Club Troppo

I knew Neil Bessell at Burgmann College in the 1970s though I was not a good friend. I was shocked to hear that he’d died and asked Hugh Borrowman who is a friend of mine and who was also a good friend of Neil to send me the speech he gave at Neil’s funeral. For those who knew Neil, or indeed, those like me who like to read eulogies even if you don’t know their subject, Hugh’s eulogy to Neil is over the fold.

Vale Neil, and sincere condolences to Judy his wife and Caitlin and Nicholas his two (now grown) children whom my wife Eva taught in the late 1980s and early 1990s when they were in primary school in Canberra. (Continued)

No doubt some have already seen this vid. I only just discovered it. Pretty gripping I think you’ll agree.

A nice story available in this article. HT: Serge Soudoplatoff

A tramp passes by a restaurant, but does not enter, as he has too little money. The cook is furious to see a tramp in front of his place, rushes him, starts fighting with him, and eventually asks him for some money. The case is brought to a judge, who listens to each side. The tramp insists, “I have eaten nothing, therefore I should not pay”, to which the cook retorts, “He has not eaten, but he has smelled the flavor. This smell is the result of my expertise, and I should also be rewarded for this!”

The judge asks the tramp for a coin, taps it on the table, tells the cook “you have heard the noise, so now you are paid”, and gives the coin back to the tramp.

No time to say much right now, but I was intrigued to see the People’s Chamber. Why wouldn’t I be? And disappointed it was scorned so instantly by various operatives around the traps. Of course the atmospherics for its introduction might have been better – this is a rescue operation with the alternative political heroics having fallen over. But I find it hard to see how anything but good can come from such an experiment.  The essence of these things is for them to reinvigorate, reinvent and relegitimate democracy.  At the moment, there’s an absence of deliberative democracy because anything that can be focus grouped or discussed to a worthwhile conclusion (like an ETS, an RRT or a GST) can go from being conventional wisdom to electoral poison with the expenditure of a few million dollars telling how [insert policy] is dreadfully unfair to [insert demographic, celebrity or billionaire] and will beggar us all.

As I’ve argued recently and not so recently, the Accord was the success it was because it served as a forum for major issues to be considered by major groups in our society and for broad agreements to be reached in which the parties compromised so that they could agree on and then share the resulting benefits.  And I expect that well done, the people’s chamber can do something similar.  The 2020 Summit was a similar idea but it was implemented in a daze, without any thought about what the government wanted out of it. The people’s chamber has promise because a government that wants to lead can use it to lead – and it can offload a lot of the burden of what I call political heroics (where the govt leads as it did with resource rent taxation or John Hewson did with the GST and everyone else gets to take potshots at it from the sidelines).  And as I’ve mused elsewhere, maybe Gillard is the kind of politician who can pull this off.

But remembering all those people trying to wish their thoughts and values into Rudd’s head, I could be doing the same thing. Only time will tell.  Still, even if I’m cynical I still find it hard to believe that the people’s chamber won’t lead to good things.  I had no such hopes of the 2020 Summit. Actually that’s wrong. I did have hopes. High hopes and low expectations.

The editorial in the Herald hit the nail on the head this morning. Julia Gillard’s population comments are purely symbolic.

She advocates a ‘sustainable population’ but won’t say what she means by that, and in any case has ruled out both avenues by which population growth might be curbed (except for boosting the death rate). Measures to reduce the birth rate would, as she herself observed, involve an unacceptable intrusion on free choice; in any case, as an explicit policy it would be in jarring contradiction with the conventional wisdom that we need more babies to mitigate the ‘aging population problem’. Nor does she intend to cut immigration quotas. As Peter Hartcher put it:

So this is not a policy, and it’s not even a debate about possible policy. It’s just a placebo, a sugar pill for the electorate to suck during an election campaign, to keep it happy and quiet. When the placebo dissolves, nothing is solved.

