Guest essay by Viv Forbes
To compete in today’s world we need to score well on resource availability, capital assets, energy costs, tax burden and workforce/management. It also helps to have secure property rights and a sound currency. Today’s Australia scores poorly on all counts.
In 1901, the year of Federation, Australia was the richest country in the world per capita.
The Pioneer generations, with freedom to explore and invest, had developed valuable mineral assets – gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, coal, tin and iron. And they had bred up large numbers of sheep and cattle on our native grasslands.
Energy was abundant – wood, horse power, kerosene, gas, hydro and coal powered electricity – we were among world leaders in cheap energy. Sydney had gas lights in its streets as far back as 1820.
The Pioneering innovators also invented game-changers such as the stump jump plough, the Ridley-Sunshine Harvester and froth flotation of minerals, and they developed better Australian versions of Leviathan coaches, Southern Cross windmills, Merino sheep, Shorthorn cattle, Federation wheat, Kelpies and Blue Heeler dogs.
The Builder generations who followed the pioneers invested heavily in productive capital assets like flour mills and wool sheds, mines and collieries, smelters and saw mills, power stations and electric trams, trans-continental railways and overland telegraph lines, orchards and plantations, stockyards and abattoirs, breweries and vineyards, dams and artesian bores, factories and universities, exploration and research, pipelines and harbours, railways and roads. There were no “Lock-the-Gate” signs.
Governments were decentralised with minimal taxes and red tape, creating new business was easy and union power was minimal and generally beneficial for workers.
But then the Termite generations took over, and for much of the last forty years taxes, handouts and green tape have been smothering new enterprise. We are sponging on the ageing assets created by past generations and building little to support future Australians. The monuments left by this generation are typified by casinos, sports arenas, wind-energy prayer wheels, sit-down money and debt.
The trendy war on carbon has already inflated our electricity costs – this will hasten the closure of more processing and manufacturing industries. Green tape is shutting-the-gate on new investments in exploration, grassland protection, dams, power stations, fishing, forestry and coastal development. Taxes are weakening existing industry and the savings that could build new industries are being wasted on bureaucracy, delays, legalism, subsidies, climate tomfoolery and green energy toys. Finally, union featherbedding is crippling any large survivors.
Australia’s future prosperity demands cheap energy, more investment in productive assets, reduced government costs, more productive labour and the freedom to explore and innovate.
We must change, or more jobs will follow Holden.
More at carbon-sense.com
“Lewis P Buckingham says:
December 28, 2013 at 3:58 am
Constantly they are telling me of outsourcing,…”
That started, with vigour, in the mid 1990’s (I was involved in one of the first IVR deployments in Aus at that time. I hated IVR’s with a vengence then, still do. I want to talk to a real person!). Outsourcing was the trend then but now “offshoring” or “bestshoring” are the new norms, and that has continued unabated (If not for someone screweing up bigtime on July 26th 2012, the job I had would be in another country). Many complain about the 457 visa system in Aus, but most companies that employ people in an indirect role will “off/bestshore” it now. Once a “job” can be defined on a single side of A4, it get’s offshored! Jack of all trades, master of none!
Mister The Pompous Git: I’m an spanish speaking person, and for us “Viv” sounds as the diminutive of “Vivian” or “Viviana”, females names. Please excuse me, Mister Forbes…
@climateace Decades ago my brother, since brain injured, shared his epiphany. “Those who chose the moniker of perfection were the most disingenuous.” Lest you claim two: climate and ace.
@climateace Fortunately, for you, somebody ‘fluffed’ up your trust fund.
Climateace..
Australia has a tripleA credit rating because the Howard government left the economy in such a healthy position, that not even GreenLabor could reduce it to rubble as happened with comparable countries—even though they did their very best to do just that.
The ratings are relative and some country had to get the triple A—and Australia had that much-spruiked ‘pipeline’ of unprecedented revenue, that Swan bragged about.
The Australian economy was competitive under the Howard government due to reform of the waterfront and other policy changes, despite the sabotage from Labor’s unions and the uncompetitive wages they’ve extorted for low productivity over many years from employers forced to sign up to sweetheart deals in order to stay in business.
