Morgan: 60-40

791 comments on “Morgan: 60-40”

1. TP 49

   Agree; that is related to the view I expressed last night. All people, including refugees have the (human) right to live somewhere they are free and safe. But that doesn’t extend to picking the country of their choice. None of us have the automatic right to move to, say, Switzerland. So if a refugee is offered safety and a palce to stay and live in India, I don’t see how they have the “right” to move to Australia specifically. That may be their preference, but it is not a right. In this regard I think some refugee advocates go too far in their claims, and undermine their cause, in so doing inadvertently giving ammunition to the dog-whistle brigade.

2. The refugee issue is something we need to think about as a nation with the potential for large numbers of climate change refugees over the next 40 years or so. The numbers of displaced people from wars is absolutely trivial compared to the numbers (in the order of 100 million) who are likely to be displaced by CC.

3. [Goldman Sachs’s Black Magic:
   demonstrate the way Goldman Sachs– rescued from collapse a year ago by taxpayers — managed to pull off the magic trick of making themselves $3 billion dollars in three months.]

   Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/goldman-sachss-black-magi_n_324210.html

   Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/goldman-sachss-black-magi_n_324210.html

4. [potential for large numbers of climate change refugees over the next 40 years or so]

   Made this point the other day, that Rudd should tie the ETS and refugee problem together. If the Coalition are so concerned about this problem then they should be keen to get something done on GW.

5. Grog @ 18

   Thanks for those figures.

   I guess not too many of those asylum seekers were able to join those “orderly queues” much beloved by the Opposition.

6. [Made this point the other day, that Rudd should tie the ETS and refugee problem together.]

   Agreed. It’s a pretty easy point for him to make too. He just needs to point out the sheer numbers the UN is predicting.

   There are a couple of low-lying islands in the Pacific looking like going under that are getting a lot of attention. I think NZ is taking many of them. People could say Bangladesh etc isn’t our problem (I disagree with that anyway) but Pacific Islanders are definitely our problem.

7. Sri Lankan refugee and asylum seekers to India:
   2006 – 73,700
   2007 – 99,600
   2008 – 102,300
   2009 – 120,000

   http://www.refugees.org/countryreports.aspx?__VIEWSTATE=dDwtOTMxNDcwOTk7O2w8Q291bnRyeUREOkdvQnV0dG9uOz4%2BUwqzZxIYLI0SfZCZue2XtA0UFEQ%3D&cid=2330&subm=&ssm=&map=&searchtext=

8. This is how utterly sick US business and the GOP are – they oppose a bill to outlaw a rape clause.

   Some woman working for Haliburton was gang raped by work colleagues couldn’t sue because of the employment contract clause. A clause submitted by Franken to outlaw this was voted down.

   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/15/jon-stewart-takes-on-30-r_n_321985.html

9. and if 30 GOP will vote against that, what chance the health bil?

10. Do the AEC have a sense of humour? Scaring Dutton out of Dickson and then clawing back may of the changes. Of course Dutton has made the seat completely unwinnable by a Liberal all by himself.

11. 130,000 is an awful lot of people to make unhappy. This sucks frankly because I (and most doctors I have spoken to) agree with the government on this one. The change takes place in Nov1 (evidently there is a huge rush to get patients in before then).

    [National Seniors says “additional pain” shouldn’t be imposed on older Australians, who make up the majority of cataract patients.

    “The impact of these changes means that ophthalmologists will continue to charge exactly the same amount,” chief executive of National Seniors Michael O’Neill said in a statement.

    “The Government risks undoing the goodwill it has generated with the increase in the age pension and should certainly expect a backlash.”

    Around 130,000 people undergo cataract surgery each year in Australia, and most of those patients are over the age of 65. ]

    http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,26222755-5005962,00.html

12. Malcolm Mackerras being Malcolm Mackerras via Mumble. Good read.

    http://www.mumble.com.au/published/20091014mackerras_ct_dutton.html

13. The rush to get the cataracts done early will be good, as after Nov 1 there will be opthalmologists with nothing to do, who can be put onto reducing the public waiting lists!!

14. The ophthalmologists are certainly looking greedy on this one. Besides the the cost of the 15 minute operation there are 2 or 3 visits before hand which adds to the costs.

