The other day when I was talking about the findings in the Essential Research poll about public attitudes towards banks and passing on Reserve Bank interest rate cuts, I linked to Janet Albrechtsen’s column in which she loudly denounced populist bank bashing and asserted the Government and citizens should all be grateful to the banks:
The bottom line is this. The more the PM and the Treasurer bash the banks, the more they hurts Australian borrowers. Bank-bashing may feel good at the time but the subsequent pain will outweigh – heavily – the momentary pleasure. Anyone who understands the economy should understand that.
Anyone who understands economics? That apparently doesn’t include the Reserve Bank’s Deputy Governor Ric Battelino, who made these remarks to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics yesterday, reinforcing a “detailed case” from Assistant Governor Phil Lowe:
When we look at bank profitability, we find that Australian banks are around the top of the international range. On the surface, this could indicate a lesser degree of competition than elsewhere. But when we look a bit deeper it seems that an important reason for the high profitability of Australian banks is their unusually low bad debt experience.
That’s directly opposed to Planet’s arguments, any disagreement with which she denounced as “hypocrisy” and “ignorance”. Let’s dwell on the first of those nouns. Stephen Mayne revealed on Tuesday that Albrechtsen’s husband John O’Sullivan works in the banking sector, and that their family wealth was enhanced by remuneration including Commonwealth Bank shares worth $5.1 million. O’Sullivan received them as a senior CommBank exec. Does Janet disclose any of this? And this is the mob who have been crusading all week for the public “right to know”?
“Today, many are dead and Georgia is in crisis, yet the Obama campaign has offered nothing more than cheap and petty political attacks that are echoed only by the Kremlin,” said McCain aide Tucker Bounds in the statement. “The reaction of the Obama campaign to this crisis, so at odds with our democratic allies and yet so bizarrely in sync with Moscow, doesn’t merely raise questions about Sen. Obama’s judgment — it answers them.”
When the “civilized world” expostulated with Russia about Georgia in 1924, the Soviet regime was still weak. In Germany, Hitler was in jail. Only 16 years later, Britain stood virtually alone against a Nazi-Soviet axis. Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers?
The details can be found at The Poll Bludger’s joint. Nelson’s down 2 points (within the moe) but no doubt that will start off another round of Costello fantasising, even if the audience for that sort of idiocy will be even less than it usually is with the Olympics and all. It’ll be as meaningless as the change in the poll, and the relatively meaningless measure itself.
Of much more interest is the new kid on the polling block, Essential Research (which btw has Labor 58-42 on the 2PP). The online poll has been mixing it up a bit with different questions. You can read all the results here, but I wanted to focus on the question on interest rates and the banks.
There was some interesting discussion here at LP recently on this thread about the right to free speech, which I think took far too narrowly American and thus falsely universal a view. In the common law tradition of Britain and Australia and comparable countries, there hasn’t historically been a legal right to free speech (except in Parliament!). Though that’s changed to some degree here, and in Britain because of the importation of civil law jurisprudence via the European Union, it has always been the case that protection from intrusion and protection of reputation have been significant barriers to press “freedom”. Defamation law, however, is a blunt instrument when it comes to protecting privacy, and the Australian Law Reform Commission has released a report suggesting higher barriers for media intrusion into people’s private lives. The report can be found here and the salient recommendations are covered in this story.
The Right to Know Coalition - an organisation of Australian media companies - vigorously opposes any new legal protections for privacy.
In an op/ed pushing this barrow in The Australian, UQ’s Garrick Professor of Law James Allan makes the case against, predictably roping in the general conservative suspicion of any measure that might resemble a bill of rights. He concentrates on a recent UK case which turned on a right to privacy, brought by motor racing boss Max Mosley. Mosley’s adventures with sex workers and domination scenarios in a basement were reported by a British tabloid, and the story had all sorts of salacious elements - including the fact that Mosley’s famous father Sir Oswald was a home-grown British Fascist. But the court found that there was no public interest in revealing all this, and indeed it’s hard really to see what that public interest might be. The suggestion from the media crew is that “ordinary people” don’t have to worry about such intrusions into their private lives. But is that so?
The supposition I had - shared by Lyn at Public Opinion - that even the diehard Milnes and Shanahans of News Limited might give up on their “Costello for Saviour” campaign in the absence of anything actually happening has been spectacularly shattered. Our Dennis - in perhaps the longest column he has ever written - piles speculation on top of speculation on top of speculation and - well, you get the picture. Labor is probably a oncer because this might happen if that happens and that might occur if this happens. Unbelievable.
