Australian Politics 2016-08-31 15:31:00
Australia's 'ticking fiscal time bomb' is untenable
This cannot be stressed enough
Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison said the word “debt” 30 times in his speech last week discussing the economic and fiscal outlook for Australia.
It was a dire warning on the future for the nation, the budget, and Australia’s fiscal future if the current settings are left as is.
That focus would be welcomed by Annette Beacher, TD Securities head of Asia-Pacific research, who wrote in a note on Tuesday that “Australia’s fiscal position is becoming increasingly untenable, even if current debt and deficit metrics remain low by global standards”.
She said that even though offshore investors usually utter “disbelief that any country with such low metrics could be at risk of losing its AAA rating” the trouble is there is a clear trend deterioration in these metrics over recent years.
That, and the dangerous reality that “the government is borrowing record amounts to consume, not invest [is] a ticking fiscal time bomb”.
Such is the way this new parliament is shaping up. Even as it just begins Beacher says the Australian government is likely to borrow at least “$A100b per year bond program for the next three years (at least) as reformist fiscal policy is stonewalled by populist politicians”.
Beacher says something must be done because the Australian government has little to no control over nominal GDP growth and national income which are heavily influenced by Australia’s terms of trade, themselves influenced by global forces.
The correlation between terms of trade and nominal GDP growth over the last twenty years is 91% she says. That renders any notion of the RBA targeting nominal GDP instead of inflation “misguided”, Beacher says.
But the real concern along with “persistent fiscal deficits is the structural break in government expenditure as a share of GDP” because the “Abbott-Hockey Liberal National government gave up on expenditure restraint (circle in chart above) and spending has been consistent with past recessions ever since”.
“How would this play out if a recession actually occurred?” Beacher asked.
This is a problem for Morrison who almost exclusively among his colleagues has continually tried to articulate a cogent reason, including strategies, for reining in Australia’s enduring fiscal issues.
But Beacher says:
The now one-seat majority of the LNP government in the Lower House, combined with an assorted array of ‘personalities’ in the Upper House (Senate) guarantees that passing any meaningful savings measures will be difficult. Whilst trimming expenditure is a priority for the government, the populist Senate is far more likely to reject savings measures, ruling them out as ‘unfair’.
It all means the federal treasurer warning that Australia’s debt position could blow out to a trillion dollars does not ring as hollow as such a headline grabbing statement sounds at first pass.
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Anti-Semitism of the progressive churches
Hal G.P. Colebatch
One of the nastiest perversions of Christianity in the world today – the attempted demonisation and isolation of Israel –has been carried out by, among other bodies religious, a German Protestant Church, under, naturally, the World Council of Churches.
One would think a German church, of all things, would hesitate before sticking a toe in the filthy pool of anti-Semitism. Anyway, its Australian equivalents are some way but not all that far behind.
The WCC and liberation theology in general, Catholic and Protestant, have been singing a bit smaller since the fall of the Soviet Union, but are still with us, with hatred of Israel replacing their previous leit-motif of anti-anti-Communism, while their attitude to the almost daily Islamic atrocities remains conciliatory,
Australian academic Bill Rubinstein, writing in last October’s Quadrant, pointed out that attacks on Israel and ‘Christian Zionism’ (ie pro-Israel evangelical churches) have become the No. 1 cause of progressive churches in much of the Western worlds, in some cases trumping even homosexual marriage.
Rubinstein comments ‘the Presbyterian Church of the USA is simply obsessed with its deep hostility to Israel. Not towards, say, Saudi Arabia, where no Christian may set foot.’ In North Africa Boko Haram and other Islamic groups murder Christians wholesale – the Christian death-toll may be in six figures for the last few years -without a word of reproof from liberal clerics. The WCC’s silence is as loud now as was its silence during the Cold War regarding the Soviet Gulag.
The same double standards prevail in the equivalent Australian churches, particularly sections of the Uniting Church which attack Israel ceaselessly, but say virtually nothing about the murderous intolerance of the Islamic countries and societies or Islamc terrorism in the West.
The Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF) of the WCC invited member churches and civil society organisations to join together in 2014 for a week of anti-Israel advocacy and action. PIEF supports the virulently anti-Semitic BDS movement, aimed at marginalising and de-legitimising the State of Israel, and ignores the atrocities committed by Palestinians against Israelis. Isis likewise does not seem to appear on the progressive Christian radar, despite crucifying Christian girl captives who refuse to convert.
Either spontaneously or in obedience to the diktats of the WCC, the Uniting Church in Australia has placed a ‘prayer for peace’ online which, while trying at first to give an impression of even-handedness, contains the unprayerful words: ‘In July, 2011, the Uniting Church in Australia Assembly Standing Committee resolved, on behalf of the Assembly, to join the boycott of products produced in the illegal Israeli Settlements within the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank.’
