Mayo
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| Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Based around the Adelaide Hills, Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island, Mayo was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984 from territory which had mostly been covered by Barker, which was compensated for its losses by absorbing the Riverland from the abolished seat of Angas. All areas concerned are strongly conservative, with Labor never having held Mayo, Barker or Angas. It presently extends southwards from Kersbrook, 22 kilometres to the north-east of Adelaide, through Mount Barker and McLaren Vale to Goolwa at the mouth of the Murray River, and westwards to the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island.
Alexander Downer entered parliament as the seat’s inaugural member in 1984, his father Sir Alec Downer having been member for Angas from 1949 to 1963. The only threat to Downer’s hold on the seat over the next 24 years was the strength of the Australian Democrats in the Adelaide Hills, which became a live concern in 1998 when John Schumann, former lead singer of folk group Redgum (of “I Was Only Nineteen” fame), increased the Democrats vote from 12.4% to 22.4% to overtake the Labor candidate and fall 1.7% short of victory after the distribution of their preferences. The Democrats polled a more typical 14.8% in 2001, before collapsing to 1.8% in 2004. As well as bringing an end his 11-year career as Foreign Minister, the November 2007 election reduced Downer’s margin against Labor to single figures for the first time, following a swing of 6.5%. Downer stepped down from the front bench after the election defeat and announced his resignation from parliament the following July, initiating a by-election held in September.
The Liberal preselection was won by Jamie Briggs, who had worked in the Prime Minister’s Office as chief adviser on industrial relations, giving him a politically uncomfortable association with the unpopular WorkChoices policies. With the backing of Downer and John Howard, Briggs won the preselection vote in the seventh round by 157 to 111 over the party’s recently ousted state leader Iain Evans, who remains a senior figure in the state parliamentary party as member for Davenport. Among the preselection also-rans was housing mogul Bob Day, who reacted to his defeat by running as the candidate of Family First, for which he would eventually be elected a Senator in 2013. Labor did not contest the by-election, but Briggs was given a run for his money by Lynton Vonow of the Greens and independent Di Bell, a local anthropologist who had the backing of Nick Xenophon. With the Liberal vote falling from 51.1% to 41.3%, most of the non-Liberal vote split between the Greens (21.4%), Di Bell (16.3%) and Bob Day (11.4%). The distribution of preferences from Day and others left Vonow leading Bell 28.2% to 24.1% at the second-last count, with Briggs finishing 3.0% clear of Vonow after distribution of Bell’s preferences.
Briggs had no difficulties winning re-election in 2010, when he prevailed with a near-identical margin to Downer’s in 2007, or in 2010, when the margin returned to double-digit territory after a 5.2% swing. He won promotion to shadow parliamentary secretary in September 2012, emerging the beneficiary of the one minor reshuffle of the term occasioned by Senator Cory Bernardi’s resignation. After the 2013 election victory he was promoted to the outer ministry as Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development.
Sturt
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| Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Christopher Pyne’s electorate of Sturt covers the inner eastern suburbs of Adelaide, including Payneham, Kensington, Tranmere and Skye east of the city, Klemzig, Campbelltown, Paradise and Highbury to the north, and Glenunga, Glen Osmond and Beaumont to the south. When created in 1949 it also covered northern Adelaide, which after 1955 formed the basis of the new electorate of Bonython (eventually to be abolished in 2004). The loss of this territory made Sturt notionally Liberal, prompting Labor member Norman Makin – who had gained Sturt from the Liberals at the 1954 election – to contest the new seat, which was very safe for Labor. Sturt has since been won by Labor only at the 1969 election, when a 15.0% swing secured a narrow victory for Norman Foster. South Australia bucked the national trend of the 1972 election in swinging slightly to the Liberals, enabling Ian Wilson to recover the seat he had lost at the previous election.
Wilson thereafter retained the seat by margins of between 2.0% and 10.3% until the 1993 election, when he was defeated for preselection by Christopher Pyne, a 25-year-old former staffer to Senator Amanda Vanstone. Pyne was already emerging as a powerbroker in the party’s moderate faction, and won promotion to shadow parliamentary secretary a year after entering parliament. However, he would have to wait until the Howard government’s final year in office to achieve ministerial rank, which was widely put down to his closeness to Peter Costello. Following the November 2007 election defeat he ran for the deputy leadership, finishing in third place with 18 votes behind Julie Bishop on 44 and Andrew Robb on 25. He served in high-profile positions on the opposition front bench over the next few years, first in justice and border protection under Brendan Nelson, then in education, apprenticeships and training under Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. In February 2009 he further gained the important role of manager of opposition business, to the chagrin of the party’s Right.
