While most of the country is preparing for the holiday season, and those of us who are political tragics have our eyes turned to Wikileaks, the dull narrative of ‘Gillard must be a reformer’ (which has replaced the old dull narrative of ‘Gillard needs a narrative’) rumbles on.
Here’s Paul Kelly:
The failures of the Australian cricket team have become a bizarre metaphor for the nation; too pampered and too complacent, it has lost competitive excellence and successful implementation.
A bizarre metaphor, all right. Is Cricket a game of “successful implementation”?
[Via Loon Pond]
I think Mr Kelly got that metaphor from his mate Johnny, whose life’s dream was to have the entire nation, blond haired and blue-eyed, dressed in white linen and baggy green caps and with sunscreen smeared on their noses and lips, singing the national anthem (God Save the Queen) and bowling perfect in-swingers. Oh, Paul quivers with excitement at the mere conjuring of that image.
Mr Denmore, the upside of that would be we would have a nation of people who know how to bowl inswingers.
On the Kelly quote, is it too late in December to get nominated for the “2010 Longest Bow Drawn of the Year” award?
Gee that thing is badly written.
“The… 2010 year”???
… and Paul Kelly attacks “Canberra’s insider political-media culture” (!)
That passive language gets my goat — the failures of the Australian cricket team didn’t ‘become a bizarre metaphor for the nation’. Paul Kelly chose the stupid metaphor, and he should own it.
And anyways, the correspondence works better the other way Australia is just like it’s cricket team, missing chances, and not getting any younger.
Yep. The metaphor works if your model for public citizenship is either Ginger Meggs or Tiger Kelly.
The point is that Aussie cricket has been going downhill ever since Labor gained power. That can hardly be coincidence.
Can “events” “bequeath” a “mood”?
Ah, yes, the Paul Kelly column-o-matic, which must include a standard reference to how Europe is screwed because, um, it is.
EU unemployment rate – 9.6% (and, remember that excludes Norway, and includes places like the Baltics).
US unemployment rate – 9.3%.
And that’s while the US is running enormous budget deficits (the right thing to do, if anything they should be bigger in the short term) and Europe is on a self-flagellating austerity kick.
Its all Paul Keating’s fault. For coining the term ‘sports junkies’.
Robert, you are doubting that Europe has deep structural problems? Unemployment is hardly the best comparative statistic. Most independent estimates of euro area GDP growth in 2011 are for the rate to be around half that of the US and for the euro area unemployment rate to come down more slowly. Two countries – Greece and Ireland – can’t access the market for finance anymore and another two – Portugal and Spain – are heading that way. The Area’s banks are a bigger mess than those in the US (Germany banks have a 130 billion exposure to Ireland alone and more than $2 trillion invested elsewhere in Europe). And besides, the unemployment rate in the euro area (which is the part of Europe with the deepest problems and excludes the Baltics) is 10.1%. There are problems across the mature economies but the euro area is facing an existential crisis that is much more serious than the problems the US is currently facing.
LO, I don’t doubt that Europe has deep structural problems. I suppose I’m unconvinced that they’re any more or less fundamental than the United States’s deep structural problems.
Incurious @7 – yes, and the bloody Wallabies scrum has got even worse. Fair dinkum, if you bought this mob a knocking shop in Darlinghurst they’d still be broke in a week.
Most independent estimates of euro area GDP growth in 2011 are for the rate to be around half that of the US and for the euro area unemployment rate to come down more slowly. -LO
Yeah, but their labour supply growth is way less than half the US’. Despite that fact that they do indeed have deep structural problems (as, of course does the US – first and foremost human capital deficiencies that both cause and are caused by gross inequalities, followed by chronically huge transactional costs related to bloated financial and legal sectors) their per capita output growth has been considerably higher than that of the US in the last decade.
As for the UE coming down more slowly, that’s got little to do with those “structural problems” and a lot to do with disastrous fiscal, monetary and currency policy.
Not for the first time, LO, you seem to have been reading too many Chicago economists. That lot are a sad parody these days of the creative and data-driven (if ideological) faculty I encountered when I learnt economics decades ago. Personally I blame the Real Business Cycle theorists – that’s when freshwater economics really lost all touch with reality.
What was Paul Kelly on when he wrote that lugubrious drivel? The weird excerpts in the OP and @3 are complemented by the pseudo-prophetic “The warning bells are assuming a clamour.”
And who else but the cable guy would you refer to to show that we are running on “borrowed intellectual diesel.” “Foxtel’s Kim Williams said: ‘We have been through an extended period of ‘blanding out’ and that can only fail the nation.’ His solution went to the survey’s unifying theme: it’s time for action and some old-fashioned Australian optimistic persistence. If only.”