15. THis story gives teh lie to some of teh “job losses” caused by an ETS: Victorians have spent at least $4.5 billion (possibly $6B) subsidising the aluminium smelters at Portland and Port Henry.
    http://www.theage.com.au/national/smelters-costing-us-45-billion-20091016-h17r.html

    They don’t generate many jobs either, or much export revenue, or value adding, as the ingots are shipped overseas for refining. Total employment in the aluminium industry in Australia is 17,000. For the same price ($300,000/job) we could have given every employee in it a house and told them to find another job, any job. The sooner an ETS eliminates these “sucker” industries the better. Of course, on top of all that, Aluminium is responsible for about 15% of Australia’s entire CO2 outputs, adn most of the producers are foreign owned. Lose-lose.

16. Those visits could cost between $110 up to $200 each visit, which approximately 70% is refundable by Medicare.

17. Muskiemp

    The pre-operative visits would be as you say. All the post-op visits are covered as part of the fee for the surgery as “normal aftercare”. And yes the ophthalmologists are basically greedy. If you think they are kicking up, wait for Roxon to cut the rebate for arthroscopy which I’ve heard is one of the next to go. The orthopaedic surgeons will go into total melt-down, and they are MUCH more militant than the eye docs (who are pretty harmless on the whole).

18. Don

    ‘Destroy the village in order to save it.’ Yeh, interesting.

    I suspect that acid rain of the order required will not be as bad as global temperatures @ plus four degrees, which is where we are headed, but, hey, take your pick.

    It will make ocean acidification worse.

19. Did PBers end up with a consensus Australian Plan For Refugees?

    How many did we end up agreeing to take in over the next five years? Business as usual? A few more? A few less?

20. Thomas Paine @ 53

    One of the many shockers about the bailing out of the global financial institutions has been that governments have taken the downside risk as effective lender of last resort *before* the equity holders…somehow the sovereign has been subordinated to the shareholders. Thus if the government support had been injected as common equity at say $50/ share, the state would have (everything eelse being equal, which of course it isnt), would have almost quadrupled its money (GAS around $180 per share.

    And in teh case, this is not at all fanciful – Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet) invested $5bn into GS in Sept as *preference* stock in Sep 08 (i.e. senior to equity holders) and has basically doubled his money

21. [So Rudd and his ministers expect plenty of hard work and long hours from their very well paid and ambitious public servants. Good. About time.]

    For about the 20th time, ministerial staffers are not public servants. They are political appointments, the “hacks” Glen keeps banging on about. They are young, fit, enthusiastic and ambitious. They get well paid, they get a priceless insight into how politics at the top works, they make valuable contacts, and they get a flying start to their political careers. Smart young Labor types almost literally kill for these jobs. They know exactly what they are getting into. This is just another stupid Murdoch press beat up.

22. Trust the Herald Sun’s comment section to be selective for they have a story about Rudd being a hard boss and they have three comments bagging Rudd, with no surprise my comment about many of them who have departed Rudd’s office being possiblly former Howard Government staff and actual supporters of the Liberal Party was ignored, i also mentioned that Rudd unlike Howard did not go on a purge upon entering office.

23. Diogenes 37:

    [Wouldn’t country X which hates a racial minority be happy to see the end of them?]

    Probably, but I don’t think it’s as simple as you suggest. There are 2 situations to keep in mind:

    – people escaping a country with no official identity documentation that would enable them to legally depart their country – if you’ve never had cause to need a passport, it’s unlikely you would have one IMO.

    – people escaping a country who have official identity documents like a passport, but for whatever reason (home and contents destroyed; you’d be picked up at the airport by officials if you tried to leave etc) are unable to utilise them in order to exit formally.

    People in either of those situations who have cause to flee for their life will not be able to book a flight to Australia on a tourist visa in order to claim asylum at the airport. I don’t know about others, but to be honest I find the notion of someone deliberately eschewing the security and comfort of an international jet in favour of the risk of sailing long distance (often) in unseaworthy vessels highly implausible.

    As for the money and cost, for decades persecuted people have been using whatever wealth/personal savings and/or their connections in order to secure the safety of their families. I don’t know what the situation is with the sri lankans however – I’m referring more generally.

24. [many of them who have departed Rudd’s office being possiblly former Howard Government staff]

    Beemer, read my previous comment. No-one in Rudd’s office is or has been a former Howard staffer. They are all Labor members. These are NOT public service jobs, they are political jobs.

25. Psephos

    Is there even the slightest possibility that a high turnover means that Rudd is losing his “corporate memory” and having to get newbies to do the job experienced people were doing?

    Do you ascribe to the universally-accepted management philosophy that high turnover is bad for an organisation?

