It was informal what won it

Now, to the serious business:

The stewards have returned from the counting room with the declaration of the 2010 Australian Federal Election.

At the first whiff of election fever your humble correspondent immediately withdrew from public commentary, stocked up on tinned foods and a rather excellent and inexpensive scotch in a shack up in the mountains and stood by and observed what unfolded.

Now the result is, officially, in. Writs have been returned.

I writ for a living, so writs are dear to me.

The numbers are irrefutable. It was the informal vote that saved Ms Gillard’s posterior.

Jumping 1.6 percent from the last election it was only outdone by The Greens, who received a swing of just a smidge under four percent.

For the record, the party of The Pretender Abbott, the Liberal Party, received a swing of 0.76.

If Abbott had of been able to engage a quarter of the voters who voted informal he would be Prime Minister right now.

It’s swinga and roundabouts though, as thye seat of Macquarie had an inverse result to this received wisdom. There the AL would have won if they had of held the voters that were motivated by bthe rather successful Your Rights AtWEork camaign in the mountains end of that seat in 2007.

A booth-by-booth measure of Blue Mountains shows the informal vote (and Green vote) up from Lapstone to Mount Victoria: if 1,041 of the 5,067 voters who voted informal in Macquarie the result is an ALP victory. But if is a big word, and not a big part of the vocabulary of the modern political operator.

Such is life

Meanwhile, we are looking at interesting times.


This business about the crossbenchers is yet bto run its course. Back to the mountains I go...

David and Ken

I love the nightlife
I like to boogie...



In 2008/09 there were, on average, 835068 passenger journeys a day on CityRail services in NSW, an increase of almost 3 percent on the year before.

Well that's the figure IPART accepted and who are we to quibble.

Which means there are at least 835068 reasons to sack NSW Transport Minister David Campbell. That he may be a shirt lifter is not one of them.


That moustache! And more chins than a Chinese phonebook. They should let the Greens run transport, they are the only ones that give a toss about it.

Failing that, they could use Jason Akermanis, at least you won't find him coming out of anything in the near future, let alone a club "for men who prefer men".

The Honourable Member's position becomes untenable

The Hon. Karen Paluzanno, Member for Penrith is gone.

She was installed into the state seat of Penrith by the NUW's mad NSW secretary Derek Belan in 2001, replacing Fay Lupo of the Ross Free do-nothing generation of suburban right wingers in NSW.

Belan's range wars in the NSW ALP are part of his ambitious strategy to take over the TWU members in the logistics industry (what used to be known as the trucking industry, but now includes warehousing and some rail).  They did it at the Pura Milk factory in Penrith, and god knows, the Transport Industry sure is disorganised outside of Concrete, Armoured Vans and private bus companies.

Belan's other good mate is The Hon. Paul Gibson, MLA for Blacktown. The tip is that Gibbo will give way for John Robertson MLC, Mr Your Rights At Work. Robbo then descends from the skies in 2013 and saves us from the unravelling mess that is the Baird government, or so the story goes.

A byelection in Penrith now would make Bass look like a mild murmur (all you psephologists out there can Google "1975 Bass Byelection", it will keep you amused for hours).

My tip? She gets kicked out of the ALP [In breaking news since this was written, that's precisely what Walt Secor...err, Kristina Keneally has done.] and sits as an Independent before quietly shuffling off to be a radiologist, as she has claimed before. 

Paluzanno actually used to be a teacher of children with difficulties, something that is well needed in this community. She was a Member of the Teachers Federation when she attended the 2004 ALP National Conference. She won preselection for Penrith in a deal that saw the intellectual colossus that is the Hon Dianne Beamer, Member for Mulgoa, selected for the adjacent seat.

Two stories about Paluzanno:

My mate Lee, a blackfella from Penrith, texts me in the weeks before the March 2007 Iemma state election, the last one. Paluzanno not keen 4 my vote. Lee had walked past her outside Penrith train station three times trying to get the flyer she is handing out to commuters. She ignored him each time.

Later in 2007 Iemma and Costa are trying to force electricity privatisation through at the behest of the NSW Treasury and ratings agency Standard and Poors (the ones that rated CDOs as AAA). Campaigners are encouraging people opposed to the privatisation to make an appointment with their local MP to press the issue. Paluzanno told a lovely old couple from Leonay that she "would have to check with the union" before she could say how she would vote on the matter.

She meant the NUW, but either way it's not a good look.

I wouldn't want to be the bloke who tipped the bucket, Tim Horan. He certainly isn't inside the tent pissing out. I wouldn't be surprised if he shows up again. He has admitted that revenge was at least "in the back of mind" - as pure as the driven snow. The office juniors caught up in this are desperately trying to lump it all on "Honest Tim" Horan.

