The regular Essential Research fortnightly average is our only new federal poll for the week, and it finds Labor losing one of the two points it gained last time to record a two-party lead of 53-47. Primary votes are 40% for Labor (down one), 40% for the Coalition (steady), 10% for the Greens (steady) and 1% for what’s left of Palmer United (steady). The poll finds only 26% deeming it likely Tony Abbott will make it to the next election with 57% opting for unlikely, with wide partisan differences along the expected lines. With respect to tax reform, strong majorities are recorded in favour of measures hitting multinational corporations and high-income earners, while fierce hostility remains to expanding or increasing the GST. However, it’s lineball on removing negative gearing, which 33% support and 30% oppose. Questions on economic and financial issues get the usual set of grumpy responses, with a balance of belief in favour of company profits having improved, but every personal and national indicator deemed to have gotten worse.
Congratulations to the Essendon Bombers today for being fount to be Not Accountable for taking performance enhancing drugs by the AFL anti-doping committee. Something like that. What I cannot understand is, if they were all innocent, why were the players so worried?
Well done also to the AFL, who have kept one of their highest crowd generating teams in the comp, and able to launch the season as though nothing has happened.
ASADA and WADA though have a less sanguine view, and may yet appeal.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/supplements-saga/the-essendon-verdict-asada-boss-lashes-essendons-utterly-disgraceful-program-20150331-1mc2zl.html
After two years Essendon have been either the victims (if they were innocent) or the beneficiaries (if they were guilty) of the slowest and most ham fisted investigation since Fairwork Australia investigated Craig Thomson. I do not see any scenario under which the AFL comes out of this with any credibility.
Ouch. On why the current economic troubles aren’t due to a mass laziness on the part of workers, Brad DeLong notes (in relation to David K. Levine, right-wing economist):
[WUSTL has a Phlogiston-theory economist. Today. Teaching.]
The sad thing is, he’s right. David K Levine is the economics equivalent of a 21st-century chemist who still beieves that phlogiston is the correct way to explain combustion. And he’s a tenured professor at a mainstream university.
I do hope the Right will shut up about “left-wing academia”…which quacks like Levin getting tenured, the notion of academia being stacked against the Right is laughable.
markjs
[Ah, yes ..what a good memory you have.]
it amazes me that a Roman Emperor who’s retreated as far a Vienna is capable of being both warlike and philosophical.
His descriptions of Vienna are remarkable.
If it is Aurelius, it would be Marcus.
Re Psyclaw100: those boats are owned by shelf companies whose headquarters are post office boxes in tax havens.
“Markus” ..”Marcus” ..who cares BW?
It seems the anti neoliberal revolution is spreading… First Greece & now Spain..
The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics..
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/31/podemos-revolution-radical-academics-changed-european-politics
An Iglesias government would take some lessons from Syriza. He did not see the deal that Syriza made in February, which gave Greece a four-month extension on its bailout, as a climb-down by his friend Tsipras. “A small, weak country that is much less important to the eurozone and the EU than Spain, has changed the way things are done – by adopting a tough, stony-faced stance,” he said. In negotiations, Iglesias would use Spain’s muscle as the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy (which, implicitly, makes it big enough to bring the currency down). “You can’t get everything you want, but if you start out hard-faced and tough, then the results are completely different.”
It seems the anti neoliberal revolution is spreading… First Greece & now Spain..
The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics..
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/31/podemos-revolution-radical-academics-changed-european-politics
An Iglesias government would take some lessons from Syriza. He did not see the deal that Syriza made in February, which gave Greece a four-month extension on its bailout, as a climb-down by his friend Tsipras. “A small, weak country that is much less important to the eurozone and the EU than Spain, has changed the way things are done – by adopting a tough, stony-faced stance,” he said. In negotiations, Iglesias would use Spain’s muscle as the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy (which, implicitly, makes it big enough to bring the currency down). “You can’t get everything you want, but if you start out hard-faced and tough, then the results are completely different.”
[markjs
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 7:00 pm | Permalink
“Markus” ..”Marcus” ..who cares BW?]
I imagine Marcus would have been philosophical about it.
sceptic
It looks as if it is spreading twice as fast.
Boerwar.. 🙂
Labor should be able to bodgie up some people who are fine, upstanding people who don’t lie, who pay their dues, and who treat people with respect.
There should be a simple bottom line: anyone who is not worth respecting is not worth having as a representative.
Good on Ms P. It is about time a political leader put decency and integrity about sleaze and power.
Maybe she will set an example and will claw back some of the people of the 85% of Australians who do not trust politicians.
Boerwar
Bloody iPad
markjs
[Ah, yes ..what a good memory you have.]
