It seems the new socialist President can’t take a trick
François Hollande has had it with austerity. Well, fair enough — austerity is dull and painful. No wonder other European leaders are keen to follow his example. But perhaps Hollande should take heed of what happened to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who also longed to escape an austere life.
The busy bodies at the UN know nothing and
Minister Tony Burke hides behind their skirts
Once again, the environmental zealots are capturing the debate. The United Nations, in its usual sovereignty busting busy body way is trying to tell us how to look after our Great Barrier Reef. Its report from the environmental arm of UNESCO was released at the weekend and is critical of the way the Great Barrier Reef is managed. these people are obviously regulation mad bureaucrats.
Walter Stark, who had some pretty frank and realistic things to say about fisheries generally in The Greens — a book I edited last year —has been reported in this article giving some sound advice about the unquestioned rubbish that is being promoted about the Reef. When will any of these progress-destroying fools in our government be challenged by straight forward, common sense facts?
On overfishing on the Reef:
Claims of widespread over-fishing at our levels of harvest are the height of absurdity. There is absolutely no scientific evidence of threatened marine species, population collapses or effects on marine biodiversity from fishing. Almost without exception, away from the coastal and tourist influences, the Great Barrier Reef is pristine, rarely visited and home to the same number of fish species today as at first human settlement.
On shipping on the reef:
And all this debate about the danger posed to the reef by shipping is nonsense. One cyclone causes more reef destruction than if all of the ships that ever traversed the reef since the beginning of time crashed into it.
Just take a look at the enormity of the reef in the photo above.
French sisterhood eats its heart out
FRANCOIS Hollande’s ambition to become France’s first feminist president has suffered a setback after the 17 women in his cabinet were dismissed as “window dressing”. It emerged that most of the officials working under them were men.
Mr Hollande made women’s rights a feature of his election campaign and feminists praised him for appointing as many women as men to cabinet posts.
Last week, however, it emerged that of 140 advisers recruited by ministers, only 38 were women.
UPDATE
More on the parlous state of President Hollandaise:
The French government has not once run a budget surplus in the past 30 years. Total public social expenditure as a percentage of GDP was 28.4 per cent in France on the latest figures, compared with 16 per cent in Australia and the OECD average of 19.3 per cent. The cheeses may be great, but France is basically a bloated nanny-state.
Just in case you hadn’t noticed
UNUSUALLY wet weather has ushered in a gloomy start to winter across eastern Australia.
Sydney had almost 40mm of rain with a top temperature of only 16.7C.
“It is effectively the coldest, wettest and gloomiest first weekend of winter since 1989,” Weatherzone’s Brett Dutschke said.
Brisbane had 47mm of rain, Canberra 18mm and Hobart 3mm. The Queensland coast had the heaviest rainfall with Bundaberg receiving 119mm, more than double the June average in only two days, and the Sunshine Coast receiving 114mm.
Birdsville received its first rain in three months.
From my review of the wonderful NGV exhibition in Melbourne at Quadrant Online
The exhibition is a quite brilliant collection of outstanding pieces, and the jewelry, furniture design and sumptuousness of this Imperial order is very impressive.
It is a testament to a distant and glorious moment in French history, It has the sad echo of what was and what is no longer – l’exception française – and, like a visit to the Forbidden City in Beijing, conveys a certain emptiness in the vanity of worldly pursuits, echoed in the presence of Napoleon’s gilded throne.
This is a very stimulating exhibition and well worth seeing.
My review of the new MTC play, The Heretic
This week started with an alarmist announcement in Sydney from the Gillard government’s two stooges — Will Steffen and Tim Flannery — on new dangers they have discovered about catastrophic heating in the Western suburbs of Sydney; madness, violence and mayhem. By way of contrast, like summer is to winter, or droughts are to floods, just a few days later I saw The Heretic by award winning British playwright, Richard Bean. [read on...]
A T-SHIRT FOR OUR TIMES
No Socialist paradise here but no disaster, if making good decisions counts
In a long interview with Chris Uhlmann on 7.30, Ken Henry almost admits that there was too much spending and not of a productive type. He stands behind the excuse, “if it’s fiscal stimulus the most important thing is to get the money out the door“. Yeah. don’t worry if it goes up in smoke on pink bats or badly targeted education revolutions.
