"Skeptics think we should stop firestorms by reducing fuel loads, and clearing firebreaks. Unskeptical scientists on the other hand are talking about going vegan, swapping light globes, installing windmills and photovoltaic panels and of course…. planting more trees. Oh the dilemma? Should we stop fires with firebreaks or wave some solar panels?" #QotD

Jo Nova writing on the reaction to the Australian bushfires from climate scientologists, asks How Many Fires Can Australia Stop with Solar Panels & Windfarms:

"As some fires rage, parts of the nation are gripped with witchcraft.
    "Skeptics think we should stop firestorms by reducing fuel loads, and clearing firebreaks. Unskeptical scientists on the other hand are talking about going vegan, swapping light globes, installing windmills and photovoltaic panels and of course…. planting more trees. Oh the dilemma? Should we stop fires with firebreaks or wave some solar panels? ...
    "What will it take for us to wake up to the Science Crisis? Somehow it had never occurred to [warmists] that rainforests can burn. What are our universities teaching?
Five kilometers away from the disastrous fires [at Binna Burra] is Numinbah, where there is no trend at all in rainfall ... 

    "This is the reality of climate change:

…

    "The only trend that’s meaningful in fires is that 67 years of fire management in the hot, dry state of WA shows the more prescribed area that we burn, the less that wildfire does."

QotD: "The concept of white male privilege is like the Christian notion of original sin."

"It seems that the concept of white male privilege is like the Christian notion of original sin. We are somehow born with it and somehow have to atone for it."
~ Australian Senator David Leyonhjelm talking to 2GB radio about 'white privilege'

.

“Australia is not the attraction: they just wanted safety and certainty.”

 

They flee from their place of danger and uncertainty to set out on wild seas in a flimsy vessel.   However dangerous the journey, it looks better to them than what they leave behind. Their voyage of hope however has ended in a concentration camp on Manus Island.

The spirits of everyone is very bad there is a lot of hopelessness there.  I was talking to a friend of ours and asked him did he know anyone elsewhere that could sponsor him for a visa.  He doesn’t have anyone anywhere else. He just looked at me and said “I am going to die here”.  He is early 20s.
    They have no faith in anything anymore including the court process. Of course every time that the court process stalls it brings on those feelings again.
    The reality is the hopelessness and boredom, they really feel like there is nothing left for them now.
    Australia is in the process of building roads between the centre and Lorengau.   
    A lot of the refugees don’t want to come to Australia: they just want to go somewhere and be safe.  Unfortunately it appears that Australia does not have any third country willing to take them.  

Australia was not the attraction: they just wanted safety and certainty. Instead, human beings get this.

Unfortunately, the government still insists on pursuing this policy, accusing the people who speak out against it of exaggerating and inventing the damning evidence. But the government is lying. And now we can see their plan clearly: they do not care that we on Manus and Nauru are refugees. They only want us to take their bribes and go back to certain danger, death and persecution. In response to overwhelming evidence of abuse, their only answer is ‘take our money, and go back to your country of origin.’
    After 40 months – more than three years – no-one has been settled on Manus Island. The few in Port Moresby are struggling to survive. Now several more of us have been attacked by local people who do not want us here. Therefore we can only say that we are official hostages.
    Saving people’s lives at sea is being used as a cover to implement this grossly inhumane and immoral policy. Turnbull and Dutton claim they are on the side of compassion. But this policy has not had any achievement; it has just caused intense suffering and extreme agony for asylum seekers in detention, while pushing other vulnerable people into harms’ way elsewhere and damaging the reputation of Australia in worldwide public opinion. True compassion comes not just when it suits political ends, but when it involves perspective-taking: recognising our shared humanity and imagining what you would have done in another’s shoes. Now, more than ever, it is time for Australian people to yell loudly at the government to urge it to confess that the policy of Nauru and Manus resettlement has reached a dead end, and to urge the government to bring an end to this cruel policy as soon as possible.

.

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Backpacker murder exposes immigration laws promoting exploitation

 

We know how Australia treats refugees and people arriving informally by boat. But their backpacker visa scheme is equally xeonophobic and almost as barbaric – as the tragic murder of a young British backpacker has exposed.

Mia Ayliffe-Chung [from Derbyshire, England[ was murdered in a remote Australian backpacker hostel in August 2016 … along with another Briton, Tom Jackson, 30, who courageously tried to save her.

The “remote Australian backpacker hostel” is not part of any resort. The one in which Mia was killed by another ‘inmate’ was in backblocks Queensland next to a field of nothing but rocks, snakes and sugar cane, a place Mia told her Mum, Rosie,was "like a prison.” It is part of a network of virtual slave-labour camps into young travellers are thrown while working out the 88 days the Australian government demands to extend their tourist visa.

Young travellers who want to extend their one-year working holiday visa in Australia are obliged to carry out 88 days of work on farms or in construction, carrying out unpopular, often extremely arduous labour.
    To accommodate them, a network of grim hostels has sprung up - such as the one where Mia died in Home Hill, Queensland - which act as employment agencies as well as offering bed and board in sparse dormitories.
    The flow of work day by day is often sporadic and backpackers are at the mercy of sometimes exploitative hostel owners and employers.
"It's modern-day slavery," says [Mia’s mum] Rosie.
    "The work is back-breaking. Sometimes the hostel owner takes passports away from the young people if they owe them money for rent.
    "There's quite a bit of sexual harassment too in some places. No one wants to blow the whistle, they all just want their visas… In the hostels there's a tense, febrile atmosphere, with drink and drugs."

By stripping the right to free movement from these young adventurers experimenting with life in a new land, the government has given almost total power over their young lives, work and welfare to what amounts to plantation owners and their overseers. The wretched young folk housed cheek-by-jowl in this hostel were woken every day to clear rocks from the fields, at pay rates well under minimum wage. To whom was there to complain ? Certainly not the government, whose job it should be to protect rights. And precious few Australians, to whom keeping people out of their big, broad land has become almost obsessive.

If those outposts on Nauru and Manus and Christmas Islands can be called concentration camps, then these are like the quarters reluctantly doled out to plantation slaves.

Since her murder, Mia’s mother Rosie has begun a campaign to highlight the exploitation of young backpayers by a system that simply invites inhumanity.

