Rudd bids for public hospitals while voters know only clear and responsible federalism will heal the sick.

posted by David Collyer on Monday, July 27th 2009

Quality health care is a bargain - just ask the sick and dying

Kevin Rudd wants to run the public hospitals and is willing to conduct a referendum to gain the power.  Why?

What can the federal government bring to our public hospital system that state governments cannot?

Do they possess superior management skills?  A lower cost base?  Or unique insights into patient care?

I don’t think so.

The federal government does have the money, courtesy of the takeover of income tax from the states in the Second World War.  And we owe a debt of gratitude to Gough Whitlam for the introduction of universal health care in the early 1970’s.

However, both of these key changes undermined the clear lines of responsibility voters need to inform their choices.  State governments blame the feds for rationing the funds they need.  Canberra accuses state administrators of ‘inefficiency’.

No government is clearly responsible; no government can be punished for its failures.   One taxes, another spends.

Many people think state governments are redundant – relics of our colonial past.  But the end of the states is not the shift Rudd is threatening a referendum on.  He merely wants to control their activities.

Universal health care is a public good of enormous value.  It is more use to the poor and sick than superannuation or transport or even social welfare.  It is the gift of life itself.

We can congratulate ourselves on being born in a country that provides quality care for everyone at a cost of only 8.8 per cent of GDP.  This is an absolute bargain!

The USA is currently debating the introduction of a system like ours – theirs currently costs 15.2 per cent of GDP and leaves over 30 million people without health care and higher infant mortality rate than all other developed countries.  That comparison makes a mockery of allegations of ‘inefficiency’.

Why does Rudd want to run the hospitals?  This is a second order answer to the problem.  A better one would be to match state taxes to their responsibilities.  Then we could vote them out for just cause, not just because.

February 2009 Victorian Bushfire – Latte Environmentalism – Why Labor, Liberal And The Australian Greens Aren’t Thinking And Won’t Talk

posted by Scott Kane on Sunday, July 19th 2009

Popularity is the life blood of any political party.  Logically, without supporters you cant get elected.  For the machines of most political parties this is the paramount consideration.  Sadly this is exactly why unpopular realities are usually ignored.  If acted upon, it is in a way opposite to the principles of decency,  safety and logic.

One could argue the Brumby Labor government is acting in direct response to the horror we all witnessed on February 7th 2009,  Black Saturday.

Giving A Disaster A Cool Name And A Royal Commission Isn’t First Aid

We are quick to stick a brand name on sorry events.  It makes it easy for the media to discuss it;  it looks sharp.  It’s easy to erect a Royal Commission to  palliate community horror and indeed outrage.

But a bandaid is not going to resolve the issues that led to this fire.  No, I dont mean the drought or climate change.  I refer to something entirely in our hands:  sensible forest management and fuel reduction.  

Two conflicting intents paralyse our emergency services and government departments in relation to the whole forestry management and fuel reduction issue.  As a society of decent, humane people we have a serious obligation to think the matter through and decide.  Let me be clear – without either a genuine fuel reduction program or the complete evacuation of all civilians from the fire-prone areas, more innocent people will die in the next fire season.

We got to this point by pandering to simple-minded green politics for the sake of votes.

Note: at no time am I referring to the brave volunteers on the ground or the men and women of our police, fire and ambulance services who were left to clean this mess up.

Latte Green Politics Is The Core Of The Issue

Many political decisions  are targeted, nay designed, to woo inner suburban greens who love the environment, even if they dont know what it means.

It’s easy, it’s attractive and it feels good.  If feels like you’re making a difference – and yes, in that they are right.  They are.  What these well intentioned and passionate people fail to grasp is that the brand of politics they  subscribe is a life-threatening danger to the people living in the bush. I live in the Federal seat of McEwen – the seat containing the communities most heavily devastated by the 2009 bushfires -and I know the people don’t want mass clearing of forest or bush.

They love it!

They live in an area they cherish and seek to protect it.  But they don’t want to die in it, just  because a misinformed green in the inner suburbs believes clearing of fuel is bad, that burning the bush is intolerable environmental vandalism and that “Black Saturday was a one off event”.  These contentions are being actively circulated by the green movement.