26. One of the reasons the NSW Liberal Party is so feral at the moment is that there are dozens of ambitious Young Lib uni graduates who can’t get staff jobs because they are out of power both state and federal. They have to go and get jobs in the private sector, which isn’t doing much hiring at the moment. Hence they have to hang around and fill in their time playing factional wargames.

27. Diogenes, on the first, possibly so, but I’m not in a position to know. I can only judge the PMO by its output, which seems to be first-class. Rudd has the correct answer to everything at his fingertips, and that comes from good staffwork. On the second, I know nothing about “management philosophy” except what I learn from Dilbert cartoons. In light of recent events, I doubt that private sector management practices offer much of a model to government.

28. I cant keep up with you guys, so ple forgive me if this post is stupidly redundant.
    An airline accepting a passenger without valid passport and appropriate visas, etc is liable for the costs of returning the passenger from whence they came, administrative costs and possible fines and even other more severe sanctions.
    Receiving a visitors visa to enter Australia is relatively easy if yoe are in Britain or the US, it is a much more difficult, time consuming and bureaucratic process in countries from where refugee problems are likely to be evident. The vast range of official and other documents required and the deliberate time spread is designed to preclude applicants from refugee claimants and other undesirables.
    Refugee applicants, especially the more bona fide applicants are highly unlikely to have passports. Apart from the problems of approaching a government who discriminates/harasses/ murders you, passports are valuable property in most third (and second) world countries, and would be confiscated/stolen at the first opportunity by crooked police, military, people smugglers or the vast networks of organised crime that are endemic in the third world.
    The posession of a passport by an applicant for refugee status almost disqualifies them unless their circumstances have changed recently and rapidly.

29. Let’s just see what wiki tells us about staff turnover.

    [When accounting for the costs (both real costs, such as time taken to select and recruit a replacement, and also opportunity costs, such as lost productivity), the cost of employee turnover to for-profit organizations has been estimated to be up to 150% of the employees’ remuneration package. There are both direct and indirect costs. Direct cost relate to the leaving costs, replacement costs and transitions costs, while indirect costs relate to the loss of production, reduced performance levels, unnecessary overtime and low morale.]

    i.e. it is bad management practice to have high staff turnover, even if they are slaves

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnover_%28employment%29

30. Psephos

    Some of those downsides are real (such as the cost of retraining etc) and some are potential, such as poor morale or poor work practices.

    I fully agree that Rudd’s output shows no sign of having been compromised but burnt-out employees often leak unfavourable things. Also poor morale reduces your loyalty etc etc. All of those things are potential risks for him. Still, I’m sure the atmosphere in Turnbull’s office is much worse.

31. Dio, the question you have to ask yourself is “Have I noticed any difference in Rudd’s work performance in the last 2 years as these staff changes have taken place”? I would venture the answer is no.

32. You beat me to it Dio.

33. Returning to the ‘Rudd as bad boss’ story, what is the basis for the concern expressed about his staff turnover? Steve Lewis has written a story designed to paint Rudd as a ‘demanding employer’, complete with a photo of Rudd with his mouth open looking aggressive like Lewis wishes to portray him; a smiling photo would never do.

    Moreover, his staffers have not merely ‘left’, they have ‘fled’ or he has ‘lost’ them, and his behaviour is described as ‘demanding’, ‘a bit all over the place’, ‘manic’, and ‘he gives little in the way of constructive feedback and doesn’t listen to anybody’, and then Lewis tells ‘there are whispers of more to follow’. ‘Whispers’ mind you; the ones that he and the Glen Milnes of this world are so good at picking up. Like all good journalists who know that personalizing a story is good gear, he concludes with “…media adviser to Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor – announced he was resigning to spend ‘quality time’ with his wife Tara and nine week old baby Allegra.” Nothing to do with Rudd, but the implication is clear.

    It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to smell a beat up from the man who gave us the Grech email story.

    23 out of 39 represents around a 60% turnover in two years. So how does Lewis press his case that this is an excessive or unreasonable turnover? By reference to the long past era of Hawke and Keating, and the last PM, Howard, whom Lewis asserts had only ‘a minor staff turnover’ and loads of ‘staff loyalty’. He quotes no figures; had he any that supported his case, I’m sure they would have been trotted out. Neither does he compare the legislative agenda or ‘case load’ of Rudd with other PMs. Did they have anything like a GFC to manage? Were they introducing anything as complex as the CPRS? Did they have the multitude of enquiries and reviews to underpin new legislation that Rudd has had? If Rudd is ‘manic’ maybe there’s a good reason.