What a useless situation.

It's bloody sad that an area that is so desperately in need of good representation because of the many problems that afflict it will probably end up with Stuart Ayres, Liberal candidate for Penrith

Barry O breathed out when he got onto 2UE. "My office was audited last year and the good news is we got a clean bill of health," he said. Which sounds alarmingly like "they didn't catch us this time".

Certainly, Paluzanno is unloved and won't be missed (read comments).  but there is one way out for the ALP in Penrith: Greg Alexander. lA good Catholic boy from St Dominic's Kingswood (Before he was poached from the Christian Brothers). He grew up in Cranebrook when it was still bush. At least then Penrith's next do-nothing MP will be well known.

Kristina should get onto Georgie Boy Pell and put the squeeze on Bucky Alexander's eternal testicles.

The Micks are good at that sort of thing. I know. I used to be one.

Julia Gillard is to the left…of Attila the Hun

m blcahb vlkbak v

Great piece at En Passant

Spot on this stuff. Gillard, like her factional soul mate Mar'n Ferguson, act solely in the interests of the big end of town and devil take the hindmost. They would do the H.R. Nicholls Society proud. Ferguson was in the Sydney Morning Herald saying we needed more immigration or, shock horror, wages might go up! Can't have that old chap, think of what it would do with dividends! Send a bad signal to the market and all that.

The structural problem is the luvvies in the union movement share Gillard's understanding the reality for most Australians, i.e. none. Most union officials and Julia have never had a real job in their lives (and no, being a lawyer is not a real job). Gillard's laws slash take home pay for aged care and hospitality staff (real jobs) - the ACTU's response? They run a campaign against Tony Abbott. Cde Burrow is about to swan off to Brussels and is so star struck by Gillard that the union movement has reverted to type: acting like a beaten dog that keeps coming back for more treatment from its "master", in this case the ALP. 

Meanwhile the rest of us that live in the real world are left to our own devices in order to survive.

Electoral politics is a joke. We live in a corporate and technocratic totalitarianism that is so seamless that most people cannot even think outside it. Orwell would marvel at how cleverly it all works to enrich so few.

And it will continue to be such, especially when most media commentary is such a craven repetition of the status quo see Kohler, Grattan, Oakes, et al - useless, the lot of them). 

My advice? Take to strong drink.

The idiots have won

Signs that these are surely the last days are not new.

People have been predicting apocalypse being upon us since, well, St John wrote Revelations.

Not being someone to believe in imaginary friends - I've never traded in that guff - I've never placed much faith (pun intended) in religion.

But whether you believe Christ is god and saviour, or Muhammad is the true prophet, or in the Giant Spaghetti Monster, Australians are hell bent on making life harder for themselves; mainly because we valorize gross stupidity to the point where much public discourse has become a carnival of ignorance.

Even in a country as 'free' as Australia, far too many areas of our existence are now observed and regulated to the point of obeisance against evidence. From abseiling to zines we are told what we can and can't do. We are micromanaged to within an inch of our lives.

I never thought I would find myself evangelizing a libertarian position, but things are getting beyond a joke. We live in a censorious age. And much of this censoriousness is fed by the zeitgeist, that impressions are more potent than fact.

Although bike helmets protect the skull but not the face or limbs, where more biking injuries occur, they are compulsory. Australia being, along with New Zealand, one of the few Western countries that actually impose the ineffective nuisance of helmets on the bike riding public.

Marijuana is banned and, as regular as the passing seasons, someone pops up in the media claiming that marijuana makes crazy people crazier. Well, derr! So the rest of us that are merely exasperated are not allowed to play. Its just grim faced Calvinism pushing a barrow that never works; prohibition.

And so on and so forth until having a fire when your camping, sleeping on the beach, traveling in the back of ute on an empty country road are all verboten in the name of keeping us all safe from ourselves. Paternalism rampant.

Yes, these things cause trouble and can be lethal. Life is, by its very nature, deadly. The solution is to censure idiots and crazy people, but this is not fashionable. Our post-modernist equivocation of values, which is passed of as equality, is in actuality a matter of making life easy for the dumb and the mad. Somehow this has led to being dumb and mad as being all the fashion.

Take smoking. More people smoke than go to church, Going to and working in hotels is an inherently unhealthy act. The best argument proffered by the proponents of blanket bans on smoking in licensed premises is that people who work in hotels should not have to ingest second hand smoke. I agree. Non-smokers should get another line of employment. Who in their right mind wants to work in a bar? Staying sober around drunken people has to be one of the more depressing visages of humanity. Smoke and be damned.