But Labor always squanders the gains made by the conservatives in cleaning up the inevitable terrible Labor messes.
From Labor, Australia always gets wage extortion—low productivity —industrial trouble—workers robbed —literally— by Labor criminals , some of whom are on trial right now—taxpayers robbed—millions of dollars—by other Labor crooks, of which there are many—-and our children’s futures and options for further education destroyed by a Marxist ideological education system and curriculum run by ideological Left wing bureaucrats and academics, and implemented by Left wing teachers—a system that has expressly and deliberately denied four decades of Australian children the literacy and numeracy they require to be fully functional.
That’s the cycle in Australia—-humungous Labor messes on every front, not just the economy, and a legacy of chaos and of massive debt and deficits, followed by a conservative government that cleans up the Labor mess and restores hope and aspiration to the Australian people.
With only three months in government the Abbott team, have had to contend with the Labor Sussex Street thugs trying to sabotage the Abbott landslide election mandate at every turn.
Are you one of those voters, Climateace, who pretends to believe Labor’s lies when they try to cast the Abbott government’s $8billion payment to the Reserve Bank as just profligate spending that indicates that they’re a big-spending government in the mould of the GreenLabor government that squandered the fruits of the once-in-a-century commodities boom on the deadly pink batts debacle—and wasted precious taxpayers’ funds on paying huge wages to union mates to build unwanted toilet blocks and school halls—leaving a >$300 billion government debt with huge interest rate payments attached, and a $50 billion deficit?
Are you one of the true believers who pretend to believe that GreenLabor didn’t white-ant the Reserve Bank as they did everything else—hollow-logging institutions to try to make a better but fake budget bottom line to flog yet another lie to voters?
Do you choose to pretend that it wasn’t necessary and in the interests of Australia for the Reserve Bank to have the funding reserves to be ready for any other GFC that might occur—that Hockey’s prudent payment to the Reserve is to be likened to Labor’s shameless handouts of taxpayers’ money to buy votes—handouts even to dead people, and overseas citizens.??
Over these three months your party has shown its true colors as a party of thugs that harbors numerous criminals in its ranks—thumbing its nose at the Australian voters who gave the Abbott government a mandate to rescind the carbon tax, and trying to prevent it from making a start on cleaning up Labor’s unprecedented economic disaster—a cleanup that will take many years to complete.
Not only did GreenLabor create the disaster, but they’re setting IEDs and booby traps to sabotage the cleanup.
Climateace,
Look, you’ve got a good strategic position in this argument, mostly because you get to extend from ambiguity. Let me explain what I mean.
1 – At the core, the proposition that more species will go extinct than otherwise due to human activity absent some sort of intervention is a solid one. On human timescales. There’s ample precedent where this has happened. So I’ll give you this, that you proceed from a valid, if limited, core idea.
2 – The trouble is, how far do we go. If a little salt is good, a mound of salt will be great, and a sackful excellent, yes? No, not really. Government must serve many conflicting priorities. It’s difficult to nail down degrees out of thin air in on a blog though.
3 – I’ve read through most of the material you’ve linked. I’ll admit my attention wandered towards the end a bit. 🙂 But if you’ve linked something to support that 10% figure over 10,000 years, I missed it. It seems to me you could say 90% or 1% over 10,000 years or a million years with equal validity as far as the evidence goes. It would seem to depend on one’s assumptions, which again, is difficult to pin down on the fly.
Now, I still think we’re making mistakes by scrambling the concepts of conservation on human timescales vrs extinction events. From what I can gather, the advent of human history is an extinction event. It’s measured in geological time and is global in nature. The puny legislative efforts of any nation are not going to reverse this. So if you want to talk about stopping ‘extinction events’, you’re barking up the wrong tree, talking about the laws in Australia. It’s not the correct scale. I think it gives good dramatic effect to talk that way, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.
