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Tag: Government

25/04/2021

Electric Vehicle (EV) Policy

25 April 2021

The Federal Government has discouraged EV uptake and now the Victorian Government wants to tax them to replace the petrol tax that pays for roads.

This is very silly. Roads do not have to be paid for by petrol tax. Any sort of tax will do. Taxes should be used to encourage sensible behaviour, not discourage it.

One other important aspect is ignored in this video and in most discussions about EVs. That is their possible use to stabilise the electricity grid. If they are charged when there is a lot of renewable energy, e.g. in the solar peak during the day, they can be discharged in the evening, so lessening the evening peak. If EV owners paid the day rate to charge and go the evening rate to discharge, they would make money and offset their vehicle cost.It might be noted that AGL (an electricity supplier) is encouraging electric vehicle fleets so that it can use their batteries to do just this, but hey, why would the government let little people in a on a good deal?The action point here is the write to Victorian Govt to stop the tax and facilitate the grid stabilisation by allowing EV owners to pay and be paid at the rate at the time they charge or discharge.

Please do this if you live in Victoria.

https://www.facebook.com/thejuicemedia/posts/306478977513607

16/04/2021

Amateur Hour in Management and Politics.

16 April 2016

When friends discuss why the world of politics seems to be going downhill, they mention that there seems to be no respect for knowledge any more. Because information is so available it is not valued. But this is not the key. The problem seems to stem from two sources;

Firstly the two wars last century were over markets and at Bretton Woods at the end of WW2 the key to preventing wars thought to be free markets, where there would be unrestricted trade and countries could rise on fall on their relative advantages, or harder work. The second item was the notion of neo-liberalism where the duty of a company was to make as much money as possible, with other objectives being looked after by someone else. But as free trade progressed like a monopoly game multinational companies became more powerful than governments, so there was no one to stop the accumulation of wealth and power. Power and wealth became the important items. If you had these, clearly you would know what to do.

A number of small stories often give insights into changing priorities. When I was at school and aged about 11 another boy, Geoff, went on a trip to the USA, a rare thing to do at that time. We eagerly asked him what it was like over there. He said, ‘Money just stands up and talks over there. If you have money and you say something everybody listens’. What he meant was that it was not because the rich person actually knew anything.

When I worked at Sydney Water, there were 17,000 employees and there was had a program to separate storm water and sewage in the pipes in the old part of Sydney, where they had all been the same. There were employment programs for the long-term unemployed, disabled people and even ex-prisoners. There were quality control units and a well-respected apprentice training school with about 220 people that produced plumbers, electricians and carpenters. The staff worked their way up the hierarchy so everyone knew their job and the tasks that they were supervising. In the early 1980s these was a major change. Sydney Water was reclassified as a State owned enterprise. It was to be ‘right sized’ which was the euphemism for downsized to about 3,000 people. All functions not immediately necessary were stopped. No pipe replacement programs, fix them when they burst. No apprentice training. No quality control- (has to be out-sourced). No printing. No computerised land mapping program (a world first, given to the Land Titles Office and later privatised) and the government was entitled to a ‘dividend’ from the enterprise which was about a billion dollars a year from all the salaries saved and work not done. There was a game of musical chairs which went on for about a decade with new management structures, each with fewer places in it, where people repeatedly applied for jobs that had slightly different titles but which amounted to what they had done before. But more than this there was incredible nepotism and people who knew about money or were politically favoured replaced those who knew about pipes and water. Deskilling was on a massive scale. Then there was a project to look at salary relativities, which seemed to come to the conclusion that the salary should relate to how many people you managed. Professionals were hard to fit into this framework, so it was opined that they should get less, but in order to get them at all, there had to be some consideration of what they were paid outside the organisation. As a professional I was also high enough up the hierarchy to get ‘management training’. It seemed that the key objective was to create a new culture in the organisation, and the main element in this was the destruction of the old culture, which was naturally assumed to be inferior to the new vision of the new management. Workshops were held to define our objectives and visions. The silly old guard had thought that it was to provide water and take away the pooh.

