 |
|
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
John Wren 
"Look after the game. It means so much to so many."
Joined: 15 Jul 2007
|
| Post subject: |  |
|
| Tannin wrote: | | Wokko wrote: | | I would also like to add that the IPA are not Liberal Party shills |
Correct! In reality, the Liberal Party are IPA shills. |
the only ipa i know is indian pale ale.
_________________
Purveyor of sanctimonious twaddle. |
|
|
|
 |
Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| John Wren wrote: | | Tannin wrote: | | Wokko wrote: | | I would also like to add that the IPA are not Liberal Party shills |
Correct! In reality, the Liberal Party are IPA shills. |
the only ipa i know is indian pale ale. |
heh, when I typed IPA into google India Pale Ale came up before Institute of Public Affairs. They're a free market think tank, more classical liberal/libertarian than conservative or 'Liberal Party'.
http://www.ipa.org.au/
Kind of an Australian version of the Cato Institute. |
|
|
|
|
Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Mugwump wrote: | | ^ I think the Howard and Costello governments were very complacent, and Australian governments since then have been little better. Partisan barracking along the lines that the NLP governments have been terrible (implying that the Labour govts have been quite good) seems to me a bit of a stretch. |
It is, however, a fact. Do not think for one moment that I'm claiming that the economic performance of Labor governments this century has been outstanding. It hasn't. It has been conservative, unimaginative, and in the main of decent quality - no more, no less. If economic management was football, the Rudd and Gillard governments would have finished somewhere around the bottom half of the top eight. (Rudd shot into the top four with a bullet for a while during the GFC, it is true, but his subsequent performance was poor and in any case I think it's fair to ascribe most of that masterly response to a global crisis to senior treasury officials and to Wayne Swan rather than to Rudd.)
Compare with the spectacularly poor management of Howard and Costello, who pissed away the benefits of a one-in-a-lifetime mineral boom on tax frauds for the rich and handouts to the wealthy. Compare again to the performance of places like Norway, which invested the proceeds of their mineral boom and set themselves up for decades of success.
| Mugwump wrote: | ^ I think the Howard and Costello governments were very complacent, and Australian governments since then have been little better. Partisan barracking along the lines that the NLP governments have been terrible (implying that the Labour govts have been quite good) seems to me a bit of a stretch.
For all that, i think the idea that the economy is primarily an expression of the will of government is a flawed one. Governments can certainly mess an economy up, via monetary mismanagement, excessive public spending or overly restrictive labour laws. They can (probably) smoothe economic cycles to a limited extent through Keynesian stimulus if they have built strong surpluses in the good times. I'm less convinced that they can create prosperity via direct intervention, however. |
^ I largely agree with that. Governments can't, generally speaking, do much to directly increase wealth and economic success. They can and do, however, decrease economic success from time to time, usually by caving in to sectional interests. Costello was a shocker for this - he made some truly appalling decisions which we are paying double and triple for now - and Abbott/Hockey would prove to be even worse if they somehow managed to get another chance, which they won't. They are getting further and further and further behind in the polls. The fact that Bill Nonentity Shorten is creaming them with an average 6-8% swing - that's landslide territory - demonstrates just how badly they are viewed by Australian voters. Getting smashed by Shorten is like losing a test series 5-nil to Holland or Zimbabwe.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives!
Last edited by Tannin on Tue Aug 25, 2015 10:13 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
|
|
|
Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Wokko wrote: | | They're a free market think tank, more classical liberal/libertarian than conservative or 'Liberal Party'. |
Translation: even harder right than their parliamentary whores in the Liberal Party. Rupert, Gina, and the tobacco companies pay for them, and get what they pay for.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
|
|
|
|
John Wren
"Look after the game. It means so much to so many."
Joined: 15 Jul 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Wokko wrote: | | John Wren wrote: | | Tannin wrote: | | Wokko wrote: | | I would also like to add that the IPA are not Liberal Party shills |
Correct! In reality, the Liberal Party are IPA shills. |
the only ipa i know is indian pale ale. |
heh, when I typed IPA into google India Pale Ale came up before Institute of Public Affairs. They're a free market think tank, more classical liberal/libertarian than conservative or 'Liberal Party'.
http://www.ipa.org.au/
Kind of an Australian version of the Cato Institute. |
yeah, i do know who the ipa are. was just being glib. got nothing of substance to add to this discussion. interesting read nonetheless.
