The only new poll result this week, from Newspoll, landed right on the existing results for BludgerTrack, which accordingly records only the slightest of movements in this week’s update. The biggest of these is a 0.4% increase for One Nation, who were up two points in Newspoll. The only changes on the seat projection result from the fact that my hypothetical election is now one conducted using mini-redistributions, giving Labor extra seats in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, and the Liberals losing one in South Australia.
The voting intention readings don’t offer much excitement, but Newspoll’s latest leadership numbers further contribute to an impression of rising popularity (or at least, falling unpopularity) for Malcolm Turnbull, which seemed to kick in two to three months ago. Turnbull’s net approval trend rating is now well clear of Bill Shorten’s for the first time since early 2016, and he has more than recovered from a slight dip in his preferred prime minister rating over New Year.
Full results:
p
ribit, ribit.
Player One @ #726 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 12:40 pm
So let me get this straight, farmers want governemnt out of the way and let them do whatever they want until they need government help (and by “help” I mean taxpayer dollars) to fix a problem that they created because the government got out of their way and let them do whatever wanted?
Turnbull:
…on behalf of the IPA.
What’s that saying? Privatise the profits, socialise the losses?
Compact Crank @ #735 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 12:57 pm
I thought Government needed to get out of the way and let farmers do whatever they wanted CC?
grimace
Western Australian farmers noted dry land salinization almost immediately they began clearing the wheat belt back before 1900. The balance between evapotranspiration and infiltration changed immediately.
Had they wanted to avoid crushing salinization they might have gotten away with clearing around 20%. Instead it is over 90% cleared.
While some areas of dryland salinity occurred almost immediately, most areas are in the nature of a slow-moving train wreck. There are a number of reasons which explain why there are differential rates of dryland salinization in the Wheatbelt: land use, depth of water table, slope, rainfall, soil type, and terrain.
IMO, most of the wheat belt will be salinized sooner or later.
There is simply not enough surface water movement to carry the salt back into the ocean.
They could hold some back and recover some with salt tolerant grazing plants. They could replant the wheat belt with salt tolerant trees to lower water tables. But the economics do not look all that good.
IMO, in terms of agriculture, there are few really good commercial options.
Meanwhile, in the far eastern reaches of the WA wheatbelt the first global warming refugee wheat farmers are walking off their properties.
There can be no doubt that for WA to continue to feed itself it is going to have to start developing cultured vat food production supported by ultra-cheap desalinated water using GMO smart genes.
rhwombat @ #749 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 1:44 pm
It’s a cloudy day in Perth so Crank and his fellow Liberal party members will have spent a long day in the courtyard of their nursing home yelling at clouds. Dinner is served at 5 and the care aids have moved CC & the rest of the Liberal party membership into the mess hall where shouting is baned, so he’s joined us on Poll Bludger and is sharing the insights he gained from his long day yelling at clouds.
Confessions @ #804 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 6:30 pm
Like I said, Compact Crank is expert at putting out there whatever he needs to say to ‘win’ the argument. Just like the dystopian demagogue Trump. Just don’t analyse what they have said too closely using evidence, logic and facts.
People who fly to Perth and have never seen the salt affected land in the WA wheatbelt before might be shocked at what they see.
I had my reminder when I returned from overseas mid-week.
The problem was first recognised back in the first decades of the last century but that didn’t stop the rush to clear more land.
There have been dozens of ideas and plans of how to stop the spread of salt from tree planting to digging drains.
I suspect nothing ever will.
Turnbull is losing it. $10 Million for a new pool in the Mayo electorate? That’s the very definition of a lame vote-buying exercise. Followed up with the ultra lamo line about it being the pool where Georgina Downer learned to swim!
I would have thought that the Downers had their own pool, so they didn’t have to swim with the hoi polloi!?!
Boerwar
I read an old newspaper from the late 40s talking about salinity in the wheatbelt. Some uni guy had warned about clearing the land and salinity decades before but the government post WWI actually made it a condition of the soldiers granted land to clear it all.
So it was not a case of doing something without knowing the consequences but fark the experts we will do it any way as far as the government was concerned.
Crank is jactitating IPA bullshit rather obsessively today.
____
Don’t you mean “ejaculating”?