"Closure for me would be to see this campaign get off the ground. I hope that I can get the message out to other young people and their parents that there are dangers out there which they may not have anticipated."
    Rosie says: "Through this campaign we could save lives. Mia is not the first person to die in that situation - how many girls have been sexually harassed on the farms, leaving life-long scars?"
    Paul Broadbent, chief executive of the UK-based Gangmasters Licensing Authority, has met Rosie and backs the campaign. He says: "Rosie's campaigning is courageous and admirable and, as an organisation that exists to prevent the exploitation of vulnerable workers, we fully support her endeavours."

You simply cannot discuss immigration without addressing all the effects of limiting the right to free movement. Including how it places those left out at the mercy of those who exploit the limits to exploit the lives of others.

If you’re a left-winger struggling to find a reason to opposed closing borders, then just think of the power imbalance that creates, and what it makes inevitable …

[Pic from the Herald article]

.

The power blackout Australia had to have, and we all have to learn from

 

Comment at Catallaxy Files

South Australia’s total state-wide power blackout (no electricity across the state apart from four diesel generators in hospitals) was the energy disaster Australian energy policies had made inevitable, and the wake-up call the rest of the industrialised world needed to have.

“There were no implications for other Australian states from the extensive blackout,” said Clean Energy Council policy manager Tom Butler in the wake of the disaster, denying any relationship between his “hipster energy” and the blackout – when it’s clear that the connection could not be more strong, and the implications far wider than just for other Australian states.

All of us should sit up and take notice.

Some years ago I wrote that NZ’s “Green Dream Team” of Kyoto + RMA would lead inevitably to long-term problems here in NZ:

The greenies’ anti-development crusade reached its climax in this country with the RMA, an act making the future construction of necessary infrastructure (like power stations and hydro dams) virtually impossible. Their anti-energy crusade has reached its climax with the Kyoto Protocol, promising measures to strangle our existing infrastructure (like power stations and industrial plants)… together, these bureaucratic monsters will act like a calicivirus on industry, and on all who depend on industry for their survival

The fact is that South Australia sucked down the same anti-development, anti-energy crusade as we did here, but in even greater doses. Anti-development laws burdened the building of new energy infrastructure and encouraged the mothballing of existing reliable energy producers; while anti-fossil-full crusading meant that any new energy producers in the state were almost soley so-called “renewables.”

The forced shutdown of operating coal plants and mandated increased use of renewables had significantly increased energy costs to consumers by eliminating production from low cost power plants while increasing use of more costly renewable energy which also requires the operation of higher cost natural gas power plants for reliability backup with these backup costs hidden from consumers.

This had made South Australia dangerously reliant on the dangerously unreliable form of energy production known in the green movement as “renewable energy” – and when the interconnection with Victoria failed, so too did the much-hyped “renewable energy” base.

Renewables? Call them unreliables.

A once in a 50-year storm was enough to shut down the renewables-packed grid, shut down all supply and send the state reeling straight back (quite literally) into the dark ages.

A warning about the undue reliance came as recently as the weekend, the Grattan Institute arguing “that the disconnect between climate change policy and energy markets poses a clear threat to the security of energy supply.”

The renewable energy target has encouraged the development of wind and solar generation but has the potential to undermine supply security at a reasonable price, since it forces the closure of inefficient power stations without encouraging the construction of the necessary new generation supply sources.

This is precisely the effect of the Green Dream Team in action, from which no western country is today immune.

We forget too easily that energy creation is what leverages human effort; without which we would all struggle to stay alive. And that until so-called renewable forms of energy become actually reliable, then we should abandon reliable forms of energy production at our peril.

So we in NZ can at least be grateful that Huntly’s reliable thermal generators will remain open for a few years yet, even as we decry Nick Smith’s Emissions Tax Scam that makes its production of energy less profitable.

But when you hear next time the siren song of a green crusader arguing to make reliable energy production more costly, more difficult and less likely – telling you wind and solar are all our civilisation needs to keep on rolling -- just call to mind what might be a useful battle-cry:

Remember South Australia!

Because the same Green Dream Team destroying energy, lives and futures there is still at work here as well.

.

---

NB: This graph below – care of Aneroid Energy [and hat tip Jim Rose and Stop These Things] shows precisely what happened when South Australia needed to lean on its much-hyped base of Unreliables:

Ouch!

Let Russel Norman never, never, never tell you we can rely on “renewables” when we’re in a hole.

To paraphrase Lou Reed:

You can’t depend on renewables,
When you need them you know they’re not there.

 

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Australia, this is no way to treat your guests

 

Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, –
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
~ Robbie Burns

Hundreds of miles from the north coast of Australia is a monument both to man’s inhumanity to man, and to one of its causes.

Rich phosphate resources once made Nauru rich, it’s people one of the world’s wealthiest. Now, its riches exahausted, it sells itself to a foreign country to be its garbage can for unwanted immigrants.

Exposed this week on Nauru is the largest cache of documents to be leaked from within Australia’s asylum seeker detention regime detailing assaults, sexual assaults and self-harm. They sought asylum, they sought desperately to breathe free – no crime but that of vision -- and instead have been locked up in concentration camp conditions with narry a date for release. What they are forced to endure there is inhuman.

The Nauru files set out as never before the assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse and living conditions endured by asylum seekers held by the Australian government, painting a picture of routine dysfunction and cruelty.
    The Guardian’s analysis of the files reveal that children are vastly over-represented in the reports. More than half of the 2,116 reports – a total of 1,086 incidents, or 51.3% – involve children, although children made up only about 18% of those in detention on Nauru during the time covered by the reports…
   Some reports contain distressing examples of behaviour by traumatised children. According to a report from September 2014, a girl had sewn her lips together. A guard saw her and began laughing at her. In July that year a child under the age of 10 undressed and invited a group of adults to insert their fingers into her vagina…
    In the files there are seven reports of sexual assault of children, 59 reports of assault on children, 30 of self-harm involving children and 159 of threatened self-harm involving children…
    Allegations of sexual assault, particularly against young women, are a persistent theme of the files. In one report an asylum seeker described being told she was “on a list” written by local Nauruan guards naming single women they were “waiting for”. “She has received offers to get her pregnant when she gets out,” the caseworker wrote.
    They reveal allegations of misconduct by Wilson Security guards at the detention centre. In one report a “cultural adviser” for Wilson Security, the company that employs guards at the detention camp, allegedly told an asylum seeker who had been sexually assaulted in camp that “rape in Australia is very common and people don’t get punished”…
    Health and medical experts have consistently warned of the mental harm caused by prolonged detention. The files show in graphic detail how this harm has manifested.
    One man asked a caseworker where he could buy bullets so he could get someone else to shoot him. A woman sharpened a pencil with a razor blade, then cut her wrists. Another wrapped a rope around her neck and tried to hang herself…

This is not how other human beings should be or need to be treated. The stories, more than 2000 of them, are dire. You can read them all here, if you can, detailed in a unique database. (Don’t do it over lunch.)

