Michael Costa has taken a leaf out of Mark Latham’s book… Forced out of office and Parliament? Write op/eds attacking your former party!
LISTENING to Kevin Rudd at Council of Australian Governments meetings as he tried to connect the global economic situation to the more mundane items on the national reform agenda was often excruciating.
Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of economics would have quickly concluded, as I did, that the Prime Minister didn’t have a good understanding of these issues.
Can a tell all book be far behind? Would it need to be a three volume set to contain slurs on all the people Michael Costa doesn’t like?
Here’s a suggestion for the under-employed former pollie - why not join the Liberal Party? You’ve already got News Limited Columnists eating out of your hand (you actually are one too!)… And your right-wing views should see you fit in nicely. Perhaps with your added ruthlessness, you could spark endless speculation about Malcolm Turnbull’s polling and leadership and unlike the Great Pretender seize the top job by the power of the Word!
Where I come from, we call that a “scab”.
Where’s that, paul? Explain exactly how he’s scabbing or in any way acting against a union of which he should/could be a member, demonstrating workings.
I’m not sure I follow, Kim. I was never a Costa fan while he was Treasurer but this is an unremarkable article full of hardly-controversial criticisms.
Clearly there are more meanings to the word “scab” than I am aware of.
I was sort of looking forward to the possibility (now impossibility) of Mr. Costa having a turn at premier of NSW. Would have been never a dull moment. *wistful sigh*
I take it you don’t care for criticism of your darling Kevvie 24/7.
This Costa seems like a Labor man I can like, especially since your disdain for him is an emphatic endorsement.
Get a grip Kim, its an opinion piece, its supposed to express an opinion.
I’ve read it. It’s a little repetitive:
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April 1: Meeting, made ‘em an offer they couldn’t refuse; April 4: Meeting, made ‘em an offer they couldn’t refuse; April 6: Meeting, made ‘em an offer they couldn’t refuse; April 7: Meeting, made ‘em an offer they couldn’t refuse; April 14: Meeting, made ‘em an offer they couldn’t refuse…
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May 10: Ordered some fresh horse heads from the glue factory.
Is the point of this post to demonstrate that a Michael Costa op/ed piece can be met by commentary with less content, less analysis and less coherence than the piece itself? If so, cracking stuff Kim.
BBB
Michael Costa has taken a leaf out of Mark Latham’s book… Forced out of office and Parliament? Write op/eds attacking your former party!
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Come on Kim. It’s a great Labor tradition. They all do that. To excel in the Party one must have skills: knife polishing skills, knife throwing skills, knowing the best places on your best friend’s back in which to stick knives.
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Why doesn’t Costa join the Libs?
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Good question. In fact you could ask that of just about everyone in the ALP and be hard pressed to find an answer. I think the real meat of the ideological conflict between them is that Labor true believers truly believe in alphabetical order. The ‘A’ should go before the ‘L’ and the ‘P’. The Libs, those avant-garde crazy kooks, are a bit anarchist. They want it done backwards and out of order even that way. Anarchists!
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It’s a serious issue. This is the sort of thing they spend most of their time mulling over. The order of letters. Does my tie look better than that other robot’s tie? Hair looks good. Looks very good. (Well not Costa’s maybe that’s why they sacked him.) Anyway let’s just
refuse to answer questions and ignore criticismstay on message people..
REPORTED: Minister you didn’t answer my question.
MINISTER: Of course not. I’m a professional.
“Of course not. I’m a professional.”
I like that one Adrien.
If I was a newspaper editor, I’d hire Michael Costa as an op-ed writer. Eclectic, opinionated, original. Not one to toe the party line. Its about selling papers and generating buzz, and I suspect Costa can do that.
If I was a newspaper editor of a largely discreditred right-wing rag, I’d also hire a discredited former treasurer in a failing labor government who did much to contribute to its failure.
He can join the other nut-jobs, incompetent illiterates, and sundry wannabes and wankers who mostly populate the pinion pages of Orstralia’s national broadsheet.
I never thought a neocon could make me laugh but when Michael said that privatizing electricity was all part and parcel of the classic ‘withering-away-of-the-state’…well… that sure tickled my funnybone.
He may be a nutcase neocon… but he’s an Aussie, nutcase, neocon.
