Author Archives: Cam

Journalistic Meta-Commentary

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The Sydney Morning Herald’s article on the Sea-Eagles trying to sign Willie Mason has fallen to cost cutting journalism and now the server just returns a meta-comment which saves on journalist labor the and reader’s precious time:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /news/news/sea-eagles-make-play-for-mason/2007/11/10/1194329564666.html on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

As a Canterbury-Bankstown supporter I agree with the opinion in this article being expressed in HTTP Status codes.

Trashing the 37c Tax Bracket

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I seem to be the only one, that I have seen anyway, in the Australian blogosphere who is excited about the 37c tax bracket going the way of the dodo in Labor’s tax policy announcement. Peter Martin even suggested it might be bad politics. Hopefully this policy becomes ‘common wisdom’ and the removal of the 37c tax bracket enacted no matter who the party in power is as it simplifies the tax system drastically and removes bracket creep for many income tax payers. Some graphs to visualise what a tax system without the 37c bracket would look like. The data for these graphs is from the 2003-2004 Tax Statistics which is the most up-to-date data publicly available from the ATO.

Note that the 30c tax bracket under Labor’s 2013 policy stretches from 37K to 180K. It becomes a long tail tax with the 15c bracket covering the head of the taxable income curve. The 40c bracket in raw numbers covers a very small minority of taxable individuals.
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I Won’t Be Voting on November 24th

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Not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. I have been purged from the electoral roll.

Like many Australian Diasporans I am in the curious position of being completely disenfranchised. My home country has kicked me off the rolls, yet I am not a citizen of another country so I do not get a democratic vote in the local, state and national governments where I pay taxes. The Southern Cross Group estimates [pdf]:

that there are at least 500,000 Australian citizens of voting age overseas who are not on the electoral roll and who are currently disenfranchised because the law prevents them from enrolling.

Where does the modern mobile globalised workforce fit in with democracy and the nation-state?

Election Media Consumption

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The AES has an interesting graph which shows trending on how people consumed political information during elections. Unfortunately the trend ends at 2004, however, the internet was already rivaling talkback radio, newspapers and radio for media consumption patterns.

I am sure that the ‘internet’ includes mainstream media sites such as the SMH, Australian and so forth as well as independent media and blogs. It would be interesting to see those same figures for 2007 as well as a breakdown of mass media websites, independent media (a-la crikey) and citizen political sites (such as blogs).

Union Power Polling and Electoral Campaigns

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Via Gary Sauer-Thompson: The Australian Electoral Study’s Trends in Australian Political Opinion [PDF] is a goldmine of graphs, polling and trending all thoughtfully gathered into the one document. Especially for graph junkies.

It is also interesting to see where the polling is at odds or in opposition to some of the narratives being told by special interest groups, of which political parties are an example. The graphs on Trade Unions is especially interesting. Fred Argy has already expressed bewilderment as to why the fear of union power is an issue:

Associated with this collective bargaining issue is fear of union power. Here too I find the debate mystifying. In todays highly competitive, globalised economy, unions cannot determine market wages and conditions except in rare situations where businesses have monopoly power (in which case unions are merely giving their workers a share of the monopoly profits).

Which I agree with, and from the graphs in the AES trending, the population seems to as well.

Since the 1970s the public seems to think that the trade unions have been declining in power. Note that this trend occurs long before Keating’s or Howard’s industrial relations reforms. Support for industrial action has seen an ever steeper decline with public opinion preempting any political or policy changes by the Keating or Howard governments.

The ersatz election campaign from the Liberal Government has been hammering on about Trade Union power and how the Labor Cabinet is composed of Unionists who would Mao the country down. Presumably the Textor-Crosby polling duo would have provided the empirical background for such a media message, but from these trends it suggests they are appealing to a minority of the population who still think unions are powerful.

Why would a majority government make appealing to a minority of the country such a big part of their media campaign? Are they hoping that the 44% in the second graph for 2004 thinks that prohibition of unions through Workchoices is not enough and gives all their primary vote to the Coalition? If that trend is consistent then the number thinking tougher laws are required for unions is probably around 39% in 2007. Which makes even less sense why the Government is banging on about it. I don’t understand it.

Graham Young and the Liberal Party

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Like many of you I saw this on facebook:

Graham Young is fighting attempts to expel him from the Liberal Party this Sunday.

This is Graham’s article on Ambit Gambit from July describing the situation and why the party is seeking to throw him out. I hope Graham gets the result he wants.

Despite the Liberal Party’s run of power at the national level they no longer have any penetration at the state level and there is a high probability of them being voted out of government in the upcoming federal election. One of the problems the Liberal Party has is that they have very few decent political commentators that are for their cause.

Most of the Liberal Party commenteriat is not liberal, but the modern style of authoritarian conservative. We see flat earth type trolls like Andrew Bolt, permanent state of emergency advocates like Janet Albrechtson or commentators such as Tim Blair who guarantees no ‘leftie’ makes a spelling error. There are very few self-identified Liberal Party supporters who write rational, well written, well thought out, liberalist political and electoral commentary. Graham is one of those few.

It appears the Liberal party is going to do a pretty ugly stint in the wilderness for the next few years and will need good commentators to bring the party back to its core liberal political beliefs rather than the authoritarian affirmation of being in power for the sake of it.

They are going to need people like Graham Young to do it.

Holden Efijay Production?

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I remember as a young bloke reading an ad for a Holden FJ that was nearby for $3,000. I rang the seller and then jumped in the car to look at it. Unfortunately even back then three grand only bought you a rustbucket FJ that is up on blocks. I ended up buying a 1962 EJ Holden instead. So it was with interest when I saw Holden display a modern vision of the FJ in the Efijay that was put on a Chevrolet Corvette chassis.

The car picked up interest in the United States and was shown around the different motor shows and cruises/drive-ins. It seems that some wealthy folks want it, and want it bad. Autoblog writes:

It’s not uncommon for over enthusiastic gear heads to make offers or even send in checks to buy a concept car with the hope that production is right around the corner. General Motors has apparently already received interest for a production version of its heralded Holden Efijy concept from “Oil-rich sheiks, mega-millionaire British businessmen and even the brother of Russia’s president.”

Speculation is that some co-operative between Holden, HSV and Elfin will build it for a cool one million a pop. It is good to see innovative design and engineering be rewarded by the market. It will also be a headline car for Holden if it all goes ahead. Good stuff.