.. sorry-TeaParty-Australia .. Call for a People's Revolution
Peter Hartcher Date March 5, 2011
An Australian-style Tea Party could be big and noisy but it will be met head on by a tightly organised opponent.
The Liberal Party's Senator Cory Bernardi has told colleagues that he would like to be the most conservative politician in Australia's conservative party. He's not only well on his way to that title, he's also positioning himself to be its most effective organiser.
When he was at university, it struck him that students on the left of politics were very active and quick to organise, while conservative students thought that it was enough to be quietly firm in their own convictions.
He decided that this was how the left won and the right lost. The former elite rower was not content to throw himself into Liberal politics, serving as the youngest president the South Australian branch has ever had and entering the Senate in 2006.
He was determined to help young conservatives to mobilise. A couple of years ago he travelled to the US and visited the Leadership Institute just outside Washington. It was set up specifically to train conservative activists. Its graduates include the man nicknamed "Bush's Brain" for his work as George W. Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove.
Inspired, Bernardi returned to Adelaide [ aside: known as the 'City of Churches' and at one time anyway was headlined as the drug capiatal of Australia .. surprised? ] and in 2009 set up his own training outfit, the Conservative Leadership Foundation. As Bernardi explains on its website: "Our goal is to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists in Australia by providing the training and skills necessary to succeed."
Bernardi set it up with his own money, and, unlike the institutional headquarters of its Washington model, it is a shoestring operation entirely operated by volunteers. What does it do? It sponsors research by young conservatives, offers public speaking workshops and essay writing competitions, and distributes books like Confrontational Politics.
Confrontational Politics was written by an American, H.L. Richardson, the founder of Gun Owners of America and a one-time Republican state senator for California. The book has become a handbook for activists in the American Tea Party movement, the grassroots right-wing populists who took anti-Obama politics to a new level of anger and activity with rallies across the US.
Bernardi also backed a suggestion by one of his young trainees to start a website designed to be a "Facebook for conservatives". His foundation supported the idea with a small sum of money and the Conservative Action Network, or CANdo, went live last October.
"It's political activism for the 21st century," Bernardi told the Herald yesterday.
So last Thursday, when Tony Abbott came out and said "I think there will be a people's revolt against this carbon tax", Bernardi was ready to help make it happen.
"I've never seen such an instant change in public mood as I have in the past week. With Rudd's emissions trading scheme, it took a year for opinion to turn against it. This time it took a week. There was an instant increase in the number of people expressing concern by phone and email."
On Monday this week he was ready to direct the anger and to foment some more. Bernardi pulled out the list of names of people who signed an online petition he had organised against Rudd's earlier version of a carbon pricing mechanism. There were some 6000 names and email address on the petition.
Bernardi emailed all of them: "The carbon tax is back and you need to get active." He directed them to the CANdo website. The website, in turn, directed concerned citizens to lobby the independent MPs who will decide the ultimate fate of Gillard's plan.
And CANdo asked them to donate money for a campaign. It also urged them to visit another website, Menzies House, where they could sign a petition against a carbon tax. By yesterday the petition had collected about 13,500 virtual signatures.
The CANdo site provides a central point for the campaign. As Bernardi said: "There might be 15 or 20 groups all organising against the carbon tax. You want a place where they can get together."
Will it be like the Tea Party? That movement rose up spontaneously in anger at Obama's plan for government intervention in the health insurance sector.
Its sparks were fanned by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel. One presenter in particular, Glenn Beck, became synonymous with the Tea Party. One in five American voters today say they "strongly approve" of the Tea Party, an extraordinary success for a movement that didn't exist two years ago.
In Australia, the first difference is that the conservative leader, Tony Abbott, has called for the "people's revolt". And Bernardi and other Liberals are promoting it. In the US, the Tea Party was ahead of the institutional opposition in its anger and organising. Here, the institutional opposition is actually leading the movement.
Second, the rallying cause is the carbon tax. These are differences, not disqualifiers. But where is the Fox News equivalent to promote the cause to a mass audience? The broad answer is talkback radio, whose shock jocks have waged a furious campaign against the carbon plan. Radio 2GB, in particular, seems to be the most likely candidate to play the part of Fox News, with two of its shock jocks, Alan Jones and Chris Smith, vying to be the Aussie Glenn Beck.
