Club Troppo

"There was a time when Labor’s aim for the poor and disadvantaged was to end poverty and disadvantage", writes John Quiggin. "Now the best they can hope for is ‘extending opportunity‘."

Under John Curtin and Ben Chifley, Labor was the party of work and welfare. The party stood for both full employment and social security.

Attitudes to poverty had changed in the wake of the Great Depression and both parties saw a need to take action. In 1941 the Menzies government established a cross party Parliamentary Joint Committee on Social Security. The committee’s first interim report declared:

For long it was held that poverty was the fault of the individual and was solely due to inefficiency, improvidence, dishonesty, drunkenness and the like. More modern opinion is that poverty is mostly not the fault of the individual but the environment in which he lives. Social services were developed largely because of the conviction that it is misfortune, not inherent evil, which brings people into want, and therefore it is the duty of the community to mitigate the worst effects of that want.

As always, the responsibility of the community was balanced by the responsibility of the individual: "to contribute to the community welfare to the utmost of his physical and mental capacity."

After Labor won office later in 1941 the committee continued its work. And in 1943 Minister for Post-war Reconstruction, Ben Chifley wrote:

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Joshua Gans can’t imagine how staff and students at The Spot would be blocking the toilets with paper towels. It turns out that the problem may be caused by toilet ‘nesters‘. As commenter Alister explains "students and/or staff are using paper towels as seat-liners."

And, as Eli points out, the one thing worse than nesters who clog the plumbing by flushing their nests down down the toilet, it’s nesters who don’t. Some bloggers take a keen interest in these issues. Lauralee explains how she combines nesting with ‘hovering’ while, Aunt B at Tiny Cat Pants has a complaint about poor hovering technique.

On the subject of externalities … at Menzies House commenters are complaining that Clover Moore’s bike paths will mean more traffic congestion in Sydney. The same argument erupted earlier this year when the New Yorker’s John Cassidy started complaining about the proliferation of bike lanes in Manhattan. At Reuters, Felix Salmon argued that Cassidy had the externalities issue "embarrassingly wrong".

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