Pyne’s hold on Sturt came under serious threat at Labor’s electoral high-water mark in 2007 and 2010, his margin being cut on the former occasion from 6.8% to 0.9%. He did well on the latter to secure the seat with a swing of 2.5%, going against the trend of a statewide swing to Labor of 0.8%, and was safely re-elected with a further swing of 6.5% in 2013. Since the election of the Abbott government he has served as Education Minister and Leader of the House.
BK
[here are prominent “Give Way” signs for the cyclists.]
Still, motorists should also have to take proper caution and care.
[Maybe I need to better understand what ‘efficiency’ means in Economics…]
Efficiency, of the Pareto kind, simply means dividing the benefits of trade in such a way that noone can do any better without at least one doing worse. Notice there is no market in that definition – they are secondary to it, and are no more than a tool for achieving an efficient allocation and the prices that support it.
The specific example of an efficient market outcome is one where noone who wants buy more can do so without increasing the price for at least one other purchaser, or decreasing the profits of the seller/s.
In all but perfectly competitive markets (which are achieved technically by assuming an infinite number of buyers and sellers that provide one good of consistent quality, etc) there is a set, or a collection, of efficient market outcomes. However, in each of these outcomes, different participants earn different surpluses or profits. This is the part that is not well understood in general, but the scenario of a monopolist gives the idea.
In the first case, consider an unregulated monopolist. The monopolist can set the price, so it sets the price to maximise its own profit. In a second case, an authority (the State) can regulate the monopolist in a way that reduces its profit. This, in effect, means enforcing a lower the market price that the unregulated monopolist would, so that more purchasers can afford the good. The result is a greater surplus accruing to the buyers, but a smaller profit to the seller.
Both outcomes (regulated and unregulated) are called efficient.
Chinese mob take things into their own hands after municipal Police bash and kill a man – for taking pictures of them bashing a woman.
Warning – gory pictures towards the bottom of the page –
[ The Chinese people have a different way of dealing with corrupt officials.
A riot involving around 1,000 people broke out last Saturday in Cangnan county of Wenzhou city, Zhejiang province, resulting in the hospitalization of five chengguan, China’s notoriously abusive and under-regulated urban enforcement officials.
The alleged cause for the riots was the five’s brutally killing a civilian.
According to reports, the chengguan “hit the man with a hammer until he started to vomit blood, because he was trying to take pictures of their violence towards a woman, a street vendor.”
This man later died while being rushed to the hospital.
…Angered by their violence, the crowd surrounded the officials and prevented them from leaving the scene.
…Eventually the officials were forced to seek refuge in a van, according to eyewitnesses at the scene.
According to eyewitness accounts, the crowd — which was growing at an alarmingly rapid pace — was shouting for the chengguan to be murdered on the spot for what they did, yelling: “Kill them! Kill them!”
They proceeded to beat the five until they were bloodied and unconscious, and later collectively tipped over the ambulance that had arrived to provide medical treatment.
…This incident is yet another chapter in the seemingly endless saga of both chengguan brutality and corresponding civilian backlashes:]
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-21/furious-chinese-rioters-beat-corrupt-policemen-death
[They went into the washing machine paired and came out single]
CTar 🙂 Definitely a separation here today. I know I put 2 pairs in. 1.5 came out!
Really weird with a front loader.
Lizzie Have I finally met a woman who doesn’t blame the washing machine? You’re a treasure. Any chance the keys could go via any overflow or somesuch
Clive is having a lend… it’s all a charade and a con.
PUP will be the Coalitions best friend.
There is an on going battle in the last 3 hours between Andrew Porter and a couple of my followers on my twitter line. I had tweeted one of Andrew”s tweets. As I have pointed out disunity is one sure way of ensuring Tony Abbott stays PM
Surprising that ABC24 showed Abbott denying Medicare Locals would go. I think it was during the 1st debate with Kev.
briefly@1246
OK up to a point but you make no mention of the role of technological change in reducing prices and producing better products.
Competition may be a stimulus to force companies to engage in the necessary research, but they also need to be of sufficient size to afford some of the really high tech fundamental research.
There are also micro-economic factors at play, such as the quality of management and the culture within an organisation. Does it maximise the capabilities of its staff or just treat them as cogs in the machine?