The WCC helped publish a book Christians and Muslims: The Dialogue Activities of the World Council of Churches and their Theological Foundation which demands the West ‘abandon its pro-Israeli attitude.’ The latest clerical anti-Israel campaign turns upon allegations that it is stealing ‘Palestinians’’ water. To a student of religious history it may bear some resemblance to the medieval anti-Semitic libel of Jews poisoning water.
On Ash Wednesday, the WCC and its subsidiaries launched a campaign, ‘Seven Weeks for Water’ at a (German) Lutheran Church in Jerusalem, with anti-Israel activists in attendance, including someone called the Co-Coordinator of the Ecumenical Water Network (an absence of a sense of the ridiculous in its titles is one of liberation theology’s distinguishing characteristics). Israeli sources say there is a ‘water crisis’ in Arab areas but that this is due to backward agricultural methods, wastage, and failure to provide adequate infrastructure. This was also the impression I received when visiting. Israel leads the world in dry-land farming techniques.
There is also the question of how far the Palestinian Arabs’ own leaders are responsible for keeping their own people as ‘victims’ for international propaganda.
Something called the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace (PJP – how quickly one gets lost in the jungle of acronyms!), was launched in 2013 by the WCC Assembly.The Ecumenical Water Network (EWN), in 2008. The WCC’s press center advertised its Seven Weeks for Water campaign as a ‘pilgrimage of water justice in the Middle East, with specific reference to Palestine.’
Meanwhile, a woman Member of the Palestine Legislative Council, Abu Bakr, has been sheltering within the council building in Ramallah since President Abbas ordered her arrest. Her crime? Blowing the whistle on the financial corruption of a cabinet minister closely associated with the President. She claims that the minister has been privately selling water to Palestinians and has illegally taken more than $200,000 from the Palestinian budget. There has not, of course, been one word about this from the WCC.
The WCC, associated ecumenical movements, and the web of organisations and relationships between them defy an organisational chart, or accountability, unlike government corporations which are, in Western countries, subject to parliamentary or other scrutiny, or private corporations which must publish balance-sheets and be accountable.
The PJP and the EWN are closely interlinked. The intent of launching the Seven Weeks for Water campaign was made plain by General Secretary of the WCC, Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, in his Jerusalem church sermon: ‘As the WCC’s Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace is focused on issues of the Middle East, particularly in this year, we hope your stories and struggle for justice and peace will become the stories and struggle for the churches around the world. May this Lenten season help us to reflect on these issues more deeply. May the Seven Weeks for Water during this Lent help us to highlight the water crisis in Palestine …’
Mr Dinesh Suna, the Coordinator of the EWN wrote on his Facebook page: ‘The IRG meeting of the WCC’s PJP started today at Bethlehem. To set the tone of the discussion we went to listen to stories of struggle to end occupation of Palestine by Israel’ (‘Struggle’? Suicide bombings, perhaps? Knifings of women and children?). ‘It was quite a touching moment for us to hear these stories…’
Any doubt whose side the WCC and the progressive churches are on now? While the progressive churches are losing membership hand-over-fist, in Australia, America and Europe, the demographically young, and very often pro-Israel, evangelical churches, are flourishing. The formation of the Australia-Israel Association in WA in 2014, held at an evangelical church, drew an overflow crowd. [Real Christians love Israel]
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Australian conservatives trying to rein in Green spending
And the pips are squeaking
Australia's clean energy research efforts are heading for "the valley of death" if Parliament passes the Coalitions's omnibus package of cuts, according to leaders in the sector
Hundreds of researchers around Australia, including dozens at both the Australian National University and the University of NSW, will be faced with the dole queue if cuts to Australia's renewable energy research agency are passed by the Parliament, according to one of the sector's pioneers.
Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull will have a tough time in Parliament getting its savings bill through with opposition from all sides.
Deep cuts to the funding of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, contained in the Turnbull government's omnibus "budget repair" bill before the Parliament this week, is an "existential threat" to clean energy innovation in Australia, Professor Andrew Blakers says.
Professor Blakers of the ANU is a world leader in renewables research and he says many of his colleagues nationwide will lose their jobs if the government gets its bill through Parliament and advances that would deliver major economic benefits to the country would be lost.
The ANU and the University of NSW are world leaders in solar energy research with PERC solar cells, now the commercial standard globally with more than $9 billion in sales, invented by Professor Blakers and his colleague Martin Green at the NSW institution.