Keep em’ comin’ Cossie. Viva la revolucione
And yet we all read it. I never miss it and must confess to really enjoying its hilariously provocative editorial excesses and the OTT opinion pieces while in fierce disagreement with its political nostrums. Besides, the constant counter-commentary on LP more than suggests the paper is fulfilling its pot-stirring mission explicitly defined by Murdoch.
Don’t know that Costa is going to be any great shakes as a provocateur though. He is too much of a one-note vulgarian and has already peaked, I reckon.
I wouldn’t give Michael Costa a job, but he could sure do with a toupee.
I’m not sure that history will judge the NSW ALP’s decision to roll Iemma and Costa and hang onto a bunch of decaying power stations while the state’s other infrastructure starves for lack of funds to be one of that organisation’s brighter decisions.
Costa ran around in a panic warning us about impending catastrophic electricity shortages. If the private sector didn’t put up billions to build a new power station the lights would go out.
Yet, in his final press conference, building a new power station was no longer a state emergency, no longer an absolute necessity. It was now a matter of if - not when - NSW needed to more baseload power. I’d be willing to make a decent-sized bet that an anouncement will be made in the next few years that, whatd’yknow, we really don’t need to build a new power station after all.
Fact is, in a rush of blood to the head after the last election, this ex-Trotskyist also wanted to privatise NSW’s share of the Snowy Scheme, Sydney’s ferries and I hate to think what else. And none of it was necessary.
Oh, and he’s also something of a climate change denier - we have names for those kinds of people: National Party members.
GB, it would have followed the same fishy-smelling trail as all the earlier infrastructure ppp’s and privatisations.
The ALP right, HoWARdists and Nats do indeed share one monstrous habit, indeed. Pork barrelling is a politer term of several, for it.
The issue was never about whether NSW would be plunged into immanent darkness if the power stations weren’t sold off. It was about the cost to taxpayers of expensive and outdated symbolism that the NSW government somehow controlled the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy in some quasi-Leninist formula about the advance of the left over the evils of capitalism because the state owns the power grid.
The years ago, if Carr and Egan had sold the NSW power stations, they would have got $35 billion. This year, they are projecting $15 billion. Fact is, the NSW taxpayer is holding a depreciating set of assets, whose value will fall further as Garnaut is implemented and the anti-coal lobby gets more political momentum.
If it is somehow deemed to be good for NSW to not be able to build more rail infrastructure, provide more hospital beds etc., because it is more important to upgrade the Munmorah power station, then that seems to me to be pretty delusional thinking. Queensland and Victoria privatised their power stations and, guess what, the sky didn’t fall in.
As it is, the Libs will sell them at the first opportunity when they win the next NSW election in an expected landslide, along with the Sydney ferries and the Snowy river scheme. They will then go to the election after that with promises to build new stuff with the revenues from the ale, while also saying they helped to reduce Labor’s debt, and NSW Labor will be sitting around in their own political darkness for a long time to come.
And, worst of all, Michael Costa will be braying about it to all and sundry in his op-ed column in The Australian.
Terry, your analysis is just stupid.
You can’t make yourself better off by selling income producing assets and buying non-income producing assets.
The NSW Labor government is hopelessly f**ked up, no argument there, but selling off the family farm ain’t the solution to that particular problem.
Sorry Terry, you’re wrong.
The issue was about NSW being plunged into darkness - that’s what Costa said. At the time Costa said nothing about state debt. In fact, the line was that privatisation wasn’t even taken into account in budget decisions. It’s sort of like right-wingers shaking their heads in mock astonishment and wondering wherever we could have picked up the quaint idea that Iraq was about WMD.
The question you should ask yourself, Terry, is this: what will governments do when there’s nothing left to privatise? Costa does touch on the real point here: the chronic problem - I remember reading a piece by Don Dunstan on this very topic - of state governments not having enough money. Instead of papering over the problem in one state with privatisation, let’s make sure all states have enough money. It’s a problem of the erosion of tax bases around the world.
Costa talks about reform, let’s have the real thing.
I’m no electricity expert, but privatisation in Victoria hasn’t always - to put it charitably - struck me as a happy experience. In fact, my guess is that it’s mostly cheaper power from NSW that keeps power costs down in the other states, or the lights on at all, in some cases.
And by the way, according to opinion polls, people in NSW are overwhelmingly “quasi-Leninist”.
