Are You Really Sure That You Want To Be a Luddite?

It's not easy to quite Facebook completely. It's easy enough to de-activate your account but deleting it is another matter completely. You have to apply to have your account deleted and that takes 14 days. 14 days during which what you'll see if you decide to log in to Facebook so that you can let all your erstwhile Facebook friends that you've decided to quit Facebook for good is this screen:

The Flood Levy - A Complete Failure of Political Will

Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard has almost but not quite fulfilled the expectations of a lot of pundits who were predicting that she would fund the Federal Government's contribution to recovery from the Queensland floods through a special levy. One third of the Federal Government's contribution to Queensland's recovery will be funded through a levy. The other two thirds will come from spending cuts. I think my opinion of this decision is quite clear from the title of this post.

In olden days, before first Bob Hawke & Paul Keating and then John Howard & Peter Costello established and propagated the Cult of the Surplus it would have been quite acceptable for a government to respond to a disaster like the Queensland floods by extending the budget deficit. But that was then, this is now. Now things are different: if Australian governments aren't keeping their budgets in surplus so that the funds obtained by overtaxing the populus can be invested in a "Future Fund" managed by merchant bankers in the United States there's something very obviously wrong. Our national economy must be run at a profit or, at worst, on a break even basis. Borrowing money to get through hard times - something any private business would at least try to do - is no longer an option for Australian governments.

(US governments have it better than ours - they can, and have, cranked up enormous deficits to fund the indulgences of the USA's ruling elites. According to some commentators sooner or later they'll have to face up to things and change their ways. Don't bet on it happening any time soon).

Here's the thing - according to the canons of economics, the justification for governments accumulating surpluses (and then investing them through merchant bankers either here or overseas) is so that when times get tough - and a natural disaster on the scale of the Queensland floods makes for a pretty tough time - the government has funds in hand to cope with the tough times. That's what surpluses are for: not proving that the government can run the country like a well-managed private business which consistently returns high dividends to shareholders but so that, like a prudent householder, it has something set aside for the proverbial rainy day (pun unfortunately unavoidable). The function of a budget surplus is to provide insurance, not profit.

Particularly galling, from a personal point of view, is that the two thirds of the Federal Government's contribution to fixing up the flood damage that comes from program cuts includes cuts to the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS). Coming at the end of a day when I've just come home after being told that I might have to wait for years before I can get housing through the Office of Housing in Victoria this news is really unwelcome - further evidence that this Federal Government won't even try to walk and chew gum at the same time.

None of this would be happening if the Gillard Government were prepared to face up to the facts and say "You know that 2013 budget surplus we promised? Sorry folks, we'll have to plead force majeur on that one. The budget will get back into surplus when it gets back into surplus. But thanks to the Queensland floods all bets are off." But no - they're too scared of what News Limited will say about them to do that.

Not that it's done the ALP any good - I think Andy Bolt's comments on the flood levy are a good indication of the sort of treatment they'll get from that quarter. It's always galling to find myself agreeing with Bolt on anything but I'll just have to console myself with the thought that we're not on the same side - we just happen to be facing in the same direction right now.

Oh, the Bureaucracy!

Yesterday, I came across this little item in the Sunday Age:

UNEMPLOYED people are $342 worse off a year on average than they were when federal Labor came to power because their living costs have been rising faster than the dole...

An analysis of Bureau of Statistics figures by Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute shows living costs of people on government benefits leapt by 12.8 per cent between June 2007 and September 2010.

Yet, in that time, the government raised the Newstart allowance by 10 per cent to take into account general price increases. That leaves the unemployed 2.8 per cent - $342 a year - worse off in real terms since 2007.

The institute's senior researcher David Richardson said Newstart was inadequate, creating incentives for people to claim the more generous disability support pension just to survive...

A report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this month warned Newstart has fallen so far behind living costs that there were "concerns about its adequacy" to support people and help them find jobs...

But a spokeswoman for Jobs Minister Chris Evans said unemployment allowances could be only "at a basic level". "Otherwise it will be unaffordable and act as a disincentive to work."

Yeah right. Maybe it's time that "spokeswoman for Jobs Minister Chris Evans" had a taste of those unaffordable "disincentives to work". Her and Chris Evans.

Hello, I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Give You a Colonoscopy

Recently the Australian Government has developed a keen - even morbid - interest in the contents of my bowels. This week I received a letter inviting me to “take part in the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program (the Program).” With it, I received a free test kit which I can use in the privacy of my own lavatory to collect a sample of the aforementioned bowel contents to see if I might have bowel cancer. According to the letter (signed by Professor Jim Bishop AO, MD MMed MBBS FRACP FRCPA APSOABN*, probably using bitmap graphics) “A positive result does not mean that you have bowel cancer”. In fact, “Most people with a positive test result” (i.e. blood in their poos) “do not have bowel cancer.”

Abbott & Afghanistan - Quick Links

The Australian  has made it official - it's OK to criticise Tony Abbott's remarks on the prosecution of three soldiers over the killing of civilians in Afghanistan, as long as you make it quite clear that it wasn't really Tony's fault - it was Alan Jones what sucked him into it.

And Peter Hartcher at The National Times reveals why it might have been better for Abbott's ego if he'd accepted Julia Gillard's invitation to join him on her visit:

Despite appearances, Abbott was not on the firing range to show off. Nor was he there to give anyone a lesson. It was Abbott who was being taught a lesson.

Sod the Rule of Law - This Is War

Ken Parish, of Charles Darwin University and Club Troppo has written an impassioned post on Tony Abbott’s recent appearance on 2GB, where the Leader of her Majesty’s Increasingly Seditious Opposition decried the way soldiers in Afghanistan were “being stabbed in the back by their own government and … a lot of people think that’s what’s happening.”

Just to keep things clear - Tony Abbott wasn’t decrying the fact that a lot of people (25,963 the last time I checked out the on-line petition) think “that ‘s what’s happening.” What he’s decrying is the prosecution of Australian soldiers for killing six civilian non-combatants, five of whom were children. Despite the fact that this is happening under a system of military justice that was introduced by the Howard government, Tony Abbott has decided that if Alan Jones isn’t happy with it and Alan Jones’s audience isn’t happy with it then there’s political mileage in it. Political principle is nowhere within cooee of the position that Abbott has taken.