Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
We’ve had almost a week now of the press gallery writing about the alleged effects of the bank guarantee deposit on managed funds. With lots of alarums… Commentators who were praising Kevin Rudd a couple of weeks ago for “decisive action” to address the financial crisis are now bemoaning “policy on the run”. Is this as good as it gets when it comes to serious analysis of the economy and of Australian politics?
It’s crystal clear that the government was never going to offer a guarantee to bail out investors in market-linked funds. There’s no surprise here - Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd both said so days ago, yet we’ve had the media either speculating on whether they will or attacking them for not being clear about their intentions for days. Nor was the offer to allow managed funds to become banks some silver bullet. It was obviously something of a feint to urge the big banks, who in many cases are the owners of such funds, to provide liquidity and capital and/or rejig their corporate structure. Meanwhile the government has been exploring the possibility of allowing ASIC to grant permission to such funds to allow redemptions in the case of urgent financial need, something that is currently restricted because of legislative requirements to treat all investors equally. But the tone of the commentary is that was meant to have been done yesterday.
Of course, if it had been, it would have been “policy on the run” and dire “unintended consequences” would no doubt follow as night follows day in the meaningless 24/7 media cycle. And you’d need to have been reading the Fin Review to know that there are current regulatory and legislative barriers to action. The rest of the press gallery apparently think there are a stack of magic wands lying around in Treasury.
Malcolm Turnbull blew this story out of the water by his admission that he’d bailed out of his own property fund investments - before the bank deposit guarantee supposedly distorted the market. Not so much because of the attack line Wayne Swan used - though there is actually some truth in pointing out that he’s radically inconsistent and supremely opportunistic in his rhetoric on the financial crisis - but because it reinforces the point that you have to have a fair bit of dosh in the first place to be an investor in such funds. Toffee voiced members of the haute bourgeoisie popping up on the news to complain that they won’t be able to afford their contemplated holidays on the Riviera (I kid you not…) haven’t helped much either in popularising the opposition and media’s “struggling retirees with millions of dollars they can’t access because of teh Government!” narrative.
So there should be no great surprise that Kevin Rudd’s been throwing out a bit of a “we feel your pain” lifeline to folks with big credit card debts instead, prompted by Sydney University research finding that one of five workers are struggling to meet personal debt and mortgage repayments. Continue reading ‘The politics of debt and liquidity’
Not the Sarah Palin campaign… or???
Paul Keating has been speaking out again about Australian history:
…unless you already know and like the answers you’re going to get. You’d reckon that the Opposition might have learned its lesson on that. It seems like they might need another one, given their response to the impending release of the Treasury modeling on the economic effects of the ETS:
Mr Robb says the Government must include recent global events before it finalises the scheme in its White Paper by the end of the year.
“We will be demanding that the White Paper is not released until such time as the Government has made some attempt to assess the impact of this financial meltdown around the world,” he said.
Well, the government could have done that, but Robb probably wouldn’t have liked answers when they came back.
Continue reading ‘In politics, don’t ask questions…’
So, I need to know a good pub in Sydney where I can hang around next week with some likeminded souls and watch the US election results roll in. Who’s got some suggestions? What would be the best time to rock up?
I seem to recall noting that some of you have the misfortune to live elsewhere. What pubs would you recommend in your own vicinity?
One of the longest bows I’ve seen drawn about the effects of the global financial crisis is this obituary (and not in elegiac style) for the 80s. And Gen X. Apparently because of Robert Zemeckis. And therefore Gordon Gekko.
I think I’m missing something here (though not surprised by the fact that whenever generationalism rears its head, the originary dissing of Gen X is reinscribed each time). Maybe it’s because the experience of the 80s was very different in Australia (and the UK) than in America, and this even similar cultural themes and texts and musical forms were read through distinctive lenses.
I feel so sorry for Generation X. They grew up without a unifying enemy. They grew up constantly criticized as a do-nothing care-nothing generation. They started the Internet boom but would eventually lose out to the young upstarts from the next generation, the Googles and Facebooks of the world. They truly are The Lost Generation, sandwiched between the crisis of Nixon and the crisis of today. Now, my generation is the second-born prodigal son, the boy-king who snatched the crown of influence directly from his parents, bypassing the first-born’s rule entirely. We are fighting the War on Terror. We are innovators in tech and energy and media.
Err… whatevs. Continue reading ‘Oh noes! The 80s are over! Don’t tell Jules…’
Republished from yesterday’s Crikey with permission.
The Australia Council, an organisation in almost constant flux, has again spun the bingo barrel and pulled out a new round of surprises in its funding announcements — this time in the theatre sector. Eleven new companies have been granted triennial funding by the Council’s Theatre Board, while the same number have had their funding axed.