There are 237 comments on this thread. Of these, 170 are in reference to and comments by a single individual. It could just be a narcissist craving attention or a new CAGW script for how to disrupt reasoned discourse here.
here’s my reply to Viv on Larry Pickering’s site where it was first posted.
unfortunately there are now 3 generations who believe that if you are successful you are greedy (unless of course you are a pop star, movie actor, or leading sports personality). If you are a fisher you are destroying the ocean, a farmer you are destroying the land, a power supplier you are poisoning the atmosphere, a politician you are stupid and corrupt, a doctor you are in the pay of big pharma, a boss you are on a power trip, a miner you are a fat bastard/bitch, yet if you embezzle union funds, distort the truth on climate change or encourage illegal immigration you are the salt of the earth.
Yet they sit in their al fresco restaurants under their wasteful gas heaters feasting on seafood, steak and wine spending their inflated public servant/academic salaries.
The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 2:26 am
…..Sad also that my farmer friends who had planted out many hectares of pampas grass for sheep forage had to burn and spray herbicide to destroy what had been encouraged by the agricultural extension officers.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In the USA it is Johnson grass, Sorghum halepense, and herbicides really do not do a good job of killing it. (The darn stuff is taking over some of my pastures)
The best method I have found to kill Johnson grass is to overwinter my horses on the infested area and let them stomp it into oblivion then let the goats at it as what is left tries to come up in the spring.
janama says: @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 8:41 am
here’s my reply…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Excellent, Let Them Eat Grass
DaveW said @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 12:04 am
Yes, the NBN rollout has been a farce and an expensive one. Yes, both lots screw us over: Tweedle Dumb versus Tweedle Dumber. My current telephone ringtone is Gillard’s rant: “there will be no carbon tax…”. I am going to replace it with The Mad Monk’s lie that I will be compensated for the carbon taxes I have been forced to pay.
metro70 said @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 7:06 am
Your attempt to whitewash the coalition won’t succeed with those of us who were put out of (small) business by John Howard’s GST that he promised he would never introduce. As a professional at the time, I went to a government-funded seminar at the time and was told that the GST, a tax to be collected for the government at the business’s expense, was designed to put 40% of us out of business. The only way to remain in business was to work closely with our accountant. If we did our own financials it was tough titty because all the accountants were fully booked and could not take on new clients.
Traditionally, SMBs did better under Labor than the coalition. Since the days of St Keating de Paul both Labor and the coalition have screwed the SMBs. The excessive and punitive regulations we endure are not all due to the Labor/Green accord. Many were inherited from the Howard government, which even if it had not introduced them all, had ample opportunity to repeal as many as it chose to. The Howard government chose not to repeal them and indeed introduced several repressive measures of its own.
Tweedle Dumb versus Tweedle Dumber…
The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Tweedle Dumb versus Tweedle Dumber…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And neither bunch gives a hoot about us until they want our vote…. or our wealth.
You might enjoy E. M. Smith’s explanation of why HERE and Dr. Evan’s (Jo Nova’s better 1/2) Regulating Class and this by Angelo M. Codevilla on America’s Ruling Class Also an illuminating Mother Jone’s article.
Mark Bofill December 27, 2013 at 5:36 pm says:
Good question Mark, with no formal definition there is too much flexibility for accurate discussion, so let’s try and define some boundaries.
The term extinction event is best used to describe an instantaneous global catastrophe that produces environmental destruction of such immense scale that it literally erases complete biota from the face of the Earth. The best generally agreed example of an extinction event occurred 65 million years ago when the Yucatan was rearranged by an impactor that created the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event which wiped out the dinosaurs.
So the current observed process of extinction in Australia over the last 200 years is clearly not in this class of event. Geology gives us another type of extinction process to study, that caused with the merging of two previously separated continental biota by the formation of a land bridge. The linking of the two Americas by the formation of the Isthmus of Panama that allowed the Great American Interchange to occur produced extinctions as a consequence of the mixing process.
Mixing of biota can produce extinctions because previously isolated fauna that occupy the same ecological niche can now compete directly. The introduction of placental carnivores into Australia by the human created virtual land bridge of ships and aircraft has literally let the cat out of the bag. Pandora’s Box is open and cannot be closed. Australia will continue to suffer the effects of alien introduction until a new ecological balance is established with less species diversity and inevitable extinctions.
