A Trial By Media is exactly what they want

As is almost always the case with Morris Scottson’s public statements, whatever he actually says, the opposite is usually the truth. (Hence my conviction that his name must, logically, actually be Scott Morrison.)

This week, he’s been fulminating against Trial By Media, a useful spectre when you want to portray yourself or your allies as the wronged party, subjected to this unaccountable, uncontrollable process. It automatically sounds partisan and subjective.

It is, of course, a lie. On two levels.

First of all, Scottson et al clearly have no problem at all with Trial By Media when it suits their own purposes. Just ask Yasmin Abdul Majid. Or Duncan Storrar. Or Bill Shorten. Or Dan Andrews. Piss off the right in this country, and you’ll soon find out just what a Trial By Media really is,

Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, a Trial By Media might not be ideal for Christian Porter or anyone else on the Coalition side of things, but it is most definitely to be preferred to any other sort of trial. A Trial By Media is deniable. It’s subjective. It can be dismissed. It has no legal force whatsoever. And, most importantly, it ends as soon as the media scents some other fresh meat.

Scottson mouths the platitudes, but his heart (if indeed he possesses such a thing – the money his government has spent on empathy consultants suggests that it’s not an organ he has much experience of using) isn’t in it. He’s just waiting out the storm, pretending to complain about it in the mean time. Sure, he’d prefer that this whole situation had never come out, but now that it has, events are proceeding pretty much entirely according to the standard playbook: deny, delay, obfuscate, smear the accusers, and hold on for dear life until the winds that threaten change die down.

Don’t Fall For It: A Pre-Emptive Warning

Very soon now, if it hasn’t already started, you’re going to be hearing a certain story over and over again from politicians. As the Covid-19 vaccines roll out across the world, and hopefully make their presence felt sooner rather than later, the drumbeat of this certain story will get louder and louder.

And that story is that the creation and rollout of the vaccine represents a triumph of capitalism, of free enterprise, of the free market. That it’s a shining example of what the market can deliver, when government gets out of the way.
Scott Morrison will be saying this.
Boris Johnson will be saying this.
Joe Biden will be saying this.

It is a lie.

Not a misunderstanding, not a half-truth, not an accidental misinterpretation of the facts. A lie.

To start with, of the six vaccines approved at the time of writing, one of them was produced by a state-owned company (the BBIBP-CorV by Sinopharm, which is wholly owned by the Chinese government) and another was produced by a collaboration between a private company and a publically-funded university (the AZD1222 vaccine by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford). So to start with, that’s already a quarter of them produced by decidedly unfree enterprises.

But even more importantly, none of these vaccines would be being made at all – with the possibly exception of the two I’ve mentioned above – were it not for the fact that there’s a lot of government money being spent to support this research. In fact, there are literally no buyers for the vaccines which are not governments. The market, such as it is, for these products is one entirely created by governments (which, remember, aren’t supposed to interfere in the operation of the market, because otherwise the market tends to sulk).

Furthermore, the actual rollout of the vaccines is being handled, in most cases, by a mixture of privately-owned and publicly-owned medical services. (Arrangements vary depending on that nation in question.) So it’s not like good old free enterprise gets to claim a whole credit for that either.

So, again, the story that the vaccine represents a triumph of the free market is a lie.

Now, the spread of the Covid-19 virus, well, that the free market can take quite a bit of credit for. Whether it’s the insecure work practices of cruise liners, the ‘flexibility’ of casualisation in nursing homes and other industries, the reflexive out-sourcing to private security firms, the fly by night operators allegedly cleaning public transport rolling stock, and so on. The list goes on and on, and all of these are just Australian examples. Each of them is an example of the market failing to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number, and almost all of them are examples of the market’s regular operation leading to preventable deaths.

Just a little something to keep in mind when the propaganda starts up.

Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At His Trophy

Recently, Scott Morrison has been showing off his new office decor in all its colonialist glory. The man does love his Captain Cook memorabilia. Conspicuously missing from it was a piece that previously had pride of place. It was proudly displaying when he first took over as Prime Minister, but somehow, it seems to have gotten lost.

It’s this, of course:

This cheap piece of tat that he seemed inordinately proud of. But taking a closer look at it, certain things about this trophy reflect on the man himself. For instance:

He Bought It Himself
Otherwise, why else would it be written in first person?

He Either Bought It As Cheaply As Possible, or He Got Ripped Off
With all due respect to whoever actually made the trophy, it looks like the work experience kid knocked it out while everyone else was at lunch. How else to explain the text justification? I like to think that Scotty paid through the nose for it, because the trophy maker saw him coming, but then I realise that in all probability, Scott didn’t pay a cent for this: the taxpayer did.

