Monthly Archives: December 2011

Judith Sloan’s intriguing argument about Newstart Allowance

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Judith Sloan surprised participants at the government’s Tax Forum in October when she suggested Newstart Allowance wasn’t adequate. She made the same claim in a piece for the Drum writing: "If we are to expect the unemployed to search for employment with confidence, there is no point pushing them into grinding poverty."

At less that $245 a week, it’s easy to see how spending months or years on Newstart might make it difficult to look for work. Even with Rent Assistance it’s hard to afford accommodation close to where jobs are far from easy to maintain a car. But Sloan seems to have something else in mind. She writes:

… there are messages in the patently inadequate allowance for the unemployed – you are not as deserving as those on other allowances, you are at fault, you should simply find a job. It is not at all clear that these messages are the best way to motivate and encourage the unemployed to gain employment.

If you remained unemployed after months of calling employers, sending out CVs and knocking on doors, what conclusion would you draw? Perhaps you’d decide that there was something wrong with you, something you couldn’t fix. And maybe you’d decide to apply for the Disability Support Pension so that you can stop making a nuisance of yourself with employers — after all, they always seem to want someone younger, fitter, more experienced or better looking. So perhaps the only way to prove that you’re not a dole bludger is to be certified as unemployable.

The classical economist Adam Smith argued that poverty led to shame, encouraging people to withdraw from social contact. Sloan seems to be suggesting something similar. She might have added that if the government’s approach Newstart acts as a signal that the unemployed are unwilling to work, that’s hardly the message they want to be sending to potential employers.

Sloan’s preferred approach seems to be a combination of greater labour market flexibility to create jobs, tough job search obligations and more stringent eligibility conditions for the disability pension to discourage withdrawal from the labour market, and a more adequate rate of Newstart Allowance.

I may not have this exactly right, so it would be interesting to hear Sloan elaborate on her argument for increases in Newstart.

Note: I’ve written about Adam Smith’s views on poverty here: What if Adam Smith was right about poverty?

Paedophile priests and creative sentencing options

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Judge Michael Finnane

Justice Michael Finnane of the NSW District Court has long been one of my favourite legal characters.  But then I’m not a criminal defence lawyer.  If I was I’d almost certainly have a different opinion, as this SMH story notes:

But it is as the state’s most punitive District Court judge – the man who jailed the gang rapist Bilal Skaf for 55 years and the paedophile Robert ”Dolly” Dunn for 30 – that Michael Finnane has made his name. His reputation has prompted defence lawyers to try in vain to move their clients to other courts, and for good reason.

A Herald analysis of the Court of Criminal Appeal’s published decisions since January 2008 shows Judge Finnane is the state’s toughest sentencer.

In the past two years, he has had a total of 37 years stripped from his sentences because the state’s top criminal court deemed them excessive, at a time when it is increasingly reluctant to do so.

Judge Finnane’s decisions were overruled 16 times – 10 of them for excessive sentences.

Even his oldest legal mates like solicitor Greg Walsh try to avoid having a matter heard by Finnane J if they get half a chance.  His Honour explained the extent of his relationship with Walsh in recent reasons for decision for decision in which he refused an application that he disqualify himself  for reasonable apprehension of bias from hearing charges against one of Walsh’s paedophile priest clients:

I have known Mr Walsh personally for more than 30 years. When I was a barrister, he would brief me to appear for his clients from time to time. For the most part I appeared in civil cases.Mr Walsh has always a done a considerable amount of criminal law work in his practice and in the few years before 2000, when I became a judge, he developed a considerable practice appearing for Catholic priests and brothers who were charged with child sex offences. At one stage, he frequently briefed Mr Chester Porter QC to appear for his clients. He also briefed other barristers to appear for them and he appeared for some of them directly. To my knowledge he has appeared in such cases in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia. From time to time, over the years, I have met him on a social basis and have discussed in a broad sense this part of his practice.

