Barton has covered Kogarah and surrounding areas on the north shore of the Georges River since its creation in 1922, currently extending north through Rockdale to Earlwood and Kingsgrove. Past members for Barton include Herbert “Doc” Evatt, who won the seat from the United Australia Party in 1940 and held it until 1958, when he moved to Hunter after close shaves in 1951 (when World War II hero Nancy Wake, running for the Liberals, came within 243 votes of victory) and 1955 (when Evatt prevailed by 226 votes). The seat nonetheless stayed with Labor until the 1966 disaster, subsequently changing hands along with government in 1975 and 1983. Gary Punch held the seat for generally narrow margins in the 1980s, but put enough fat on the margin in 1993 that his successor Robert McClelland survived the 1996 landslide.
A member of the NSW Right, McClelland held a series of senior portfolios after entering the shadow ministry in 1998 and served as Attorney-General since the election of the Rudd government. McClelland emerged as an important part of the Kevin Rudd camp during Julia Gillard’s prime ministership, an association going back to Rudd’s ascendancy over Kim Beazley in December 2006. An oblique reference by McClelland to the AWU affair in June 2012 was invoked as validating the subsequent blizzard of media interest in the matter, and was generally seen as a deliberate effort to undermine her. He had been dropped from the ministry after Rudd’s failed leadership bid the previous February, which followed two months from his demotion to emergency management and housing.
McClelland announced in January 2013 that he would bow out at the election, causing concern to Labor that the NSW government might seek to precipitate a by-election by offering him a position on the state’s Industrial Relations Commission. Reports in mid-2011 suggested McClelland was being advised to step aside to avoid a preselection stoush. It was thought the seat might provide an entry for former Premier Morris Iemma, who told the media he would not be interested if it involved “backstabbing friends”. The Iemma for Barton idea was again raised in October 2012 by Bob Carr, who speculating on the possibility that McClelland might decide to retire. When that duly came to pass in January 2013, Iemma did not emerge as a starter for the seat, encouraging the conclusion that he was not fancying Labor’s electoral prospects.
Labor will instead take the field with Steve McMahon, chief executive of the NSW Trainers Association (as in thoroughbred horses) and former mayor of Hurstville. McMahon won a local preselection ballot with 128 preselection votes against 101 for Shane O’Brien, Rockdale mayor and NSW Public Service Association assistant secretary, a former adviser to Tony Burke. McMahon reportedly had backing from Morris Iemma and state upper house MP Shaoquett Moselmane, key to votes from the Lebanese Muslim community, leading O’Brien to complain that his own support had come instead from “free-thinking individuals”. O’Brien’s opponents accused him of being a sore loser who had himself had courted the Macedonian and Greek vote. Moselmane had himself been a nominee early in the process but he quickly withdrew, amid suggestions he was merely seeking leverage to shore up his position on the upper house ticket.
The Liberal candidate is Nick Varvaris, accountant and mayor of Kogarah.
Chris Curtis
Thanks for your Gonski contributions.
meher baba:
[But I am also a believer in the modern economic idea that successful capitalism requires an ever increasing level of shared entrepreneurship, investment and co-ordination from government]
On this point at least, despite your professed right-centredness, you and I would agree.
[So, while I don’t believe in state-owned enterprises, and would be pleased to see more privatisation in some aspects of the delivery of health and education services, I don’t necessarily believe in shrinking the size of the public sector as a whole. {typo removed}]
Here I am going to differ. I don’t ‘believe in’ state-owned enterprises either. I don’t disbelieve in them either. I favour the burdens and benefits of productive work being settled fairly, efficiently and effectively as technically possible and with apt regard to the likely future claims of those not yet alive or else equipped to participate in what the working people of the planet have built. I am in favour of meeting that end as swiftly and securely as possible and where some kind of non-state owned enterprise facilitates that, or fails to obstruct it, I’m in favour of it, but not otherwise. Efficiency, effectiveness, equity and the temporal dimension form a nice quartet in shaping what one who seeks optimal human solutions should want, but squabbling over whether something is or is not a state-owned enterprise, or should or should not attract ‘a subsidy’ or ‘the public sector’ is larger or smaller is silly, IMO. Size isn’t everything, as those who like double entendre might have it.
