Turnbull in a phonebox

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Two moments of non-elite partisans communicating to party elites of the right have seemed most meaningful to me since I last blogged.

First, the moment in the second US Republican debate where Jeb Bush claimed that his brother George W. "kept us safe", to which the wingnut audience at the Reagan Library burst out into unanimous applause. The idiocy of this assertion in the context of 9/11 and dozens of Benghazi-level embassy and consulate attacks is lost on these ideologues in their media bubble of epistemic closure, and the message to GOP elites is to ramp up the crazy because that's what gets the base excited. Thus we will probably get another government shutdown this year, with Congress in chaos and no competent candidate willing to grasp the poisoned gavel of the Speakership to replace the failed John Boehner.

Second, the moment in the most recent Australian Liberal Party conference when Malcolm Turnbull rolled out a canned line that every Liberal leader runs with at such times, to the effect that the Liberal Party is superior to the other side because it doesn't have factions. The attending LNP hoi polloi - some of whom were the factional elites who installed him as Prime Minister in the party room, but most of whom were rank-and-file members aligned with one of the factions - laughed him down with a scornful tone. This gut reaction not only put a lie to Turnbull's bald statement, but signalled that we don't go for that sort of bullshit in this country, not even in right-wing politics.

The upshot of this is that the Republican Party is descending into the murky territory of actually being unfit to govern and an electoral majority of the public realising this truth, whereas the Liberal Party still has a hope of running the public sector without completely buggering it up. We tried the Third Way of Rudd-ism and it was found wanting in terms of implementation, allowing the Utopia-style APS bureaucracy to rise to the level of its incompetence in the absence of firm hands being on the departmental levers. Now we will give Turnbull the wheel and see if his brand of cheerful waffle managerialism masquerading as techno-wonkery can do any better.

Prior to the decisive spill, I had been building a case over the previous year or so about how Scott Morrison would be the next Liberal leader. The Libs decided to go with Turnbull, with Morrison's faction delivering the key swing votes in the party room, which led to the heated Ray Hadley 2GB interview in the days afterwards. It is blindingly obvious that Morrison could have put his hand up to be the champion of the Abetz/Andrews religious nudge faction but demurred, trusting that he will be the next Liberal leader to win an election when Turnbull fails. I won't go so far as to guarantee it, Andrew Elder style, but I agree with Morrison's calculations.

Meanwhile, the Turnbull government is now ensconced, albeit he has been mostly busy launching policies put in place by Abbott and hasn't had time to do much off his own bat. Honeymoon polls have been mostly underwhelming, going as low as 50:50 already without the leader having actually made a contentious decision yet.

I am not sure how Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy figures that Turnbull will shift the party to the right. Colour me skeptical about Turnbull delivering on the promises Abbott abandoned. Turnbull has promised a more consultative PMship with participation from Cabinet - but he stacked Cabinet with younger wets and purged it of Abetz and Andrews. Turnbull may not have a mandate to shift the party to the left either, though, given promises he has made to Morrison's faction and the Nats to uphold key Abbott policies.

I have not seen anything to dissuade me from the notion that Turnbull is as hamstrung on policy as Abbott was. This government has been a lameduck administration from the start, we've just exchanged caretakers. Turnbull doesn't even have any culture wars to wage to distract the Liberal luvvies. If and when he actually starts making any decisions, one of two things will happen. If he moves to the right, watch his polls plummet immediately. If he moves to the left, watch the party room destabilise (and then the polls plummet later).

One foot in the nursing home, the other in his gob

I am still reading a lot of poliblogs in between childrearing, just not posting much. I really should learn how to do shorter posts.

In that vein, I can't help but note how comprehensively stupid this piece is. Steve Kates, the most foolish man in Australia, not only posts complete faff from Ohanion and Cole attacking FDR's role in saving America from the Great Depression, he treats the linked press release as if it is new when it was written more than ten years ago, and the poliblogosphere's absolute smashing of the thing to pieces occurred three years ago when the authors got some undeserved WSJ publicity.

And if you don't like that repudiation, try this much similar C&O article mere days after Obama's inauguration, no doubt intended to scare him off any FDR-like heroics in the face of another Republican-created economic disaster, and compare it to actual reality since its publication in 2009. Wherever austerity has been tried, it has only exacerbated the pain. Wherever stimulus has been applied, it has worked (until, as in Japan recently, sabotaged by further austerity). Austrian economics teaches us nothing about how to solve today's problems. While no one is trying anything like the New Deal these days - more's the pity, because that's a lot of what we need right now - Keynesianism is still the best way to understand and address the situation in which we find ourselves.

It's as if Kates is not actually a professor of economics at RMIT at all, but some emaciated hermit who lives in a deep, dank hole, is fed via a bucket on a rope by Sinclair Davidson and for education is only allowed access to dot matrix printouts of Powerline and Drudge links. He's a cross between a victim of Buffalo Bill and a Japanese holdout. It's the only lucid explanation for his ongoing display of economic Aspberger's syndrome. Nobody can be that clueless.

The abject failure of the Institute of Public Affairs

Following on from Alan Moran's sacking from the Institute of Public Affairs for anti-Islam tweets, John Quiggin sticks the knife in by comparing the IPA to their American counterparts, the Heartland Institute.

Finally, there’s the question of how long the IPA can avoid the fate of Heartland, which has lost most of its corporate sponsors (except for a few diehards from the fossil fuel sector) and is a shell of its former self. the IPA has already gone a fair way down the same track, and is now, in large measure, a private plaything of Gina Rinehart. In return for her bounty, she has demanded the most humiliating obeisances, most notably support for Northern dam projects like the Ord River scheme. Until recently the IPA was a reliable critic of such boondoggles.

Similarly, Andrew Elder details the flimsiness of Dick Warburton's review into the Renewable Energy Target, and how the agenda from the right is to abandon economic rationalism in favour of killing off entrepreneurialism and disruptive innovation of companies like Silex and ARENA, and handing money over to established monopolists.

The government's anti-RET position means that current electricity provider(s) will be able to buy the intellectual and other property rights for the proposed solar facility at a fraction of the cost that it would have been worth as a going concern. This means that the incumbency of existing providers will be maintained without them having to do the hard work and take the risk that Silex/ARENA took, while reaping the rewards properly due to Silex/ARENA. 

Are we starting to see a pattern yet? How about the cost-benefit analysis of the National Broadband Network, yet another rubbish report prepared by expensive external consultants to produce exactly what the government wants to hear: specifically, that the Internet doesn't have exponentially expanding bandwidth demand and Australians aren't going to want any more bandwidth in ten years than they already do now. This is patently stupid, but nothing more than can be expected from the Minister for Ill Communication, Malcolm Turnbull.

