An open thread where, at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like*.
*we expect this basic courtesy towards other participants: allow the Salon to be a space for something different to be discussed. i.e. do not threadjack the Salon with comments that better belong on other active threads.
Try our roundtables index for recent lively discussions or browse our archives for topics of interest.
In Brian’s wrap of the Queensland election, he observed that “competence” was a factor in the election loss:
The second specific factor was competence. First there was the Health Department pay debacle, a stuff up of gargantuan proportions which went on forever. Staff were mostly being underpaid, but some were overpaid. Payments for overtime and extra shifts were not going through. Attempts to compensate and rectify became farcical. Is it fixed now? Then an employee managed to nick $16 million dollars.
This was April 2010. This is December 2012 where they are still talking about significantly improving the ‘payroll experience’ of staff. This happened as the election was about to be announced. Maybe it was the Commonwealth Bank’s fault, but it didn’t help.
I’d like to pick apart this notion of “competence” a bit.
Ultimately, government should be held accountable for the quality of the services that they provide. But, realistically, how much influence does a Minister have over the way the policies they decide are implemented? Was the Queensland Health Minister supposed to be sitting in on code reviews while the Health Department’s accounting software was being developed?
In the ideal world, analysis of government “stuffups” would attempt to distinguish between “pure” implementation failures, where the policy was fine and the bureaucracy for whatever reason simply stuffed up. In such cases, criticism of the government should really be about appointing the wrong people and perhaps lack of oversight. By contrast, there are plenty of cases where the policy itself contributes to the stuffup, or even makes it inevitable. I certainly haven’t followed the ins and outs of the Queensland pay dispute issue, but I don’t think there’s any dispute, at least, that the Health Department needs a payroll system. By contrast, with something like the Victorian government’s policy of putting armed guards at every train station, the policy itself is fundamentally misconceived, meaning that the implementation is inevitably going to be a stuffup.
But seeing we’re not going to get those kinds of distinctions, and governments do get judged on whether important stuff like health workers getting paid happens, what can politicians do to reduce “stuffups”? Are state government ministers not hiring enough people who know something about program delivery and can smell when a project is going wrong, for instance?
This week’s belated whimsy is brought to you by the distractions of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, where I am spending a week of intensive MICFing with some fellow comedy tragics. The Opening Night Allstars Supershow was last night, and this chap Simon Munnery was hands down the most whimsical performer of the night (n.b. although the video below shows incidents taking place on Calvary Hill, it’s the day after events covered in the New Testament).
Please share any bits and pieces you have come across recently that have surprised, delighted, intrigued or otherwise positively engaged you.
NB: the weekly whimsy thread is a stoush-free zone
Whilst our attention has been focused on the disaster that struck Queensland on the weekend, a major international conference, Planet Under Pressure, is currently under way in London.
Here’s a report on what leading scientists have being saying at the conference.
We’ve reached 400 on the other thread and I’m not sure we are done yet. Any way I wanted to make a rather long comment.
To me there were three general factors and three specific ones. The first general one was it’s time. Poll Bludger says that governments accumulate baggage until it’s too heavy to carry. He points to the 2006 election when the Bundaberg Dr Death scandal should have sunk any government, yet Beattie kept most of his large majority. Continue reading “Queensland election wrap”
Our weekly (mostly) look at media spin tactics: let’s dissect the PR and propaganda that aims to blow one’s own horn, bury one’s errors, resurrect the shambling zombie corpses of well-flogged deceased equines and take them for yet another trot around the same old track, and ooh look! A Big Distracting Thing! What did they hope to bury in Friday’s news-dump? Cui bono? What’s really going on?
Please note – this thread’s just for the analysis of media manoeuvres and their intended effects – discussion of other aspects of issues of interest belongs elsewhere. e.g. browse the archives | roundtables | open thread
Since we don’t live by politics alone (I sincerely hope), what else did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
The polls will be closing shortly. The expected result, as no doubt everybody knows by now, is a massive swing to the LNP with only an ignominious rump left for Labor.
What was voting day like on the ground? What did the media get up to today? Projections and speculations welcome, let’s make an effort to keep excesses of partisan Hanrahanning and triumphalism to a minimum.
An open thread where, at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like*.
*we expect this basic courtesy towards other participants: allow the Salon to be a space for something different to be discussed. i.e. do not threadjack the Salon with comments that better belong on other active threads.