Gail Combs Dec 28 at 4.08 pm
Yes, Gail, I suspect that many realist Aussies would fit Climate Ace into this description provided by David Evans last year –
“The supporters of the theory of manmade global warming are mainly financial beneficiaries,[vi] believers in big government, or Greens. They are usually university educated. They generally prefer the methods of government, namely politics and coercion, rather than the voluntary transactions of the marketplace—especially when it comes to setting their own remuneration.
They are an intellectual upper class of wordsmiths, who regulate and pontificate rather than produce real stuff. There is little demand in the economy for their skills, so they would command only modest rewards for their labor in the marketplace. Arguably they are a class of parasites enriching themselves at the expense of producers, because they are rewarded out of proportion to the value they create—value as determined not by themselves, but by voluntary transactions in the marketplace.
“They don’t like the market place, basically because the marketplace doesn’t like them. [vii] The marketplace doesn’t reward them as much as they think it should. They prefer a system where people like them form the government and bureaucracy, where they take a large slice of everyone else’s income by threat of force, and then they pay themselves what they think they are worth out of those taxes. This stands in stark contrast to most people, who are generally paid only what the market will allow.
“Their shared economic basis makes them a class. Let’s call them the “regulating class”.[viii] [ix] (It seems like a trivial thing, but this argument is bedevilled by the lack of a widely-accepted name for this class. Due to the modern context they are a new phenomenon, but they are similar to coalitions identified in the past—such as the “new class” of Milovan Djilas[x] which is described by George Orwell as “a new aristocracy”,[xi] or the classe politique in France,[xii] or the tradition of Legalism in Imperial China. We chose “regulating class” because regulation is their core action, their standard tactic to advance their interests.)”
We will not change the mindset of such parasites. They believe in intellectual superiority. You won’t change them in a blog exchange. Best to spend ones precious times on more rewarding topics, like the core of Viv’s essay which I think will strike a chord with many people.
@ur momisugly Sherro
William Cobbett called them tax-eaters in his book Rural Rides in the early 19th C. An excellent read if you have not come across it before. Some things don’t change much…
“Tax-eaters” an excellent name for them since it include the grant-eaters, politicians, bureaucrats and the welfare ‘Pauls’ who are bought and paid for with our tax dollars.
Too bad the “Tax-eaters” are getting close to 50% or more of the population of many of our countries, especially when you add in the useful idiots who vote based on what the MSM tells them.
“Too bad the “Tax-eaters” are getting close to 50% or more of the population of many of our countries, especially when you add in the useful idiots who vote based on what the MSM tells them.”
That seems kind of hopeful ; we must be close to the breaking-point. Bring it on!
The Pompous Git @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 3.20pm…
Why don’t you try to refute any of my claims, PG? Because you can’t?
It’s very droll, I know—and seen as so-o fashionable to just cry ‘they’re both the same’ or ‘ a pox on both their houses’, but it’s not reality—very far from it as you must know.
It’s not the reality of most in the SMB sector or their spokespeople, who make no bones about which party they want in power.
As you know, politics is the art of the possible, with no possibility of being all things to all people—and so there are always some disaffected people even within a largely supportive group.
No doubt you are one of them who never got over it.
On the GST, first of all, John Howard ‘s statement that he would not introduce a GST was made in the context of enormous wall to wall hostility and Left wing partisanship in the MSM, that would have seen to it that he wasn’t elected, if he had even intimated that there was any possibility that he would introduce a GST.
No doubt at the time he believed that he would never be permitted to make such a move at any time in his Prime Ministership with the extreme bias against him—from left wing ‘journalists’, not proprietors —except for Labor’s ABC and SBS.
When he came to the conclusion that it was the best thing for the Australian economy, he didn’t just break a promise and do it—as is Labor’s way—but took the proposal to the people and sought a mandate at an election—as is the Coalition way—quite different, despite your jaundiced and bogus assertion.
If you were put out of business by the GST, then your business must have been on the brink anyway—or badly run.
