A message for the future

A friend of mine sent this to me today.

I have grown a little older and more cynical - and never was it clearer than while I watched this video. I assumed, as it started, that it was going to be a joke of some kind... most of the videos I get sent these days are, after all.

Then, as I watched and realised it wasn't a joke, I wanted nothing more than to be able to laugh at it. Whatever it was that was coming, I wanted it to be silly, saccharine... an inadvertent joke, with itself as the punch line.

But finally, as I got further, I realised just how important this video was...

No matter how jaded you are... no matter how many times you've made the argument "but it's more complicated than that"... this video, this message, is the point we should all start from.

We pass off sentiments such as this as "simple", "too broad". We ignore such advice by saying such things as:

• we need to think about the bigger picture
• the economy is important too
• it's just not that simple

All of these statements are true. But, it is no less true or more broad sweeping to say:

• we create enough food for everyone in the world
• we aren't trying hard enough
• "we shouldn't break what we can't fix"

This message, in the video below, is where it all starts - the big picture, the simple dream, from a clear thinking child's perspective.

This is a message from 1992... I thought it was filmed today when I first saw it... and the really sad message there is, a child could tell us all of this 16 years ago and we're still not listening.

I love Nelson as a leader... for the Coalition

Actually, I'm starting to suspect Dr Nelson never really changed his politics after all. Maybe he's still actually working for the Labor Party.


The Challenge

I wish to offer you, dear reader, a challenge.

1. Make sure you have nothing around you to entertain distract you
2. Watch the video below. Pay close attention and focus only on the video.
3. Try to make it past the 2:00 mark without feeling the desperate desire to watch something else or turn it off entirely.

Please respond with your own personal reactions below.



What Brendan Nelson has learned

So apparently, Brendan Nelson has discovered that there are people in this country who can only afford $30 a week for petrol, and people who can only put $5 worth of petrol in their car at a time.

Wow. It's obviously been a big week for the man. I wonder if his coalition buddies will believe him.

"No" they will say, "that just can't be! How can people live like that. You must be mistaken. Obviously this is all the fault of the Labor Party and their mismanagement of the economy. This kind of thing never happened under Howard. No one will put up with those kind of living standards for long."

Well I guess if he learns only this one small thing then he has at least listened to someone and learned something.

It's a start, anyway.

But honestly, if that's a revelation to Brendan Nelson - no wonder he doesn't get what 2020 is all about. If he honestly needed to talk first hand to poorer Australians in order to work out they exist - or in order to work out that not everyone can afford to fill their tank with petrol whenever they want to... why should we ever expect him to understand an issue like Global Warming, or the importance of education to social equality.


What Brendan Nelson just doesn't get

And in further news - Brendan Nelson wants us to feel sorry for the banks.

Brendan Nelson: life hard for banks
Nelson wants you to encourage banks to make a profit
Banks are people too: Nelson

Yes that's right. Dr Nelson wants us to realise that "Banks are people too"...

Um... no, actually...

They're not...

They're banks... you know - Companies...

They may be, by strict legal definition, for tax purposes, "entities" much like a person. But the day we start taking our definition of "people" from the tax department, I think we've really lost the battle against pseudoscience in our education system.

But wait, hold on, isn't he saying we should feel sorry for the individuals who have to foreclose on people's mortgages - I hear you say.

Well, in this day an age, I'm sure that an individual employee's experience of foreclosing on customers, compared to times in the past, is about as close as fighting a field battle is to launching an international missile strike. Someone sits in a room somewhere and hits a button that causes the printing of a thousand letters. They get folded and packed by machine and posted to a thousand customers. Some of them contain offers of more credit, new loans and investment opportunities. Some of them contain foreclosure notices.

Along with his lack of understanding about how many Australians live their lives with respect to money, Brendan Nelson also seems to have very little idea about how large offices work in the modern society.

Banks, these days, run by rules and regulations. Certain levels of risk imply certain behavior and certain levels of underpayment require foreclosure. No individual favours or punishments. No human interactions. No guilt. Just transactions, payments and foreclosures. The way it should be.

Dr Nelson said people should stop criticising banks and they should be encouraged to make profits. Isn't he just encouraging us to support banks making a profit?, you respond.

