Right Pulse

Finally someone in the ALP fesses up to what they have known 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:

Rudd’s expertise in foreign affairs at work again:

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was expected to arrive early next week, but an Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman says it will not go ahead because of scheduling issues.

The Opposition says Australia’s relationship with Indonesia has been strained by the Government’s handling of a group of asylum seekers on board the Oceanic Viking.

Opposition Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop says Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is to blame.

Comes after Rudd was unable to secure a meeting with SBY at APEC. SBY has every right to feel angry at Rudd for dumping the ALP’s  illegal immigration problem on Indonesia. A problem of Rudd’s creation.

Well not quite. The Council has set-up some type of consultative process to air the views of a range of Australians, and of course  who gets the most publicity. Well you figure it out by the headline appearing the the SMH:

Identity crisis: our cross to bear

These tax-payer funded community consultative processes have become veiled attempts to air the views of the radical left – because they wouldn’t get an airing any other way. You know, Australians are just a bunch of racists and so are our national symbols. Everything from the Union Jack to the Southern Cross. And of course guess who is to blame?

…the Australia Day Council launched a campaign last week to ask which symbols and images best represent our country, opinion-makers and public figures were at odds on how to answer the question – variously describing the Southern Cross as everything from ”beautiful” to ”racist”….

Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and author of Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives, said symbols such as the Southern Cross came to be associated with a new wave of patriotism under the conservative Howard government.

”Many Australians have been content to regard all expressions of national pride as thinly disguised racism,” he said. ”The result has been a surrender of all things patriotic to extreme nationalists.”

It is a bit formulaic – ‘ we are all meant to question our current symbols because clearly they are inadequate, especially after JH’. However if the Australia Day Council wants to promote this tosh they might want to consider that the only people with the identity crisis are those on the PC and radical left.

Australians for Constitutional Monarchy national convener Professor David Flint disagreed, saying critics were out of touch with the Australian people and that it was a ”pity to undermine the great symbols of the nation”.

”The fact [the symbols] have been imported doesn’t make them any less Australian.”

Well I never thought it would happen, but it looks like the ALP has said no to John Howard being the Chairman of the NRL Commission:

The Herald can reveal that Mr Albanese was instrumental behind the scenes in lobbying the NRL against giving the former prime minster a role on the code’s new independent commission…

The minister rang the NRL chief executive, David Gallop, as well as other league officials to tell them it was ”a stupid idea”. Mr Albanese also marshalled officials from the Rabbitohs, of which he was once a board member, to help kill off the idea.

”Nobody I spoke to thought it was a good idea,” Mr Albanese said.

We now know who really runs the NRL. Seems they can’t keep politics out of the sport. Well, Rugby League is a dieing sport, especially since the rugger buggers won themselves a place in the Olympics. I don’t see where the attraction for Rugby League will come in the future – maybe ex-convicts looking for a good time.

Using 2007 data, the final year of Howard’s term in office, the UN has ranked Australia’s standard of living as 2nd best in the world. Before Howard took over as PM, Australia was ranked 15th on the UN’s Human Development Index in 1995. According to Rudd though, it was all good luck. So based on this logic there must be 179 countries - those ranked below Australia – with lots of bad luck.

Rudd’s recent accusation that the other side of politics dropped the ball on reform, and of being ‘indolent’, has been rebutted from Howard ‘Stirred from his sick bed’:

His analysis of the economic reform process in Australia since 1980 was partisan, inaccurate and lacked any semblance of objectivity.

Which is to be expected from Rudd, a PM that seems to have been asleep over the last 30 years.

Readers may recall a Yes Prime Minister episode entitled ‘A victory for Democracy’ in which Jim Hacker does battle with the civil service to ensure the continuation of democracy on the island of St George (a fictitious island). The civil service do their best to stop Jim Hacker intervening in the affair to defeat a group of Marxist agitators intent on overthrowing the democratic government. The Foreign Office have drawn up their own policy position and they are intent on ignoring the will of government. The position on St George’s can best be summed up be these classic lines:

…every support, short of help.