We are dealing with a complex array of human systems, attempting in some way to address very socially, spatially and even temporally diverse human needs and wants over time. It seems very clear to me that if we are to achieve a system capable of reconciling what we can produce with what is materially needed to reach these goals, we will need the active involvement of very nearly all the stakeholders — humanity. Anything short of that will fail to optimise at least one of those aims.
That’s really what is key here, IMO.
Thanks, CTar1 and Poroti,
I’m happy to oblige though I wish I had been successful in getting the government to see sense.
mb @ 943
My views are not so easy to define. As a starting proposition, I’m conscious of a kind of existential tension: we act as individuals, but we do so within networked systems. So there is interdependence between all economic actors as well as the expression of individual choices.
It is not new to observe that many of the assumptions of classical economics are just wrong. For example, the idea of “perfectly competitive markets” seldom applies. We usually see markets that are monopolised to some degree. As well, many goods and services are provided outside markets or in circumstances of “market failure”.
Moreover, the concept of “consumer autonomy” breaks down, because consumers do not and can not have perfect knowledge, a class of knowledge that is presupposed in classical economics.
Even further than this, a basic proposition of classical economics is that individuals act rationally. But we know this is false. Most “behaviour”, including consumer behaviour, is just that – behaviour. It is not the product of rational choice, but represents a synthesis of whole lot of reflexes, beliefs, normative responses and both inductive and deductive processes. Likewise, classical models of investor behaviour also offer very poor explanations for the choices investors make, and do not explain why markets get things so wrong so easily and so often. This being so, market theory alone does not really explain even basic phenomena, such as the prices of goods or services, or why they change, or how wages are set. So with this in mind, clearly “classical economics” can be applied in only very narrow circumstances.
Even so, classical economics introduces some very useful concepts – supply, demand, ways of understanding surplus among them – and demonstrates that the exercise of individual free choice is not only a good thing from the point of view of individuals, but can also serve socially-useful ends. This was a very important intellectual claim of the early economists and serves to keep our focus on two related entities – the “self” and the “context”. This dualism is at the intellectual core of economics in my opinion.
To continue, in my opinion classical economics cannot by itself explain the operation of networked systems, which are far more complex than their abstract depiction. To my mind, that is what an economy is – a networked system. In this construct, costs/benefits and process momentum arise not only from the acts of individual entities – “buyers/sellers”, “firms/households”, “savers/consumers”, “employers/workers” – but from the nature of networks themselves.
Very many of the benefits that accrue to us as individuals arise not from our own acts (purchases or investments) but from the existence of interacting “layers” of “systems” that operate all around us. Therefore, it is not possible to separate the welfare of any given individual, household, firm or even market from the performance of all others with which they interact.
The financial markets are an excellent illustration of this. But there are many others, from public sanitation, to transport and communication systems, through to advanced research and education and the interaction of the human economy with the natural environment.
This means – to me at least – that economics should be about understanding and explaining the functioning of networks, and illustrating what the relationships are between individual welfare and network performance.
This is much more than micro- or even macroeconomics.
Perhaps this offers a way of understanding dynamism, which is the principal feature of our system: it is dynamic, contains many variables, can be measured in innumerable ways, and it pulses at different rates over time. It is “alive” in a sense that classical abstractions are not.
Maybe this gives us another way to analyse phenomena like the GFC and its aftermath, and to deduce better ways to extract ourselves from what is quite obviously serious, prolonged and recurring systemic dysfunction.
(And a parting word about Marx. I think he was less concerned about the past – about history – than he wished to be able to foretell the future. He was an early futurologist, who made the mistake nearly all forecasters make – that is, he believed you could tell the future by projecting the past. He tried to deduce a cyclical theory of history and then posit the recurrence of cycles into the future. This is a false reading of the past and has proved an unreliable guide to the future.)
sprocket_
Some truly digusting stuff in those headdlines.
Does anyone who has access to the FR feel like reporting on this piece by Tingle?
[The optics of the Gillard government’s education announcements on the weekend – slicing up university funding to pay for increases in school funding – are, on first glance, appalling.]
http://www.afr.com/p/national/education_plan_has_more_clangers_ofNqRbefvzpIbiSAXyKTjK
I’d like to know if Tingle discusses a “second glance” at the funding.
