Some unrelated electoral news nuggets to keep things ticking over:
• The Australian Electoral Commission has announced the deregistration of two right-wing minor parties, the more newsworthy of which was Cory Bernardi’s decision to decommission Australian Conservatives. This party owed its party registration to Bernardi’s position in the Senate, rather than its having 500 members, so the matter was entirely in his hands. In a sense, this also means an end to Family First, which won Senate seats at the 2004, 2013 and 2016 elections and had a presence in the South Australian upper house from 2002 to 2017, when it merged with Bernardi’s newly formed outfit. However, Family First appeared to lose energy as evangelical Christians increasingly preferred to direct their organisational efforts towards the Liberal Party, and was dominated in its later years by deep-pocketed former Senator Bob Day. Even further afield, the Rise Up Australia party, associated with controversial pastor Danny Nalliah of Catch the Fire Ministries, has voluntarily deregistered.
• JWS Research has released the latest results in its occasional series on issue salience, recording only one particularly noteworthy movement over the past three surveys: defence, security and terrorism, which only 20% now rate in the top five issues most warranting the attention of the federal government, down from 23% in February and 29% in November. “Performance index” measures for the government across the various issue areas have recorded little change post-election, except that “vision, leadership and quality of government” is up from 35% to 42% (which is still the fifth lowest out of 20 designated issue areas). The survey was conducted from June 26-30 from a sample of 1000.
• In the New York Times’ Upshot blog, Nate Cohn casts a skeptical eye over the record of online polling in the United States. It notes a Pew Research finding that YouGov’s “synthetic sampling” method achieves the best results out of the online pollsters, by which it “selects individuals from its panel of respondents, one by one, to match the demographic profile of individual Americans”. Another survey that performed relatively well, VoteCast, did so by concurrently conducting a huge sample phone poll, results of which were used to calibrate the online component.
A tax cut is not much use to an unemployed person, or an under-employed person, or a person who is marginally attached to the labour force.
What helps those people is for the federal government to directly create just the right number of jobs to make the labour market very tight.
Then people spend more, which creates demand for additional output, which motivates firms to invest in expanded production (which creates more private sector jobs).
We’ve had decades of real world experience to see what happens when you allow unemployment and underemployment to be high (because of insufficient federal government spending) and tax cuts are enacted.
What happens is that inequality increases.
The tax cuts don’t make a dent in the problem of labour wastage and the horrific misery that it inflicts on people.
Diogenes says:
Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 5:59 pm
Fred
It’s like that Canadian fertility doctor who used his own sperm on about 100 women. Incidentally he got caught because of those ancestry tests. We could market an ancestry test which gives you the % of God in your DNA.
Did he get into trouble? If there was no sperm specification then wouldn’t his be as good as any? Why should he not compete with god.
Fred
I hope you were on your knees when you typed that sacrilege
…my sister was failing Economics at Uni. I told her to stop using her knowledge of how the world really worked and just regurgitate the theories from the textbook. She did very well after that.
J.K Galbraith starts one of his books by saying wtte that if economists really understood their subject, to the point where they were right even 50% of the time, they’d all be multi millionaires and thus wouldn’t be working as economists.
Nicholas
Exactly. As Labor proved with its GFC response.
Oakeshott Country says:
Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 6:09 pm
Fred
I hope you were on your knees when you typed that sacrilege
I am sure the angles will beat me up tonight.
Business studies covers a number of areas and the exams usually require the student to know the difference theories, terms and processes connected to that area of study. Its easier than an engineering degree but far harder than a journalist degree 😉
Bucephalus:
The Commonwealth should force all State Government to remove payroll taxes, through a combination of :
– carrots – compensation set at the current lowest level levied by a State govt (which is perhaps 4.75%?)
– sticks – withholding 10% of GST allocations from States that refuse, growing by 2% per annum
Payroll taxes are both regressive and a tax on employment. Removing them has a more or less immediate effect (unlike income tax cuts in 2024)
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-10/pressure-to-overhaul-age-pension-as-baby-boomers-leave-workforce/11295722?pfmredir=sm
Richardson is way off here. The important question is whether our society will have the productive capacity to support older people in retirement.