This seems to be what has happened throughout the entire public service. Lifetime employment has gone, and the gradual salary increments that made public servants content to work for less because they had lifetime security of employment and respect for the niche knowledge that they had developed.

Now the two overwhelming values are power and money. They are assumed to go together. Money buys political power, and political power gives control of large amounts of money. So part of this new values hierarchy is the assumption that other values are lesser. Public interest knowledge as stored in the public service, the Australian Bureau of Statistics or the research community are run down as the new breed of consultants rise. The consultants are chosen by their masters for their political or economic orientation and have to come up with solutions that fit with the views of their masters lest they not get their next job. It is an incestuous and nepotistic system where ideology and opinion have displaced long-term experience and expertise.

Some years ago, as a NSW Democrat MP, I went to a YADS (Young Australian Democrats) conference in Canberra. The YADs were enthusiastic young people interested in politics, and some of them were lucky enough to work in Parliamentary offices. On the Saturday they hospitably asked me to come to a party that they were attending. I felt a bit old for the group, but they insisted. It turned out that the Party was at a Liberal staffer’s house. No one took much notice of the old guy in the corner sipping his beer, so I observed a group of very privileged young people telling stories of their exploits in the corridors of power. The striking part of the stories was the extent to which they were merely playing a chess game. They were the goodies, Labor were the baddies and the whole discussion was about winning. There was no policy content at all. The issue was whether we won or not. John Howard was Prime Minister and I was left with the overwhelming feeling that power was in the hands of those who had neither knowledge nor respect for the responsibility that they were carrying.

So I was interested to read this article by Jack Waterford, which traces the replacement of the public service by political staffers, ambitious non-experts with a lot of ideological baggage and little time for long-term expertise.

The replacement of respect for knowledge with respect only for power and money may be the reason for the decline in decision-making in our political and management systems, and may yet be the cause of the decline of Anglo civilisation.

Morrison’s minders at the heart of his doldrums

15/04/2021

Our Military

April 15 2021

If you ask soldiers to do totally unreasonable things, you should probably expect totally unreasonable things.

The Australian Commander, John Cantwell was of the opinion that the Afghan war could not be won, and every Australian life lost in Afghanistan was totally wasted. He was on the short list to be the supreme head of the Australian armed forces but he took himself off the list and retired in 2011 with PTSD and wrote ‘Exit Wounds- One Australian’s War on Terror’ in 2012. It is inconceivable that he did not tell the Australian hierarchy that the war was unwinnable prior to his resignation in 2011, which is 10 years ago.

To ask for ethical behaviour from the troops, when there is none at the top of the nation is hypocrisy writ large.

Is Ben Roberts-Smith the Biggest Anzac Story since Gallipoli?

15/04/2021

Australia to follow the US out of Afghanistan

15 April 2021

Australian troops are to leave Afghanistan, now that Biden has taken the Americans out. The fact that we had no strategic interest there, and that we were merely there to please the US merely shows how pathetic our efforts to please the US are.

We go into foreign wars in the hope that if we are ever attacked the US will defend us as they did in the Second World War. Let us look at some realities. The British had promised to defend us in WW2, but when we were attacked they sent two battleships that were promptly sunk and they wanted to keep our troops in North Africa and assured us that if we were captured they would come and recapture us when they had (hopefully) won in Europe.

The US came to help Australia as they could not let the Japanese take us over and they were already at war with them. The US visited Jakarka just before Indonesia invaded East Timor, so it must be concluded that they were happy to let that little country go. If in future the US has a global war problem, they will act on their immediate strategic interests which may or may not mean helping us. Being a bit player in historic wars in Vietnam or the Middle East will not be top of mind.

So we are giving our troops absurd tasks where they go overseas and see their mates killed for no real purpose. Note that the Australian commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Cantwell wrote ‘Exit Wounds- One Australian’s War on Terror’ and developed PTSD from what he said was an unwinnable war in Afghanistan in 2012.

