A new poll conducted for ReachTEL by Sky News gives Labor a 52-48 lead on two-party preferred, which is down from 53-47 at the last such poll on May 11. At the moment, primary vote figures are limited to the first question which allowed for an undecided response, which comes in a 7.1% – I assume the undecided were then given a forced response question, to which we don’t yet have the results. If the undecided are simply excluded from the available numbers, the results are Coalition 36.5%, Labor 35.6%, Greens 10.3% and One Nation 9.8%.
An all-or-nothing question on the Liberal leadership breaks 68.3-31.7 in favour of Malcolm Turnbull over Tony Abbott, while Turnbull leads Bill Shorten 54.1-45.9 as preferred prime minister. Turnbull’s combined very good plus good rating is “just under 27%”, compared with 36.5% for poor or very poor. Same-sex marriage has 62.4% supportive and 25.9% opposed, with most believing the matter should be determined by a plebiscite, and 64.1% believe penalty rates should be higher on Sundays than Saturdays. The poll was conducted yesterday from a sample of 2389.
Poroti
My point is more social mores. We don’t have to portray having to work as noble, and therefore not working as ignoble. The stigma is purely societal.
How true. It’s way past time we just got on with legislating the inevitable.
bemused @ #198 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 9:36 pm
I thought both of those came from McTernan himself. Anyway, whoever it was should be flogged to within an inch of their life. Which side of the life/death border that inch falls is irrelevant.
And I should add if Turnbull isn’t capable of steering that ship he should step aside and let Shorten Labor finish the job of giving us marriage equality.
Knifing of Rudd was terrible. Me and my whole Labor voting family was like wtf is going on? I wasn’t that into politics then and 20 years old but I thought it was crazy what they’d done to him. Seeing him cry made me feel uneasy. No one out in the voter land could understand why.
I remember when this site was filled with favourable analysis of both Cash for Clunkers and the Citizens Assembly. I got some of my best lines for ‘selling’ both from here…
dan gulberry @ #203 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 9:53 pm
Nope, I have previously posted an article from, I think, the Age, naming the ‘Citizens Assembly’ culprit as Tom Bentley. I have it from a NSW contact that he was responsible for the other brain wave but that is not as authoritative.
Bet Di Natale is fuming at Rhiannon being offered a national platform at this juncture. And LOL that Gerard draws the short reactionary straw of appearing on Insiders after a week of Pell facing child abuse charges and Germany legalising SSM. This week’s ep could be highly entertaining.
gorkay king @ #205 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 9:55 pm
Betrayal by someone you trusted or should have been able to trust is particularly devastating.
Zoomster
<blockquote.
My point is more social mores. We don’t have to portray having to work as noble, and therefore not working as ignoble.</blockquote.
Agreed but until the fact that one gives a chance for some comforts and the other abject poverty it is not going to change.
bemused @ #207 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 9:56 pm
Fair enough.
Gorbay King
And that was the problem. In the name of unity, people who knew how bad things were stayed mum, until it really became impossible. And then, out of respect for Rudd as a former leader, they still stayed mum, so no one knew why they had acted as they did. Which allowed a whole lot of speculation to fill the void, which meant that when it became obvious that the truth had to be told, people already thought they knew what that looked like. And when people have done that, then no amount of truth cuts through.
For what it’s worth, I’m told that it’s almost impossible to imagine how bad things were under Rudd.
zoomster:
Everything was retro fitted to accommodate Ruddist Revision after he was shown to be a failure and decided to turn martyr. His fans are still carrying on like he’s the second coming. Meh, whatever.
The only reason the citizens assembly was bad was because it was seen as a substitute for action. With the hindsight of what Gillard did pass I think it would have been stronger than what people thought.
We will never know as Labor did not get a majority
Gay Pride in Turkey 2017AD!!!
A Basic Income Guarantee would reduce people to mere consumption units, and its proponents ignore the immense psycho-social benefits that people get from having structured, paid opportunities to contribute to society. It is far better to receive a living wage for doing something useful than to receive a pittance for doing nothing. We should retain the Disability Support Pension and the Age Pension (and increase both significantly, because they have fallen behind per capita personal income and national productivity growth). But a universal payment that is untied to production or contribution would be inflationary, and it would fail to respond to what unemployed and under-employed people are saying they want: meaningful paid work.