It wasn’t.  It will happen again.   On average there’s a bad burn every ten years.  Each time the loss of life and property has increased.  Yet we do even less fuel reduction now than when I was a boy forty years ago.

Labor, Liberal And Green Votes – Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire

Let’s talk perfectly plain here.  Environmental concern is a good thing.  The Australian Democrats have actively pursued best environmental practice for 30 years.  This isn’t about environmental concern or environmental activism.  There is nothing wrong with that.  In fact I  ran an entire electoral campaign on the issue of Climate Change in 2007.

What is wrong is government,  specifically, political parties pandering to the latte environmentalists purely to garner votes and look impressive and concerned.

It’s wrong and yet it works – and that is gravely concerning.

In a forthcoming article, I’m going to address issues of science and previous debate and inquires..  That is, the evidence we had before February 7th 2009 aka Black Saturday.  It was predicted by credible scientists holding hard, scientific, verifiable data.  They were ignored.

Today,  I am contending that the problem lies with Labor and Liberals desperately seeking to win votes that would otherwise go to minor parties or independents.  That problem and The Greens, specifically their supporters, are doing the Australian community great harm campaigning – particularly at local government level – with rhetoric based on pseudo science, emotionalism and the cult of the glowing ember.

Can’t See The Wood For The Greens

The labor government has had ten years to address the problems that led to Black Saturday.  Before them the Liberals had their chance.  The Victorian state government has had 70 years to do so!

Consider the commissions, coronial inquests and public  submissions to both since 1939.  We have the answers yet they’ve not been acted on in an overwhelming number of instances.  It hasn’t always been due to the influence of green politics, to be sure.  But that does not detract from the fact that there has been no action at all.

I remember – like it was yesterday – being caught in the 1969 bushfires.  I lost a fire fighter school friend in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires and I’ve mentioned here previously that my sister, family and friends lost their homes and in many cases their lives on Black Saturday 2009.  So many lost so much, and the reason is simple.  We live in the area the green movement of the inner suburbs likes to poke holes in the air about.  We live here and, as was the case in February 2009, we die here.

We had commissions and inquiries after all these calamaties.  Yet after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires there was less, not more fuel reduction taking place.

How could that be?

The rise of Green politics.  After the 60′s and 70′s environmental movement had passed and – it needs to be said,  with some very positive outcomes – there was a brief pause in the early 1980′s.  Enormous energy was devoted opposing the nuclear fuel cycle  – rightly – and I applaud that work even now.  It was the Australian Democrats, in the Senate, who led the charge against the damming of the Franklin River – not Bob Brown and The Greens despite their desperate and recent efforts to rewrite history to look like they’ve actually done something, anything!

I supported those real environmental actions.

But the need for fuel reduction is a real concern.  It isn’t based on flimsy theories that trees enjoy being barbequed every ten years by a firestorm.  Sure, Australian native trees germinate widely after a bushfire.  But a firestorm is not the same thing as a bushfire.

When greens point with orgasmic enthusiasm at a series of green sprouts covering the trunks of recently burned trees, they are pointing to an desperate illusion in many cases.  Much of this “green regrowth” is  a last ditch stand of the tree to hang on to life -  soon be extinguished as the tree rots out from the inside.

And that breathless naivity makes me ill.

Yet, this is exactly the kind of material we see published by the green movement.  This and a whole swag more.  Sure, not all the trees will die.  Some of them will in fact go on to live, but  many with this symptom won’t.

How do we know?  The scarring on the hills of Lorne or Warburton after Ash Wednesday is how.  Visible ten years after the fire had passed.  Dead, lifeless trees.  In other words – past forestry experience.  It takes decades to recover from a firestorm, and if not carefully managed leaves the door wide open for invasive and undesirable species to take over.

A little bit like the Senate now the Democrats are absent.

This disinformation is swallowed whole by  latte drinking greens.  This is why labor and sadly the conservatives will not, can not, address this issue – they are desperate to hold the support of these “believers”.