He Takes Credit For The Work Of Others
Quick question: how do boats get stopped? Does it take (a) the coordination of hundreds, if not thousands, of naval personnel, intelligence agents, public servants, and police? Or (b) one narcissist in Canberra giving an order to his ministry? If you answered (a), congratulations, you see reality more clearly than Scott Morrison.

There’s No Proof It’s Accurate
Due to former Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s refusal to discuss what he called “on water matters”, there is no way to prove that current Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s claim, as made on this trophy, is accurate. As with his assurances that he did, indeed, stop the boats (at least until it was politically convenient for them to start up again), we have to take his word for it.

And finally:

Based On All The Points I’ve Listed Above, This Is – At Best – A Participation Trophy
You know, the kind of thing that the parents of millenials insisted that their children be given, apparently so that later on, they could criticise those children for accepting them.

Our Prime Minister. How good is he?

“Something has gone horribly wrong…”

It’s just gone four in the morning as I type this, and in my home state of Victoria, there’s still ten seats left to call in the election – which doesn’t really matter because even if they won all ten of those seats (and that seems unlikely), the Coalition would still be another ten seats short of winning the election.

If you’re a member of the Liberal or National Parties, or a voter for either of them, it’s hard to disagree with the assessment of now-former Shadow Attorney-General John Pesutto, that “something has gone horribly wrong” for the party. Because it truly has. This is one of the worst defeats that the Coalition has ever suffered in Victoria. Hell, it’s one of the worst defeats any party has suffered since Victoria became a state in 1901.

And yet…
Continue reading ““Something has gone horribly wrong…””

Why a “No” vote isn’t even a “No” vote

I understand that you might want to vote No in Australia’s rapidly-approaching postal survey about whether or not we should stop treating our gay and lesbian fellows as second-class citizens. I disagree with you, but it’s your right to do it. I won’t stop you.

I will, however, point out that your No vote isn’t really a No vote.

It won’t settle this issue once and for all, and if you believe it will, you’ve read too much propaganda about the namby-pamby Lefties. If the result of this vote in No, it won’t change a thing for the Left. We won’t stop fighting until we win this fight, and a decade after we’ve won, even you will wonder what all the fuss was about. The fuss you made – but I digress.

This survey is not really a question of if. It’s a question of when.

Your No vote is, at most, a Not Yet vote. That’s all.

That’s as much as you can hope to achieve by voting No.

Not an end to homosexuality, not a guarantee of the primacy of the Christian churches, not an end to the ever-growing societal acceptance of homosexuality – simply a delay in the recognition that we are all human and all deserve the same rights. Just a delay.

The ALP is already on record as saying that they will legislate for Marriage Equality in the first hundred days after they’re elected, and you know that the Greens will vote with them on this, so it will sail through both houses – which means that, at most, it’s about two years away (unless the LNP starts to perform markedly better than they have since winning office in 2013, and really, what are the chances of that?).

You can delay it, but you can’t stop it. And really, what does the additional delay gain you? Seriously. I want to know. What measurable, concrete benefit do you derive from it? Because I can’t think of anything, and I’ve tried. I’ve also read a lot of the No side’s arguments, and it’s pretty obvious that no one much on that side can list any either.

So vote Yes. Vote to bring the future into the present. Vote to recognise and celebrate our common humanity:

Vote Yes

Australia Federal Election 2016: What Happens Next?

The short answer is “counting continues”. The long answer is that “counting continues, and it’s a much more complicated process than you might think”. But before I go into how votes are counted, it’s worth taking a look at how they’re cast, because understanding that is important to understanding why counting takes as long as it does.

Starting at the Start:
Voting actually commences before polling day, in several different ways.

There are pre-polling centres across Australia (and the world, but I’ll come back to them) where you can vote ahead of time for whatever reason (say, if you have to work on polling day). Many, but not all, of these are also polling booths on election day. In the cases of those that are also polling day booths, these pre-poll votes will have begun being counted by now, after the polling day votes are counted on election night. In the cases of those which are not, these votes will have been sent to the divisional office to await counting.

There are also mobile pre-polling booths, which primarily exist to serve people in hospital who cannot physically attend a polling booth otherwise. These booths operate throughout the pre-polling period and also on polling day, finally reporting back to their respective divisional offices. (If you look at the results for nearly any division across the country right now (that is, on this Sunday after election day), you’ll see that the majority of votes from these mobile booths have not yet been counted.

There are postal votes, for people who can’t get to a polling booth. These are individually addressed: for each division, postal votes go back to the divisional office for their division. Postal votes are allowed two full weeks – up until the second Friday following polling day – to arrive at their divisional office.