David Walker at Club Troppo runs interference for Turnbull, which is understandable because Turnbull pushes all the buttons of a high-level wonk. The Minister sounds like he's well briefed and in command of all the facts; a cursory glance at the Delimiter story stream on Turnbull - culminating in an apology by Renai Lemay for ever thinking Turnbull was on the level - shows that his position is a Potemkin village that only impresses those who don't know the hollowness of the Liberal policy platform. Just as Henry Ergas believes his economics credentials qualify him to blog about politics without justification, David Walker thinks that as a journalist, consultant and policy wonk that he can grok broadband technology just like that, and wave through Turnbull's cunningly constructed consultancy conclusions.

Now, allow me to set out my credentials in this one: I was originally a technology journalist, starting in 1997 on weekly newspapers and then moving to bi-monthlies including Internet World Australia where I covered a lot of ISP and Internet industry stories during the dot com boom. Additionally, I spent a year or two in the mid 2000s doing sales for Neighborhood Cable, so I have some direct knowledge of what regular customers want out of their broadband connections.

Walker's justification for agreeing with Turnbull is that we don't need broadband for anything other than pirating video content.

Trouble is, most of the innovations we have come up with recently don’t use all that much bandwidth. Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram are only medium-bandwidth even at their most intensive. Twitter and smart electricity grids are low-bandwidth. Networked games like Halo 3 use surprisingly little bandwidth too, with local hardware doing most of the work. And beyond a certain point, the speed with which you see Web pages has little to do with bandwidth; it’s mostly about server responsiveness and network latency.
Most projected e-health applications, including your latest x-rays, won’t use that much bandwidth either. Even fairly decent video-conferencing for education and medical consultations and business meetings uses perhaps 2 megabits per second, according to the demand document. To the extent that something is limiting growth in the use of such technologies, that something is generally not bandwidth.
The real policy problem with the NBN is that high-speed broadband just isn’t that much of a revolution. And to justify the cost of universal provision, it needs to be.

There are all sorts of things wrong with this mode of thinking. Correlation does not imply causation; perhaps the applications recently developed are low-bandwidth because they have to deal with crappy networks that don't enable innovation of more bandwidth-heavy content?

The assumptions in the demand document are slanted towards broadcast media. For instance, the 2Mbps quoted for videoconferencing is just for one-on-one calls, yet videoconferencing is made for more than two callers at a time, for collaboration in business and family or party calls in private usage. The one-on-one model is a relic of the broadcast media era, and that's the revolution that the NBN promises: the disruption of the one-to-one or one-to-many modes of communication, and the enabling of many-to-many modes.

With these things, it's always instructive to follow the money. Who stands to lose the most from the rise of the Internet and its disruption of existing businesses? If you look at the bandwidth usage, it's video content that eats up a lot of it. Foxtel is the major provider of paid video content in Australia. News Corp is the entity most at risk if the Internet is used to bypass its paywall to access content-that-wants-to-be-free. (In previous years I would have included Telstra in this part of the rant, though they don't really care as much as they used to about this stuff, since they have started to give up on owning content and focus on getting paid to operate the networks no matter what runs over it.)

I got questioned recently on why I don't join much of the rest of the left in bemoaning the supposed dominance of the IPA, its ubiquity on ABC platforms, its frequent appearances at The Conversation, its infection of Liberal Party processes, etc etc. My contention is that the original aims of the IPA - to be the intellectual arm of the Liberal Party and guide its policy development along ideological lines - have comprehensively failed. These days, as Quiggin rightly notes, the IPA is a cheerleading outfit for Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch and the tobacco lobby, at the expense of any policy credibility they might once have enjoyed. As Elder goes through, the IPA is no longer a defender of entrepreneurialism, but a paid shill of crony capitalists. They actively lobby against Schumpeterian creative destruction, because they are paid by the people whose businesses' destruction would be caused by healthy capitalist competition. They have almost completely abandoned Menzies' founding principles, as evidenced by their recent dabbling with anti-Islam bigotry.

The reason I am ambivalent about this situation - the IPA's continued success of getting their message out to the public, combined with the poisonous nature of that message - is summed up by Harry Clarke in a comment on the Quiggin piece:

The IPA has been spectacularly successful at getting its extremist message across. I congratulate them. The difficulty is that people don’t like their message. I think the great Australian descriptor “ratbag” describes them well. Fundamentalist economics that perverts what economic theory instructs. I agree with you – the CIS relies more on reason.

In the words of John Williamson, Australians revel in our ability to "tell our leaders to go jump in the lake (but we'll never knock Australia, you make no mistake)". Yeah, we're fair dinkum in this country about recognising galahs when we see them. I believe in democracy, and the capability of the Australian public to work out who is on their side. The more the IPA's message is disseminated, the more Australians jeer and laugh at it. I know enough about the IPA to conclude that it is a failure, a folly, a flailing flinger of falderol, a figure of fun... the rest of the nation is just catching up on the news.

By the by, it should be pointed out that Moran's "sacking" from the IPA hasn't stopped him from posting on Catallaxy Files. This suggests a schism developing between John Roskam, still lurking about in the race for preselection for the Victorian seat of Hawthorn being vacated by Ted Baillieu, and Sinclair Davidson, who runs Catallaxy Files and has done nothing to stop its strong shift to becoming a secular freak show of anti-Islamic hatred, to the extent where Davidson ran a guest post this week tying a possible Australian conspiracy by public servants around a Rotherham-style Muslim child sex ring to the abandonment of the repeal push for s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The cognitive dissonance of holding the belief that the appalling Rotherham case presages a global epidemic of Muslim-on-white-teen rape after having defended the Catholic Church against allegations of a global epidemic of organised Catholic-priest-on-white-teen rape does not seem to bother anyone there. It is at the point right now where many Cat commenters would be welcome to speak at a Catch The Fire Ministries event, since their ideologies are functionally identical. With the abandonment of ideological principle, the IPA and its blog Catallaxy Files don't have much left to talk about, so they are in danger of descent into contagious conservative fear.

Paying politicians not to be corrupt

A very silly piece today by Sinclair Davidson - during day 2 of the apparent ban at Catallaxy Files on talking about the sacking of Alan Moran from the Institute of Public Affairs - about campaign finance. His contention is that public funding of politicians is a "great threat to democracy" because regulation to "protect" voters from political corruption ends up maintaining privileges of the elites.

Let us apply this same thinking to Professor Davidson's own employment, since politicians and economists are merely two similar aspects of public service. Why should the public fund his position at RMIT, or that of Steve Kates, subtly indoctrinating economics students into their worldview of classical economics? The "lurks and perks of office" - in this case being the inculcation of a generation of economists to applying neo-liberal ideology which eventually results in lower taxes for supporters of libertarianism and right-wing thought in general - should be enough to fund Davidson and Kates through private means. If Sinclair believes in this so much, he should donate his wages from his professorship back to the state as a matter of principle, and draw his wage from Bond University or some other private educational institution where he is not compromised by hypocrisy.