C@t:
Believe me, I do not waste my time with Crank’s comments.
The pool would be cheaper than the latest model Russian rain making machine, though.
And provide more water.
Confessions @ #813 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 6:52 pm
I didn’t bother engaging with him. Waste of time. Just made a comment. 🙂
Guardian has an AAP story on Turnbull and Downer today (probably the same as in the Oz but I can’t access their version).
It’s interesting that Turnbull and her father are quoted defending her, but no quotes from the candidate herself.
Is she unable to stand on her own two feet and face the electors alone?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/02/mayo-byelection-turnbull-rejects-talk-about-downer-not-being
‘poroti says:
Saturday, June 2, 2018 at 6:48 pm
Boerwar
I read an old newspaper from the late 40s talking about salinity in the wheatbelt. Some uni guy had warned about clearing the land and salinity decades before but the government post WWI actually made it a condition of the soldiers granted land to clear it all.
So it was not a case of doing something without knowing the consequences but fark the experts we will do it any way as far as the government was concerned.’
Yep. They knew. Any line about they did not know what they were doing is a straight out lie. There are accounts of people realizing the connection between clearing and dryland salinity in the wheatbelt back in the 1880s.
I have just witnessed something truly amazing!
Briggs and Senator Pat Dodson rapping at the MCG at the beginning of the Sir Doug Nicholls Indigenous Round of the AFL!
Deadly!
Am at the G. This indigenous ceremony is very good. Just had some hip hop, now senator Dodson on stage.
Boewar
As recently as the early 1970s the WA Government was still releasing land for agriculture on the fringes of the wheatbelt.
I think the boast was a million acres a year for new farms.
citizen,
Georgina Downer, despite every leg-up in life a child could wish for, could still only manage a 3rd Class Honours at Uni. I doubt she could string a coherent sentence together on her own without coaching first.
Fulvio Sammut @ #816 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 4:52 pm
On a related note about making it rain, I love Bill Maher’s quip about Trump not having read up on conservatives like Buckley or Reagan when he decided to run, noting his only experience with Goldwater was in a Russian hotel room.
The world’s tallest and smallest horses, according to CNN.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/23/sport/tallest-smallest-horse-spt/index.html
‘rossmcg says:
Saturday, June 2, 2018 at 6:58 pm
Boewar
As recently as the early 1970s the WA Government was still releasing land for agriculture on the fringes of the wheatbelt.
I think the boast was a million acres a year for new farms.’
They are still permitting forest clearing that is helping to kill the Reef. Fuckers.
rossmcg @ #809 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 4:45 pm
I have a market solution to the problem. I’m sure that the farmers, having voted for the party of small governemnt, better economic managers and personal responsibility will be 100% on board.
The government stays out of the way of farmers and lets the better economic managers show everyone how it’s done. When the farmer inevitably loses their farm because of their destructive and short-sighed practices the government can step in, acquire their land for next to nothing and then hire the farmer through a labour-hire firm to rehabilitate the land.
Grimace
It is interesting that despite the loss of land WA farmers have adapted and with efficiencies and new techniques can still produce record grain crops in good years. Last year was one if I recall correctly.
If you are making money where is the incentive to try and fix the problem?
I could see from the air the other day where some had been making the effort. On some farms the neat rows of trees along what were probably drainage lines were one sign.
Will it work? Nobody is likely to know anytime soon. Wheatbelt mallees take a long time to grow.
grimace
There are only around 4,000 wheat farms in Western Australia.
In terms of social policy, what to do with the wheat farmers is tiny white noise in terms of the total social security bill.
Many of the smaller wheat belt towns are already dying. Some because of the same patterns affecting small country towns across Australia. Some are having difficulty staving off dryland salinization affecting the built environment. Salt has a particularly devastating impact on the structure of clays. They tend to start behaving like liquids. Dirt roads disintegrate.
Pseudo Cud Chewer @ #789 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 2:56 pm
So, there should be no laws as they present a barrier to human nature!
Excepting of course, you must have laws protecting my property!
Libertarian shit!!!!!!!
Many Wheatbelt WA towns are dying because they have the highest rates of ageing population in the state. Young people are moving away to the cities and larger regional centres for employment, and young families with kids don’t want to live in small towns with no services.
