We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Driving through Adelaide this morning, I idly turned my radio on, not something I normally do. But I happened to hear the South Australian police minister explaining to a couple of bemused hosts that the government here had made the possession of crossbows illegal. The radio hosts were bemused, not so much because of yet another assault on the tattered remains of Australian liberty, but because crossbows hardly seem like a problem hereabouts. It is not like you see gangs of youths roaming the streets with crossbows, after all.
The minister explained that there was a case in New South Wales a few years back and the government was keen to clear up ‘loose ends’. Apparently you can still possess one if you can prove you have a ‘lawful use’ for it; the Australian notion of liberty is that you are free as long as you enjoy the good grace of the powers that be.
Youths are hardly likely to be carrying crossbows, but they may well be carrying knives. I read this morning’s Daily Telegraph and came across an op-ed calling for a crackdown on knives, which are becoming a serious problem. Going by some of the comments to that op-ed, it’s a fairly popular idea with the ‘Torygraph’s’ readers as well. To be fair, Shaun Bailey does point the finger at the weakness of the criminal justice system, which is causing young people to take to knife ownership with such enthusiasm.
However, he also blames ‘culture’, which sounds to me like the old leftist excuse whenever someone did the wrong thing; that ‘society is to blame’.
We need to look at the material that youngsters have rammed down their throats every day. Magazines such as Zoo, Nuts and MaxPower. Programmes and films such as World Wrestling Entertainment, Get Rich or Die Trying, and MTV, City Gangster flicks and the whole music culture in general. If we want our youngsters to stop being violent, we need to stop showing them violent material, especially so early in their development. As a colleague said to me, the music industry is “peddling death to our children”.
I am certainly no expert on ‘popular culture’, but I would question the idea that ‘culture’ forces anything on young people. Cultural industries like magazines and music and television programs really are businesses just like any others; they have to respond to what the market is asking for. The point is that cultural industries are a lagging indicator, not a leading one.
What would change the culture is a change in society so that perpetrators of criminal behaviours face the full consequence of their actions; I suspect that would have a far greater impact on ‘youth culture’ then any ‘initiative’ to meddle with our culture; or to take away from lawful citizens their legitimate right to defend themselves. Which is where sloppy thinking like Shaun Bailey’s op-ed will take us to.
Do my eyes deceive me or are Australia’s two main parties in effect in a race to see who can get the credit for abolishing the top rate of taxation? Now that is a vibe I would like to see spreading to other parts of the world.
I hope they decide to not stop there… if reducing the tax rate for some is good, reducing it for everyone is even better!
Australian government efforts to foist an ID card on its subjects have not really worked out, but the statist desire to identify and regulate its subjects are as perennial as weeds, and the latest gambit looks likely to get the go-ahead, with the cabinet to discuss a photo-ID ‘government services card’. This half-way house measure could be announced in next month’s budget, despite costs that look likely to be north of $A 1 billion.
As well as a photograph, the card will carry a computer chip with all of the subject’s details on it.
It has been a relatively quiet year so far in Australian politics, with the main story being an investigation into a scandal involving the Australian Wheat Board, which was accused of paying huge bribes for wheat contracts to Saddam Hussain’s Iraq. The political controversy relates to what the government knew about it and what it did about it.
It seems that the government did not know very much about it, and did absolutely nothing about it. The Cole Enquiry that has been formed to investigate this matter and Prime Minister John Howard will testify tomorrow. I have generally taken the view that the enquiries have been a political circus and conducted for partisan reasons, so I’ve not followed it very closely. Other people have taken a greater interest, and have come to different conclusions. However I still feel that this matter is more a case of cock-up rather then conspiracy.
I got thinking about the case from a different angle though, about the bribes. The fact that bribes needed to be paid at all for a straightforward commercial transaction is a shocking indictment of the regulatory stranglehold Saddam Hussein and the UN had placed on Iraq. This is small beer compared to the literal stranglehold that the tyrant kept his people under. But bribery is a natural part of things in so many parts of the world, in various and many degrees. It is by no means restricted to ‘third world’ countries either. But it occurred to me that the more you need to bribe agents of the state to get anything done, the worse the control the state has over the economy, and is a passable indicator of real, as opposed to nominal, economic freedom in a society.