Well, yes he is. And in general, we can all support banks making a profit. It's good for the economy. Any company making a profit, in general, is good for the economy. No argument here.

But to encourage the pursuit of profit, blindly, with no other considerations would lead to many horrible outcomes. Imagine a world in which car manufacturers chased profits with no fear of the repercussions of bad safety standards and no adherence to pollution level guidelines. Imagine if we were encouraged to support housing developers profits in the face of buildings that fell down within a few years of being built.


The Solution?

Maybe the people who can no longer afford to pay their mortgages should never have been loaned money in the first place (they might be better off now if they hadn't). And maybe, just maybe, the banks should have to take some responsibility for the (bad) decision to lend them money when they did. Perhaps we could find a way of minimally fining, or otherwise disadvantaging banks for foreclosing on loans. Maybe then we wouldn't have as many foreclosures as less risky loans were avoided.

Maybe then we wouldn't have so many sad banks to be sympathetic for.

Maybe then less people would only be able to put petrol in their car in $5 increments.

Hey - maybe Brendan Nelson's got a point after all.

Then again... maybe not.

Albinos protected from witch doctors in Tanzania

Excuse the long break - I'll be getting back to the political commentary and ways to save the world soon - but...

In stranger, more disturbing news just out - Tanzania's 150,000 albinos are now under the protection of the President... protection from Witch Doctors.

Witchdoctors were involved in 19 murders over the past year, says President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete. Police have been ordered to hunt them down. Apparently the witchdoctors have been murdering the albinos to use their body parts in magic potions - potions designed to bring people good luck.

The End of the Ice Age - The first 100 days

It looks like Kevin Rudd is keeping his own list of achievements for me (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see Things that make me happy)

Whitlam and Rudd - the first 100 days

For those of you wondering where Kevin Rudd gets his inspiration, and whether he models himself on anyone in particular - let's take a quick trip back in time... the passage below is from one of Whitlam's own speeches - Keynote Address by the Hon E.G. Whitlam AC QC "Thirty Years Later: the Whitlam Government as Modernist Politics", Old Parliament House, Canberra. December 2, 2002, 0930hrs.

______________________________________

"... In 1973, Robert Drewe wrote an article for The Australian on the Whitlam Government's first 100 days. He described himself as a '30-year-old child of Robert Gordon Menzies out of World War II' and he was just on the threshold of his brilliant literary career. Bob Drewe wrote:

You're aware of a certain rare feeling of national self-respect these days. It's not as if we're suddenly a big-shot country … but the fact is that Labor restored some dignity to the conduct of our national affairs at a time when we had all come more or less to expect nothing but ill from political action. Without precedent in the history of British-style governments, it set out to make up for lost time by immediately implementing its campaign promises. Australians blinked as within weeks we recognized China, ended conscription, abolished race as a criterion of our immigration policy, began reform of the health service, supported equal pay for women, abolished British honours, increased arts subsidies, put contraceptives on the medical benefits list, took the tax off Australian wine, moved to stop the slaughter of kangaroos and crocodiles and searched for a new national anthem. Along the way, the Government attempted to make our relationship with America … a bit less one-sided. The End of The Ice Age, is how Russel Ward describes the new era in a current Meanjin article.

In his essay, Robert Drewe put the view that to the extent the new spirit reflected the personality of the Prime Minister, it was 'by using (and being seen to use) the idea of the Australian Government, as he prefers to call it, as a direct and intelligent instrument for the general good.' I believe that idea is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. Furthermore, I am convinced that relevant and contemporary policies, developed on the basis of that idea, creatively mobilising the resources of the Labor Party, the Parliament, the Constitution and the United Nations, will speed the day when the men and women of Australia will proclaim once again: It's Time."

_____________________________________________

I would like to give a future echo to Bob Drewe's "rare feeling of national self-respect"... now here's Kevin's first 100 days:

First Cut: PM reflects on first 100 days

Rudd releases achievement book

Nelson, Hypocrisy and Videos

With Nelson and Hypocrisy on the brain... I found these funny and thought I would leave them here for your enjoyment.