It’s like a psychotic experiment writ large: Give thugs unmonitored virtually life-or-death command over desperate people, and then stand back to find out what happens.

What happens is bestial.

Australian’s themselves can’t disclaim responsibility for this shameful treatment of other human beings on the basis that it’s their government doing it, not them. Every election the go-to move for an Australian Prime Minister in trouble is to damn these folk they call “boat people.” To mistreat them. To banish them. To make them go away. How? Somehow. This is being done in the name of every Australian, and everyone bears the stain.

As author Robert Heinlein suggested, successful immigrants demonstrate just by their choice and gumption in choosing a new life that they are worthy of respect. So God damn you if the only two words you can find to put together when talking about people who leave their homelands to seek a better life for themselves and their families are ‘illegal aliens.’ Or ‘boat people.’ And God damn you to a hell of your own making if this is the way you treat them.

And what’s at the heart of the inhumanity? What could make people we think we know turn barbarian like this?

Let me suggest an answer. Instead of seeing these people as a net benefit, they see every one only as another mouth to feed. They see them not as other producers, but as beneficiaries. They have been made to think that way by politics. By politicians whose job it is to set one group against another.

What condemns these people to die in squalour is the Welfare State.  The dark secret at the heart of the Welfare State is that it's an essentially tribal structure. It's a kind of caveman collectivism: if you're inside the group, you can eat. If you’re outside the group, you can starve.

There is no cow more sacred than our creaking and bankrupt welfare state. By its very nature, the Welfare State dehumanises people—viewing them as nothing other than either a mouth to feed or a wallet to plunder. In defence of their wallets, they think, Australians demand defence of their shores. Defence against the helpless, the hopeless, the dying.

Not just bankrupt. Morally bankrupt.

And once again, this dehumanising moral bankruptcy at the heart of the Welfare State lies exposed, this time on a small island several hundred miles and well over the horizon from Australia.

RELATED STORIES:

 

 

 

 

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New Aus climate department head damned by Greenpeace – so he can’t be all bad

 

While new UK PM Theresa May was disestablishing Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change in her very first day in office – raising hope with some of us that she may be as completely wet as she appears – Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull is going the reverse route:

The Dept of Environment has been merged with Energy, which makes sense for carbon traders and the renewables industry, but perhaps not for the environment. [ref: JO NOVA]

Mind you, Greenpeace and the Greens don’t like the appointee in charge of the new super-ministry, which offers some cause for hope:

Former Greens leader Bob Brown said Mr Frydenberg would bury Australia’s environmental hopes and aspirations.
    “The pro-nuclear, pro-coal Frydenberg has been whingeing about environmental campaigns against him in his seat of Kooyong,” Mr Brown said.
    He has previously supported an end to Victoria’s moratorium on onshore gas exploration and praised Margaret Thatcher’s record on environment and climate change.

Although Thatcher’s record is not great, to be fair. There is evidence for example that it was her who helped begin the climate wailing. Nonetheless:

Greenpeace campaigner Nikola Casule said Mr Frydenberg’s views on climate change were “an embarrassing relic from a different era.”

Which sounds much more promising. As does this:

The Victoria MP has long been a supporter of nuclear energy, and has shown he is also a strong supporter of the coal industry, recently insisting it had a strong future, describing it as a “living, breathing, success story.” …
    On coal … Frydenberg said: “There is a strong moral case here,” …. “Over a billion people don’t have access to electricity. That means that more 2 billion people today are using wood and dung for their cooking.”

Which is true – and Al Gore’s wet dream would keep them that way.

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Australia’s refugee detention programme “uneconomic, inhumane and flat-out stupid”

 

Australia’s refugee detention programme is supposed to save the country* while saving the country money.

Neither is true.

Minister in charge of the programme Peter Dutton is down to arguing that a flood of "illiterate and innumerate" refugees “would be taking Australian jobs, there's no question about that." It surely makes you wonder how poorly Australians must be doing their jobs if they would be taken by folk who are illiterate, innnumerate and (in Mr Dutton’s eyes) barely human.

If they weren’t in here stealing Australian’s jobs, says Dutton, they’d be out their languishing on welfare – costing Australian taxpayers money. (You wouldn’t know an election is going on, would you?) Yet the programe to keep them out is already costing Australian taxpayers several billions. (Not to mention any reputation for humanity.) Taken together, refugee detention centres cost more then putting 670,600 people on the dole. Or to put it another way, every single asylum seeker currently detained on Manus or Nauru already costs Australian taxpayers around $400,000 for each person every year.

By contrast, allowing asylum seekers to live in the community while their claims are processed costs just $12,000 each person per year, one twentieth of the cost of the offshore camps, and even less if they are allowed the right to work.

And work is what they do really want, which is how refugees more than pay their way. Indeed,

the latest report from [Peter Dutton’s] own department, compliled just a couple of years ago, shows that overwhelmingly refugees, asylum-seekers, those who’ve come in under the humanitarian programme to Australia overwhelmingly contribute. They are not a burden on [taxpayers]…
    These reports by his department that have been prepared over twenty or thirty years have shown that they are the opposite of a burden or a cost to the Austrailan economy and society. They contribute on every level possible. They are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be here,and they make something of themselves.
    And just as a sidebar: five of the eight billionaires on the BRW Rich List have come from impoverished migrant backgrounds.

So not just uneconomic, but inhumane and flat-out stupid.

No wonder the ruling Liberal Party see this treatment as an Australian election winner.

.

---

* But, but, if taxpayers guardians weren’t out there on the high seas stopping the boats, says Julie Bishop, there would be “millions” of “boat people” flooding in.
Not true: “The highest ever number of asylum seekers to arrive by boat in one year, 2013, was 21,000. That was just 9% of Australia’s overall annual immigration intake that year. In the same year the USA took 88,400 claims, France took 60,100, Germany 109,600 and Italy 27,800. The Liberal government has now slashed the annual intake to 16,500.”

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Farrar lies to Australians

David Farrar has been lying to Australians, and the fact he needs to lie tells us a lot about what the Key Government is not.

