Three new polls this week, from Newspoll, Morgan and Essential Research, have made as little difference to the BludgerTrack poll aggregate as one poll did last week, although Labor does at least make a gain on the seat projection in New South Wales. Things are a little more interesting on the leadership ratings, thanks to a new set of numbers from Newspoll (which has only one more poll to go in its present form, not two as I intimated in the previous post). This finds Tony Abbott overtaking Bill Shorten on net approval to add to the preferred prime minister lead he opened up a few weeks ago, and which he continues to consolidate. The improvement in Abbott’s standing since the nadir of the Prince Philip knighthood has been quite remarkable, although his net rating of minus 11.8% is by no means anything to write home about.
Tiptoeing through the tulips.
Skirting around the turd in the path like Michael Palin.
Oh wouldn’t it be luverly if ..Grattan. Kelly and all the other spinsters came out and told the story of the terror mongers as it actually should be told and in direct and frank terms at that? Eh?
ratsak
This is the Mark Kenny piece you referred to. I had actually missed it
http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/malcolm-turnbull-draws-line-in-the-sand-on-terrorism-fervour-20150603-ghg4u7.html
Matt
I agree with that comment
zoomster
Yes, you definitely are a ‘thing’ 😀
I love it when members of the media refer – disparagingly – to “The Media”.
Paul Sheehan is just the latest.
[While there was a clear majority in support for change among those who did bother to vote, the failure to even acknowledge that this was only a third of the adult population reflects what I think has become the media’s obsessive front-running, cheerleading and push-polling around this issue.]
Any economic and voting stimulus from the “$20K for tradies” scheme could wear off once reality sets in:
[Maree Caulfield, director of tax for accounting practice MGI, told SmartCompany this morning the scheme will apply to most assets that businesses use to generate income and so the type of assets that fall into this criteria “can be pretty broad”…
But Caulfield believes there is misunderstanding in the general community about what the measure is and its potential benefit, saying MGI received plenty of phone calls in the week after the budget from business owners asking when they will receive “the cash” from the government.
She says it is important to remember the scheme is not a cash rebate, but instead a mechanism to reduce a business’ tax bill.]
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/finance/47180-ato-not-worried-about-small-business-rorting-20-000-asset-write-off-and-you-can-claim-a-ping-pong-table.html
Thank you, Matt.
[However, monetary masturbators do not come under any of those headings. Yet they are among the highest-paid individuals, and their firms among the most profitable, in the current structure. It strikes me as rather perverse that, by exploiting 20-30 second long, 0.2% differences in the price of the same thing in two different places, they should be so idolized (and vastly paid) as they are.]
Lizzie
While thanking Matt for his insightful comment, why can’t you put some meat to the bone of your number 30 comment, I don’t bite
zoomster
For the purpose of accuracy, I should have written ‘a thing’, which has a subtle difference from ‘thing’.
citizen
Precisely what we bludgers were saying after the budget. This measure was presented as a cash rebate. In fact some thought you could spend up to $20,000 and get a full rebate!!
Surely people don’t think its just a cash hand-out, they have to actual spend some money first.
Yeah, good one Matt.
Now, to pinch a line from Julius Sumner Miller – why is it so?
mexican
Yes you do, you said I was cheating, just because I prefer not to argue with someone who obviously has a different view.
Legendary former FED Chairman, Paul Volker – the man who defeated the inflation – feels the same way and has repeatedly declared the ATM as the greatest Financial ‘innovation’ in the last 50 years.
He disdains most other so called financial innovations.
[However, monetary masturbators do not come under any of those headings. Yet they are among the highest-paid individuals, and their firms among the most profitable, in the current structure. It strikes me as rather perverse that, by exploiting 20-30 second long, 0.2% differences in the price of the same thing in two different places, they should be so idolized (and vastly paid) as they are.]
[Tricot
Posted Thursday, June 4, 2015 at 8:37 am | PERMALINK
That someone should be around at 3.24 am, or some such, to make a comment here surely is an oddity. Even more strange is that it always seems to be the same person making the same type of comment.
Boy, do some need to get a life.]
Yes. ESJ is certainly a sad case. Pathetic really.
mb
The initially adverts from Harvey Norman didnt help. I stopped hearing them after a few days and when the advertising returned it had been modified. How unsurprisement of Harvey Norman to be involved in misleading the parliament
Lizzie
I said you were cheating because you embraced Fredex answer rather than answering a pretty harmless simple question
And you have not demonstrated how I would disagree with your idea of a productive industry.
http://www.theage.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/anz-named-as-one-of-the-appalling-banks-in-ratefixing-probe-20150603-ghg0sz.html
[ANZ has been named as one of the big banks frustrating an investigation into the fixing of key market interest rates, in behaviour the corporate regulator has called “absolutely appalling”.