Boerwar @10:21AM
Sorry about the delayed reply, but RL caught up with me today – and a rare fine day was too nice to spend at my desktop 😛
Here’s my earlier UBI math-out – tell me what I’m getting wrong here. The key numbers are as below:
You’ve come down to $25,000 p.a., which is more reasonable – but speaking from experience, $20,000 p.a. is enough to scrimp and save on and get by. The DSP is still less than $25,000, and disabled people are expected to live on that indefinitely. $22,500 may be a decent compromise – about halfway between current Newstart ($16,000 p.a.) and your initial $30,000 p.a. figure.
For $22,500 p.a., this comes to $430bn p.a. – which is indeed more than total Federal revenue currently is.
Instead of $28.5bn, this would be $32bn.
That makes the gross cost of a $22,500 p.a. UBI $462bn p.a. – or $1.9trn over forward estimates. Which is, indeed, a huge bill. I don’t deny that it’s a daunting proposition to find a way to pay (at least most of) it by increasing revenues – but I’m not sure that it’s quite as impossible as you imply. For instance, it’s not as if Australia’s already a high-taxing, high-spending government – our tax structure is among the leanest in the OECD, and more rounds of tax cuts are being spruiked quite heavily at the moment. Whether or not we have enough room to maneuvre…this is just my intuition, but I suspect that “not” is the answer.
Having said all of that – the question we need to turn to face, sooner rather than later, is “What do we do when structural unemployment increases?” Because I don’t see any way it won’t over the next couple of decades – the advances in automation are happening so rapidly, and the potential bonanza for individual firms which commercialize these advances is so huge, that it’s going to happen. When there is simply not enough work to go around that cannot be done better, faster and cheaper by automation, what kind of society do we want to make?
***
As for the idea of a People’s Bank – it’s one of a handful of Di Natale’s that I’m willing to sign on for. It’s what the Labor Party did when we set up the Commonwealth Bank, back in 1911. And reactionaries & conservatives howled about the cost then, too…but it worked out very well indeed for Australia! One of PK’s biggest mistakes was to sell off the Commonwealth Bank – by operating as a commercial bank with a mandate to operate honestly and ethically, rather than to maximize profit at any cost, the CBA played an invaluable role in keeping the private banks clean. Or at least “acceptably grubby”, not “covered in fraudulent sewer muck”.
This part is flat-out wrong:
Each commercial bank holds gross assets worth less than $1trn. Since the purpose of setting up a PB would be to provide an “honest alternative” to the private banks rather than to be a direct rival to them, it need not be as large as them to serve its purpose. A total start-up cost of $1trn would probably be far more than “enough” for that purpose.
Compact Crank @ #720 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 2:36 pm
You’re right. It’s 99% Obama and 1% inertia left over from Obama.
rossmcg
World food production is rising at a decreasing rate but the decreasing rate is still faster than the rate of global population increase.
In other words, there has never been more food per person than now.
There is a linked trend – food on a global scale has never been cheaper (weather and global trade politics aside).
The rate of increase highest in areas where biodiversity is excluded as far as possible from agricultural systems.
The rate of increase is lowest in parts of Africa where they are not all that good at excluding biodiversity from their production systems.
In terms of the Wheat Belt, they were developing salt tolerant eucs around 30 years ago. They had got them to the stage where they would grow in water that was around half as salty as sea water. There are limits having to do with chemistry and physics but I am not sure how far they have pushed the limits.
The potential to GMO salt tolerant species to turn them into food producers has largely been untouched, as far as I know.
The elite from the Adelaide Hills
The Bishops and the Downers
When US businesses start collapsing from a trade war with Europe & Asia, we’ll know that has everything to do with Trump.
Fulvio Sammut @ #777 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 4:52 pm
Tolerated Trump.
@ BW
The farmers can go and f**k themselves now that it’s their hour of need.
They’ve spent generations supporting the political party who advocate (in many cases successfully) the removal of pay, conditions and public services from working people.
At every opportunity, they’ve engaged strikebreakers and scabs to undermine the cause of working people. Where they didn’t personally do it, they cheered along others and supported the various farming associations while they did it.
They retained aboriginals as slave labour, fought efforts to emancipate aboriginal people so they were paid for their labour, and have yet to pay proper compensation for this.
