Federal Budget

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[Mugwump]

^ WPT, suggest you read the case study on Portugal very carefully. By 1999 a staggering 1% of Portugal's people were addicted to heroin (see Al Jazeera's article 10/2016). That's what happens when you lose control of drug policing so comprehensively. After that, legalisation, as with alcohol, probably becomes the only option. Once you allow a drug to penetrate society so deeply there is not really any alternative.

As for Marxists and the sixties, well, Marxism has clearly been the professed ideology of many of the most hateful, repressive, "equalising" and immiserating regimes of the last seventy years, and any half-awake analysis would recognise that something started to change fundamentally in our society in the 1960s, and the social consequences of that change are consequential and clear today. So your eye-rolls are fetchingly gestural, but no rebuttal.

I read your nine points, all of which were long on assertion and short on evidence (as an example, for all the rhetoric, we have never fought a war on drugs in the way they have in the more sober and industrious and rapidly-advancing societies of Asia). Rather, we have glamorized and normalized drug taking as a libertarian, risqu� lifestyle choice, while failing to police workaday transgression. This is rather like a man who throws a match into a forest, insouciantly allows the fire to develop, underresources the CFA and then triumphantly claims that fighting fires is a waste of resources.

I am prepared to provide willpower support to those who feel they have an addiction, but I believe that the law needs to be upheld at the same time. It is clear that those who take drugs today have had little fear of the law since the campaigns for liberalization started long ago. We will be healthier as a society if we start spending money on properly enforcing the laws made by our parliament, and stop spending so much money on sweeping up the consequences of libertinism. All of the liberal eye-rolling in the world will not ameliorate the lives destroyed by those who turned the desires of youth into mainstream adult behaviour two generations ago.

Regardless of political disagreements, enjoying your anecdotes about Thailand (and I did have a laugh at your "love you long time" game day summary in the footy thread), so hope it continues to go well and you are getting a good break.

[David]

I think you need to clarify what you're talking about here, Mugwump. No Australian government, Liberal or Labor, has ever � in rhetoric or action � budged an inch from the established "drugs are bad" approach. Where there has ever been a softening of drug laws, the premise has always quite explicitly been harm reduction and not glamorisation. So your fight here is, quite clearly, with culture.

The trouble with culture is that it is an incredibly difficult thing to police. Consider the rave culture in Britain in the '80s and '90s, in which pill-taking thrived � this had nothing to do with Marxism or '60s hippie culture and everything to do with hedonism and what was considered cool at the time. Needless to say, what is cool is often the direct opposite of what is legal or encouraged by public policy. Clearly, the problem here was not that the Thatcher government wasn't tough enough on drugs.

The authoritarian response to such a social problem is always more laws, longer jail terms and harsher rhetoric, and can go as far as shutting down nightspots and banning techno music, depending on one's taste. We can look anywhere in the world for case studies of these approaches, from the US of the 1980s to modern day Singapore and Iran; when it comes to authoritarian anti-drug policy, there's nothing that hasn't been tried. But all these approaches do is create a climate of fear that does little to deter risk-takers or actually get to the core of the cultural issues involved.

If the Portuguese model tells us anything, it's that drug decriminalisation may be no silver bullet, but that it at least doesn't make things any worse. That on its own is a victory: why would you pump billions of dollars into policing and prisons, further destroying already vulnerable individuals and families, if there is zero net benefit in reduction of drug use, addiction or associated crime? Surely, there would have to be evidence for such an approach resulting in a significant decrease in drug-related harm for us to want to contemplate returning to it.

This Turnbull budget measure may not be a hardcore war on drugs manoeuvre, but it's a step back in the direction of the punitive approach, based on the belief � if we are to presume that it's not merely disingenuous vote-buying, which is a bit of a leap of faith � that fear of losing vital payments will motivate people to get off drugs. It's an idea that looks good on paper, but we should have learned by now that it will cause far more harm than good in practice.

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Mugwump, in the state of Victoria almost every (ex) police commissioner, senior medical person, senior folk in addiction services and D & A services supports legalisation & decriminalisation. These are not marxist or libertarian folk. They know the area they work in. In Victoria the cells & other areas of remand are already full of alcohol, ice & other drug users.

I speak from experience. (not from the inside I should clarify!!)

Unless you want to fund more prisons and allocate a heap more resources to "policing" then go ahead punish, punish & punish more.

[Mugwump]

[Mugwump]

[Pies4shaw]

[Skids]

Isn't it ironic that the government is now trying to slug the banks?

Why they ever sold OUR assets continues to baffle me. Thanks Paul!

The privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank was a financial disaster for the Australian public, although investors in the float did very well indeed. The capital structure established prior to the sale of the first tranche of shares in 1991 involved the issue of 835 million shares. Although the par value for the shares was set at $2, the relevant consideration for valuation is the issue price which was set at $5.40. This implies a valuation of $4.5 billion for the Bank as a whole, (or about $5 billion valued in 1995-96 dollars0. The procedure for the sale of the second tranche of shares in 1993 ensured that the government received an amount close to the market price of the shares at the date of sale, which turned out to be around $9.50, implying a valuation for the Bank as a whole of $7.9 billion, or about $8.5 billion in 1995-96 dollars. The final share offer for the Bank was announced in June 1996. The sale price was around $10 per share, also implying a valuation of $8.5 billion in 1995-96 dollars. The total proceeds from the three stages of the sale amounted to about $7.8 billion in 1995-96 dollars.

Average real annual profits over the period 1988-93 (which covers a complete business cycle) were around $560 million. Computing the present value of this stream of profits at a discount rate of 5 per cent yields a value of $11.2 billion for the Bank as a whole. Therefore, even if profits had not increased after 1993, the public would have incurred a loss of around $3.5 billion from the privatisation. In fact, primarily because of the removal of restrictions on the monopoly power of the banks, profits have soared. Profits for the three years from 1998 to 2000 totalled $5.4 billion, or more than half the total sale proceeds received by the Australian public.

Financial deregulation has been similarly disastrous. Since the advent of financial deregulation, banks have raised fees and charges, cut services and exploited their collective monopoly power whenever possible.

http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/JournalArticles01/CBAPrivatisation01.html

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[Pies4shaw]

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[Mugwump]

^ WPT of course I made no assumption or claim to having your experience. I acknowledged your good intentions and tried to explain why I changed my mind. I also tried to indicate that the kindly consensus can and does have consequences far from its benign intentions.

I have never believed that those on the front line of an issue have an automatic right to set policy. We must strive to understand and learn from their experience, but soldiers in a war are not necessarily the best people to set foreign policy. If one looks at the way teacher unions, largely left-wing, have shaped a crumbling education system for the last sixty years, I think it's clear that shutting up and supping from their spoon is no substitute for democratic argument. Groupthink is especially strong among those who share intense experiences.

Your point about alcohol is one I understand well. As I have said, once a drug becomes so entrenched in a civilization, with such a critical mass, it is practically impossible to eradicate it, as the Us proved from 1917-1930. I would, however, impose greater restrictions on alcohol than we have today, for the reasons you indicate. The argument that "alcohol, a terrible scourge, is legal so we should make other drugs legal too" is worth examining. For about five seconds.

[Mugwump]