_______Civilizing Capitalism-
A pioneer of the Labor movement in NSW in the 19th century coined the phrase…”civilizing capitalism” to outline the tasks facing any future Labor Govt
The problem is however that capitalism can be ok but on the lose and wild it can do terribe damage…and Reagan/Thatcher and Howard.et al..were of a mind to set the dog loose…with the calamity we see now in Europe and elsewhere
BK
[sprocket_
Some truly disgusting stuff in those headlines.
]
Indeed. Mr Plod seems to have a defective idea of democracy.
[AUSTRALIA’S top cops have agreed to investigate WA Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan’s plan to ban alcohol sponsorship and advertising in sport. ]
A little history of leaking now compared with then.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/loose-lips-20130413-2hs9y.html
[Three decades later, the flow of leaks from government is much less, even in the turbulent circumstances of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership. There have been notable exceptions – the travel rorts affair of 1997 that saw the resignation of transport minister John Sharp, a massive leak of highly classified intelligence assessments on Indonesia and East Timor in 1999, the FuelWatch leak in the early part of Kevin Rudd’s government. However, control over government information is much tighter than in the 1970s, or even as recently as the 1990s. Many so-called ”leaks” are in fact authorised disclosures by ministers pushing their own political barrows.
By and large the Australian Public Service is much more disciplined than three or four decades ago and major leaks of sensitive, especially security classified, information are relatively few.]
Bill Maher on America, North Korea and War
Funny, but also true.
Fran@952. Thanks for your comments. I’m not exactly sure what you were trying to say in your last two paras, but I sense a belief in some form of major economic redistribution along the lines of “from each according to his means to each according to his needs”. You also referred to some sense of intergenerational equity/responsibility which, to the extent to which it corresponds to Burkean conservatism, I tend to find myself quite attracted towards (the gap between a moderate form of environmentalism and Burkean conservatism being quite narrow IMO).
But I do not subscribe to a strong form of redistributive economics, and this is one of the reasons I consider myself to be right-of-centre. Too much redistribution – like too much subsidization of inefficient industry – creates a group with a sense of entitlement to unwarranted support from the rest of us. The “beneficiaries” of this redistributive generosity end up trapped in welfare-dependency which is far more damaging to them than whatever it was that caused them to deserve our assistance in the first place (which, more often than not, was the misfortune of being the offspring of a welfare-dependent parent: increasingly, there’s only one visible parent these days).
I’m a strong supporter of increasing equality of opportunity, building strong pathways out of poverty and welfare-dependence, especially for young people. But I don’t support redistribution to achieve greater equality of outcome. I especially don’t like “horizontal equity” welfare for middle class families with children. I’m not even sure I like the idea of progressive tax scales or free education or health services for those who can afford to pay for them.
Fran Barlow
Nice to see/hear he left out WW1 out of his list of “necessary” wars.Damn right “Maybe it’s me ? “
[960
Fran Barlow
Bill Maher on America, North Korea and War
Funny, but also true.]
Very good!!
Was I dreaming, or did the ABC report a Poll this morning? Must have missed the comments?
[961
meher baba
…I’m not even sure I like the idea of progressive tax scales or free education or health services for those who can afford to pay for them.]
I think the basic rule is that in order to secure free education and health services for those who CANNOT afford to pay for them, they necessarily will be made available to all. It seems to be s social norm.
Of course, to pay for, we need a progressive tax system.
thanks for that info, Chris.
briefly@954. Hard for me to argue with what you say. It is the increasing complexity of markets that necessitates ever more government involvement, not ever less: as the classical economist would have it. But government must be very wary of entering the market with the primary intention of distorting its outcomes. Or of making a profit. As you say, market failure and information asymmetry are good reasons for government to become involved. But there are risks in this as governments can quickly go too far: eg, “market failure” arguments provide no justification for the wasteful subsidization of the car industry (or the forestry industry in Tasmania).
Re Marx: his predictions were wrong, but his theory of human history as being driven by the growth of productive forces and struggles over the ownership of the means of production remain very meaningful: to me at least. There is no good reason whatsoever that these historical processes would inevitably end in socialism, and Marx’s continuing assertion of this now seems outdated and quite embarrassing. But it doesn’t discredit everything he wrote.
I’ll be interested to see if we have street marches organised by the NUS, Getup!, and various student unions to decry the fund-siphoning for Gonski as an “attack on universities and university students”.
