Club Troppo

In a new high watermark in he said she said journalism the ABC news tonight had a story of a school that ‘someone said’ had been “paid off” to keep silent about education spending overruns.  The story seemed to be this: Some school community had complained that they couldn’t get anything useful done with their money.  A government pollie came and saw them and told them that this was the best offer they would get. Some disgruntled people in the school community took this as a ‘threat’. The ‘threat’ amounted to the proposition that the community would need to spend this money or they would lose it.

The school subsequently got offered an additional $400,000 which they spent.  Someone said (he said) that this was hush money to prevent the school from speaking out about things. The state education minister (she said) that this claim was absurd.  It seems absurd.

But the ABC news reported this in such a way that if you were not concentrating you would get the impression that money had been slipped out the door to keep people quiet – that it really was hush money.  Well anything’s possible, but I was amazed. The proposition that it really was hush money wasn’t really treated seriously by the story – that is, given that it’s a pretty striking allegation you’d expect some probing of the person who said it was hush money to find out exactly what he meant and what his evidence was. No such luck – just a nice expression that rolled off the tongue of the accuser. I think he meant $400,000 to keep us quiet, shut us up, as in ‘keep us happy’. There seemed no serious allegation that there was any concerted effort to really make it clear that it was money provided on condition of silence.  But that’s what anyone watching the bulletin who was not paying close attention would have assumed.

I was truly amazed.

I hate to say this but all my forecasts over recent months seem to be proving right.

First, we have over-done monetary policy (see my contributions in Club Troppo, January 29 and February 4th 2010).

Second, our expansionary fiscal policy was on the right scale (although mismanaged at times) e.g. see my Club Troppo piece of February 25).

Third, the world is now entering the “early stages of a third depression”, due to a general fetish about public debt (e.g. see Krugman piece of June 28th).

Finally, any future macro-policy change (to the extent it is needed in this country) must rely more on additional spending (on health, education and infrastructure) and less on labour market deregulation and reductions in taxes (see for example my CT piece of March 18, 2010). The people who are most vulnerable (the medium to long-term unemployed and under-employed) are the real victims of the global financial crisis.

Grossly unfair but wickedly funny:

Paul Krugman asked the New York Times if he could publish today’s column on Troppo.  We have of course licensed the content to the NYT.  In fact, ironically, owing to an administrative oversight, the column appeared on the NYT website before it was hoisted here.

Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.

But future historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps. (Continued)

Professor Peter Drysdale  of the ANU’s East Asia Forum, veteran of Australia’s foreign economic relations with the region, outlined the demise of Rudd to the readers of the Forum’s weekly digest.  It kind of helps to remind us how strange this would look to foreigners.

Many of our international readers are perhaps justifiably baffled by the overthrow last week of former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, by Australia’s new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

Rudd stood tall on the international stage. He led a government, alone among all the OECD countries, that steered Australia successfully through the Global Financial Crisis, without recession. He was among the most effective of the protagonists that influenced the launching of the G20, meeting this weekend in Toronto, a new group that has promise of providing a greater measure of international and political security because it is more representative of global power than its predecessor, the G8, and is more adept at dealing with the problems in global economic governance. He swiftly moved to have Australia sign the Kyoto Protocol. And Rudd, among all global leaders, had a surer grasp of Chinese affairs than any major political leader outside China, when that is a political commodity in drastic short supply at a time of great need. In dealings with China he communicated with dignity and uniquely in the Chinese language. He had the correct strategic sense of how urgent it was to begin re-crafting arrangements in Asia and the Pacific to provide greater opportunity for dialogue on political as well as economic affairs in a way that comprehends the huge transformation of economic and political power that is taking place in our region.

These were impressive international political assets, and unquestionably huge assets for Australia. And, at home, he brought leadership to reconciliation with indigenous Australians and set in motion a substantial social and reform agenda. Rudd’s achievements in his short tenure in office were undoubtedly considerable.

Objective analysis suggests that Rudd was poised to win the next election, due within the next six months or so, despite a big drop in popular support driven by gaffs in the implementation of expansionary spending programs, a reversal of course on climate policy and questions of leadership style and process. The truth is that these questions provided the opening for factional powerbrokers within the governing Labor Party, in which Rudd had no permanent factional base, to settle scores. And amid the political uncertainties a sudden fracture of trust between Rudd and his Deputy led her to seize the unexpected prize.

Prime Minister Gillard is a very talented and polished political leader. There are likely to be few fundamental changes in Australian foreign policy direction. Rudd has chosen to continue in play. His foreign policy initiatives and big international diplomatic goals, in relation to China (of which Ms Gillard has a very sure grasp), climate change and regional architecture, are matters of deep foreign policy strategy that will not change and on which Rudd’s talents are likely deployed in some way.

The transfer of leadership has cut the Australian Prime Minister out of the G20 Summit in Toronto, where Rudd was also due to have important bilateral discussions with President Obama. That is a pity and an important cost to Australia’s national interests of the events of the last week in Canberra.

Other recent articles in which you may be interested from the East Asia Forum are listed below. You can click the title of each one or visit www.eastasiaforum.org for daily content.

Peter Drysdale,
Editor, 28th June.

