If I became leader of the Australian Greens

Thank you for attending this press conference. Lauz, Tingles, Kez, Uhlo, Bongo, Knackers, welcome all.

I realise my rise to become leader of the Greens has been sudden and precipitous. None of you predicted my rapid rise from recent membership to climbing the ranks, a parachuting mission into the Senate under what has become known as Operation Varsity II, and completing that particular analogy by invading Germany, I mean the Green caucus room. The inevitable Downfall mashup video chronicling the events surrounding my accession to the leadership over Ms Waters was rather amusing - I particularly liked the gag about how Greens really are watermelons, since we found out just how red Larissa was underneath her green exterior when she got backstabbed. Heh.

Anyway, all that is behind us now, and I would like to set out my policy vision for the Greens into the future. I would first like to pay respect to the founding father of the Greens, Bob Brown. However, what I am about to say may not jive with his recollection of what he set up the Greens to do. The Party has nonetheless moved on, and we have new challenges to face.

I see the Greens as the ultimate economic rationalists. You may protest and say that this is anathema to the history of the party, as we have traditionally opposed many aspects of globalisation and neoliberalism. While that is true, my view is that the Greens can and should be seen as superior economic managers of all parts of the economy. The crucial difference is that we, the Greens, include the environment in our economic models in a way that most economists do not. Most economic models classify natural resources, energy sources and biodiversity as assets to be mined, exploited and exhausted. In short, the environment is seen as an "externality".

This word, externality - which has become part of the language of the political class without much examination as to its meaning - means an economic effect, either bad or good, which affects an uninvolved third party. That is what the Earth is treated as in traditional economics: something external to the economy, something Other. Economics is, almost by definition, in opposition to environmentalism. It is, in the wrong hands, the science of exploiting the environment by pretending that it is a limitless resource.

The consequence of this in traditional economics is that their sums work while the environment provides, but once the resources dwindle and become more expensive to extract and exploit, markets fail and recessions happen. I am here to say: no more. The environment is not an externality. It is internal to our definition of ourselves. We are part of it, and it is a part of us.

I realise that this language sounds like that of many of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and I acknowledge that the Greens have a debt that can never be repaid to them for teaching us how to value our land and to immerse ourselves in its many wonders with respect and appreciation. We must be careful never to get too mystical, but there is a time and place for a little bit of dreaming in what the Greens say and do.

Ah, you might say, but these are just words. How do you propose to combine economics and environmentalism if they are so opposed? The answer is that they do not have to be opposed. A synthesis is possible. In fact, I am a firm believer in the power of economics within capitalism to empower the powerless and grow a country better than any other system. Including the environment as an integral part of economic modelling does not break the models, it merely means economics removes a lie and becomes more grounded in reality.

This does not mean we leave all the coal in the valleys, all the oil under the deserts and all the trees in the forests. This means prudent planning for harvesting and renewing resources, and transitioning away from exhaustible resources and towards renewables where possible in a gradual fashion. Economics can also be seen as the management of energy, and cheap energy is a social good that the Greens should not reject, and will not under my leadership. The shale oil boom, in particular, is already starting to have positive impact on many smaller economies, which we can not forget in our zeal for ideological purity within our own country. To deny the world cheap energy would be to slow down the wholly positive process of globalisation inexorably lifting up the economies of those in developing countries. Shale oil can be extracted under the control of environmental safeguards even at levels we are comfortable with in Australia, and I will not stand in the way of another energy boom that could underpin the next decade of Australian growth.

You might be thinking that I am not saying anything new. It is true that we have already gone some way towards internalising the externalities, with the carbon price being the most prominent example. The Greens have been at the forefront of developing and implementing the carbon price in Australia and around the world, and I acknowledge the work my predecessors have done in this area. Far from repudiating this proud history of the Party, I seek to build on it to underline the economic credentials of the Greens. We are often portrayed as being at the far left end of the political spectrum, but I do not see it this way. We are a party of the centre, it is just that we define the centre as being centred and at one with the environment, with all of our economically rational policies flowing from that river source.

This is not sophistry, or wispy wishfulness. I believe that the Greens can successfully meld what is called economic rationalism with environmental concerns. How this impacts on individual policies is for a later day, but today I am here to say this: the Greens are the greatest economists the world has ever seen... we just take a longer view than most.