    So if comparison with past PMs is unhelpful, how do we judge Rudd’s turnover to be excessive? As Diogenes knows, in medicine absolute values are of limited usefulness; it is only when a value is placed on the bell-shaped curve that describes the normal distribution of the attribute that its ‘normality’ can be defined. Does it sit within two standard deviations above or below the mean? Can anyone point to what would be regarded as ‘normal’ turnover in the office of a Prime Minister running a country of 22 million people in abnormal times? It’s little help to compare Rudd with a company director, whose job is quite different, or to quote someone from ‘Hayes Specialist Recruitment’ who opined “That is a very high turnover rate. You need to look at the work environment and your recruitment (methods)”, without stating the basis for comparison. For good measure Lewis quotes actor Rob Sitch of Hollowmen, whom he represents as qualified to give an opinion, and ‘workplace stress expert’ Meiron Lees, who published the book D-Stress, who said “it’s not surprising” so many people had left Mr Rudd’s office given his workaholic example. There’s always a helpful expert around to say what the journalist wants to hear.

    He then goes on to record the staff departures from the offices of Julia Gillard, Penny Wong, Wayne Swan and Kate Ellis and I suppose in case someone asks the question, he concedes there has been loss of staff from 32 Opposition offices, but all this is well down the page where the average reader would be too bored to go. It’s sloppy journalism, and he gets paid for it.

    Frankly I don’t know, given the situation the country is in, given Rudd’s workload, which is difficult to quantify, given his agenda both nationally and internationally, what a ‘reasonable’ staff turnover would be. Maybe other bloggers can give us all an informed fix on this, rather than a vague hunch or a gut feeling. Until then I for one am not going to get exercised about what is yet another News Limited ‘let’s put down Rudd’, by one of the usual suspects.

34. Michael

    [An airline accepting a passenger without valid passport and appropriate visas, etc is liable for the costs of returning the passenger from whence they came]

    What happens if someone arrives with dodgy documents and claim refugees status when they land? Let’s assume they are a genuine refugee. Presumably they are free to move in Oz (perhaps having to call into Immigration once a week) until their refugee status is determined. Is the airline still penalised?

35. adastra

    That is completely true but there are a few other points.

    1. As TP said, if there is such a huge workload (because of the GFC and CPRS etc) they should be able to get more staff, after all it is the most important office in the land and should be appropriately staffed.

    2. While the journo was lazy and should have listed comparable turnover figures, 60% staff loss in 2 years does seem very high.

36. Could it be that people get tasks in the PMs office, they are employed to liase on a certain project, when that project is complete they retire from whence they came?

37. Some good news on the refugee front. Now everyone can sit down in a calmer climate and sort out “the best way forward”.

    [THE Sri Lankan asylum seekers holed up on board a boat in Indonesia intend to end their two-day-old hunger strike and are considering stepping ashore.]

    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26223029-601,00.html

38. Dio

    I could be wrong but I thought that until customs clears you you are not considered to have “entered the country”. Theya re treated like international border zones (ports of entry). I thought this is the case in most countries, not just Oz. Hence you could just be put on the next return flight without ever having been deemed to enter the country. I may be wrong on this so any lawyers present please comment.

39. Diogenes
    60% does ‘feel’ high, but I have no real basis for the feeling. Would we feel more comfortable with, say, 40%? Or would it have to be as low as 20% for comfort? I don’t know. It would be nice if there was some valid basis for ascertaining what is ‘normal’.

40. Dio, two points raised. One. I think the airline is still liable for penalties, but whether discretion would be shown is unknown. Immigration doing the right thing is a concept to ponder! Two. The applicant would be off to a detention centre (local) to go through the basic tests of health, security, etc and then allowed to live out until their fate is decided one way or the other. Note that the sucess rate is significantly lower for applicants arriving at airports than for boatpeople who are restrained till finalisation.

    Another point. Some people have questioned why refugees move on to Australia after passing through other options. Several countries are notorious within refugee assistance bodies for having formal laws for assisting and protecting refugees and other migrants but in practice treating them horribly. Much of this poor treatment is the almost universal problem of third world countries having lots of law but not much order. Policing in these countries is often crude, violent, capricious and corrupt. If it even exists in some areas. A refugee arriving in a third world country with unemployment north of 50%, few social amenities, scarce food housing etc is unlikely to get any better reception than a Cronulla bogan would provide. The receiving country almost by definition will have no resources to help them or defend them.
    Often refugees are literally refugees from their previous refugee camp.
    I have heard heartbreaking stories of Sudanese refugees having to surrender daughters and occasionally sons to organised crime groups in order to be allowed to survive. Undoubtedly the same happens to Sri Lankans, Afghanis etc.

