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.
Vale Betty Churcher. My mother knew her professionally, and I actually got to meet her once about 20 or so years ago when she was still with the NGA.
She was incredibly classy and had this real presence about her.
And yeah, totally agree with GG about the uselessness of the AFL’s drug testing regime. What a farce the whole Essendon thing has been.
Wasn’t ASADA somewhat ‘nobbled’ by the refusal of a key witness to give evidence..?
[
And won’t Eddie hit the roof if two pies get rubbed out and Essendon get off.]
That would be wonderful!
Boer, I’m very glad to say I met McCulloch and listened to her reading for a few hours one afternoon in Fremantle. I also met Gough and Churcher. I had no idea at the time just how brilliant Churcher was, but we had a lovely and all too-short chat. I also helped stage a very rowdy protest against Fraser at one point. We came face to face as he tried to bust his way along a balcony crowded with angry students. I’m sure I denounced him as we glared at each other. Those were the days.
If a business person can’t work out the cost of wages for the year, including penalty rates and calculate what price they sell their product fro every day they open to spread the costs over the year – they need to go back to school and learn some simple maths
WWP,
I just find it sad that two young athletes with good prospective careers ahead of them have thrown it all away.
BTW, here is what Eddie said about the situation.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/collingwood-president-eddie-mcguire-warns-magpies-lachie-keeffe-and-josh-thomas-facing-the-sack-over-drug-tests-20150331-1mbqrj.html
briefly
It is a nice part of life when we get to meet remarkable people. They need not be famous. In my case I keep going back and drawing inspiration and strength from them.
Eddie McGuire:
“More broadly, McGuire said the drug code had to be reviewed at some stage because “the whole world has changed” since it was introduced.
“Down the track … we have to readdress the drug code, we have to have another look at it,” he said.
“When the drug code came in, it made a bit of sense, now it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
What part of ‘No Drugs in Sport’ doesn’t he understand?
GG
A bit all over the place?
156
Of course competition from importers and online is just diddly squat
[AussieAchmed
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 8:26 pm | Permalink
If a business person can’t work out the cost of wages for the year, including penalty rates and calculate what price they sell their product fro every day they open to spread the costs over the year – they need to go back to school and learn some simple maths]
Bullshit.
Supply and demand in just about every business varies in unpredictable ways.
[
WWP,
I just find it sad that two young athletes with good prospective careers ahead of them have thrown it all away.]
They have done something together that they shouldn’t have done – whether deliberate or inadvertent. They like crawley really have no excuse. Every drug cheat when caught claims to be innocent so a no fault regime is sensible.
What is not sensible is a club deliberately trying to get an unfair advantage injecting into players experimental crap and probably banned substances. Who would actually believe those running it – including Danks, would never ever use an undetectable banned substance?
So it is absurd what has happened to Essendon. It is a much darker day today than the day it was correctly identified that two Australian sports codes had almost certainly being involved in systematic drug cheating. Two very dark days indeed and just how lightly Essendon got off will be apparent when Crowley and the two collingwood guys (assuming their b sample fails as well) get career ending bans.
So how many eateries sell their product of the ‘net.
Attacking penalty rates at retail and eateries is the thin end of the wedge.
Police, fire fighters, nurses, ambulance drivers, prison officers, public transport, mining employees, are just a small number of the workers who rely on penalty rates to provide a decent wage
The AFL drug code has tried to differentiate between social narcotics which may be illegal but are not performance enhancing and those that are for improving performance like steroids.
Their 3 strikes policy and the fact that players could self report themselves without penalty are what Maguire is driving at.
They reckon the clenbuterol was in meat they ate because farmers are sticking clenbuterol into beef cattle to make them grow bigger, faster and with less tucker.
That is it.
I am off pies.
GG
Oh.
Boerwar@135
I thought so too, but then I looked it up on Wikipedia:
[The letter K comes from the letter Κ (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kap, the symbol for an open hand. This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for “hand” representing D in the Egyptian word for hand, d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.
In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel, K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C and its variant G replaced most usages of K and Q. K survived only in a few fossilized forms such as Kalendae, “the calends”.
When Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was transliterated as a C. Loanwords from other alphabets with the sound /k/ were also transliterated with C. Hence, the Romance languages generally use C and have K only in later loanwords from other language groups. The Celtic languages also chose C over K, and this influence carried over into Old English. Today, English is the only Germanic language to productively use hard C in addition to K (although Dutch uses it in learned words of Latin origin and follows the same hard/soft distinction in pronouncing such words as English).
Some English linguists prefer to reverse the Latin transliteration process for proper names in Greek, spelling Hecate as “Hekate”, for example. And the writing down of languages that do not have their own alphabet with the Latin one has resulted in a standardization of the letter for this sound, as in ‘Kwakiutl’.]
[
Bullshit.
]
Nicely summed up.
I always find it objectionable when the same businesses that do all they can to strip all certainty from employees / contractors / Occassional labor, take every possible advantage when labor supply is high and scream for protection the second labor supply tightens (or organizes) ask for certainty themselves.
It is just an old fashioned con!
GG
[So, business as normal in Parliament if Gordon remains.]
Yep.
Also, I think the AFL doesn’t want to have any positive drugs tests and will whitewash anything it can get away with.
The AFL competition is obviously not drugs clean and they don’t care.
silmaj 162
If the only answer is to cut workers wages then that shows poor business acumen.
[Their 3 strikes policy and the fact that players could self report themselves without penalty are what Maguire is driving at.]
I’d like to know how many times a collingwood player used that absurd loophole!
But were not the ‘Kwakiutl’ a north American first nation?
Surely it must have all been greec to them?
WWP,
Half the team in 2012 so I am told.
You might notice that a lost of players have moved on from Collingwood since then.
from mari re wage cuts
[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.]
Many years ago ms fredex and I were in the city and decided to have a quick lunch at an upmarket kitchen/café that sold pancakes.
Sat down looked at the menu and saw an attached note from the owners/management that because the workers wanted higher wages the prices would increase.
So we took the menu, with note, to the counter and told them we wouldn’t eat at a place that wouldn’t pay its workers the going rate and tried to propagandise its customers and then we walked out.
Dunno what impact we had.
If there’s any clenbuterol in the NZ or Australian beef supply chain, someone’s looking at a huge, huge investigation, given that it’s illegal to give to livestock in both countries.
The reason Cousins and his mates over in the West never got caught doing coke and meth is that both of those drugs get out of your system too fast for random testing to pick up unless you’re really, really unlucky with your test dates. The Eagles boys (and the other guys in every other professional sporting club in the country doing recreational drugs) knew when they could get away with it and when they needed to be clean. It’s only the really dumb or really unlucky ones who’ve been caught in Australian sport for recreational drugs. Look at the Queensland rugby ones – the coppers were onto it before the sports themselves were.
The WADA code is tough on performance enhancing drugs, as it should be, but there’s never been the same scrutiny on recreational drugs, especially the ones that flush fast.
[and the fact that players could self report themselves without penalty ]
That is completely bizarre. Yes I understand the need for some kind of tolerance to permit the player space to undertake rehabilitation without chopping off his career. But to have no penalty when a player admits to using illegal or banned substances? Just inviting contravention and abuse.
Boer war @126
The correct quote is :
“Gallia est in omnis divisa in partes tres”
Caesar must be turning in his grave (or urn).
[143
Nicholas
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.]
Export-oriented industrialisation (EOI) and its counter-point, import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) have both been tried. They’re not classically-liberal paths to industrialisation. However, they both really require the repression of real wages/household incomes. This can enable the rise of national champions, such as has occurred in China and in earlier instances, Brazil, Korea, Japan, Germany and France…and, once upon a time, here too.
The trouble with this is that the suppression of wage income gives rise to excess national savings, in turn generating imbalances between economies with surplus savings and those who receive these savings, either as portfolio or foreign direct investment flows. Excess savings flows are a principal source of dysfunction in the global economy, leading to currency distortions, capital miss-allocation and, as we can see everywhere, predatory over investment, deflation, financial repression and hoarding.
China’s excess savings have been a source of instability in the global system for more than a decade, while Germany’s excess savings flows have helped create similar instability in Europe.
It is just not possible to separate national industrial production strategies from cross border financial flows.
Seems Marn had no problems with appearing in those Liberal party adverts.
http://www.afr.com/news/politics/ferguson-should-go-if-he-actively-cooperated-with-the-libs-shorten-20150331-1mbmra?stb=twt
[Wasn’t ASADA somewhat ‘nobbled’ by the refusal of a key witness to give evidence..?]