The announcement continues a recent history of wrenching change in the Commonwealth’s arts funding agency. In 2005, then-CEO Jeniffer Bott pushed through an organisation-wide restructure (labelled a “refocussing”) that led to two of the Australia Council’s funding boards being abolished. Out went specific Boards to support new media and digital arts, and community arts. In came some impressive-sounding “community partnerships” and a special department called the “Inter-Arts Agency”.
As respected ANU academic Jennifer Craik has argued in her book Re-Visioning Arts and Cultural Policy the Bott restructure was not really about addressing the major issues facing the Australia Council and its client organisations. Instead, “the restructure was more about bureau politics than policy reform.”
Continue reading ‘Guest post by Ben Eltham: Australia Council changes bathwater, loses babies’
One of the intriguing things about wading through some of the business and economics shelves of some CBD bookshops in (fruitless) search of some of the titles John Quiggin reviewed in the Fin Review on Friday (not online of course) was seeing tomes with titles such as “Bubbles last forever!”, “How to make enormous amounts of money from endless bubbles!”, “Greenspan is the greatest!”. I’m exaggerating, but not much. I suspect their shelf life is almost over, and they’re headed for the remainder bin soon. At any rate, I’ll have to cross my fingers and hope the AUD recovers soon so I can afford to buy something a tad more contemporary - and serious - from Amazon.
Since September, I’ve been wading through far more reading matter than I’d ever imagined possible on economics and finance. Much of it has been, by necessity, somewhat ephemeral. However, it’s good to see some commentators coming out with something of a longer view.
It’s hard to ignore resurgence of the ‘Australia shouldn’t do anything until everyone else does’ meme, most recently by the National Party. Dennis provides another variation on the theme, spinning this fair and balanced question in the latest Newspoll:
Currently, the federal government intends to introduce the carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2010. Under the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the price of energy sources, such as petrol, electricity and gas may become more expensive. Do you think the federal government should delay or should not delay the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme beyond 2010 because of the recent financial crisis?
Push poll much?
Climate Denialism is usually shorthand for someone who denies the truth of the basic science of global warming, but I think a more relevant redefinition is Climate Recalcitrant - someone who doesn’t believe that we can get organised to do something about the problem. What the Nationals and Dennis have in common are a desire to trash 15 years of global negotiations, bury their heads in the sand and yell ‘head for the hills (or the barracks)’! Continue reading ‘Climate Denialism whack-a-mole’
Sally Neighbour’s 4 Corners report on the AFP was a bit patchy, relying a little too much on two disgruntled former officers and, in one case, his wife, for interview fodder. However, it does provide a good, succinct summary of events leading up to the charging of Mohammed Haneef, strongly suggesting that the charges were the result of pressure from high up in the AFP. And there’s plenty on Keelty’s propensity for keeping the government of the day happy, and the Howard government’s desire for bureaucrats to stick to the party line.
But one of the most interesting bits of the whole program was on another issue entirely; there are indications that the refocusing of the AFP on national security issues has led to its ignoring other less glamorous but equally important issues. From the transcript:
JOHN BROOME, FORMER CHAIR NATIONAL CRIME AUTHORITY: The question I ask is whether we’ve done this at the expense of the AFP’s core budget, whether they’ve taken their eyes off major issues such as drug trafficking, financial crime, issues such as child sex tourism, these kinds of issues which the AFP saw as its main work four or five years ago and which apparently now is not its core business.
SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Former chairman of the National Crime Authority, John Broome, says the shift is reflected in a dramatic drop in the number of criminals charged by the AFP. Cases sent to the DPP for prosecution have fallen by half, from more than a thousand to around 500 a year.
As noted on this post, John Quiggin’s been having a look at Alan Greenspan’s rather muted confession of error:
After this crisis, the Keynes-Minsky view of financial markets as inherently destabilising looks a lot more appealing than the opposing view, argued most prominently by Milton Friedman.
Once the EMH is abandoned, it seems likely that markets will do better than governments in planning investments in some cases (those where a good judgement of consumer demand is important, for example) and worse in others (those requiring long-term planning, for example). The logical implication is that a mixed economy will outperform both central planning and laissez faire, as was indeed the experience of the 20th century.
Alan Greenspan and other disciples of Ayn Rand have been getting somewhat of a worse press, interestingly, than the rather mild questioning he came under at a Congressional committee. Continue reading ‘Fountainhead?’
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All politics is local, but power is global
The Guardian’s Comment is Free website and Soundings magazine are organising a series of debates on the theme of After New Labour: Who owns the progressive future?. Some of the contributions are making it online. After excoriating the “Third Way” for its lack of focus on what used to be the left’s core goal - working to put into practice the belief “that it is the sacrosanct duty of community to care for and to assist all its members, collectively, against the powerful forces they are unable to fight alone”, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman poses a problem which haunts anyone concerned with political action in the name of social justice:
Continue reading ‘All politics is local, but power is global’