I worked in an environment where quick reading and a retentive memory was required.
Some parts still stick.
Cheers.
Just read a report on BBC about fibre rollout there – it seems difficult to believe they will have fibre to the home before me in a developing country in Africa – but it seems to be the case.
CTar1..
I’m very impressed ..and a little envious 🙂
[sceptic
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 7:07 pm | Permalink
It seems the anti neoliberal revolution is spreading… First Greece & now Spain..
The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics..
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/31/podemos-revolution-radical-academics-changed-european-politics
An Iglesias government would take some lessons from Syriza. He did not see the deal that Syriza made in February, which gave Greece a four-month extension on its bailout, as a climb-down by his friend Tsipras. “A small, weak country that is much less important to the eurozone and the EU than Spain, has changed the way things are done – by adopting a tough, stony-faced stance,” he said. In negotiations, Iglesias would use Spain’s muscle as the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy (which, implicitly, makes it big enough to bring the currency down). “You can’t get everything you want, but if you start out hard-faced and tough, then the results are completely different.”]
The back story has always been the countries other than Greece. Tsipras and Varoufakis thought they were the vanguard of the revolution of the masses who would rather not pay their debts.
This is why the Eurogroup agreed to a four month and not a six month extension (You would recall that SYRIZA had announced it would never, ever accept ANY extension).
Six months would have got Greece into election periods for other countries.
The point is that if Greece makes it to four months, and if it still does not come good with fair dinkum acceptance of its responsibilities, that would give the Eurogroup two months in which to ditch Greece, pour discourager les autres.
re: Billy Gordon, 20 years ago many Victorians came back from their Easter holidays to the whispered news that the Premier’s wife had decamped to a women’s refuge. She was enticed back home with a $5 million share portfolio that was invested in a blind trust that we learnt in the financial pages of the newspaper some 15 years later had been invested in shares the trustee controlled and the trustee caused the share price to plummet so Mrs Premier never took control of a $5 million share portfolio
http://toobigtoignore.org.au/ t
The latest campaign to cut wages
IPA Inspired no doubt!
Steve 777
Yes, I expected that the ownership details of the cruisers would resemble a spider web.
Thanks.
[“The more Murdoch’s sh*t-sheet howls with outrage ..the more Mr Wellington will dig in..”]
Just like…. Slippery Pete?
Borewar
“vanguard of the revolution of the masses who would rather not pay their debts.”
I think that’s thier point.. the debts aren’t the debts of the masses, but the debts of the elite & their bankers including the fraudulent US merchant bankers that help cook the books & the likes of S&P that no doubt turned a blind eye.. time for massive hair cuts all round.
I’m confident the masses will rally & pay their taxes when they see the former government & bankers in prison for generations of fraud.
To be fair Mr Wellingtons letter to the alleged DV victim was reasonable enough and the Courier Mail was going for SMH level “editorialising” with their Too Busy headline
Bw
[If it is Aurelius, it would be Marcus.]
Happy to have my spelling in English challenged. Read long ago in Latin ( when I still remembered enough of it).
“Markus” ..”Marcus” ..who cares BW?
I don’t think the ancient Romans used the letter’K’.
CTaR1
I did not get much past, ‘Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisum est.’
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciation#Letters_and_phonemes]
[
Barney in Saigon
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 3:47 pm | Permalink
…
Fair chance ASADA will appeal the decision so more to come.
]
Bet they don’t. It was a make it go away decission and ASADA will be on the list
The clerk of parliament say Labor and Lib can’t refuse Gordon’s vote as the cross benchers vote after the government and opposition.
[108
sceptic
It seems the anti neoliberal revolution is spreading… First Greece & now Spain..
The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics..]
…or not.
The right won the municipal elections last week in France. Le Pen’s far-right made few gains; Hollande’s Socialists lost to Sarkozy.
If, as seems increasingly probable, Syriza lead Greece to default and complete chaos, it is highly unlikely Podemos will win anything at all in Spain.
Notably, Syriza and Podemos sent some activists to Frankfurt earlier this month to set fires outside the ECB building, presumably in the expectation that disobedience in German streets – aka as arson – would set off open revolts across Europe. Nothing like that occurred. The mass of Europeans are utterly unmoved by the smart-arsed left-populism of Syriza and Podemos.
[sceptic
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 7:30 pm | Permalink
Borewar
“vanguard of the revolution of the masses who would rather not pay their debts.”
I think that’s thier point.. the debts aren’t the debts of the masses, but the debts of the elite & their bankers including the fraudulent US merchant bankers that help cook the books & the likes of S&P that no doubt turned a blind eye.. time for massive hair cuts all round.
