Richard Farmer’s chunky bits

The nonsense bankers speak. ”It’s been a bad week, and a bad month, for the Aussie,” Westpac currency analyst Robert Rennie said, describing the value of the currency falling to US97¢ on Friday night. Westpac clearly does not give much weight to the interests of exporters or struggling local manufacturers when determining what’s good and what’s bad.

A Kep Enderby moment. The would-be treasurer Joe Hockey brought us one of those memorable moments at the weekend as he paraded with his wife (and, on another page, the children) for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph:

“Having more women in the workforce increases participation.” What words of wisdom. They will surely rank alongside those of former Whitlam Labor government minister Kep Enderby that “traditionally, Australia obtains its imports from overseas”.

Propriety and political appointments. I always admired Stephen Fitzgerald (a family in-law) when, as a Gough Whitlam political appointee as Australian ambassador to China, he offered his resignation as soon as Malcolm Fraser became prime minister back in 1975. It was the right and proper thing to do, just as Fraser’s decision to keep him in the job despite past political allegiances was the sensible one.

What is not right and proper is to appoint a Labor mate to the country’s softest and plushest diplomatic job as Consul-General in New York, with the appointment to begin just days before an election in September that Labor is likely to lose. If former Victorian premier Steve Bracks had any sense of honour he would not have accepted the offer. If Prime Minister Julia Gillard had an ounce of decency she would not have made it.

The Crikey Indicator pointed the way. The Eurovision song contest voting went pretty much as predicted by the Crikey Indicator.

Will the federal election indicator prove as accurate a forecaster?

There certainly seems to be a turn for the better for Labor post budget — the Crikey Indicator has moved 3.5 points to show a 12.2% probability of victory. That’s still not flash, but we are just entering the serious part of the election contest.

Same budget, similar poll results but … News is what you make it, I suppose, and never better illustrated than on these two front pages reporting the findings of respective opinion pollsters.

News and views noted along the way.

• Keep on truckin’ — The psychedelic cargo haulers of Pakistan’s highways.
• Pakistan, rusting in its tracks — “A train journey across Pakistan highlights the woes of its rail system, which are a microcosm of larger troubles: corruption, economic disparity, political unrest and neglected infrastructure.”
• Helicopter money as a policy option
• Just how useless is the asset-management industry?
• The inconvenient truth about GM — “Genetic modification has so far mainly been confined to developing crops that tolerate herbicides and resist pests. It has done little to increase yields.”
• What rational really means — “The word rational is widely misused.”
• Is there a curse of resources? The case of the Cameroon — “Oil seems to have brought few development benefits to Cameroon, indeed quite the opposite. This looks like the resource curse doesn’t it? So is resource wealth always a curse?”
• What stock to buy? Hey, Mom, don’t ask me. — “If I could pick just one stock for someone to buy, what would it be? I would now suggest something like the Vanguard Total World Stock exchange-traded fund.”