Still struggling to understand what New Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull stands for (hint: nothing), the Australian Financial Review invited David Farrar to fill them in one of the few clues Turnbull has let slip: that John Key “has been able to achieve very significant economic reforms in New Zealand … by taking on and explaining complex issues and then making the case for them.”

As curious as the rest of us were to have these reforms revealed (Michael Reddell having already supplied a short list amounting to zero of reforms they have carried out, and a large list of things they haven’t reformed, but should have, and an even longer list of things that are a genuine step backward), AFR readers would have read the piece with some eagerness.

The lying starts early: "his government has balanced the budget and achieved several significant economic reforms,” says Farrar.

I count one flat-out lie, and several significant exaggerations. (You see what he/I did there?)

First the lie: For the benefit of Australian readers, the Key government has NEVER balanced a budget. Not once. Not for want of boasting about it—but then, at the start of the global financial crisis John Key boasted to the WSJ about not overspending either, and we know how that turned out: as a commenter on Farrar’s post describes: “pissing away $100 billion in extra borrowing to oil every squeaky political wheel.”

Because not only as the Key Government NEVER balanced the goddamned budget, it has very dramatically gone out and done the opposite—blowing the budget for several years by several significant hundreds-of-millions.

And Farrar knows that full well.

So what are the "several significant economic reforms" according to Farrar? According to him, they include
"partial privatisations of three power companies and the national airline."

Neither of which is either significant, or a reform.

“Another significant economic reform was a tax switch package—income tax rates were dropped and GST increased.”

Which ended up only in increasing the total tax take.

And that, dear readers, is that for even a Key supporter trying to talk up these alleged reforms that have allegedly been so significant.

Which, frankly, is why he has to lie.

And, ironically, his lying it comes at a lull when even government supporters are beginning to wonder if we’ve just witnessed a dirigiste turning point in the Key Cabinet, in doubling down on “the decision of two government ministers to overturn fundamental property rights and signal the political interests of the state were supreme.”

So perhaps there really is a clue in John Key’s Government to let Australians know what to expect from their new grey man across the ditch, in that “The most singular part about Malcolm Turnbull leadership is [perhaps] that he has no desire to lead anywhere except where others also on the left already want to go.” Because in that, Key is very definitely a role model.

Quote of the Day: On Malcolm Turnbull [updating]

“Malcolm is almost the perfect reflection of media opinion. He is like blotting
paper, soaking up every conventional opinion without any actual apparent
ability to think for himself. He is a non-entity in the Barack Obama mould,
filled with vapid thoughts and a high opinion of his own abilities and intellect
that is never at any stage reflected in anything he says or any action he takes.”
~ Steve Kates, ‘If you’re so rich why aren’t you smart?’

UPDATE 1: Chris Berg: ‘The Abbott Government's Real Problem [Was] That [it Was] Not Ideological Enough’

UPDATE 2: Other commentary:

• “The anti Abbott, Abbott, Abbott campaign in the media has been relentless and successful. Turnbull has said he will stick with Australia’s carbon emissions cuts (26% by 2030) but this means nothing.”
• “How did it come to this? Start with widespread discontent with Abbott’s performance at all levels in the party. From his broken election promises on health and education reforms to his selection of Prince Philip as a new Antipodean knight to his tendency to undermine cabinet government, Abbott upset the sensitivities of not just the metropolitan sophisticates (who have always loathed him) and mainstream Australians (who voted for him in droves two years ago), but many of his parliamentary colleagues (who feared they’d lose their seats in next year’s election)… They may look like a party with a death wish, but Liberal MPs believe tonight is an act of self-preservation, not self-destruction… But the immediate future hardly looks bright.”
• “Tony Abbott was the dumbest prime minister of my lifetime. The epitome of dumb. Dumb on policy and and dumb on expressing it. Fully committed to the dumb economy in scrapping mining taxes, promoting dying commodities, holding back productivity reform, cheering on another salivating house price bubble and its rent seeking banks and doing nothing to prepare the nation for the mutual sacrifices needed to return dynamism to our productive sectors. Turnbull must turn his formidable rhetorical skills to undoing this legacy of dumb.
• “If Malcolm Turnbull is serious about economic reform –  which frankly seems unlikely –  he shouldn’t be looking across the Tasman for inspiration and example.”
• “The punchline: Turnbull was Chairman of Goldman Sachs Australia from 1997-2001.”

And from Catallaxy Files:

• “Malcolm Turnbull, I believe, can deliver Liberal government to Australia in a way Tony Abbott cannot. To be fair to Abbott he did bring down a Labor government and see off two Labor Prime Ministers, but he never grew into the role himself.”
• “Recall that this government has not succeeded. It reversed itself when it shouldn’t have (free speech, tax increases, medicare co-payment) and has entrenched itself when it shouldn’t have (submarines).”
• “Tony’s a dud, a busted flush and a waste of space, but the truly horrifying realisation is that he may be the best we can do, in current circumstances. Prop him up for long enough till someone better, or at least less clueless and gutless, comes along.”
• “The Liberal Party has always been the natural home for classical liberals in Australia … With the exception of selling Medibank and winding back the NBN, this government has done nothing that could be described as liberalising, and has ruled out reform to free speech law and IR. It is facing the serious prospect of failing to achieve trade liberalisation, even in the tepid form reflected in the bilateral trade agreements. It has increased marginal tax rates, and increased the scope of government in almost every sphere of activity. If you want traditional Liberalism – the liberalism of intellect, and achievement outside politics – however improbably and unattractive he may be, Turnbull seems your best choice.”
• “Turnbull is the reason you can’t even choose what lightbulb you want in your house. If that’s “liberal” give me mindless conservatism.”
• “Turnbull bayoneting another Liberal leader while ensuring Labor is a lock for next election. If he was not so consistently dreadful Abbott wouldn’t have survived so long.”
• “I’m voting informal – I refuse to choose between three left-wing parties.”

Modern Australians have such a short attention span

Modern Australians have such a short attention span.

They grew tired of old John Howard in 2007, throwing him over for an overwhelmingly popular prefect called Kevin. *

The popularity didn’t last. They soon remembered they couldn’t abide prefects, so his party threw him out after three years and voted in a headmistress.

And after three years, they remembered they really didn’t like headmistresses either  and asked for the perfect prefect back.

Meanwhile, the Blue team were running through their own leadership lists until they found one the electorate quite liked, mostly because (unlike the Malcolm in the Middle whom he supplanted) he had opinions.