But one important difference to the US experience crystallised yesterday. The progressive grassroots outfit GetUp! intercepted an email from some of the would-be Australian Tea Party organisers. It has galvanised an immediate counter-movement.
The email is from a fellow named Jacques Laxale representing something called the Consumers and Taxpayers Association, which a GetUp! activist derides as "a reputable group of three members".
The email from Laxale to his supporters says, in part: "Hi everyone. Thankyou for your patience, the meeting with Chris Smith from 2GB has provided an official date, time and place. Chris will be doing a live broadcast from outside Parliament House Canberra on Wednesday 23.3.11 at 12 noon …
"We don't want it to be an overnight fizzer. Let's give Canberra our best shot while Gillard is there." The email also listed rally dates and locations for other cities. The first is set for Melbourne, in front of Julia Gillard's office, next Saturday, with another in Sydney on April 2.
In response, GetUp! organised a counter-movement. By yesterday afternoon, eight groups had agreed to join the counter-Australian Tea Party. Among them are the ACTU, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society, the Climate Action Network Australia, and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. GetUp! is to be the organising hub and its director, Simon Sheik, its public face.
The coalition's first act will be to organise counter-rallies to the "No carbon tax" protests. In the US, the Tea Party ran unopposed as it gathered force. The instant counter-movement here is a key difference.
The Australian People's Revolt has a tough goal to achieve. Generating a big, noisy protest is one thing. Stopping the carbon tax is another. The carbon tax is planned to begin on July 1 next year. There is no election due until 2013.
The Gillard government's plan is built on the expectation that, once it is in place, the scare campaign will be exposed as hollow as companies adjust and the economy rolls on.
So that makes it imperative for the anti-carbon tax lobby to try to stop the tax being legislated in the first place. And that's why the independent MPs are such a central target.
The anti-tax forces will have to do a better job on this. So far, attempts at pressuring the independents have backfired. Coalition members' escalating pressure on one of the key independents, Rob Oakeshott, merely persuaded him to cancel his regular meetings with Tony Abbott.
Another, Andrew Wilkie, has reacted to Liberal party dog-whistling on asylum seekers by accusing Abbott of tolerating a "racism that eats at the Liberal Party". He called on Abbott to discipline Scott Morrison and Bernardi.
After criticising Islam, Bernardi felt obliged to issue a clarification to specify that he had intended to attack only Islamic extremism, not Islam itself.
A third, Tony Windsor, has said that the Liberals' campaign against the independents has been amplified by talkback shock jocks who, in turn, have incited hatred against the independents. Rather than split the independents away from the Gillard government, says Windsor, this tactic only "has the opposite effect".
And the Greens leader, Bob Brown, whose MP Adam Bandt supports Gillard in power, says that Abbott, by trying to destabilise the government to force an early election, is overreaching and producing a counter-effect: "Now he has to raise the stakes higher and higher to get an outcome that is less and less achievable."
Consider the voting record in the chamber where government is formed, the House of Representatives. The total number of bills voted through the chamber since the election stands at 72, including the flood levy. The number successfully opposed is zero.
An Australian Tea Party could be big and noisy. It will also be countered in a way the US one was not. Can it stop the tax? Not by pressuring and intimidating the independents, on the evidence to date.
Perhaps the central difference between Australia and the US is that we have compulsory voting. Extreme tactics in the US work because they motivate people to turn out at the polling booth. In Australia, where everyone turns out by law, the Liberals will win government only if they appeal to their right base and to the centre. They already own the right vote. Over-reaching could alienate the moderate centre and cost them support.
American analogies only go so far, and the Liberals might be on the verge of stretching this to breaking point.
.. then there was Abbott's drive to have the Carbon Tax repealed .. that tax which is driving electricity prices so .. ha .. for more to that picture .. see reply ..
Consumers spending more and saving less have helped the Australian economy grow by a stronger than expected rate in the last three months of the year.
The economy grew at a seasonally adjusted 0.8 per cent in the December quarter, taking the annual growth rate to 2.8 per cent. The quarterly figures were up from a 0.6 per cent expansion in the three months to September.
