Lindsey Tanner throws a hissy fit because our political system isn't locked between two major parties like in the US

Resident ALP whiner Tanner doesn't like the Greens. Last election, he ran a few Fieldingesque home movies attacking the Greens and this election, apparently stripped of his video playthings, has been forced to go for a more low-budget response: the opinion page.

Green voters typically either have or are getting a tertiary education. Support is concentrated among tertiary disciplines focused on more than making money. Their viewpoint is increasingly at odds with that of Labor voters who aren't tertiary educated. On issues like asylum seekers, forests and civil liberties, differences can be stark. The Greens seek to exploit them.

No, the Greens aren't 'exploiting' any factions. We're just representing environmentalism and human rights. By adopting Howard's policies, the ALP has abandoned its left faction. That more lefties and not just environmentalists are supporting the Greens is your doing, not ours.

Whatever Labor does, it is never good enough for the Greens. Even when we're repealing WorkChoices, apologising to indigenous Australians, or tackling climate change, they attack Labor for their own cynical purposes. If the Greens had voted with Labor, the Senate would have passed the climate change legislation.

No, that wouldn't have happened at all. You're conveniently forgetting Steve "Thank for the ALP Right is so cynical in its preferences" Fielding. The guy who your party got elected in 2004, and has adopted the Abbott policy of flat out denialism. Even if the Greens had supported your total sellout of a policy, which had been so watered down by working with Turnbull it was in every way worse than useless, the bill would've never gotten past Fielding. That you couldn't pass it is your doing, not ours.

We now have no legislation at all. The Greens' political posturing took precedence over action. Their policy would have no chance of passing the Senate, even if Labor supported it.

Of course not. We don't yet have the balance of power. This election will (hopefully) change that. And stop with this 'obstructionist' meme you're running. The Greens didn't support it because the bill would've locked in failure. Australia would have unable to reduce its emissions by any more than a pitiful amount. The Greens were right in opposing it, and were supported by the overwhelming majority of greens.

The Greens are not some benign group loosely allied with Labor. They're not a middle-ground party. They're not idealistic activists changing the world. They're just another political party, no less cynical or manipulative than the others.

No, we are less manipulative and cynical. That's seen every election. The ALP routinely lies about, and demonises the Greens in the constant hope that throwing every smear it has will keep its dwindling progressive supporters on board. The Greens advocate three simple things: public services, civil rights and liberties, and protecting the environment. Those three objectives are far less extreme than you'd like to think.

It might seem like a good idea to support those who yell the loudest, but it's unlikely to produce good outcomes. Labor is the only worthwhile option for achieving progressive change through parliamentary politics. It might be a bit piecemeal and gradual, but it beats the hell out of doing nothing.

No, the ALP doesn't represent "progressive change." It abandoned progressive values when it sought to out-Howard Howard. The ALP support the internet filter, the draconian anti-terror laws, an inhumane refugee policy, tax cuts over public services, the forestry industry over forests, keeping gays from expressing their love, and I would imagine a whole host of other anti-progressive policies. Because Labor is a 'big tent' party, as a progressive voter I have no idea if you will represent my left-libertarian views in parliament (actually, I do have an idea. It's a big fat 'no, you'll keep treating me as a chump while remaining a fundamentally rightwing party'). But when I vote for the Greens, I actually know what I'm voting for. I know that they will represent my views in parliament (not precisely, of course, but they're by far the closest to my beliefs).

If you're so afraid of the Greens taking your precious votes because people are beginning to realise that the Greens actually represent the mainstream left, then you can start by actively trying to represent the mainstream left yourself. You could start by lobbying the ALP to legalise same-sex marriage. Then, you could adopt Latham's Tasmanian forestry policies and support treated pine plantations rather than logging and wood-chipping native forests.

Above all else, if you want lefties to keep voting for you, than you have to actually represent them in parliament. Instead, you've just taken the easy route-pushing further to the right, whilst assuming lefties are too brain dead to recognise just how Liberal you've become. But this isn't America. Australia actually has a proper, representative democracy where minority views can be expressed. I know just how much you hate that.

Old rice and monkey nuts*, religion and atheism.

The latest from Andrew "Manlier than Teddy" Bolt:

Another example of how atheists seem to be walking, ranting evidence of the need for Christianity’s civilising influence.

