Right Pulse

Finally someone in the ALP fesses up to what they have know all along but been too insecure to admit:

Last night Mr Swan credited the Coalition with helping create a ”most remarkable run” in economic success. ”For those who may not know, who have somehow escaped being told several times already, we are now in the 19th year of uninterrupted economic expansion in Australia.

”Later this year we will begin the 20th year,” he told guests who included Mr Hawke, Mr Howard, Mr Keating and Mr Costello.

”This long run of prosperity … follows more than a quarter century of economic difficulty for Australians. The expansion of the world economy played a part, particularly the strength of the Asian regional economy.

”But decisions made in Canberra played a role too. I think of financial market deregulation, some of which began when John Howard was treasurer…

”We think of the continuation of financial sector reforms carried out by Peter Costello and John Howard when they were in office, in particular the prudential regulation that safeguarded our banking system during the global financial crisis. We honour John and Peter for that.”

Some though continue to be full of pride and just plain ignorance:

Where’s Rudd’s anti-market, pro-government, pro-debt neo-liberal conspiracy theories now?

Flow data shows an abrupt withdrawal of German and Asian capital from Club Med debt markets. The EU’s refusal to offer Greece anything beyond stern words and a one-month deadline for harsher austerity – while admirable in one sense – is to misjudge how fast confidence is ebbing. Greece’s drama has already metastasised into a wider systemic crisis. The world risks a replay of the Lehman collapse if this runs unchecked, this time involving sovereign dominoes.

Barclays Capital says the net external liabilities of Greece are 87pc of GDP, or €208bn (£182bn). Spain is worse at 91pc (€950bn), and Portugal worse yet at 108pc (€177bn); Ireland is 68pc (€123bn), Italy is 23pc, (€347bn). Add East Europe’s bubble and foreign debts top €2 trillion.

And its immediate relevance:

Britain, France, Japan, and the US are all vulnerable. All must retrench. The great “reflation trade” of 2009 is over.

Bail-outs, socialist and debt fueled ’stimulus’ spending are coming back to bite much sooner than I thought possible. Good luck trying to re-finance all that government debt,  especially with tighter banking rules covering lending and investment. That means higher taxes to punish the independent and make them government dependent.

Apparently Malcolm Turnbull made a speech in Parliament explaining why he was going to cross the floor to vote for Rudd’s ETS. The ABC of course has made a big deal of the speech in a desperate attempt to make their inside man relevant again. I figured I might as well play their game and go into censorship mode and not link to something I ardently disagree with. I understand now why the ABC does it. Makes life easier. Good times.

Who exactly runs the ABC? Taxpayers via the Communications Minister, or Mr. Scott the CEO of ABC?

Mr Scott urged the Rudd government not to put the ABC’s international broadcast operations out to tender at the end of its current five-year contract.

Sky News Australia is lobbying the government to create an open tender process for the $20m contract to run the Australia Network, the diplomatic broadcasting service controlled by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The ABC’s contract to run Australia Network expires next year.

In a speech at Macquarie University three months ago titled “A global ABC: Soft diplomacy and the world of international broadcasting”, Mr Scott said that “using the media underpins soft diplomacy” and that China and India were firmly in Australia Network’s sights.

This just shows how in the pocket the ABC is with the ALP. The ABC basically wants to be the broadcaster of government policy – preferably it seems of a centre-left agenda – while using state power to drive out competitors that may threaten their left-wing ’soft diplomacy’ agenda.

Impressive.

Compare and contrast, GST vs ETS:

As the treasurer who introduced a GST, Peter Costello rehearsed offsets and compensation for almost three years. He declared later it “scarred my life”.

But that drab work equipped Costello to answer the thousands of questions he received about the price of Coca-Cola and even the Hockey Bear pyjamas from Korea that Labor’s Simon Crean produced in parliament one day, without falter. This week in parliament, Rudd was unable to answer questions about what compensation a single person earning $45,000 a year would get or what a double-income couple on $65,000 each — a NSW policeman and teacher — would get.

Small Business Minister Craig Emerson blustered about the “most stupid question” he had heard when a dairy farmer’s concerns were raised about electricity price rises from the introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme being added to price rises everyone was already feeling now.

Of course Emerson has spent his entire career  in cushioned government employment. It was the ETS’s ’let them east cake’ moment.

I’ve being covering the risk to the US’s sovereign credit rating for a while now, at least since November 2008. Well a little while ago Barnaby Joyce was hounded down by Wayne Swan and his financial commentariat in the press for suggesting that a US downgrade was a growing distinct possibility. Well guess what?

Moody’s Investors Service fired off a warning on Wednesday that the triple A sovereign credit rating of the US would come under pressure unless economic growth was more robust than expected or tougher actions were taken to tackle the country’s budget deficit.

This is not the first time such a warning has been fired off. Moody’s previously issued a veiled warning last year. It seems now they are manning up to the reality of the US’s dire fiscal position.

“Unless further measures are taken to reduce the budget deficit further or the economy rebounds more vigorously than expected, the federal financial picture as presented in the projections for the next decade will at some point put pressure on the triple A government bond rating,” the rating agency added in an issuer note.