No, of course I am being equally silly. Prof Davidson provides a valuable service to his students and to the community at large (not sure about Kates; evidence of the quality of his written rhetoric suggests he would be a poor lecturer). Sinclair's work for RMIT University does not actually constitute straight indoctrination to the ideology of Mises or Rothbard, since students can presumably follow Keynesianism in his subjects and still pass if they show enough skill and knowledge. There would be checks and balances put in place by public-funded institutions to curb such subversion of his role.

Equally, politicians who are funded by the public are also bound by conventions and regulations from not being corrupt, or corrupting others, in the course of fulfilling their elected obligations. Adherence to those societal norms is the main thing separating humans from animals. The public pay politicians to be subservient to them. Davidson's wish is that the pollies would dance to the tunes of those private citizens who paid them - or, as is often the case in America, restrict entry to the ranks of elected politicians to those who can afford to tip in millions of their own dollars.

I am open to hearing arguments against the current actions by the Greens, Labor and the Liberals to shut out other minor parties. Abolition of public campaign finance, though, is yet another one of those completely unworkable and untenable IPA wishes which never survive any sort of scrutiny. The uselessness of their platform is why they will never gain much in the way of real power in this country, no matter which politician is in office. The more a politician tries to fly their thought balloons, the more air is let out of the wingnut zeppelin.

Alan Moran sacked from IPA over anti-Islam tweets

Wow, what a bombshell for the right. The Australian reports that Alan Moran has been sacked as fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs:

Dr Moran recently engaged with left-wing activists on the issue of Islam and the sexual assault investigation into Labor leader Bill Shorten, which was dropped because of a lack of evidence. On August 17, Dr Moran accused federal Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek of backing the investigation into Mr Shorten for reasons of ambition. “Tanya Plibersek backs rape probe into unnamed senior Labor figure. Can only be ‘cus he is a rival for leadership?’’ Dr Moran tweeted. He sparked outrage when he tweeted this month: “Is there ever anything but evil coming from Islam?’’
IPA chief John Roskam confirmed that Dr Moran had left the IPA. Dr Moran told The Australian there had been concerns about his social media activity.

Catallaxy Files, the unofficial blog of the IPA, has been full of anti-Islamic fervour recently, as in this thread on the James Foley beheading. The usual suspects in the comments at the Cat routinely ascribe all sorts of hellish agency on every single member of the Islamic religion, without any guidance towards sanity by the lurking IPA reps. Yet, if the Oz is to be believed, the red meat that Steve Kates et al have been throwing to the Cats is actually against the IPA's financial interests:

It is understood there was particular concern about Dr Moran’s position on Islam, given the IPA receives donations from some ­Islamic individuals and seeks to engage with moderate elements of the Muslim community.

This is an explosive claim. This is exactly what Sinclair Davidson has been thrashing the Liberal Party about over their backdown on s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act: influence from the Islamic lobby undercutting right wing principles. Just as with s18C, it appears moderate Australian Muslims are having a direct effect on the right if they really are the reason why Moran has been boned.

The right have some questions to answer. Is this democratic centrism in action, as I said about the s18C backdown, or is the IPA really so cravenly mercenary that they will don burkas and recite the Quran if they get paid for it? How do the remaining IPA employees reconcile continued opposition to s18C with their newfound love for Muslim mullah moolah? Is this a new power coupling between Christian religious fundamentalist conservatism and Islamic religious fundamentalist conservatism in Australia, or is it just a case of filthy lucre? And do the Muslim donors also run tobacco companies?

Dr Moran has spent too much time among the reprobates and racists at Catallaxy Files. It is not the done thing to speak like them in public. This is what happens when you act like a Cat poster in polite society: the flecks of spittle tend to set the hoi polloi offside. The IPA's strategy has been to operate the Cat as a zoo, where the denizens are fed chunks of raw flesh to fight over while standing on dirt and grass roots, while the IPA employees wear nice suits to stroll carpets and represent their antediluvian interests on the ABC and in government with more acceptable language. Moran forgot that zookeepers shouldn't get in the cage and engage their primal screams.

UPDATE: I missed this on the weekend but this isn't the first IPA bod to be sacked over social media shenanigans recently. Aaron Lane was sacked from running as a Liberal candidate for the upper house in western Victoria for, you guessed it, offensive tweets. And for those of you out there who like to connect dots, IPA boss John Roskam is considering running for the Libs to replace Ted Baillieu in his safe Victorian seat. Is it any wonder that the IPA is now acting just like the Liberal Party in appeasing appealing to Muslim lobbyists? Still no mention of this shameful shift to centrism on the Cat.

Like a Reagan cowboy

After the recent shooting down of passenger flight MH17 with around 300 dead by Ukrainian separatists and/or the Russian military, Sinclair Davidson posts Ronald Reagan's speech on passenger flight KAL 007 after it was shot down by the USSR military in 1983, later calling it "forceful and inspiring". This is an echo of similar posts at Hot Air, RedState and Fox News comparing Reagan's strong words with the cautious early reaction of Barack Obama, which already has the tabloids incensed.

As usual, the right is ignoring the facts in favour of a partisan narrative. As Crooks & Liars details and the Monkey Cage blog at the WaPo annotates, Reagan's reaction was rated at the time by the right wing media as inadequate and weak, gadding about on horseback on vacation in Hawaii for days while the bodies of the American victims were still warm. In fact, Reagan eventually did nothing except continue his previous policy of economic opposition to the USSR without direct military engagement, which is pretty much what Obama has been doing against Russia in the wake of Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea.

It is refreshing to see such a debate go on without reference to domino theory, which has been thoroughly discredited since it failed to predict the encroachment of communism in the 1980s. There has also been a lot of sighing from the American left about the preponderance of Dubbya-era reprobates in the media talking up re-engagement in Iraq and/or the Crimea. I am as sanguine about that as I am about the IPA's ubiquity on the ABC: these are free countries, they're allowed to have a voice, and we're allowed to laugh at them.

Reagan may have been a lot of things, but one thing he was right about was how to fight an empire: economically, with any military troops on the ground to be confined to smaller proxy battlegrounds. Obama learned that lesson, and he's already putting the Reagan playbook into practice by squeezing Putin with sanctions, using the tragedy to further pressure the EU to join the US in applying sanctions. As is only proper.

Texas sharpshooters seek plain packaging's smoking gun

The far right is still busy employing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy to attack plain packaging, in the face of all evidence against their arguments. So far, we have seen a succession of attempts which have all been discredited in sequence.