_________________
Purveyor of sanctimonious twaddle. |
|
|
|
|
Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Wokko wrote: | | Kind of an Australian version of the Cato Institute. |
Just so: an extreme right-wing lobby group paid for by a handful of secretive, obscenely wealthy magnates to advance their own narrow, short-term sectional interests and smash anything and everything that stands in their way, including (among other things) scientific facts about tobacco smoking, gun violence, and global warming.
IPA? Or Cato Institute? Both, of course.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Cato_Institute
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_of_Public_Affairs
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
|
|
|
|
Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
|
|
|
|
Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
|
| Post subject: | |
|
"Extreme left wing"   Yeah right, what a laughably dipshit claim.
That page reckons that anyone who once belonged to or worked for the mainstream US Democratic Party is "extreme left wing".  I mean we are talking mainstream US Presidential candidates here, we are talking a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in President Clinton’s Justice Department - they reckon that makes her a communist we are talking a mob so paranoid that they think LBJ's former press secretary is a communist. Remember LBJ? The President responsible for taking America (and Australia!) into the Vietnam War on a giant scale? Yeah, right, turns out he was a communist too
Fair dinkum, I encourage all Nicksters to read this tripe. It is hysterically funny.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
|
|
|
|
Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
|
|
|
|
pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| regan is true fullback wrote: | | The ABC has many conservatives on its programs. Trouble is they behave like spoilt embarrassments whenever they get on the air. They then spit the dummy and claim bias rather than look in the mirror. The problem is the ABC and Fairfax are desperate to display such po-faced even handedness that they allow any half wit with a Thatcherite complex to say whatever they like and then look silly. |
Very well expressed. As we know, this is the anti-science, denialist tactic, too.
It's a manipulation of the human reflex to seek justification for received, or emotionally- and financially-invested views by consuming material within very narrow bounds and considering the mere existence of other views—no matter how careless, factually incorrect, ill-researched, unsupported and illogical—as sufficient evidence.
But what do you do? It doesn't matter, for example, that the only HQ study of its kind found:
| The SMH reporting on the IMF's Findings that the Howard government was the most wasteful in modern Australian history wrote: | Australia's most needlessly wasteful spending took place under the John Howard-led Coalition government rather than under the Whitlam, Rudd or Gillard Labor governments, an international study has found.
The International Monetary Fund examined 200 years of government financial records across 55 leading economies.
It identifies only two periods of Australian "fiscal profligacy" in recent years, both during John Howard's term in office - in 2003 at the start of the mining boom and during his final years in office between 2005 and 2007. |
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/hey-big-spender-howard-the-king-of-the-loose-purse-strings-20130110-2cj32.html
The zombies eat people's brains in their childhood somehow: No matter how wasteful Howard was in actual, technical numbers, they still think Rudd was more wasteful, despite the former being gifted a boom, and the latter a financial crisis.
As a matter of plain record, Howard had the most wasteful government in modern history; he tethered voting to boat people fear, general racism and handouts rather than productivity and progress; he vocally supported and helped push through two failed, horrific and costly wars which were major factors in the GFC and the primary factor in the unstoppable terrorist boom, the chaos of Syria and ISIS, and much more.
Abbott not only had a major hand in seeing all of that pushed through for Howard, he has since destroyed the national business model by completely cocking up the commodity cycle, putting all the eggs in the one grubby crony basket, and failing to implement any necessary shifts in revenue streams and technology to cope with the realities of this millennium.
But Howard taught him the basics, probably never imagining for a moment he would be let loose from the party back room. Unfortunately, the horror has been realised and now Abbott's deranged, infantile psychiatry is just wrecking the joint to get what it wants.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
|
|
|
|
Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
|
| Post subject: | |
|
^ interesting reference to the IMF study. I skimmed it and i'm not really familiar enough with the particular theory to critique it, but prima facie it seems rather surprising that a government which turned in annual budget surpluses and zero net debt was fiscally irresponsible. It may be so, of course, if revenues were temporarily inflated, as they clearly were through 2003-2013, but that is always easier to know in hindsight than at the time.
The IMF is not a partisan body, however, so the research is credible and interesting for that reason. I'll try to find time to read it in more depth this weekend.
As usual the Fairfax economic reporting was pretty illiterate, apparently conflating tax cuts with spending. It's the government's money after all, and when they give it back to you after you've earned it, that's spending, in Fairfax economics. Oh dear.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
|
|
|
|
pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
^I like what they're trying to do with their modeling as far as that sort of effort goes, but assessing it in-depth might take you a while if they've done it as carefully as seems.