--- Australia's economic growth IMAGE INSIDE
GDP growth in Australia over the past five years (year-on-year rate, seasonally adjusted). ---
"There are some positive signs," federal Treasurer Joe Hockey said of the latest GDP figures.
"I remain positive about the outlook for the Australian economy and the trends revealed today [show] we are headed in the right direction."
The Australian dollar jumped nearly half a cent on the back of the stronger-than-expected figures to trade as high as US89.97 cents.
The fourth-quarter growth was driven by a 0.6 per cent boost from net exports and a 0.5 per cent contribution from consumption. A 0.3 per cent fall in investment offset some of the gains.
"While the wind-back in mining investment expected over the next couple of years will weigh on growth, there are some early signs that other sectors of the economy are starting to pick up," ANZ senior economist Felicity Emmett said.
"Housing investment is set to pick up strongly this year, household consumption spending looks to be trending higher, and the outlook for non-mining investment looks to be improving."
Household consumption improved slightly for the period to a seasonally adjusted 0.8 per cent, while government spending lifted by 0.3 per cent. At the same time, the household savings ratio slipped from its almost decade-highs to 9.7 per cent.
"It did come back a bit," National Australia Bank senior economist David de Garis said of the fall in the household savings ratio.
"Maybe that's a sign that consumers are a little bit less anxious towards the end of last year, but consumer sentiment has come off a bit since then, as we've had a lot of potentially destabilising news on corporate lay-offs."
Mr De Garis added that the figures showed that the domestic economy remained quite soft, with business investment contracting for the quarter.
"Consumer and business spending still remains on the cautious side," he said.
The mining, manufacturing, rental, hiring and property sectors contributed 0.1 per cent to GDP, while the terms of trade - a ratio that measures export prices to import prices - rose by 0.6 per cent.
Economists had tipped the growth rate for the quarter to come in at 0.6 per cent, and for the year-on-year rate to be 2.5 per cent.
A series of indicators released over the past week that feed into the GDP figures have painted a mixed outlook for the economy.
Data released on Tuesday showed that net exports were expected to contribute 0.6 percentage points of growth to fourth-quarter GDP.
At the same time, business investment intentions projections for the 2014-15 reaffirmed expectations of a fall-off in mining firms' spending plans but pointed to a soft outlook for investment by non-resources companies.
Meanwhile, other partial GDP indicators showed reasonably strong growth in businesses' wages and profits.
Economists have said resources exports were expected to driven GDP growth, but that domestic demand remained weak.
.. and yet, STILL, on so many websites you see the message Australia is going into recession .. LOL, gulp, it's been on for years, yet Australia is still hanging in there ..
To sell or not to sell government assets, that is the question
Cathy Alexander | Jan 14, 2014 12:53PM | EMAIL | PRINT
.. Australian .. :) .. also interesting, lol, and applicable to most any country for the views on privatization of public assets ..
We crown four experts treasurer for a day, asking them which of the 11 government entities up for privatisation they’d sell. The answer? All or nothing.
The debate about which government entities should go in the next round of Commonwealth privatisations has raised deep ideological questions on the role of the state.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott wants to sell off public corporations to pay down debt, but we don’t know which ones he has in mind. Yesterday, Crikey compiled a hit list of the bodies .. http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/01/13/for-sale-tony-abbotts-potential-privatisation-hit-list/ .. that could be sold off. Medibank Private, Australia Post, the ABC and SBS are on there. So is NBN Co, Snowy Hydro and the bodies that manage rail tracks, air traffic control, Defence housing and submarines. And Abbott could sell off HECS debt.
We’ve put that Crikey list to four experts to see what they would sell. As you’ll see, in a very polite way, they thoroughly disagree with each other …
Saul Eslake, chief economist at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia
[ that is funny .. lol .. it was extra good to later see Bill Mitchell's, just below ]
and reckons public companies can become too powerful?—?and dumping grounds for ministers’ pals, “usually the lazy and inefficient”.
The government should ask whether each corporation should legitimately be in public hands, and if the answer is no, the next question is whether the benefit won from selling it off (and using the proceeds to pay down debt) outweighs the cost of lost dividends.