Productive capacity is determined by things like
Scientific research and development
Technological capability
Education and training
The quality of public infrastructure and services
The Australian Government will always be able to pay any amount of its own currency to retirees.
The question is whether the goods and services will be there for the retirees to buy with their pensions.
Nicholas
Won’t it be a short term problem ? The boomer bulge hits then just as quickly dies away ? Governments have known this was coming for many decades and of course have prepared for this ;lol: 😆 😆 😆
Nicholas,
I give your recent work an A+ 🙂
In case you missed it earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFgBFYkBZ6E
We are not investing enough in our productive capacity. Failing to work urgently on the climate crisis is an obvious example of this. Neglecting public services and public infrastructure is another. We could be investing a lot more in scientific research and development. We could use a Job Guarantee and other forms of public sector job creation to make the labour market very tight. This would increase the size and the knowledge and skill level of the labour force.
Meeting the needs of a society that has a growing percentage of retired people is not a financial issue at all. It is a productive capacity issue.
C@tmomma says:
Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 4:53 pm
lizzie @ #689 Wednesday, July 10th, 2019 – 4:35 pm
However, I’m more fatalistic. Not that I can afford PHI anyway, but I sort of think that if I get into the Public Hospital system for any ops I need and I have to wait a little longer than I would otherwise, que sera sera.
__________
Why can’t you afford PHI? You told us you held property worth $2.3m on a peninsula on the central coast. Surely you can afford PHI with assets like that.
Nicholas:
Mostly true, but the main exception is a payroll tax cut (or complete elimination of such tax), which decreases the cost of the labour factor relative to that of the capital factor, and thus directly and immediately benefits under-employed people, and may actually reduce unemployment, and through the combination of these effects over time leads to increased labour market participation.
Cuts to stamp duty (below a threshold determined by house prices that are affordable to ordinary workers) would have similar effects (though with less predictability)
AI: rather than worrying about machines (AI) becoming smarter, and thus eventually smarter than humans, perhaps we should instead worry about humans becoming more stupid, and hence more stupid than machines…
This is how you do it, Liberal Style..
“Govt wants broadband tax passed this year
Resurrects legislation.
The federal government has resurrected its heavily-delayed plan to introduce a broadband tax, with the laws expected to be in place before parliament wraps up for the year.
Plans to both introduce and pass the regional broadband scheme (RBS) charge bill were revealed in the government’s proposed laundry list of legislation released on Tuesday.
The tax, which was first proposed in December 2016, would see residential and business users of “NBN-equivalent” fixed line services slapped with a monthly fee of $7.10.
The proceeds would then be used by NBN Co to fund future costs of commercially unviable portions of its network – the satellite and fixed wireless footprints – and prevent future calls on the budget or public funds.
“
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/govt-wants-broadband-tax-passed-this-year-527568
Stan Grant just said that David Attenborough was originally a climate change sceptic who has been swayed by the evidence. Listening to DA’s talk to the pollies this morning, I got the impression rather that he said that at first nobody believed that what was happening was human induced climate change, but the evidence is now incontrovertible. Of course, as always, I could be wrong.
sprocket_ says:
Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 6:54 pm
This is how you do it, Liberal Style..
______________________
What’s sprocket style? – Copying and pasting other people’s original thoughts. Never troubled with an original thought of your own.
I think that the people who work for private hospitals are doing good work.
From a systemic point of view, it makes no sense for the federal government to starve the public health care system and then very partially, in a round about way, compensate for that failure by providing subsidies for private health insurance premiums.
It would make much more sense to just fund the public system to the full extent of the public’s need for services.
I mean ask yourself this: “Do the private health insurance companies and the private hospitals add capacity to the overall health care system? Or do they merely divert capacity from the public system?”
It would be one thing if the private health insurers and private hospitals were using their revenues to create their own parallel health care workforce.
That would be adding capacity to the system overall.
But that is not what they are doing.
The private hospitals employ nurses and doctors who were educated and trained in public universities and public hospitals.
It is not greed that causes private hospitals and insurance companies to decline to add health care workers to the system.