41. Does anyone think asylum seekers will be in the political news cycle next week? My bet is it will be the coalition party room meeting on CPRS amendments.

42. And what flows from Michael’s point is that this is not really a question of “political asylum” in the old sense at all. There are probably a billion people in the world who are living in countries where they are both poor and subject to some kind of political, ethnic or religious persecution or disadvantage. Usually when they leave their home countries, they find themselves in countries which are nearly as poor and where they are not welcome. What they really want is to live in one of the about 20 countries which are rich, multicultural and democratic – the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and western Europe. Is it going to be our policy that those who are strong, smart and ruthless enough to fight their way to the border of one of those 20 countries will be classed as “refugees” and allowed in, thus filling up the host countries’ refugee quotas and leaving the other 999 million with no hope? You could make a good case that they are the *last* people who should be accepted as refugees, because they have climbed over the backs of everyone else to get to the head of the queue.

43. It’s not just me who’s wondering how genuinely Sri Lankan some of these supposed refugees are! Forgive my cynicism, but that 9 year old girl seemed very well coached.

44. Michael

    Thank you for that.

45. [It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to smell a beat up from the man who gave us the Grech email story.]

    Ad Astra – totally agree. Who believes Steve Lewis anymore. Certainly not this household.

    I had to attend a sporting function today and found the OO on seat so had a read. Decided that it’s still not worth buying. Also scored the SMH so it was an interesting day spent reading papers I haven’t bought much for yonks.

    The OO wasn’t holding back on articles about Rudd asylum seekers and Paul Kelly’s article was just bunkum. He’ll be a gigantic bore on Insiders tomorrow no doubt.

    Must be a newspoll weekend again. Beat up Rudd on asylum seekers and then reinforce it with his office staff. Actually there was a small piece (SMH, I think) saying that Rudd’s office and the Cabinet/Ministers work far harder than Howard’s lot ever did. It wasn’t a derogatory article like that of Lewis.

46. Today’s SMH had some decent contributions from David Marr and Peter Hartcher(probably in the AGE also).

47. Psephos

    It all depends where you draw the line. You could certainly argue that the Tamils in their wretched internment camps are still better off than starving Congans in a never-ending war. I don’t think there is a correct answer to this one.

48. We had a Newspoll last week, did we not?

49. Until recently I worked in an office that had a very high turnover of previous staff in my position. When I started I was told that due to the previous loss of staff doing my job, no-one had any time (due to trying to catch up) to actually tell me what my job was! I had to figure it out for myself!

    Being an enterprising fellow I did figure it out, changed work practices, eliminated red tape (which had been holding my predecessors back), fixed the problem (once I found out what it was: the organization itself) and eventually got to a stage where I could come to work and twiddle my thumbs for the first couple of hours, offering to help others out with their overload.

    The boss first congratulated me and then, when I told him how I had done what I did, he hit the roof. I had abandoned procedure in order to accomplish my work targets. When I pointed out to him that a procedure which prevented work targets from being achieved was no use at all – to him, to me, or the company – he went through the roof. So I went out the door, voluntarily. That was a scary place to work, more involved in procedure than the task. The bastard made me work out my four weeks’ notice though. I was the fiirst employee ever to leave the place not to have been summarily dismissed.

    I expect a lot of people want to work in the PM’s office. And a lot would find it harder than they think. They have babies. Their spouses complain they’re always at the office. Telling them (the spouses) they have a country to save wouldn’t cut it, methinks. Rudd is probably a hard taskmaster. It all adds up to chaos, but controlled chaos, at least for the time being. 60% is high (my own erstwhile employer’s turnover was only 35% over 2 years) but what are we to do? Things seem to be going pretty well at the moment. Rudd must be doing something right.

    The thing is we… simply don’t know what his office is like. And relying on Steve Lewis to tell us is a big mistake.

    My current employment is specifically to change procedures so that things run smoother, so I’m hoping my new boss will appreciate my efforts. He’s one of those “brain-in-a-bottle” techno geniuses who works until 7am, and then I wake him at 9am. My first task is to convince him to go to bed at night. Now I know how my father felt.

50. [We had a Newspoll last week, did we not?]

    Yep and one the week before – the last one was a leadership special.

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