We go into wars for no godo reason without so much as a a Parliamentary debate- the Cabinet just decides. We buy American arms wily-nilly to spend the 2% of our budget that the US demands in order to help their arms industry and balance of payments, picking up lemon fighter planes and overpriced and probably obsolete submarines. We let the US station its force in Darwin. We cooperate with the Israelis in weapons development and we sell arms to practically anyone, including Myanmar and the Saudis in Yemen. The arms industry is giving hugely to the Australian War Memorial but want more modern displays. It seems that the object is not to remember the fallen and that they fought for peace, but rather to have a Temple of Militarism where our youth can have their warrior fantasies.

There are some Peace groups that have achieved good things. Australians for War Powers Reform want Parliament to decide before we are committed to wars, and other groups are active’ IPAN, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, MAPW, the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, and IPPNW, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

But a lot more action is needed if we are to stop this military folly.

www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-to-withdraw-all-troops-from-afghanistan-after-biden-vows-to-end-war-20210415-p57jeb.html

14/04/2021

Myanmar, What is likely?

14 April 2021

The Myanmar Generals are shooting their population, who at present continue protesting. As I have written before on my visit to Myanmar in 2017-8 my observation was that the population have no time for the military, who were hanging onto power and had kept Aung San Suu Kyi as a figurehead without power or real democracy. The military were socially isolated, but in a highly privileged world of their own.

The government has a capital 4 hours from Yangon and totally isolated from the reality of the rest of Myanmar.

If the people are willing to be shot as they protest, we might ask where this will go. Gandhi used passive resistance against the British, where the people just kept coming as the police beat them with batons. The strategy was to look for a changed response from those doing the beating. I am unsure whether this will work in Myanmar. Perhaps the military will just keep shooting.

But if there is a national strike and the economy falters, what then? Will the Chinese step in and help? For how long? Myanmar also has immense internal problems with ethnic armies fighting the central government. These are quite well armed, but have been confined to their own provinces. Will they link with the people against the common enemy, the military junta? Will the world take action? Probably not militarily against a well-supplied army fighting for their own country- this might actually allow the government to get legitimacy against the foreign threat, and no country is likely to want to be in the front line. The UN is unlikely to be able to act anyway with Russian and Chinese arms sales and UN vetoes.

I fear that there will be immense bloodshed. The question is whether change can be achieved. There is little doubt that the people want it and have waited a long time, so will be willing to sacrifice a lot.

Here is Peter Hartcher’s opinion from the SMH of 13/4/21

Trump’s example playing out in Asia, the world has to intervene

The generals of Myanmar decided to follow Donald Trump’s example. Like Trump, they declared a free and fair election to be a fraud. Like Trump, they made an unconstitutional grab for power.

But where Trump was frustrated in his attempted coup, the generals of Myanmar were successful. Or so it seemed. There was a moment of quiet shock on February 1, when the army cancelled parliament and locked up the elected leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi.

Senior General Min Aung Hlaing announced a one-year state of emergency and installed himself as ruler. But resistance has built every day since. At first, it was demonstrations by students and young people, then the whole society seemed to join in. Truck drivers stopped delivering goods arriving at the ports. Workers went on strike, forcing banks to close. Civil servants stayed home, cutting government services. Doctors marched against the junta. The army restricted internet access to try to stop protesters organising.

The Myanmar military controls a multibillion-dollar business empire that funnels profits from jade, rubies, banking, oil and gas, construction and mining into the army’s pockets. These independent profits allow it to operate outside the structures of the state and to act with impunity.

So the resistance aims to shut down the economy as a way of curbing the army. It is starting to work. Myanmar’s economy thrived during its decade of democratic rule, growing at 6 per cent every year and doubling in size.

Now the World Bank expects it will shrink by 10 per cent this year. The financial information company Fitch Solutions says that “all areas of GDP by expenditure are set to collapse”, that a 20 per cent economic contraction this financial year is “conservative”.