They can cry me a river. I won’t be living a finger for them or giving their plight a moments thought. Last time I was at Woolworths and they asked for donations for some farming cause or other I told the person collecting donations as much.
Thank god there are no factions in the Liberal Party – just think how much worse it would be:
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/internal-liberal-fears-rise-over-donations-reforms-20180601-p4zj0a.html
PvO is on Insiders tomorrow, a hint at the possibility of a sane panel.
grimace
Didn’t one of the WA farmer groups support the wharfies when they were fighting Corrigan and @#$#Rieth ?
Matt
Hi. Thanks for a temperate, reasoned and rationale response! It comes as a bit of a relief after the the snouters in the personal abuse trough yesterday.
What is the right level? How do we know what it should be?
The level of $25,000 is a round up figure not all that far from the poverty line, which is only slightly lower than that. So, that is what I went for.
In terms of the level of the UBI, the assumptions are critical to figuring out the costs. For the sake of simplicity, for my final calculations, I offset the entire social security spend. (There are some issues with this: it actually means that some of the social security spend goes direct to wealthy individuals, for example.)
Another consideration is how much is enough to trigger what I call agency.
My view is that a poor UBI level is one that is designed just to stave off poverty. A good UBI level is one which drives individual and societal change.
I define the latter as having enough money to start seeing yourself as a confident actor in the economy. As an example, in one Canadian trial of the UBI, people started upskilling on the UBI. They also started avoiding behaviour that would have ended them being in jail or in hospital. IMO, the key to the UBI’s impact is that it changes both personal psychology and social relations. There was virtually no change in terms of whether people sought for, or got into jobs. But there was a change in the jobs targetted: people started to hunt better paying jobs and more satisfying jobs.
There is another consideration. Is the UBI about replacing all social security spending by turning it into direct individual transfers? IMO, it should be. The savings in terms of administration would be immense. (This is essentially the model for the NDIS, by the way.)
My calculations were based on the UBI being given to people on their 18th birthday and 40% for each child below that.
While there is room at the edges, once you start multiplying 20,000,000 by around 25,000 you start getting some stupendously large calls on the Budget.
In the broad we came up with having to double personal income tax and corporate tax to cover the the additional spend.
As I stated yesterday, I am a little bit of a leaner towards the UBI. It appeals to my idealism! And, yes, if we are not to create or rather embed a permanent underclass, the current arrangements are failing.
Matt
‘Then, of course, there is Di Natale’s People’s Bank which will need capitalization of several $trillion.
Each commercial bank holds gross assets worth less than $1trn. Since the purpose of setting up a PB would be to provide an “honest alternative” to the private banks rather than to be a direct rival to them, it need not be as large as them to serve its purpose. A total start-up cost of $1trn would probably be far more than “enough” for that purpose.’
It all depends. Di Natale wants the People’s Bank to compete with the commercials, and he has been explicit about that. If it can’t compete, it will not be writing any business at all. If it can compete (and it will be subsidized by taxpayers, so why not?) then it will write all the business. The business available at the moment is $2 trillion. If Di Natale wants only half that business, he should tell us how he is going to cap the People’s Bank offerings.
My main objection is the way Di Natale is going about this. Nothing is costed. None of the assumptions are clarified. He is just doing a populist rant.
Those of us oldies who remember various state banks will shudder at his easy come, easy go attitude. The rather uncritical Greens youth will simply suck it up with delirium: free money! How hard is that!
poroti @ #839 Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 – 5:37 pm
I don’t know. If they did, any such support would have been inconsistent with their history and their current position.
grimace
Australians are blessed with around about the highest quality, most abundant, most reliable, freshest, and cheapest food in the World. You don’t have a clue about what it is to starve to death or to go hungry.
Not only that, but Australian farmers stave off starvation of tens of millions of people overseas.
Where is your gratitude?
Today’s PvO tips a bucket on Barnaby, deservedly so.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/barnaby-joyce-poses-a-conundrum-to-vex-the-wisest-of-nationals/news-story/57a0147af068a14a487bf1b0c9741d97
Also gives a shout out to the WA Nats (led by a woman Mia Davies) who came out early demanding Joyce resign, and asks those in the coalition who attacked her for doing so how they feel now.