• Claim: Tobacco usage increased after plain packaging went into effect. Wrong; according to the industry itself the market shrank by 2 to 3 per cent in the first six months.
• Claim: Tobacco usage is actually up because the ABS chain volume figures are affected by price changes and there is a substitution effect from smokers shifting to cheaper brands. Wrong; the ABS has confirmed that chain volume is adjusted to take into account the change in mix of price points.
• Claim: Tobacco usage doesn't respond to increased regulation anyway. Wrong; it began sliding as soon as restrictions were imposed starting in the mid-1970s.
• Claim: Tobacco imports are up, surely that must reflect consumption. Wrong; those numbers were caused by the last local tobacco manufacturer shutting its doors.

In addition to those discredited lines of inquiry, there are a number of other claims which are so ridiculous as to not even require refutation, such as that ABS figures can't be relied upon because they are subject to revision, or numerous cases of blatant misreading of data.

The latest bullet hole from these scattershot scatterbrains is the claim that smokers are flocking to the illicit tobacco trade to get their fix. Thus, in the comments of my last piece I had one of the Cat denizens (I'm guessing it's Aristogeiton) post a bunch of links to reports on the illicit tobacco industry in other countries.

"After all, if they weren't working to change behaviour, why is there such a kerfuffle about it from the tobacco companies?"

Why do you think? Because people are buying cheaper brands, because illegal tobacco sales are increasing, they are losing market share and profits.

Unfortunately, our anonymous friend can post all the links he likes to studies of the illegal tobacco trade in other countries, but none of it relates to the point that he is trying to make: that plain packaging causes Australian smokers to move their consumption to "chop-chop". There just isn't any hard data on that.

For instance, Sinclair Davidson linked a study by his RMIT colleagues Lisa Farrell and Tim Fry, which is viewable free of charge at this link. Farrell and Fry use what they call "novel survey data" to claim that tobacco users are price sensitive enough to change to chop-chop when the price of legal tobacco is 2.5 times the cost.

The data were collected by telephone survey during the period March to July 2007; respondents were aged 18 and over and self-identified as regular tobacco smokers. They were asked whether they had ever smoked chop-chop and were presented with a set of questions about its usage, as well as detailed questions relating to their health status and licit tobacco consumption. In total 1,621 interviews were conducted, with a response rate of 63 percent. At the time of the survey, six percent of smokers participated in the illicit market. Basic descriptive statistics tell us that 58 percent of smokers had seen or heard of unbranded illicit tobacco and, of those who reported awareness, 59 percent claimed to have smoked it. These findings are broadly consistent with those of the National Drug Strategy Household Survey... 

The sample was of a mere 89 smokers, who were already qualified as having moved to chop-chop. This is strike one against the survey, since its data set was taken not from the 100% of smokers but the 6% of chop-chop users. Strike two is that they include some irrelevant obiter dicta railing against plain packaging, when the survey is about price points and not branding issues - they quote British American Tobacco as saying their reaction to plain packaging would be price slashing, but that's their commercial decision and not an actual reason to fail to regulate the industry. Strike three is that this survey was done in 2007 but the study was published in 2011 when the plain packaging laws were debated and passed. This is a deeply flawed piece of work.

If that's the best they can do locally, there's not much evidence on their side.

Cigghazi descends into farce

Having been completely undermined by the facts on tobacco sales under plain packaging, there is no fuel left to fire the juggernaut of wingnut outrage. What was Sinclair Davidson's next salvo? Evidently to get high and write some rubbish about bank branding. Let's go through the craziness in full.

The push for plain packaging - and intellectual property expropriation - began as a consumer awareness campaign. So, for example, consumers might think that ‘Lights’ weren't as unhealthy as ‘regular’ cigarettes.

That's the first mistake. The push for plain packaging by government in Australia is a continuation of nudge policies started in 1973 with health warnings on packs. "Light" cigarettes were a branding response by the cigarette manufacturers in the 1950s to the first wave of research linking tobacco tar to cancer. One is a public policy and the other is a private commercial decision - the latter was a failed attempt to avoid the former. Conflating the two is erroneous.

Maybe they were confused. Some of my colleagues who did research into chop-chop discovered that users thought it was healthier than purchased tobacco because chop-chop was organic.

If it was the case that there was such consumer ignorance out there, the only solution is more education.

The point being that branding confuses consumers – and the government, we are reliably informed, as a role to play in ensuring that consumers don’t get confused.

If a private company is deliberately confusing the public with a term like "light" cigarettes - which still kill you over time, just slightly less quickly - then yes, government does have a role to play to stop such irresponsible fooling of the public.

So where is this leading? Well last week an article in the AFR caught my eye.

Banks’ brands misleading public…In its submission to the Murray inquiry, COBA said the position of the major banks was “now so dominant that the majors frame competition in banking as something that occurs only between themselves and within their multiple brands”.It cited independent research from D&M Research showing 50 per cent of customers were unaware of the major banks’ ownership of smaller “competitors” and 80 per cent were unaware that the banks own certain home lenders. “This consumer research strongly ­suggests major banks are getting away with portraying their sub-brands as independent competitors,” COBA said.

There is an on-going assault on branding and advertising that threatens all business. Having succeeded in stigmatising one industry and its consumers, the progressive left are now targeting other industries.

What? Where did that conclusion come from? If consumers are being duped into thinking competition exists where there is none, then yes government has a role to play there too. Companies don't have carte blanche to say whatever they like, especially in the subcategory of commercial speech. This is not a free speech issue, anyway. Consumer protections trump commercial concerns in a democracy.

An industry which kills most of its users and seeks to hide the evidence over decades using front organisations like the IPA to argue their case absolutely deserves what it has copped over the last 40 years from the Australian government. Another industry which seeks to hide its lack of competition also deserves to have the disinfectant light of truth shone on its dirty practices.

It's funny how the right, which nominally is supposed to stand up for the individual, seems so often to stand on the side of the corporation against the individual.

Smoke lobby should be ashen-faced

Plain packaging is only the latest in a series of "nanny state" measures started in 1973 to curb the prevalence of tobacco smoking. The Department of Health today put out a fact sheet to celebrate the success of this bipartisan policy - the star of which is the above graph - which comprehensively debunks the ridiculous stance of tobacco denialism which is splashed across the Australian newspaper today.

The raft of articles, attacking Stephen Koukoulas as he details here, is much the same sort of group bullying tactics as the Murdoch press used against Margaret Simons for her comments regarding the Finkelstein inquiry into the media in 2012. In both cases, the attacks include an accusation that the target failed to disclose their previous work for ALP in government - attacks that are for a large part made by those who fail to similarly disclose their affiliations with the Liberal Party. Sinclair Davidson joins in the Koukpile, which is de rigueur for mavens of the Institute of Public Affairs who have a history of funding by Big Tobacco.