Australia’s flagship national broadsheet, The Australian, published an article today sporting the title Cut to the bone: working poor on the rise. To illustrate this terrible phenomenon, the Oz article provides the example of Vicki and Terry Rawiri, who
[by day] worked at the supermarket, while at night Vicki, 42, weighed carcasses and Terry, 43, classified as a labourer, worked as a slaughterman.
And even then they could barely afford the gruel, you might surmise. Well – not really. This pitiable couple
were trying to get ahead by paying off the mortgage of their $365,000 [about 150 000 GBP] home in Cowra in eight years
Your heart bleeds, no? The sacrifices abject poverty forces one to make! Leaving aside the horrors of working hard to pay off one’s mortgage quickly, the article goes on to quote a survey filled with anecdotal evidence of the plight of Australia’s poor; how they cannot afford to drive registered cars, thus risking the law’s wrath in unlicenced wrecks, how they can only find $20 to go to the movies if it comes out of the food budget. Well, here’s some anecdotal evidence that I have gathered in my travels – I once worked at a very large and very busy liquor store in an especially low socio-economic suburb in Perth. The poor may not be able to drive a registered car or spend $20 on a movie, but rest assured that a large chunk of them generally have quite a lot of money to spend on alcohol. Putting that aside, the tough luck stories of a few are not borne out by hard economic data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics pertaining to the poor in the aggregate:
over the period from 1994–95 [to 2003-2004], there was an estimated 22% increase in the real mean income of both low income people and middle income people and 19% for high income people
→ Continue reading: Australia’s working poor: a tragic case
Like my co-Samizdatista Jonathan Pearce, and like Mark Holland of Blognor Regis, I have also been watching the Winter Olympics. In truth I find the winter Olympics to rather more fun than the summer Olympics, partly because it is genuinely a more lighthearted event with more of a party atmosphere than the summer games, and partly because power in the world is rather turned upside down. (Here is a competitor from Norway – he must be good. Here is someone from the United States of America – he will be mediocre). Mostly though, I think it is the simple insanity of many of the events that I find most enjoyable. Winter sports lead to extremes of human achievement that (a) one is amazed that they are possible, but not so much as (b) one wonders why anyone would actually do this, and how the sport was invented in the first place, for surely the first twelve people to try it must have ended up killing themselves.
Mark wonders just how Britain has a luge team, or as he puts it…
Anyway, I get to wondering how on earth a chap from Pinner decides to take up the sport. I mean, say for instance I’d been so inspired by the top luging at the Calgary Olympics that I’d immediately thought, “That’s the event for me!” where am I supposed to go from there? If I’d have gone to my games teacher, Mr “Manly” Stanley, and said, “you know how this football and rugby doesn’t interest me at all, well instead I fancy taking up sliding down an icy tube at 130 km/h whilst lying on a glorified tea tray”. What’s he supposed to do? Phone up the local British Luge Federation affiliated club? That’s not going to happen is it.
Of course, in Australia, the answer as to how and why people take these things up, is that there is an official taxpayer funded organisation that encourages them to do it. At the winter olympics, Australia tends to specialise in something called the “Womens aerials”. For those who have not watched aerials (one of the events in a wider school of insanity called “freestyle skiing”), it involves skiing down a slope, up a ramp, doing three backwards somersaults and a double twist, and then landing on the snow on your head and breaking your neck.
Actually you are not supposed to land on your head and break your neck. You are supposed to land upright on skis and continue down the mountain. Landing on your head and breaking your neck does appear to happen relatively frequently, however. Again, the question of why anyone would do this does come to mind, and the question of why the Australian taxpayer pays for it comes to mind even more. → Continue reading: This is insane
“We’ve taken the biggest surge in national income in years and squandered it. The punters are spending every cent they can and Canberra is encouraging that by handing back its share of the commodity price loot as tax cuts.”
Who would say such a thing? Sounds like the rantings of some bleeding heart welfarist think tank, rather than Australia’s leading economics consultancy, as Access Economics likes to describe itself.
Yes, Keynesian wannabes Access Economics released a report fretting about interest rate hikes, and it feels the answer is to remove the financial options of individuals and ensure that the government collects and hoards ever more of the people’s income. I suppose one should look at it this way; some day soon you might benefit if you find yourself in a geographic or demographic sweet spot that the government needs to court come election time.
