The perennial fixation with restless reptiles not satisfied with their hot rock broke out yet again in Media Watch last night ... with the mutton Dutton's attempt at a makeover producing salivating, drooling copy - and then the pond saw the headline in the tree killer edition this morning, and it was almost as if the lizard Oz had watched the show and decided to double down...
Ah, with bonus "woke" lashing beneath the snap of the grinning warrior, so profoundly human, and with a family too and a Qld cop to boot ...
Luckily the pond had another herpetologist to hand to explain the phenomenon, with Christopher Warren in Crikey scribbling ... (paywall)
Will Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s shiny “gentler, kinder politics” break News Corp? Or will News Corp, once again, triumph over the paradigm of nice? For the incoming government, it’s political. For News Corp, it’s existential.
Every day, News Corp (and its Fox sibling) makes its money out of the outrage story of the moment. Now, it’s confronting a new narrative: an election read as a direct repudiation equally of the News Corp business model and of the Liberal-National post-Tampa political strategy.
The Germans, as ever, have a word for it (or, in this case, a post-punk song lyric): “Angst, Hass, Titten und dem Wetterbericht” (“Fear, hate, titties and the weather report”). It captures the past two decades of News Corp’s and Australia’s conservative parties. Hate of political opponents and cultural dissidents, fear of the other from asylum seekers to African gangs, sexualised and homophobic panic, climate denial and obstruction.
This past week, there’s been the odd pause for breath in the outrage factory. The Monday tabloids delivered the briefest of honeymoons: “Top dog Albo: ruff and ready” on The Daily Tele front page; “Top dog flies high” in the Herald Sun; The Courier-Mail back-handed with “Albanese unleashed”; and The Australian begrudged “Albanese does it”.
On Sky News after dark, of course, it was business as usual with “1000 days of resistance”.
The message the company’s New York head office has sent post-Biden’s election is that hate and fear are still great business. Expect no letting up in the “war on woke” in Australia. But if Albanese’s nice politics takes off, ending (or muting) both the culture and climate wars, the News model is under serious threat.
News is pulling off a pivot from ad-supported mass media to readers’ subscriptions by continually outraging an audience safely sequestered in an echo chamber behind hard paywalls.
Those hard paywalls are both a curse and a blessing. Blessing: they successfully monetise the attention of a deeply engaged audience. Curse: the demographic is finite, ageing and dwindling. The pivot is sacrificing public influence for private engagement.
In short, no breaking of the reptile outrage machine, but with a handy link to an earlier yarn by David Hardaker about the reptiles going all in ... (paywall)
The rise of community independents is the standout story of the weekend elections. But it has been accompanied by another major story: the failure of News Corp’s national and capital city outlets to keep the Morrison government in power.
The Murdoch organisation threw everything it had at discrediting the government’s opponents. It also abandoned any pretence of neutrality or balance. But to no avail. Voters paid no heed to warnings that Australia would be plunged into chaos if independents were elected, and ignored the endless attacks on “red” Anthony Albanese.
In short, the Australian electorate gave the Murdoch machine the finger.
The pond loves the sound of that: Angst, Hass, Titten und dem Wetterbericht - especially the fear and hate bits, which were on display throughout the election season.
There's no need to go into all the examples, many featured in the pond, suffice to say that the reptiles are going to have to a lot more make-overing, and woke bashing and the like ...and they'll be up against the cartoonists ...
Phew, has the immortal Rowe taken a liking to the new grandees or what?
No Major yesterday, and Barners gone today, and Tamworth bereft and full of sadness, and in his place a Littleproud a little proud for having voted against SSM ... quick, some Titten und dem Wetterbericht, and it's going to be a little chilly for reptiles ...
Such is the chill the pond is tempted to join the Major, take a seasonal break and join him in that search for the long lost Order of Lenin medal, but no, today the pond must serve up the bromancer in full woke bashing mode ...
Meanwhile, in New Zealand ...
And meanwhile in Canberra ...
And so to the day's groaning, and the pond must preface this by saying it recently read in The New Yorker a piece Idrees Kahloon titled The War on Economics (maybe outside the paywall, the pond can't tell) ...
There has always been something irresistible about advice in mathematical form. When, in the Book of Genesis, Joseph was plucked from prison to interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh, he offered some Biblical budgeting: To survive the seven years of famine that will come after seven years of abundance, the Egyptians must save exactly a fifth of their harvest. Sun Tzu’s military counsel in “The Art of War” depends on ratios: “It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.” Alexander Hamilton, arguing for a national bank in 1790, presented the appeal of fractional-reserve banking in quantifiable terms. “It is a well-established fact, that Banks in good credit can circulate a far greater sum than the actual quantum of their capital in Gold & Silver,” he wrote in a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives. “The extent of the possible excess seems indeterminate; though it has been conjecturally stated at the proportions of two and three to one.”
