The model of A and B shares isn’t as uncommon as we might think. I know of at least 2 State government set-ups that have done exactly that. The “ownership” shares in these cases are held by the government to protect a capital investment but in neither of the cases did the State government (Qld and NSW) actually want to operate the business. They made sure their class of share gave them a nominated seat on the board and some veto powers but have largely been silent partners as far as I can tell. Both were property related but neither are listed companies so I guess that’s a difference.

After ten years of anti-Howard howling by the media, opposition and commentariat, the public has become deaf to that note.

As time goes on, not only is he more vulnerable to what you say, but he too is more removed from voter concern, through all those changes. Which one will out?

We could hope there’d be a return to some sense of ministerial responsibility, and what you say prevails.

But look what’s in store. With Beazley there, it could be said the electorate is fairly connected in sentiment to Labor failure, which is a shame as far as alternatives are valuable, as Beazley once had access to voter heart. It’s too much to overcome his own baggage let alone eject the incumbent. Labor will need to change before the government changes. Go Julia.

Will IR bite in the meantime? We’ll see the damage of it often enough, but will there be enough of it where it counts?

And let’s see what Howard is cooking locally, in terms of racial tension. Many of us thought Australia could take no more division, no more low blows of opportunism, should we once again say those depths have been done?

A renewed terrorism threat, especially internally, and it’s a big ask to put Labor in as they now are.

Global environmental issues (reason enough to banish the incumbents and have them redesign their constitution from the ground up, and no philosophical joy from ALP either) have only just touched the outer minds of the electorate, no real movement there.

As you say, there is plenty unstomachable about. Debt alone might do it.

But none of it will change without a saleable alternative. Change the alternative, and a swathe of changes could be unleashed, slamming those untouchables severely.

Back on track, should we expect AWB to cop the blame, their heads roll, to find a lushy little post elsewhere? And so it goes…

There are now plenty of examples, as there were in 1993-6, that this Government has now reached the time where they need to be chucked out because of their incompetence.

This always just increases until the brilliant politicians don’t notice until they are kicked out.

I remember ‘brilliant ALP strategists’ telling me the punters didn’t care about Hindmarsh Island.
I suspect this will be similar. Nothing too much alone but becoming too much over time for most people to stomach.

Like Keating after 93 Howard after 04 thinks he is untouchable.

Vaile might have trouble but his problems are seen in the wider context of the Nationals Liberals unsettling. Clearly the advice is to hold out and Howard will back him.

At the end of the day, voters will know it’s a scandal but their hearts will be with the farmers. After the drought, and with farmers hurting more and more as this issue unfolds, there’s plenty of electoral room for Howard to invoke the farmers’ best interest play. Watch Howard start hurting for the farmers, pained face, and do it brilliantly while he is culpable not only for the scandal, but the damage to farmers from the inquiry as well. It’s a media walk he’s well used to.

And it’s not as though voters are immune from expecting kickbacks were the norm for dealing with that regime. Again, the ‘farmers’ best interests’ come into play.

Howard has built a public reputation of pragmatism, agree with it or not. The pragmatism of this issue lays in what is a fair bet of voter immunity from a proper expectation of dealing with Saddam’s regime, regardless of the fact or act of that dealing, and we want our farmers to get a break. It’s a money based mindset out there in voter land, and that make-money pragmatic need aligns nicely for Howard, once he pains it for the farmers.

And why is Howard so keen to await the results of the inquiry?

Hopefully more truth will become evident, but as it stands at the moment, and with the wheat farmers hurting more by the day, there’s a fair bit of teflon around for those doing denial.

The next election is too far out, and too many issues yet to arrive, for Howard to do anything but hold out on this one - because the only thing that will stick through until then is a political scalp: a big call in this day and age. Maybe with undeniable evidence, and with the farmers adding a screaming voice on account of it, something will give. That happening is more of a long shot than is the political damage as it now stands.

But, gee, there’s a real sense of the pressure cooker about some of our institutions now, and somewhere it might pop with the sound of a blowing whistle.

When the program was set up it was already an obscenity making starving people pay for their own humanitarian aid. The people caught in the tsunami didn’t have to pay for their aid cash, the people of Afghanistan, Sudan, East Timor and other countries don’t have to use their own resources so that an outside body and other governments can give them permission to starve or eat - at the rate of $180 per year.

It’s like the world was running a Stalin type regime against innocent people because they didn’t like the Stalin type leader. We ill never know how many people in Iraq starved to death - but try in your imaginations to think how far $100 million per year would have gone towards feeding Iraqi kids.

Don’t forget they were not allowed to even accept donations of medicine with donors being fined or even sent to jail.
Never in the world has anything so grotesque and immoral been done to an entire population of people for no gain at all.

Then throw in the AWB - carpet baggers being paid upwards of $1 million a year in Lindberg’s case to steal from people existing on $180 per year. It’s interesting that Downer is still saying he didn’t know anything at all when even Lindberg wrote to him in June 2004 and told him explicitly that they were being accused of a complicit relationship with Saddam.

The letters are exhibits 83-87 on the exhibits page of the Oil for Food inquiry site and read like a bunch of boys got themselves into a sort of mad Secret 7 or B grade James Bond film and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Look at the nitwits today taking armed police and guards into a board meeting then ducking out the back like the criminal thugs they are.