By innovative thought and adoption of different approaches, I have saved companies I have worked for many millions of dollars. I was not in the least influence by competition with other companies, just frustration at stupidity and a desire to do a better job.
bemused, I did omit innovation form my list…I edited it out by mistake!!
It’s one of the principal benefits of competition, as you say.
“@ABCNews24: Watch LIVE: @BillShortenMP is addressing media in Melbourne on proposed changes to the ALP. Watch #ABCNews24 at http://t.co/TTkTJ5G5Ba”
BH
I lost a bit of control of the soc population when OH took over hanging out the washing. Now it is back under my control, I can stick by the rules I made years ago: socks must go into w.m. in pairs, be hung on the line in pairs and folded together in washing basket. If there’s a singleton, I run it to earth immediately. (Oh, and I confess I hang things on the line in colour matching groups. Obsessive? Moi? )
When OH went into hospital I was shocked to find that his sock drawer consisted almost entirely of unmatched single socks.
“@justinbarbour: “the Liberal Party always put the interests of the powerful ahead of the national interest… this is why they exist” @billshortenmp #auspol”
LU
Wow… I will have to contemplate that…
thanks!
BH
And “blush” I haven’t washed those jeans yet, so no way the keys could have gone through. The w.m. empties into a sink with tiny outlet holes.
Conservatives implementing a GP tax.
Their mantra is to socialise debt while privatising profit.
“@justinbarbour: “the argument that we only need to change perceptions… this is not good enough for us, we need to be more serious” @billshortenmp #auspol”
“@AustralianLabor: “Today I want to announce a major campaign to help rebuild the Labor Party.” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”
I think these changes to ALP membership/voting will result in a shift to the centre-right.
rex
Maybe. If so it will be a stronger Labor and stronger Greens.
The loss of the centre the LNP have ceded will show
“@AustralianLabor: “By July we will launch a one click online joining process, nothing less will do.” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”
“@AustralianLabor: “…every supporter should be able to become a Labor member in minutes, not months.” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”
@farrm51: The nub of Bill Shorten’s message to the ALP: Change or die. http://t.co/g7MOT0HM7w
Rex D
Why do you say that?
BH
A ‘sock’ story:
One Sunday my nephew, his wife and 4 small female’s (between about 2 and 8 at the time) at my place having lunch.
The first thing I do on arriving home is to ditch shoes.
The smallish of the clan always gets hers off and lines them up next to mine at the kitchen bench.
While they’re still ingesting lunch I sneak out to have a cigarette.
Smallish one turns up in the courtyard to berate me, not about smoking, but for going outside in socks!
“@AustralianLabor: “If you don’t engage in politics, you’ll be governed by vested interests…” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”
briefly
I’m by no means commited to a point of view here, just exploring ideas….
[Competition stimulates lowered prices, better quality and better services.]
Lower prices – I don’t see that that is necessarily so.
Take this scenario (using, of course, the time honoured example of a widget) — five companies set out to make widgets. They must all buy much the same plant, hire a building of roughly the same size, hire the same number of workers, and have the same amount of administration.
One company – replacing all five – can buy a bigger machine, with the same output of all the five put together, which will be cheaper (that being the nature of these things) to buy and probably operate than all five individual plants running at once.
They only need one building, not five; their workforce will not be five times that of the firms they replace; and they will not need five times the amount of administration (there be little or no difference between selling one hundred and one thousand widgets, paperwork wise).
And, of course, these economies of scale operate throughout the system, from purchasing (in greater bulk) the materials needed to make the widget, to distributing the widgets more efficiently.
2. Better quality – possibly. But, arguably (and based on the small workshops I’ve observed) the race to provide the cheapest item can reduce quality.
3. Better service – again, possibly. But that’s not an argument about cost.
[If monopolies were intrinsically better than competitive markets, the USSR would still be a going concern.]
A bit of a false analogy, given that I’m talking about Standard Oil, an American company.
The reason monopolies don’t exist in our system isn’t because they weren’t successful, but because capitalism abhors them as a concept, and most capitalist systems prohibit them.
Thus Standard Oil – and later, Microsoft – were targetted for dispersal not because they weren’t successful but purely because they were monopolies and thus anti competitive.
In other words, they were done in by ideology, not because their business models had failed, or they couldn’t thrive in a capitalistic world.
The ACCC basically exists to try and avoid monopolies happening.
[Another is that the economy as a whole benefits from having a diversity of enterprises as the system will have more resilience and dynamism.]
Agreed. But there’s also a downside to this.