I’m confident the masses will rally & pay their taxes when they see the former government & bankers in prison for generations of fraud.]
I am not averse to thinking nasty things about elites and bankers. But in the case of Greece, the greek masses didn’t pay tax and don’t pay tax.
OTOH, around 6 million of the Greek masses are on social security.
The bottom line is that if the greek masses had paid their taxes and had refrained from rorting social security to the max, Greece would be fine.
The idea of the SYRIZA, aka the greek masses, that the way to fix the greek debt problem is to get free tax money from tax payers in other countries is not all that popular with the masses in those nations where the masses actually pay their taxes, pay off their loans, and cut back on social security when the moolah runs short.
Diogs,
So, business as normal in Parliament if Gordon remains.
ASADA has now been tucked into a Fed Department.
ASADA has always been on the Coalition hit list so:
(a) intense pressure will be brought to bear on ASADA to STFU.
(b) ASADA’s efforts will be ‘reviewed’.
(c) ASADA’s independence will be white-anted in the consequent ‘reforms’.
The pig in the poke is WADA.
The very, very, very humungous big stick that WADA wields is that any nation not compliant with the WADA code does not get to play in international sporting competitions.
[122
sceptic
the debts aren’t the debts of the masses, but the debts of the elite & their bankers including the fraudulent US merchant bankers that help cook the books & the likes of S&P that no doubt turned a blind eye.. time for massive hair cuts all round.]
Sadly, the debts of the Greek State are the responsibility of all Greeks, just as the solvency of their Government is essential to their shared destiny.
The Greeks will have to establish a solvent State at some point. They can still do it now, inside the Euro and with the support of their neighbours; or they can do it later in a Drachma zone with support only from the IMF, and after their economy has shed another 30-40% of its output, jobs, savings and social incomes.
Steve 777 @125 (& Markjs, BW & CTar1): …they certainly did not use K. I wasn’t quite old enough to cop a corporal punishment for not pronouncing the Pacifier of Gaul as Yulius Kaiser.
rhw
If you read the above link you might find that latin has the ‘k’ sound (as in Marcus) but not the ‘k’ letter.
BW,
Looks to me like the AFL Tribunal has simply kicked the problem to another jurisdiction.
Pretty clearly there were no positive tests from the players and enough confusion about whether the supplements injected were banned. So, they really did not have much to ping the players with.
What is clear is that the AFL drug testing regime has been nigh on useless in detecting drug cheats. Ben Cousins never tested positive in his 10-15 years in the AFL.
WADA may force the Government to cut the AFL loose regarding future public funding or else face the consequence of having our Olympic athletes and other international affiliated sports banned from participation in WADA sanctioned events.
Hmmm
Colleen McCullogh, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and now Betty Churcher.
We have lost a fair bit of talent and colour in the past few months.
mark
[I’m very impressed ..and a little envious ]
Totally incidentally.
BW @135: Whoops. That should have been …they certainly did not use J. I perseverated.
137
Boerwar
…Neville Wran too, not long ago…
GG
Yep. One cockup after another.
I suspect that being cut loose would suit the AFL. It is never going to be an international competition.
As for the drugs testing, the three strikes strategy will come under great pressure.
I suspect, without knowing, that the scenario you outline could be quite real. No Australian government is going to be responsible for stopping Australians from being world champions or Olympic gold medal winners.
The two pies players have all the appearance of being the sacrificial goats for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
briefly
Yes.
The next Australian generation will be able to regret the deaths, in due time, of such luminaries as Abbott, Hockey, Maurice Newman, Bolt, Hadley, Jones and Pell.
Protecting domestic industries is not necessarily wasteful. Ha-Joon Chang is an economist whose books demonstrate that the world’s strongest economies used infant industry protection to become strong. Neoliberalism has never turned a weak economy into a strong one.
mari
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 7:27 pm | Permalink
http://toobigtoignore.org.au/ t
The latest campaign to cut wages
IPA Inspired no doubt!
The usual rubbish about penalty rates. Any business person who blames penalty rates for lower profits or as reason not to open shouldn’t be in business. It’s an admission of poor management
And won’t Eddie hit the roof if two pies get rubbed out and Essendon get off.
sohar
win win?
sohar,
The Pies have cut the two players adrift.
They’ll be sacked if the B sample comes back positive.
AussieAchmed 144
Simple remedy to any businesses who do it, is just go in and say nicely, you don’t want my custom then and walk out. :devil:
Was ASADA started under Howard goverment with Peter Baume as Chairman ?
Thanks, GG, I didn’t know that re Pies players.