Where leaders once turned to sages and pols for such wisdom, they now turn to the guild of economists. The most powerful states in the world are accustomed to outsourcing the management of their crucial macroeconomic decisions to committees of central bankers. Nowadays, no arena of public policy is untouched by economic guidance, solicited or unsolicited. Economists influence the way that children are cared for and schooled; the way that citizens are housed, treated in hospitals, and policed; the way that countries regulate industry and manage climate change. Public policy is now conducted in the language of budgets, cost-benefit studies, regulatory-impact analysis, and mathematical models of dazzling beauty and complexity.
Speaking of maths, the pond also read Rivka Galchen's The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician, featuring the deeply weird Alexander Grothendieck ...(also maybe outside the paywall)
What's that? No one's interested in the pond's reading habits, they want a good groaning from a top notch economist?
Well you've come to the wrong place, because by definition a good groaning and top notch economical thinking are deeply incompatible ... a bit like a delusional aging white Xian male claiming that only others do identity politics ...
Once again the pond has done its duty, and will leave others to pick over the groaning entrails ... because the pond must finish up with another immortal Rowe ... with the Groaner having stayed discreetly quiet about tilting at windmills, despite her devotion to climate science denialism ...
Oh yes, the reptiles and the windmill thing ...
"Stagnant waters are level, and in them the scum rises."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.liberals.net/theforgottenpeople.htm
Our Dame for this day does wave the flag - or should the metaphor be a balloon - for fear of inflation from increasing wages. Of course, it is only money squandered on the low-paid that can inflate - remuneration to business executives and lawyers seems to have built-in valves that prevent any inflationary effect.
ReplyDeleteThe Dame does give a teeny mention of productivity right at the end - but leaves that to the new Treasurer to sort out.
Reminder - we have a Productivity Commission for this country. It was set up by that great economic innovator, Peter Costello, during the first Howard government. It was up and running by 1998, and its first group of commissioners included - Judith Sloan. She remained there for 12 years. And what did that commission do for productivity?
In brief - taken on a lagged 15 year trend, the index rose steadily up to 2005 - when it ran out of puff, and has been dropping since then.
The ABC offers an entertaining summary of what has been happening since 1994
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-28/productivity-growth-has-stalled-since-2005-and-isnt-improving/100097492
with an interesting reference even to ‘bots that can write political news.’
And we do believe we are seeing that in the alleged ‘work’ of the Dog Bovverer, and others. Rupert would consider that a gain in productivity.
Which brings us back to the asymmetry in inflationary tendency for money paid to workers on low rates of pay, and the ‘incentives’ sprayed on to business execs. Oddly, there is remarkably little evidence that those incentives - often several multiples of what, for example, a health-care worker might see in a year - have done anything for productivity across most industries. We need not go into what might or might not constitute a measure of productivity for lawyers.
No doubt the Dame will return to this issue regularly, if only to instruct Treasurer Chalmers on what he should do. The Dame having been on the Productivity Commission when our index of productivity took its downward turn those 17 years back, she must have kept some notes so future Treasurers would be able to learn from whatever the Commission didn’t get right, then.
You know, talking about "productivity" always has me a bit mystified as to what "productivity" actually is. Sure, for a motor car assembly line it's how many units it can turn out in a day, that's fine. But like my father was a bricky and in his case, I guess "productivity" was how many bricks laid in a 8 hour day ... except that kinda depended on the nature of the brickwork: eg the inner layer where appearance doesn't count and you can just basically throw the bricks onto the mortar (having a 'labourer' to mix and deliver the mortar so the bricky doesn't have to stop) and not even bother to round off the mortar line between the bricks. But on the outer layer, you had to be just a bit more professional and make sure the bricks formed a completely even surface and the mortar lines were clean and indented and so on.
DeleteSo what exactly constitutes 'productivity' for a bricky ? I know that later on in his career, my dad was a skilled 'finisher': some young, fit bricky would throw bricks onto the mortar and then my dad would come along and pretty it all up. So he didn't actually "lay" any bricks at all, but the combination of the fit young bricky and him produced a higher quality brick wall in less than half the time ether one could do it alone. So I guess that's an increase in productivity.
But the one I really think about is opera singers: so an opera singer can only produce just so many sung notes per minute, neither more nor less. So what does an opera singer do to achieve a productivity increase to justify an increase in wages ?
It tells us a lot about the Productivity Commission, and neo-classical economics, that the PC employed both Dame Groan and "Mad Matt" Canavan.
DeleteGB - had you encountered 'Baumol's Cost Disease'? - which offers some interesting observations on the work of performance artists. The 'Wiki' has a neat summary, with further references -
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
Looking at the illustration heading the Dame's column, outside of the black economy how long has it been since Australian workers were routinely paid in cash - in old fashioned pay envelopes, yet?
DeleteAmazing how the "Oz" manages to demonstrate, even in tiny incidental ways, its complete irrelevance to the 21st century.
