As foreshadowed by the immortal Rowe, this day being budget day, the reptiles are in something of a frenzy, while the pond is inclined to a big sleep. Not that big sleep, not yet, but still, a big sleep, beginning with a very big yawn ...
In the tree killer edition, it was either the budget or the Lehrmann matter ...
The pond has always refused to get involved with the reptiles obsessively and compulsively 'reporting' on the Lehrmann matter - the pond uses the word 'reporting' in lieu of 'crusading' with an inverted commas sense of irony.
The official Oz comments section below the fold was no better ...
Polonius banging on about the ABC? Nothing new there, and the pond never bothers with Polonius when he dresses up as a dog ... it's just too ... furry. Not that there's anything wrong with a certain furriness in the right time and place. It's just Polonius being full furry that sets the pond off ...
And there was the simplistic grinch Simon - here always a conflict of interest - doing his best to deflate any surplus joy, while ancient Troy tried to play it straight.
There was a good groaning of course, but that could come later ...
So what to do? Catch up on old reading, and contemplate the Murdochian touch, down there with the monkey's paw?
Can the old buzzard ever be trusted in the digital space? Is it always a MySpace saga?
Perhaps catch up on old cartooning, which the pond regrets not deploying, though it would have meant running an IPA climate science denying column to enjoy the full correspondent-approved flavour...
Lloydie of the Amazon has gone silent of late, but doubtless there'll come a time when the pond will revert to this correspondent-recommended special in full ... recreating as it does the reptile conspiracy mindset ...
Meanwhile, it seems that the Royal infection has passed, leaving this Wilcox as a memorial ...
It did however set the pond on a curious path with the bromancer and his visit to ancient England ...
The pond is pleased to learn something is working ... things must have improved since this turned up in the New Statesman on 29th December 2022 ...
On and on she ranted until concluding "we are being gaslit", which is just a tad too close for comfort considering the very gassy bromancer story ...
But speaking of gaslighting, the pond found this offering by Rex Huppke amusing ...
It's the sort of thing the pond would fling open the window and shout to the sky about if only all the pond's windows weren't stuck ...
The pond will leave the rest of the read on site ... because now inevitably, and at last, the pond has to turn to today's jolly good groaning for its main course and dessert ...
Why was the pond reminded of that old poem Said Hanrahan?
Could it be because you could rely upon Dame Groan to deliver a classic groaning, in accents most forlorn, whether there be full, middling or no employment at all?
The bottom line in any good groaning?
We'll all be rooned, said the Groaner, before the year is out ... but at least there was a gap before the pond turned to the immortal Rowe for the day ... though as it featured bum sniffing rugger buggers, the pond didn't quite understand the metaphor, not that there's anything wrong with bum sniffing in the right time and place ...
It is indeed difficult to get a handle on today’s Groaning - though that may not be an uncommon experience. There are a lot of stop-start, half unfinished themes there. The Dame posits that you can have too low an unemployment rate - but doesn’t seem to go much further on why that may be the case, let alone what an ideal unemployment rate may be. She starts a groan about inflation - but doesn’t put forward much in the way of reasons for its growth, and seems a mite puzzled that it can’t simply be blamed on those pesky workers. She cites benefits to employers from high numbers of low-wage migrants - yet isn’t high immigration usually one of the Dame’s bette noirs? She claims measures should be taken to reduce the number of JSA claimants - but of course makes no suggestions as to what such measures might be, as well as neglecting to note that many JSA claimants, such as older unskilled workers, have simply been thrown on the unemployment scrap heap. Of course there’s the obligatory whinge about poor productively, but again without context; the uncertain last three years may not be the best period from which to draw any real conclusions, and no linkage is made with her earlier claim that employers lacking incentive to train workers.
ReplyDeleteSo it may well be that the article lacks some overall grand theme that I’m missing.I’m no economist, not even a stupid one. It does however give the impression that the Dame sat down to churn out this week’s article, couldn’t decide quite what to write about, and simply stopped once she’d got to the appropriate word count.
Heh, it's just classic reptile, Anony: "I'm here to point out what's wrong, and it's up to you to fix it. And you've been in government for nearly a year now, so why haven't you yet fixed all the stuffups that the Coalition made in its 9 years ?"