I was reminded of this episode when reading a Paul Kelly article on the East Timor intervention, with reference to the great mandarin and apologist for corrupt regimes, former civil servant Hugh White:

Defence Department deputy secretary Hugh White, the leading strategist, defined what he believed were Australia’s objectives. They were: having East Timor remain part of Indonesia; ensuring ties with Jakarta were put before the fate of East Timor; retaining Australia’s military ties with Indonesia; and avoiding any Australian Defence Force deployment, if possible.

In other words, ‘every support, short of help.’ Another case of Canberra civil servants pretending to be politicians. However:

These were White’s principles guiding the Defence Department; each of them was trashed before the end of the year, proof of the violation of policy orthodoxy that Howard and Downer would entertain.

The whole Paul Kelly article is worth a read. I disagree though with one point; that the success of the mission was only due to Indonesia deciding not to challenge the intervention. As if the ADF did nothing at all to contribute to the mission’s success – it just happened by itself. This is typical left-wing historical defeatist revisionism at work.

The story of East Timor’s independence is pretty remarkable for the speed in which it took place and the people Howard and Downer convinced (Habibie, Clinton) or pushed out of the way (Hugh White) to make it happen.

MT has written a to the point response to Rudd’s latest essay, in which Rudd once again condemns something he calls ‘neo-liberalism’, in favour of big socialist government bureaucratic driven and highly regulated solutions to national problems. Well history is clearly on MT’s side. As Thatcher once said, socialism fails because eventually it runs out of other people’s money. Equally clear is that Rudd has no idea, firstly of what caused the financial meltdown and secondly of recent economic history – especially the 1970s stagflation. If Rudd is seriously arguing that the last 30 years have a been a ‘neo-liberal’ failure, then what, the 1970s were boom times!?! Gerard Henderson tears apart Rudd’s recent essay, exposing the contradictions and plain ignorance of Rudd’s words.

…If right-of-centre politics is responsible for the GFC, then the British economy should be in a stronger position than Australia’s. It isn’t.

But to acknowledge this Rudd would have to concede that the Howard government made some correct decisions on taxation and expenditure, industrial relations including waterfront reform and financial regulation and oversight.

Of all the actions Rudd has taken since being in government, his water policy above all else demonstrates his disdain for rural Australia in favour of his devotion to the inner-city ‘green’ chattering classes:

On water security, our biggest environmental challenge, he is abandoning the vision of investing $10bn in increasing water efficiency in rural Australia by diverting these funds to buy back more and more water entitlements without regard for the impact of those buybacks on food security or the communities that depend on them.

Rudd’s let them eat cake moment, imported at that.

A fairly damning assessment of Rudd’s 24 news spin cycle tactics from former adviser to the Small Business Minister, Craig Emerson:

…he is trapped by his opposition policy agenda established in times of irrational exuberance.

It began when Kevin07 challenged John Howard with anti-market measures that grabbed attention on the nightly news and won him favour on Seven’s Sunrise. This was sometimes referred to as “scab flicking” politics. An issue would be raised, hence the scab. It would bleed from the politicisation, hence the flicking. Then there would be a call for an inquiry to indicate some action. This was the Rudd office playbook 101 for opposition. The Rudd opposition mercilessly used the politics of scab flicking on areas as varied as demonising Australian Workplace Agreements, using the navy to protect whales, green power schemes and, most explicitly, the cost of living facing working families.

Yet the sentiment scab flicking stirred up and the market interventions it has created will increase unemployment.

It seems the ALP right is turning against Rudd, who apparently stopped attending factional meetings when he was in opposition. Michael Costa deals with one of the products of Rudd’s 24/7 Sunrise news spin cycle:

The failure of Grocery Choice will, for political purposes, no doubt be blamed on the major supermarket chains. The reality is that with or without the co-operation of these supermarket chains, this was a ham-fisted way to address retail competition.