Within the past few years, he has borrowed from me a set of robes I had kept from my days as a junior counsel, my barristers wig and some jabots so that he could appear as counsel in the Supreme Court of Tasmania in a child sex case involving a priest or a brother. He discussed this briefly with me.

Greg Walsh’s bias application against his old mate Finnane J arose from a jocular conversation at a morning tea at the District Court following the swearing in of a new judge. On Walsh’s recollection you can certainly see why he was concerned that His Honour might not bring an entirely unbiased mind to bear on the question of sentencing his priestly client CUR24 if a jury ended up finding him guilty of any of the very large number of child sexual abuse charges due to be heard before Finnane J. Unfortunately for Walsh’s client, His Honour’s admittedly hazy recall of the conversation was different enough to allow him to adopt the robust attitude that the High Court says judges should apply towards bias disqualification applications. We wouldn’t want to encourage solicitors to manufacture spurious bias claims against trial judges merely for the purpose of cynical forum shopping, would we?

Anyway, whether Walsh’s recollection or that of Finnane J is the more accurate is currently a moot point. His Honour refused to disqualify himself. Nevertheless His Honour’s version of his morning tea conversation with Greg Walsh is well worth revisiting:

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Annoyed by Google’s helpful improvements? Try the verbatim tool

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Sometimes the words I type into Google’s search box are the words I want to appear in the results. For years now I’ve been using the ‘+’ operator to ensure that every result includes a particular term. But recently, without warning, it stopped working. Fortunately Google have introduced a fix with the verbatim tool. According to Google’s search blog:

In most cases, Google’s algorithms make things better for our users – but in some rare cases, we don’t find what you were looking for. In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly.

Since then, we’ve received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as

  • making automatic spelling corrections
  • personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
  • including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
  • finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
  • searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
  • making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]

You can access the verbatim search tool under “More search tools” on the left-hand side.

According to Andy Baio at Wired, Google wouldn’t disclose why they phased out the ‘+’ operator "though it seems obvious that they’re paving the way for Google+ profile searches."

In the good old days French children burned Santa in effigy

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Last year French parents were outraged by an advertisement that claimed Santa Claus wasn’t real. AdWeek reported:

"I have some bad news for you," a father says to his (grown) son right at the beginning of the spot. "Père Noël doesn’t really exist." Parents are all upset that their children’s illusions about the world will be shattered by this uninvited revelation, since the ad aired during a broadcast of Ratatouille. One child psychologist even claims this could have the effect of a "bomb" on children.

But 60 years ago attitudes in France were different. In a pastoral letter the Catholic Bishop of Toulouse wrote: "Do not speak of Santa Claus for the good reason that he does not exist and never existed. Do not speak of Santa Claus because Santa Claus is a fiction clever people use to remove all religious character from the Christmas holiday."

The bishop’s condemnation was only the beginning. In Dijon, a young priest, Abbe Nourissat, burned Santa in effigy in front of a crowd of cheering children who pelted him with orange peel.

As it happened, Santa rose again to deliver a speech from the town hall: "Nobody can kill me," he said, and assured the children that if they believed in him, there would be plenty of gifts.

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Troppo exposes secret analysis of the NZ election: Shock

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I was sent the following analysis of the NZ election yesterday.  I was sent it by someone I know, but I can’t possibly tell you who it was (or I’d have to kill you). Moreover the person who sent this to me, did not identify the person who sent it to him. I think that’s because he or she is a public servant and he or she can’t be bothered with the hassle of having publicly expressed views. Which is all fair enough. In any event this is the analysis, which I found of some interest.

You inquired about Don Brash and the ACT party in the recent NZ elections.

It’s a terrible result for the ACT.

·         They retained the leafy Auckland seat of Epsom, but with a reduced margin, and with the victor being a conservative named John Banks.

·         They only got 1% of the party vote: their worst ever result, which means that they don’t get any ‘party-list’ parliamentarians to sit alongside John Banks.

·         Don Brash has quit as leader – John Banks will presumably step into that role.