DeleteAnonymous - to those of us who knew of the Dame when she was a (slightly more) humble researcher in South Australia, just about all that she writes now - and, as you hint, DameBot 1.2 could actually make a better job of tying together the themes and memes of the week - anyway, what she puts her name to now simply shows how far she has removed herself from her time within the research group at Adelaide U and Flinders that she was a minor part of.
DeleteOne of Don Dunstan’s long term commitments was to improve on conditions for work, at least in South Australia. He fostered research units in both universities, with sections in relevant state government departments as part of a web of trials and studies. While Dunstan’s time barely crossed with that of Elton Mayo, Mayo had an international reputation in social psychology in the workplace, and the Dunstan initiatives certainly built on that.
Our Dame was, at best, a junior researcher - I cannot recall that she was lead author of any of the published studies. Dunstan’s successors were less committed to concerns about what motivated people to go to work or how they might find satisfaction in what they did, apart from the pay packet. They were readily persuaded by lobby groups that those hints of ‘industrial democracy’, on the dread Scandinavian models, were incompatible with Jobson Grouth - it was disappointing to see how some Labor ministers positively preened with a little duchessing from business lobbies.
There is still a core of senior academics, and a steady recruitment of post-grads, working on labour studies in the SA universities, but the Dame has long since made the appropriate adjustments to what she writes to be considered absolutely ‘sound’ by the business lobbies. It is difficult to try to discern what, if anything, she actually believes at this stage of her life, because, as you say, her writing is so inconsistent, sentence to sentence, that you cannot point to any regular theme or personal philosophy within it.
So I guess what you're saying, Chad, is that Dame Groan was ok at making the morning tea, but couldn't be relied on for much more than that. And still can't.
DeleteOh, but Elton Mayo of GE Hawthorne factory fame. So many years (maybe nearly 50) since I've encountered that name and those studies. Had to look him up again just to remind myself and I came upon an entry in Wikipedia:
"His theories are also based upon the assumption that humans, by nature, want to cooperate and form groups, and he never allows for the possibility of José Ortega y Gasset's idea of "the stranger," built upon the proposition that humans, by nature, are suspicious of others. More recently, in 2003, James Hoopes criticised Mayo for 'substituting therapy for democracy.' Re-analyses of the original Hawthorne data indicate that the quality of the research was poor."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_Mayo#Mayo's_credentials
Well there ya go, and pray tell, who gives a rat's fart for the opinions of Gasset, Hoopes et al. If one can't see that, suspicious or not, the one thing humans have done over and over, and bigger and more complex, is form groups and live under group mandates, then one might be tempted to say that the quality of the research is exceedingly poor. And maybe Hoopes was just 'substituting ideology for research and observation.'
GB - while I cannot recall assessment of the aspiring Dame's willingness, or talent, to make the morning tea, I have mentioned here comment at at Economic Society seminar when a rather brash Stutchbury, himself trying to get into writing for the newspapers, rambled on about a graph that she had added to her column in the 'Tiser. Moderator for the seminar, who happened to have been one of her academic supervisors, said something along the lines of 'Where did the graph come from?' Stutchbury said it was in her column in the 'Tiser. Moderator suggested he check to find out where she had obtained it, because, as Moderator put it 'I don't think Judith has ever actually constructed a graph for her own research purposes.'
DeleteI think the abiding conclusion of the Hawthorne Experiment remains that workers like to be consulted about what they do and how they go about it. Not yet a fashionable idea in 'management' - if you happen to have any friends who still put in time with Woolworths, you will be able to gather your own anecdotes on how that firm goes about 'management'.
I think one of the other things that Elton showed quite elegantly, is that people will form groups to defend and protect themselves. Once upon a time, that was called 'the Union Movement'.. But hey, that never happened because human beings are always suspicious of each other.
DeletePure heresy from Sheridan, writing that he was happy with no gas!
ReplyDeleteOK, he was more confused than usual, but he forgot to mention that if renewables had been used to power electric heating for the hotel, then he wouldn't have been gassed at all.
