Cop it on the chin, then move on

Copping it sweet. My long-time friend, the late Jim Killen (he was my best man when I got married in his house — I just toss that in to bemuse those who dismiss me as just another Labor man), once cautioned me about writing off a politician who had made a serious political blunder. The politician had gone into the House of Representatives and made a complete “I was wrong” statement and Jim correctly forecast that such an abject apology would remove any political heat from the incident. As he was so often, Killen was quite right.

I was reminded of this incident last night when I watched South Australian Attorney-General Mike Atkinson do his complete and utter recantation of his insistence that those who comment on internet blogs during an election campaign give their full name and address or risk being prosecuted. There were no ifs, buts or maybes as the A-G copped it sweet. And I liked his “Reports of your non-existence are greatly exaggerated” comment as he came face to face for the Adelaide Advertiser’s photographer with that man he publicly said did not exist.

I am sure there will now be little lasting electoral damage from what was shaping as an awkward election campaign moment.

Learning to take no notice of forecasts. The evidence just keeps coming of the worthlessness of economists looking in to the future. The New York Times this week takes an insightful look at the recent history of US Budget forecasts and the actual result.

Those little light lines are what the US Government forecast years ago would happen to its Budget surplus/deficit. The heavy blue line is what actually happened and the light blue line is the latest attempt at prediction.

It should be compulsory reading for all journalist just before they enter the lock-up in May to report on Wayne Swan’s pre-election effort. Then we would see truthful stories beginning with something like: “The Labor Government wants us to believe … but who knows what will actually happen because Government forecasts are notoriously inaccurate.”

Confident about climate change? Given the record of economists in telling us what their models say will happen with the economic world, just how confident can we be about scientists using their models to predict future temperatures? Not very. I’m afraid, but unfortunately for future generations I suppose there is just as much chance that global warming is being underestimated as overestimated. How thankful the current crop of politicians should be that they will not be around to see whether they did too much or too little to curb CO2 emissions.

The bank clearly knew better. Perhaps the wisdom of having some actual business people on the board of the Reserve Bank was the reason there was no interest rate rise this week. While the economists were all sure that the economy was starting to boom along the bank was more prudent and the retail sales figures for December out from the Australian Bureau of Statistics this morning show it was right.

In current price seasonally adjusted terms, Australian turnover decreased by 0.7% in December 2009 following increases of 1.5% in November 2009 and 0.3% in October 2009. Need I say that the median forecast of 20 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a 0.2% gain.

Piers gets his two pet hates into the same intro. “Mad mullahs believe bad science is gospel”, the headline in this morning’s Sydney Daily Telegraph told us. Clearly, Piers Akerman does not want anyone to doubt what he thinks of our Prime Minister as he wrote: “Global warming believer Kevin Rudd has adopted the strategies of radical ayatollahs to push his agenda for a huge new tax on Australians and a global wealth redistribution scheme”.