Your claims about what you were told at that ‘government-funded seminar’ is very hard to believe, unless some rogue Labor tax accountant with an axe to grind, got hold of some government money with the idea of running his own little sabotage racket.
Did you ask him whether he had taken up his obvious gripes against it with the government?
Did you take it up with the government?
There was a heap of material and advice being provided at the time.
The person providing your ‘information’ sounds as though he took the money under false pretences to me.
Your claim that before Keating—that’s before 1983—SMB did better under Labor than the Coalition—is nothing but a fairytale.
Before 1983, Labor had nothing but contempt for free enterprise, and its unions had all levels of business and institutions like education , the Defence Forces and transport and the postal service under constant threat of lightning strikes over ridiculous trivia and massive wage claims alike.
So bad were Labor’s unions that Lee Kwan Yu said Australia was set to become the ‘white trash of Asia’,and all kinds of business farms, factories, all of them—–were hostage to the Labor/union thugs —the wharves were an industrial war zone run by violent ideological criminals in the Marxist unions.
Many jobs were lost as businesses were either driven to the wall or had to shed staff because of the guerilla tactics of Labor’s unions.
At the whim of Labor’s unions, perishables [ whether imports or exports] would languish on the wharves until they became worthless—Australia lost customers —businesses went out of business, and some went off-shore.
Construction sites were shut down in the blink of an eye, in the middle of a huge concrete pours with all the implications of that, because some worker inadvertently opened a gate that was another’s job—and for infinitely more ridiculous reasons than that.
The Howard government, with Chris Corrigan, changed all that , and changed the face of the Australian waterfront — an enormous assistance to all levels of business.
Only someone with tunnel vision and a completely blinkered view of the history of both parties—or just plain malicious intent directed against the Coalition—could possibly claim with a straight face that both of these parties are the same—tweedle dum and tweedle dumber as you proclaim with such scintillating wit.
You’re dead wrong.
The Pompous Git @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 3.20pm…
Why don’t you try to refute any of my claims, PG? Because you can’t?
It’s very droll, I know—and seen as so-o fashionable to just cry ‘they’re both the same’ or ‘ a pox on both their houses’, but it’s not reality—very far from it as you must know.
It’s not the reality of most in the SMB sector or their spokespeople, who make no bones about which party they want in power.
As you know, politics is the art of the possible, with no possibility of being all things to all people—and so there are always some disaffected people even within a largely supportive group.
No doubt you are one of them who never got over it.
On the GST, first of all, John Howard ‘s statement that he would not introduce a GST was made in the context of enormous wall to wall hostility and Left wing partisanship in the MSM, that would have seen to it that he wasn’t elected, if he had even intimated that there was any possibility that he would introduce a GST.
No doubt at the time he believed that he would never be permitted to make such a move at any time in his Prime Ministership with the extreme bias against him—from left wing ‘journalists’, not proprietors —except for Labor’s ABC and SBS.
When he came to the conclusion that it was the best thing for the Australian economy, he didn’t just break a promise and do it—as is Labor’s way—but took the proposal to the people and sought a mandate at an election—as is the Coalition way—quite different, despite your jaundiced and bogus assertion.
If you were put out of business by the GST, then your business must have been on the brink anyway—or badly run.
Your claims about what you were told at that ‘government-funded seminar’ is very hard to believe, unless some rogue Labor tax accountant with an axe to grind, got hold of some government money with the idea of running his own little sabotage racket.
Did you ask him whether he had taken up his obvious gripes against it with the government?
Did you take it up with the government?
There was a heap of material and advice being provided at the time.
The person providing your ‘information’ sounds as though he took the money under false pretences to me.
Your claim that before Keating—that’s before 1983—SMB did better under Labor than the Coalition—is nothing but a fairytale.
Before 1983, Labor had nothing but contempt for free enterprise, and its unions had all levels of business and institutions like education , the Defence Forces and transport and the postal service under constant threat of lightning strikes over ridiculous trivia and massive wage claims alike.