A diversity of enterprises creates winners and losers. A successful company either drives its competitors from the market or greatly impacts on their ability to survive. There’s a real human cost in that — indicated by the 80% of small business owners who go bust annually.
The price of competition is thus wasted money, wasted resources and wasted lives.
Astrobleme
[ I have worked in Public and Private sector, but haven’t really noticed any real efficiency difference – perhaps it’s not evident in my line of work.]
Oh dog I’ve noticed a huge difference in my line of work.
Incoming rant.
20 years ago 3 of us started up our irrigation business and promptly struck numerous/dozens/even more than that, examples of private businesses’ inefficiencies that we would never have tolerated in our various public services.
Just about every involvement we had with private companies and businesses was stymied in one way or several by business practices that were inexcusable.
For example, ‘expert consultants’ recommending equipment of various types that was incapable of performing the required tasks as carefully stated, appointments not kept, supplies promised but later found to be ‘unavailable’, overruns on time and costs usual rather than rare … all of these were, still are, ‘normal’ SOP.
We had to rapidly adjust our mindset that had been used to punctuality, reliability of promises, accuracy of advice.
We had to double check, even triple check everything carefully, we had dozens of conversations along the lines of “Do you have such and such a pump part in stock? Could you please go and check your stock now whilst will we wait on the phone – could you label it ‘To be picked up at 11am tomorrow with date by so and so ..thank you.”
And then – ring back before driving to that shop – “Do you have a spare part under the counter put there by Bill yesterday labelled …?” before wasting a trip there to find nothing at the end.
Over 20 years we must have had a 100 or more examples of such.
We learned to winnow out those companies whose equipment was faulty [I can recommend a couple of pump manufactures but not others], service providers who did actually deliver the service they promised. For example pump repair and maintenance businesses dwindled down to one that eventually shifted out of reach and finally to one and one only. We travelled 150 kms , bypassing a half dozen plus others who had promised and failed, to the one mob that can be relied upon to fix a problem in a given time at a quoted price and that because the owner/manager is acutely aware of his obligations to his customers.
The most recent example I had was a couple of months ago when a pump failed [after 18 years of hard yakka that was reasonable] and I used a local business [which I usually try to do], but that was a mistake.
They gave me the wrong address, they had shifted premises a few weeks earlier but the website and phone book and the boss bloke on the phone didn’t mention it, didn’t answer their phone in the next couple of days, supplied the pump days late, had no customer name on it when it did arrive, quoted the wrong price, didn’t supply the extra widget as requested, weren’t there when I arrived as scheduled and the lad there had no knowledge of anything but managed to find it after an hour of looking.
A morning wasted that didn’t need to be wasted.
I won’t deal with them again.
Sorry about all that but the realization that ‘private efficiency’ is a myth and fallacy came at a cost.
lizzie
I think most Australians occupy the centre-right.
[In an ‘ideal’ world, a monopoly can produce an item more cheaply than several companies competing against each other.
This is a fallacy. Competition stimulates lowered prices, better quality and better services…]
Yes, if it’s free and informed competition, which for many goods it is (e.g. bulk commodities, standard factor inputs to industry, electricity generation, etc).
[As well, monopolistic production will only result in lower unit costs if increasing returns to scale exist…
Aside from a very few exceptions, beyond a certain point, there are usually negative returns to scale, which is to say that in general both the producers and consumers of products benefit from competition. This is one reason why this economy should be de-monopolised.]
I hear this kind of reasoning a fair bit, and I respectfully don’t agree with it, for a few reasons.
1. Businesses tend to have high fixed costs and low marginal costs. As such, it strikes me that most are operating on the downward-sloping section of their cost average total cost curves, and even if there are dis-economies of scale, many companies haven’t reached them yet.
2. When decreasing economies of scale do hit, why wouldn’t the budding oligarch open another plant?
3. Without the recent and near-universal macro policies of inflation targeting and QE, we would probably have seen nominal price deflation over the last 10 years, which (I think) indicates at least some scale effects in globally traded markets.
Overall, though, the role of competition in reducing prices is overstated because the conditions necessary for this mechnism to work are all to often not present in a market. That is, there is significant market power and/or asymmetric information.
On the contrary, competition’s role in driving innovation and product/service differentiation, which destroys existing markets and constantly disrupts the production process is very evident in the Australian manufacturing landscape at present.