Victorians Have To Decide.  Either We Fix This Now Or We Stop People Living There.

The equation is a simple one at the end of the day.  We either fix this issue by listening to bushfire scientists or we tell people they can’t live in bush-fire prone areas.  It’s a simple decision but it’s painful.  If we attend to proper, science based fuel reduction management then all political parties advocating it face a voter backlash from the latte sipping types we’ve discussed.

On the other hand there is going to be hell to pay if we are going to tell the people, such as those of McEwen, to pack their bags and leave their homes and lives.

The remaining option is no option at all.  That is, to continue to ignore the problem, to pretend all things green are good, and to watch homes and lives burn again.

What would you decide, as a humanitarian, if it were up to you?

Scott Kane

Will we use the low interest rate window to knock down private debt or return lemming-like to the financial orgy?

posted by David Collyer on Saturday, July 11th 2009

Australia struts the world stage, its banks safe, consumption stimulated and exports robust.  Well done, Mr Rudd, you followed the IMF script pretty well.

Except, ahem, what about private debt?  What about the reality that our banks fund half their assets with restless offshore loans, not from sticky domestic deposits?

The Bank of International Settlements prefers the figures to speak for themselves.  And they do.  Australians have borrowed heavily to buy shiny cars and large comfortable houses.

Borrowing to buy long life assets is a useful way to achieve one’s goals.  But in the end, it is all about balance, a quality we are strikingly short of.  Big loans mean heavy repayments – so don’t lose your job, get sick or lift your gaze for a moment from the long and arduous task of forwarding your earnings to the bank.

Today’s low interest rates ease the repayment burden.  Those that use this window to beat down their borrowings buy flexibility and freedom – for themselves and their country.

And, yes, the economy will recover, followed by higher interest rates.

While the banks have been ‘stress tested’, citizens have not.  What happens if the interest rate on your very large mortgage is ten percent not six? What if it is13 per cent?

“Sir!  Sir!  I know! Sir!  Sir!”

Pain.  Thirst.  Sacrifice.

The Australian Government does not have a debt problem.  But you do and I do.

Graph Source: Bank of International Settlements, 79th Annual Report

Home-buyer Health Hazard

posted by David Collyer on Sunday, July 5th 2009

I am gravely concerned about the level of Australian house prices.  Real estate prices have tumbled in the US, the UK and New Zealand, but not here.

It may be unpopular and unwelcome to point this out, but our very high property prices are a cost and not a benefit.

According to RP Data-Rismark, the national median house price of $468,819 is just $520 shy of the record set in February last year, before the global economy sank into recession. Melbourne is leading the housing recovery, with a 6.1 per cent growth in prices between January 1 and May 31 and auction clearance rates in excess of 80 per cent for the past seven weeks. Sydney recorded 5.2 per cent growth in prices over the same period.

All sorts of reasons are offered for this – demographics, immigration, rationing by land-banking corporates and government action to contain the spread of our already large cities.  None of this explains why house prices are so high relative to incomes.

That is, Australians spend much larger multiples of their income on housing – they now cost about six times earnings – than anywhere else in the world. How is that affordable? How is that socially or economically useful?

If that is confusing, understand that at six times earnings a mortgagee with a 100% mortgage over 30 years will need to pay 20 per cent of their pre-tax income in principal repayments.  Interest is extra.  Anyone signing up for such a mortgage is committing themselves to a lifetime of poverty, after including those interest payments.

A reversion to the long term average ratio – house prices at about three times earnings – would mean a halving of house prices. That seems impossible and psychologically impermissible to a lot of Aussies. Price falls of that magnitude are already underway elsewhere and probably nearly completed in the USA.

Our government sparked a lending boom to those people in Australia with the most to lose from taking on a huge mortgage at the low end of the interest rate cycle: young Aussies, the most vulnerable workers in the job market who spend the highest percentage of their discretionary income (not much) on an asset they are buying at the top of the boom.