Educating and training health care workers is an extremely resource-intensive task. It isn’t profitable to do it. So it isn’t a private sector task. It is a public sector task.
The Australian Government should be funding public health care to the full extent of the need, which would make private health insurance obsolete.
It ought to be possible to get prompt elective surgery, dental care, and mental health care in the public system, with no user fees.
There is no financial impediment to the Australian Government making the necessary investment.
The federal government needs to create more capacity in the health care workforce.
The federal government also needs to sort out challenging issues like the best way to pay health care workers (fee for service versus salary versus bundled payments) and how to increase the level of cooperation and coordination in a patient’s care.
Hi Poroti, I’m not sure what the data are regarding expected productive capacity in the late 2020s and whether it will be enough to support everyone. That would be useful to know. It’s the kind of thing that the Parliamentary Budget Office should be researching instead of publishing irrelevant analysis of nominal payments. The number of dollars isn’t the issue – the issue is what people will be able to buy with their dollars.
“The federal government has resurrected its heavily-delayed plan to introduce a broadband tax, with the laws expected to be in place before parliament wraps up for the year.”
Funny, I don’t recall this being mentioned before the election. They must have “forgotten” about it.
OC
‘Et in unum Dóminum Iesum Christum,
Fílium Dei unigénitum,
et ex Patre natum ante ómnia sǽcula.
Deum de Deo, lumen de lúmine, Deum verum de Deo vero,
génitum, non factum, consubstantiálem Patri:
per quem ómnia facta sunt.
Qui propter nos hómines et propter nostram salútem
descéndit de cælis,
et incarnátus est de Spíritu Sancto
ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est;’
What divine writing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZVx5xNxYdE
In case anyone is wondering, Mary was assumed body and soul into Heaven.
Hence the feast of the Assumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assumption_of_Mary
Democracy Busters R Us
Delayed Onset Until After the Election Section
Additional chapter: Broadband tax legislation
lizzie
Attenborough made a career out of pretending that nothing much of relevance was happening beyond the immediate footage he was narrating.
In later years he copped a pizzling therefore.
He is now, IMO, doing good.
“Stan Grant just said that David Attenborough was originally a climate change sceptic who has been swayed by the evidence.”
I think that this is likely the path that most well-informed and unbiased people have followed. Skepicism was the correct initial reaction. After all, we encounter all sorts of claims in the media – everything causes cancer, a new cure for this or that cancer is just around the corner, pollution bringing on a new ice ice (70s). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
But in the case of global warming, as in the case of smoking and health, the evidence eventually became incontrovertible. Those still pushing climate denial are either working for vested interests that would be disadvantaged by effective action, or those duped by them.
E. G. Theodore @ #767 Wednesday, July 10th, 2019 – 6:48 pm
Too late, I’m afraid.
BW
Which is the answer to my question on papal infallibility
Pius XII declared himself infallible when, in 1950, he announced the Assumption of Mary was catholic doctrine
Only the second time a pope has been infallible under the current meaning
Hi Theodore, I agree with the idea of abolishing payroll tax and stamp duty. Those taxes are badly designed and create perverse incentives.
Ideally the state and local governments wouldn’t raise any taxes. Ideally the Australian Government would fully fund the sub-national governments. That would liberate the state and local governments to focus on 1. administering and managing their budgets; and 2. designing and developing public services and infrastructure that meet the needs of their residents.
The federal government would need to make a watertight guarantee about how the size of each budget would be determined. The process for determining the budget size would need to be fair, sensible, and sensitive to the needs of each state and local government area.
Guytaur,
Stop telling the ALP what to do. The Greens cannot stand on a tower of achievements, so they are the last ones who should be giving advice.
And The Greens are not our concerned friends.
‘Oakeshott Country says:
Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 7:46 pm
BW
Which is the answer to my question on papal infallibility
Pius XII declared himself infallible when, in 1950, he announced the Assumption of Mary was catholic doctrine
Only the second time a pope has been infallible under the current meaning’
It leads to real conceptual difficulties. IMO the chief of these is that the Assumption, body and soul, logically forces Heaven to be somewhere.
