“Child pornography is great,” the man said enthusiastically, “Politicians do not understand file sharing, but they understand child pornography, and they want to filter that to score points with the public."

maxwellhill · 2012-05-25T12:30:59.107180+00:00

but that's entirely the point. If there is something stopping you from killing someone then you are not completely 'free' are you?

All freedoms must have limits - my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose and al that.

maxwellhill · 1 day

True freedom is anarchy, and anarchy sucks.

Gorfob · 10 days

Wtf? Way to completely change the argument.

The idea is not to replace everything overnight. Quite the opposite. The whole point of putting a price on carbon is to enable the market to gradually reduce emissions by moving organically to lower carbon sources, because it will make commercial sense to do so.

We've got about 30-50 years to fix the problem, and the earlier we start the less it is going to cost us in the long run. If you are truly concerned about the economic impacts, then consider as well the impacts of the alternatives: paying people to plant trees does nothing to fix the underlying problem, and will only make things harder in the long term.

But carbon pricing is deliberately design to provide a gentle encouragement to look at alternatives. It's not going to break the bank nor the economy, but it will start us down the right path.

Gorfob · 12 days

pensioner wondering if you can afford some heat in winter you may think differently

pensioners are better-off than ever under this year's budget. If they can't afford to heat their home it won't be because of the carbon tax.

I'm sorry, but whether or not we are in a recession has nothing to do with my opinion. The numbers don't lie - we have continuing low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates, and low levels of taxation (even with the carbon AND mining taxes). Conversely, wages have continued to grow, so much so that we are now almost the richest nation on the planet on a per capita basis.

Now everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but there is just no way humanly possible for you to characterise our current situation as anything even remotely resembling a recession. There just isn't.

esquire_rsa · 13 days

Doesn't matter, I'm withdrawing the whole thing.

Gorfob · 13 days

the country will be in recession

If you truly believe this to be the case then it just shows how effective the Opposition's bullshit campaign has been over the past few years.

Growth is forecast by Treasury to continue at trend (3.25%) for the next 12 months, continuing for 2013-14. That's a looong way from a recession.

The carbon tax will not be that bad. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.

Question though; if the Treasury forecasts are correct, and Tony Abbott is wrong, how would that affect your impression of the government and alternative government respectively?

Not_Stupid · 13 days

If I'm reading this right, it means the headline rate of unemployment/employment is still correct, but the estimate of new jobs created is significantly off, because the population has grown faster than the ABS has modelled.

Gorfob · 13 days

Methinks the tales of the demise of our economy are greatly exaggerated.

Gorfob · 13 days

That's an inherent characteristic of our tax system. Indexation of tax brackets would be a massive reform that neither side of politics is likely to propose.

MeadowbankMujahideen · 13 days

He's also a blowhard with a long history of public pronouncements that wiser heads wisely ignore.

MeadowbankMujahideen · 13 days

Union boss Paul Howes

Yawn.

dredd · 13 days

Not so long ago we used to look down on the Poms for being a bunch of whingers. I wonder if they wouldn't be justified in returning the favour these days.

RenaiLeMay · 13 days

Genuine security rests on cooperation, fair economic and social development, environmental sustainability, and respect for human rights, rather than on military capabilities. - Are you for real?

Yes. No amount of military force will protect us from terrorism and asymetrical warfare. Military forces are of course important, but true security will only come when people have no reason to attack us in the first place. That's not really an extreme position.

Lets get out of Afghanistan!

Last time I checked, that's exactly what we're doing. That's what the Americans are doing. Whatever you may think the people of Afghanistan want (I'm sure you've spoken to lots of them), the consensus position seems to be that our mission over there is untenable and we've got no choice but to leave.

Drugs! Lets give drug addicts a place to inject and the drugs while we're at it!

Perhaps you head about the recent report published by a group of experts on drug policy, the title, "The prohibition of illicit drugs is killing and criminalising our children and we are all letting it happen" tells you pretty much all you need to know about how succcessful the current approach has been. If refusing to support a policy that has demonstrably failed over multiple decades, and proposing an alternate regime supported by expert opinion constitutes 'extremism', then you can count me in with the extremists.

So after that wall of text, you've found precisely three policies that supposedly support your claim of extremism, all of which I consider eminently reasonable. But other than that, all you've got is the default over-arching hyperbole about communism and wanting to control everybody's lives (unlike those people who want to prohibit drugs for example, or gay marriage, or censor the internet, because that's totally different).

iheartralph · 13 days

Damn fucking straight.

MeadowbankMujahideen · 14 days

Revenue generally rises as GDP rises. But so does expenditure. Some expenditures, like Health, tend to grow faster than than revenue independent of anything the government does. That's been true across every government this country has ever had.

But I'm still not clear on how rising revenues means the government is a bad money manager? As it stands, revenues are now only slightly higher than pre-GFC in absolute terms, but as a percentage of GDP they are much lower. But even if they were massively higher I'm not sure how that leads to your conclusion.

Are you saying that the government should have spent less (as the Opposition claims)? Many economists think they were too conservative and should have spent more to keep the economy growing.

flashman · 14 days

You forgot the bit where it was up to the public to decide he's guilty in any event, and hold the government accountable for not 'getting it'.

flashman · 14 days

yeah, but the final legal position barely even matters at this point.

flashman · 14 days

I think the story is they used his credit card to pay for hookers for someone else. I don't know that there are any allegations that he personally used the hookers.

But obviously there's little point in him making any attempt to defend himself at this stage. Everyone's already decided that he's guilty, it's just a matter of how much.

flashman · 14 days

Would that testimony be reliable either way though?

MeadowbankMujahideen · 14 days

Labor are taking it to the extreme

I don't really think that's a fair characterisation of their approach. But nevertheless it is your perception, which is of course what politics is all about.

I think it would be fair to say that there seems to be little cohesion in some of the policies put forward. But that's not actually unique to this government. What's unique about this government seems to be that people are willing to look at every policy in the worst possible light, because of a perception that they aren't any good.

don't believe they are actually any good at managing the money better this term

I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. What evidence would convince you that a government was good at 'managing the money'?

MeadowbankMujahideen · 14 days

That's probably true.

Certainly most of the statements that come out of any politician's mouth are bullshit in one way or another. But the numbers rarely lie.

And I find it appalling that the electorate's solution to this lack of trust is to install Tony Abbott as Prime Minister instead.

MeadowbankMujahideen · 14 days

43 per cent saying they would be personally worse off.

That's extraordinary. For multiple reasons.

Firstly, it can't be even remotely correct. With multiple billions in carbon and mining revenue being redirected to lower-income households (and "families"), there's just no way that a plurality of the population will actually be 'worse off'. I can only assume that people are expecting the impact of the carbon tax to be much bigger than it is.

But more fundamentally, I find myself a little disturbed by the 'what's in it for me' mentality that underlies the question. We even had that ABC journo in here the other day wanting know how the budget would affect us 'personally', which apparently didn't include whether anything was good for society generally.

Fiscally, I'm going to be 'worse off' under this budget. But balanced against the benefit of living in a peaceful and stable country, without the riots and the kind of upheaval we're seeing around the world, I think this budget leaves me very much better off.

marszau · 14 days

So just like now then :D

Naly_D · 14 days

I agree entirely. Democracy clearly sucks balls, except in comparison to anything else.

Except that I would make an awesome dictator, because I really do know better than everyone else.

Not_Stupid

TROPHY CASE

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