Try our roundtables index for recent lively discussions or browse our archives for topics of interest.
It’s basic bargaining strategy. Threaten to walk away.
Behre Dolbear have just released their 2012 annual survey of Ranking of countries for mining investment. Australia, Canada, Chile, Brazil and Mexico are ranked in that order as the top five nations in which to locate mining projects> Australia was top in 2011 and also in 2010.
Glenn Dyer and Bernard Keane say at Crikey:
During the debate on the new mining and carbon taxes, we’ve had terms such as “sovereign risk” tossed about by people who don’t know what it means: not just the likes of Tony Abbot, but people who should know better, like Tom Albanese of Rio Tinto, any number of newspaper columnists and online chatterers (like Robert Gottliebsen at Business Spectator).
But all the while mining companies have continued to invest: groups such as BHP Billiton, Rio, Fortescue, and more: iron ore, coal, gold, copper, oil and gas, LNG. More than $300 billion worth of projects are planned or under way or on the table. And, despite that, we still get these strange comments about the threat to mining from this cast of know-alls (WA Premier Colin Barnett is the latest on 7.30 on ABC 1 last night: “for the first time in my career I’ve heard business people overseas, governments overseas, talk in terms of political risk and sovereign risk.”).
Regardless of what the national fiscal situation looks like at any given point in time, few topics divide the commentariat right from the commentariat left as keenly as whether or not the top rate of income tax should be cut. The right will have you believe that cutting the top rate of income tax encourages the rich to spend more and the entrepreneurial to expand their businesses; that a heavy top tax rate discourages people from striving to earn more and encourages them to find ways to cheat the tax system. The left will have you believe that cutting the top income tax rate, explicitly (as it is) in aid of the affluent, cannot be morally justified when there are so many more worthy targets for government expenditure out there. Why put a few more dollars into the bulging pockets of society’s most fortunate, when you could put a few more dollars into schools, hospitals, or to help the needy or vulnerable? Ethically it just doesn’t add up.
As someone firmly on the “left” side of the argument, I do wonder whether there would be any circumstances under whether I would feel that a cut in the top rate of income tax could be justified. Society, I think, would have to be motoring along swimmingly, with a high median income and a high quality of public service provision for people from all walks of life. There would need to be a clear sense that people on high incomes were really being stifled by the tax system, or that the tax system was configured in such a way that the top tax rate was proving ineffective in delivering revenue.
Two of the giants of Western Europe have seen some of these philosophical issues rise to the forefront of public debate in recent weeks. In France, the Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande has proposed a bold tax rate of 75% on personal income earned over €1,000,000 per year. Contrastingly, in the UK, a furore has arisen in the lead-up to the Budget (to be delivered on Wednesday at 12:30PM UK time) after it emerged that the Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition are planning to cut the top income tax rate from 50% to 45%. Andrew Rawnsley at The Guardian has a ruminative piece summing up the machinations, and asks the question most LP readers are probably wondering:
Reducing the top rate will please a lot of Tories and it won’t have escaped Mr Osborne’s notice that these are the people who will ultimately select Mr Cameron’s successor. It will obviously go down well among the minority who earn enough to pay the top rate. No doubt it will be justified on the grounds that a 50p rate sends a negative signal to entrepreneurs and deters talented people from working in the UK. But the chancellor will struggle to explain why he has made a priority of cutting the top rate to the far greater number of less affluent voters who are suffering the worst squeeze on their living standards in decades.
In short, cutting the top tax rate (as Rawnsley quotes “senior Labour figures” as describing it) really does sound politically mad. It will literally benefit just the top 1% of tax-payers, leaving a sizable proportion of the remaining 99% feeling appalled at the government. It provides the struggling Labour Opposition with a stonking great club with which it can beat the Conservatives and condemn them as being out of touch.
This is an act that reeks of the Tories’ self-perceived need to touch up their own supporters, with scant regard for either the state of the economy or the vast majority of the British population. The next election is still a few years away – so there is a palpable sense of “now or never” for the blue-bloods, with a few years grace yet to patch up their image before the public gets to pass judgement on them again. What is ironic is that Hollande in France is taking a mirror-image approach; 75% is a hefty headline-grabbing number seemingly designed more to mobilise and appeal to his party’s base rather than to solve France’s economic woes or to aid the struggling.
When did the top income tax rate become little more than an intellectual chew-toy for the political classes?
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