Two discreet problems exist: First, regulation of public life has fallen into the hands of obsessive control freaks; secondly, this overarching need to control human behaviour reinforces and rewards a mixture of stupidity and madness.

I fully accept that there is a role for health and safety in employment. Commonsense would dictate that in other areas prudence and caution should take precedence over individual standards for the general good. The accent here is on general good, not how you'd like others to live - but how others living impacts on you. Then there is the problem of how commonsense evaporates amongst the stupid and the mad.

This is about risk management. It is also about power, but more on that later.

I am not risk averse, but most people are. As a result I am subject to the same risk assessment as all others, including the stupid and the mad. Effectively the state is treating me as if I'm stupid and mad.

What if I want to measure the value of existence by living my life as I see fit? Surely that is my prerogative? After all, it is me that is in the box at the end of the day.

But this is no longer the case.

How did all this start?

Modern government was well summed up in a speech by Kelvin Thompson to Sustainable Population Australia:

"In the modern era, with its twenty-four/seven media cycle, it is possible to get elected without solving problems provided you can use the media to get across three messages - first, that your heart is in the right place, second, that you're working as hard as you can, and third and most importantly, that the other mob would be worse."

Which is why having to fix things takes second place to pretending the problems aren't there and creating this parallel universe where reality is created by ministerial announcement, press release and stage managed media event by governments, corporates and the usual roll-call of NGOs.

Unfortunately, once the cameras roll on messy reality takes hold once more.

A lot of this spin is underpinned by useless scholasticism designed to impress funding bodies with polysyllabic tinkering at the edges. This rolls out sound bites peddled as authoritative voices and 'take-home' messages for a public that has been plunged into a cloud of ignorance. The prescription then becomes a simplistic sloganeering that is even at times at odds or at least antipathetic to evidence gleaned from serious research.

This is the nut of the problem; the one-size-fits-all approach to regulation that looks good on a tabloid front page, but doesn't work or is prescriptively onerous in reality.

Which brings us to the question of power. In this entire regulatory milieu, who benefits?

The usual suspects; the state, which finds a cheap and easy solution that makes it look good; insurance companies, who are by nature risk averse; the rich, who can afford to ignore regulation and buy their way out of it; and dickheads, people that have an anally retentive view of life and don't like the 'messy bits' that are innate to human existence.

Unfortunately the dickhead's obsessiveness drives an eagerness and zealotry to impose their worldview on the largely apathetic rest of us.

Regulation happens by default. Makes good copy. Takes fun out of life. Bring on the apocalypse.

Building the mortgage revolution

Most Australian households take home less than $50K a year. That’s not average wages, that’s average income per household. There are plenty of households, and people, that don’t pull a wage. See ABS stats if you’re curious.

Despite this, the vast majority of those households manage to acquit themselves financially. It’s called surviving, and the alternative is homelessness.

This is in stark contrast to the recent track record of the well-rewarded employees of some of the world’s largest banks during the global financial crisis.

I don’t capitalize the global financial crisis, because logic is hardly a proper noun.

It’s a banking crisis. It started when a whole bunch of people, a lot of them coked to the eyeballs, played pass-the-parcel with a whole lot of other people’s debt. They bundled these debts up and sold them as a bet – that the debts would be paid off.

Some very large banks bought into the bet and did their dough big time.

Corporate culture is wholly set against bad news. Bad news meant the sack, or at best, a transfer to somewhere harmless, and less lucrative. At the very least you were risking your bonus, which, as IPO shares picked up in contra deals with institutional investors – our superannuation, were almost certainly going to be a cashable asset, at a profit; certainly worth more than $50K a year.

So we leave a bunch of overpaid junkies in charge of this section and they all smile and nod and rake in the cash – then it all goes to shit.

The commodity was fundamentally flawed. It came from a drive to raise a whole pile of debt, and pass it on. It was a scam; a Ponzi Scheme (now there’s a proper noun!); a screw-up, and most certainly a poorly researched asset.

It came off the back of an explosion in credit for people previously considered a marginal security proposition, which morphed from easily available credit cards to mortgages on marginal housing acquisition; marginal in the sense that it relied on a housing bubble for people to make money and repay their mortgages. Joe Bageant was writing about it 2005. It was hardly a secret.

So the US housing bubble bursts and a chunk of assets are worthless. The debtors walk away from the wreckage and move to a trainer park outside Toledo. The banks stop giving each other money to get people into debt to make money to get people into dept to make money..,

As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was wont to say: and so it goes.

In Australia we have four main banks. Outside of them there are a range of outfits from credit unions (some of which have aggregated over the last decade), community banks (which are more than Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life telling everyone that their money was invested in their lives), to payday lenders and swarthy chaps in dark cars in supermarket car parks.