And a second front against the army soon opened. The ethnic armies that once warred against the state had become largely inactive, but in the last few weeks the Karen and Kachin and the Shan and the Rakhine militias have joined forces with the civilian opposition. The ethnic armies are demanding that the military, known as the Tatmadaw, restore civilian government. And they are moving to take up arms.

“If the Kachin, Karen, Shan and maybe Rakhine insurgents were to engage in widespread military operations, however loosely co-ordinated, and at the same time there is an increase in violence in the heartlands, the Tatmadaw would face a huge problem,” according to Anthony Davis, a security analyst with Jane’s intelligence. He estimates the total strength of the ethnic armies at around 75,000 fighters.

Two fronts – the civilian opposition on one side and the ethnic armies on the other – is too many for the regime. Fearing exactly this, the Tatmadaw asked for negotiations with the ethnic armies. That was rejected. So the air force has started bombing them instead.

At the same time, the military has grown increasingly violent with the civilian protesters too. The army’s latest escalation came on Friday. It was bad enough that troops had been firing into crowds of peaceful protesters for weeks, worse that they’d started to order snipers to shoot unarmed civilians in the head.

But on Friday the army launched a dawn raid on a protest camp in the ancient capital of Bago, firing rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at unarmed demonstrators. They killed at least 80 that morning, the biggest massacre in any one place since they launched their coup. The Tatmadaw has killed more than 600 civilians in total, according to a monitoring group.

The two resistance movements are in the process of formalising their alliance: “We are waiting on a daily basis for the announcement that a national unity government has been formed,” says Chris Sidoti, Australia’s former human rights commissioner and one of the three members of an international expert group calling itself the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar.

The “unity government” would include Aung San Suu Kyi’s National Democracy League and its elected members of parliament as well as civil society leaders and the ethnic armies.

“The military lacks legitimacy and it seems to be losing control,” observes the Australian federal Liberal MP and former diplomat Dave Sharma, who is convening a parliamentary sub-committee on foreign affairs and aid to discuss the crisis on Tuesday.

The UN’s special envoy to Myanmar, Christine Schraner Burgener, predicts a “bloodbath” unless there is some sort of intervention. The UN Security Council, however, is paralysed – vetoes by China and Russia prevent it from even condemning the coup, much less taking any action.

Sharma worries about a worst-case scenario: “If you have a protracted civil conflict it inevitably pulls in outside actors and you can have a situation where Myanmar becomes Syria in Asia,” as neighbouring countries take sides to protect their own interests. A failed state in the heart of Asia, in other words.

The conflict could spill across borders, driving big flows of refugees, as Sharma points out. “I think this problem is only going to get larger for Australia and the region. We will need to examine policy settings and co-ordinate with regional countries.”

There’s no evidence of any activity by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne – which is probably why it falls to Sharma, a mere backbencher, to try to stimulate debate, though he’s too polite to say so.

Sidoti has a list of policy ideas for Australia. One is to join the US and Britain in imposing sanctions on the Tatmadaw’s commercial empire. Another is to join the two-year-old genocide prosecution of the Tatmadaw in the International Court of Justice.

A third is to work with Thailand to make sure humanitarian help flows into Myanmar. Fourth is to work with ASEAN, which is having trouble bringing coordinated pressure to bear on the Tatmadaw, partly because ASEAN can only act with the agreement of all 10 of its members and Myanmar is one of them.

Who would represent the country at an ASEAN meeting? Australia could help break the impasse by convening a larger initiative to mediate with the regime, including some key ASEAN members plus the US, China, India, Timor-Leste and Japan, suggests Sidoti.

Finally, Canberra should stand ready to recognise a united national front as Myanmar’s legitimate government the moment it is announced. The coup attempt didn’t work for Trump, gratefully. The world has an opportunity to make sure it doesn’t work for Myanmar’s military either.