(Continued)

Following the efforts of James Farrell as to the many different things meant by lay folk and professionals by the word ‘belief’, I wanted to try to tackle the question from an economics points of view. Given that the methods and mindsets of economists are an amalgam of other scientists, we firstly need to review how different stereotypical scientists from various disciplines would answer this question. Before getting to the perspective of economists, this medium-sized essay will therefore first present the view of a mathematician, a statistician, and a modern cognitive psychologist (or at least how I think of them).

(Continued)

One of the things I’d like to do in this election campaign is to draw attention to all the (most egregious) cases where the press engage in the mindlessness of “he said – she said” journalism. That is where they report various sides accusations of the other as if that then finishes their job. Obviously us voters want information to help us tell which of the two sides stories is more plausible. And obviously enough sometimes even a hard working journalist can’t find out the information necessary to throw light on the subject.  But often they can.

There’s always the next day of course, but I’m not after miracles here. Today there was a classic case of “he said – she said” journalism – well I expect there were endless cases of it, but the one I’m referring to is the situation where, one day after promising that a Liberal Government would not make any changes to the Fair Work Act until at least the return of Halley’s Comet Tony Abbott promised to – well change the Fair Work Act. He would do so by changing another act, and that would impliedly change the Fair Work Act as Ken has pointed out below.

The political stupidity or brazenness of this beggars belief, but there you go. Kerry O’Brien made a good fist of this in ripping into Joe Hockey on the first opportunity he was given. But ABC news reports confirmed to the standard ‘he said she said’ formula. Now there isn’t a clear cut right and wrong here – if the Coalition want to say that implied repeal of the Fair Work Act is consistent with yesterday’s pledge, then well and good – presumably any other part of the FWA can be likewise amended. But the ‘he said she said’ reporting didn’t really get to that point. It was as if the ALP’s lawyer and the Coalition’s lawyer were disagreeing. As Ken points out they weren’t. The Coalition’s lawyer just said that you can effect the change the Coalition wants without (expressly) changing the FWA. (How? by impliedly changing it!).

Why am I telling you all this? Because I’ve had enough. I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking it any more. Well I am taking it, but I’m hoping that maybe in this age of social media that it might be possible to mount a campaign against he said she said reporting. And though I’m flat out and so can’t give this the time I’d really like to, now is the time to have some impact. So I’m hoping that we can regularly publish articles shaming specific examples of ‘he said – she said’ journalism, and saying how the journalists in question could reasonably have actually given us information that would have enabled us to work out just a little more about whose story was more credible.

Why I’ve even been trying out a twitter hashtag – yes #hesaidshesaid. There is a small glitch, but it will only add a bit of spice and enjoyment to your day. Though largely unused, the hashtag gets a bit of a showing amongst people (Americans it seems) who want to relate particularly juicy and bitchy gossip and sniping such as this: “She said that you said to her that someone told you i was fckn thee btch, so u fkd him. Uhm, gtfo with that #hesaidshesaid”. Can’t really argue with that.

But these tweets only occur about once a day. So Troppodillians I’m hoping that you’ll email me (ngruen AT gmail) and tweet examples of #hesaidshesaid journalism using the hashtag.   Of course it will take a while, but I really think if we can do a bit of consciousness raising on this one, we may be able to start making a difference. (Continued)

I got this email from someone with whom I’ve been having an enjoyable correspondence for the last few months (though I’ve never physically met him). He’s an Australian, living overseas, in his twenties or perhaps early thirties (I’m guessing) and is ideologically predisposed right of centre parties. (I continue to imagine that I’m not really left leaning, but that my preferences towards the ALP over the Coalition are because the Coalition are so uninterested in policy and therefore just bad at it. But I know lots of readers won’t believe me, and they may be right.)

Anyway, I have his permission to reproduce his email to me.

Nicholas,

I don’t believe I have ever witnessed such a backward and chaotic start to an election campaign as has come from the Liberal Party. How can the party of business with people who have “real world” experience lack basic organisational leadership? In a party populated with lawyers and wannabe MBAs they are looking more like the keystone cops than professionals.

