Abbotts foot in mouth thread...

[pietillidie]

Brandis is a blundering twit of Rumsfeldian proportions.

You can be a clear and staunch supporter of Israeli security without kowtowing to the blackmail of the far right nutcases. Indeed, kowtowing to the loons plainly damages Israeli security by pissing off the sane who grasp that all humans really are equal and can see through the BS efforts to deny that fact.

How long does it take for people to get a grasp of things for Eloh'im's sake?

[1061]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/06/navy-vessels-to-be-built-offshore

[Wokko]

This is what's lost me. Money paid to a local business ends up back in the government coffers through taxation and local spending. Any money spent overseas is just.. gone. Also servicing, parts all need to then be based overseas and also security concerns with having military equipment built overseas.

I may not be an economist, but this seems pretty simple to me.

[pietillidie]

^You're partly right, but there is an ultimate value no matter how much you circulate capital around the one economy, namely the use of financial and labour capital versus some alternative thing you could be doing (i.e., opportunity cost).

Thus, in the simplest sense, if the local team builds half a ship for ten units of cost, and the overseas one builds a whole ship for ten units of cost, the value you're circulating around the local economy is not really equal to a whole ship's worth of value.

The difference between that sub-optimal local use of capital and labour (comparative advantage, or in this case comparative disadvantage), and the money you take out of the economy by paying someone overseas to do the job more efficiently (the loss of the multiplier effect of that capital being put to other local uses), taking into account the social costs of any related unemployment (externalities), gives you the real number you're after.

Obviously, the optimal circumstance is for the local labour that is half as productive building ships to be moved into another industry which is internationally competitive. That way you get a full ship's worth of value in the new industry locally, and a full ship at half the cost from overseas. Setting this train in motion is precisely what real leaders like Hawke and Keating did back in the 1980s. But that process ran out a decade ago, with any negative effects being masked by the resources boom.

But such a process actually requires having another industry to move people into (in H-K's case it was services and the early stages of the knowledge industry), which is why people like myself have no problems closing shipyards and car factories if people are encouraged into competitive alternatives.

Closing sub-optimally productive industry is vandalism if labour has nowhere productive or meaningful to go. This is why scuttling the NBN and ransacking the education system is an absolute economic violence; true economic leadership would have put forward initiatives to tightly couple the two and create industries which optimise competitiveness. Instead, the current lowlifes are hiding behind the mining industry and the inability of people to discern the externalities the bastards have imposed upon Australia's social quality through their American Working Poor "reforms".

Just think, Australia's most competitive source of income outside agriculture and high mineral prices, the education sector, has just been shat on both in terms of funding and essential infrastructure. And not a whimper from the so-called "adults in the room" who claim to be the economically responsible ones in our midst.

This is an absolute violence against the nation and one of the worst acts of criminal economic negligence in Australian history.

[watt price tully]

Very funny: John Oliver on Tony Abbott:

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-roasted-by-john-oliver-on-hbo-show-last-week-tonight-20140602-zrvl1.html

[pietillidie]

^That was gold. What an effing cringeworthy national embarrassment. The only upside of him being Australian is that he lacks the power to cause George W. scale catastrophe.

[pietillidie]

Double gold! George W. Abbott has arrived in "Canadia" to form an alliance with fellow mining billionaire-funded George W. wannabe Stephen Harper.






http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/06/09/tony-abbott-canadia-canada-harper-ottawa_n_5473331.html?utm_hp_ref=canada-politics

[David]

More damage to our foreign relations. What will they think of next?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/13/australia-may-be-hit-with-sanctions-over-occupied-east-jerusalem-policy-change

[AN_Inkling]

Abbott's clearly a big football fan: his message to Ange, Mike and the Socceroos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs7-MSS_8kc

Ah, that's Mile, Mr Prime Minister .

[sixpoints]

Inspirational Tony.
Filmed his special Prime Ministers message wishing "Mike and the boys all the best in soccer's World Cup"

Mike?

There are no players or coaches in the squad called Mike.
Who is this idiot referring to?
Who is Mike?

[HAL]

They are someone just like you, that I met online.

[think positive]

maybe he meant Nike?!

[stui magpie]

Interesting that 'Mile' is actually a Michael.

[Wokko]

[sixpoints]