertarians look more like liberals than conservatives on most measures of personality" Haidt wrote in his recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. However:

Where they diverge from liberals most sharply is on two measures: the Care foundation, where they score very low (even lower than conservatives), and on some new questions we added about economic liberty, where they score extremely high (a little higher than conservatives, a lot higher than liberals).

So if progressives are wrong about conservatives, could they be right about libertarians? In a recent paper, a group of researchers including Haidt reported that libertarians reject the morality of altruism "as well as all other moralities based on ideas of obligation to other people, groups, traditions, and authorities."

Interestingly, the research suggested libertarians may be less satisfied with their lives than either progressives or conservatives. The researchers reported that "libertarians may be less happy in part because they care less about others and (most likely) bond less with others, particularly close others." Libertarians seem to rely less on emotion and more on abstract reasoning.

Given their lack of interest in conservative values, why do American libertarians consistently favour the Republican party? According to Haidt:

People with libertarian ideals have generally supported the Republican Party since the 1930s because libertarians and Republicans have a common enemy: the liberal welfare society that they believe is destroying America’s liberty (for libertarians) and moral fiber (for social conservatives).

There is always potential for tension between conservatives and libertarians. As I argued in a 2008 article for Policy magazine – ‘Defusing the American Right‘ – the alliance comes under stress when conservatives enlarge the size and scope of government in order to pursue their values. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on drugs were areas of tension under the Bush administration.

But perhaps not all libertarians lack concern for people who are poor and marginalised. Recently a number of libertarian thinkers have gathered together at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog. Some of them are even talking about social justice.