Updated with this week’s Newspoll, the BludgerTrack poll aggregate records a half-point gain for Labor on the two-party preferred, along with two gains on the seat projection, one each in New South Wales and Queensland. Bill Shorten also seems to be enjoying a modest upswing in his net approval trend; I still haven’t found time to sort out a trend for Scott Morrison, despite the fact that I probably have enough data to work with now. Another feature of BludgerTrack this week is that I’m now counting Wentworth as an independent seat, and following my usual policy of assuming elected minor party and independent incumbents will be re-elected.
Speaking of Wentworth, there has been no further progress in the count since last week, presumably because the Australian Electoral Commission has been waiting for the last eligible postal votes to trickle in before yesterday’s deadline. This should mean a few hundred votes will shortly be added to a score line that has Kerryn Phelps with a lead of 1783. You can find my detailed results display for Wentworth here, and BludgerTrack through the link below.
Note also the post below this one, an extensive summary of news from the Victorian election campaign. Not to mention the post below that, in which I plead for donations.
‘Cud Chewer says:
Monday, November 5, 2018 at 4:53 pm
BW you know where you can stuff your envelope’
Classic Greens: too lazy to do the numbers; shoot the breeze; shoot the messenger.
You guys have zero policy cred because you rave on and don’t do the hard work.
“African crime” will apparently be featured on ABC 4C tonight. There has been some concern on Twitter that it will support the Guy/Coalition view and will not be beneficial to Andrews/Labor.
I suppose I’d better watch it then. 🙁
Laocoon
That’s a 13 minute walk to Chatswood station.
Its evidence of what is driving land prices in Sydney. Physical size and lack of fast transport.
Instead anything within a walk of a station is commanding insane prices.
ScoMo tackling a new population of voters today.
BW you are the one being too lazy.
It doesn’t take too much effort to run the thought experiment “how could you make a UBI actually work”. But instead this is simply another cheap excuse for you to Green-bash because you think its a Green issue. You do it over and over again and its plain boring.
FYI I’m not a Green voter.
Say what you will about Australia’s election system and processes, here’s why the soon-to-be USA “permanent minority” Republican Party will always prevail until the planet has deliquesed.
1. The Republicans’ Senate advantage from the smallest and invariably the most conservative states will be exacerbated as the populations of small states continue their slower percentage increases than the populations of largest tier of states. Australia’s only got 1/6 of its Senators in the category of “unrepresentative swill”. USA already has approximately 1/3 of its Senators in this category, guaranteeing the Democratic Party’s disadvantage will grow worse with every successive election.
2. The Founding Oligarchs’ Electoral College has gifted the last two Republican Presidencies to candidates who were defeated in the popular vote. Currently, there is one Electoral College vote for every 195,000 Wyoming voters, but only one E.C. vote for every 710, 000 California voters. This will also continue to get worse for the Democratic Party.
I think the greens biggest challenge, that the current leaders will not be able to overcome, is that they act and behave like a minor party of opposition that will never ever have to take responsibility for anything. Quite fairly voters consistently treat them like that.
A Job Guarantee of the kind advocated by Stephanie Kelton would be nothing like Work For The Dole.
A JG job would pay the minimum wage and provide paid annual leave, paid sick leave, and all other protections and benefits of permanent employment.
There would be a vast amount of choice in the types of jobs that people could do. The job would be designed around the abilities and interests of the jobseeker. A JG takes people as they are.
For macroeconomic reasons the JG jobs would have to pay the minimum wage (there wouldn’t be a skill-based wage structure). The JG sets the wage floor below which nobody can fall.
The federal government can always fund higher paid jobs as part of the regular public sector if the real resources are available to enable this to be done in a non-inflationary way.
The flexibility of the job design in a JG means than most people with disabilities would be able to participate if they wanted to. People with mental health struggles and chronic illnesses would be able to participate in a way that meets their circumstances and needs.
On-the-job skill development would be a big part of a JG.
By guaranteeing full employment at all times, a JG raises the quality of employment in the private sector. Businesses would create a lot of entry level jobs, train their workers, make their workplaces as healthy and friendly as possible. The best economy is one in which there is more than one job vacancy for every job seeker and business has to compete hard for workers.
There is a lot of work that has been done on the details of an unconditional Job Guarantee scheme.