This was so successful that the electorate through out the prefect they remembered they hated and elected the monk they’d forgotten was mad, until after a time (or the time he knighted a duke, anyway) they remembered they didn’t much like opinions either. Especially his.

                                     (You keeping up?)

Meanwhile, the twitterati and literati were still carrying such a torch for the Malcolm in the Middle (who tended to lean more left than middle in a way the twitterati and literati rather liked) that he decided he could sleepwalk to a place in his party’s hearts ahead of the monk over differences more about populism and personality rather than policy.

Only it turns he couldn’t.

Not today, anyway,

Leaving the nominally frugal momentarily in charge of the always fickle.

Here’s Stevie Wonder with the two-word summary of the monarchist monk’s egregious faux pas that led to today’s non-decision:.

* No relation whatsoever to the Undertones’s Perfect Cousin.

A libertarian joins the Australian Senate

Australia now has its first member of parliament from a libertarian party: David Leyonhjelm, from the Liberal Democrats.

Here’s his maiden speech:

[Hat tip Catallaxy Files]

And Now for Something Completely Different:

As Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott heads to the Northern Territory to live in an aboriginal community for a week, honouring an election promise to gain “a better understanding of the needs of people living and working in those areas” by spending one week every year living amongst them, our guest correspondent from Australia, Suzuki Samurai, offers his own thoughts on the aboriginal culture, and its problems.
Complete with strong views, and even stronger language …

And Now for Something Completely Different

I've been putting off writing my thoughts on this subject for some time now. Not due to lack of wanting to mind you, but because I haven't been able to get my head around what is that I've been seeing, or sometimes even believe what I'm seeing, around me – or what a solution might be. (And because even on a politically incorrect blog I’m not sure what the reaction will be.)

Living  in Australia out the back of Bourke, it is impossible to avoid concluding that the state of the Australian Aboriginal is not a happy one.  Whatever else may be said, the Aboriginal culture is truly sad, frustrating, and, to put it bluntly, the most disappointing that I've had the misfortune to lay eyes on.

The first time I'd ever really given half a thought to the issue was at a wee gathering in Sydney a few years back. Over a bottle or three of Ardbeg on the balcony that night (a long night), discussing topics such as the merits or otherwise of your average Australian and the benefits of positive drinking, were four people: the editor of this blog, PC, a Rev Michael Gordge, an Australian whom PC kept referring to in a quasi-friendly manner as “Cunt'' (well, he was a building inspector), and me.

The Reverend Gordge, who lives in Darwin, was telling us about his perspective on the state of the Aboriginal...long story short, and to 'gild the lily' a lot, he mentioned that there are “a few problems” within the Aboriginal community that no-one however well-educated was able to fix. After much heated discussion the conversation eventually faded into a dribbling competition, so I can't recall if we came up with any ideas that night of what should or shouldn't be done -- but I do remember PC singing a made-up Dylanesque song while strumming an imaginary guitar...at which point, I fell off my chair and decided it was bed time.

Anyway, here I am now in a remote Northern Territory town where there is a large Aboriginal population in an adjoining settlement, and the conversation frequently comes back to mind. In my current employ I have daily contact with many of these folk and, barring a few delightful exceptions, they are disproportionally illiterate in English, innumerate, obese (or, oddly, underfed), unwashed, and very often drunk - or a combination of all these fine attributes. There are so many problems, and so little that seems can be done.

Now as I’ve already suggested, I have no problems rolling around drunk myself. But one sees too many drunker aboriginals rolling around on the ground in public parks and sometimes slumped on the branch of a tree, yelling at themselves or someone else, or just the phantoms flitting through their heads. That’s the noisy ones. The quieter ones can be found sleeping in a shade offered by the thousands of flies covering their bodies. The kids have the cutest faces, but with snotty noses of the infectious kind, sores, and often with bandages on their broken or cut appendages one can't help but wonder how they'll survive.

It’s a sad story, and much, much too common.  I don't think I'm embellishing; the visual preponderance of these maladies beggars belief. Of course there are multiple past and present reports that confirm what I see. I won’t bore you with the statistics. Besides being boring, statistics tend to make abstractions of real people.

But one stat in a recent finding stood out: in a town/area of a fairly static 1600 people, the vast majority of whom are Aborigine, has over the last 10 years reported over 3000 cases of STDs. Included in that number are girls under 10 years old, and many more under 14. Look at that number again: three thousand over ten years in a community of sixteen hundred. And these are only the cases reported. So this is a culture with real problems.

Let’s just say, and to put it into perspective for NZ readers, that all of the negative stats attributed to NZ Maori would be something for the Australian Aboriginal to aspire to.

So what bought bout this shambles? Let me start with what I think the well-intentioned, and/or government folk think. While in Alice Springs writing his book Down Under, author Bill Bryson watched as Aborigines & white people walked about town on a busy Saturday morning, and made this astute observation:

The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes.

He's right, it is like that. Bryson then goes on to make reference to some things done by past governments – some, like the “stolen generations” now considered to be bad things.  He then points out that they are doing a lot more, a lot better stuff now, with programs that target Aboriginal 'issues' much better.  But he sounds like he’s trying to persuade himself, because he eventually admits that all these measures are failing too, and that the poor stats remain either the same or worse. All true. But curiously, he still ends with this feckless statement:

If I were contracted by the Commonwealth of Australia to advise on Aboriginal issues all I could write would be: 'Do More. Try Harder. Start now.'

Do more of what’s already failing? Start now? Makes no sense, does it.

This is the all-too-often default position for good people isn't it?  Whatever has been done, has either done nothing or made things worse. But the situation is so shit, that any caring person would want something to be done. So if something ain't working – do it harder. If the money isn't fixing it – spend more. If government inference isn't changing anything – they should interfere even more in perhaps another way, or the same way, or both ... fuck, who knows?  Something must be done – this looks like something – so just for fuck’s sake do it!!

This is worse than simply a problem of a growing underclass; a problem seems to grow no matter what is done, even with the very best intentions. Every programme started ends in total failure. Yet without any programmes at all, the failure simply continues.  And every day,  the media releases reports, publishes pontificating, and hosts the usual grizzling about the continual Aboriginal enfeeblement being caused by … well, by Captain Cook & Arthur Phillip and their colleagues it seems, though both seemed fairly enlightened souls even by the standards of the day.