Michael Costa is entitled to take a dim view of Kevin Rudd’s pomposity and wordiness. What was it Justice Murphy said? “Mr X is entitled to be an agitator.”
If the ALP regarded criticism with your kind of grim disdain, it would not really be social democratic, eh? More of the kind of totalitarian-thug Party. More Mafioso than battler-friendly. Jeepers.
Twenty years ago, Australia had three airlines and two of them were 100% owned by the Federal government. Domestic travellers had the choice of a government-owned airline TAA, remember it) and a private one (Ansett, remember it). The Hawke government got out of the airline owning business because (1) taxpayers had to meet the cost of fleet upgrades, and (2) the public stake in having a government-owned airline was, to put it mildly, minimal.
Similarly, if my argument is stupid, then it is a stupidity shared by Labor as well as Liberal governments in other states. In two states (Victoria, Queensland) the electricity system is privatised, and in one (NSW) it remains under state ownership. Of those three states, it is pretty apparent which one has the most precarious balance sheet at present. I certainly know that Queenslanders don’t get worked up over whether or not the government owns the state’s power stations.
Public ownership is actually being de facto expanded through interventions such as the Future Fund. Whether or not that works, the point is that it is not about tying the taxpayer to depreciating assets. And as the backlash against the coal industry grows, the government is going to find it harder either to sell or reinvest in power stations. NSW taxpayers are paying a significant opportunity cost for protecting the ETU and the Labor Council’ right to give the Labor government a bloody ose at State Conference.
The decade from 1998-2008 was a great one for state government revenues, with the combination of GST revenues going to them directly and rising revenues from property-related taxes through the housing boom. For example, stamp duty on housing sales is 3 times that in NSW as it is in Qld. If state government couldn’t make hay in that environment, there will be little enthusiasm for them coming to COAG with the begging bowl as the easy money from property dries up.
I think the attachment to the state hanging on to power stations in NSW regardless of the opportunity cost was naff sentimentality that will have repercussions both for the state and Labor’s prospects in the state for some time to come.
Terry, The reason why prices didn’t rise, as Kenneth Davidson of the Age said just a little while back, was because the government electricity system of NSW, being accountable to the public rather than shareholders kept prices pegged lower than the privatised ones, which acted as a breakon profiteering elsewhere.
Following Legge and Davidson, as well as I beleive, Quiggin, outsiders such as Singapore infrastructure owners, pressured NSW to sell- up, to release that public interest break on prices, at the expense of the wider public, for the benefit of the privateers.
Strange how two posts here throw around words like “totalitarian” and “quasi-Leninist”. How about you don’t call someone who identifies strongly with the anti-totalitarian Left tradtion a communist and I won’t call you a Fascist, deal?
And Michael Costa is no stranger to “grim disdain”. I remember hearing Costa years ago give a speach at which he told anyone who doesn’t like free trade to go live in North Korea (there’s a theme developing here). Even as someone who basically goes along with free trade, I came away thinking what a rare gift for unpersuasiveness he had, and how much of a nong he was.
…speach? Sorry.
GB, I certainly would agree with you about the unpersuasive nature of the Michael Costa style of arguing a point. There is a view that Iemma might have got more of what he wanted if he hadn’t delegated the sell job to Costa. It was actually Paul Keating, writing in the SMH (apologies, no link handy) who persuaded me on this one.
On the question of electricity prices being lower in NSW because of public ownership (are they?), I would be very surprised if they don’t go up by more than the rate of inflation over the next two years to cover the $1 billion budgetary black hole. If Rees and Roozendal don’t increase electricity prices in NSW in the November mini-budget, then the low wattage bulbs are on me.
I cannot see, however, many other tax options that they have on the table at present, particularly given that government’s precarious relations with small business and what sort of swings I suspect are coming up in the Ryde and Cabramatta by-elections. And a slash and burn on new infrastructure commitments would only bring back the question of why are they hanging on to the power stations, an issue around which the Opposition will behave completely opportunistically, as they have throughout this saga.
Let’s deal with one of the biggest media myths - that this was voted down by those beastly union delegates. From what I understand some union delegates actually voted for privatisation. Non-union delegates (who make up half the votes of ALP conferences) voted overwhelmingly against it. Opposition by unions wasn’t the decisive factor (tell me when unions have won any big battle at conference in the last 30 yrs). Overwhelming community oppostition was the real reason, and that was informed by real-world experiences like those in Victoria.