For the United States context, a recent detailed publication is
http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/public-service-employment-a-path-to-full-employment
For the Australian context, a detailed proposal for administrative arrangements is
http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/pubs/wp/2006/06-15.pdf
For the Australian context, a detailed study of unmet community needs that could be met by Job Guarantee workers is
http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/pubs/reports/2008/CofFEE_JA/CofFEE_JA_final_report_November_2008.pdf
Say that ten per cent of the workforce is out of the workforce because it can’t get a job, in part time employment but want full time employment or fully unemployed.
Say FT unemployed equivalent of around 10% = round this down to 1,500,000 people.
Say basic wage $20K, plus at work costs (uniforms, tools, laptops, mobile phones), plus training say $2000, plus on costs OH&S, Super, insurance, plus management costs, plus, plus, plus:
Say $30,000 per individual job guarantee – absurdly cheap – but why not?
That is the basic all up gross cost of the UJG: $45 billion a year. Off course there are offsets but you will never find the Greens explaining the numbers. They do not do numbers. They do ideology.
And that is just the start. Because the one thing a UJG will certainly do is start a wage price inflationary spiral with no end in sight.
WWP
In terms of straight political considerations the biggest problem facing the Greens is that Australia is not yet quite ready for a wishy washy gormless hipster Labor Lite prime minister.
lizzie
I DO like Mr Farr!
UBI can mean a lot of things and it depends on how it would work. I’m also not a GRN voter (occasionally in the senate perhaps).
Job guarantee’s are inefficient. What is the point of creating work that isn’t needed, or will soon be done by robots? What’s wrong with letting people surf, or do unprofitable art, or whatever?
The federal government has the power to fund public infrastructure and services to the full extent permitted by ecological limits and real resources that are available for sale in the government’s currency.
We need to stop the obscene waste and the immense suffering that is unemployment.
The federal government must make an unconditional offer of minimum wage employment to everyone who wants it.
We need to enlarge the regular public sector as well to create more medium and high skilled jobs.
We must empower communities to identify unmet needs and to get those needs met by people who are doing jobs that fit their abilities and interests.
We need there to be more than one suitable job vacancy for every job seeker at all times so that all employers have to lift their game. We need to abolish involuntary unemployment.
We must widen the concept of what it means to be productive, what counts as a paid job.
We need to be doing as much socially useful and environmentally sustainable activity as our real resources permit.
The unemployed are a valuable resource that we are wasting.
Let’s empower everyone who wants a job to have a job on demand, as a legislated right.
Nicholas, this is the bit I find hardest to believe. Not that it wouldn’t be a good outcome. Rather its about the real world.
A vast choice? Including jobs for highly skilled unemployed people? How? What projects? I’d be the first to suggest a high speed rail project, which is mostly highly skilled jobs, but you can easily imagine the political objections to this.
Where exactly are the highly skilled jobs a JG could offer? And why would someone with a degree in Engineering want to work for the minimum wage? Or more precisely where is the “voluntary” nature of a JG job if the choice is between the minimum wage and something much worse?
How do you ensure that to each unemployed person there is a job created tailored to that person? An army of caseworkers and a huge back office. And of course interminable bureaucratic delays. Nice in theory, but in practice the government will say “here’s a bundle of jobs, come and get it”.
BW one can only laugh at your pathetically one sided back of the envelope calculations. I’m not taking them seriously.
GG @ 12.46pm
100% plagiarised and not acknowledged.
Think its the 7th commandment you’ve unabashedly breached, and the 11th.
That’s what I don’t get either Question.
I mean if its an actually useful thing to do, like more teachers or nurses or whatever, then the government should simply go out and hire more teachers and nurses or whatever. It doesn’t need to call it a JG as such. Indeed not calling it a JG doesn’t invite the “make work” tag.
Besides, if you have a decent UBI people will go surfing for sure, but then they (most will) quickly find socially useful things to do – like read books to kids, or even guerilla gardening.. or a thousand other productive payoffs of having happier people.
‘Cud Chewer says:
Monday, November 5, 2018 at 5:01 pm
BW you are the one being too lazy.
It doesn’t take too much effort to run the thought experiment “how could you make a UBI actually work”. But instead this is simply another cheap excuse for you to Green-bash because you think its a Green issue. You do it over and over again and its plain boring.
FYI I’m not a Green voter.’
Thought experiments are fine for dreaming about the cosmos, but here on earth we need to do the money numbers for real world policy development.
I have been right through the UBI numbers, complete with assumptions made explicit.
As noted above, you would have to double the tax, take what offsets you can, and not spend anything on anything else in order to afford the UBI.
I assume that some numerate Greens policy wonk (should one exist, which is doubtful) has told Di Natale the numbers because he has gone totally quiet on the UBI.