So bad were Labor’s unions that Lee Kwan Yu said Australia was set to become the ‘white trash of Asia’,and all kinds of business farms, factories, all of them—–were hostage to the Labor/union thugs —the wharves were an industrial war zone run by violent ideological criminals in the Marxist unions.
Many jobs were lost as businesses were either driven to the wall or had to shed staff because of the guerilla tactics of Labor’s unions.
At the whim of Labor’s unions, perishables [ whether imports or exports] would languish on the wharves until they became worthless—Australia lost customers —businesses went out of business, and some went off-shore.
Construction sites were shut down in the blink of an eye, in the middle of a huge concrete pours with all the implications of that, because some worker inadvertently opened a gate that was another’s job—and for infinitely more ridiculous reasons than that.
The Howard government, with Chris Corrigan, changed all that , and changed the face of the Australian waterfront — an enormous assistance to all levels of business.
Only someone with tunnel vision and a completely blinkered view of the history of both parties—or just plain malicious intent directed against the Coalition—could possibly claim with a straight face that both of these parties are the same—tweedle dum and tweedle dumber as you proclaim with such scintillating wit.
You’re dead wrong.
The Pompous Git @ur momisugly December 28, 2013 at 3.20pm…
Why don’t you try to refute any of my claims, PG? Because you can’t?
It’s very droll, I know—and seen as so-o fashionable to just cry ‘they’re both the same’ or ‘ a pox on both their houses’, but it’s not reality—very far from it as you must know.
It’s not the reality of most in the SMB sector or their spokespeople, who make no bones about which party they want in power.
As you know, politics is the art of the possible, with no possibility of being all things to all people—and so there are always some disaffected people even within a largely supportive group.
No doubt you are one of them who never got over it.
On the GST, first of all, John Howard ‘s statement that he would not introduce a GST was made in the context of enormous wall to wall hostility and Left wing partisanship in the MSM, that would have seen to it that he wasn’t elected, if he had even intimated that there was any possibility that he would introduce a GST.
No doubt at the time he believed that he would never be permitted to make such a move at any time in his Prime Ministership with the extreme bias against him—from left wing ‘journalists’, not proprietors —except for Labor’s ABC and SBS.
When he came to the conclusion that it was the best thing for the Australian economy, he didn’t just break a promise and do it—as is Labor’s way—but took the proposal to the people and sought a mandate at an election—as is the Coalition way—quite different, despite your jaundiced and bogus assertion.
If you were put out of business by the GST, then your business must have been on the brink anyway—or badly run.
Your claims about what you were told at that ‘government-funded seminar’ is very hard to believe, unless some rogue Labor tax accountant with an axe to grind, got hold of some government money with the idea of running his own little sabotage racket.
Did you ask him whether he had taken up his obvious gripes against it with the government?
Did you take it up with the government?
There was a heap of material and advice being provided at the time.
The person providing your ‘information’ sounds as though he took the money under false pretences to me.
Your claim that before Keating—that’s before 1983—SMB did better under Labor than the Coalition—is nothing but a fairytale.
Before 1983, Labor had nothing but contempt for free enterprise, and its unions had all levels of business and institutions like education , the Defence Forces and transport and the postal service under constant threat of lightning strikes over ridiculous trivia and massive wage claims alike.
So bad were Labor’s unions that Lee Kwan Yu said Australia was set to become the ‘white trash of Asia’,and all kinds of business farms, factories, all of them—–were hostage to the Labor/union thugs —the wharves were an industrial war zone run by violent ideological criminals in the Marxist unions.
Many jobs were lost as businesses were either driven to the wall or had to shed staff because of the guerilla tactics of Labor’s unions.
At the whim of Labor’s unions, perishables [ whether imports or exports] would languish on the wharves until they became worthless—Australia lost customers —businesses went out of business, and some went off-shore.
Construction sites were shut down in the blink of an eye, in the middle of a huge concrete pours with all the implications of that, because some worker inadvertently opened a gate that was another’s job—and for infinitely more ridiculous reasons than that.
The Howard government, with Chris Corrigan, changed all that , and changed the face of the Australian waterfront — an enormous assistance to all levels of business.