The first is the lamentable habit Rudd has retained of retail politics Howard style. So we get grabs on the tv news every night of what Rudd thinks about x y and z - many of which have zip to do with the job of being PM. Let’s not forget the excuse for bringing the Beazer down - mixing Rove McManus and Karl Rove up. Perhaps the twenty something whiz kids Inside Kevin08 have a better grasp of pop culture, but would you really trust KRudd to comment on the political pop culture story of the week - Paris Hilton? Maybe the dude got where he is today in part because he was on breakfast telly and FM radio all the time, but isn’t there some truth to what Keating says about not just the dignity of the office but also trivialising the Prime Ministerial voice? When the Orstrayan public becomes less enamoured of Kevvy than we are at the moment, could it be that we’ll be as uninterested in what he has to say about economic policy as what he thinks of the last cricket result or all those many many many artistic and intertube-ish threats to teh kiddies? (Which probably - incidentally - needlessly alienates part of his support base without really gaining him much…)
Secondly, there’s a very sensible piece by Bernard Keane in today’s Crikey on the narrative thing. It repays reading in full but there’s one bit I wanted to highlight.
What do you do if you’re a columnist for the Opposition Organ and nothing is actually happening in the Peter Costello Leadership Story? Write about Chrissy Pyne’s Facebook status updates as if they’re news, that’s what! Score one zero for the Liberals in the Web 2.0 politics sphere, I guess.
Liberal frontbencher and staunch Costello supporter Christopher Pyne used his Facebook site to kill the speculation, writing: “Christopher Pyne thinks Peter Costello’s position is clear and unchanged since November and wishes everyone would move on and get stuck into the ALP. Who arehopeless!”
Well, thanks for that, Dennis. Paul Keating probably killed off the Great Pretender for the time being more effectively, but I suppose it is hard to keep writing the same columns and stories about a quintessential non-event day after day. We’ll miss the comedy value. I imagine we’re about to see the switch flicked back to that other “media narrative” - “the Rudd honeymoon is over” now.
I feel all dirty, as if I’m the Fairfax Online website crew or something, embedding this. But it’s kinda funny. And everyone else is. And there’s a serious point here - why wasn’t Obama reacting better to the attacks on him from McCain which are keeping the latter’s candidacy alive? Writing at the Graudian’s Comment is Free, Cliff Shechter worries that Obama might be joining a long line of failed Democratic presidential candidates who failed because they failed to hit back at Republican slurs. McCain’s negative strategy is designed to box Obama in - if he doesn’t reply, the mud sticks. If he does, the gloss of the “charismatic new politics” comes off. So send out some surrogates already! It shouldn’t take a viral from Paris to make McCain look like the nasty old bugger that he is.
Edit: the original video we embedded was on YouTube, which has been pulled because it violates the copyright of Funny Or Die. Luckily, they have an embedding facility as well.
Well it’s August so it must be time again to condemn. Here’s a twenty third open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
At Public Opinion, Gary Sauer-Thompson takes a look at the craziness of a climate change denialist clothing himself in the raiment of the Enlightenment. Astonishing.
Update [by Mark]: Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge links to a piece by David Karoly at Unleashed which debunks a lot of the climate change “scepticism” and has a neat statement of what scientific rationality is actually about.
…is Louise Adler. The saga of the Great Pretender and what Crikey calls “Australia’s first fully media-driven leadership crisis” keeps providing comedy gold, if nothing else.
Senior Liberals want Mr Costello to publicly clarify his future as soon as possible, before the intense speculation harms the party.
Although the official line is that the timing is up to him, Liberal sources say they do not believe he can keep colleagues in suspense until he launches his book next month. But Mr Costello seems determined to try to keep quiet until then.
Melbourne University Publishing chief executive Louise Adler said yesterday: “Our advice would be to all our authors — including Peter Costello — that before publication they minimise media appearances.”
If you read between the lines of Peter Costello’s in house columnist/propagandist at News Limited Glenn Milne’s column today, and add in Tony Abbott’s words of praise for The Great Pretender on Lateline on Friday, and the story that came from “nowhere” about Cossie knocking back a 2 million buck a year job, the Liberal leadership narrative is becoming pretty clear - signals are being sent that the party’s Right, and particularly Nick Minchin, want $weetie in the leadership.
But let’s be clear about two things:
(1) Costello is still doing his usual petulant thing - signalling that he’ll only take the leadership if asked. Whether or not a 10 month sulk while his party lies in smoking ruins is a mark of a clever politician or just a massive and self-centred ego is - as they say - a question for the party room.
(2) The Liberal Party right are turning to Costello in order to fend off Malcolm Turnbull. So any suggestion that the former Treasurer is some sort of moderate, or indeed that he might have his own agenda, can probably be put to bed. He’ll be the captive of the denialist hardliners just like Brendan Nelson is. And that - all his past feints to the moderates aside - would be entirely consistent with his history as a politician - a natural right winger, but a lazy one with few ideas of his own, and no eye for political strategy. Turnbull is unlikely to take any second coming lying down.
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
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There was some interesting discussion here at LP recently 
As a bit of a follow up to 
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