His evidence?
That's it. Catherine used a naughty word, which makes her "uncivilised." I don't see how Christianity is a necessarily 'civilising' influence: christianity has been a justification for countless atrocities-from the Inquisition, the KKK, the American Taliban, and just about every abortion bombing in the history of the US.

However, ol' Rusty isn't finished yet. For his next column:

...if the Christian God really is dead, then there’s not much to stop people here from being barbarians.

I’d have hoped that the Atheists Convention’s speakers would have reassured me not just by fine words but finer example that a godless society will nevertheless be a good one.

How about the obvious: that despite the US being one of the most outspokenly Christian countries (certainly in the Western world), on every parameter it fails in its Christian teachings? The US has an infant mortality rate worse than Cuba. It's the only developed country without universal health care. It's education is worse than most other developed countries.

Compare this with the Scandinavian countries, all of which are amongst the least religious countries of the world. Sweden and Norway are among the best in preventing infant mortality. They are ahead in literacy. They have among the best public services while in comparison, while the US's infrastructure is on the verge of collapse.

I'm not saying that there's an inverse causation between religion and the of a country (ie, that the more religious a country is, the more it fails on actually meeting its religious convictions in protecting its citizens). What I'm saying is that religion is irrelevant to morality in services. A country can be highly religious and deliver health-care that would shame the Scandinavia countries. It may be entirely atheistic and be reminiscent of Zimbabwe. Either way the concept that Christianity is somehow 'civilising' by itself is nothing short of crock.

To go even further, there is evidence of non-human moral behaviour; that the ideas of justice and ethics aren't exclusive to humanity. This, more than anything else, would put to rest the notion that atheists are inherently less moral than theists.

I have no idea what Bolt's religious convictions are. Given how he so intensely defends Christianity, I'm inclined to believe that he has some sort of spiritual belief. Perhaps he doesn't, I don't care. However, before he starts with the classic 'if we become atheists we won't have any skydaddy to tell us what's right and wrong so we'll all go back to the caves and smash each others' heads in with clubs and crowbars' meme, he may want to see how the smear holds up to reality.

*Hattip to the original Pure Poison.

Now *that's* embarrasing.

Either that, or it shows just how much of a mercenary Rupert Murdoch really is. From the Australian:


Reminds me distinctly of the shenanigans between Rupert and Andrew "If Sarah Palin can get a gig at Fox News, why can't I?" Bolt.

Songs for a Sunday

Because everybody else is doing it, because I'm lazy, and because there is almost no new blogging material. Therefore, I present: Michael Jackson: The Orchestra!

I couldn't put it any better myself

So I won't. From Chris Middendorp and Kenneth Davidson:

Without taxation, life would be less liveable

It was that protean genius Albert Einstein who said that the hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax. We can only speculate that with the great man cogitating on whether or not God was playing dice with the universe, he was too preoccupied to see how the revenue collected by government actually made life here on earth bearable.

If you bother to reflect on the role that taxation plays in a democratic state, it's almost impossible not to conclude that it is what makes a civil society achievable. Not just by funding a police force, a fire brigade or a defence force. Not just by paying for roads, public transport, gardens and parks. Not just by building hospitals, libraries, schools and sewerage systems. But by funding practically everything that makes it possible for human beings to flourish.

All this raises the question: why is the paying of income tax so reviled? How is it that elections are often won or lost over such a beneficial concept? Taxation is a synonym for an unpleasant obligation.

Many on the political right would go even further and view taxation as virtual government theft of an individual's hard-earned cash. The truth about taxation is rarely stated. It is a privilege and nothing less than our opportunity to make a positive contribution to the wellbeing of our nation.

Nevertheless, the politician who does not comprehend the public's general antipathy towards taxation is doomed. In 1993, when Liberal opposition leader John Hewson was unable to explain his new tax ideas during a TV interview, he generated widespread fear and lost the "unlosable" election. In the US, when George Bush snr failed to deliver on his triumphant neo-liberal promise "read my lips, no new taxes", he condemned himself to being a one-term president.

In recent times, the Liberal leader, Tony Abbott, has achieved some traction by evoking the great taxation demon. In seeking to discredit Labor's climate change initiatives, Abbott endlessly repeated the childish mantra that the policies were nothing but a "great big new tax". He knows that pandering to our fear of taxes is a better strategy than actually engaging in a debate about policy content.