People considered the UK Labour campaign to be poor but at least they knew that local party organisation is crucial if the party lacks the financial horsepower for advertising. The Liberals (esp. LNP) look and sound chaotic in comparison without financial strength and little strategic or organisational ability to back candidates

Maybe you should run a post on your blog asking how the Liberal Party can be trusted running the country if they cannot run an election campaign?

Cruel but fair. It’s certainly been pretty lacklustre. Today the Libs proposed a change in the Electoral Act which would render nugatory a section of an act that yesterday promised never to change. Never ever.

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey must be hoping that very few voters have any understanding of the basic principles of statutory interpretation.  Any who did would instantly realise that the Coalition’s promise to amend the Electoral Act to force unions to repay the Australian Electoral Commission for the costs of running union ballots effectively renders completely meaningless Abbott’s more general promise not to change Labor’s Fair Work Act.  The latter is, of course, designed to negate Labor’s scare campaign that the Coalition has secret plans to resuscitate Work Choices.

The parties currently seem to be engaged in a game of duelling senior counsel, with Labor trotting out Bret Walker SC to assert that “if the Coalition changed the Electoral Act, it would be impossible not to affect the Fair Work legislation …” while the Coalition relies on academic constitutional lawyer Andrew Lynch:

(Continued)

In May of this year, the Australian government announced a tax increase on the mining company whereby all profits over the long-run bond rate would be taxed at 40%, with off-sets for losses. This tax on the rent created by the boom in mineral prices was spent on reductions in the company tax rate and on various overall subsidies. Following a fairly extensive campaign by the big mining companies and their representatives such as the Minerals Council Australia, the government in July negotiated directly with the three major mining companies and reduced the planned tax increases in return for the explicit promise to stop campaigning. If we compare the revenues the tax would have gotten (under the revised price estimates) with the current expected revenue, it seems radio silence has come at a cost close to 5 billion dollars per year. In terms of discounted values, every dollar spent on campaigning by the mining industry seems to have paid off (ball park figure) something like a thousand dollars in less tax.
Elsewhere, I have talked about how the media campaign was made up of false arguments and wild exaggerations. Essentially, jobs and investments in mining were never truly at stake and it was a straightforward fight over money with on the one hand a few dozen billionaires who stood to lose and on the other hand millions of small businesses and consumers who stood to gain but of whom a fairly large slice was scared into thinking they were going to lose.
Observations:
1. One lesson from this saga is that negative campaigning works, particularly in an election year. The basic recipe for protecting privilege has been applied here: muddle the argument; roll out experts with minor doubts and represent those doubts as sincere opposition; get the masses to believe something unfair is happening and they have something to lose; and never once talk about money. Not once did the media blitz even try to run the argument that it is fair for billionaires to make more money out of Australia’s mineral resources. The eventual outcome, 5 billion dollar less taxes for the mining industry per year, was never put forward as the goal of the campaign. Will the mining companies give this bonanza to charity? Don’t count on it.

2. The super-wealthy stood fairly united. As I remarked in an earlier blog, other wealthy organisations who make their money from rents, like property developers, banks, and most financial institutions, could have expected to be the next in line for tax increases. This is clearly the whole idea of the Henry Tax review. Probably as a result of this, Business Councils did not line up behind the tax even though all non-mining businesses clearly won out because of the reduced company tax rates.

3. Nothing is secret when this amount of money is involved. The mining industry had clearly prepared for this campaign long in advance, even though the Treasury tried to keep the exact plans secret.

4. The dip in Rudd’s popularity was used to settle old scores within his party and his administration. They must have really hated his guts.

5. The media seems to have been a victim in all this, being fed stories about Rudd from within his own circles, being fed all kinds of storylines by the mining interests, and being bombarded with opinions from all and sundry. No wonder the mainstream media had no idea what to believe.

Lessons:

(Continued)