I’m no expert, but here’s my take as to why it happened.

·         Minor parties lose votes after being in government:

o   The three minor parties in the coalition each lost votes.

§  Being in government disappoints idealists – they liked the ACT when it railed against government excess, but didn’t like the party once it failed to change the world and it (mis)used taxpayer funds (eg travel rort claims against former leader Rodney Hide).

o   Those who like the government seem to reward the major party in the coalition: the Nationals have risen from 58 to 60 seats.

§  Don Brash tried to campaign on the ACT record in government, but perhaps people didn’t associate the reforms with the ACT, or perhaps they weren’t popular reforms (eg easing unfair dismissal laws).

§  He tried to campaign on what the ACT would do in a future coalition government, but if they couldn’t get those reforms up last time why expect it the next time.

·         Parties like the ACT are particularly vulnerable to disintegration.

o   Those who are principled/dogmatic enough to want freedom in all spheres of life are few.

o   So parties like the ACT try to attract the more populous hippies (who want drugs to be legalised, and social services) and rednecks (who want wars on drugs, and tax cuts).  But this leads to:

§  constant attacks from the NZ Greens for the hippy vote and from NZ First for the redneck vote (both parties seem to have stolen votes from the ACT); and

§  disunity and splintering (there was public disagreement between Don Brash and John Banks on marijuana decriminalisation, and leaked conversations about the ACT leadership between Banks and John Key).

o   The same thinking could be applied to think-tanks like the IPA.

Susan Johnson’s memoir of a fistula

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I read Susan Johnson’s memoir – A Better Woman – when it came out a few years ago.  I like her writing – clear, insightful and keenly felt. The memoir is about her medical adventures when her body ‘let her down’ as it were after childbirth. In any event it’s out as a audio book.  I assumed when I came across it on ABC radio that, to try to squeeze a few extra pennies out of it wouldn’t be available as a podcast. But I was wrong. Perhaps the publishers figured they might get more Christmas sales if they made it available as a podcast. Perhaps Susan Johnson wanted it podcast. In any event, you can get the downloads here. I recommend it strongly.

The other thing I like about it is that it’s read by Susan Johnson, not an actor. One of the things that intrigues me about the world is that acting is never ‘realistic’.  For instance whenever you listen to a documentary and some scene is ‘reconstructed by actors’, you can always tell that they’re actors.  They say their lines like they’re in a play or a movie, yet they’re acting real life. Strange isn’t it? They’re professionals at feigning life, and yet, when their only job is to feign life, not to ‘put on a play’ which is understandably a kind of hyper-real-life, they can’t do it. I’d like to understand why this is so. I’m sure it’s not a reflection on actors that their acting is not fully ‘realistic’, just as a TV presenters speech to camera is not like they speak normally, and just as when we give a speech to a group it’s not the same voice we use to speak to each other. Still I think it is a very telling reflection on actors that they show little sign of doing something completely realistic on the rare occasions when it’s called for.

In any event, I’ve never heard Susan Johnson speak, but I presumed from the moment I heard her that I was listening to the author. Somehow she read the words as if they were hers. No histrionics or carrying on. No schmoozing over the surface of the words to amplify their mellifluous qualities. Just the words and the feeling of their meaning. And perhaps another sign was that her voice is particular and not particularly strong as actors voices often are.

Anyway, I recommend it as a fine listen.

Different responses to a big opportunity

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Home loan market share

Look at this graph of the great tectonic shifts brought about by the GFC. Securitisation collapsed as a form of funding, and those in the official family ran round doling out gold plated assistance like free government guarantees to our banks (and next to nothing for our securitisers). The opportunity was taken up by just two of the four banking oligarchs, with the other two deciding to let the moment pass. ANZ was busy leveraging its government guarantee to buy Asian banking assets and NAB, well I’m not sure what NAB was doing. Perhaps they and ANZ invested wisely, but you’d work a long time to pick up the market share that Westpac and CBA managed to do at the time.