Oh that Orson, what a card

As a long time troll myself, I can only lean back in my chair and applaud as a master of the genre delivers a virtuoso performance. This Orson Scott Card piece is not just inflammatory, it is Red Wedding level of bastardry.

This is the column where I predict how American democracy ends.

No, no, it's just a silly thought experiment! I'm not serious about this! Nobody can predict the future! It's just a game. The game of Unlikely Events.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn't exist. The greatest trick a troll can pull is to convince the world he isn't trolling. Card is mostly in full on slavering hellmouth beast troll mode, but at key points he breaks the fourth wall to reassure us he is just trolling. The flow of this technique is fascinating. The following section appears about 80% of the way through the essay:

All right, the game is over. We don't seriously think any such thing will happen.

But if we learn anything from history, it's this: Anything can happen. American democracy, already a pale shadow of what it once was, is only a couple of centuries old.

But right after it, Card goes right back into Unabomber/Breivik territory, the contents of which are irrelevant to the point of the essay which is to lampoon the quality of the current debate in American politics, and the Pavlovian aspect of much media commentary. He has taken us into the depths of depravity, then jolts us back out of it to what he coos lovingly is the real world, and THEN hits us with his real message of evil, which is just as insane as what he told us was just the thought experiment.

The denouement is similarly manipulative, down to the very last sentence.

Will these things happen? Of course not. This was an experiment in fictional thinking.

But it sure sounds plausible, doesn't it? Because, like a good fiction writer, I made sure this scenario fit the facts we already have -- the way Obama already acts, the way his supporters act, and the way dictators have come to power in republics in the past.

Just keep your head down, and you'll be OK. Unless your children repeat at school things you said in the privacy of your home. Unless an Obama crony wants your house or your job. Unless you tell the wrong joke to the wrong people. Unless you have already written or said dangerous things that will come back to get you shot trying to avoid arrest ...

Just kidding. Because if I really believed this stuff, would I actually write this essay?

This gives him plausible deniability, but allows him to revel in saying things that Serious People can't normally say. Is he trolling, or isn't he? Of course he is. But does he believe the terrible things he said or not? The reaction from the blogosphere has generally been to assume he is being serious and just playing word games to pretend he isn't, as in this Slate piece. Of course Slate, as a left wing site, finds it convenient to demonise Card as a "smart kook" due to his previous history. Does that simplification of the essay say more about Slate or Card? As The New Civil Rights Movement puts it:

Orson Scott Card has taken a few moments out of his busy anti-gay agenda to get his name back in the news, and we are only too happy to oblige.

Both sides are getting what they wanted out of this trollery. The left gets to blindly bash Card for his homophobia and racism for an audience that probably won't examine the source material closely enough to realise that it's not that simple this time, and Card gets to whistle Dixie for his audience and strengthen his position among those who understand the point of his piece.

As with much post modern art, trolling is as much about the reaction in the media that springs up around the piece rather than the piece itself. Card groks that, and is using it for his own political purposes. Applying a moral judgement to such playful tomfoolery seems old fashioned, to say the least.

Red Centrism: it's the new black

One underreported aspect of federal politics since Kevin Rudd regained the throne is how much the two sides have moved their policy platform away from extremes and towards the centre. This has not been accomplished just by copying each other's policies, as Rudd did again today with his Northern Territory economic zone announcement.

Rudd spoke of three pillars.

Here they are:

Create a Northern Special Economic Zone focussing on the Northern Territory to attract new Australian and foreign investment through simplifying investment rules, streamlining regulation and application processes for major projects, and introducing new tax incentives with the objective of reducing the company tax rate for Northern Territory based companies in five years.

Expand the Ord Irrigation Scheme Stage 3 by providing $10 million to the Northern Territory Government to help facilitate expansion of the scheme from its current 29,000 hectares to 43,000 hectares. This will increase economic output in northern Australia by an estimated $150 million every year, mainly through expanded sugar production and agricultural crops.

Develop twenty-year growth plans for the regional hubs of Darwin, Cairns, Townsville and Mackay. Infrastructure Australia will oversee these plans, based on the successful Mount Isa to Townsville Economic Development Zone supply chain model, developed in collaboration with the private and public sectors. These plans will target key industry sectors and include strategies for increasing trade, investment and employment in these regional centres.

