Politics

As Australians should express it: don’t be a fucking idiot on Saturday.

Scott Morrison comes to the defence of Fiona Scott’s “Asylum seekers clogging the M4” comment: “We’ve had 50,000 people turn up over the last five years,” he said; “in addition to that we have 20,000 people who have been released into the community under the government’s policies and they have principally been released into south-western Sydney and in Dandenong area in Melbourne and other places. Proving this is purely about the presentation rather than the actual issue, Morrison neglects to mention the 50,000 asylum seekers over 5 years represents only 5% of the 883,626 migrants that have been granted settlement in Australia over the same time. They’re not all living in Bondi and St Kilda, Mr. Morrison. ...

Houses and Holes on Macrobusiness reflects much the same view I have in my Election 2013 post below - sheer politics is getting in the way of good policy: Deloitte acknowledges that this is not a cost benefit analysis. But if we’re talking about a $25-$30 billion uplift in household standard’s of living per annum, even at a significantly higher cost of building that would be worthwhile and it would be difficult to match in any other spend of the same amount of money. ...

I wonder how long the general public cottons onto the fact that campaign launches are as much a marker of how much money a campaign wants to get out of the public purse as it is of a cohesive platform launch. Again this year, Labor and Liberal parties left their campaign “launches” until the latter half of the actual election campaign period, allowing them to claim up until that day as part of their regular business of representing people. What crock. ...

So, the election has started in earnest, and we finally know the date: September 7th. Today was Day 1, and the action is all under way for Election 2013. Hmm: let’s recap for those who haven’t been paying attention. Back in 2007, Kevin Rudd was Opposition Leader, running against the tired old policies of Howard. Rudd promised… well, roughly the same policies as Howard, but he’d be nice to the Aboriginals, the refugees, the environment, and the “working families” who were about to be put on cruel and unusual employment conditions. Rudd got into power, and appointed his deputy Gillard to oversee the transition away from the cruel & unusual working terms (a.k.a. WorkChoices). He then got stuck into the hypotheticals, called a major ideas conference, and then promptly did… well… I don’t think anything actually concrete came of that conference. I’m not sure even something ephemeral did. Then the GFC happened, and everything else went out the window. ...