It would certainly happen if these were the Howard years.
Meher baba:
[There is no good reason whatsoever that these historical processes would inevitably end in socialism, and Marx’s continuing assertion of this now seems outdated and quite embarrassing.]
This is a misreading of Marx. In the famous Communist Manifesto one reads:
[The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles … that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. {emphasis added}]
Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Trotsky all affirmed that socialism was not the inevitable consequence of the intersection of and the conflict between the forces and relations of production. Human agency is a key component and barbarism was a clear possibility.
briefly@965. What you are describing used to work. But now, people with higher than median incomes are opting out of “free” health and education and taking a significant part of their share of the public funding with them. So the progressive tax scale is paying for a regressive, publicly-subsidized two tier system of government services.
It would be better and fairer to lower the overall tax burden and not subsidize those who can afford to pay for their own health and welfare (and also establish a genuine comprehensive private health insurance system).
Churning tax receipts from the class back to the middle class creates so many distortions in our economic system. Nobody would now argue that subsidised public housing should be made available to middle class people. I feel that health (with the exception of publicly-beneficial things like immunization and care for the severely mentally ill) will eventually go the same way.
Education is a bit different, because it doesn’t only benefit individuals, but society as a whole. So there should always be some subsidies. But at present they are far too high for better-off parents, IMO.
Frsn@969. I could find you quotes which give a strong sense of Hegelian inevitability to the outcome of the class struggle. However, looking at some aspects of Putin’s Russia or contemporary North Korea, the idea that socialism could lead on to barbarism has a certain appeal.
970
Means testing services causes economic stratification of services and that leads to poorer services to the poor. It also undermines the bargaining power of the public service providers by reducing the share of the market provided by them.
meher baba:
[However, looking at some aspects of Putin’s Russia or contemporary North Korea, the idea that socialism could lead on to barbarism has a certain appeal.]
Or it would if socialism (as distinct from the collapse of some hitherto existing autocracy and their replacement by the best organised group of contenders at the time) had come first to Russia or Korea.
Fran@973. I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to differ on that point. I think that revolutionary socialism, under any circumstances and in any conceivable form, is a misguided millenarian delusion: sometimes well-intentioned, more often not, but either way bound to end in tears.
Fran. Great post at 737.
[Fran. Great post at 737.]
Thanks Crikey Whitey
If teachers in our Educ Systems are in crisis, how would you describe journalists in our media systems then. bwahahahahahaha
bemused
[If you are accident prone, you can get silicone membrane covers to make your keyboard immune to spills.]
A keyboard condom!
Socialism or Barbarism
______________________
A 19th century German socialist said that in the end it would not be a choice between socislism or capitalism…but a choice between socialism or barbarism
He in a way had a foresight of fascism,into which capitalism often descents…see Pinochet’s Chile.Hitler’s Germasny et al
meher baba:
[revolutionary socialism, under any circumstances and in any conceivable form, is a misguided millenarian delusion: sometimes well-intentioned, more often not, but either way bound to end in tears.]
Now who is predicting the future? In your case, I suppose, nobody will be likely to say you embarrassed yourself at some point in the indeterminate future.
I admit that I don’t know whether I will live long enough to see inclusive governance and am even less inclined to suppose that I’ll live long enough to see socialism. It’s certainly possible that neither will come to pass and humanity will end its days with civilisation laid waste and living in near universal squalor. One never knows, but I hold on to the idea that humanity can solve its basic challenges and establish a truly just society on a world scale. I will draw my last breath believing that to be so.
meher baba, I suppose what I’m trying to assert is that individual welfare – say in relation to something dull but universal, like banking services – does not just depend on the choice and preferences of the individual or his/her bank. It depends ultimately on the sum of the transactions all banks have over time within their exchange universe.
That is, the “welfare opportunities” for individual savers/borrowers depend on the “performance” of the financial services network as a whole.
Therefore, we need to develop indicators of network capacities, resilience and production qualities, and to manage networks in the interests of all those who rely on them. This is true regardless of who owns networks or whom they employ. This also recognises that ideas of “choice” (which are at the heart of economic understanding) are in practice limited by network properties.
From this point of view, if the role of government is to optimise the welfare (broadly conceived) of the population, then Government should focus on ensuring effective and efficient networks are created, on measuring the “welfare” they generate and on elaborating and optimising returns from their functioning and from investments they attract.