Mandate schmandate - the ultimate hypocrisy

My letter today, to the Australian:

To the Editor of The Australian,

RE: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23203982-7583,00.html?from=public_rss

Ms Albrechtsen has spent an entire article arguing against the existence of "Mandate Theory". She makes a very convincing argument. I happen to completely agree with her. In her own words "Mandate theory? Bunkum." I don't support WorkChoices, by the way - but I don't believe the Labor party has the right to roll it back unless it can get its law changes through both houses of parliament in the prescribed manner.

Mandate theory is, indeed, the hypocritical rhetoric of both sides, used, whenever they are in power, to attempt to subvert the checks and balances we have built in to our democracy. Howard was wrong when he claimed the Senate was getting in his way. He was wrong to put forward changes that might have decreased the senate's power to stop laws - and the Labor party is wrong now, to claim they have a mandate over and above the senate's right to stop any law change they wish.

I agree with all of that.

Janet Albrechtsen then commits the ultimate hypocrisy by calling on mandate theory to defend the continuation of IR changes made before 2004. She writes "After all, voters approved those changes at the 1996, 1998, 2001 and 2004 elections. Dare one remind Labor that the Coalition won four mandates for those changes?"

If every government had to maintain the laws of previous governents simply because they were once elected, and enacted them, then the Coalition should have been stopped from ever rolling back laws that Hawke and Keating implemented - after all, presumably they had a mandate to implement them when they were elected. By Albrechtsen's argument, no one should be allowed to change anything that could have ever claimed a "mandate" in the past.

She has gone from "no mandate theory", to the "hyper-mandate theory". Just think of the laws we would never be able to change.

Ms Albrechtsen spends much of her piece gathering evidence of the innate hypocrisy in most arguments that use mandate theory as their basis. Having spent so long making a reasonable argument against mandate theory, to call upon it to argue for anything at all is clearly the greatest hypocrisy of all.

Nicholas Gledhill.

The French and the US - social security vs. efficiency?

Due to the political makeup of my extended family, the fact that many of them are French or live in France and our collective passion for politics, I often find myself debating the positives (or otherwise) of the American and European styles of social security.

Long before Michael Moore's famous comparison between the French health care system and the American - the French welfare system was the whipping boy of pro-American style economies. After all, the Americans love to hate the French, so they have to find a way of diminishing their, otherwise apparent, achievements.

Basic claims, from defenders of the American welfare system, range from "But everyone knows the Europeans can't afford their welfare system" to "but you know the French are going broke don't you". I was on the lookout, recently, for statistics and/or information from reputable sources that would refute such assumptions, without simply saying "go on, prove it".

So, I was very happy to hear this quote, today on Radio National, from Princeton Professor of Economics, Paul Krugman:

"So we say, Well, American equality is essential to our productivity, and then you compare it with France, which has much less and is much more generous a social welfare state, and it turns out that the French problem is they screwed up their retirement policy. It's not something cosmic , it's not a basic fundamental flaw of trying to have a more equal society. And they have health care, that is as good as or better than ours, and it covers everybody at 65% of the cost of the US system. In many ways they do better, but of course everybody knows that we're at the cutting edge of technology. So just look at the future, except it ain't true. Turns out that broadband is now more widely available and faster in France than it is in the United States. We're actually losing that edge too. So the whole notion that the US have done so wonderfully and that justifies all of the brutality of our society, is just based on ignorance.

I think a lot of political rhetoric in the United States depends on the notion that Americans have no idea what life is actually like in other countries."

Well! What else can I say? There it is, from a Princeton Professor of Economics none-the-less.

He has a lot of other very interesting points to make about the death of the middle class since the 1970s. The only point I disagree with him on is - he says the phenomenon is "unique to the United States" and that "the closest thing you can see this unequalisation that's taken place in the United States is in Britain during the Thatcher years". I would like to invite professor Krugman to investigate the progress of wealth distribution across Australia, over the last decade, and ask him if he can see the same process here as well.

Before I let this one go, there's one other quote from him that I would like to point out:

"... prime age working years in France, 25-54; 80% of French adults between the age of 25 and 54 are working, which is exactly the same as the United States. So if your vision is that there are huge numbers of unemployed French people, with no employment for middle-aged French people and with no job prospects, it's just not true. They're exactly as likely to be working as we are."

For a full transcript of his whole talk on how the New Deal society has been dismantled in America, and the reasons for it, see here - or for the full audio, see here.

Don't believe the hype.