13/04/2021

Politicisation of Vaccine Rollout has caused the Problems

13 April 2021

Scott Morrison’s objective was to have a low risk strategy. He got the States to handle the COVID19 crisis, while he merely took the credit for its success. Then he wanted to have a successful vaccination programme, and go quickly to an election. He announced a lot of vaccine deals, waving a chequebook with our money to put us high in the world’s vaccine queue. (Tough luck poorer countries with much more cases).

But the deals were soft, the Qld vaccine had problems with false positives for the HIV/Aids test, and it seems the Astra-Zeneca vaccine is not quite as effective as the others, and had a few side effects. So his loudly-touted intervention has just made him look ineffective.

The problems in the health system with the overlapping Federal/State responsibilities and cost-shifting, and the starving of Medicare with subsidies to the private system have all been swept under the carpet in the crisis. But the government’s new dynamic, which is to ignore good advice and treat everything as a political problem, with Morrison giving advice on every subject from weather forecasts, to fires to vaccines is part of the replacement of knowledge by politics, which is a problem in many areas.

Here is an analysis of this fiasco by Steven Duckett, one of Australia’s leading health economists.

https://theconversation.com/4-ways-australias-covid-vaccine-rollout-has-been-bungled-158225

28/03/2021

Government Scandals

28 March 2021

James Dupres has put together this interim list of scandals by this Federal Government. It is still expanding, but a valuable resource for those who want to recall what has been happening. We look forward to his articles.

May be an image of text that says "In Alphabetical Order. AdaniRail HawaiiHoliday AgedCareCss HelloWorld APSOutsourcing HillsongFunding Funding Asylumgate Icaregate AuPairs IndueCard BankingCommission JobkeeperKept BarrierReefgate Juvenilel Detentio BrittanyRape MurdochPayout BushfireAbandonment NBNgate Cash4Visas INTGrants Chinagate Paladin Chris tianPorterGate PalmerJetGrant Parakeeliagate QAnonConnection RoboDebt RubyPrincess SercoFraud ServeGateCharity SportsRorts StafferAbuse Submarinegate Taylorgate Vaccine VaccineBotched Botched Watergate [Firesga Furnitur Grants GrassLandsGate GrassLan Can't for the life of me figure out why the LNP are not long dead and buried by all this?"

Here are the references for the topics!

27/03/2021

The Answer to our Problems is not More Religion

27 March 2021

Here is an article in the AIM, drawing attention to the political savvy and militancy of the Christian Right. They have been historically powerful with tax deductible status since the Middle Ages. In the 1960s they got State Aid (i.e.subsidies) to religious schools, and this has allowed them to take an ever greater percentage of the children, effectively entrenching an elite class.

The well-off have ‘choice’ and those who are residual do not, so rather than schools unifying a childhood experience they create two sets of parallel but different experiences in two different groups, and those in the privileged one will grow up with little concept of the other as they inherit the right to rule over it. The organised religions consciously going for temporal power will accentuate this, and the idea that you hide your religiosity until you have power is no less than deceitful.

Religious people behave no better than others. All this in Parliament House has been with a Christian cabinet in control of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy and the priggish piety that surrounds sex with guilt and makes adolescence that much more difficult has made no positive contribution. It is likely to obstruct the sex education that seems the best way to tackle the situation.

Edmund Burke said ‘The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing’. And Richard Dawkins said more recently that atheists have to become more militant. Amen to that.

https://theaimn.com/mere-men-are-not-godly-beings/?fbclid=IwAR3uGlSDPeKaHwCLDlEk3m9GWiuzXByP6JPboue2I-ceQchwMl4kWUcBGlo

26/03/2021

The End of Scomo?

26 March 2021

We have heard so many stories about bad treatment of women in Parliament, that each one now becomes just become one more and focus has shifted to the government’s response.

Prime Minister Morrison has been hugely criticised for his response, which now belatedly includes thanking rape victim Brittany Higgins for bring up the subject. SMH 26/3/21.