Labor's Dubai Lite policy now has significant similarities with the Liberals' special economic zone policy to turn everything north of the Tropic of Capricorn into a Middle Eastern hellhole of low wages and FIFO ghost towns, but with key differences to wedge Abbott on his Coalition's internal divisions on foreign investment, as the Guardian goes on to discuss. Since the relevant Ord River project is controlled by a Chinese firm, this is just another aspect of the same issue (hat tip: dd from the Cat).

This gives Rudd a platform with which to talk about the policy but narrow the focus of discussion down to areas with which he is comfortable. This is also the case with the Libs' NBN Lite and Gonski Lite policies, in that they can keep bashing Labor on overspending on the last mile of broadband, and can maintain ideological purity despite pouring money into schools by borrowing from David Cameron's Big Society faff to empower local committees to have power over federal money.

A line can also be drawn with Rudd's announcement yesterday to follow Abbott's line in ruling out a parliamentary alliance with the Greens; the difference there is that Rudd retained the flexibility to direct preferences in individual seats, but overall he has given in to policy pressure from the other side. I didn't really understand Rudd's reasoning on that one, it seemed like he got bullied into a corner when it is still entirely possible that we will have another hung parliament. What would be the solution, keep having elections until one side wins? That favours Abbott, unquestionably. If Abbott wants to limit his options then good luck to him, but that was no reason for Rudd to do the same.

It is understandable to want to make yourself a small policy target. It seems that both Abbott and Rudd want the benefits of opposition - this is not a new insight, of course, but the extent to which they are both pilfering from each other's platforms has reached ridiculous levels. Rudd obviously wants this election to be as presidential as possible, so that he can engage in the same tactics as President Obama and achieve a similar victory over an out-of-touch tool of big business. Neutralising most of the differences in the respective economic policy platforms is one way to achieve this, leaving only personality politics and social issues.

The common thread running through both sides' attempts to move to the centre is that both require large amounts of money spent by government, with the differences restricted to bureaucratic style. So, arguably, this is not moving to the centre at all, or at least it is redefining the centre as the Red Centre. This is the dead hand of Julia Gillard, I think, her legacy writ large in daily headlines screaming that this or that side is going to spend taxpayer dollars to fund one or other of the policies she nursed through the processes, or go even further in Gillardesque fashion to announce boondoggles that can't be funded under present taxation arrangements.

Is there going to be a reckoning at some point during this campaign, where both sides are asked how they are going to fund this ratking of policies? Will any of the debates include a serious discussion of raising taxes, or will the prospect of scare campaigns prove too much of an obstacle to rationality? My money is on the craziness continuing.

The Kouk cracks into the Howard economic legacy

Economist and sometime Labor apparatchik Stephen Koukoulas has put the sword to John Howard's nominally impressive legacy of wiping off government debt today.

So how did the Howard government do it? It was very simple, with a three-pronged approach to debt elimination:

- A record high tax take - the Howard government was the highest taxing government in Australia's history.

- Record low spending on infrastructure - the level of public construction work done as a percentage of GDP reached a record low under Howard.

- A large-scale asset sale and privatisation program.

One thing the Kouk doesn't mention is that Howard was only able to raise the tax take and draw down on investment without causing a demand-side recession because Australia was undergoing a long boom, after Keating had instituted a number of reforms to make the country competitive and open it up to global markets. Howard surfed the tsunami that Keating had started, in short (Bermuda shorts?). But that wasn't necessary to say in the article I suppose, no need to run up the score when the win is so decisive!

Why do we care about this now? Because the prospective Liberal front bench in the current election is made up mostly of Howard era recalcitrants, most notably leader Tony Abbott and treasurer Joe Hockey. Their policy on economics - and pretty much everything else - hasn't changed much since then, due to the failure of Arthur Sinodinos to single-handedly develop new policy as he was parachuted in to do.

This dose of economic reality underpins the recent attacks on the Libs for secretly desiring to raise the GST. There has been no significant renewal of the Liberal caucus to flush out the Howardist mindset, so voters can be excused for refusing to believe the protestations coming from Hockey and Abbott.