Our fear and loathing of taxation has generated a vigorous culture of tax evasion in Australia. Through trust rorts alone, it is estimated that our community is robbed of about $1 billion a year by companies and wealthy people who conceal their true taxable income.

I'm advised by senior academics who specialise in taxation that there have been few, if any, studies into the full extent of tax evasion in Australia. In an era when research is conducted into navel lint, this omission seems staggering.

It is telling that the Australian Taxation Office is spending more than $774 million over four years to help identify what it calls "gaps in compliance".

Its goal is to energetically prosecute those who would avoid their tax responsibilities, thereby raising an astonishing $6 billion. What unfathomable amount, you wonder, will still slip through the Tax Office's lavishly funded dragnet?

In the meantime, we can read almost daily in the media how there isn't enough revenue to fund vital community programs. Treasury figures estimate that in four decades Australia will require $40 billion more in revenue just to fund age pensions and maintain aged care services.

The recently completed and much awaited report into tax by Ken Henry will be giving Treasurer Wayne Swan a lot to think about and will hopefully generate fresh strategies to capture the significantly increased revenue we require.

You will often hear conservatives posit how Australia is a high-taxing nation, but the truth is we are among the lowest taxers of the OECD nations. There are countries such as Sweden, for instance, that understand that a full public purse equates to a higher quality of life.

While it is true that there are many possible debates about how a tax system should be structured in terms of efficiency and fairness, what isn't debatable is that tax evasion is stealing from the community.

Many of us are clearly infuriated by the thought that people we know might be shirking their fiscal responsibilities, and this is reflected in the year's 56,000 phone tip-offs to the tax evasion report line.

Contrast this with the National Security Hotline, where reports of suspicious behaviour and potential terrorism are made. Even during the paranoid days of 2005, following the second Bali bombing and the London attacks, it only managed to peak at about 30,000 calls.

When politicians promise tax cuts we should be suspicious, not euphoric. A promise like that should make us contemplate what the community will be going without. By not paying tax, we will all pay in the end.

Australia faces some significant hardships ahead. Depleted resources for childcare, aged care, mental health support, housing, schools and hospitals are not just boring statistics. These inadequacies will destroy lives.

It is clear that we need to improve the efficiency of our tax system if we are going to continue to cherish the proposition that Australia is the lucky country. We need to grow up and acknowledge that paying income tax is not a burden; it ought to be our proud contribution.

Private health? It's enough to make you sick

There is not much point in starving the health system of funding to minimise taxes if it shifts the burden from citizens as taxpayers by creating an even bigger burden for them as consumers.

The debate is seldom framed in this way because the recently released 2010 intergenerational report, the Rudd government's first, is set up to ask only about budgetary costs of health, not the total cost.

I suspect that it was deliberately set up this way by the Howard government, which initiated the process, to avoid questions that involve confronting powerful vested interests, especially the private health insurance industry.

This industry has administrative costs that impose an unnecessary 10 per cent tax on premiums because its overheads are higher than Medicare's overheads. It also enjoys a $3 billion subsidy - dwarfing that given to any other industry - yet its major purpose is to give its customers the chance to jump the queue for elective surgery while allowing providers to over-service and over-charge their patients.

A sensible report would take into account all the costs of medical services and whether they were delivered efficiently and fairly.

The provision of medical services is a classic area of market failure. Fear of ill health reinforces the tendency of those who can afford to over-insure to jump the elective surgery queue.

Private health insurance subsidies encourage specialists who are otherwise available to public hospitals to shift to the higher paying, less stressful, private system. They undermine the idea that access to health services should be based on need rather than income. (Even so, it is still true that if you are really sick or have a medical emergency, the probability is you will end up in a public hospital.)

Cost shifting from the budget to individuals and stampeding them into private insurance - whose prime motive is profit rather than bearing down on health costs - is a recipe for a US health system - indisputably the developed world's least efficient. This is why the US spends 17 per cent of its gross domestic product on health, while Canada and Australia spend 10 to 11 per cent and have better health outcomes in terms of longevity, infant mortality and morbidity than the US.

The bloated incomes of US providers have allowed the industry to capture enough Republicans, and a minority of Democrats, in the Congress who will lie and filibuster for as long as it takes to prevent any diminution of the health industry's ability to gouge its customers and lock some 40 million Americans out of access to reasonable healthcare. Australia's political health vandals haven't been nearly so successful.