The Stare of Origin is on a 30 minutes delay on Ch9 in Adelaide and we have put up with 35 minutes of vacuous crap and ads so far!
BK
Bloody useless ch9, could not even give us a live telecast. Why didn’t they just delete their News, it is good for nothing.
BK
Meoldema is home and watching it, being Qlder.
Puff
I’ll be asleep before it starts!
Which is just as well, I wouldnt have heard the commentary with the rain and wind.
All is now quiet on the northwestern front.
India has just lost 3 wkts for 5 runs chasing NZ’s 239.
Bad idea. We don’t need any more taxes when we have so much unused capacity.
We have 700,000 unemployed people.
We have 1.1 million under-employed people.
We have 1.1 million people who are marginally attached to the labour force.
Of the 700,000 unemployed it is likely that about 200,000 are so-called frictionally unemployed. These are people who are spending a relatively short amount of time – days or weeks, not months or years – lining up their next job. This is the only kind of unemployment that is okay. This kind of unemployment doesn’t hurt people.
If our economy were at full capacity we would have about 200,000 frictionally unemployed people, close to zero under-employed people, and close to zero people who are marginally attached to the labour force.
We are very far from full employment.
We need a lot more net spending by the federal government.
The spending needs to be targeted at job creation, public services, public infrastructure, research and development, and other things that enhance productive capacity and social welfare.
A less literalist interpretation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary holds that it is less about Mary than it is about Jesus. It is rather an oblique affirmation of the divinity of Jesus.
BW
If you can believe that a square of unleavened bread is in fact the body of God then believing there is a physical heaven is what we urologists call “a piece of piss”
Jesus worked out a special deal with God to look after his mum.
‘Oakeshott Country says:
Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 8:27 pm
BW
If you can believe that a square of unleavened bread is in fact the body of God then believing there is a physical heaven is what we urologists call “a piece of piss”’
Not really.
The unleavened bread has been transubstantiated. (As is the altar wine, BTW. You can sort of see why Roman Catholics tended to the plonk. But I digress.)
But there is the thing. Mary went to Heaven untransubstantiated.
You can see the problem.
OC
Mind you, Mary may just be getting in, or up, or down, or around the corner, early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_the_dead
PFTMD
I went away. You are part of the problem with the stop telling Labor what to do. I am only one person. I am not a Green Party politician or member.
Instead of saying “You Green People Need To Stop Telling Labor What To Do” you should try listening. As I mentioned earlier long term Labor people are looking for alternatives to the Labor party.
You can doubt my word. You can’t doubt the election results.
Argue the content. Don’t just be a Pavlovian dog shouting Greens Boo!!!
Boerwar
Mary would have, presumably died, and would have had a “resurrected” and immortal body. The nature of an immortal/transfigured body would necessarily be different to a mortal body. i.e. it may not require a “location”.
🙂
Steve777 @ #793 Wednesday, July 10th, 2019 – 6:37 pm
Typical Jewish Mummy’s boy.
guytaur @ #796 Wednesday, July 10th, 2019 – 8:23 pm
It is not Pavlov’s dog. It is what I actually think. So I will give The Greens advice, if that is the go.
Get rid of Richard de Natale. He is about as much use as a condom is to a jelly fish.
Nicholas:
The Dutch seem to be fairly objective. I think they try to use something called “value based healthcare”, which aims to maximize “health value” per Euro. In principle this should mean that health outcomes are a strictly increasing function of money spent (which is unlikely to be the case with procedure based costing).
Here’s an example:
– https://www.bcg.com/en-au/publications/2018/how-dutch-hospitals-make-value-based-health-care-work.aspx
Probably in comparison to US, which is is a damp squib…
There is an Australian site here:
– https://valuebasedcareaustralia.com.au/
Unfortunately it is rather opaque
Per that Dutch example, multi-disciplinary teams/meetings (MDTs/MDMs) seem to be a key part of the value based approach (MDTs obviously militate against individual doctors performing their preferred procedures, and hence against the procedure based approach). And because MDTs/MDMs are widely used in advanced cancer my impression is that advanced cancer care in AU substantially adopts a value-based approach, including for quality of life / palliation / extended management when cure is unattainable with current technology.