Talking about rum plans, this proposal from Deloitte floats an admirable (though not particularly original) idea – swapping tax deductions on work expenses for across-the-board tax cuts. Liberals will start to choke when they see Deloitte’s adjustment of the progressive income tax rates:
The poorest tax payers would see their rate cut from 15 per cent to 4 per cent, with the 42 per cent tax rate paid by people earning $75,001-$125,000 falling to 33 per cent. The top 47 per cent rate paid by those earning more than $125,000 could be cut to 44 per cent.
Deloitte would surely have access to the masses of theoretical and empirical evidence showing the superior economic benefits of shrinking the gap between top marginal rates of income tax and the lower rates, not to mention the moral argument. Why this EC (and I do not mean European Community, though maybe I do…) drivel, then? Why do Deloitte believe they need to field a taxation proposal that is going to win elections?
Thankfully, the political party that prides itself on its fiscal responsibility and economic liberalism holds government in Australia. Yet we have a curmudgeonly treasurer (chancellor of the exchequer) who steadfastly refuses to budge over our absurdly high top marginal tax rate of 47%. He is more than happy to ladle out benefits to politically useful groups, however. Oddly named, the Liberal Party of Australia, when one considers it is run by big government conservatives.
Couple these few good men with the leading economics consultancies, who seem to be trying to outdo each other in the social crusading stakes.
Have these people never heard of the Chicago school? I despair.
I have not commented on the recent riots in Sydney, which have been reported in the global media, for the reason that the scale and size of them are not particularly great. They certainly have been overblown in the media, both in Australia and overseas.
Of course, that is not to detract from the nastiness of them for the victims. People have been beaten, stabbed, and had their property vandalised in a deeply unpleasant way. But compared to what happened in Paris, these disturbances are very small beer.
However they are also very different to the Paris riots because the causes of them are totally different. In Paris, people were rioting because of the perceived heavy handedness of the French state and discrimination issues. There may or may not have been an Islamic element as well.
The Sydney disturbances were nothing of the sort. They were started by outraged ‘surfers’ and beach bums who were incited by populist media types, and also by some deeply unpleasant racist thugs. They were continued by the people that they were protesting about- the gangs of thugs who have been causing a constant law and order issue for Sydney residents for several years now.
These gangs have been allowed to ‘run amok’ because, not to put too fine a point on it, they are Lebanese Muslims. The nominally ‘centre left’ ALP state government has been too terrified of being accused of racism to uphold the rule of law. This leads to massive double standards in the enforcement of justice, which has been a feature of policing in Sydney.
There have been two developments in consequence to these riots, both of which are deeply depressing. The first is that the NSW State government is using the riots to claim for itself massive increases in police powers in order to ‘deal’ with the situation. Those who have seen the NSW police force in action over a long period are unlikely to have confidence that these powers will not be abused.
Secondly, the Australian media has indulged itself in a veritable orgy of self-flagellation about race relations in Australia and ‘multiculturalism’. The few blogs willing to point out the law enforcement issues involved have been ignored.
Equality before the law is supposed to be a core principle of any government that fancies itself to be democratic. Yet in Australia, no one wants to talk about it. Draw your own conclusions.
In the Sydney Morning Herald entertainment blog, Edmund Tadros made this rather extraordinary claim on Wednesday:
Australian blogs will never be as hard-hitting as their overseas counterparts because of our restrictive laws.
Now, I wonder, why would anyone think that? How do you define ‘hard-hitting’, anyway?
Is a hard-hitting blog one that causes events, especially public events?
Is a hard-hitting blog one that changes public opinions, or stimulates thought?
In the United States, political groups have used the internet to telling effect, and blogs have also exerted a powerful if difficult to define effect on public debate. The rise of Howard Dean, the Trent Lott affair, Rathergate and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all things that could have happened in the context of the Australian legal environment.
Australia also had an election in 2004, but there was only one major effort to use the Internet to influence the Australian public, that being the ‘Webdiary‘ of Margo Kingston, (which was then hosted by the Sydney Morning Herald). The reasons why ‘Webdiary’ was so ineffective in the public debate were numerous, but the principle reason must surely be the total intellectual incoherence of the site and the vulnerabilitiy of the main contributors to the most paranoid interpretation of public events. The most famous example of this was probably the famous ‘anti-gravity’ article in 2003, but it was never easy to take seriously a campaign lead by a senior journalist who could not spell. Margo’s spelling errors and flights of fancy deprived her campaign of credibility and provided a rich lode of material for the likes of Tim Blair and “Professor Bunyip” to mock and ridicule her.