Anyway, I say those two as opposed to today's non-Aboriginal population because, contrary to popular belief, the Aussies I've seen or have gotten to know seem on the whole to be extraordinarily fair minded (I know, but I swear it's true). If I have heard any complaints from these tax-payers about the largesse poured into the bottomless Aboriginal midden, then it's pretty damned tame. So things on that score at least seem to have changed.

Of course, what you won’t hear from anyone, or only rarely, is any criticism of the Aboriginal culture itself, nor will you hear anyone talk about, let alone recognise, the destructive results of welfare and the government programmes that have tried to solve things. Too scared to step outside the never-ending eulogy to the “noble savage” while watching them suffer and die. One exception  is the late Neville Kennard from the Centre of Independent Studies, who argued government failures can be called "genocide by welfare" :

As with all things government does, the unintended consequences of its well-intentioned idealism and largesse has gone horribly wrong. Schooling, nutrition, health, work, integration. It is time for a major and radical re-think to save the tragedy continuing for generations to come.

Yet the tragedy is not inevitable, since

Aborigines who escape the Aboriginal Welfare Industry fare well in the white-fella’s society. This would seem to indicate that despite certain “communitarian” customs in their tribal and traditional culture, they can adapt very easily to western ways.

Nonetheless,

The political-correctness of “aboriginality”, of language, of customs and black-fella culture ensures the Original Australians remain an underclass in the land they occupied for thousands of years.

Whatever the failures of government, and they are many even if well-meant, one would think that the question of the Aboriginal culture itself should be recognised as being at least partially responsible for the problem.   Yet, if media reports were all one had to go on, you would think that irresponsibility, indolence, violence, jealousy, theft, rape, incest, paedophilia, intemperance, and lack of concern for the future all started with the arrival of a Yorkshireman and his ship in the 1770's.

In fact, the aboriginal culture is often referred to with such deference and obsequiousness one would be forgiven for thinking they'd reached such a state of Nirvana we should all be emulating them! Yet this is a culture whose language, as Bill Bryson mentioned, that never contained a word for 'yesterday' or 'tomorrow.'

Telling, isn't it.

The narrative of the Aboriginals’ 45,000-year history is given some majesty in popular opinion pieces. Why, I don't know, unless stagnation is your thing. Wandering about for 45,000 years while advancing as a culture not one iota: no writing, no buildings, no structures, no technological advancements of any note. In short: Nothing, aside from some rock painting, superstition, and subsistence. This is nothing about which today’s Aboriginals need to feel either pride or humility, since today’s individuals have no responsibility for what others did in the past, only what they themselves do today and in the future.  But this 45,000-year story of stagnation does not seem to me what constitutes the natural state of man, or any sort of grounds for future success should one attempt  to find lessons in it for today.

Sure, if I were in need of dinner if stuck in the god-awful Australian desert, then I'd sure-as-hell like a traditional Aboriginal bloke to find me a nice bug or two, or toss a bent stick and catch me a kangaroo to ride out on. But, after 45,000 years of coming up with fuck-all else, that should be the least he should know. (And by the way, does anyone know why Rolf Harris wanted his kangaroo tied down?)

And none of this stuff has disappeared.  All the aspects needed to live in the traditional ways are all still right there. If one wants to live off the land, there it is.¹ If one wants to jump up and down and bang sticks together, the sticks haven’t gone away. Roll around in linesman paint, roll away. Blow into a hollow stick? – sure. If you want to wander about looking for bugs, berries, kangaroos...or whatever else blows your leather loin cloth up, it's all right there, land-o-plenty.

However the only people I've seen digging up inshore shellfish are the ever-industrious Thai women who live in Aussie. But Aboriginals? Hardly. And who could blame them. Not surprisingly white fella’s groceries seem to be the preference of the very earliest of Australia's settlers. Right there on the shelf is every imaginable product. No sweat required. Geez, according to the statistics, for the majority of Aboriginals , you don't even need to work to get it. You just show up with the coloured paper the white fella's machine gives you every second Thursday, and take it to the white fella's shop and he'll give you whatever you want. As ridiculously oversimplified as it sounds, this is exactly and tragically how it is.

Even if an Aborigine from one of these remote areas suddenly wanted to get a productive job: 1. There is usually no industry, nor anything else for that matter; and 2. If there is industry, he is most likely illiterate, innumerate, hopelessly unreliable, and completely unskilled. (Note to statisticians: being one of 8 people lying under a tree while a ninth rides a lawn mower along a stretch of tussock no man has ever been down, and probably never will again, and getting a wage packet from one of the multitude of quangos for doing so is not productive or skill enhancing work)

And herein I believe lies the problem.

One of the many great benefits of living in a division-of-labour society is the multiplication of knowledge achieved by living and exchanging with others. Yet the government has been led to believe, through guilt and pressure from sociologists, that Aborigines are better off living in remote communities, far away from society -- alone with their culture as it were. Another way to put that is this: they are creating an incentive by paying welfare and lip-service to people to live far away from jobs, education, health, and most importantly – OTHER IDEAS. At the same time, the government introduces other initiatives like relocation allowances for better job opportunities, skills training programs for people unable to write their own name, and welfare management programs with cradle to grave assistance that comes wrapped up with messages to stand on their own two feet.  No wonder they looked dazed and confused at the white fella’s idiocy.

So what's the solution? Well first of all, it's about time all those powers-that-be, and the population in general, stopped speaking in hushed, politically correct terms. Then recognise that welfare must come to an end – stop the genocide.

For Aboriginals themselves. Grow up. Grow up somehow. Recognise that while a lot of the 'stolen generation' policy was confused and wrong headed, at least acknowledge the fact that many children's lives were often saved or at least improved by removing them from sub-human conditions. Grow up, move on, and start thinking about tomorrow.

Or, in Thomas Sowell's more eloquent words:

Cultures are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives. The judgement that matters is not the judgement of observers and theorists, but the judgement implicit in millions of individual decisions to retain or abandon particular cultural practices, decisions made by those who personally benefit or who personally pay the price of inefficiency and obsolescence. That price is not always paid in money but may range from inconveniences to death.

Aborigines have been paying the price for the inefficiency and obsolescence of a culture that should by now either be a museum piece  or a tourist attraction, but not the working machinery of their everyday lives.

They are self-evidently not ideas worthy of modern man.

---

Suzuki Samurai is NOT PC’s roving Asian/Australian correspondent.