Only someone with tunnel vision and a completely blinkered view of the history of both parties—or just plain malicious intent directed against the Coalition—could possibly claim with a straight face that both of these parties are the same—tweedle dum and tweedle dumber as you proclaim with such scintillating wit.
You’re dead wrong.
Gail Combs…@ur momisugly December 28 at 4.08pm…
PG is not correct about the two parties in Australia…the Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber reference…
They could not be more different.
One [ Labor] is the party of big government—the one that in the time ‘before Keating’ when he claims they were more business-friendly than their opponents, the truth was [ on the record] that they were full-on Socialists that had nothing but abhorrence for business and were actively seeking out ways to nationalize ‘the means of production and distribution’, and nationalize all of our banks.
In their regular publication ‘The Socialist Objective’–the copy put out just before they completely switched to the long reviled and demonized ideology of their opponents, they obsessed about how they might get around the clause in our Constitution that requires government to pay ‘just terms compensation’ for any appropriation by government of private property.
They felt that made it too expensive for them to grab private property if they had to pay the owners for it.
The unions are the core of the Labor Party, and the record I laid out in my reply to PG is just the tiniest fraction of the nefarious anti-Australian behaviour that they wrought on these country for many years before they were made unelected partners in government—holding the whip hand—with Labor in the 80s and 90s—and until the Coalition government drove the Marxists and other criminals Labor harbored in their ranks out of the total control of Australia’s waterfronts.
As I said in an earlier post, Labor Party and union criminals are on trial in Australia right now for egregious allegations of law-breaking.
You place both of our major parties in the same category re wanting ‘our wealth’.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Labor dissipates the wealth of Australians in many ways—with carbon taxes, regular taxes, handouts to buy votes, favors to cronies in big business, trashing of industries not in their loop, government debt with its attendant huge loan repayments—-incredible incompetence——and in their social [ Socialist] engineering that has created that underclass of miseducated dependents on ‘big government’ largesse [ the ‘taxeaters ‘ you speak of]— and the intergenerational unemployment and self-perpetuating dysfunction that sucks up all of the government money that could otherwise go to building and maintaining infrastructure and funding those Australians with terrible disabilities.
The Coalition believes in small government that tries to design the economy so that it supports individuals and business in general , in being the best they can be under their own steam, with as little government interference as possible.
It aims always to have prudent and judicious regulation only—the kind that saved Australia from the worst aspects of the GFC and the sub-prime loans debacle—and apart from that , to free business up from regulation and red and green tape wherever possible.
It has none of the subversive ideology that Labor assaults Australia with—and in fact it is always under assault itself from the infestation of all of our institutions by the Left—under Gramsci’s plan for a gradual Socialist takeover of the democracies—‘The Long March Of the Left through the Institutions’.
Thank you for those references you provide—I’ll be very interested to have a look at them.
“The Pompous Git says:
December 28, 2013 at 3:20 pm
As a professional at the time, I went to a government-funded seminar at the time and was told that the GST, a tax to be collected for the government at the business’s expense, was designed to put 40% of us out of business.”
Rubbish! Having run my own businesses in New Zealand (GST), Australia (GST) and the UK (VAT) they were never at risk of failing due to a costs I applied/added to “goods and services” or “value add” to what was being supplied. It is true business owners who charge GST/VAT do become unpaid tax collectors. You use an acountant (A service) to see how much they can save you in the form of rebates and returns.
In any case, Howard took the GST to an election. We cannot say that about Gillard, the ALP and the price on carbon.
@Gail Combs and jdgalt –
Thanks for the good words on my post. I assure you it’s a work in progress, only the tip of the iceberg I have in mind. Here’s a couple more tidbits: draconian controls over education and academic publishing to prevent the propagation of false “science” (I don’t believe that free speech extends to lying or propagandizing in the class room or in the professional journal; let the zealots find other outlets for their superstitions); I would have the mass news media be required to state their biases on every newscast; I would add to the Fifth Amendment to say not only don’t take property, don’t take the right to use or enjoy said property. I’m working on many more, inter alia in connection with a novel I’ve been writing (to use in the constitution of the leading country of an alien world) that basically succeeds where we are failing).