Rudd does govern like those bunch in-bred clowns on Sunrise. Paul Keating has also taken a swipe at Rudd’s defence policy, putting on his typically Asian apologetic hat to accuse Rudd of basically being anti-China. That claim is a bit rich. If Rudd is anti-China, then I wonder what he would be as Keating styled China apologist.

One of the reasons Howard was so respected in Asia, apart from all the cheap loans he made to the region, was that he didn’t bow down to Asian leaders like Keating used to. Keating used to chase Asian leaders like a fanatical obsessed fan following their favourite Hollywood star around the world. After a while it just became weird and annoying. Rudd has not really found a coherent Asian policy yet, or at least one that everyone understands. Remember his Asian EU style policy statement? What ever happend to that? And he seems to be coming and going on China. Between Keating, Rudd and Howard, undoubtedly the most successful leader in Asia was Howard.

As part of Gillard’s pathetic attempt to cadoodle up to the Obama administration, she has gone out of her way to present herself as a progressive while in the USA. This is in stark contrast to before the last election, from the ABC November 2007 she said the following:

I’m an economic conservative. I’ve always believed in an open competitive Australian economy. I’ve always believed in the value of hard work and I certainly believe we need to keep the budget in surplus over the economic cycle…and we should not increase taxation as a percentage of GDP.

Well the budget is not in surplus, the real tax burden will increase as a percentage of GDP and spending is at record levels. Where is the conservatism in all of this? This is what she is now saying, from a recent address in the USA:

It’s also a time of challenge for the global community, a time in which that challenge demands progressive responses.

But the success of those responses is not guaranteed.  For example, we are warned and worried by the advances of the right and far right in this month’s European elections, just as we are cheered that change has come and continues to come to Washington.

So when Gillard said conservative she really meant progressive. And as for the rise of the ‘right and far right’ what exactly is she referring to, the BNP? They want to abolish the monarchy – check one Gillard – they want the government to take over businesses – check two Gillard – increase government welfare- check three Gillard – more public health instead of private - check four Gillard – tighter worker conditions – check five Gillard – higher taxes – check six Gillard. The BNP has far more in common with Gillard than it has with John Howard. As pointed out by Telegraph blogger and MEP Daniel Hannan in relation to the BNP:

As Hayek wrote in 1944 in his brilliant chapter on “the socialist roots of Nazism”, the dispute between fascists and socialists is a dispute between brothers. Labour and the BNP are, in a sense, competing for the same sort of voter: one who believes in the power of the state. The one kind of voter whom both fascists and socialists regard as beyond persuasion is the small-government Tory.

She then says that Australia’s recent economic prosperity is all due entirely to “global demand for commodities”. In otherwords, Howard/Costello had nothing to do with it. This is the ALP’s luck thesis, that economic and fiscal management is all down to luck, good or bad. She goes on:

In the last period of US politics, Australia was associated with the most negative aspects of a conservatism which is still alive and potentially powerful today – a conservatism of unrestrained economic liberalisation and narrow social morality.  Of climate change denial and unilateral military intervention. 

A conservatism which sought proximity to US power and tried to bank the economic benefits of globalisation, but did nothing to build a new culture of stewardship or legitimacy with which to address the huge challenges of global interdependence that this conference is discussing.

The Rudd Government was elected in late 2007 with a mandate to change that direction.  We stand on the shoulders of the reforming, progressive governments which have driven progressive politics through the 1990s and into the 21st century.

Once again, so much for economic conservatism. Gillard would never speak like this in public in Australia. As for “unrestrained economic liberalisation”, where was the downside in Australia to this? And then she uses a number of left-wing code words like social mobility, denial and unilateral. Then questions the very legitimacy of the Howard government: ” did nothing to build…legitimacy.” Legitimacy is not built like some Trotsky terror guard, but is bestowed through the people via something called voting. Gillard might want to google it.

Our Government was elected just in time to form a response to the global financial crisis. Our response has been in keeping with that of the US, the UK and other economically progressive governments.

In a nutshell, massive amounts of unsustainable levels of debt to be repaid by those not yet born. Progressive, no? In an Orwellian kind of way.