What a contrast to Sweden when in exactly the same situation. Unlike Australia and the rest of Europe, it decided to radically reduce taxes. Cash handouts were a small part of its strategy. Today, Sweden has no budget deficit and is returning a real surplus. It is among Europe’s fastest growing economiues, with growth heading towards 4 percent, and certainly without the help of a mining boom.
How did it do it? By NOT doing what Gillard did and is still doing.
When elected four years ago, leading a four-party coalition, [Swedish Prime Minister] Fredrik Reinfeldt had a striking slogan. ‘We are the new workers’ party,’ he said, meaning he would cut taxes for those in employment, but not for those on benefits. When faced with protests about how the poorest would be paying a higher marginal tax rate, he appealed to voters’ innate sense of fairness – and resentment at the high level of welfare dependency. At every stage, his ministers would explain the basics of low-tax economics. Cut tax on wages, and you increase the incentive to work. ‘This will increase employment,’ Reinfeldt said. ‘Permanently.’
Not that he was believed – at first, anyway. The party fell 20 points behind in the polls, and braced itself for the ritualistic electoral ejection. It carried on regardless, with tax cuts for cleaners and baby-sitters (most home helpers were paid ‘black’, as the Swedes say, because the tax was so high). Tax on low-paid jobs fell sharpest. Nursing assistants, for example, saw their tax bill drop by a fifth. The aim was to make work compete more aggressively with Sweden’s famously generous welfare state.
Taxes for the rich also came down. Reinfeldt abolished the notorious wealth tax, which took 1.5 per cent a year from any Swede worth over about Skr1.5 million (£125,000). Anders Borg, the finance minister, faced predictable protests about a Bush-style tax cut for the rich. He replied: ‘The big winners are, in the long term, all Swedes, because we must create conditions for companies to match global competition.’ So while the Tories were endorsing Gordon Brown’s plan to increase the tax on the rich, the Swedes were cutting the tax rate – in order to collect more from the well-paid.
“They grew the pie with the mining tax”. Tony Jones
A short exchange between Tony Jones and Judith Sloan on QandA last night was about a fundamentally important economic concept, that of “sharing the pie”.
When an economy is growing and a nation becoming wealthier, the pie grows and there should be more for everyone. When the pie is static and the government takes more of the pie, there is less for everyone.
Jones was reacting to the government’s largesse of taking from the rich — the mining tax — and wantonly splurging it on families to compensate for its costlly carbon tax. For the benefit of the doubt, Jones may have been temporarily confused, but he suggested that this government largesse was an example of the pie getting bigger, rather than a good example of Norman Lindsay’s ”magic pudding”. “That’s not right Tony”, cut in Sloan, and she explained that the government largesse was nothing to do with growing pies.
Tony Jones seemed to be displaying the classic socialist mind: Socialism is good until you run out of other people’s money.
UPDATE
Here is the transcript of the lesson on economics for Tony Jones on national television. The transcript is from 31:10.
SLOAN: There is a really important principle in economics and it is this. You have to create the wealth before you try to redistribute the wealth …
You really have to try and expand the pie … when you talk about egalitarianism, that comes at the expense of shrinking the pie. That’s what’s happened in Europe.
JONES: They just grew the pie with the mining tax.
SLOAN: Well they didn’t. They redistributed the pie, actually.
JONES: They grew the pie with the mining tax, and then they redistributed the income from the mining tax to poorer working families in this budget.
SLOAN: That ‘s not right at all Tony. I mean tax is redistribution. there is no growing the pie. And in due course it may be quite inhibiting of investment and shrink the pie. If there was some magic pudding where you could increase the pie by increasing taxes, that would be a wonderful world, but doesn’t work like that.
APPLAUSE
Clive needs to cool his jets and be open to debate
Clive Hamilton has reared his predictably peevish head over the MTC’s forthcoming production of Heretic. Andrew Bolt takes him to task for his stream of abuse and hypocrisy. This is somehow not surprising for a man who is a left-green professor of public ethics.
Having read this piece of bile disgorging spleen, I take it that Clive is upset. As James Delingpole said on his recent visit to Australian, when you encounter flack like this, you know you are above the target.
Sadly, and ironically however, the most striking impression I got when reading this immature piece is that Clive Hamilton is himself a man in denial. The debate has moved on and his reactions resemble rather more those of a child in tantrum mode because he can’t get his way as he may once have been used to getting.