Having protected Christian Porter he is now considering a cabinet reshuffle, which supposed moves Porter but does not sack him. This is unlikely to placate criticism, and the criticism may eventually threaten his own position. SMH 26/3/21

The talent pools seems quite shallow with over-religious people, but Treasurer Josh Frydenburg seems the most likely and is apparently replete with ambition. He has experience in banking, law, and international relations. A son of Jewish post-war refugees, he was educated in Jewish private schools and is very pro-Israel. It is rumoured that Lachlan Murdoch would like to see the change from Morrison to Frydenburg, which may give the Liberals a better chance in next year’s election.

Morrison has concentrated all the attention for this government on himself, so it he goes the Libwrals can pretend that there have been big changes. There is a lot of precedent for this as a successful tactic. When Abbott won the 2013 electi0on and quickly became unpopular, he was replaced by Turnbull, who managed to turn the tide just long enough to win the 2016 election. Turnbull was powerless within his party and when this was perceived, the Liberals again crashed in the polls, but Morrison replaced Turnbull and they won again in 2019. Now if Frydenburg replaces Morrison, Labor remains lack-lustre, COVID recedes helping an unexpected recovery, can they win a 4^th time? No doubt that is the Liberals hope.

Morrison’s track record may come back onto focus.

www.michaelwest.com.au/scott-john-morrison-where-the-bloody-hell-did-he-come-from/

19/03/2021

Murray-Darling Farce- Another Summit.

19 March 2021

One of the more absurd ideas of neo-liberalism was to privatise ownership of all the water in the Murray-Darling and then rely on ‘the Market’ to allocate the water optimally. All that happened was that water was another commodity to be traded with its price more related to its possible future price than any physical or environmental constraint.

I learned a bit about this many years ago from my grandparents. One of my grandfathers was a retired metallurgist who would tell me about world trends in metal demands and buy shares accordingly. His wife, my grandmother, knew nothing about this but would buy shares based on what the market was doing and tell me separately about how she despaired of my grandfather’s share investments. After a few years, she was much richer than he from a much lower base. The moral was that the share price had little to do with reality.

Why anyone would think that turning water into a speculative commodity would optimise its use is beyond understanding. But that was what happened. Joh Bjelke-Peterson built Cubby dam on the Queensland border and used the water to irrigate cotton, so NSW was behind the 8 ball from the start. NSW cotton farmers used surface water and took water from aquifers with no supervision of their meters. Brokers with mobile phones bought and sold water entitlements, and famously recently a Singapore-based company sold a lot of water rights to a Canadian superannuation fund, who felt that growing almonds (which are heavy water users) would be a good thing to do. (SMH 3/12/19) Hey, the price of almonds is good at present and you cannot smell rotting fish from Canada.

The idea that if you fix the money, everything else will come right seems to permeate every aspect of our neo-liberal, managerial society. I think of it as a religion, that ‘the market knows best and will allocate optimally with the unseen hand’. It also seems that religious folk are more prone to believe this, happier to believe that an unseen force can magically fix things and that it morally worthy to suffer now for some future redemption.

But in politics, we do not even have to debate these things; there is another option, ‘kick the can down the road’. Having the CSIRO produce a report in 2008, ‘Water Availability in the Murray Darling Basin’, led to an inappropriate Murray-Darling Basin Authority report in 2009. The CSIRO’s scientific response in 2011 was ignored. There was a Royal Commission inquiry by Bret Walker which found that the Authority has shown ‘gross negligence’. So they had another ‘Summit’, just last month.

All this is not to mention that Angus Taylor spent $80 million in taxpayer money to buy back water rights from a company called Eastern Australian Agriculture registered in the Cayman Islands and run by an ex-rowing mate, with the deal signed off by Barnaby Joyce. (The Guardian 19/5/19)

It is a worry, when the senior counsel assisting Walker inquiry writes a book called ‘Dead in the Water’ and still comes back with an opinion piece like this.

www.smh.com.au/national/murray-darling-basin-summit-a-laughable-response-to-finding-of-gross-negligence-20210318-p57brq.html