Thanks for that reference, Chad. As soon as I started to read, I remembered that I had indeed heard of Baumol previously, but basically only in passing, so no entrenched memory. I did then recall his example of the symphony orchestra though - probably what subconsciously made me think of opera singers.
DeleteWhich causes me to think that rises in symphony orchestra wages really come from how much, in perpetually 'inflating' economies like them all now, can be charged for admission to a symphony performance.
Makes me wonder, though, how much wages increase should be paid to all those robots, especially on production lines such as vehicle manufacturing, that are the real generators of "productivity" increases. The long process of 'by hand' becomes 'by hand with tools' which moves on to 'by mechanisation with also hands' to automation and finally to robotisation as we've seen in the last few centuries. We're even getting robot fruit pickers now, and trying (so far with almost no success) to robotise my one-time 'profession' of cab driving. They're also getting into libraries:
The Impact of Humanoid Robots on Australian Public Libraries
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24750158.2020.1729515
All of which takes us into today with a large, and growing, shift out of 'production' industries and into services of all kinds. So, how quickly will 'unpaid robots' take over there too. All robot symphony orchestras and opera singers ?
Steady, Anon, that cash was decimal ...the true spirit of the reptile must yearn for a return to the days of in for a penny, in for a pound ...
DeleteOh here we go again, from the Bromancer: "people should make the in-principle argument against racial classification in the Constitution..." It's not racial, you slithering reptile, it's just recognition that: "Those lands and waters [of and around Australia] were colonised by Europeans, who took them without treaty or consent, and Australia’s Constitution, our most important legal document, contains no acknowledgement of the First Peoples of Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not given a voice in the convention debates of the 1890s, which led to the drafting of the Constitution in 1901, and few were able to vote for it.
ReplyDeleteMany laws and policies enacted since 1901 have discriminated against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our Constitution could offer protections against unfair treatment. But at present it does not—nor does it recognise the special place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the life of the nation."
Discussion Paper on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2016-12/referendum_council_discussion_paper.pdf
So, onwards, ever onwards: "The argument that First Nations status is about culture, not race, is disingenuous." No, you blithering idiot, it isn't race and it isn't culture, it's about Europeans (is that a race ?) taking everything from them and how: "In Australia, Aboriginal people were dispossessed and suffered ongoing discrimination and disadvantage." And they suffered massacres and had their children stolen with the intent of wiping 'aboriginality' out completely.
And trying to make up, just a little, for all that which was committed by the European "culture" (or is that a race ?) is why they should have their very own protected voice; protected so that a bunch of political wingnuts can't just cancel it at whim. Yes, there may be some difficulty deciding whether some people, especially in the future, are "truly First Nation" but these days we have records of who is an offspring of whom, and we don't steal their kids and pretend they're not 'Abos' nowadays.
So, Bro: "So how is it that someone identifying as indigenous who lives in, say, Parramatta should be meaningfully consulted about policy specifically.directed towards a remote Aboriginal community in Arnhem land?" I dunno, Bro, but how d'you reckon it works now when people living in Canberra and other capital cities, make policy "specifically directed towards a remote Aboriginal community in Arnhem land?" Or do you believe that never happens ?
So finally: "Next on the agenda will be treaties, acknowledgements of dual or multiple sovereignty, veto rights in certain policy areas and who knows what else." And each and very one of those, and any number more, things will be subject to legislation and possibly referendum just like everything else. Or is that just some kind of traditional "give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile" thinking so endemic to wingnuts and reptiles ?
Idle speculation, I suppose, but - if Covid is rampaging through China at a rate that even the Party admits, how does that align with Sharri's thesis that the main infectious agent was designed, and cooked up, in a laboratory in Wuhan?
ReplyDeleteSurely, if your scientists are clever enough to design a virus with all the cunning attributes of this coronavirus, and, implicitly, with the objective of greatly weakening the economies of all countries other than your own - those same scientists would have stockpiled vaccines of high effectiveness, well before the virus was released on an unsuspecting world - as Sharri's remarkable investigative 'journalism' has chronicled. Surely?
Naah, Chad, it just proves Sharri's point - you ask her and she'll tell you. See it's really camouflage: just kill off a few of the excess population - and with a total of 1.4 billion you can afford to lose a few million without really noticing it - so that the world thinks it really wasn't your fault.
DeleteBut a serious investigative journalist like Sharri sees right through that.
:)³
DeleteInteresting background in that "Oz" photo of Dutton, showing portraits of past Liberal leaders. Neither Menzies nor Howard can be seen, and most of those on display are notable duds; Gorton, McMahon, Snedden, Peacock,Nelson, Abbott and Turnbull. Sure, some of them ended up as PM but none of them could be considered great successes in the job. Fraser is there of course but I'm surprised that his pic hasn't been removed, even that he became a heretic in Liberal terms in his later years. Is the layout sheer coincidence, or does it foretell Dutton's future?
ReplyDelete