Medicare remains popular, despite the best efforts of the Howard government to wreck it by providing a massive subsidy to private health insurance; imposing a tax surcharge on higher income groups who sensibly chose to self-insure by putting aside savings to meet the cost of private elective surgery; and by attempting to push as many people as possible into private insurance with a none-too-subtle threat to run down public hospitals.

The Coalition is frustrating the government in its attempts to claw back some of the $3 billion a year subsidy to private insurers. To add a farcical touch, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey said last week that, in government, he would sell Medibank Private.

Hello? Medibank Private is the biggest private health insurer because it is public. Hockey said it could be worth $3.5 to $4.5 billion, based on its revenue. This may be why the Coalition is obstructing means testing the $3 billion health insurance rebate - to maximise the sale price.

Don't laugh. The first thing the Kennett government did in Victoria was to boost electricity prices by 10 per cent to fatten up the sale price of the State Electricity Commission.

Meanwhile, the government is spinning the intergenerational report to show the burden that an ageing population will impose on future budgets, using it to justify a continued high level of immigration to offset the ageing population.

It won't achieve this, but continued high population growth based largely on immigration means that Australia's unconditional promise of a 5 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 translates into a 20 per cent cut in per capita terms.

This is an impossible dream, unless greenhouse gas reduction policies are put ''front and centre'' in election debates and the winner has a mandate to undertake real climate abatement policies.

Like its predecessor, the Rudd government is obsessed with the burden an ageing population will put on the budget.

It is a red herring. We will be richer and healthier in the future. Healthier people want to work longer. The bulk of spending on hospital costs occurs in the last two years of life, irrespective of whether average life expectancy is 80 or 84 and medical technology is likely to reduce health costs in the future.

Did you know there was more than one Fundies First Senator?

I didn't-probably because ol' Steve spends his every waking moment thinking of news ways to gain attention/make a total arse of himself.

The FF doesn't just have coverage on the federal level; there are two senators in the South Australia and one on the NSW Legislative Council. The NSW guy is the most interesting, as he was in the Christian Theocratic Party before a hilarious fallout with Fred Nile, and then moving the the slightly-less-overtly-bigoted-yet-still-ironically-named Family First.

True to form, if anybody told him that there were gays in families, his head would explode.

“Most of the people promoting same sex adoption speak about the right of gay and lesbian couples to have a child to satisfy their own instinct for parenting. Our point is totally different. The concern of Family First is for the right of a child to have the role modelling and contributions that are given throughout a child’s life by a mother and a father.”

Reality notwithstanding, of course.

And then there's his painfully ironic press release titled 'The damaging consequences of bullying into adult life' despite his clear endorsement of homophobia. There's also the mandatory 'fertilised cells are people too!' posts, and the "EXTREME GREENS EXTREME GREENS EXTREME GREENS!!1!!"

In SA, the work experience kid has been assigned to graphic design and layout, while Pastor Evans is just as reality-immune as Moyes. The fundie roots are exposed in this funderful newsletter:

On Family First’s insistence, we no longer have ‘de facto’ marriages in South Australia – with all non marriage relationships being placed in a lower category called ‘domestic partnerships’. Further, the bill was worded in such a way as to place an obstacle in the path of gay adoptions and artificial insemination (which are heavily promoted by the Australian Greens and are the gay lobby’s stated next objective).

The Greens: more pro-family than FF, despite the former beginning as a single-issue environmental party and the latter beginning as a 'pro-family' party. And finally, there's a Palinesque dig at at Senator's Hanson-Young's age:

Tony Bates is a senior executive with Adelaide’s G.M. Holden operations. Tony's main competition in the fight to gain a South Australian Senate seat for FAMILY FIRST will be the Australian Democrats' "human shield" Ruth Russell, and SA Greens' 25-year old law student Sarah Hanson-Young.

And yet this 25 year old beat your sorry butt and and took the seat.

Well, thankfully, that's it. Steve is hellbound this year, stripping Fundies First of its most prominent Senator. This will significantly reduce the FF's national presence and hopefully bring them to where they belong; a minor, fringe party, of which most people would be embarrassed to admit their support for.

Just to show that this blog is still technically active.

The Catholic Encyclopedia was opposed to women's suffrage. Basically, just par the course for the Vatican.