Gothic Archer Liberal MP for Bass Bridget Archer caused her party all manner of annoyance over the past year — distancing herself from the Morrison government’s chaotic final months, crossing the floor to vote against their religious discrimination bill and notably scrapping any mention of the party from her election material. A cynic might have noted that Archer, roughly 500 votes away from losing her seat, had made a calculation that jumping from the sinking ship before it exploded (there was a lot wrong with the ship…) couldn’t do her any harm.
That said, we have to give her some credit for continuing to push the moderate line now that she’s secured another three years: she plans to cross the floor and vote with Labor on its new climate bill. But her disclosures overnight do paint an interesting counterpoint to all this — she owns a bunch of shares in mining companies with her partner:
Is the vote for an emissions reduction target while investing in fossil fuel companies yet another sign of her selfless commitment to her principles, or… perhaps a sign that Labor’s targets don’t go far enough?
A question of Truss Our friends at The New European detect “something like a monkey paw curling one of its fingers“. Having wished so fervently for the end of Boris Johnson’s shambolic time as UK prime minister, they now have to deal with the reality of that wish coming true: his potential replacements. They have little love for Rishi Sunak, but they are particularly worried about the prospect of a government led by Liz Truss (the overwhelming favourite with bookies at this point) and have put together a list of “39 good reasons Liz Truss will be a terrible prime minister”.
There’s plenty of good stuff in there, but our favourite has to be the clip they unearthed from the 2014 Conservative Party conference where she boasts of her imminent trip to Beijing to open “pork markets” and then smiles eerily into the silence that follows, like a skit Tim and Eric discarded for being too off-putting, before the audience realises that Truss is waiting for the applause she assumed would greet this revelation:
Keating up appearances That former prime minister Paul Keating was called on by The Sydney Morning Herald for some click-ready commentary on Greens Leader Adam Bandt’s criticism of the Labor Party isn’t that surprising. Indeed, Keating is such a gift to journalists it’s surprising they don’t call on him more often to weigh in on the political debate of the day. Who could fail to rejoice at his turn of phrase? He called Bandt a “bounder”, a gorgeously archaic term that recalls his fondness for words like “blaggard” in his time in office.
Still, this one was stretching it a touch. Keating was apparently furious at Bandt calling the ALP a “neoliberal” party. Of all the things for Keating to be mad about… whatever you wish to say about Keating’s time in office, as treasurer and PM, it favoured privatisation, deregulation of finance and banking, a greater emphasis on enterprise bargaining with individual employers, and removing tariffs.
Jonesing “Do you know what perjury is?” Mark Bankston must have dreamed of moments like this. Bankston is a lawyer for the parents of one of the children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, who are currently suing disgraced broadcaster, conspiracy theorist and professional-level scumbag Alex Jones. Via an error by Jones’ lawyers, Bankston was provided with every text Jones has sent for the past two years, and was thus able to point to Jones’ demonstrable lies under oath during the trial.
Nothing can make up for what these parents have gone through — the senseless murder of their children compounded by years of harassment and slander initiated, encouraged and profited from by Jones — but we hope this latest moment of well-earned public humiliation for Jones gave them at least a moment of true satisfaction.
Keating ‘began’ the era of neoliberalism in Australia. He was following the US and UK and it was a time when people did not fully understand the erroneous and pernicious theories of Milton Friedman.
40+ years later we do understand that eg. ‘trickle down’, debt and deficit comparisons with household budgets etc have never worked.
It would be a shame if Keating, in spite of his intelligence, has not grasped this but what is intolerable is that the current Government has economic advisors , including the Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Secretary of Treasury who are still peddling the same faulty theories, including increasing interest rates to fight supply based inflation and being prepared to tolerate an increase in unemployment.
We still seem to have a neoliberal treasurer!
( I have hoped Jim Chalmers would turn out to be a NINO)
A lot of public servants at the time could see where it would lead but if you wanted to get ahead at senior levels, you had to get with the program. Soon most public service jobs had knowledge/ degree in economics as a selection criterion and as part of the job description , and whereas before, the public service recruitment selected graduates from a wide range of disciplines, it became more skewed to those with some economics.
What is a NINO?
BTW I am disappointed with the tack being taken by Jim and the Reserve Bank as well.
My initial thought was Neoliberal in name only, but not so sure on 2nd thoughts.
Yes
Charmless Jimmy has made no secret of his neolib lurve affair for most of the last year or so.
Whilst serving the Wan Goose, smarming & schmoozing up the greasy pole to preselection, he must have been chaffing to let loose his inner Invisible Hand as Treasurer
Re Keating’s comments: he never called anyone ‘blaggard’, the word is blackguard. He would be piqued by the misquote.
Blackguard was a common word, especially applied to mischievous cuttees, tearaway teens or ne’er-do’well adults in the tribal Labor Oirish community in which PJK grew up, certainly until the 60s, and usually pronounced as blaggard
That clip of Alex Jones suffocating under the weight of his own bullsh*t is priceless.
So here we have Paul Keating showing the traits of what Gareth Evans described as ” The Relevance Deprivation Syndrome”, where former leaders can’t help themselves but comment on the current political landscape.
Whilst in agreement with many of his contributions, especially on world events, his denial in pursuing a “neo-liberal” policy agenda beggars belief ( as supported by the link provided).
I vividly recall his response to a very matter of fact contribution by Sally McManus from the ACTU in her address to the National Press Club in March 2017, where he admitted that “liberal economics had run into a dead end”. No mea culpa then from Keating in his role and now rubbing salt in the wound he created in denying his role.
Let us not forget the arrogance of Keating in declaring the “recession we had to have” and the ramifications – interest rates at 18% in 1989, unemployment at 7.2% and over 900,000 thrown onto the employment scrap-heap.
The sorry legacy of where we are today can be sheeted home to Keating.
Hopefully he’ll soon be with his class traitor colleague Hawke where they belong. Warm enough?
Damn straight
Yes, it is a bit rich for Keating to complain that “Bandt is a bounder” for saying, quite correctly, that Keating was the Treasurer that presided over the introduction of neoliberalism in Australia. Keating has a point, though. Keating introduced what might be called “Neoliberalism with a human face”. The problem is that the neoliberal faith, with its “small government”, “low taxes on the more wealthy to encourage their initiative”, “continuous productivity improvement” and other fetishes has gradually erased or dimmed the “human face”. Initially, HECS provided a means for students to contribute to their own education, thus assisting the required expansion of higher education. Unlike the climate change legislation, this contribution had no ceiling, so that expansion of higher education came to be seen as “unsustainable” , because it required continued budget contributions, which were incompatible with “small government”. So the HECS contribution expanded and became politically orientated to encourage study in areas that would benefit industry and business, while requiring students in less useful subjects to virtually pay entirely for their own education. This has led that “bounder” Bandt to call for elimination of the HECS debt.
Similarly, the health scheme has been underfunded so that it too would not continue to grow “unsustainably”.
Federal funding of education was meant to support state funding but was distorted into support, with gratuitous waste, for private schools.
We have to start again without an economic faith, which has no foundation in reality, but which students who do not understand science cannot recognise as a faith because of the use glittering mathematical “proofs” that private markets with small government are as good as anything else.
I do hope Jim Chalmers is a NINO but fear that he is not. I would not handle inflation driven by profiteering with kid gloves, as he has so far. But perhaps he has to create his means to handle it with an understaffed, slow moving public sector, with too many followers of the Neoliberal faith.
So it’s Labor’s fault that Bridget Archer has mining shares? Bit of a long bow.
No. It’s Labor’s fault that they are putting up a climate target that even people making money from mining companies are ok with