Media Watch ran the theory on Monday that the real agenda from the tobacco lobby was not in Australia, where the battle has been lost, but in Britain and Ireland where plain packaging is still being debated. This argument is quoted from Mike Daube, who makes a habit of trolling Big Tobacco for justice.

I have a lot of time for News Corp Australia, and many people within it. They employ a lot of good people who do fine work on a daily basis, the nitty gritty of journalism which is a thankless and low-margin task. I get that the Australian prides itself on being a campaigning paper, and there is nothing wrong with that in principle. In practice, however, the mob mentality that is unleashed when people like Simons and Koukoulas are singled out for rough treatment undermines the credibility of not only News but all of journalism, and contributes to the distinct unpopularity of the journalism profession in the minds of a public who is largely ignored at times like this.

If you're going to campaign, do it on behalf of your readers please, not corporate interests.

UPDATE: Sinclair responds to the above graph:

There is a long-term downward trend in tobacco usage in Australia. We all know and understand this to be the case. But look at the impact policy has had on usage. Nothing. The downward trend doesn't seem to respond much to ever increasing regulation.

This is rank stupidity in the form of a logical fallacy, deliberately ignoring cause and effect. I have taken the liberty of preparing a graph from the ABS figures since 1959 on chain trend per capita in dollar terms, along with labels as to pre-1990 policy changes.

For Sinclair to say that policy has had no impact on usage is ludicrous. Usage had been flat for more than a decade before the policy changed, and usage changed with it.

Zombie Reaganomics at the Cat

Regular Catallaxy Files commenter Fisky - a combative chap who is nonetheless prone to sudden brain farts like his panicked Malcolm Turnbull spruik - posts today in praise of Reagan and in criticism of Thatcher, re their economic legacies.

The politics of austerity, where conservative governments risk short-to-medium term recessions in order to clean up the fiscal mess of their Left-wing predecessors, should be abandoned. Labor never take responsibility for their irresponsible spending and it is maddening that the Liberals always get suckered into bearing the political costs of being the “mean party”, the tax-hikers and the penny-pinchers. What is needed instead is an unapologetically belt-loosening pro-growth agenda of the kind that carried Reagan to the biggest electoral landslide since WWII, the supply-side economic policies to match, and a simple slogan to knit the whole thing together – such as “Legalise Growth!” or, better still, a resounding “No to Austerity!”

Translated, Fisky is calling for deficits to blow out like they did under Reagan, fuelled in an engineered bubble of Keynesian pump priming to magic up jobs in the public sector regardless of cost benefit analyses, and "worry about fiscal retrenchment later". US government debt as a share of GDP increased from 26.2% in 1980 to 40.9% in 1988, with deficits of a proportional size not seen since WW2.  In Reagan's case, the deficit paid for military build up that did very little for the regular domestic economy. In the case of Australia, where public-debt-to-GDP is still below 15%... well, there are plans for a true NBN lying around, but maybe Fisky wants to cover the Arafura Sea with brand new additions to the OPSOB fleet to enforce Rudd's wildly successful PNG solution?

Joe Hockey is already doing what Fisky wants (and what Reagan did) on the spending side as part of the Australian bipartisan commitment to Keynesianism. Many, many billions of dollars are being poured into roads and medical research, not to mention many hundreds of millions for fighter planes. Hockey maintains some level of decorum on the revenue side, though, and he's not likely to make the same mistakes that Reagan did in kickstarting a generational change in inequality by cutting taxes on those who can most afford it. Hockey will wait it out for bracket creep to inexorably shore up the structural revenue shortfall that happened under Labor, as a responsible Treasurer should.

Fisky is the sort of cheerfully dumb character whom it would be fun to have a beer with and talk a load of old toot, but you'd be seriously worried if he came home with your daughter. Hilarious that he is what passes for an intellectual over at the Cat, because the usual suspects in the comments over there don't even twig that he's calling for a Keynesian spending blowout and have been cheering loudly for leftist policies that even Krugman would think fiscally irresponsible.

If there's any inheritor of the Reagan legacy in Australian federal politics at the moment, it seems to be Clive Palmer with his populist, responsibility-free calls for lower taxes and higher spending. Perhaps Fisky has jumped ship yet again?

Randsformers versus Establicons

It seems everybody hates Tony Abbott these days... well, almost everybody. Mike Seccombe makes the case in the Saturday Paper for the Institute of Public Affairs being Abbott's only friend, with some quotes from the IPA's John Roskam. Yet Seccombe's argument falls down at the first hurdle, as he has to acknowledge that Abbott has not been doing the IPA's bidding on (to them) key policies like repeal of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The repeal of section 18C of the RDA became number four on the IPA’s policy wish list, and before you knew it, Attorney-General George Brandis had personally drafted changes to protect, as he memorably put it, the right to be a bigot. Alas, the public debate has run overwhelmingly against them. Roskam fears “we’ll lose that one”.

Similarly, Quadrant calls Abbott and Brandis cowards and quislings for failing to stand up for the rights of old white guys like Andrew Bolt to be racist. The paleoconservatives at the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, who at least are open and honest about their nationalist strain of white power politics, characterise this as "establicons" turning away from the Coalition.

Meanwhile, the Ayn Rand acolytes of the libertarian movement are in even more disarray. David Leyonhjelm got smashed from pillar to post on a recent proposal to sell Australian citizenship for $50,000 a pop by the Establicons, with the Randsformers powerless to defend the silliness of the LDP's egghead Pollyannaism. Open the front door, says David? Shut the front door, say the Cat's resident tories.

So, libertarians hate him for failing to defend freedom or lower taxes, while conservatives hate him for reindexing pensions and disrespecting diggers... is there anyone left on Tony Abbott's side? One has to turn to the News Limited papers to find them - some of whom are connected to the IPA, to be sure. Murdoch's continued support is not about ideology, though, but about media ownership laws. As Jason Clare said yesterday:

“Media reform is a well-trodden minefield and Malcolm Turnbull is welcome to it.”

Turnbull can't even have lunch without causing a national incident, so if Murdoch thinks the Liberals are going to be able to finesse a bill through the Senate past Clive Palmer to enable him to take over the Ten Network for which he has been angling for years, he's going to be sorely disappointed.

Democratic centrism in action

So George Brandis is allegedly going to water down the promised nobbling of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, after pressure from Liberal MPs sitting in traditional Labor seats trumped the whining of Andrew Bolt:

The Attorney-General was forced by the cabinet in March to soften his original plans amid a welter of protest from Coalition MPs in marginal electorates, some of whom represent large ethnic communities.

It sounds like nothing will happen at least until the budget falderol is resolved, and maybe not even then. Clive Palmer hasn't announced which way his party would vote, but it would be very easy for him to side with the little guy (e.g. the Jewish lobby) as part of his pants-seat-flying platform of populist opportunism.