Automation creates opportunities for us to widen our imagination of what a paid job can be. Automation liberates people to do jobs that are more interesting and less dangerous. The practical impact of automation is determined by the federal government’s policy response. If the government responds by maintaining full employment, then what happens is that the allocation of tasks between people and machines changes, but the total amount of socially useful work that people can do need not decline. There is an immense amount of socially useful work that the federal government could pay people a living wage to do in the fields of social and community services, environmental services, artistic and cultural services, and entrepreneurship. Many socially useful tasks that our culture currently defines as hobbies, or as leisure, or as unpaid service, or as personal risk (such as developing and launching a small business) can and should be converted into living wage public sector jobs on demand. There is no need for anyone who wants paid work that is relevant and meaningful for them to go without it. The decision to stop targeting full employment is the biggest national policy blunder of the past forty years.
The claim that automation reduces the total amount of useful work that people can do is based on a static understanding of what work is. The nature of work can, should, and actually does change over time, in response to productivity increases, technological improvements, and cultural norms. Culturally, paid work fulfills a deep sociological need for reciprocity – for people to be seen to be contributing in proportion to their capacities. A Basic Income would violate people’s expectation of reciprocity because many people would be seen to be consuming without contributing. We already have a stigmatized cohort (the involuntarily jobless). A Basic Income would merely transfer this stigma to a different cohort. The scheme would be highly susceptible to political attack, and would inevitably be chipped away over time. In any event, the amount would either be too small to live on, or too high for the nation’s productive capacity, which would inflate much of the payment away, defeating its purpose. In the absence of full employment, a Basic Income would probably end up being pocketed by employers as a wage subsidy, and workers’ bargaining power would decline even more than it already has.
I want the federal government to assess what real resources – labour, materials, energy, and technology – are for sale in the Australian dollar, and then use Overt Monetary Financing to mobilize unused real resources for socially useful and ecologically sustainable ends. I do not accept the widespread belief that the federal government is financially constrained when it spends its own currency. The constraints on federal government spending are real resource constraints, not a budget or financial limit. At present we allow an obscene waste of real resources because of a false narrative that the federal government would need to borrow its own currency or increase its overall tax take before it could increase its spending. Since 1983, when Australia adopted a floating currency with no commitment to convert, on demand, Australian dollars into another currency or commodity at a fixed exchange rate, the federal government has had immense fiscal policy space. For ideological reasons those fiscal powers have not been used to their full potential. The government places voluntary financial constraints on itself, causing needless suffering. The macro-economists to whom we should be listening include Bill Mitchell, Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton, and Pavlina Tcherneva. Mainstream macro-economists have failed us terribly, and our policy options are unduly narrow as a consequence.
zoomster @ #206 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 9:56 pm
I think I initially reacted favourably, then had doubts and tried to rationalise, then read some good economic analysis and accepted cash for clunkers was a dog. I am less clear about my thought progression on the other, but knew what it was based on having learnt about ‘Action Research’ at Uni.
Poroti
I think that’s what I was getting at – that automation should be seen as a way of freeing people’s time up, which carries with it the implication that they have sufficient means to have the time freed up (through higher wages for less work, for example).
I’m really mildly stunned that this is in any way at all ‘out there’. It’s what my father expected Australian society to be like when he got off the boat in 1947.
bemused
Yet Rudd retains your support, when I know that you didn’t even have an initial favourable reaction to many of his policy thought bubbles. Why the double standard, I wonder?
@Zoomster
I see what you mean. I just hope we never go through this kind of crap again.
zoomster @ #212 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:00 pm
Oddly some members of Federal Parliament had a different perception and even some who dumped on him wanted him to campaign in their seats.
Please explain zoomster.
Zoomster
Unfortunately the ‘Greedy Bastards” aka the “1%” but more properly the 0.01% have seen fit to pocket all the productivity increases .
guytaur
Both policies were in the context (accepted at the time) that there was at least a year after the election before a carbon price could possibly be legislated (this turned out to be incorrect, but it was a fixed belief then).
‘Cash for Clunkers’ was more expensive than carbon pricing, but it was the next best in terms of bang for your buck. Once the cheaper option of carbon pricing became possible, of course it was unnecessary.
The same with the Citizens Assembly – the idea being that the case for climate change, and for tackling it via carbon pricing, was so clear cut and obvious that ordinary people would see that when the facts were laid out before them. And, of course, laying out the facts for them would lay it out for other ordinary people, who would be following the process. It had the potential to be a very powerful educational tool.
Again, it became unnecessary when carbon pricing was fast tracked, although if it had been implemented, the necessity for action may have been more generally accepted, and carbon pricing thus harder to wind back.