1. It’s true, as Neville Kennard says, that “Property Rights, the sine qua non of prosperity, is denied to aborigines in their tribal lands; they have “Land Rights” (whatever that means) but have no Property Rights.” But nor did they before Captain Cook arrived. Then, as now, “ they own some land collectively (the Tragedy of the Commons) but individually they can’t own the land or the houses or buildings they may put on the land individually. They can’t sell or lease or buy or make contracts on the property as is normal and taken for granted in white-fella society. This is tragic for the personal responsibility of the aboriginal people who live on the land put aside communally for them.”

‘The use of the English language in Australia’

Yes, Tony Abbott, words do have meaning.

[Hat tip Suzuki Samurai]

You can’t drive a Toyota with a cloth cap

If you had a dollar for every time a local unionist or union supporter was heard to say that higher Australian wages are due to greater union militancy (as if all that extra capital Australian workers have to work with were  irrelevant), you’d have enough money to pay all of Matt McCarten’s outstanding debts.

Sure, unions can push wages high. But sustainable wage levels are generally a function of capital and its productivity – push them higher, and they soon become unsustainable.

Latest example: Toyota Australia, joining Ford Australia and General Motors Australia on the scrapheap.

Killed.

Killed, not just by protectionist businesses (so eager to farm subsidies they forgot their actual bottom lines) and not just by governments keen to pluck a good-looking golden goose (which helped reduce their profits) but by ongoing and crippling union activism (which helped raise costs beyond what could ever be sustainable).

And with this, says the Macrobusiness blog,  The Australian disease enters a terminal phase

RELATED READING:

• Who Killed Holden? – NOT PC
• Where Would General Motors Be Without the United Automobile Workers Union? – George Reisman

Australasia: the world leader in excessive house prices

Alan Moran at the always enlightening Australian economics blog Catallaxy Files is uncomfortable sharing his country’s appalling housing affordability ranking with New Zealand.

There is one area where Australia leads the world [which it shares with New Zealand].  Demographia’s 10^th Annual Survey of house prices - this one covering 360 cities in nine countries – shows Australasia imperiously blitzing all opposition other than Hong Kong in house prices.  To ensure against distortions from different standards of living and costs, the survey compares median house prices in terms of average family incomes.

Although considerably higher than land-constrained Hong Kong, Australia (and New Zealand is similar) has average house prices relative to incomes that ate 60 per cent higher than those of the US, 12 per cent above the UK and 20 per cent above Japan.  Australian house prices are even higher than those of Singapore.

The prices are driven by the stock of new houses being built in comparison to the demand for houses – a significant factor of which is population growth.  Although new houses add only 2-4 per cent of total stock each year, it is these small numbers that drive the overall average price levels.  And the number of new houses built is critically dependent on approval regimes.

This can be seen by breaking down new house costs into their three components: the house itself, the land preparation and the land itself.  Thus for Sydney, a standard “22 square” new house itself costs some $130,000 and the preparation of land, roads, sewerage etc. costs a further $70,000.

While the third component, the land itself is worth only $2,000 as farmland (far and away the most prevalent usage of the land) because of government rationing (euphemistically called “planning”) the block costs perhaps $300,000.  So a new house which should cost under $250,000 costs twice this much and this lifts the whole of the market – the median price of a house in Sydney is now $723,000 and in Melbourne it approaches $600,000.

The comparisons are even more stark once individual cities are taken into account.  Australia’s restrictive planning laws are pretty much a constant across the continent but Melbourne and Sydney are two of the least 10 affordable cities worldwide.

Remember, these comparisons take into account different building costs and income levels.   Relative to income levels, even thriving metropolises like Atlanta, Dallas, Memphis and Houston have house prices that are half those of Australasia’s major cities…

You might say, as the ignorant do, “Oh well, they can’t be unaffordable if people can still afford to buy them.” This ignores that the price effect is created by a small number of purchasers on the margin, a small few to whom housing is so important they have to forego whatever else they might have done with the extra money needed to pay for their house; it ignores the destructive “wealth effect” created when other home-owners’ paper profits encourage them using their house like an ATM machine; it ignores that large gobs of otherwise productive capital is instead tied up in folk chasing riches through selling houses to each other.

And it ignores the many injustice created by restricting what land-owners can do on their own land, and the interest groups who encourage it.

For our part we have pressure groups that prevent ‘sprawl’ whose fellow-travellers now dominate the planning department that control land use backed up by thickets of interlocking regulations amassed over decades.  Some relief is possible by redevelopment of the brownfield sites along the lines that [London mayor] Boris Johnson claims to support.  But though he suggests there are thirty such areas in London, he does not specify their size and even if, his goal of them providing 47,000 new homes a year were to be realised this would be inadequate.  Moreover, Johnson will find, as redevelopment proposals in Australasia find, that there is persistent and vigorous opposition to such plans, even for areas … where the population density today is only a third of its level two generations ago.

Inner city redevelopment is a help but the only solution to the exorbitant house prices faced by Australasian non-house owning younger people is to free up land supply.  Few politicians will bite this bullet, not only because of the bicycle riding anti-urban-sprawlers, but also because of existing home owners who have paid for the costs imposed by supply restraint and do not want to see the values of their investments brought down to their underlying worth.

Who Killed Holden?

With General Motors announcing the last Holden will roll off the line in Australia by 2016, there are a number of defendants who could be called to answer to the charge: Who Killed the Golden Goose That Used to Be Holden?

I’ll answer your first question first: It wasn’t General Motors Australia, who would happily continue making Holdens if the stars were aligned differently—or General Motors America who in those benevolent starry-eyed circumstances would be more than happy to let them.

So who’s responsible for shifting the stars?

First in line are Australians: Most fundamentally it was Australian consumers who killed Holden when they stopped buying their shitty cars. It might be an “iconic Australian company” according to sundry business and no-business journalists across the great sunburnt land, but Australians themselves stopped buying Holdens many years before the subsidy per car reached the tens of thousands it is now.

Whatever they tell surveyors holding clipboards, Australians in large numbers buy other cars instead of Holdens. So if they want someone to blame for Holden’s demise, they could start by looking at themselves.

Second in line is the Australian governments that Australians vote for in their droves: not because this one elected to stop subsidising this inveterate corporate bludger, but because for decades every Australian government has denuded by usurious taxes the capital this company and others needed to reinvest to keep it ahead of its competition (pouring this stolen money mostly into various welfare black holes instead of putting it to any productive purpose),¹ and because for decades it gave Australian unions the right to terrorise this and every other Australian producer, disregarding that the golden goose they thought could be plucked forever could not.

In this respect Holden is every Australian producer writ large. (And this goes for NZ producers as well, take not.)