When the money dried up internationally the Rudd Government moved quickly to shore up the four main banks, the spine of Australia’s financial system. Our money.

Some people thought we would hit the wall hard, Steve Keen the most celebrated example. Australia was a country that has slashed employment in traditional primary industries, let its manufacturing industry roam free across Southeast Asia and kicked on with digging up rocks and a service economy which relies on the money churning around.

The Australia’s big four banks injected a lot of money into the Australian economy by borrowing quick money, and lots of it, and lending it to people. That was where the American banks came in. Problem was the American Banks had run out of dosh. Unless the Australian banks got money, and got it fast, the whole joint was going to end up like a Steinbeck novel.

The Rudd Government, or more accurately Treasury, put together a plan that was equal parts devious and genius.

The Rudd government couldn’t give the banks cash, because this was a free-market economy and the banks were at the epicenter of free-enterprise through offering credit. At the very least they were creating money that people needed to pay the bills and make Gerry Norman richer, etc.

The government gave the banks a AAA credit rating, underwriting them and making them a safe haven for what money was still in circulation internationally, which was still substantial despite its epicenter, Wall street, watching its assets diminish daily.

And they gave a lot of money, something around the size of the entire NSW budget, to households.

Ken Henry said go big, and go households. And they did, and why wouldn’t they, politicians love to spend money, but for the last thirty years they’ve been no good at raising it.

Most Australian households earn less than $50K a year after tax. They get along by running a continuing line of credit with financial institutions. In recent years it has ballooned to over 100 per cent of disposable income. So the households gave it to the banks.

We are a service economy. A lot of people run around in white vans with ladders, and utes, while a whole pile of invisible others cram into trains and buses from 6am onwards in our capital cities. It has been pretty much business-as-usual for this part of the economy. The concerns they had in 2007 are pretty much the same concerns they have now.

The Rudd government decided to call this Keynesian act of largesse to the major banks names like The Building the Education Revolution, and the Home Insulation Scheme, and so forth. There’s probably a pile of others – all with the same object, getting people who have mortgages paying their mortgage. By a good old-fashioned bit of pump priming, jobs for blokes with utes and ladders popped up like mushrooms.

Even those that don’t have mortgages have helped by creating a jobs boom at our retail oligopolies. And those people with the name badge at K mart certainly have a mortgage, or want one. You must really need money if you’re prepared to work retail for it.

This explains why the Rudd government has seemed distracted about the detail of the implementation side of all this spending, because its not about the project – it’s about making sure the money go round continues, with the bottom sink, or sump, being the banks.

It’s the reverse trickle down effect and it has worked a treat. It’s objective was to shore up the financial sector, and its done that in spades.

Meanwhile, the structural problems – infrastructure bottlenecks, skills shortages, overpriced housing, bubble merrily along as if nothing has happened.

And for people on $50K a year and less, nothing has.

I was an angry young man

[I found this essay while going through some handwritten papers and notes I am transferring onto the computer. It was written in probably the second half of 1999, when I was planning on leaving Canberra. It is surprising how much of this still stacks up. It is reproduced here warts and all.]

I am thinking of moving back to Melbourne and, wide-awake, I know I will end up in cheap housing in Depreston or Unfairfield where the defeated citizens of the Northern Suburbs pack sullenly into cheerless conductorless trams. Less is more these days.

The stoic Edwardian indignant cheerfulness, larrikin Catholic charm and Mediterranean swagger of those chaotic streets has been boarded up and replaced by a lobotomised suburbanness with a stark, obsessive, authentic passionless new that only an architect could be pleased with. The streets are teeming with TV programmed drones full of predictable obsequious rebellion that is no insurrection at all – they bought it, off the rack. They trade passion for labels – and labels of labels.

Lamentations are futile. Melbourne, a huddle of windswept memories, is littered with its own unburied dead. The Fitzroy Club Hotel is now a dialasyis [sic] centre.

The pernicious fascism of opinion whines against the sad view we could all use in a fleeting vision of what constructs us. No one wants to know more than the façade reveals. No one wants anything to be behind it. What point of sacrifice when the fields of battle at Arden Street, Glenferrie, Victoria Park, Lakeside, Junction Oval and Brunswick Street are little pathetic venues for the second rate, A [sic] place for weeds to grow? A place for myths to dissolve and several generations of passion to evaporate. The past may as well not have happened.

But it did happen.

Hungry men in hewn army coats dyed black. Their hair lank from worry, neglect and the weather huddled by the Yarra and the Maribyrnong. Fat whores and tribes of children. Angry bicycles. Sad horses that has always been old, like the men bent over the reins. Perplexed immigrants looking both ways quickly without taking a step. The way Ice Cream melts.