Take a look at @roweafr’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/roweafr/status/880683973072105472?s=09
Wonder if the papers at bottom of cage to catch the shit are News Ltd ones?
guytaur @ #214 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:00 pm
Try this: http://johnquiggin.com/2010/07/25/votes-for-clunkers/
zoomster @ #219 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:04 pm
All things are relative. I am critical of those things, but as was amply demonstrated, the alternative was far worse.
bemused
‘Oddly some members of Federal Parliament had a different perception..’
So few that he didn’t even contest the leadership ballot, despite initially saying there would be a spill, because it became obvious it wasn’t just a case of not having the numbers, but that it would be downright embarrassing.
‘ even some who dumped on him wanted him to campaign in their seats.’
Such as?
For reasons I outlined to GK, Rudd remained popular with voters, who didn’t actually have to work with him. People who want to retain their seats invite people they think are popular to campaign with them. It’s not a personal endorsement.
The Liberal party elected Malcolm Turnbull as leader, and we know that they hate his guts.
Zoomster
Yes I can only agree.
Zoomster
The mistake was to tout the cash for clunkers as a carbon emission reduction scheme rather than propping up Australian jobs in the automotive industry during a time of crisis. One had a solid argument the other not so much.
If this is meant to infer never again should a party in govt remove an unsuitable PM then I don’t agree. Compare and contrast with what’s happening in the US and thank whoever that we have a system that allows for swift removal of unsuitable leaders.
Bemused
I saw Cash for Clunkers in the same light as shoving cash out to Centrelink recipients. A fast boost to the economy.
Not great but doable.
Mari:
Not sure I get tonight’s Rowe. It’s hardly as if that beast is contained in any way shape or form.
zoomster @ #223 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:10 pm
Quiggin’s article I linked to gives the lie to that.
zoomster @ #227 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:14 pm
Graham Perret was one.
Oh, and Gillard had to call him in to campaign in Queensland to save her sorry arse.
Yes, he was ambushed and had no real chance to counter-organise. He bowed to what was, at the time, inevitable.
Sen James Patterson on Lateline …
When he says ‘my colleagues’ the question is to me is ‘are they the members, workers at the IPA OR other members of parliament’.
poroti @ #229 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:18 pm
Les than it would have once as by then the percentage of locally made cars had declined markedly. So much of that benefit would have flowed overseas.
I see Insiders are, yet again, going for the boring & tedious ‘sideshow’ conflict of Marr vs Henderson..
..we’ll learn nothing new about PellGate..
A bit late, but Germany decides to adopt marriage equality.
I sort of hope Australia is the last.
We have become a stupid country with a toxic political life, with a despicable media, with contemptible politicians and with a rapacious capitalist class.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/30/germany-poised-legalise-same-sex-marriage-bill-law
This shitshow continues unabated
1 more reply
Dr. Dena Grayson @DrDenaGrayson
·
18m
Replying to @aliasvaughn
Markjs:
Insiders lost its value for me a long time ago. I might watch the interview with Rhiannon (assuming it isn’t pulled between now and then), but that’s about it.
bemused
‘her sorry arse..’
Why, bemused? This is a former Labor leader you’re referring to, one who put in place great Labor policies. This kind of language is totally unnecessary and definitely sexist.
I don’t call Rudd a traitorous prick, I focus on criticising his actions.
Oops this thread may work
https://mobile.twitter.com/aliasvaughn/status/880758225297125376
‘Les than it would have once as by then the percentage of locally made cars had declined markedly’
That was part of the point. You had to be buying a locally made car for the cash to come for your clunker.
markjs @ #237 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:34 pm
It will be interesting to see how they tippy-toe around it without saying anything sub-judice.
‘Yes, he was ambushed and had no real chance to counter-organise…’
Why would a popular leader who was at least liked by his colleagues need time to counter organise?
A year later he still could only must about 30 people to vote for him – memorably, this result was described as the poorest ever achieved by a challenger for the leadership of any Australian party ever.
zoomster @ #241 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:40 pm
Of course not, Rudd wasn’t the deputy who betrayed his leader.
Oh, Rudd betrayed his leader….and the whole of the Labor party.
I don’t use that as a justification for poor behaviour on my part. A pity your own standards are so low.
LOL I have no idea who posted that, but good to see the ignorance and naivety continues in the RGR bullshit wars.
FMD some people need to get a life.
zoomster @ #247 Friday, June 30, 2017 at 10:47 pm
So they responded by electing him leader again.
After Gillard had been given ample opportunity to perform.
Markjs
You are not wrong on that.