Australian Securities Investments Commission chairman Greg Medcraft told a Senate committee the big banks were being “very defensive” and he was “not reluctant” to deploy a $50 million war chest to progress the probe into manipulation of the bank bill swap rate.]
Parliament – public
mexican
OK. My last word on it. IMV productive industries are those which benefit the community in practical ways (and that includes food, shelter, health etc) and are not created for the purpose of individual profit. A person who shuffles paper all day might judge themselves ‘productive’.
I can’t do long posts. Fingers.
Hence my cheers for fredex and Matt.
Lizzie
Thanks, not sure what on that list you think I view as unproductive.
[mexicanbeemer
Posted Thursday, June 4, 2015 at 9:12 am | PERMALINK
Surely people don’t think its just a cash hand-out, they have to actual spend some money first.]
Our tax dollars are going on an advertising blitz for the scheme, as they did for the intergenerational report. At least the advertising sector is gaining an economic stimulus from Hockey.
Has any journo asked one of the numerous govt MPs shouting treason over leaks whether the person who leaked the cabinet proposal to the Tele should be booted as well?
So, it seems the other Australian archbishops and cardinals still put their paychecks above their parishioners …
[ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-04/archbishops-write-letter-backing-cardinal-george-pell/6520188 ]
… or at least above their parishioner’s children.
Lizzie, Matt and mexicaneemer
Having read that guardian article, think the thrust was that so many of today’s very smart people do not go into fields that could better the human kind ie medical research, engineering, social services bc banking and management consultancies gobble them up. I have worked in management consultancies and very little of that work would benefit society as a whole. It paid well and hence is hard to give up. Not sure about banking but that industry does not seem as a whole to be out for the betterment of the greater good either!
I wouldn’t put it into productive or unproductive. You can be very productive and only benefit urself at the detriment of everyone else. So not a good measure.
virtualkat
Putting it that way (75) there are some job types you look at and do wonder why a person went to university to perform that role but then again I think people benefit from attending university.
I agree, productive is probably the wrong work, a better term might be good and bad.
MB
[Yeah, I read that silly article in the Guardian, I note that the author rightly coped some flack in the comments section]
He did cop a bit of flak but the vast majority of the comments were supportive of the article.
Jolyon Wagg
There was some support but considering the natural anti-corporate slant of the Guardian’s readership, that support wasn’t as strong as one would have expected when first reading the article
I stand with Lizzie
I have had this discussion before and find that those trained in economics have palpitations as the idea of any job being unproductive. It just is not within the tenets of the great religion “market, my market my God.”
Matt’s definition of useful jobs is way way too broad.
Imagine if Tony Rabbit decided that Australia would be better if every child leaned ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Sung dynasty poetry. To achieve this end he created 10,000 new jobs teaching these disciplines (after school, so no loss of productivity in any sector, other than in playing playstation or watching Bold and Beautiful after school)
Now our measure of GDP would go up and unemployment would fall (we would use our own home grown scholars as teachers). However would the real wealth of Australia have increased because every kid now took lessons in Ancient Greek?
I used an extreme example, but it is the same basic argument about many jobs in the advertising, finance and lobbying industries.
It is not always easy to decide what is “useful” and I guess if Australians voted to say that leaning Ancient Greek or Sanskrit was vital to the national psyche or promoted intellectual growth and judgement, then a case could be made, however it does require rational judgement for people to call it as they see it and say that a job or activity is useless in terms of national wealth generation.
So like Lizzie I call it to say that financial activities that just gamble with short term market changes are useless unproductive activities. For AUSTRALIA (not the world) they are only useful if the extreme wealth gains from such activity is taxed heavily and directed towards building infrastructure or promoting other industries. However our gain is some other nation’s loss. the net benefit to the world as a whole is zero.
If you consider advertising, the waste of resources is staggering. Now advertising that tells us of a new product or a new retail outlet or even some special price discount IS useful, since it addresses key market requirements for information.
However advertising that promotes one brand of soap power compared with another practically identical product are basically a waste of resources, just about as useful as mass learning of Ancient Greek.