It is more than melancholic nostalgia. It is rude defiance of collective effort. John Batman and William Faulkner didn’t lay every brick. Anonymous and underpaid millions created this space, and if we mask their ills it only cheapens their good.

It is not that that time (the past) will ever be again – it is the stupendous denial that it ever was. How can a person reflect on the travails of their predecessors and then profit using the same mentality of past tyrants!

By identifying bastadry it is then no solution to go off and be a bastard yourself. My name has no station in Melbourne, no place. I never grew up there, none of my family did. I witnessed it as a stranger witnesses a fatality – with ineffectual [sic] remorse. I loved Melbourne from afar. She is dying from the disease that took away my own town, Sydney – the disease of greed.

Sydney is now a shiny laquered [sic] over cesspool. A swamp of indignity – with no respect for anything that is permanent. It eats it’s [sic] own excrement for want of anything better to do. Melbourne has become little better.

Now I live in exile and always will. It matters little where I go so out of respect for their faltering memory I have sat down amidst my most ancient of ancestors within my grasp. And they have little to offer for their place has been swept under the tide of the supreme insidiousness of what laughably passes as the nations [sic] capital. A place that all too well shows the braggart hollowness of this failed European outpost.

Their intentions are so shallow they may as well build their monuments of plaster + cardboard as no policy favours anything beyond one lifespan – and life is short.

It is hard to find goodness when things subjective have been flailed by the whip of post-modernism. So goodness be buggered, I will throw my lot in with the art of paying attention.

It very well may be that I will go to Melbourne to learn how to make a quid out of writing bullshit. Or I might just as well go and live in Bermagui or Adaminaby or some such place and wait to die – fixing my mind on such simple and obnoxious pleasures as watching the seasons change, accepting mortality, remembering and learning of the past, and…paying attention.

I have already learnt that there is no capacity to human foolishness – a million tales in a thousand languages have already told us this. I will now leave the fools to admire the emporer’s [sic] new clothes. I have nothing to offer profit, except my dead body – and they won’t get that for a whiles yet. In the meantime those flint eyed pultroon’s [sic] with their commerce and real estate can KISS MY ARSE. I will spite the living by remembering the dead, a club we will all join sooner or later.

The Emperor Has No Lights On

Damn hippies all warning about global warming but I ain’t going nowhere
Cause I believe what I’m told, that the levees’ll hold and that the President really cares

“Deep Deep River” – Fred Smith (From the CD Texas)

Earth Hour drifted past last night, all candle lit and quaffing champagne.

As far as tokenism goes, it is hard to beat.

Folk will be familiar with the concept. For those who came in late, the idea is that lights are turned off for an hour to symbolise reducing our energy use, with the idea that it will encourage businesses and households to use less electricity.

Despite the onanistic self-congratulation that surrounds this spectacle - especially from the major sponsor, the Fairfax news group – it has a miniscule impact on consumption and an even more tenuous educational benefit.

Its primary function seems to be to provide absolution from guilt for shiny middle class types and a platform for self-absorbed public figures to make unctuous statements about the importance of ‘battling’ climate change.

The defence flung out by the event’s marketing arm (what am I writing, it is all marketing) is that Earth Hour ‘raises consciousness’ about energy use.

Well that has been a miserable failure. The Australian Energy Market Operator in its latest Statement of Opportunities is forecasting a steady increase in energy consumption across all Australian states for the next decade.

No government is taking demand management, which was used so successfully with water consumption in capital cities, seriously.

NSW is spending $17,000,000,000.00 on locking in the electricity network to existing coal-fired power stations, with electricity users being left to foot the bill. If that dosh was spent on creating publicly owned community based renewable energy infrastructure we just may have a chance of getting out of this mess with most of the furniture intact.

The problem is that there was no Earth Hour at Wallerawang Power Station. There was no earth Hour at the Tomago Aluminium Smelter, which chews up about ten percent of NSW’s electricity and pays a peppercorn tariff for the pleasure. Earth Hour hasn’t made an impression on the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics who, along with Federal Energy Minister and serial idiot Martin Ferguson, have predicted that coal will continue to be our dominant source of electricity generation for the foreseeable future, regardless of what it will do to the climate.

They are almost certainly right.

Despite these rather salient issues the event has been a hit worldwide with scores of cities and jurisdictions jumping on board. Why is this?

The bottom line, which runs everything in these halcyon days, means people across the western world will demand reliable electricity supply to their houses

Australian society revolves around 240-volt electricity and the motorcar. These two functions are sacrosanct. Only losers catch the bus and, well, we “need” air conditioning and, somehow, a plasma screen TV the size of a small African country is important to have.

Consumption is about status; people acquire things to impress other people. People define themselves by the car they drive, the house they live in, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to; you are what you eat.