ARENA was established in 2012 by the Gillard government and abolished by the Abbott government in 2014.
The agency received a stay of execution in March 2016 but Coalition policy now wants to strip $1.3 billion of funding from ARENA and merge its funding role with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which expects to see a financial return on money it invests in research.
The Clean Energy Council has published a briefing paper that likens de-funding ARENA to "plunging into the clean energy valley of death".
ARENA chief executive Ivor Frischknecht told Fairfax that existing commitments would be met even if Parliament agreed to back the Coalition's cuts.
"The proposed reduction in ARENA's uncommitted funding will not affect existing commitments," Mr Frischknecht said.
"Projects currently receiving ARENA funding will continue to receive funding and ARENA will continue to oversee ongoing contract management and knowledge sharing outcomes for these projects."
The office of Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg did not respond before deadline on Tuesday to a request for comment and Labor says it has not arrived at a position on the ARENA cuts.
Professor Blakers said the decision, if passed, may mean the end of Australia's clean energy research effort and said both sides of politics would shoulder the blame.
"There is an existential threat to renewable energy research, innovation and education in Australia," Professor Blakers said. "If ARENA is dismantled, then many people would lose their jobs including dozens at ANU. "In the longer term, Australia's leadership in solar energy would vanish.
"After the fiasco involving CSIRO climate scientists, we now have a potential fiasco in mitigation of climate change."
The research leader called on the Labor Party not to just "wave through" the proposed cuts. "It appears that the ALP might wave through a change to the ARENA Act, which would allow the end of ARENA granting," Professor Blakers said.
"For 30 years there has been a renewable energy funding agency in one form or another in Australia. "This has led to phenomenal success in generation of technology and education. "The worldwide silicon solar cell industry owes its existence in large measure to Australians who were supported by grants from government renewable energy agencies. "Billions of dollars of benefits have accrued to Australia."
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Prison treatment of unruly black youth criticized
The prison officers were clearly just trying to shock him into co-operativeness
SHOCKING footage from inside Brisbane Correctional Centre shows a 17-year-old being confronted by seven officers and put in restraints including a spit mask — a practice Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath said was not used in Queensland.
On remand for offences including break and enters and robbery, the teenager was placed in a barren cell because the adult prison’s “boys yard” was already overcrowded.
He appears in the footage — obtained exclusively by The Courier-Mail — to be yelling before prison officers enter his cell, but does not become violent or resist and there is no suggestion he spat.
The prison officers put him in handcuffs attached to a body belt to restrict his movement, placed the spit mask over his head and left him alone in the cell for an hour.
CCTV footage of the teenager being placed in a spit mask.
Prison reports suggest the Aboriginal teen, Jarrod Clayton, was restrained because he pressed the emergency intercom without reason and was warned about the same thing the previous day.
He had earlier sworn at officers and kicked his cell door.
His treatment was the subject of a complaint of excessive force that was eventually dismissed on the basis of insufficient evidence.
After a similar incident in a Northern Territory youth detention centre was made public, Ms D’Ath said the treatment of the offender was appalling and “spit hoods ... are not used in Queensland”.
In any other state Clayton would have been in a juvenile detention centre, with Queensland alone in the country in treating 17-year-olds as adults in the criminal justice system.
The Prisoners’ Legal Service uncovered the February 2013 video during an investigation into the teenager’s treatment during the term of the former Newman government.
Director Peter Lyons said the actions were “extreme and degrading”. “This is a classic example of what happens when you place a 17-year-old in the environment of an adult prison,” he said.
The face mask, body belt and handcuffs “cannot be seen as being reasonably necessary” to stop him pressing the intercom button, he said.
“The use of multiple restraints and abandonment of the juvenile while restrained and hooded amounted, in our opinion, to punishment unlawfully administered by the corrective services officers.”
Barrister and Youth Advocacy Centre chairman Damien Atkinson said the video “looks horribly routine, as if they have done it many times before”.
“What you can see is prison officers don’t have a lot of skills for dealing with young people, and the time we have them in custody is being wasted,” he said.
Mr Atkinson has lobbied successive governments to bring Queensland in line with other states and treat 17-year-olds as juveniles.
“The State Government says we don’t put Queensland children in spit hoods. But here’s a child and here’s a spit hood. Everyone in the Queensland public treat 17-year-olds as children and they belong in the youth justice system.”
Clayton had never before been in detention including juvenile detention.
He had been arrested for break and enters, and armed robbery and car thefts and was using the drug “ice” at the time of his crimes.
Before being transferred to the prison he had spent 16 days in the watch-house so was not drug-affected on his arrival.