Agree Cud,
I would argue that people doing something they enjoy, like surfing, rather than plodding off to some job a robot could do, is socially useful in itself.
‘Cud Chewer says:
Monday, November 5, 2018 at 5:20 pm
BW one can only laugh at your pathetically one sided back of the envelope calculations. I’m not taking them seriously.’
Fine. Do you own. Put up or shut up.
BW you’re full of shit, lazy and if you can’t take it seriously I won’t take you seriously.
The USSR had the UBI.
Zero unemployment.
The cobblestones were swept until polished by hordes of broom wielding babushkas.
Until the economy tanked completely.
Question says:
As the amount will hardly enable a life of luxury all the money will end up with “the butcher the baker and the candle stick maker” giving business a kick along.
Paid to surf, potter around the garden, read books, watch the paint dry… whatever…
Beats being paid to work!
But who would do the work?
All that proves is that broom pushing is less useful socially and economically than other tasks.
Nath @ 2.02pm
I think your grammar needs a touch up.
Perhaps you really meant that the Royal “we” is 1st Person, Plural.
Tense, as I’m sure you really know, refers to the point in time a verb refers to, ie past, present, future etc
Shit getting real in America the day before the Mid terms:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/04/racist-magical-negro-robo-call-oprah-targets-stacey-abrams-georgia-governors-race/?utm_term=.819cd7377cdb
And you thought the ‘Kerryn Phelps has AIDS’ flyer was despicable?
psyclaw,
Back to defend Bemused, the sexist stalker, again for another day? 🙂
Steven Hail of the University of Adelaide did these calculations for a UBI for all Australian citizens and permanent migrants aged 15 and over.
(why 15 and over? Because 15 is the minimum working age and the UBI is supposed to be an alternative to paid work.)
(why include permanent migrants? Because it would be unethical and unfair to exclude them.)
Set the UBI at $21,700 per year (which is the current maximum base rate for the Age Pension and the Disability Support Pension).
20.2 million people would receive it (this is the current number of Australian citizens and permanent migrants aged 15 and over).
Scrap all existing social security and welfare spending.
Total federal spending would still have to increase by 50 percent. That is a massive increase.
To make the extra spending non-inflationary, it would be necessary to
double the GST
AND
increase all marginal income tax rates by 10 to 15 percentage points
AND
abolish all existing tax deductions (including the very popular deductions for superannuation)
Or you’d have to come up with some other set of tax increases that would have the same net effect.
Good luck selling all those tax increases to the Australian people.
You can read Steven Hail’s take here:
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/a-job-guarantee-a-better-cheaper-alternative-to-the-greens-ubi,11486
Professional Surfers make a lot of money!
And the money doesn’t evaporate. It either ends up as private sector savings or goes back into tax. There’s nowhere else for it to go.
Michael A @ 2.34pm
No, it is not “number”. See my last post just above.
I worked with a guy who perfected the looking busy at work look without actually doing much at all. It involved walking fast through the office, clutching documents and photocopying with haste. Getting in early but once ensconced in the office, getting some extra sleep on the couch in his office.
He spent most of the time looking at cat videos . Secretly installing a putting green in the office for recreation. Probably did 3-4 hours of actual work a day. Enough not to get fired. Salary of $93000 a year.
True poroti.
Boerwar, part of the thinking behind a UBI is thinking about the future, and the idea that robots will soon be doing much of the work.
Without giving away my age, I went on the dole for about 6 months when I left school, and back then all you had to do was hand in the form every 2 weeks. There were bugger all hoops that I remember (it was much more like a UBI). I wasn’t much of a surfer, but I had plenty of other frivolous activities.
I soon went on to greater things 🙂
Nicholas you’re quite right that with a UBI taxes would have to increase at the top end. Plus you’d have no tax free threshold above the UBI itself. Plus you’d have to deal with tax avoidance for companies.
No one is saying that would be politically easy to implement. But without a UBI there will always be stigma. There will always be people being assessed as “in” or “out” and all the inefficiency that begets. Even with JG there will be people who feel undervalued or overqualified, or left to fall through the cracks as unemployable. Only a UBI fixes that. And while I’d consider a hybrid, leaving out a UBI is just sticking your head in the sand about the real world and real lives.
If you want to talk about how to introduce a UBI in a way that overcomes fear and political bastardy that will be welcomed.