So third in line is the unions: It was Australian unions who helped kill Holden…

…the unions and their enterprise bargaining over many years that has made their own members unemployed. The cost of wages is more than double what it should be.
    It was a great effort by the unions to achieve high pay rates, but now there are no jobs. Any Australian who does not recognise the truth is sadly deficient in reasoning ability.
    Australian car manufacturing labour costs are reportedly twice as high as in Europe and four times as high as in Asia. Nobody wants Australian workers earning Asian wages but productivity isn't just about wages.
    Maritime workers famously insisted Australia's waterfront could never match Singapore's best practice regarding container movements per hour - until the stevedores were all sacked, replaced with novices and eventually rehired with a refreshed commitment to the job.
    Better workplace processes lead to superior output and, therefore, increased productivity without sacrificing wages.

So between losing the capital to reinvest (stolen by government) and losing the ability to improve workplace processes (stolen from them by short-sighted trades union leaders pro-union legislation empowering unions to oppose them)

 What George Reisman wrote about parent company General Motors in America could be repeated virtually word for word about General Motors in Australia. So I will (for UAW just read AMWU, and divide gross numbers involved by the ratio of the different populations):

What the UAW has done, on the foundation of coercive, interventionist labour legislation, is bring a once-great company to its knees. It has done this by a process of forcing one obligation after another upon the company, while at the same time, through its work rules, featherbedding practices, hostility to labour-saving advances, and outlandish pay scales, doing practically everything in its power to make it impossible for the company to meet those obligations…
    First, the company would be without so-called Monday-morning automobiles. That is, automobiles poorly made for no other reason than because they happened to be made on a day when too few workers showed up, or too few showed up sober, to do the jobs they were paid to do. Without the UAW, General Motors would simply have fired such workers and replaced them with ones who would do the jobs they were paid to do. And so, without the UAW, GM would have produced more reliable, higher quality cars, had a better reputation for quality, and correspondingly greater sales volume to go with it. Why didn't they do this? Because with the UAW, such action by GM would merely have provoked work stoppages and strikes, with no prospect that the UAW would be displaced or that anything would be better after the strikes…
    Second, without the UAW, GM would have been free to produce in the most-efficient, lowest cost way and to introduce improvements in efficiency as rapidly as possible. Sometimes this would have meant simply having one or two workers on the spot do a variety of simple jobs that needed doing, without having to call in half a dozen different workers each belonging to a different union job classification and having to pay that much more to get the job done. At other times, it would have meant just going ahead and introducing an advance, such as the use of robots, without protracted negotiations with the UAW resulting in the need to create phony jobs for workers to do (and to be paid for doing) that were simply not necessary…
    Third, without the UAW, GM would have an average unit cost per automobile close to that of non-union Toyota…
    Fourth, without the UAW, [Holden workers would not need to be subsidised to the tune of $50,000 per worker], which is where it is today, according to [Grace Collier in today’s Australian].
    Fifth, as a result of UAW coercion and extortion, GM has lost billions upon billions of dollars. For 2005 alone, it reported a loss in excess of $10 billion. Its bonds are now rated as "junk," that is, below, investment grade. Without the UAW, GM would not have lost these billions.
    Sixth, without the UAW, GM would not now be in process of attempting to pay a ransom to its UAW workers of up to $140,000 per man, just to get them to quit and take their hands out of its pockets…
    Eighth, without the UAW, GM would not now have pension obligations which, if entered on its balance sheet in accordance with the rule now being proposed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, will leave it with a net worth of minus $16 billion…
    Ninth, without the UAW tens of thousands of workers — its own members — would not now be faced with the loss of pension and healthcare benefits that it is impossible for GM or any of the other auto companies to provide, and never was possible for them to provide. The UAW, the whole labor-union movement, and the left-"liberal" intellectual establishment, which is their father and mother, are responsible for foisting on the public and on the average working man and woman a fantasy land of imaginary Demons (big business and the rich) and of saintly Good Fairies (politicians, government officials, and union leaders). In this fantasy-land, the Good Fairies supposedly have the power to wring unlimited free benefits from the Demons.
    Tenth, Without the UAW and its fantasy-land mentality, autoworkers would have been motivated to save out of wages actually paid to them, and to provide for their future by means of by and large reasonable investments of those savings — investments with some measure of diversification. Instead, like small children, lured by the prospect of free candy from a stranger, they have been led to a very bad end. They thought they would receive endless free golden eggs from a goose they were doing everything possible to maim and finally kill, and now they're about to learn that the eggs just aren't there.
    It's very sad to watch an innocent human being suffer. It's dreadful to contemplate anyone's life being ruined. It's dreadful to contemplate even an imbecile's falling off a cliff or down a well. But the union members, their union leaders, the politicians who catered to them, the journalists, the writers, and the professors who provided the intellectual and cultural environment in which this calamity could take place — none of them were imbeciles. They all could have and should have known better.
    What is happening is cruel justice, imposed by a reality that wilfully ignorant people thought they could choose to ignore as long as it suited them: the reality that prosperity comes from the making of goods, not the making of work; that it comes from the doing of work, not from the shirking of it; that it comes from machines and methods of production that save labour, not the combating of those machines and methods; that it comes from the earning and reinvestment of profits not from seizure of those profits for the benefit of idlers, who do all they can to prevent the profits from being earned in the first place.

Now, it’s said that the government should nonetheless continue subsidising this losing proposition in order to “keep Australian jobs.” But the fact is, they’ve killed this golden goose and reincarnation on present lines is not possible.

The good news however is that all the capital now tied up in manufacturing and aftermarket work hasn’t disappeared. It’s all there and waiting for entrepreneurs and investors to put it to more productive use.

Just as long as governments and trade union leaders let them.

Here’s Tenpole Tudor.

1. On this point, the intelligent reader might like to enjoy George Reisman’s “Anti-Obamanomics: Why Everyone Should Be in Favor of Reducing Taxes on the "Rich"”

Multi-Choice Test: The Australian Election

The Australian Election: Was it  (choose one):

a) a victory for a neanderthal who doubts the global warming nonsense, likes women, sports, beer, and wants lower taxes?
b) a sign that the voters of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Britain are all to the right of those in the US?
c) a referendum on axing the carbon tax?
d) an indication Australia has now decided to permanently enshrine itself as the 'Lucky Country': i.e., only by the luck of birth can one now reside in Australia.

Please select one.

[Hat tip Catallaxy Files]