Tonight I listened while an Iraqi doctor described to me the horror of the sanctions and oil for food program - he told me of the children he was forced to watch starve to death. He was sobbing like a baby.

Not at all. The Oz ran hard on children overboard, the Republic, Tampa, Rau and Alvarez. And call me naive, but does Rupert really call through on a daily basis to pass on the leader content?

By far the loudest media “howler” on the AWB scandal is The Australian - hardly ‘left wing media’ by anyone’s definition.

It does seem a bit out of character for them - someone suggested Rupert might be more interested in sucking up to the US at the moment, but that would surprise me.

So ‘the point’ was what were you going to do, not what lecture were you going to give.

With export facilitation up for consideration, the IAC recommended 35% tariff only assistance and then when its recommendations were not looking too healthy judging from responses to the draft report, the IAC upped its ‘offer’ to 50% tariff only. (This is in 1982)

Implicitly the choice it was making was to subsidise import replacement of between 35-50% disability rather than subsidise export production at a disability of 35% or lower.

Dumb if you ask me. But those proposing the latter course were accused of being ‘protectionist’, but not the IAC - go figure!

But surely that misses the point Gus Hooke was making. It’s more harmful on all these grounds than having no quotas or subsidies at all. And it’s the cost/benefit calculus of assistance compared to no assistance that we’re talking about.

Mind you, I’ll happily concede that the policy was about the best politically feasible one at the time - but “best politically feasible” is not the same as “economically good”.

The Howard haters and left-wing media have been howling so long and loudly over non-issues and portraying them as government scandals that even if there was a real scandal, the public would just dismiss it as more of the same.

I agree with you about the difference between the payment of bribes in general and the context here.

Add virtually all of Africa, much of East and South Asia, parts of Latin America and quite a few of the emergent, post-Soviet republics in eastern Europe and central Asia. The big news with the Iraqi Oil for Foor scandal was not that bribery was going on, per se, but that it was being conducted under the auspices of the UN, thus adding to the impression of an organisation so compromised by morally dubious practice that it’s difficult to see how it can be reformed without root and branch restructure. That Kofi Annan continues to preside as Secretary-General is eloquent testimony to the UN’s inability to confront and deal with it’s own demons.

The AWB has clearly adopted a “whatever it takes” approach in an over-heated competitive environment where I doubt that any players - including the US and Canadian whistleblowers - can legitimately claim the moral high ground. I’m sure that Cole will reveal AWB to be everything we perceive them to be but
the commentariat isn’t really interested in AWB itself.

There’s a bigger canvas here than the one on which the Australian media and opposition have focussed.
The decision to concentrate all energies on the singular pursuit of the government, in the hope of proving their direct authorising and sponsoring linkage into the scandal, looks shallow, politically expedient and business as usual. Worse, having failed to produce the requisite photos of Howard in bed with a container load of wheat, Saddam Hussein and 300 million in Treasury drafts, a la Trevor Pflugge, Rudd and Beazley are reduced to claiming the government was “negligent.” So what? Oppositions claim that governments are negligent every day. That’s what oppositions do and the hysterical insistence that Downer and Vaile were as good as mailing cheques off to the next-of-kin of self-detonating Palestinians just sounded desperate.

I suspect that most voters, flicking over briefly from the sports pages, would conclude that the opposition couldn’t give a big rat’s bum about the bigger questions at issue here. It’s about short-term political oneupmanship and it’s the droning backgound noise of our political discourse. People reflexively switch off. The smoking gun may yet emerge but I’m willing to bet that a wide-ranging investigation into the offshore commercial dealings and cultural practices of Australian companies will not.

It would be an advantage if our production was high enough to act as a serious monopoly seller on the world market. If this was ever true, it certainly isn’t now. The AWB’s only function now is to reduce price risk and variance.

At least the *idea* behind the *export monopoly* makes sense: To advantage Australians at the expense of the rest of the world. However, there is absolutely no justification for the existence of the old domestic monopoly board, or the current monopoly single desk domestic agencies like the Potato Board and Egg/Dairy marketing boards in WA and elsewhere.

The main effect of the sellers monopoly is to disadvantage consumers in favour of producers. This kind of makes sense in a twisted nationalistic fashion if the producers are Australians and the consumers are not. It makes no sense at all when the consumers are also Australians (as is the case with the potato board).

This is where Nicholas’s post gets to the heart of the conundrum. Why have a monopoly international wheat trader anyway? Is there any net advantage? I had reached the same conclusion as Nicholas on that, and was even musing about writing a post to that effect, although it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as elegant or economically literate as his column. If AWB was merely a private company without a government-conferred monopoly, this wouldn’t be a massive political scandal at all. It would still be a scandal of sorts, however, because it would evidence the fact that Australian governments are no more diligent than any other governments in ensuring that their citizens observe UN economic sanctions. However, as with the payment of bribes in countries where that’s the only way you can do business at all, the appropriate response is a resigned yawn. It would be nice if everyone put international morality ahead of short-term self-interest but in the real world it’s never going to happen, which is why economic sanctions have generally been a fairly ineffective weapon in international relations.