At its most extreme, status is marked by conspicuous consumption. Now that is a defining point of status, the ability to throw things away. It shows how rich and ergo, how powerful a person is.

With status wrapped up in the symbolism of what we consume (or don’t consume) it is going to be a hard shit to shift.

Symbolism can be powerful: the guy in front of the tank in Beijing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, burning draft papers. Earth Hour is not one of them.

In the end Earth Hour will go the way of solariums and Second Life. Status trumps Change. People just want to get on with the important stuff, like watching Australia’s Biggest Loser on a wide screen plasma TV, upgrading to this year’s Prada or getting a mortgage on a McMansion in the newest estate.

You can turn off all the lights you like, catch the bus forever or live in a solar powered shack in the bush, like I am, but the rest of the world is going to keep on chewing up fossil fuels and spewing out carbon dioxide like there is, literally, no tomorrow.

Lousy value for money

Dean Mighell was in the news. The Victorian Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union upstaged no lesser personage than Kevin Rudd, on talkback radio in Melbourne.

Those that care about such things will no doubt know the story. For those that came in late, a woman caller to (I think) the Neil Mitchell show was in tears with fear about what could happen to her.

She had insulation installed in her roof and was worried the whole place could go up in flames.

Rudd proffered an emergency response number. She said she’d tried that and it was unhelpful (fancy that, an unhelpful call centre. Who could have thought there’d be such a thing). In fact, they were more concerned about whether she owed them money.

Rudd is promising everything except going around there himself, when it emerges that the good Mister Mighell, a licensed electrician, had arranged to check to see if her insulation was safe. Militant unionist 1. Technocrat hack 0.

Mighell popped up in the Fairfax papers around the same time with an op-ed piece about whether the union movement should keep its links to the ALP. It’s an interesting point, but first some clarification.

One; the ALP was founded by the union movement around 120 years ago after a period of rapid growth in unionism hit a brick wall in the early 1890s when the Victorian land price bubble burst and the floor price of labour collapsed.

Two, not all unions thought tying themselves to a political party was a good idea, and even today most unions aren’t affiliated to the ALP.

Three, from the get-go the parliamentary ALP has tended to pretty much ignore the agenda of the organised labour movement. The primary relationship has been one of personnel. The union movement has employed most ALP politicians at some stage.

This is not to say that those politicians have ever been particularly attached to the principles of the union movement, it’s just that there is a strong history of partiality around unions when it comes to their employment selection practices.

That said, the links between the ALP and trade unions are pretty strong, in a networking rather than policy sense.

Which is why most of the leadership of the ACTU have been largely silent while Julia Gillard is, in reality, cutting wages for hospitality and care workers (amongst others) under the banner of Award Simplification.

Gillard, as she is good at, plays the clever lawyer and argues that it is possible for employees to negotiate their way out of a pay cut. But wasn’t that the whole point about why WorkChoices was bad? That people were expected to have to negotiate a solution rather than having the protection of an Industrial Award?

But the ACTU wants to be seen as a ‘team player’ in the eyes of their ‘friends’ in Canberra. The wooden Jeff Lawrence had a minor whine about it, Sharon Burrow doesn’t want to criticise her buddy Julia. So the whole situation has been largely ignored.

The problem is probably a lot bigger than the few news articles that have covered it would suggest. After all, these are people at the bottom of the labour market, so who really gives a shit?

I am meeting people caught up in it. Anecdotally, the vast majority are un-unionised casuals, so they just suck it up and wonder why Kevin Rudd is doing what John Howard did.

Unions that aren’t affected by it seem to be rather indifferent to the plight of these workers. The ‘I’m all right Jack’ principle is ascendant in the modern labour movement.

But most union officials must be, at the very least, slightly uneasy about how things have panned out. Wasn’t the Your Rights At Work campaign supposed to do away with the assault on working conditions at the perennially soft bottom end of the labour market?

A few things have improved, but there are also a large number of people who are still missing out. This is especially true of the unskilled, the casual and young people – the people who were at the pointy end of WorkChoices. The same people who got screwed under the Keating/Hawke reforms.

After the disaster of the Latham campaign, the Union movement knew it needed to get rid of Howard. So they brought in a PR firm, Essential Media Communications, to advise on creating a grass roots campaign. It’s called astroturfing, and it worked a treat.

Your Rights At Work got rid of John Howard, so after November 2007 it was allowed to fizzle, splutter and die.

Sure, there were a few half-arsed campaigns with little or no follow through at the local level and the odd mass email just to keep up appearances, but the union movement was never really serious about creating an ongoing community campaign.

The reality is that the union movement couldn’t organise its way to the shops, which is why they brought in the consultants.

