This is a rare act of wanton disregard of ecological concerns, representing a reduction of quality to quantity in an absurd way. In a state and a country that just seem to be getting worse all the time, this is beyond satire.

Marcus Strom on the absence of oppsition within the ALP to the war on Afghanistan.

Anonymous cyber-attacks on Australian government

I don't necessarily endorse the view that there is anything intrinsically desirable about a total freedom of 'information', but I do share the view that the Australian federal government's moves towards restricting the internet are extremely sinister.

This is a dark fucking day: the dependence of Sydney on a really unnecessary desalination programme is established.

SMH Election Petition

The Sydney Morning Herald has launched a campaign to amend the NSW constitution to get rid of fixed terms. A modest, and completely non-specific, reform proposal.

The principle that the people should be able to recall the government tends in the direction of democracy. Though the word 'recall' is being bandied around here, the petition does not include it: the simplest way to end fixed terms is to allow parliament to choose when to call an election. There's nothing particularly admirable about that principle. There's no reason to think that things would be better with it.

The campaign for a recall provision is effectively a secondary, subsidiary objective for the paper. This is a noble cause in itself, however. That said, in our current position, it's not possible to see any particular advantage to it. A new election would either legitimise the Labor government, or install a Coalition government that would scarcely be preferable.

The suggestion we would put forward is to abolish the state of NSW, and the states of Australia generally, as the way to deal with the entrenched corruption that can be found in their institutions. They are outdated colonial institutions for which there is simply no longer any need or advantage, only a financial burden to the taxpayer and an obstacle to clarity for the voters.

Keneally

I suppose we should find it rather comforting that our leaders aren't surrounded by a phalanx of security goons who would prevent this kind of thing from happening. This is, more realistically, probably because we have so many tiers of government that they can't afford that, not to mention that the NSW premier is just a placeholder and not worth protecting. Anyway, here's to our first American premier.

Ethics

The putative introduction of 'ethics' classes in NSW is pretty interesting, but hardly great news. It represents certainly a slippage in power of the old, religious ideologies, but indicates the intent of state to ensure that bourgeois ideology is inculcated into Australian workers one way or the other.

By the way, I'm opening this log up to comments as of this post. Let's see how it goes.

Recession-proof?

Notwithstanding the strenuousness of the technical definition of recession – such that the economy has to keep contracting for multiple quarters, and actually has to contract at that, whereas Ross Gittins points out very low levels of growth will look and feel like a recession – Australia seems to have dodged the recession bullet.

Well, part of this is clearly due to the stimulus package, which meant that the public purse took the hit for the team. But it wasn't Rudd or Swan's fiscal genius that meant that the Australian stimulus prevented recession whereas the American or British ones didn't – something else is going on. Basically, the Australian economy is – no surprises – different from those of Britain or America: less dependent on the financial services sector, more reliant on primary production.

The big surprise to me is that the demand for Australian primary goods hasn't collapsed. That is, that the demand for primary goods hasn't collapsed full stop. Why hasn't this happened? The answer is that Asian demand hasn't collapsed, because Asia's not in recession, and that's where all the coal and shit is going to.

Why hasn't Asian demand collapsed, though? Asian growth has been fuelled by exporting to First World countries, where the economy is in serious trouble.

Has demand for Asian goods outside Asia fallen? Yes, I think so, but not by that much: Asia makes what is cheap, so what is likely to still be bought in the bad times, and the stimulus packages have stimulated purchases of Asian-made goods. Retail spending is resilient in Britain, for example, and this has been ensured by public policy. Moreover, we have the Asian version of the stimulus, the reorientation of the Chinese economy towards domestic consumption.

Well, now what? Is everything going to be fine? I still can't help waiting for the other shoe to drop. The great flaw in the world economic system it seemed to me was that Asia was producing for markets who couldn't afford to buy, and were buying on massive credit lines extended, effectively, by Asia. This is precisely what precipitated the crisis, because the credit stretched to breaking point. Now some of the credit's been nationalised and everyone's trying to get back to business as usual, i.e. running up enormous amounts of credit and importing Chinese plasticware. I can't see this ending well: indeed, what I expect to happen is an almighty crash, again, and at some point there is going to be no restarting the credit-bubble-economy.

Australia is not immune: it runs a substantial current account deficit, if not as substantial, and is also (therefore) a credit-bubble economy, if not to the same extent as other parts of the Anglosphere.