Are you tired of separating the recycling and having to put your underpants in the laundry basket? Are you sick of watching your wife’s vampire shows on tv? Chrysler knows how you feel. Last year the struggling US auto company filed for bankruptcy protection and was forced into a humiliating shot gun wedding with Fiat. So in keeping with the spirit of the age, the company’s made-for-Super-Bowl Dodge Charger ad features whiny men who feel oppressed by women. Now you can broadcast your powerlessness and frustration every time you fire up your new muscle car (just make sure you remember to put the trash out first).

The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin. argues that there’s a connection between beaten down men and America’s shrinking manufacturing sector. Rosin spoke with Geraldine Doogue on Saturday Extra where she argued that traditionally male industries are in decline and displaced men are failing to adapt to new job opportunities.

In an article for the Atlantic Rosin wondered whether the "modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men":

(Continued)

I won’t shed any tears for Kevin Rudd. He was an irritating smooth talker, incapable of commanding much personal affection. Julia Gillard seems a nicer person, conveys a deeper sense of commitment to social democratic values in contrast to Rudd’s technocratic rhetoric, and is at least equally bright, articulate, and solid on policy detail. She will probably be a good Prime Minister. But there are troubling things about the process by which the transition has occurred, and I’d appreciate help in grasping what this is all about.

1. Was Rudd’s sudden decline in popularity due to the postponement of the ETS? The Fairfax editorialists — Peter Hartcher, Phillip Coorey, Lenore Taylor — have asserted repeatedly, without providing much evidence, that this is the case. But if the public is impatient for legislation to cap carbon emissions, why would the Government’s backtracking cause any of them to switch allegiance to the Opposition? How could the electorate’s preference, on a two-party basis, be affected at all? Is it really plausible that voters care more about whether they know ‘what the Prime Minister stands for’ than about the substance of the policy? (Continued)

Magnus Carlsen, 2813	Wang Yue, 2752	Boris Gelfand, 2741
Teimour Radjabov, 2740	Ruslan Ponomariov, 2733	Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, 2672

Yes folks, he’s on the rampage again.  And this time there’s a new toy – which has probably been available for quite some time, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. Magnus Carlsen is eating them up at a super grandmaster tournament, the King’s Tournament in Bazna, Transylvania in Romania. Super grandmasters used to be those rated 2,600 and above. Now they’re rated over 2,700 and these guys are a who’s who of the top ten players – averaging a raging of just under 2,750. Anyway, after starting quietly and drawing twice Carlsen has just reeled off a Fischer like 4-0, two wins with white, two with black. He’s got an ugly style, nothing very classical about it, but he seems to play more like a computer than anyone else. When things go badly as they did for him early in the 6th round game, he thinks nothing of sacrificing a pawn or so to get something more interesting happening, even if it isn’t technically a better position. In round six his position looked worse after he’d sacrificed a pawn.  Not just to me, but also to the computer.  But it certainly created chances, which he managed to take.

The new toy, which if you’re reading this within a few hours of my having posted it you can check out live as the game proceeds is chessbomb which enables you not just to look at the game as it unfolds – you can do that on the official site – linked to above – but also to see how a top computer rates the current position and what its analysis of the main line is.  Even in complex positions it’s amazing how often the players get it right.  But sometimes they don’t and then the friendly computer writes their move in purple (iffy or ‘suboptimal’ as the computer says) or worse still red (a weak move).

Postscript: Carlsen rampaged his way to a 2 point victory – amazing. 

This week at work I was discussing the throw-in in soccer with a colleague (we work at night and we were watching the World Cup) when I had a memory. Growing up in Maitland through the 1990s, when I played soccer either as a junior or at school, the throw in was invariably described as a “shy”. After leaving Maitland at 15 (for Newcastle), I never heard the term again. When I mentioned this another colleague quickly proposed that it may be related to the term “coconut shy”, and several dictionaries give “a quick throw” as a definition of the word. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that a term could be ubiquitous in one town and unheard of in one 20 minutes away.

Then I started thinking of several other terms used by my classmates [fn1]. I was the only child who ate dinner, where everyone else, in the British fashion, had “tea”. I was the only child with a grandma or a grandfather, everyone else had a “nan” or a “pop”. Intriguingly some used “learn” to me “teach”. My dad told me that when he moved there in the 1970s, a bag was still referred to as a “port”, something unheard of elsewhere in NSW (but apparently common in QLD).

This is all presumably due to the history of the place, with miners coming from Northern England and Ireland (I believe this use of “learn” is Geordie) – which may also explain the great avalability of black beer on tap in the Hunter Valley compared to Sydney -  and a strangely strong identity to the town. As dad said once of Maitland “It was different. You didn’t have to like it, but at least it was different”.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Maitland is currently booming, with a large influx of new residents, so I doubt what Maitland English exists will long survive.  Which is a pity. There’s precious little regional variation in Australian English as it is. I don’t see much point in promoting the retention of the varieties, change is a part of life, but I would like to see them at least remembered. It’s simply interesting.

The relevant Wikipedia article is not, and is unlikely to be, much help. Wikipedia in its current state is likely to delete anything added based on personal experience, but personal experience is the only valid source for this kind of knowledge. Unless we happen to have access to a linguist (who’d write something tolerable to the wikirati as a citation), this kind of variation will be lost forever.

So this post may have to suffice. What small variations have you found between towns and places in Australia? Record them now lest they be lost, or uncover the variations that are now developing.

[fn1] My parents were not from Maitland, which may explain why I didn’t use them, but the class mates that did use them came from a number of backgrounds, many non-English speaking