Slumbering Green

While the rest of the country is getting exercised about other things, I thought it timely to return to a topic that had legs in 2019 when Labor lost an election it was, apparently, going to win by a mile. Talk of another election has been hosed down by the prime minister, but it won’t be too long before these issues will again start to enter the public sphere. Sometime in the early part of this year, Labor publicly announced that it would drop the policy whereby a tax credit would not be paid to retired shareholders on account of tax paid by companies. This sounds pretty arcane and marginal but if you’re living on uncertain income from investments – as retirees all are – then it sort of becomes a big deal. Franking credits are tax refunds available for retired shareholders. Because companies pay income tax, the government decides that shareholders do not have to pay tax on dividends paid to them as a result of owning shares. Under the existing system, even if you pay no income tax, yo...

Early on the morning of 23 February news about JobSeeker started to trickle out through the webs, first with a story on the Sydney Morning Herald website, then one on the Guardian ’s website. The SMH said JobSeeker would go up by $80 and fortnight and the Guardian said it would go up by $50 a fortnight.  Either way, it was disappointing. Though to get any movement on the unemployment benefit was a good thing. It just wasn’t far enough to make a real difference to the way people are affected by unemployment. As I’ve pointed out before , Covid-19 has changed the debate about government support. We now know that the cost to the collective from doing things for others is not insurmountable. The old right-wing consensus has been badly eroded and people understand, now, that doing things together is better, sometimes, than always making people function as atomised individuals. Shared destiny is a witness to hope. Every cent spent on JobSeeker will go back into the economy, as people use...

It’s not just news organisations that have been inconvenienced but even the Bureau of Meteorology, Australian Council of Social Services, and other organisations that provide critical information to the community. Facebook’s overbearing flexing of its corporate muscle to silence people needs to be met with alternative arrangements in the form of legislation – which both sides of the political divide could sponsor – that would bring the tech giant to heel. Who decided what gets published in Australia? Is it the people of Australia and the elected representatives of the nation – a proud nation of individualists that has seen its fair share of collective suffering and joy – or else a small coterie of highly-paid offshore executives whose sole mission in life seems to be avoiding paying taxes? Time for Australia to stand up and be counted. So far, it’s been a matter of people being asked politely on TV to go to the native website of the organisation or news outlet to find the information t...

Well, Donald Trump was just the first of many, it seems. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday – “Craig Kelly cops one-week Facebook ban for COVID-19 misinformation” – other politicians are fair game when it comes to censorship.   Now, I’m not a supporter of Kelly, who I view as a slightly toned-down version of Pauline Hanson, but social media companies that take action to suspend the accounts of politicians, or to remove posts they’ve made on the platforms, are indeed, as Leigh Sales proposed recently, walking a fine line. It’s instructive, perhaps, that the same day the Facebook ban of Kelly was announced I posted on Twitter: We need "woke police" to make sure ppl are liking the right things. Mb Twitter can set up an AI bot to do this, just give people suggestions or else block "likes" that are illegal. This was in response to a post by Glenn Greenwald, a journalist based in Brazil, who’d written: I was just reading on smart-liberal media Twitter earli...

If Barilaro’s tumbling verbiage weren’t indicator enough Peter Dutton’s scrambling for coherence yesterday must show that the clock has – finally – struck the witching hour. As the Guardian reported: Labor’s immigration spokesperson, Kristina Keneally, has attacked the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton over a fast-tracked grant to the National Retailers Association, which he denies was influenced by a donation. Here’s Kenneally on ABC News at just a few minutes after 8am yesterday answering reporters’ questions. The Liberals have form. We shouldn’t forget the water buybacks scandal that animated Twitter in April 2019. In that case, government looked guilty but nothing was proven. There was also the Paladin case , centred on a company that had provided services to the government on Manus Island, where Australia used to operate a refugee camp and where a number of refugees the country has so far refused to accommodate are still living (in the general community).  Given all thi...

A breath of fresh air descended onto my Twitter feed: federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese was ignoring the poor job Shorten had made of industrial relations. With new legislation before federal Parliament dealing with casualisation, Ablo’d seen an opportunity to do a Howard on Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Remember WorkChoices? Their passage by John Howard under a previous Liberal-National coalition government led to the loss of power and – for Howard himself – the loss of his seat. The only surviving part of the original Australian settlement of a century before was being attacked and workers rallied to unseat the abuser. Here's Krinatina Kenneally – a senator – talking industrial relations on ABC News channel this morning. The Sydney Morning Herald – which has published a good backgrounder on the debate – seems to be of two minds about Labor’s and the Coalition’s plans, and have written their story with the debate as a locus of conflict headlining two battling politicians. T...