ASADA/AFL had the power to compel Danks etc to give evidence but elected not to use that power. Were these people even trying?
Clembuterol is in some Mexican and Chinese meat but isn’t in NZ or Oz meat, supposedly. A cyclist got off using the meat excuse.
fess,
You’ll find the copyright to the interview is owned by someone other than Ferguson and they did not need his permission for the comments to be used.
Sort of like a newspaper clipping!
172
Overseas competition is what will cut wages. Or we will end up doing nothing here at all.
Since the mid-1980s real wages have fallen far behind labour productivity increases. Bill Kelty, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke sold out Australia’s workers. The immediate priority for labour policy is to lift the minimum wage to the level it would be at had wages kept pace with productivity. Then the minimum wage must be legislatively linked to what is happening with labour productivity. If labour productivity rises, wages must increase automatically. There is no compelling reason why the unions should have to go cap in hand to the Fair Work Commission and make their claim and the employers make their claim and then the Commission splits the difference.
@silmaj/184
Overseas competition is rising wages, not cutting them.
The “high penalty rates” campaign is, as many have noted, the thin end of the wedge in an attempt to lower wages across the board.
When faced with an increase in costs, the standard threat of business is to simply pass the cost on to the customer, & in fairness this is frequently unavoidable.
The reason this isn’t done with wages is so that any gains (wage reductions) can be expanded on by immediately linking them to other worksites.
[Since the mid-1980s real wages have fallen far behind labour productivity increases. Bill Kelty, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke sold out Australia’s workers.]
Absolutely, so true and what really pisses me off is the respect that those 3 ….’s get from workers and unionists who are unaware of how they were coolly and deliberately betrayed.
GG:
I reckon if Ferguson really wanted to object he could’ve raised a ruckus. The way Coorey has written his article makes it sound as if Marn went ‘meh’ at the thought of his interview being used in attack Foley advertising.
Watching the Megalogenis program. It should be required viewing for anybody who thinks that the GFC did not happen. Strangely there are a lot of them out there. Real people, not just the robotrolls who infest this blog.
When do the eastern states come off daylight saving? It must be soon.
TPOF:
I had no idea Mega George had a program. When and on what channel does it appear?
185
A labour productivity rise could be that 4 employees are now one with three robots. Lucky the one left who will get the higher wage.
fess,
Yeah, but the circumstances I outlined give him plausible deniability.
Plenty of Labor luminaries opposed the policy and have said so in the past. They are not in the gun (and neither should they be).
@silmaj/193
So you had a little whinge about lower wages overseas, then happily spout out about how robots are taking over people’s jobs.
How about live on another planet?
[deewhytony
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 8:48 pm | Permalink
Boer war @126
The correct quote is :
“Gallia est in omnis divisa in partes tres”
Caesar must be turning in his grave (or urn).]
I have just had a look at the Latin text and you are right… grrrr.
[163
Boerwar
AussieAchmed
If a business person can’t work out the cost of wages for the year, including penalty rates and calculate what price they sell their product fro every day they open to spread the costs over the year – they need to go back to school and learn some simple maths
Bullshit.
Supply and demand in just about every business varies in unpredictable ways.]
It’s very easy to do arithmetic. But by itself that is never enough. Disruptions occur all the time. What would you do if you ran an iron ore mine? No matter what you try to do, the prices keep on falling – falling much much faster than any adjustment you can make. You can calculate your costs as much as you like, but you’re not in control of your prices or, fairly often, the volumes shipped. Your revenue is outside your control and, moreover, cannot ever be in your control.
For a number of years exporters experienced a continuing rise in the currency. No matter what exporters tried to do, their revenues kept on falling. As a result, a very large number of small-medium diversified Australian exporters went out of business in the period from 2004 onwards. Their share of GDP fell from 15% to 7% in the decade to 2014. This was not because of any inability to perform mathematical calculations.
Daylight saving ends in the early hours of April 5. So Easter is an even longer weekend – 97 hours – in the Daylight SVing states. However, Sydney will be getting its traditional Easter weather, so it will be a long, wet weekend.
confessions
It’s called Making Australia Great – inside our longest boom -it’s on ABC
If I ran an iron ore mine, I wouldn’t plan on the basis that the iron ore price would be $100+ forever.