How do I know this? I worked on the Your Rights At Work campaign.

This pattern is continuing with some unions now getting a contractor to do core union work – signing up new members.

In terms of creating a solid protection for working conditions the Your Rights At Work campaign failed. All it did was elect Rudd. Forget all the dribble about Kevin 07 and climate change, the only game in town in November 2007 was Your Rights At Work – it shifted tens of thousands of votes to the ALP where it mattered.

But it didn’t protect Award conditions – Julia Gillard’s Award ‘simplification’ is taking working conditions away. People that were screwed under WorkChoices will be screwed under Fair Work Australia.

Mighell is right; the union movement would be better off if it wasn’t just a work-experience factory for ALP staffers and would-be politicians.

The Liberal Party likes to foam at the mouth about the amount of money the union movement gives to the ALP, but they miss the point.

Most of this money is simply club membership to keep the union movement inside the tent pissing out. The politicians always end up playing the ACTU and their affiliates like a violin.

Club-busters like Mighell will go nowhere in the union movement, which is built on a scared rabbit inward, defensive, almost paranoid, consensus that totally misunderstands the nature of modern society.

In the meantime the money the union movement gives to the ALP, so that the Rudd government can keep kicking working stiffs like you and I, is pretty obviously lousy value. That is if the union movement’s core mission is to protect working rights, as opposed to getting on in politics.

Don’t get me wrong; this is far from an endorsement of the Liberals – especially under Abbott. It is merely pointing out that neither of the major parties are seriously interested in the lot of working stiffs as anything more than ballot fodder, and as consuming machines to keep the big mortgage holding banks and retailers happy.

Outside of that the government, whoever is in power, is hell bent on crunching down the price of labour. In a service-based economy where you don’t need anyone with too many brains or skills it spells bad news for future living standards for the majority of us.

Now, if we had a union movement that was prepared to oppose this economic ‘consensus’ - as Mighell suggests - the prospects for my friends working bar, waiting table and wiping old folks arses would be brighter.

As it stands, they are screwed whoever wins this election.

Sport’s asset bubble

Will there be a global sporting financial crisis?

The implosion of Tiger Woods last year was reported in the business pages; this is because Tiger is more than a person, he is a brand.

It is a status he shares with other leading sports ‘personalities’. The idea is that product endorsement by the likes of David Beckham, Roger Federer or Michael Jordan actually leads to consumers modeling their purchasing habits viz that same endorsement.

What David Bekham knows about mobile phones is probably up there with my knowledge of Canadian fungi, but it must work as Motorola paid him a truckload of cash to endorse their Razr phone. In fact, a lot of pseudo science has been peddled around trying to quantify how much product endorsements are worth.

Given that a lot of this “research” bleeds from the marketing industry, most of it can be dismissed out of hand.

Marketers do know that human beings aren’t rational. From this it flows that neither are marketing budgets. Most of it is just simple psychology aimed at making people feel like they belong. It works well in societies where real social networks (as opposed to facebook) are parlous or have collapsed, such as suburban Australia, especially at the more affluent end.

Exhibit A in this regard is Firepower.

Product endorsement by sports personalities is just a subset of the power of celebrity that has been growing since the mid-twentieth century.

Such endorsements are not new. Pope Leo XIII once endorsed a plonk laced with cocaine (left), which probably explains Tony Abbott.

Even if celebrity sports endorsements do work to some degree it is probable that their audiences, globally, are shrinking.

There may be more people watching, but as a percentage of total potential audience sports are in decline.

I base this assertion on declining TV audiences. No doubt many sports watchers have simply shifted medium, but that doesn’t help sports organisations whose main income stream is from traditional media.

Cricket Australia has a revenue stream of about $150 million, a fact it attributes to income from media. Cricket Australia isn’t doing media deals with the profusion of dinky little blogs and message boards that can keep you very up to date with matters cricket. They do their deals with the likes of Foxtel and Channel Nine who, in turn, rely on cricket’s drawing power to grab eyeballs and thence advertising and/or subscription.

It’s a simple business model that has two big, terminal problems. One; audiences for TV, especially free-to-air, are in decline; and two, advertisers are getting much more targeted in their marketing spend, leaving TV ads as poor value for return.

Radio has been through this revolution and the result is revenue from radio ads is a lot lower, the ads are cheaper, and the products they now flog are a lot more downmarket, generally speaking and radio as a whole is becoming a shoestring operation with a decreasing accent on celebrity.

The current crop of Australian players are already not loved by the Australian public, as David Sygall pointed out in the Fairfax papers a few weeks ago.

