Is a danger to be trusting one another,
One seldom want to do what other wishes;
But unless someday, somebody trusts somebody,
There’s be nothing left on earth excepting fishes!

And of course something the blogosphere seems nary aware of:

There are times I almost think nobody sure of what he absolutely know,
Ev’rybody find confusion in conclusion concluded long ago.
And it puzzle me to learn that tho’ a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly will he fight,
He’ll fight to prove that what he does not know is so.

Is a puzzlement.

I wasn’t referring to the rights or wrongs (entirely wrongs if you insist) of elecricity privatisation.

cheers

Jack

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.

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.

Where does that leave Mark?

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….

“Mr. Potato Head, is that you?”

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.

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.

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.