The Kouk's point about lack of infrastructure investment causing inflation and lost productivity will most likely be lost behind the shouting about tax increases, but it is no less important. The Libs could even adopt the NBN model of public-private partnerships (albeit once removed via bonds) to keep infrastructure investment off the budget balance sheet, if they want to maintain the fiction that they aren't big-government tax-hungry statists. Abbott has shown a willingness in this campaign already to adopt Labor's policies, but that one might have to wait until after the election.

Or, if Abbott really wants to win big, he could embrace the Howard legacy to the fullest. Advertise himself as the man with the Big New Tax that will fund all of the social programs that Gillard introduced but we can't afford due to revenue problems with the budget. Want Gonski? GST goes up to 11%. Want the NDIS? 12%. Want the full FTTP NBN? 13%. Want the baby bonus back and an increase in the dole up to somewhere near the poverty level? 14%. Want a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme for everyone, not just the rich? 15%. Want the third airport for Sydney and the East-West Link in Melbourne? Hmm, well maybe not.

Joe Hockey could be the new Oprah Winfrey. "You get a per cent! YOU get a per cent!!" Now that's the Liberal Party I remember.

Great Ders of History: The 4.3%

I am fascinated by this graphic from a Business Spectator piece, detailing demographics that a company called Torque is using for their newly established political polling activities. You could see it as a magic quadrant on AOD-9604, or a mini golf course on acid.

To understand this picture, the firm’s methodology needs a bit of explaining. Torque normally specialises in market research for major retailers. If a supermarket wants to know where its customers are travelling from, their ethnicity, socio-economic status, hobbies, tastes or beliefs, the firm produces highly granular survey data that can identify even particular streets of interest with a retailer’s catchment.

For this election, the firm has applied a similar process to polling booths. Based on the swings of the 2010 election, and individual polling booth date released by the Australian Electoral Commission, it estimates that just 4.3 per cent of Australians will determine this election result.

Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like a 47% comment. I would see myself as #6, a Mature Affluent Urban. Apparently I'm not eligible to be a swing voter, because their research shows that only 11 of those 58 demographics are capable of being swung.

I'm not sure this is all that insightful, beyond that aspirational voters in the suburbs and INSERTLEADERNAMEHERE's battlers mostly live in marginal seats. Perhaps the leaders should appear in ads for supermarkets wearing guitars shaped like big red thumbs, or with an arm around a hunky celebrity cook? But hey, the parties have to spend all that money they raised on something. They might as well try something different than just relying on the likes of Hawker, Textor, or Australian Psychic of the Year 2013, Debbie Malone.

At least, now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

WADA and ASADA, harder and harder

We are currently in the late stages of private negotiation between the AFL, Essendon Football Club and related individuals from coach James Hird on down to determine the league's sanctions for governance issues relating to the ongoing drugs scandal, which are separate to any forthcoming sanctions from the drug authorities for actually taking the drugs. Andrew Bolt thinks the AFL should charge its own CEO rather than Hird, who created a "pharmacologically experimental" environment, with bringing the game of Australian rules football into disrepute.

If Essendon broke a rule, punish it.

But “bringing the game into disrepute” is just a “vibe” charge. Can’t prove anything, just don’t like the vibe.  This is saying something’s wrong just because the likes of Andrew Demetriou and The Age feel it is. This is a kind of witchhunt justice - a bone to thrown to the mob simply because it expects one. 

I don’t hold the game in any less regard because of what Essendon or coach James Hird did. The club was slack, yes, but has suffered for it and sacked people. But I still can’t see any real proof of a knowing infringement of any rules or a desire to cheat.

How would the AFL even prove the game was now held in lesser repute thanks to Hird and Essendon? 

This line was the same one used by Mark Robinson of the Herald Sun and Tim Watson of (let's face it) the Essendon Football Club yesterday on radio SEN: no performance enhancing drug (PED) use can be proven, so you can't punish anyone for taking them.

The Essendon case, and to a lesser extent the similar one at Cronulla, have sent the media in this country crazy, of which Bolt's reaction is only the most extreme allowed to be printed by a newspaper. The media has taken turns in joyfully printing leaks from inside the process, and hand wringing about how they wish it was all over and the destabilisation of sport would finish.