The Bro is full of praise for Britain’s National Health staff - and for the latest leader of the government that has starved them of both pay and resources. No doubt that disconnect hasn’t crossed the Bro’s gas-addled little mind.
DeleteOh pish tush, Anony: people simply can't be heroic unless they're suffering under considerable adversity. There's nothing heroic about a meander through a fine park on a warm spring day.
DeleteSo of course Rishi and pals were just giving the NHS folk every opportunity to be very heroic. Can't really criticise that, can you ?
As always, The Groan manages to get in a reference to the NAIRU as though the only possible cause of inflation is 'workers' pushing for wage increases that employers pay - albeit not without opposition - and then respond by hiking up the sale price of whatever it is they produce whether or no any 'productivity increase' has occurred. And that the only possible cure for this affliction is to ensure that enough people are unemployed - thus "surviving" on the JSA - such that workers will not keep on pushing for wage increases. And of course the history of 'inflation' over the last century or so, shows that works a treat. Absolutely no significant inflation at all over the past century or so, is there.
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted to say that only people who can't draw their own graphs could believe in such poppy-cockle, but who am I to say. What I can say is: "this solution hasn't worked at all, and after so many repeated failures, shouldn't we be at least talking about a new, or at least different, solution ?"
But then I forget that we can't talk about such things because we're all so very suspicious of each other.
The culture that ran for tens of thousands of years in this land, until it was replaced by white fellas, had the outstanding characteristic of hunter/gatherer economies - there is no unemployment in a hunter/gatherer clan. So unemployment is a relatively recent imposition on us, due entirely to those 'Enlightened' whities.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what the unemployment level, the NAIRU and the JSA was in Rome in the year +1 ? - there never having been a year 0.
DeleteWhaddya reckon they were for Attila's army ?
GB - on my readings, I would put the level of unemployment in Rome at that time at 0. Slaves were always fully occupied - slaves including managers of households and business, accountants and suchlike, and, as I understand it - prostitutes and similar entertainers. Free people no doubt considered themselves fully occupied supervising their slaves, and any men of suitable age were inducted into the legions for assorted reasons and by even more assorted means.
DeleteWe've gone downhill in a bucket since then, haven't we. I don't know what, if anything, the Romans had in the way of 'social security (they didn't have NDIS), but I know they did tax property - I guess taxing 'income' might have been a little hard to police - and they don't seem to have had public starvation.
DeleteSo I guess they made it work without 'unemployment', NAIRU and JSA.
Oops, now it's the whole Tory Party 'projecting':
ReplyDelete"For decades, the Tories have perfected the psychological trick of displacing their own negative traits and failures on to their enemies."
They call it ‘projection’ but it’s a grand deception. And it’s Sunak’s only hope of staying in power
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/09/projection-deception-sunak-staying-in-power-tories
I reckon Sheridan and his wife must be among the unluckiest of people, to be exposed to CO poisoning, and among the luckiest, to survive. It seems to be this incident: " 25 firefighters attended a carbon monoxide leak from a basement boiler room at a hotel on Lexham Gardens in Kensington." https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/incidents/2023/april/carbon-monoxide-leak-kensington/
ReplyDeleteYou can only get CO through incomplete combustion of gas - that is, a faulty burner. I can't think how the CO would get from the boiler room to the hotel rooms I think that even in Britain, heating equipment would be serviced to ensure it is safe so that improbable events like these do not occur, but, under the Tories, perhaps that sort of red tape has been done away with?
Then, it is extraordinary that they survived. I hope that they do not suffer delayed effects - these can be very nasty (see, eg the Wiki on CO poisoning).
There was a program of public and domestic gas heater safety inspection (which I recall as compulsory) in Victoria a shortish while ago, and my heater failed the test (we now have an electric heater instead). Obviously in Tory Britain they don't do such things - maybe too many Labour voters would survive if they did.
DeleteJust a couple of good reads if you have some spare time:
ReplyDeleteYes, the Met police threw royal protesters into cells for no good reason – but at least they regret it
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/09/met-police-royal-protesters-cells-force
Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, says pair bonded over media intrusion
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/09/prince-harrys-ghostwriter-jr-moehringer-says-pair-bonded-over-media-intrusion