On a broader note, in my final year of uni, after completing the standard economic training that any BEcon would, I had some very interesting discussions wrt evolutionary framings of economic systems with some of my more worldly educators. The argument was: In nature, we see one species for each niche. In economic theory, we assume that there are limited niches and many firms competing in them – why? Mathematical/analytical convenience?
Now what happens to an economy undergoing a significant transition in its composition – if you significantly alter a biological landscape, some of the existing species adapt, but most are replaced; however, and more importantly, in the transient phase, there is a loss of biological activity…
I’ll leave it to you to complete the analogy, with bonus points if you can include a reference to the “Cambridge capital controversy”, since Joan Robinson was referred to earlier 😉
“@AustralianLabor: “The Labor Party is not the political arm of any one group alone…” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”
Will be interesting to see how the MSM filter runs with this speech.
Ah, lizzie, I luvs ya. Thought I was the only twit to hang colours together ♡
Bill Shorten mentioning horror stories of lost membership paperwork. In NSW last Dec/Jan a lot of volunteer help was involved in renewal of membership. There were lots of stuffups so maybe a paid position is needed.
Centre
ALP-RIP
The Greens Forever(Caves are quite comfortable and low on maintainence too)
“@joshgnosis: One-click membership sign-up? If they’re adopting Amazon policies will Labor membership be delivered by drone, too?”
“@AustralianLabor: “If you have betrayed the trust of your members… We don’t want you, get out.” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”
“@DrCraigEmerson: At @ABCNews24 studio, ready to be interviewed on Bill Shorten’s reform proposals.”
Has Bill Shorten got anything positive to say about unions ??
[Thus Standard Oil – and later, Microsoft – were targetted for dispersal not because they weren’t successful but purely because they were monopolies and thus anti competitive.]
Sure, but there’s one more step the argument against monopolies – they can use their market power, that is, their ability to affect the market price, to extract a greater surplus (rent) from the market than several competing firms would.
The same thing goes for price-fixing cartels, and surely your not in favour of those?
[I think most Australians occupy the centre-right.]
It varies across the country. Victoria, Tas, ACT and SA seem to tend to the progressive end of the scale; WA, NT and Qld tend to the right; and NSW seems to be charging ever more rightwards, but mostly both sides in NSW just follow the cash of the big end of town and organised crime, as well as the reactionary bogans of west Sydney. they seem to be dragging the whole nation to the right.
“@latingle: The picture of @billshortenmp on sky talking alp reform keeps getting smaller next to kate and william ‘LIVE’!”
Good on 24 for sticking with Mr Shorten
LU
I made that clear that was the problem with monopolies in my first post on this subject.
“@AustralianLabor: “This is about saying to people who don’t have a big block vote behind them… the deck is not stacked” @billshortenmp #rebuildlabor #auspol”
LU
[The same thing goes for price-fixing cartels, and surely your not in favour of those?]
And I’m not ‘in favour’ of anything — I’m running a line of argument to see where it leads. I might come out of it believing monopolies are inherently Teh Evil.
My contention, at its simplest, is that, all things considered, a monopoly should be able to deliver goods to the customer more cheaply than a series of smaller competing firms can. Whether they would in reality is obviously quite different…
[Smallish one turns up in the courtyard to berate me, not about smoking, but for going outside in socks!]
Haha Priorities, bless her heart
It’s a simple calcuation for bill: he needed the unions to get the top job, but he doesn’t need them to keep it – indeed, they’re an impediment to him getting into the lodge. Ergo… The recent leadership rule changes were really quite revolutionary and delivered the leader astonishing power.
Sorry Zoomster, must have missed that.
To clarify, my point was that rule around anti-competitive behaviour are there for the public benefit – which is an ideology I’m more than happy to be aligned with. In contrast, unfettered and imperfect markets (e.g. containing players with market power) are open to exploitation.
For those talking about the NBN:
http://www.zdnet.com/at-and-t-unveils-roadmap-to-bring-fiber-to-100-u-s-cities-7000028606/
AT&T are now rolling out FTTP.
The state of the UNion
________________________
The US columnist James Kunstler,looks at the dire internal state of the USA ,and says the American people must rise up and break the financial power of the super-rich,and also stop the very costly actions of the US military which he says” goes around the world wrecking countries”top keep itself occupied and seeming to be ..essential to the nation
and he’s not the only US writer saying so these days
Great stuff
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whats-been-and-whats-next/
Kunstler writes on the great probllems of the USA
BH – She is is intelligent and seems to have learned most of what her older sisters know.
‘A thing of pleasure can be a joy forever’
(No doubt a mis-quote!).