The position of requiring absolute proof to convict ignores the history of drug cases overseas, especially in America. No specific positive drug tests were used as evidence to convict Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Marion Jones or Alex Rodriguez. (Some did test positive much earlier in their careers, but their suspensions were for later periods.) The careers of all of these elite sportspeople, who were even more legendary than the great Hird was in their fields, are forever tarnished without definitive non-circumstantial proof of their guilt ever having been presented to a court.

The crucial part about this is that this is the way that the drug agencies work. The supra-national World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), and its national arms like ASADA, are not given the same powers as police. Drug cheats in sport operate in a grey area where they are technically not committing crimes, but they are doing society a great disservice by hoodwinking the public into cheering on a lie. As a society, we have deemed it suitable that we do not elevate sports drug agencies to the enforcement level of federal police, for better or worse.

The way they were nailed, these drugs cheats, was accumulation of circumstantial evidence, and months and months of ongoing pressure on the support staff and hangers-on of the cheats until the weight was finally too much and the cases broke open. These things take months and years, something which we in Australia hadn't experienced before but have copped this year in spades. Rather than burly men with badges hauling ne'er-do-wells in by their collars like real police, the work of sports drug agencies is as much about using the media to shame the participants into co-operation via targeted leaks and backgroundings. This is the price we pay for not giving them too much physically coercive power.

One consequence of this situation is that facilitators like Stephen Dank can dance their merry jig around the unenforceable regulations of sporting bodies without having to face up to Plod, as long as they are smart about not breaking any statutes along the way. Dank is flourishing like Michael Flatley in this regard, and even had the temerity to tell the media yesterday he felt sorry for Hird and advised the AFL on their strategy.

Bolt and others on the Right have taken the easy opportunity to side with Dank, wedging the authorities between their lack of power to compel evidence of direct guilt and society's desire not to see sports drug agencies kitted out in riot gear doing armed raids on bikie hideouts. Lost in the middle of all of that is the truth, which usually comes out afterwards from the likes of Armstrong, Jones and Jose Canseco that they were juiced up. Drugs in sport are never a black and white issue... until the confession comes out.

UPDATE: 1996 co-winner of the Brownlow Medal sacked! But it's not Hird, it's Michael Voss from Brisbane.

UPDATE II:

The AFL has charged Bombers coach James Hird, doctor Bruce Reid, football boss Danny Corcoran, assistant coach Mark Thompson and the Essendon Football Club with bringing the game into disrepute over the club's supplements program.

Note: this in no way absolves any player of guilt. In short, ASADA wants to haul Dank in using its recently beefed up powers to nail the case on use of PEDs. Until then, the sword of Damocles is still swinging in the breeze.

Australia's debt ceiling

Sinclair Davidson muses in a post about the PEFO on the forthcoming debate about the Australian debt ceiling.

For a start, public debt will breach the debt limit of $300 billion in December of this year. While the opposition will use this event to further criticise the ALP, the fact remains that post-election the government will have to raise the debt limit. More importantly the government (of either side) will have to, at some point, provide a narrative about the appropriate level of public debt that Australia should maintain. While the net debt should be low – even negative – it isn't clear what an appropriate level of gross debt should be.

To my mind there is an obvious answer to this question, at least on the high side. The ratio of debt to GDP should not rise much above 30%, and the evidence for this threshold can be found in the highly contested Reinhart and Rogoff study Growth in a Time of Debt, about which much has been said this year. While most of the conjecture was around the 90% "cliff", the data (once distortions were removed) did point to a significant drop off in average GDP growth of 4.2% for 0-30% and 3.1% for 30-60%.

Now, of course R&R could have chosen intervals of 25 or 33 instead of 30 and produced much the same result, so we should be careful about making the same mistake of marking the exact location of a dangerous precipice on our maps when it's more of a gently downsloping sand dune. Nevertheless, assuming we don't get anywhere near the destructive nature of the debt ceiling debate in America, hopefully a bipartisan tacit agreement can be reached in broad terms to try not to push the ceiling far beyond those levels.

The above does not, of course, rule out blowing the debt past that limit if Europe finally implodes and we get the double dip depression that some commentators have been soothsaying in sombre tones.

Note: along with some of the more traditional labels for posts here on Loaded Dogma, I have started one called Dog vs Cat for the posts I make in response to those from Catallaxy Files.