And why wouldn’t it? The US is lucky to have the rating it does now. Printing money to devalue your country and monetise your debt is not exactly likely to impute investors with confidence. Given the way the US Federal Budget is put together by both President, Congress and Congressional Committees – all responsibility but no accountability – there seems no prospect of bringing spending under control.

The cavalier way in which the government dismissedJoyce’s previous warnings makes it clear that Rudd is more concerned with attacking his opponents and savings his own skin than preparing the nation’s budget for the economic mess that would be created from a US downgrade. Certainly it would make the cost of borrowing in Australia more expensive, but I don’t see that stopping Rudd’s spend-a-thon.

Easily the best critique of Kevin Rudd has been published by Spectator, care of Tom Switzer. He exposes Rudd’s two faced hypocrisy. In his desperate attempts to be all things to all people Rudd ends up being nothing, other than a man obsessed with his own power and influence I suppose.

What Adlai Stevenson once said of his old nemesis Richard Nixon could also be said of Kevin Rudd: ‘This is a man of many masks. Who can say they have seen his real face?’

I believe he doesn’t have a real face. It seems he holds no core believes or convictions beyond himself.

The point here is that Rudd is an opportunist of such proportions that the only thing that exceeds his reach is his grasp….

Looking at Rudd’s political career since 1998, it is also difficult to identify anything he seems genuinely to believe other than his own political success.

On nearly every issue of substance Rudd has shifted his position, based on what he has said and what he has ended up doing.

ABC reporter Chris Uhlmann, who is meant to be one the more balanced ABC journalists, has summed up what he regards as the key issue in the up coming Federal election:

Climate change isn’t the positive it once was for Labor and one in its ranks recently noted that the Prime Minister shouldn’t keep claiming Copenhagen was a success saying, “you should never tell the punters what they know isn’t true”.

All that said, if most of the electorate didn’t want some sort of action on climate change then the Coalition wouldn’t have a policy at all. To eke out a draw in this battle its position has to be defensible and that means people have to see its alternative as credible. So that’s where Labor has launched its attack. In the end, to paraphrase John Howard, it will probably boil down to who you trust to keep carbon emissions low.

Chris Uhlmann, like his ABC colleagues, clearly has not spotted the change in voter sentiment over the past six months on climate change. Or maybe it is just wishful thinking? Less and less people care about the issue. Early in October 2009 the shift in opinion was first indicated by the Lowy poll. It showed that the majority of respondents didn’t rate climate change as a pressing problem – 52 per cent. A move of 20 per cent over the previous poll in 2006. 20 points!!!

Then we have had IPCC scandal after IPCC scandal, the collapse of the Copenhagen Conference, Prof. Plimer’s best selling book Heaven and Earth, the rise of Tony Abbott and now Lord Monckton’s last minute sell out speaking tour of the country. The fact that the ABC has done its best to either ignore or cover-up this change in sentiment provides more evidence of the group think mentality within the organisation and a sneak into how the ABC is going to lobby for the Greens first and ALP second at the next election.

Oh well, looks like the IPCC is about to fall over.

India has threatened to pull out of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and set up its on climate change body because it “cannot rely” on the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

Gee, shucks. If India pulls out I doubt the IPCC would be able to continue in its current form. What little credibility it has left would simply vanish, with 17 per cent of the world’s population automatically checking out of the body. I wonder how the ABC would try to spin such an event? Imagine the clamour of scientists in Australia worried about their funding stream for continued doom mongering if they don’t get more funding to study their own doom mongering predictions. Talk about positive feed back loops.

The reason for this threat is that India is none too pleased about the IPCC’s deliberate misrepresentation of the effects of global warming on Himalayan glaciers, claims that benefited funding for the IPCC’s head Dr R K Pachauri, and his research institute.  Add to that the IPCC’s sloppy research covering the Amazon, relationship with the Climagegate scientists, misrepresentation of sea level rises, using non-peer revised material to make shocking headline graping claims for publicity sake and seemingly exaggerating virtually every other climate related issue of note. Seems the manufactured scientific consensus has reached its used by date. Even the Guardian’s prophet of doom George Monbiot is getting worried:

These scandals have done tremendous damage. This is not because they threaten the canon of climate science– that would require similar exposés of tens of thousands of scientific papers – but because they create an atmosphere of opacity and evasion.

The canon of climate science?!? There are not ‘tens of thousands of scientific papers’ supporting the IPCC’s claims about the heating effect of human carbon emissions on global temperatures. Monbiot’s statement is complete bonkers. In order to disprove the IPCC’s claims one only has to show that carbon dioxide will not heat the climate to the extent the IPCC proposes it will. Every other scientific paper written in the name of climate change will fall if the IPCC’s claim about climate sensitivity can be shown to have been exaggerated. Some claim that it already has, in the context of Rudd’s ETS:

…the IPCC’s central estimate of CO2’s warming effect, according to an increasing number of serious papers in the peer-reviewed literature, is a five-fold exaggeration. If those papers are right, after a further decade of incomplete compliance and billions squandered, warming forestalled may prove to be just a thousandth of a degree.