Prison reports show officers regarded him as highly disruptive and repeatedly took disciplinary action against him in the month before resorting to the spit mask.
“Prisoner Clayton has no respect or regard for other prisoners or staff,” reads one incident report from January 2013.
Another report from two days before the mask incident says he was “showing increasing signs of aggression”.
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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
Order, Such As It Is, Returns to the S&P 500
A little over a week ago, the Wall Street Journal suggested that the U.S. stock market was especially quiet, which is to say that U.S. stock prices aren't very volatile lately.
Another way to describe that situation is that order in stock prices may finally have returned after having last broken down on 20 August 2015.
So we put that proposition to the test, with the results visually presented below. As best as we can tell, some degree of order returned to the S&P 500 sometime in late March 2016, where we're starting the clock for a new period of order as of the last day of the first quarter of 2016, 31 March 2016.
Since then, we've seen one outlier affecting the overall trend, which corresponds to the reaction of global stock markets to the outcome of the Brexit referendum, in which voters in the United Kingdom directed that nation's politicians to begin exiting from the European Union.
Other than that outlier, which the U.S. stock prices recovered from quickly, we can confirm that there has indeed been very little in the way of volatility in the U.S. stock market. Additional credit may also be given to the rise of oil prices since mid-February 2016, which has boosted the business prospects of the U.S. oil industry, and also the apparent stabilization of China's economy, which both had been major contributors to chaos in the U.S. stock market during much of the latter portion of 2015 and early 2016.
Does political inclusion of rebel parties promote peace after civil conflict?
Does the inclusion of rebel parties into the post-conflict political process help contribute to peace after the end of conflict? In this article we examine whether the transformation of rebel groups into political parties actually leads to the development of a durable peace after a civil war.
Examining the likelihood of recurrence of civil wars in a country and recurrence of conflict in government–rebel group dyads after a settlement, we find that the inclusion and participation of former rebel parties in national government has an important impact on the likelihood of a durable post-settlement peace.
Most importantly, not excluding major rebel parties from access to governing institutions is the most important factor in promoting post-conflict peace.
Australian Politics 2016-08-30 15:34:00
Australian Report Predicts Global Coffee Shortage Will Get Worse
It's hard to know where to start in dismissing this nonsense. All that global warming would do for ANY crop is to shift polewards the areas where it was grown. There is no conceivable reason for an OVERALL shortage. There are always new areas opening up for coffee growing anyway.
Secondly, the current problem is described as drought. Yet a warming world would mean a wetter world so warming could in fact SOLVE problems of coffee growing!
Thirdly, if they understood any economics they would know that any lasting reduction in supply would cause price increases and sustained price increases would then draw out more supply. Australia's empty North, for instance, could undoubtedly be opened up to coffee growing in some parts. There is already a small operation on the Atherton Tableland. They even grow Arabica there
A new report from Australia's Climate Institute predicts that by 2050, global warming will make at least half of the land currently used for coffee production unable to produce quality beans.
By 2080, it cautions, hot temperatures could make wild coffee plants completely extinct. Although this report is projecting what will happen to supplies in decades to come, the coffee shortage isn't really off in the distant future.
It's already started to fall. Brazil -- the source for over a third of the world's coffee -- has seen its coffee stores dip dramatically in the last two years as the result of a long drought. So far, unusually large harvests in other world coffee markets helped to make up most of the difference.
But we can hardly expect these big harvests to continue. In fact, their trend may actually reverse.
Much of Brazil's latest shortfall was made up for by a record-breaking coffee harvest in Honduras -- which is a coffee-growing area that this new report says will probably be hit particularly hard in the coming decades.
Even the relatively smaller shift from Brazil's shortage in the last couple years resulted in a price surge and a jump in counterfeit coffee beans (which pretend to be fancier coffee varieties than they are).
With the spread of the shortage, we can only expect to see rising coffee prices and counterfeiting show up as even more of a problem in our daily cups.
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African crime out of control in Melbourne
This is the thanks Australia gets for taking them in as refugees
Terrified Melbourne residents are fortifying their homes amid a spree of African Apex gang home invasions
Terrified Melbourne residents are fitting their homes with secure metal doors and sophisticated alarm systems in a desperate bid to remain safe from the Apex gang.
A spree of gang-related break ins and violent carjackings in the city's south-east has seen a huge surge in business for security companies cashing in on the state of fear.
Multifit Security Doors managing director Rick Hyland told the Herald Sun that his company had seen a 30 per cent increase in demand this year alone.
He said most of his clients were from Dandenong and Cranbourne, suburbs where the predominantly Sudanese street gang has run riot the past 12 months.