At the same time, as you know I have little patience with macro analyses ontologically because the assumptions will, ultimately, prove constructed and imaginary. However, from the perspective of convention and received narrative—such as the assumptions Australians have been hypnotised into accepting through repetition—it is a rather amusing side note.
And, what if you spend three months assessing it, and then I spend three months assessing it, and we disagree? What then? I'm telling you, so much of this macro stuff is just authority by clever positioning and time-dependent brute force, not actual knowledge.
Alternatively, what else could we do with that six months of meaningless grind?
The house of cards of modern thought is collapsing not because people are thinking less, but because they've got the access and authority to counter the once-accepted BS; sadly, once that's done not there's not much of substance left!
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
|
|
|
|
Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| The Liberals are so good at managing finances, they don't even know when someone's ripping them off by stealing party funds for years. |
|
|
|
|
Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Tannin wrote: |
It is, however, a fact. Do not think for one moment that I'm claiming that the economic performance of Labor governments this century has been outstanding. It hasn't. It has been conservative, unimaginative, and in the main of decent quality - no more, no less. If economic management was football, the Rudd and Gillard governments would have finished somewhere around the bottom half of the top eight. (Rudd shot into the top four with a bullet for a while during the GFC, it is true, but his subsequent performance was poor and in any case I think it's fair to ascribe most of that masterly response to a global crisis to senior treasury officials and to Wayne Swan rather than to Rudd.)
Compare with the spectacularly poor management of Howard and Costello, who pissed away the benefits of a one-in-a-lifetime mineral boom on tax frauds for the rich and handouts to the wealthy. Compare again to the performance of places like Norway, which invested the proceeds of their mineral boom and set themselves up for decades of success.
|
Don't necessarily disagree with that, but hindsight is 20/20. Howard and Costello cut taxes when they had a fiscal suplus and low (zero, I think) net debt. That It seems a reasonable thing to do, on the basis that it's the people's money, after all, not the government's. I do not have the data clearly in my mind, but I can believe that benefits were disproportionately shovelled to the wealthy.
Where I think the Gillard government deserves some criticism is that the budgetary balance was already clearly worsening from about 2011 ,and they winked at both the continuation of Costello's tax cuts and increased spending. They also funked the critical Henry inquiry RRT recommendations, which probably came too late in the day for the mining profit cycle anyway, but might have provided a better tax base for the future.
The pressures on them given the slender majority perhaps made it too hard, but I have the impression that Swan was also complacent - he just (so to speak) spent the proceeds rather than committed the robbery.
The GST response was fine, but owes a lot to the fact that the Rudd Government was granted freedom to manouevre by the favourable debt position left by the Howard government. Costello may have been profligate - but he could have been far more so. As a comparison, britain and the US both entered the downturn with a net debt of ca 40% of GDP at the end of a massive boom. That was profligacy for you.
I am not trying to defend Howard and Costello, who arguably spent the proceeds of a windfall rather haphazardly, connived at excessive tax breaks for the well-off, and ducked the hard decisions on tax reform when they had the sunshine to make them. I don't think anyone deserves gold stars for economic management in Australian politics.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
|
|
|
|
regan is true fullback
Joined: 27 Dec 2002
Location: Granville. nsw
|
| Post subject: | |
|
It has happened again. Yet again I am not making this up.
Things are getting a bit tetchy in Redneck Land. Someone at work had left the radio on 2GB, which is the darkest place for conservative shills, apparatchiks whatever...
Ray Hadley was on. Ray is a Rugby League heavyweight, and also a big time conservative commentator up here. He was discussing the article about the Libs wanting to get rid of Hockey:
| Quote: | Tony Abbott being urged to consider dumping Joe Hockey and calling a March election: cabinet ministers
Date
August 31, 2015 - 7:10AM The Age James Massola
|
...with a Liberal spokesman. Apart from being a tad Molly meets ABBA, big Ray asserted that the Fairfax journalist had made it all up, just like the ABC had made it all up about the Liberal candidate for Canning, and the ABC and Fairfax make it all up as a matter of course.
Who told you? says the Liberal
Says Ray "Andrew Bolt." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum
|
|
The Rules
FAQ
Usergroups
Calendar
Search
Log in
Register