If you wanted to deliberately wipe out the financial prospects of an entire generation by saddling them with crushing debt, increasing the first buyer’s grant and putting on a time limit is exactly what you’d do.Many thanks for background to The Daily Reckoning Australia  www.dailyreckoning.com.au

The pain is yet to begin

We Can’t Allow Senator Conroy’s Internet Filter To Be Decanted. Huxley Was Right, Not Orwell

posted by Scott Kane on Saturday, July 4th 2009

June 8, 1972, in the village of Trang Bang, nine year old Phan Thi Kim Phuchad had stripped off her burning clothes following a napalm bomb attack on her village.  The photo won Nick Ut a Pulitzer Prize. It was Ut who took Kim Phuc and the other children to the hospital.

Under the seriously flawed – if not itself depraved – internet filter proposed by Australia’s Senator Conroy we would be unlikely to see this photo.  We are lucky to be able to see it and in turn appreciate the gravity of the scene and the proof that innocents are horrifically treated in war, simply because poor little Phan ripped off her burning clothes in an agony of searing, horrific, flames and fled naked from her obliterated villiage.

This photo demonstrates why internet censorship cannot be tolerated.

We know there are dangers on the internet, particularly for children.  It is our parental responsibility to make sure they are not exposed, not Senator Conroy and his Huxlean legislation.

A filter like that one proposed for Australia by Senator Conroy – the chief proponent of Australia’s own digital “Great Wall of China” – is not and cannot be a solution.  Senator Conroy and his merry band of byte blockers would consider this heinous example of man’s inhumanity to man pornographic or to quote the Senator’s own dark expression: “Inappropriate”.

It fits many if not most of the definitions he has put forward.  Yet surely, the blocking of an image like this is as sickening as those who ordered the napalming of the  Trang Bang village.

George Orwell famously wrote 1984 and Animal Farm.  While both poignant warnings in their own right, with 1984 warning us to be wary of invasive, government controlled technology, it is Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” that contains the prophecy.

“Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.”
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 3

Conroy’s crude filter and it’s supporters lump logical argument into a grab bag of aspersions.  Opposing the filter exposes one to any number of despicable characterizations.  But Huxley’s quote is paramount in relation to the Senator’s reckless, industry and democracy-threatening censorship.

Senator – there are many options available, including international work on preventing “inappropriate” content by ending the financial streams of those engaged in it.  It’s more work, yes, but it does work.  Filtering Australian internet services is a laughable waste of time, money and effort.  Truncating our information technology sector with a filter based on Victorian-era terror is socially, politically and economically disastrous.

As soon as it’s released it will be circumvented – and those who do the evil the Senator is keen to protect us from will still exist and will still be doing that evil – but Senator Conroy won’t be able to see them behind his filter.  Australia’s very own “Ostrich 2.0″ of the world wide web.

Senator Conroy’s preoccupation with “naughty bits” is an issue Senator Conroy needs to deal with in his own life, not yours, not the lives of Australians.  The Senator should not, nay, must not force Australia to lay down to his own private version of what constitutes good or bad content.

It’s so fatally flawed it’s remarkable Conroy’s expert advisors haven’t pointed it out to him – or perhaps they have and the Dear Senator is mimicking the odd bird with it’s head in the sand pictured above? I remind the Senator of Huxley’s words:

Australia: Hang your head in shame!

posted by David Collyer on Wednesday, June 24th 2009

We all know the miserly income trickled out to old age pensioners by the Australian Government is an outrage.

Now, the OECD – the rich countries’ club – has joined the chorus, finding Australia has one of the highest rates of poverty for people aged over 65. (See http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/0/33/43008716.pdf)

And this is even though we have fewer pensioners per employed person than virtually every other OECD country.

The Howard Government so relaxed the superannuation rules that anyone over 55 could slip a million dollars into their personal fund tax-free. But they kept the OAP rates down, the scum.

Did you have a lazy million dollars to deploy into super? Hmmm.

The tax revenue forgone in those superannuation concessions could have made a large difference to the quality of life of many elderly people.

They are your grandparents, or parents, and one day, this will be you.

The old age pension is the ultimate act of kindness to the frail and worn. Miserable selfishness in this area diminishes us all.