'The Apex gang has created a lot of issues,' Mr Hyland said. 'Ten years ago home invasions were unheard of but now it's a weekly thing.' 'One of the jobs we have just done was for a pet food supplies store and we had to urgently do a door for them; we have had three cars stolen from our street as well.'
A Melbourne security alarm system business told the Herald Sun that they too had experienced a huge surge in business across the past six months.
The company said that families were requesting to have sophisticated camera and alarm systems installed to keep them safe while they were sleeping.
Earlier this month it was revealed that Melbourne families were resorting to fortifying their homes with barbed wires to protect themselves from the Apex gang. ‘I will be doing this soon. It's either barbed wire or broken glass siliconed around the top of the fence,’ one resident said in a thread about barbed wire being used on properties in the area.
‘Go the glass. They might see barbed wire and look for another way in but the glass would be easier to keep hidden until it's too late,’ replied one.
Residents in the street where a 12-year-old girl was threatened with death during a violent carjacking linked to the Apex gang last month told Daily Mail Australia they are terrified to leave their homes.
The shocking incident has left neighbours so frightened that one couple, who have lived in the street for 40 years, will not leave the house at night. 'I am a man and I am too scared to go for walks in my own street,' the man said. 'It is scary to even sleep - I am keeping a metal bar beside my bed in case they come inside.'
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Leftist hate speech reprimanded
Labor leader Bill Shorten has been confronted by a preacher imploring him not to describe opponents of same-sex marriages as homophobic.
Mr Shorten was addressing reporters after leaving a parliamentary church service in Canberra on Tuesday when the man asked for a word.
He picked up on a comment the opposition leader made after the Orlando nightclub shooting that the plebiscite campaign would "give haters the chance to come out from under the rock".
"Please don't speak like that about other Australians so we can have a civil and tolerant discussion rather than the hate that's been coming," the man said. "That was disappointing, and I like you and I like the Labor party."
Mr Shorten replied he understood people of faith could be opposed to same-sex marriage. "But some people who object to marriage equality do have homophobic attitudes," he said.
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Pauline mentions the unmentionable
Note that nobody could refute her. All they could do was splutter. What she described is common in Britain and Germany but I don't know how common it is here
Pauline Hanson left her Senate colleagues dumbfounded when she accused polygamist Muslims of rorting the taxpayer during a Sky News debate last night.
While the One Nation senator's assertion that was she was "going to be controversial" initially seemed redundant, her fellow crossbenchers almost fell off their chairs listening to Ms Hanson's remarks.
"You’ve got people out there, of Muslim background, they’re actually having four wives, numerous children, they’re getting into housing commission houses, we’re actually paying for that, and that is not right," Ms Hanson said.
Derryn Hinch, who had jokingly asked earlier if the debate would be protected by parliamentary privilege, could only stare at Ms Hanson with the kind of inscrutable expression usually associated with the onset of an aneurysm.
Nick Xenophon, meanwhile, was quick to remonstrate with Ms Hanson, pointing out that polygamy is illegal in Australia.
"But it's happening!" Ms Hanson retorted.
"You can't single out one religion and pick on them," Mr Xenophon argued.
"I'm sorry, it's happening, that is the religion, so don't bury your head in the sand," Ms Hanson said.
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South Australian cop loses it
A SENIOR police officer has been charged with a range of serious offences over a domestic dispute and siege at Blackwood earlier this month that locked down part of the suburb.
Chief Inspector Ashley Francis Gordon, 54, was charged on Tuesday with aggravated stalking, aggravated serious criminal trespass, making unlawful threats, threatening to cause harm, disturbing the public peace and possessing unsecured ammunition in relation to the incident.
Gordon appeared in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Tuesday afternoon where he was refused bail.
The court heard the incident occurred after the breakdown of Gordon’s long-term marriage.
Chief Magistrate Mary-Louise Hribal remanded Gordon in custody, citing the seriousness of the charges.
Police allege Gordon sparked the siege at a unit on Main Rd at Blackwood just after 9pm on Sunday, August 14.
Dozens of STAR Group officers surrounded the home at the height of the siege and paramedics and firefighters were called to the scene on standby.
Main Rd between East Terrace and the Blackwood roundabout was blocked off to all traffic and the public was kept well away from the area until the siege ended about 12.15am.
Gordon was detained and taken to the Flinders Medical Centre for a mental health assessment.
Police also issued Gordon with a Police Interim Intervention Order.
“Police warn that they will not tolerate domestic violence and will take every action available to protect victims,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.
Gordon has served in several high-ranking positions over a lengthy career spanning almost 30 years in the force, including as officer-in-charge of the Transit Services Branch and in senior roles with South Coast and Sturt police.
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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here