Eslake says Medibank Private could be sold because it “certainly isn’t doing anything that isn’t being done by a large number of private organisations”, it doesn’t keep premiums low (its original purpose),
[ i'm not sure if there is indisputable evidence MediBank Private has not had some influence in keeping premiums lower than they might have been without it ]
and the government regulates health insurance premiums anyway. Defence Housing Australia could go because other organisations could do that work, and HECS debt could “certainly” be sold.
He has an open mind on Australia Post; the private sector already does much of what AP does, but Eslake says delivering mail to the bush is an essential service that should remain in public hands.
There isn’t a compelling reason to keep the Snowy power scheme in public hands, according to Eslake, but it would be difficult to privatise because it is used for irrigation and recreation as well (and Alan Jones is against a sale). And he doesn’t advocate selling the ABC (although a function like merchandising could be privatised) but says there could be a case for a commercial broadcaster?—?or the ABC?—?to take over SBS.
Bill Mitchell, professor of economics at Charles Darwin University
Mitchell cautions against listening to Eslake. “All these characters who work for investment banks … they’re just selling their own services. They’re held out as if they are experts with good intentions, but they’re not independent at all.”
Mitchell says no body on the list should be privatised. “A public investment can take into account what we call social benefits and costs, whereas a private organisation only considers the private cost and benefit,” he told Crikey. Mitchell says the claim that the private sector performs better is “just plainly the most flakiest proposition”.
Look at Qantas, he says. Sold off in the ’90s, it is now asking for government money and cannot compete with large publicly owned airlines (Emirates, Etihad, etc).
Mitchell also argues against privatising Australia Post. In remote areas the post office “becomes a hub for social activity, for caring and hearing things. For regional Australia those things are really important.” AP is a public corporation that is astutely run and has positioned itself well in new markets, he says. Mitchell points to the privatisation of Telstra, saying the result was poor management.
Mitchell isn’t buying Tony Abbott’s budget logic; “the fundamental proposition that the government has a debt problem and you sell off assets to resolve that is ridiculous.” And governments sometimes sell entities at a low price while bidding a permanent farewell to the revenue?—?on past examples, “the people who made a killing were the stockbrokers and lawyers”.
Daley says selling assets to pay down debt is a “tried and tested strategy”?—?but while some on the list could be sold, HECS debt should not be.
He points to a Grattan report .. http://grattan.edu.au/publications/reports/post/balancing-budgets-tough-choices-we-need .. to show how government asset sales helped reduce debt. However, Daley says Commonwealth debt is actually relatively low and the bigger problem is budget deficits. “And asset sales do not necessarily help here: by definition they only assist if the future interest on the asset sale price is more than the future dividends. There is no guarantee that the Commonwealth will, in fact, drive such a good bargain for any asset it sells,” Daley told Crikey. “Nevertheless, many of the assets may be more efficiently and better run in private than public hands.”
Bill Mitchell says the Grattan Institute’s views should be considered in light of who funds it, and suggests donations by big companies may predispose the institute to certain opinions. To that end, we note the institute’s donors and “affiliates .. http://grattan.edu.au/about-us/affiliates” include BHP Billiton, the Myer Foundation, the National Australia Bank, Ernst and Young consultants, and PricewaterhouseCoopers consultants. Read the institute’s view on its independence here.. http://grattan.edu.au/about-us .
Helen Dickinson, associate professor in public governance at the University of Melbourne
“Australia has relatively few remaining collective goods, and I would be sorry to see any of the list to be privatised without careful consideration,” she told Crikey. “History shows that those who do worst out of these privatisation processes are those with low levels of wealth.”
Dickinson says the mainstream media debate over whether to privatise Medibank Private had largely been presented as a done deal, but there is little public support for the move. “Whilst a sale would deliver a welcome injection of cash, there are no guarantees about how this might be spent, and the dividend provided by Medibank Private is a useful form of ongoing income generation,” she said. She says the insurer functions as a working asset that allows the government to reduce taxation. “The groups who arguably benefit most from Medibank Private being government-owned are working Australians who experience a lower tax burden, without losing quality of services,” she said.
Dickinson says the debate about privatisation is too simplistic and “needs to be about more than just economics”.
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