I wouldn’t oppose all privatisation. I prefer a less ideological, nuanced view of these things, case-by-case. I don’t think the electricity market can be kept honest without the presence of NSW government electricity. Despite what the right would have us believe, the government in some areas is more efficient than the private sector - take Medicare.
Forget opportunity costs, what happens when goverments no longer have these periodic injections of easy revenue? We’ll still be left with the basic issue of a lack of revenue.
At the moment, despite all Costa’s carry on about losing our AAA rating (from ratings agencies that gave all those defunct banks in the US a clean bill of health) it should be a great time for governments to borrow - investors are flocking to the safety of government bonds.
Love the photo.
“Mr. Potato Head, is that you?”
How did he ever get in? Answer that and you answer what is wrong with the NSW Labor party. Costa and News Ltd have a great deal in common, no of it praiseworthy. Like Latham he will lose all self respect and the respect of anyone else as his selfish bile spills out.
“Strange how two posts here throw around words like “totalitarian” and “quasi-Leninist”. How about you don’t call someone who identifies strongly with the anti-totalitarian Left tradtion a communist and I won’t call you a Fascist, deal?”
fair call, but only up to a point…..
Harsh political attitudes are found in many places, and I have only a limited number of referents to draw on for analogies. All analogies are inexact also, granted. But there’s a sense in which harshness is itself an independent variable. It’s not that comms and fascists meet on policy grounds, but that they ‘meet’ on harshness (call it thuggery, bloodiness, totalitarian habits).
The post sounded like a call to excommunicate an heretic. Is that a fair way to proceed? Is it the kind of attitudinising that turns most folk away from the (perceived) viciousness of the political contest?
Must politics always be a blood sport? Who’s against capital punishment?
just asking….
I’m much more worried about the right wing Howardistas in the Commonweath public service who are giving Rudd advice he actually listens to - don’t increase pensions because we might be going into a recession, for example - than anything an irrelevant Michael Costa says.
Puzzling decision to hire him. Who cares what a discredited machine man has to say?
Kim wrote: You’ve already got News Limited Columnists eating out of your hand (you actually are one too)
Where does that leave Mark?
As someone who used to write for the Higher Ed section of the Australian very occasionally, but doesn’t now?
Ambigulous, I disagree. There has to be passion in politics - and why not passion over pieces of public property worth billions of dollars? But what has keeping electricity in public ownership - a perfectly respectable (mainstream) posistion - have to do with Gulags, show trials, mass deportations, terror famines? Let’s have a bit of respect for history and cut out the juvenile stuff.
Costa has been trying to excommunicate himself for a long time now. It’s his choice to rat on his party. But if he kicks dust in his party’s face - a party that has provided him with a very nice pension - why aren’t Labor supporters entitled to kick some back?
They say you can judge a person by their enemies. Rudd is hated by the likes of Latham and Costa. It’s the Keating school of suicidal integrity - they think they’re cleverer than everyone else because they’ve read an entire economics textbook and they think you’re not doing your job if you’re not driving your party off a cliff. Apparently this first world country with next to no government debt is in such dire straits that it needs constant, emergency “reform”.
All it does is further consolidate Rudd’s hold on core Labor supporters.
Mark,
my point is even you, at some stage have contributed to a News Ltd paper. Kim is drawing a long bow via her comment. Ipso facto should you then also be questioned/judged for what you did? Of course not. Who Costa writes for should be irrelevant.
No, I don’t think so, Maugrim. I was writing for a bit of the paper that had something of a different ideological slant and a different audience - but, even then, I think I might have been a bit too complacent about the costs of writing for the MSM. I’ve shifted my thinking on all this over the course of the year.
I think there is something significant in Costa being trumpeted as “our new columnist” and joining a staple of writers who tend to take a definite line, and who usually sacrifice reasoning for emotive blather.
What will it be called? How about “The King and I”?
He’s a Labor rat.
Jack
GB,
I wasn’t referring to the rights or wrongs (entirely wrongs if you insist) of elecricity privatisation.
cheers
Well, OK then. Game off.
Sam - How about “The King and I”?
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Now Sam The King and I contains within a brilliant bit of political philosophy. Please allow me to cite it viz geopolitics:
And of course something the blogosphere seems nary aware of:
Is a puzzlement.