On Tuesday 8 February – hardly a significant day in the calendar – John Barilaro, deputy premier and leader of the New South Wales Nationals (part of a conservative political party with its roots in rural and regional areas) was up against questioning by Greens Member of the Legislative Council David Shoebridge. The subject was the use of funds allocated for projects to offset the negative impact of heavy bushfires last summer. Shoebridge was later shuffled onto the set at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s for display in the evening’s ‘7.30’ program (see photo). He’s a tough adversary to have and his points were well taken by the community, many of whom sympathised with local government areas that missed out on allocations. Barilaro said that such submissions were eliminated from competition due to not meeting various elements of the guidelines set by the state government. But his words had a hollow sound. Gladys Berejiklian – the state premier – faced similar accusations put b...

It’s been the best part of a decade since I’ve been writing about greentech and innovation in the environment space. In March 2013 I consolidated my experience and wrote about the carbon price, which was introduced but which – following the Liberal-National coalition’s electoral win in September of that year and despite the stock market taking no notice of the carbon price – was abolished.  Within two years the architect of elimination – Tony Abbott – would be out of office and a new leader appointed in his place. Malcolm Turnbull immediately started to make noises about greentech. Julie Bishop appeared on-camera from Paris in the wake of the COP21 talks aimed at gaining global agreement on what to do about climate change. It was all "technology" and "innovation", with the foreign minister parroting what the new PM had been rabbiting on about on TV for months. Until this year that was about all we heard about technological solutions – and the attendant profitability...

We’ve seen the government pour billions of dollars into the economy through handouts to companies and individuals. Even that we’re having a debate about what used to be called Newstart (unemployment benefits now renamed “JobSeeker” to match with JobKeeper – a special Covid allowance given to companies whose revenues had dropped significantly due to the virus) is cause for celebration. But there’s more. We’ve seen state governments try to address the problem of cost-of-living notably, for example, in New South Wales – Australia’s most populous state and where (in Sydney) the nation’s highest housing prices are to be found – under, surprisingly, a Liberal-National Coalition government. The conservatives are normally all for the working of the free market and for small government, but Gladys Berejiklian and her ministers and their officials have come up with a plan to include social housing in some new developments. What’s now called the Waterloo Estate was called the Endeavour Estate whe...

Zali Steggall’s climate policy is in reality a bit of a damp squib because it doesn’t offer much more than something resembling a think tank. As if we needed another committee to tell us what needs to be done.  Do we really need a new body to study environmental issues when there are already plenty of groups doing this sort of important work? The Climate Council and the Clean Energy Council are busy, the Australian Industry Group has climate advisers in place who can funnel good suggestions to the government when asked (or, even, when they’ve not been asked). In fact, any number of well-funded organisations have such people employed whose only job is to dream up schemes suited to both making money and improving environmental outcomes for the whole community. But if you’re looking for a statutory body – an institution established by an act of Parliament – there’s the Committee on the Environment and Energy, which has been operating since 1996. The defunct Climate Commission – its na...

A long conversation on Twitter recently had me thinking more about my decision – since Google announced on the 22nd of last month that it’ll likely remove its search engine from Australia – to switch to Bing.  It wasn’t a rancorous exchange, but smouldered. As can happen when people communicate via anonymous accounts over things they feel strongly about. I kept my cool and tried to invite the guy (I think it was a “he”) to come to the table and have a serious, well-intentioned conversation. God knows we need good intentions. Especially online. No-one lost the argument because it finally petered out absent a flame war – so I’ll count it as a success. But it got me to thinking: what’s the difference between a corporate home page and a news website? Why ask Google to pay news organisations for the information they produce, while not paying, say, Rio Tinto or Westinghouse for similar content? Many companies make PR material using copywriters, that they then publish on their home pages....

I made an evident mistake on Sunday when I tuned into the #insiders hashtag, coming away from the experienced somewhat depressed but wiser for the detail conveyed to me about the errors people make in their judgements about the Liberal-National Coalition (the conservative party here in Australia).  When I awoke ready for the next day I nursed remnants of a dream about the governor-general – it’d been in my imagination a new GG’s inauguration ceremony – and I felt chastened for the richness of the imagery displayed by my unconscious mind, with its soldiers and trains. Our current GG was a soldier, and this class of citizen had IRL furnished many candidates for our top constitutional role. Accustomed to serving the Queen and forming a link to Buckhingham Palace he or she is a form of guarantee of sanity. You feel secure that, however strange the natives become with their outlandish ideas, leadership shall always be kept within bounds established in the distant past. Not so with our e...

It’s been tough for me driving due to noise from diesel trucks, and from buses, in the lane next to me interrupting my enjoyment of the latest episode of my favourite series of podcasts. To cope I started using the car’s moon roof – the window in the cab ceiling, which opens at the press of a button. I’ll keep it up as doing so lets me get air circulation on hot days while keeping out the worst of the grumbles from the 16-wheelers beside me as their drivers gear down to stop at the traffic light on Regent Street in Chippendale.  I need to make such trips fairly often as they let me pick up my mail and get select groceries local stores won’t carry on their shelves. Choosing the right type of bread or getting my favourite type of cheese contribute to allocating the amount of time I spend in various shops. It’s all about choice as well for investors, with the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank setting up taskforces to help their executives understand climate risk. The link...