Finally, there are international votes, which are chiefly held at Australian embassies and consulates across the world. Most of these operate pre-polling and polling day services. These votes will be sent back to Australia, and then separated out to their respective divisional offices.

The Big Day
Polling day is when the majority of the country votes and eats sausages (or the local and/or dietary equivalent). According to surveys, it’s also when the majority of voters decide who to vote for, which implies that the gut rather than the mind drives a lot of our electoral results. After the business of voting finishes – it runs from 8AM to 6PM in most locations (and if you go too early in some of them, you’ll be there before the sausages are ready) – the business of counting the votes begins.

Spare a thought for the poor bastards doing the counting on election day, because they are the unsung heroes of this story. The AEC hasn’t updated its staffing practices in a long time – and unfortunately, what we have doesn’t scale well. FT employees on election day start at 7am, and work until they’re allowed to go. They do get some breaks, but they’re not allowed to leave the premises during their entire shift. (They also get paid a fixed amount, irrespective of how many hours they work – this year’s crew got ripped off there.) It’s a pretty shit job, no matter how many sausages you eat.

On election night, the only votes counted are those cast at the physical polling booths on that day for the division the booth is in. (Some few polling booths serve more than one division – counting is particularly slow at those booths, because the staff have to split up and each of them works on only one division’s votes). Very few divisional offices are also polling booths (they mostly lack the space for it), so votes that are sitting at the divisional office do not get counted on election night. This year, with a very high pre-poll vote, that means there’s a good chunk of votes still to be counted – 25-30% in most divisions – so this election is still, potentially, anyone’s game.

Also, on election night, Senate votes are barely looked at. This year, we have a count only of first preferences of above the line polling day votes only counted on election night. I’ll come back to this.

They don’t work the Sunday, never have. No idea why not.

You Keep Talking About Divisional Offices
I do, and it’s because they’re very important.

Divisional offices are where all votes are centralised for counting. So not a lot of counting gets done on Monday, because the Monday is largely taken up by logistics. Monday is when all the polling booths return their votes to the divisional offices, and they each need to be checked to make sure that the numbers match. (A counting of ballots, rather than votes, if you follow me.) From these, the absentee votes (votes cast in one division that belong to another division) have to be separated out, and sent on to where they should be. In most divisions, this means nearby and intra-state votes get sent directly to their divisional offices, while votes for divisions in other states are bundled separately, but sent to their respective state head office to be dispatched to their divisions (which usually means an extra day for the travel and sorting).

From Tuesday onward (sometimes late Monday for the smaller urban electorates), divisions start receiving their own absentee votes, which must also be checked off and then added to the counts.

Throughout this period, postal votes will continue to filter in – the AEC allows until the second Friday following the election for all of them to arrive – they are also each checked off and added to the count.

International votes, like other absentee votes, go to state head offices first, then out to divisional offices. They usually take longer to arrive due to the vagaries of travel times and international freight schedules – some of them will take more than a week to arrive, and the AEC cannot declare a count completed (which is different from declaring a result) until they are all counted.

Plus, all of this is complicated by human error – which is less about votes miscounted than mislaid. It’s not uncommon for a division to receive votes intended to go to another division with a similar name, and these need to be redirected to their correct location.

What About the Senate?
The Senate votes take much longer to count than the lower house votes, for a number of very good reasons:

  1. Before you can even begin counting Senate votes, you need to separate the above and below the line votes, because these two groups are counted apart from each other (and totalled at the end of each count). Currently, all Senate votes go into the same ballot box on polling day – the AEC could save quite a bit of time and money just by putting them in separate boxes.
  2. There are a lot more candidates. Even the simpler above the line vote usually has twice as many candidates as a lower house vote, and below the line there can be more than a hundred candidates.
  3. More candidates mean more eliminations, and thus, more rounds of counting. A lower house seat might have a dozen candidates – at most, it gets counted 11 times. A Senate vote, with over a hundred candidates, is likely to get counted more than twice that.

And because the Senate does not determine who forms the government in our system, it is also generally given a lower priority in counting than the lower house. Each day at each divisional office, there will be at least one count for each house, but the lower house will inevitably be counted before the Senate – although towards the end of the count, the pace picks up, and the Senate votes will be counted multiple times each day as candidates are eliminated.

But Wait, There’s More!
And all of this does not take into consideration the possibility of recounts, which are certainly going to be demanded by a variety of parties in some of the seats with narrow margins (Batman and Cowan, for example, are both very likely to go to recounts based on what we’ve seen so far in the count). There is no set number at which the AEC must have a recount, but generally any result with a margin under a hundred is going to be recounted.