The Greens’ polling is appalling at the moment. Firstly, they usually experience a bit of a surge mid-cycle. Secondly, they should be where disaffected moderate Liberals are parking their votes, so there should be more of a surge than usual. Thirdly, the drought is drawing people’s attention back to environmental issues, especially, of course, climate change.
And the best they can do is an 0.7 gain since the last election – with history showing that they’re likely to poll more poorly on election day than they are now. So, really, nothing.
Oh, btw, nath, you’re ‘once they’re Green they never go back’ is factually incorrect. For starters, Cunningham. And the two WA Greens in Keating’s time. And Tasmania, where they formed coalition governments, twice, but now aren’t nearly so important.
The Drum very interesting on extra funds for the War Memorial, recognition of veterans and “our story” according to Brendan Nelson. Mostly critical.
The story of Australia must surely include native peoples. Never mentioned. 🙁
I’d like Nicholas to meet my sister.
Cud Chewer @ #1640 Monday, November 5th, 2018 – 5:46 pm
What did she do to you that she would deserve that?
Question says:
Monday, November 5, 2018 at 5:41 pm
True poroti.
Boerwar, part of the thinking behind a UBI is thinking about the future, and the idea that robots will soon be doing much of the work.
Without giving away my age, I went on the dole for about 6 months when I left school, and back then all you had to do was hand in the form every 2 weeks. There were bugger all hoops that I remember (it was much more like a UBI). I wasn’t much of a surfer, but I had plenty of other frivolous activities.
I soon went on to greater things
__________________________________________
I had a similar misspent youth. When first applying to the CES I adopted a mentally restricted demeanor. I was left alone for a year.
When eventually forced to go to job interviews and asked what my biggest weakness was I would reply: A tendency to take things from around the workplace. Left alone again.
Eventually went to uni where I probably did even less. BA 4 life!
Won tattslotto age 29. thankyou very much.
And then you have people like Gina, who’s daddy taught her how to sell Australian assets (that also belong to lazy surfing Australians) to the world, and now she sits on a pile she could never spend in 1000 lifetimes.
Psyclaw, we’re actually both right: the “number” of a verb is either singular (1 subject) or plural (more than 1 subject). But good to see I’m not the only PBer who cares about these things!
https://www.grammar.com/Finite-Verb-Tense-Person-Number-Mood
That sounds too much like hard work for real surfers 🙂
Al Pal @ #1503 Monday, November 5th, 2018 – 2:35 pm
No polls have rapidly tightened.
RealclearPolitics: Generic Poll
Polling Data
Poll Date Sample Democrats (D) Republicans (R) Spread
RCP Average 10/13 – 11/3 — 49.4 42.2 Democrats +7.2
NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl 11/1 – 11/3 774 LV 50 43 Democrats +7
ABC News/Wash Post 10/29 – 11/1 737 LV 52 44 Democrats +8
IBD/TIPP 10/25 – 11/3 798 LV 50 41 Democrats +9
Economist/YouGov 10/28 – 10/30 1296 RV 47 42 Democrats +5
NPR/PBS/Marist 10/28 – 10/29 509 LV 52 43 Democrats +9
Harvard-Harris 10/26 – 10/28 1835 RV 47 38 Democrats +9
Reuters/Ipsos 10/24 – 10/30 1383 LV 49 42 Democrats +7
Rasmussen Reports 10/21 – 10/25 2500 LV 47 44 Democrats +3
USA Today/Suffolk 10/18 – 10/22 1000 LV 51 43 Democrats +8
FOX News 10/13 – 10/16 841 LV 49 42 Democrats +7
Rasmussen is notoriously Repub friendly.
There is no detectable late movement. It seems very likely that the pollsters are underweighting for younger voters and ‘minorities’.
…
A charmed life nath 🙂
Unfortunately I had to earn my early retirement. I really should have been born when the robots will be driving us around and wiping our arse.
The only problem is then capital will rule over labour (small “l”). We need to plan ahead.
Michael A says:
Monday, November 5, 2018 at 5:51 pm
Psyclaw, we’re actually both right: the “number” of a verb is either singular (1 subject) or plural (more than 1 subject). But good to see I’m not the only PBer who cares about these things!
Then there are verbs that became nouns, often from frustration and sometimes from neglect….the couldabeens…the shouldabeens…the wouldabeens, the gunnas and the hasbeens…along with the hoodunnits and the t’ain’ts family.
Question says:
Monday, November 5, 2018 at 5:58 pm
A charmed life nath
______________
Well it was only 40k but it did help at the time. I also won 1200 another time. Not working is boring though, you’ve got to have balance.