The three things I think are the most important are: absolutely rigid, unbending, total control over the behavior of people in public office with draconian penalties for rights violations, dishonesty, corruption or other misconduct that injures people; and two, no lifetime careers in government for anyone (excepting only the military, emergency responders and peace officers and perhaps one or two other non-administrative functions); and three , NOTHING coming from unelected officials can have the force of law.
I once coined a term for the sort of government I’ve had in mind: I called it “reverse totalitarianism,” where it’s the government, rather than the people, who are under totalitarian control over every detail of what they do.
MB
‘Climateace,
Look, you’ve got a good strategic position in this argument, mostly because you get to extend from ambiguity. Let me explain what I mean.
1 – At the core, the proposition that more species will go extinct than otherwise due to human activity absent some sort of intervention is a solid one. On human timescales. There’s ample precedent where this has happened. So I’ll give you this, that you proceed from a valid, if limited, core idea.
2 – The trouble is, how far do we go. If a little salt is good, a mound of salt will be great, and a sackful excellent, yes? No, not really. Government must serve many conflicting priorities. It’s difficult to nail down degrees out of thin air in on a blog though.
3 – I’ve read through most of the material you’ve linked. I’ll admit my attention wandered towards the end a bit. 🙂 But if you’ve linked something to support that 10% figure over 10,000 years, I missed it. It seems to me you could say 90% or 1% over 10,000 years or a million years with equal validity as far as the evidence goes. It would seem to depend on one’s assumptions, which again, is difficult to pin down on the fly.
Now, I still think we’re making mistakes by scrambling the concepts of conservation on human timescales vrs extinction events. From what I can gather, the advent of human history is an extinction event. It’s measured in geological time and is global in nature. The puny legislative efforts of any nation are not going to reverse this. So if you want to talk about stopping ‘extinction events’, you’re barking up the wrong tree, talking about the laws in Australia. It’s not the correct scale. I think it gives good dramatic effect to talk that way, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.’
Mark
Thanks for this response.
(1) Thanks for acknowledging that the basic are more or less OK.
(2) As a human society, we have choice about what we are going to do about the mass extinction event we have initiated in Australia. (I should say that this comes partly from the stats but also partly from direct observation – in every single place I have ever lived in Australia there are taxa that are extinct – locally, regionally and globally.)
(3) There is some angst upstring around the definition of a mass extinction event. The defintion is, IMHO, entirely an arbitrary decision. On the current rate of extinctions, and given that there are many more species in the extinction pipeline, and assuming no intervention from governments, Australia will be out of vertebrates within 30,000 years. I count that as a mass extinction event. (Noting that some vertebrate rapid-breeding generalists with a very wide current DNAs will almost certainly survive the mass exinction event.)
(4) I have not entered AGW into the debate. Given that there is documented movement in the geographic distribution globally (as well as changes in phenology) of thousands of taxa in response to current shifts in climate, and given known changes to ocean chemistry, current and predicted, we know that some taxa are already being affected (both positively and negatively).
By the way, for all you bleeding heart desk jockeys, elites, easy-come-easy-go wordsmiths, faux experts on the hard life, so-called self-styled battlers and sundry victims of governments, bureaucrats, big business, plus all the genuine whingers who have never had to do a real hard day’s work for a living in their lives, the three ways you used to be able to bleed in relation to growing and harvesting spuds:
(1) Cuttng yourself with the seedknife. It is quite easy to do when you cut ton after ton of spuds, a spud at a time, and your concentration wanders.
(2) Sticking yourself with the potato bag needle. The important trick here is to make 100% sure that the tip of the needle does not end up in your eye. The forces involved were/are quite large.
(3) picking spuds when the ground is dry, the clods are hard and harsh, and the constant brushing against the clods abrades the skin off your fingers (the bits adjacent to your fingernails) until your fingers bleed.
I have done (1) and (3) and I was in a paddock once when a guy stuck himself with the needle… fortunately not into his eye.
Of course these days no human hand touches a spud until it comes out of the plastic bag ready for cooking.