When discussing whether certain jobs are ‘worthy’ I’m always reminded of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker series, where Earth has been settled by a contingent of hairdressers, telephone sanitisers, salesman etc who were deemed to be ‘unnecessary’ by their home planet.
…everyone left on the home planet is then wiped out by a disease spread by telephones…
There simply aren’t enough ‘worthy’ jobs to go around.
(On the other hand, a friend of mine in medical research says that it’s not that he’s not paid enough, it’s that others are paid more than they need…)
The side note to the finance sector, in Islamic banking all forms of derivative trading is prohibited, as is anything which earns or charges interest.
…of course, if we wiped out the ‘unworthy’ jobs, the unemployment queue would get rather large.
Warning – anecdotes arriving.
A mate of mine worked for donkey’s years as a carer/nurse in an institution for severely physically/mentally handicapped people .
Very demanding job, satisfying but emotionally demanding, so much so that ‘burn out’ amongst staff is a major problem.
And all for low rates of pay – SFA.
So he told me what he does to overcome both problems.
Every couple of years he takes a ‘holiday’ and goes off and does either real estate or used car selling, turns his conscience off, turns on the sales charm, makes more than double the amount of money that he makes in his nurse/carer role and recharges his batteries for the return to the socially admirable but financially undervalued [there’s bugger all profit to be made in caring for severely disadvantaged people in comparison to flogging stuff off] nursing job.
Our society has a strange set of values
I’ll spare you the other anecdotes.
Nothing like a healthy dose of anti-intellectualism to bolster an argument.
mexican
The reason why Jewish families were so prominent in banking for centuries (Rothschilds, etc) was because Christians were forbidden to charge interest but Jews weren’t.
Good Morning
On benefits to society of work. I agree with Lizzie and company. I do think that includes Mexican Beamer too.
Productive is not the right word. Instead we should use advantage. That is professions that with a cost benefit analysis bring advances to society.
Then when you consider cost benefit analysis you can look at environmental effects pro and con, same with health, culture, etc.
We could then give disadvantaged industry, business or career a loading as its a cost to society. Therefore to use what I think is an obvious example corporate raiders who only do paper shuffling to make profits by stripping companies of assets and jobs would suffer a financial penalty as they are disadvantaging society.
[Now, to pinch a line from Julius Sumner Miller – why is it so?]
That’s easy: Monpoly capital. Through financialisation of production (and most other things), capital is able concentrate wealth. As wealth is concentrated, the rents capital monopolists can extract from society grow.
Of course, eventually demand collapses because the rest of society is unable to afford anything other than the rents required to survive, the value of capital collapses with it. Bad times.
[Tom L
Posted Thursday, June 4, 2015 at 9:28 am | PERMALINK
Has any journo asked one of the numerous govt MPs shouting treason over leaks whether the person who leaked the cabinet proposal to the Tele should be booted as well?]
They seem to have reached a ‘Mexican stand-off’ over Cabinet disunity. Nobody in Cabinet is willing to admit they are the leaker and Abbott is unwilling to sack any Minister, lest it results in him being toppled.
Fortunately the electorate, as shown by the polls, still places the Abbott government in a losing position.
Guytaur
You might be able to use such a criteria when setting corporate and other business related taxes
Citizen
I’m not talking about that leak to the SMH. I’m talking about the leak of the citizenship proposal to the Tele, before cabinet had even been briefed on it. Presumably by Abbott or one of his lackeys. My point is he can’t use leaks like that to his advantage and then complain when a rival does the same against him.
[Has any journo asked one of the numerous govt MPs shouting treason over leaks whether the person who leaked the cabinet proposal to the Tele should be booted as well?]
Sorta, kinda, not a leak, as it was supposed to have been an “announceable” (public information) as soon as Cabinet agreed to it.
If you’re talking about double standards, on the other hand, then of course you’re right.
Abbott feels free to leak to the Daily Telegraph, but only (for him) “good” news.
If anyone leaks “bad” news (although it’s since been re-classified as “good” by Abbott himself) then that is when “political and personal”ramifications kick in.
The basic situation is that Abbott is treating Cabinet as his personal plaything. It is Abbott who is traducing the confidentiality of Cabinet, and its processes.
It is Abbott who ambushes his ministers. Abbott who leaks to the Daily Telegraph. But when he thinks they’ve ambushed him, he gets all shitty.
At stake is whether the Cabinet ministers are happy for Abbott to have one set of rules for himself, and one for everyone else. At stake also is the essence of the Cabinet system of government.