The tears of the wingnuts on this are delightful. The IPA has no meaningful constituency, as such, whereas ethnic communities are well represented at grassroots level. I would imagine a lot of those marginal seats are in suburban Sydney where there are geographically dense enclaves of ethnic populations - Chinese, Jewish, Vietnamese, Lebanese et cetera - who would all be telling their newly minted MPs that s18C protects them from the depredations of white wingnut wannabe wideboys. The latter demographic, tiny as it is, is well represented at Catallaxy where they are getting to that endlessly enjoyable stage (for me) of morose nihilism. I just love it when they realise, periodically, that all hope is lost and the world won't conform to their wacky internal realities.

Commenter Viva sums up the cognitive dissonance of wingnuttery:

You won’t cut the guy any slack even though he has to operate in an environment which has been totally unforgiving from the get go. You refuse to even consider the problems associated with culture change and the need to compromise and take a longer view. Your prescriptions must be followed to the letter right here, right now. The world just doesn’t work like that. You are surely all old and enough and ugly enough to have learnt that by now. Why haven’t you?

This is the sort of thing you would never see in America these days, with the shocking gerrymander in place for Congress ensuring very few representatives are from ethnically or demographically diverse electorates. Such pressure from the grass roots on marginal MPs is a triumph for the Australian Electoral Commission and the system which empowers it to ensure diversity in electoral zoning.

The Green & Gold Lantern Theory of the Prime Ministership

Ezra Klein details the Green Lantern Theory of the American presidency, something which the US Left uses constantly to bash Barack Obama. In short, the theory is that even though the US Constitution built in all sorts of safeguards against executive power including vetoes all over the place, filibusters, congressional conventions and other rules to stop the President shooting lightning bolts from his fingertips... if the President just closed his eyes and pointed his superhero equipment at the baddies they would be vanquished and all of the comic book theorists' pet policies would be enacted by magical Marvel fiat. Thus you have wailing like this Jesse Eisinger piece, attacking Obama from the left for not passing financial industry reform laws, as if that was going to be possible via a click of the fingers.

In Australia, the talk is similar when the Prime Minister can't get his agenda implemented, but mostly we talk about a democratic "mandate". For instance, Alan Moran has a whinge today about Tony Abbott's failure to bone the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and other green instruments of the Gillard administration, which were established through acts of Parliament and would require the consent of either the Greens or Clive Palmer for repeal bills to pass the Senate. His view is that the green industry has "sandbagged" the CEFC and other encouragers of environmental investments which the right dismisses as "green hedge funds". The comments are filled with utter stupidity, ranging from calls for Cyprus-style bank account confiscation to Thailand-style martial law.

If Tony Abbott has a mandate, it is to implement Labor's policies, at least for this term. That is the corner he boxed himself into by promising not to cut most of the Labor spending areas. He will have to deal with Palmer as the founding fathers intended back in 1901. There are good reasons why America, England and Australia have safeguards in their constitutions to give competing mandates to politicians in different chambers, and bestow veto powers upon them. The end result should be a centrist compromise, if both sides are willing to make concessions. This is not Russia where you can send Clive to the gulag, much as the right might wish. Abbott is not a superhero, and nor is he a supervillain. He will have to find common ground with at least one other member of humanity on this one.

Sinclair Davidson, professional kurdaitcha man

RMIT economics professor Sinclair Davidson got his head on 7.30 the other night, attacking the government from the right on its debt levy.

SINCLAIR DAVIDSON, ECONOMICS PROF., RMIT: My view is very similar to Milton Friedman's dictum that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. So I think this temporary program, this temporary tax is going to be with us for quite some time.
[...]
SINCLAIR DAVIDSON: Without a doubt in my mind whatsoever, this is a broken promise. Mr Abbott promised before the election, he gave absolute assurances, that the tax burden would be lower under a Coalition Government than it was under the Labor Government.
This is his moment that Ms Gillard had when she stared down the camera and said, "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead." This is exactly what Mr Abbott is doing.
Ms Gillard never survived from that moment and I think Mr Abbott faces that same problem. Politically it is a disaster for him.
[...]
SINCLAIR DAVIDSON: Politicians, who are the people who got us into this budget problem in the first place, should have the kind of incentives to get us out of this problem.
And, for example, you could have a rule whereby while the budget is in deficit that their salaries get cut by 50 per cent and they remain at that level until the budget is back into surplus.
SABRA LANE: In this season of speculation, that's one idea that can safely be ruled out.
SARAH FERGUSON: Sabra Lane reporting.

The first thing that strikes me in what he says is that there is not much economics content, an affliction that also cruels the works of Henry Ergas in The Australian, a fellow Catallaxian. For a bunch of economists, the Australo-Austrian School, or whatever they call themselves, seem to spend a lot of time talking politics and not enough talking straight economics. Perhaps that is because, as Steve from Brisbane details, when their minds do turn to economics they struggle to mount a solid argument.

Sinclair has been running a series of posts on Catallaxy Files running much the same line, similar to the series he ran after the carbon tax was introduced by Gillard Labor in July 2012 and drawing a direct connection between the two issues. If he wants kudos for messaging independence from the Liberal Party, here you go: let it be known that I have awarded you One Kudos Point.

Of course the game's made up and the points don't matter... the points are like Catallaxy Files itself. They talk a lot over there about useful idiots, a phrase popularised in wingnut circles by Ludwig von Mises to describe liberals who ran interference for Lenin and Stalin - but Sinclair is just as useful to Abbott right now as "proof" of the government's centrism. As long as we can still see the scary silhouettes of Davidson and Ergas through the Overton Window, it's in the right spot for a conservative party. Libertarians are the mystical boogeymen used by conservatives to scare liberals into compliance. Does Sinclair know that this is what he is doing on behalf of the centre right, or does he really believe in the extreme silliness he retails?

Speaking of magical thinking, the particularly stupid elements of the right have been openly hoping that the debt levy is some sort of ruse, a false flag operation which will be revealed on budget night to have been just a joke guys, had you going there, sucked you all in didn't I eh? Fairfax's Paul Sheehan has been (indirectly) fanning these flames with an unsourced and uncorroborated assertion on Twitter that the debt levy would be boned. He also pinned the lead balloon on Joe Hockey, setting up a potential fall guy if his prediction does come true but somehow figuring that Hockey will come out smelling like roses.

#auspol If Abbott was slashed by his own Gillard Moment "There will be no new taxes", who benefits most? The man who floated it, Joe Hockey
— Paul Sheehan (@Paul_Sheehan_) May 7, 2014

If this was Labor in government, the wolfpack in Canberra would already be barking for for a spill, Sky News and ABCNews24 would be on it round the clock with journo jerks circling each other for the scoop. But it's the Liberals, who get off scot free and leave Scott (Morrison) free to accumulate backroom numbers without significant scrutiny.