Put that man behind a pay wall.
Can we get Ponting sacked, then?
Razor, I would suggest Ponting’s employment arrangements be opened up to market competition in a fixed captain-and-trade framework.
Paul Kelly quoting Kim Williams? I’m surprised he’s not quoting Piers Akerman, or whoever the genius is who edits the NT News?
It’s been trumped. There’s a new narrative now.
Seen over at
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2010/12/15/tragedy-used/#comments
Ooops. Stuffed up the quote tags. Can a mod please fix? That’s if you can bear to touch the ASCII.
I’m still speechless.
Doneskies.
Kelly’s cricket team thingy isn’t a metaphor. It is a personification.
RM @ 9: with Ron Paul chairing the House committee overseeing the Federal Reserve, we may yet see a change in monetary policy, insofar as he’s a believer in the pre-Keynesian Austrian school of economics. So much for “the right thing to do”. The 9% can go freegan.
I’ll say it again, R Ponting is as useful as a chocolate teapot. P Kelly made the links. The gulf between “insider” and “outsider” perspectives leave us with soft centres and hard liners. If as Gary Banks says, we are in danger of fooling, are we in equal danger of drooling. I’d like a Productivity Commission view on the Australian cricket team, “Never in the 10 years …. has the level of exasperation run higher.” There is nothing easier for ACB selectors to do than introduce bad cricketers. The”great complacency” is exemplified in politics, short-termism, renewed contracts and faith in past deeds. Oh, and PK is a tool.
Apologies to Myles Barlow
DD, in the most recent OECD projections, Euro area per capita growth is expected to be pretty weak in the medium-term. And much of the higher per-capita growth in the zone as a whole over the past decade was due to the exceptional and unsustainable growth in periphery countries. With those countries now needing internal devaluations it seems pretty unlikely to me that the Euro Area as a whole will see much convergence over the coming decade.
As for the unemployment rate comparison, in aggregate the Euro Area NAIRU is almost certainly higher than that of the US – you seem to be confusing the cyclical with the structural.
And besides, my intention in mentioning unemployment was actually to point out that it is not the best way to compare relative economic problems across regions. If it were we would be lauding Japan.
As for the Chicago point, that is a bit cheap. The structural problems I pointed out are broadly in line with those highlighted by most economists looking at Europe, not just those with a right-wing bent. If you doubt me, look for yourself at how the real exchange rate of the periphery countries evolved over the past decade. Look for yourself at how the average European bank is actually more highly leveraged than the average US bank (both pre and post crisis). Look for yourself at the literature that is pretty clear about how difficult it is to have a currency union function properly with what are overall, pretty inflexible labour markets. I’m not advocating that Europe mimic US institutions, but some reform is necessary.
Abd if by disasterous monetary policy and currency policy you mean the currency union itself, well, I’d agree with you. But given the enormous costs of breaking it up, I’d kind of call that a structural problem wouldn’t you? Prior to the crisis you had one country, Germany, running current account surpluses of over 7% GDP, while another 3 (Spain, Portugal, and Greece) were running deficits larger than that. Those imbalances necessitated enormous cross-border capital flows that, as we know, turned out to be very destabilising. Recovering from those imbalances will take a very long time.
The latest OECD review of the Euro Area has just been published. I’d suggest everyone take a read to get a sense of what the zone is doing well and what it is doing badly.
I don’t know whether anyone caught up on Mark Latham’s column in the Thursday AFR. He reckons that our cricket team has gone soft because the country has gone soft. Change the nation and you change the cricket team. Apparently no-one is prepared to do any decent training in any sport, and we need more mongrel. He hasn’t heard about Curtly Ambrose, who used to keep smiling all the while as balls whistled past the batsmen’s ears.
Also he obviously missed the Commonwealth Games, where we had a boring procession of medallists and far more than our fair of winners. But the Australian cricketers happen to be playing a pretty good team at the moment, whereas we should worry about the next time we run into New Zealand, Pakistan, if they are trying, the West Indies and even Bangladesh.
Latham is a prize klutz but Paul Kelly is getting there.
I wonder what drugs Paul Kelly was on when he wrote that drivel.
How/ where/ why is Australia non-competetive? Oh yeah…
We can’t comp[ete with the US unemployment rate.
We can’t compete with Iceland on their finiancial woes.
We can’t compete with the British on the scale and savagery of the cutbacks.
We can’t compete with Fiji in their abrogation od consitutionality.
I reckon Paul Kelly should get off the Possum Creek weed and smoke something milder like afghani hash ~ the local stuff is too strong for him.