Framing investment is a principal function of Government in my opinion, because it is the means by which future production/consumption and savings/investment will be determined. This has contemporary relevance. If wiser investment policies had been pursued over the last twenty years, we would not have a fiscal deficit issue today.
It is a shortcoming of the current method of economic management that so little attention is given to investment policy. Perhaps there should be a Minister for The Economy, Productivity and Investment Policy, whose job would be to co-ordinate the roles of Treasury, Finance, The RBA and the other Economic Ministries – Education, Trade, Communications, Resources, Science and Technology, Workplace Relations, Immigration, The Environment, Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, and Industry (and any I’ve forgotten.)
Chris
a passionate contribution to a democratic process is not wasted – your view is now on the record.
Very well done.
If ever anyone needed yet another reason not to shop at the Woolies or Coles, this:
http://nancycato.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/dear-mr-wooliesfrom-nancy.html
[969
Fran Barlow
……In the famous Communist Manifesto one reads:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles … that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.]
“History….is the history of class struggle.”
Compelling prose, completely erroneous as social theory.
History, to be very drab, is many things. Exactly what one sees depends mostly on one’s point of view.
Fran
[One never knows, but I hold on to the idea that humanity can solve its basic challenges and establish a truly just society on a world scale. I will draw my last breath believing that to be so.]
Of course it can. But it’s extremely improbable based on our history.
CTar1@982
Seconded. At the very least, this random internet forum person read some of it ;).
PVO and Emerson at it again.
“@CraigEmersonMP: .@blitzbub @vanonselenp I have never asked for or received money to write for The Australian. Try sticking to the truth.”
Display
The irony for someone like Chris who puts time aside to get his ideas down on paper is that these sort of submissions are ‘mined’ by politicians later.
A coherent view like Chris’ will in 5 or 10 years be picked up by some politician who will spruik it (No idea themself but the concept is self contained, so easy to defend. And no attribution to the author).
Chris – You could be lucky on the ‘poli’.
Quality gear like Nigel ‘the rabbit trapper’ Scullion?
guytaur:
I wondered how long it would take before PvO became involved in another twitter spat.
Reckon he’s picked the wrong person in Emmo to fight with though!
confessions
Yeah I think the same. I would describe it as being like the young boy taking on the computer at chess
Remember you can tune in via internet if you not in Sydney.
@702sydney: The Prime Minister @JuliaGillard will join @sarahvmac at 9am tomorrow to discuss the government’s #Gonski school funding plan.
Bemused 900
Well done!
CTar, I will put software to make it easier for politicians to mine ideas submitted to the government on my wishlist :).
guytaur@991
ABC have an excellent free app in Google Play.
Access radio from their national network, ABC 24 etc
Oh boy
“@oz_f: Nova just asked listeners to call in and tell them why they want to strangle their partners…”
This may be worse than the Royal Prank Call.
At last I’ve found the Poll I heard mentioned this morn.
Abbott doing his best to shake confidence in Super.
If only I’d known it was the Tele!
[In an exclusive interview, Mr Abbott told The Sunday Telegraph he was not surprised that the recent superannuation debate had damaged voters’ trust in Labor.
He said Labor had shown in the past few weeks that it thought the public’s money was “available to the government for a smash and grab raid if the government needs it.” “I just think that’s dead wrong.”]
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/galaxy-poll-shows-tony-abbott-as-leader-voters-trust-on-superannuation/story-fncynkc6-1226619876002
http://www.news.com.au/national-news/tim-mathieson-leads-motorcycle-riders-on-hagar-child-slave-charity-ride-before-crashing-into-a-curb/story-fncynjr2-1226620111906
Can’t believe anyone who has seriously studying Abbott could believe this. “Great statesman”?
[Mark Guinane @stevethompson49 you think anyone gives any credence to anything Fraser says? I assure you TA will be known as a great statesman & PM.]
Display
[to mine ideas submitted to the government on my wishlist]
Not many good policy ideas come from politicians.
The APS and people like Chris mostly put real ideas out there.
The poli’s are too busy doing tactical stuff rather than strategic.
:shrug:
This gets to the nub of it:
[“@mumbletwits: Cutting education for elites in universities to fund real Australians’ chidren in schools passes the Lindsay test & that’s all wot matters.” ]