That cricket is aware of the potential damage this could do is undeniable. Sygall reported the market research they are doing. Also witness their ham fisted attempts to control the image of their ‘product’ by keeping news agencies from reporting test matches unless they signed ‘we love you’ waivers with Cricket Australia.

It is worth noting that if Cricket Australia’s revenue stream declines, so does the share going to the contracted players. So the deflation from lost media revenue will flow through to deflation in player’s incomes.

I’m using Cricket as an example here, but you could equally apply it to AFL, Rugby League, Rugby Union and Football. Globally, football will remain strong because of its sheer weight of numbers, but Tennis, Golf, the American sports and global Rugby must be getting nervous.

Sport as a product faces some big problems when it comes to the dreaded monetization. The problem that many of us have suspected for some time – that elite sports people and their organisations are paid far too much – is coming home to roost.

Celebrity is so vacuous that it relies on constant attention to survive. Paris Hilton knows that if the eyeballs stray elsewhere, they may never come back.

Sport as a business faces the big problem of continuing to attract eyeballs in a day and age when its very elitism and the carry on of its 'celebrities' alienates many viewers for a host of reasons that it isn't worth dwelling on at this time. Hence their need to turn to the vulgarity of 20/20 in cricket in order to feed the popularity beast so essential to the mainstream media outlets.

There is an alternative that is unthinkable to the moneymen surrounding elite sport. Sports could always return to being a past-time; an activity, rather than a spectacle.

But, who is going to endorse your product or watch your TV show if everyone is out there playing sport? Besides, humans are far too passive to reject the verisimilitude of spectating.

Actually doing it – as Nike suggests – requires more effort than western consumerism could stand.

Rupert Loves Kristina

A funny thing is happening in NSW. The News Limited stable is having a love affair with the latest ALP Premier Kristina Keneally.

Witness this

Simultaneously, over at the thinking right wing lunatic’s newspaper, the Australian, Liberal opposition leader, Barry O’Farrell is getting beaten about the head and neck for being, well, Barry.

A Canberra media source has suggested that Rupert likes to back winners, and perhaps News see Kristina as a winner.

An alternative reading may suggest that there’s a contra deal going on here. If so, what is News Limited getting for their gushing coverage? It’s a scary thought. Time to bury the silverware.

There is a genuine liking out in the community for Keneally. Her ‘li’l ole me’ routine is working a treat; as is the super-mum thing. The less said about the MILF factor (although it has to be acknowledged) the better. All of it is bullshit of course, but the public enemy number one running Kristina, Premier’s Department head Walt Secord (who did the same job for that equally talentless fluff, Bob Carr), at least has something to work with this time.

It’s not just News either. The Parrott was in on the act, reminding his listeners on Monday January 18 what an intellect Miss Ohio was, and how she bikes to work, performs miracles, etc. etc.

If News Limited think Kristina can survive it’s also assuming the ALP is going to survive, which is not beyond the realm of possibility, just beyond the realms of sanity. Maybe they’re just happy that Hamlet of Macquarie Street, Nathan Rees, is gone? Whatever it is, it sure is weird.

The psephologist’s psephologist, Antony Green pointed out that Rees received a similar (though marginally less impressive) bounce [link] when he ascended to the right hand of Joe Tripodi. None of that bounce flowed through to improving the ALP’s vote though and in the end he was bumped, along with his minder, Graeme Wedderburn, who was proving to be a looming problem come the ALP senate preselection.

So News, and Alan, may want to be careful. Preferred leader polls are always a beauty contest and have little to do with voting intention. Keating was preferred Prime Minister right up to election day in ’96 – and that ended up with the ALP wandering the streets crying “bring out your dead”.

Likewise, the primary vote numbers in the poll that prompted the WE LOVE KRISTINA headlines still has the ALP lying in a ditch with flies buzzing around its eyes.

She is also stuck with a team that is the end result of three generations of nepotistic inbreeding. None of those jokers have had an original idea since the Golden Palace in Sussex Street last changed it’s menu back in 1984.

What will be of greater concern for the Tyke Keneally will be the release of the attempted papicide, Mehmet Ali Agca.

Kristina is a good Catholic Girl – Quiet up the back! – and must be terrified at the thought of the guy who tried to kill the pope, who has God’s mobile number on speed-dial, being welcomed back into society, a la Denis Ferguson.

Ole Memsy is loose on the streets of Ankara, offering to kill Osama Bin Laden and declaring himself Messiah.

Such delusional antics prompt an idea that Mehmet is fine material to be the next Premier of NSW. Bob Carr is living proof that Mehmet wouldn’t be the first character the major parties have thrown up who came with his very own Messiah complex.

(Methuselah would like to declare that he is a former altar boy, and as such will have three Bloody Mary’s and a How’s Your Father as penance.)