UPDATE: I note that Sheehan has deleted the above tweet implicating Hockey, but not the original one predicting that the debt levy would not proceed. Everyone else in the media is assuming it will go ahead.

Steve Kates whistles, cats go feral

I am not going to make a habit of dissecting RMIT economist Steve Kates' posts at Catallaxy Files here at LD because he doesn't deserve the attention, but occasionally he surprises me by pushing the boundaries of brainlessness beyond what I thought he could get away with. Today's Kates post on the Ukraine situation which leads with the theory that the President of the USA hates America plumbs remarkable depths of idiocy.

It is also a signature example of a Cat OP cat-whistling hard and the strays coming a-gamboling with slobber drooling from their lolling maws. So far in the comments, there have been positive references to:

• the theory that this is all a ploy to deliver Israel to the PLO, or something;
• John Titor, the fake time traveller from 2036 whose predictions included the US being in a civil war right now that ends with three billion dead;
• Aleksandr Dugin, whose theory published at National Review is that Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler complete with a love of mysticism and a belief that Atlantis was not only real but influences world events to this day;
• Angelo Codevilla, a neo-Machiavellian super hawk who seems to be auditioning to be Kissinger Mk II in a Palin administration;
• investment advice from troll JC on what commodities to go long on to take advantage of the situation;
• a drive-by troll calling himself LABCR-TV who runs the line that Obama is actually a puppet of unnamed shadowy rich people;
• CL saying the stupidest extremist thing he can think of and claiming it is God's honest truth, which he does constantly in every Cat thread.

When even self-labeled imperialist Mk50 is "bemused", things must be getting amazingly dumb. (I dislike the word "derpy", which some would use here - sounds too much like it's making fun of the disabled.)  I like the Cat best when it's getting maudlin and introspective, not this distasteful freak show. DrBeauGan makes me smile at the end of a defeatist rant about how we're all rooned already:

All we have is a bunch of old farts moaning about it.

Quite.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings

From candy in the comments in a recent Open Thread at Catallaxy Files, in the face of an onslaught of support from the wingnut denizens for Scott Morrison to dethrone Tony Abbott:

So, we’ll have an overnight coup, because the polls have gone down a bit, where Tony Abbott is stabbed in the back and Mr Morrison put in as PM, but the electorate doesn’t like this kind of shenanigans with the PM they voted for, and the LNP suffers. Eventually they are voted out because of instability and poor management, even though Tony Abbott makes a comeback, but it’s all too late. And the ALP brings back some socialism for another 6 years.
Is that what you mean?

An excellent point candy makes there. In this scenario being cooked up by the crazies on the lunar right, Morrison is to Abbott as Gillard was to Rudd. There is no difference, it's exactly the same thing they cried blue murder about from opposition not too long ago. Abbott's government has lost its way, and the Cat is full of faceless men wielding long knives, suffering from Abbott Disappointment Syndrome.

The current surge of desire among the conservative base for Morrison, like the cat in South Park who gets aroused watching lions mate, is nothing more than submissives getting excited by someone acting dominant, as in yesterday's televised exchanges in Senate committee between Morrison and Sarah Hanson-Young et al. Of course, the Cat inmates are attacking SHY in the most sexist language they can think of, because they'd rather it was them that Morrison was acting all alpha and handsome at.

BTW, candy is one of the more interesting characters at Catallaxy Files. It's an open question as to whether she's real or a sock puppet, as she comes across as a caricature of a doctor's wife. Her careful prose combines bland motherhood statements with incisive commentary, and she's treated by others as if she's genuine. Can such a person exist in reality, or is the account a fake to try to broaden the turf of the Cat with a bit of plastic? The mystery continues.

UPDATE: in further Cat own-petard-hoisting news, usual suspect Tom is now predicting Bill Glasson to win Griffith, dismissing the prohibitively long odds the bookies are giving him based on nothing more than poll truther feelpinions. This, after the Cat spent months supporting the bookies on their Abbott odds until the cows came home.

Stagflation: hothouse of hype inflation

Further to the stagflation scare, David Bassanese of the Fin has waved his wand of conjuration, an indiscretion for which Stephen Koukoulas has threatened excommunication from the guild of economist wizards.

Those who are predicting stagflation hope to win the same argument that Milton Friedman won against the Keynesians over the 1960-70s stagflation episode, as John Quiggin notes in passing. However, that episode coincided with a savage supply shock in the form of oil crises. The current situation is quite the opposite: the US is now a net exporter of oil due to the shale oil boom, while Australia is tipped to be the next big beneficiary of this phenomenon, if only it can rid itself of agrarian socialists who would rather farm arable land than drill under it.

As the Kouk pointed out yesterday in the middle of his sugar rush from the latest inflation figures - headline figure well within the RBA-favoured band of 2-3% but the second half of 2013 running at an annualised 4% - there is all the room in the world for the RBA to lift rates and cool down the overheated sectors of the Australian economy.

Speaking as someone who just shouldered not one but two mortgages at the same time, and having gone through a year-long process of finding, bidding for and buying a new house, I can vouch for the fact that the real estate agents on the ground have been pushing low interest rates like Rob Ford's crack dealer pushes crack to Rob Ford. Having watched it closely for more than a year, it does not surprise me at all that the housing market is growing at double digit rates. 12 months ago I was watching Elwood as a target suburb but this time last year every house went up by about quarter of a million dollars, as prices there started equalising with neighbouring St Kilda and Brighton. Similarly, this summer I looked hard at Newport which bordered Williamstown but was relatively sanely priced... until I attended an auction where the house went for $126,000 over the listed maximum, as part of a recordsetting day where much the same effect happened overnight in Newport as had occurred in Elwood.

Far from a stagflation scenario, the current situation is merely a normal overheating from a strongly performing economy, for which Glenn Stevens knows exactly the levers to pull and can pull them without fear or favour. Joe Hockey might squeal, and no doubt Bill Shorten will make some hay about interest rates being at their lowest under Labor, in the face of John Howard's famous claim to the contrary, but it's standard operating procedure for a reserve bank in current conditions. The only reason for GDP growth stagnation would be if the federal government went on an APS pogrom for ideological reasons, as Campbell Newman did recently by slashing public servant numbers in Queensland causing a near-recession in that state. Hmm, what are the chances of that...