I am surprised that more ministers aren’t more pissed off at the roughshod way he treats them: issuing public threats against them, the ambushes, the leaks, harnessing maniacs like Christensen, The Telegraph and Ray Hadley (and the rest of the 2GB/shock-jock, raving journo crew) to do his dirty work, while he sits back, claims the high ground and smiles that crocodile smile of his at how clever he has been.
While I’m at it, I’m amazed that the (relatively “respectable”) portion of the journalism profession who are non-Murdoch, put up with the constant favouring of News Corp outlets over their own. They are constantly running behind the Murdoch rags and Sky on “announceables”, yet their protests are quite mild and indirect at this preferential treatment. I’d be yelling blue bloody murder if I was a serious journalist.
Abbott in general is a wrecker. He’s never seen an institution that he doesn’t think he can run better than it’s being run.
He tried it at Sydney University with the RC.
He tried it at the cement company (his one claim to fame as having been “in industry”) where, full of his own importance as “a manager”, he attempted to reorganize customary industry work practices by forcing truck drivers to wash and polish their trucks every day, upon pain of discipline. That particular adventure in Abbott hubris ended in a serious strike that saw him seen off the premises so that normality could be restored.
At the Seminary he was put in charge of catering, and immediately cut off some of the basic food and beverage services that had been traditional for the novitiates, classifying them as perks and the recipients as lazy (or “leaners” if you like).
At Sydney Uni his exploits are legendary: the bullying, the intimidation, the drunkenness and the violence, the heckling and the foul language.
In Parliament he is exactly the same.
As Prime Minister, we now see him at the height of his power, and we see the results of his inevitable over-indulgence in it.
Once Abbott gets some power in his hands he always overdoes it. He loves being the boss. He enjoys telling other people what they are to do. If they baulk, he gets nasty. He is a thoroughly unlikeably person who has been booted from just about every institution he’s ever been a ember of, or even come across casually, because he always throws his weight around. He can’t help himself.
He has a psychopathic need to dominate, to cause trouble, and to heavy anyone who gets in his way. Where some politicians can be talked around to seeing common sense, Abbott can’t. He makes noises like he’s reformed himself, but he always resorts to going to biff again. He really believe that it is better to seek forgiveness than ask permission. He’s been getting away with “charming” (if that is the word) his way out of trouble all his life.
Even his own sister, now an adult, and now (you would think) well out of the way of any harm he can do her, is still terrified of him, placating him, giving way to him, trying to stop him from getting angry again.
It’s because Abbott never forgets and never forgives. If you think he’s gotten over some slight you’ve done him a century ago, you’d be wrong. He is on an eternal quest for payback, but not only that. The Abbott treatment involves buring and cremating his opponents, burning their institutions to the ground and murdering the fruits of their careers. Abbott’s favourite pastime is erasing his enemies from history. People know this. They know he will always get revenge. That’s why they try to keep on his good side. He’ll always get them back if they don’t.
There has always been one rule for Abbott (who sees himself as a one-off, unique) and one (different) rule for others. For some reason he has a way of tricking people into thinking they can control him, channel his energies to better suit their agendas. These people always come off the worse for their naiveity.
Abbott’s interests will always be paramount. Abbott’s survival more import than anyone else’s. When he talks about the “Come to Jesusmoment”, he’s serious. Not kidding. He means it.
It’s his way or the highway, or rather more likely buried in a ditch beside the highway under a hundred tonnes of concrete.
Abbott doesn’t make threats idly. He carries them out. That is the secret to his success.
On popularity.
The polls reflect the immediate post budget period. They do not reflect the growing realisation amongst many that the budget is not a good as first presented.
Its going to be a similar result I think to the first budget but will be slower for the voters to realise as the gallery did the whole what is Labor doing rather than analyse the budget by really listening to economists.
Now the economists are starting to cut through as we see with housing affordability being in the headlines. This enabled Labor to go on the attack and the pathetic Hockey clowns response.
For these reasons and the leaks from cabinet and voting against their own business measure changing the Press Gallery tone* I think the polls are going to head into more negative territory for the LNP.
*see responses to QT by Latika Bourke and responses to the small business vote.
———————–
Shorten presser
Italics off.
Shorten doing well on presenting Labor as the sensible party on national security.
Oh shit no. A butcher.
A good rant BB!
Journalist asks a sensible superannuation dixer. Halfway through 24 cuts away to an Abbott presser
Uhlman asking about South China Sea
O dearly me Tony has brought out the we are friends line!