And then, of course, there’s still the possibility – at this point, the likelihood – of a hung parliament when all the counting’s completed in any case. In which case it will be up to the crossbenchers – projected to be at least six of them right now, with possibly more to come – to decide who they want to back. If anyone.

Which means we might go back to the polls yet again, and who knows how that will come out. Probably an even closer result.

Oh, and after all this, the joint sitting of both houses that’s required to try to pass the bills that served as the trigger for the double dissolution in the first place will still need to be held, and will quite likely result in those bills being defeated anyway, because on current numbers, there’s no way that the LNC – even if it wins the election – has the combined numbers in both houses to get it through.

Dunning-Kruger Club

The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is: you’ll never know you’re a member of Dunning-Kruger Club

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you don’t need me to tell you what the Dunning-Kruger Effect is. (If you don’t, click on the words.) And while much has been made of it as an explanation of why so many people vote against their own interests based on gut feelings and such, less attention has been paid to its effect within politics, and particularly, within political parties.

There are many ways that the Dunning-Kruger Effect can manifest within a political party, quite aside from the behaviour of individual politicians. (If the words ‘Captain’s Call’ or ‘Pig Fucker’ make you shudder, you know what I mean.) But increasingly, the most common is an insistence on ideological purity over competence to govern.

For decades, this insistence was considered the dividing line between professional and amateur politicians: it was the extremists at each end of the political spectrum who made that error, whether it was the ever-schisming-over-arcane-points-of-doctrine Left or the holier-than-thou Right. If you were too hung up on being pure (however it was you defined ‘pure’), you were never going to make it as a serious politician. But over the last few decades, as the definition of a professional politician has become ‘a politician who’s never had a job outside of politics’, this mode of thought has migrated to the centre of poltitics. I don’t believe for a second that this is merely coincidence.

When ideological purity is substituted for intellectual rigour and practical competence, you wind up with the kinds of situations that are currently rife in the democracies of the West. The Tea Party Movement of the United States is among the more prominent exemplars, and indeed, the problem often seems worse on the Right than on the Left, but it’s hardly the only example. (If the problem is more widespread on the Right – and this appearance may be simply confirmation bias – it is likely because the Right has a more authoritarian style than the Left, making it even harder to question the arrant stupidity that so many politicians display.) In Australian politics, the imprudence of Tony Abbott and the intransigence of Cory Bernardi on the Right are matched on the Left by the occasionally baffling decisions of the Greens about when it is and isn’t alright to compromise. Its defining feature is a preference for absolutism over incrementalism.

It’s not hard to find examples: every time someone decries the solution of whatever problem for not being a perfect solution, it’s there. Every time a single incident or utterance is held to be representative of the entire person, it’s there. Every time bullying is used instead of reasoned argument, it’s there.

What the ALP absolutely will not do next

Actually, that’s really quite simple. Anything that takes integrity. And anything that takes courage. This is a political party that is now so dependent on opinion polls and focus groups that it doesn’t cross the fucking street without market-testing whether it should look left or right for traffic first.

Continue reading “What the ALP absolutely will not do next”

Where Ya Gonna Run To?

It would be nice to think that today, this bright new 28th of February, that we could finally put this whole ALP leadership challenge thing behind us. It would be nice to think that now, perhaps, just perhaps our government could get on with the business of actually governing. (Well, after the inevitable Cabinet re-shuffle, at least.)

Or that the media would actually report it if they did.
Continue reading “Where Ya Gonna Run To?”

The Job-Creator Fallacy

The latest fashion amongst the Republican front-runners – and let’s be honest, if these are the best that the party has to offer, the world is in serious trouble – is to refer to the very rich as “Job Creators”.

In a sense, this is actually accurate. In a sense. As the heads of major corporations, they are ultimately responsible for the jobs those companies create. But conversely, that means they’re also the ones responsible for the jobs lost to redundancies, offshoring, and all the other cost-cutting measures so beloved of the corporate mind.

In this, as in all other things, the power to create is also the power to destroy. Just ask the Old Testament God so beloved of the Republicans.

Not that you’ll hear Gingrich, Santorum, Romney or anyone else admitting to this. That would require honesty and integrity. (In fairness, it’s unlikely you’ll hear any Democrats referring to this, either. Both teams know better than to bite the hand that feeds.)

But the real nub of the Republican “Job Creator” fabulation is that increasing taxes on these people will stop them from creating jobs. Even when official treasury statistics show that unemployment in the USA is approximately double what it what when these tax cuts were first introduced. (See for yourself.)

This is an argument that I expect that Obama will bash whoever the Republicans finally decide on over the head with come the debates later this year…

…just as I confidently expect that the Republican response will be to complain that referring to the facts is cheating.