C
All the Turnbull supporters in the MSM have taken a turn at sledging Joyce.
These were the same rah rah merchants who, when Joyce was being touted as the greatest retail politician of our time and while Joyce was debauching the $10 billion MDB Plan, were silent.
If UBI is the answer, what are the sensible, saleable intermediate steps to move us there in a comfortable broadly supported way. I seem to see only ‘dive right in’ and ‘we can never ever afford it’ and nothing in the middle.
The right is very very good, and it may well just be innate evil in action rather than any grand strategy, but they are very very good at biting off and selling little steps towards the hell of inequality and economic insecurity we have built ourselves, while at every step promising everyone is getting close to rivers of wealth.
The UBI evangelists seem to have the same promise, but no intermediate steps to allow it to be sold progressively (no pun intended) without ever scarring the horses.
Do you roll it out to low and the bottom half of middle income earners by number to see how it goes, and how much it costs and what other social changes follow?
Do you replace the entire pension system with UBI for those eligible and then see how it goes?
Is there a gradual chance option or have its proponents only got a ‘dive right in the water is fine (we hope)’ option.
Obviously if you were in America you might get some kind of revolution you can bring it in under, but as Egypt and Syria have found out revolutions aren’t always grand, even if the French tell you they had a grand one that went very well thanks.
Having said all of that – the question we need to turn to face, sooner rather than later, is “What do we do when structural unemployment increases?” Because I don’t see any way it won’t over the next couple of decades – the advances in automation are happening so rapidly, and the potential bonanza for individual firms which commercialize these advances is so huge, that it’s going to happen. When there is simply not enough work to go around that cannot be done better, faster and cheaper by automation, what kind of society do we want to make?
Alright, so I’ve finally had a bit of a think about this and I believe that where a lot of you are slipping up is in the lack of elasticity of your thoughts about ways to make a Living Wage, which I prefer to a UBI, work.
Now I’m no Economist, nor much of an expert with money even, but I think that, if you want to make this thing work then maybe you can employ some of the more creative solutions to the money and transfer systems. So, I’d find a way of incorporating the blockchain, barter and supply chains into the mix.
Surely it is not beyond the wit and wisdom of our best and brightest to sustain our nation with a system that is flexible enough to have the ability to work for each individual citizen, according to their needs? There has to be an algorithm and an app for that!
The federal government could have agreements with supermarkets, farmers markets, and even the corner store, to engage in a system whereby each citizen has, dare I say it, A Healthy Basics Card (minus the creaming off the top by Larry Anthony), which allows each citizen a certain amount of credit for their weekly shop. They can also use the card in shops for clothing, furniture and electrical items, all data for which goes back to the central collation centre which tallies up the bill. To the point where you get to a pre-agreed limit for each man, woman and child, such that, as you get a monthly statement, you know if you go over your limit then you have to pay out of your own pocket….which encourages you to do work, or to do study that will enable you to get well-paying work, so that you can live a higher standard of living, if that’s what you choose for yourself or your family.
Other than that, you can barter the skills you already have, in exchange for other goods or services people may wish to trade with you for.
I don’t think there’d be much point for a Black Economy either because Mates Rates would have to be paid for in cash and that would have to be come by with more difficulty than the other system.
I hope that makes sense. And, as an idea, it’s probably full of holes, but there you go. 🙂
C@tmomma@6:46pm
Tolic: MT is losing the plot and lame exercise in vot buying
Couple of things
1. It is an established fact that he does not have political judgemnt.
2. He is giving $10 million because Mayo is rich electorate and they need high class swimming pools because they already have other things like hospitals or they can afford those things quote comfortably. When Gillard government structured the private insurance subsidy to phase out after 250k, I remember seeing on TV one of the Woman residents of Mayo whose family income is 250k complained that Gillard is targeting people with middle clasd incomes about that reduction of subsidy. That is how rich residents lf Mayo think.
Boerwar:
Yes indeed, that’s definitely true. They also tolerated his behaviour at late night Estimates where he’d return from the dinner break clearly inebriated.
That should’ve been a warning to them that things weren’t quite altogether kosher with Barnaby.
WWP
The ‘U’ in UBI is ‘Universal’.
There are perfectly sound reasons for making it universal.
Your suggestions are actually social security policy variations.