On trolling and Catallaxy Files

Re my last post on my stoush with Sinclair Davidson over his stagflation call of 2011, Sinc has now decided to permanently ban me from the Catallaxy Files blog. His stated reasoning follows:

So yesterday I placed m0nty in auto-moderation so he couldn't continue to derail an otherwise interesting thread while I was out and about. During that time he posted this:

... where I spend a bit of time trolling the various Christianists, libertarians and other wingnut denizens. While admittedly I get away with a lot ...

making it clear that he doesn’t come here to argue and/or debate but rather simply to troll and derail threads. I can think of no good reason why someone who has no intention of making any sort of useful contribution should participate in our discussions. As such I have moved him from auto-moderation to the banned list.
No doubt like others (Bird, Homer and TonyN) he will continue to follow the threads but he will only be able to participate in discussions by writing at his own blog.

Of course Sinc has the right to ban me, the Cat is a private blog. This is not a freedom of speech issue, since I am perfectly free to post here and elsewhere. I ban people from my own site on a regular basis when they are consistently anti-social.

Where I will push back, however, is this notion he is pushing that the reasoning behind the ban is purely because he does not want trolls at the Cat, due to some noble goal of engendering useful discussion. The Cat is full of trolls! The Cat has a page about trolls! It states:

It all boils down to this: every so often you have to shoot a troll, the better to encourage the others. It’s fun!

Sinclair banned me not for some higher motivation, but purely because I had him by the short and curlies on his stupid stagflation call. I could call him names over this, but I'm more interested in the consequences of his actions on the Cat. The effect of his policy will be that the remaining trolls on his site will all be on his side, all agreeing with each other, in a boring echo chamber. I had thought the Cat was a more interesting site than that.

The last word belongs to Steve from Brisbane:

Freshwater economics gone stagnant

RMIT economics professor Sinclair Davidson runs the blog Catallaxy Files - self-styled as "Australia's leading libertarian and centre-right blog" - where I spend a bit of time trolling the various Christianists, libertarians and other wingnut denizens. While admittedly I get away with a lot, I am currently in moderation over there for taking up an old battle with him. I am not so much posting this entry to whinge, but to set it all down somewhere while I'm remembering, and for future reference once this topic inevitably resurfaces.

In 2011, Sinclair posted an article at The Drum entitled 'Stagflation' looms for Australia's economy predicting a rise in inflation to dangerous levels concurrent with a precipitous stall in growth, with an attendant Cat thread and then a follow-up thread a fortnight later (presenting a Zero Hedge graph of questionable construction).

Since that point, and contrary to Sinclair's predictions, growth in Australia has recovered to historical trend levels, while inflation has plumbed new depths - the latter so much so that there is now talk of deflation, which occasioned not just one Deflation risk thread on the Cat but a sequel as well. As is my wont, I immediately waded into Sinclair in the comments with hard economic numbers, plus a reference to Art Laffer's recent capitulation in the face of economic data which refuted his previous pronouncements on inflation. By the time the sequel thread came around the stoush was in full session, leading to the moderation. As Homer Paxton points out, it's hard to fathom why Sinclair can not admit he got it wrong, when the facts are staring at him in the face.

Denial is a distinguishing feature of many economists of the freshwater school, which is one of the many reanimations of right-wing supply side economic thought in the last century or so. Paul Krugman is the best prosecutor of the case against neoclassical economics - led by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago -  after it failed to predict the Global Financial Crisis. Sinclair is part of an even older, less creditable sect: that of the classical economists. Classicists were embarrassed out of the profession, for the most part, by the Great Depression in the 1930s which saw the rise of Keynesianism as voters in recently enfranchised demographics realised they didn't like mass poverty and long-term unemployment. Empirical data which scientists did not expect tends to shake up scientific theory, or at least should do if said scientists are actually using the scientific method.

Despite several such fact-based setbacks to supply side economics, Catallaxy Files is the gathering point of a self-styled "Australian school" of economics, which takes its cues from the Austrian school headed by Ludwig von Mises. Chief hunter of the classicists is John Quiggin, economics professor at the University of Queensland. His characterisation of classicists as zombies in his popular book defined the battle.

Economists like Sinclair now sit in fetid, dried up billabongs, not having changed since the time of the dinosaurs, like freshwater crocodiles in a drought. The climate has changed for freshwater proponents, and they are not able to evolve to adapt to the new environment. This is why Sinclair can not accept reality. He will continue to bare his teeth and wallow in the dust, until the dry wind comes to pick his bones clean.

Abbott: Weak-Tea or just weaksauce?

Barrie Cassidy posits, after rambling for half an article, something which I am somewhat qualified to comment upon:

There is no equivalent in Australia of the Tea Party that has wreaked havoc upon the Republicans in the United States. Not yet anyway. 

But there is at the margins signs of a "weak-tea party", made up essentially of far right commentators and a small minority in the parliamentary party who want to use high office to settle scores.

We are lucky in this country not to suffer a lot of the insanities built into the American system of democracy. One of the main flaws in the US system at the moment is the primacy of money being funnelled by old rich white men to unelected political organisations which then hold elected officials to ransom, dragging them away from the platform they were elected on and towards positions that suit the interests of old rich white men. This long story, which has developed over the course of decades, is now coming to a head with the congressional wing of the Republican Party declaring civil war against conservative groups like Heritage Action and Club for Growth. These "super PACs" are, like the Tea Party, funded mostly by billionaires and share most of their values, so that the Tea Party itself is mostly an entity of the grass roots but the super PACs act as their avatars in Washington.

Thankfully, we don't have that sort of perversion of democracy at work in Australia, or at least nowhere near those levels. When Murray Newman bangs on about lowering the minimum wage, no one treats it seriously and it means nothing. David Leyjonhelm of the LDP banged on about the exact same subject the other day in the Fin Review as republished on Catallaxy Files, and that also had no effect whatsoever. If this was America, there would be danger of supply being blocked in the Senate until all Hungry Jack's burger flippers were paid $5 an hour. Erick Erickson of Redstate.com wields significant power; when he makes threats like this, you can be pretty sure it's going to come true:

Then a comical and strategically miscalculated thing happened. John Boehner decided to let everyone know publicly what many have known privately for a while — he won’t be coming back in 2015 as Speaker.

Erickson's closest counterpart in Australia might be Sinclair Davidson, who sometimes uses Catallaxy to attack others on the right, but whose rants largely fall on deaf ears.

There are, however, some significant parallels between the Tea Party and the Liberal Party of Australia. The Tea Party's ultimate goal in life is to gain political power, but then dismantle government from the inside. Their libertarian ideal is for government to consist of police plus defence, and very little else. The Liberal Party seems to be doing a swell job of implosion itself in its first three months, which have been the worst in recorded history. Like the Tea Party-inspired Republicans, Abbott gained a reputation as leading a "party of no" while in opposition, and he has continued that negativity into government with most of his actions concerned with tearing down previous Labor reforms.

Of course, the old saw about never assuming conspiracy when incompetency is more believable applies here. Is Abbott leading an extremist fifth column with an agenda of self sabotage to undermine the legitimacy of government... or is he just not any good at governing?