The more prosaic truth is that many Australian blogs are not very good, and those that are good tend to either be more interested in talking about policy of interest to a small few, or are devoted to dissecting and satirising Australian culture. The plain fact is that ‘the great Australian political blog’ is yet to be born. There’s plenty of room for an Australian blog with journalistic skills and political savvy to wake up the slumber in Australian politics, and it has nothing to do with the Australian legal climate.
But it certainly will not be a blog that chewed through $44,000 in its first 10 months as an independent entity.
Seventeen people have been arrested in Sydney and Melbourne and charged with various offences with relation to an intention to commit terrorist attacks on Australian targets. Police found chemical stockpiles in their raids which were similar to the sort used in the London bombings in July.
There is no indication as yet as to what the terrorists had in mind as targets, but it does appear as if the groups had reached an advanced stage of planning. As a result, a co-ordinated surveillance effort of 18 months was turned into a massive police operation involving domestic security services, the Australian federal police and state police forces. They swooped in co-ordinated raids to apprehend the suspects.
The suspects all appear to be followers of one Abdul Nacer Benbrika, a radical Muslim cleric based in Melbourne.
This is a major tactical victory against terrorists in Australia, because it demonstrates the ability of police and security agencies to effectively counter bomb-making efforts before they have a chance to succeed. Islamist extremists who wish to strike in Australia now clearly know that they will have to devote greater efforts to security and that in turn means less efforts can go into creating mayhem. This in turn means that international groups are less likely to devote resources like bomb-makers, money and propaganists towards a ‘hard’ target like Australia.
In the long term, though, it is nevertheless of concern because this affair reveals that even in faraway Australia, Islamic hatemongers can find willing tools that can be manipulated into fulfilling their murderous fantasies. Until the hatemongers are stopped, it seems that the terrorism will continue, with all the loss of life, liberties and humanity that follows.
Australian civil liberties are looking increasingly shaky as the Australian government proposes sweeping new laws that give security services astonishing powers to control ‘people of interest’.
UP to 80 Australian Muslims could immediately be placed under effective house arrest under the Government’s proposed anti-terror laws.
The laws mean they could each be required to wear tracking devices, or prevented from working, or using the telephone or internet, or communicating with certain people.
Fancy that. The state wants to have the power to rob you of your right to make a living and put an electronic dog collar on you.
The laws will apply to anyone who has trained overseas with any of the 17 banned terror groups, including al-Qa’ida, Jemaah Islamiah, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Abu Sayyaf and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The intent of the law is that authorities leave these people alone if it is considered they no longer pose a security risk.
Oh, so that makes it okay, then?
I must confess to having mixed feelings about this. I do not want people who have been hanging around that sort of outfit running around in Australia without some sort of supervision. I loathe these barbarians and their theological nonsense, and I concede that we do not live in a perfect world.
But to see people who have not actually committed an offence to be deprived of their ordinary right to make a living, and to be dragged hither and yon at the whim of an Australian beaurocrat is almost as grating as an Islamofascist.
There are real threats that Australia have to face. This story outlines how the Australian government sees the situation. But there are some troubling aspects.
For example, there hasn’t been any sort of terrorist attack in Australia since 2001 by Islamic extremists. The report claims that they’ve already disrupted several attacks. Therefore it seems that the onus is definately on the Government to prove the case that it actually needs these new powers. Instead,
The Government insists it should be taken on trust that the new laws will be carefully implemented and used only sparingly.
Only the most casual observer of the Australian political scene will have any trust in the government’s ability to do so. The Australian government has been mired in controversy over mis-management of the immigration system, and its competence in security matters is hard to assess. And with the re-introduction of ‘sedition’ laws, the government’s ability to prosecute people for their opinions is wider then ever.
All this is troubling enough, but what is even more alarming is the way democratic governments all over the world seem to be competing with each other to take more powers to control and imprison their citizens. The common thread is that if you are different, you are a threat.
Care to explain to me how that makes dealing with real terrorists any easier?
Australian blogger Tex has an encounter with a former Green Party candidate, and learns a few things. Not least about economics, where Thom Lyons explains that:
Socialism is the syetem of choice is the most prosperous countries.
as well as several choice facts about 9/11, Cuba and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Tex has more patience with this sort of character then I do. But the sad thing is that Lyons’ views are becoming more and more prevalent in Australian society.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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