The City of Port Phillip, the blog’s local council, is yet again trying to establish new benchmarks in world’s worst practice community consultation.
This time it is a variation on one of its previous efforts – consultation over its budget. The last time the Council tried such a consultation it announced it with a multi-coloured leaflet letterboxed to all properties. Sadly it so closely resembled junk mail that many, including the blog, put it out in the recycling bin.
In the unlikely event that an Australian journalist asks Scott Morrison about Sri Lanka, and the refugees his colleague Peter Dutton has sent back to the country, he will no doubt say the question is in the ‘bubble’ and then express deep and profound regret about the terrorism over the past 24 hours.
Cost benefit analysis
Scott Morrison and elements of the media are demanding that Bill Shorten release cost estimates for his climate action program.
The demands are an indication of their ignorance of both the issue and elementary accounting and economics. What is required in simultaneously assessing the costs of addressing climate change and the benefits of doing so is simple – conventional cost benefit analysis.
Policy debates
While it is difficult to imagine that there is a deep policy debate going on in Australia given the current election campaign there actually is one.
Indeed – while we are waiting for ScoMo to announce that if people vote Labor God will send a great plague, fires and damnation to the nation – the Grattan Institute continues to produce high quality work over a wide range of policy areas. Most importantly, they regularly evaluate their impact and report back on it the public.
The blog is taking a break – but in the meantime (over the next couple of days) here are some odds and sods.
Western civilisation
It is ironic that those spruiking loudest for the virtues of Western civilisation include not only the Ramsay Foundation, Tony Abbott and John Howard but also America’s far-right ideologues. In a recent book, Not all Dead White Men, Donna Zuckerberg describes how groups from the alt-right to misogynistic men (frequently the same) drawing on the classics for inspiration and justification.
As Anzac Day approaches are you getting ready to remember afresh how Anzac defines Australian culture and history and why we fought; how the French will never forget Australia and its role in WWI; and, how our Vietnam veterans were spat upon, reviled and denied welcome home marches?
Well, if you are, you probably shouldn’t read Mark Dapin’s Australia’s Vietnam Myth vs History; Romain Fathi’s Conversation essay about whether the French care about Anzac; Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget; or the blog’s Anzac Day memorial address in 2017. On the other hand, what have you got to lose but some illusions shared by many of your fellow Australians?
One of the arguments in the forthcoming Federal election campaign (if an election is ever called) will be that the Liberals are better economic managers than Labor.
Indeed, it will be a major thrust of the Government campaign even though the evidence since 2013 suggests they couldn’t run a chook raffle or a piss up in a brewery – to use the Bluey and Curly language the Prime Minister favours – even though he might baulk at the second colloquial phrase just in case it upset his Pentecostal brethren (of which more later).
Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his magisterial biography of Thomas Cromwell, at one point asks what differences Cromwell made – what were the innovations he was responsible for above and beyond what could be considered the regular part of his work or position? The first was water management but the second was what we would now call PR.
“This is the West sir, and when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” says the reporter to the Governor who is returning to a town for the funeral of a friend,Tom Doniphon, in the final scenes of the 1965 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
The quote came to the blog’s mind when reading an obituary of the economist, Alan Krueger, just after it had read yet another quote from yet another business leader saying that increasing the minimum wage would increase unemployment. And this wage-unemployment myth is very much part of a modern Western myth just as much as it was part of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance US western cow town myth.
If you were running the Victorian Government what would you do with a spare billion dollars? Education, health, clean energy, public transport, the arts, reduced taxes or something else entirely?
What you probably wouldn’t do is give it to a company to run an event which adds to greenhouse gases; causes noise pollution; refuses to adopt normal standards of financial accountability; and, consistently produces misleading figures on its State economic benefit.