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NSW Election 2011

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chief

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No way. I expect more from federal MPs than what she has delivered at a state level.

I don't. Keneally has class, this current bunch of Federal MP (Moana Pasifika)'s lack that. When she took over she knew perfectly well that she was in charge of a sinking ship. Had John Curtin, or Paul Keating taken over from Rees, then they would certainly have lacked credibility, and would have been ridiculed the same way Keneally has. It's just unfortunate that Keneally has a bunch of misfit corrupt members of her team. That and Channel 7, who seem to stalk ministers which seemed too far.
 

naza

Alan Cameron (40)
I'd say she's done better than expected in her role as premier, mostly because she's handled the brickbats well and has won people over by being a likeable, pleasant human being. But she's still a lightweight.
 

Ash

Michael Lynagh (62)
And she might be in trouble for proroguing parliament to dodge an inquiry into the power sell off. The big problem isn't the sell off itself, the wider ranging problem is that they bungled it so badly that they sold it for a lot less than it was worth and for unfavourable conditions. Not to mention that Tripodi's multi-million dollar trip around the world to find buyers was a miserable failure.
 

naza

Alan Cameron (40)
I've never understood the sell off of assets. It seems like the short term thinking you get from big business - its all about quarterly results, not thinking 20+ years ahead like the Chinese. Look at the Lotteries sell off - that was just a sweet little earner and what happened to the money they sold it off for ? Do they even know ?
 

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
One argument is: why does the government own asset X when those services could be provided by the private sector and why then are we competing against them? The Commonwealth Bank is an example. The Telstra retail arm is another. Realistically, why does the government run a lottery? It's a tax on stupid people and/or on those who can least afford it. Regulate the industries, yes, but public ownership for many services baffles me as much as sell offs do to other people.
 

Elfster

Dave Cowper (27)
One aspect about public (government) ownership that needs to be considered is the government's current and future revenue streams. Though, in some ways, I am philosophically against government ownership for the sake of it, we are entering an era where future government expenditure will be increasing whilst its revenue will be potentially decreasing. (If we all start buying things off-shire, how will that affect the GST revenue for instance...)

Let's face it, we all want more for less, and no party will go to the polls not giving us that option. Regardless how short-sighted and idiotic that may be. So if the government can retain some useful cash earners, it is not necessarily a bad thing. Or have a sovereign or future fund sort of thing.
 
C

chief

Guest
I think more Government ownership is better. Private sector a lot of the time can not be trusted to provide reasonable prices. I'm talking industries like Banking and Electricity. Government ownership provides for sufficient competition. Banks have posted billion dollar profits. While privatization of electricity will really fuck homeowners around, and people will be paying a lot more. Why have the money hungry private sector dictate the price of electricity and mortgage rates, when you can have directly elected governments control those prices. Being said, my ideal society is long gone, ever since Comm Bank, and now electricity in a lot of States are being privatised.
 

Elfster

Dave Cowper (27)
I agree with aspects of what Chief says. Regardless of what regulation you have, if you don't own something then you don't have full control of it. And the private sector does have a profit driven agenda so these once state owned assets will be used to get a suitable return. And if, some of these assets are natural monopolies, it is not a good thing for the general public.
 

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
It has to be a case by case basis dependent on the industry to my mind. Most industries don't need any public ownership at all. Things like manufacturing, farming, mining, most residential services, supermarkets/retail, automotive, house construction etc etc. Some industries are grey areas, like utilities and public transport. Those are the cases where you ask people like the Productivity Commission to have a look at it and outline the cases for and against.

The way to get better prices is for there to be robust markets with plenty of competition. That's why in spite of all appearances to the contrary, our mortgage lending market is better than before. Twenty five years ago you had to give your first born to the bank before they'd even consider your loan application. Now with the credit unions and other non-bank financial institutions, there is a lot more choice. The fact that those organisations have plenty of customers would tend to indicate that this has improved things.
 

Gnostic

Mark Ella (57)
1. In a country such as Oz with a centralised population and far flung rural areas with little population density Government owned utilities and essential services is the only way to provide those services to all in an equitable way. Try to find a bank or pay phone or get mobile service in smaller country areas. Vodaphone was awarded the contract to provide the National mobile phone services to cover the National Highway network,. Yet this private company is now being sued by it own customers for providing very poor service. IO can atest to that as I live 15Km from Highway 1 and get zero Voda service in the area which it wa contracted to provide it. Given I know the manager responsible for the infrastructure in that case I know the coverage issue is purely one of insufficient population to make the provision of service in the area they were contracted to uneconomic.

I here many City centric people say "user pays" and "why should the city subsidize the bush". Basically so you can eat at a reasonable price. If the farmer and all the support industries and people have to pay hugely higher prices than their city counter parts many will migrate to the cities leaving a labour shortage in the bush. The farmer has to pay higher wages to get the labour back, has higher overheads etc. What does he then charge for the product? If that increase in price doesn't happen, no more farm and you will eat imported food which will be higher in price in any event and in many cases of lower quality. It also puts further strain on the already struggling city infrastructure.

2. Private ownership of utilities is dangerous on a couple of other levels. Firstly - the sell off the retail (money making units) of the system leaves the public with the liability side of things. We no longer have the retail side of things to pay the increasing cost of maintaining infrastructure which has been in decline since the break up of the Electricity Commission. It should be noted that at this time the EC owned the Coal Mines which the Power Stations sat on. Since then we have had the Generation arm split away from the distribution and the retail section and the coal mines sold to mining companies. The Generation could make money so it was broken into a couple of separate units which were government owned in preparation to be sold. Then it was sold to a number of different private players. As an aside the sell off of the coal mines previously operated for the the EC is largely responsible for the massive increases in the price of power we are now experiencing as the price of Thermal Coal has increased hugely over the last 5 years.

Secondly since the sell offs little preventative maintainence has been undertaken and very few up-grades to existing units.
 

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
Given that I grew up in rural SA and WA, I am sympathetic to the needs of country people. There is no easy way to provide services in a place with as low a population density as ours, government or private. Really the only country we can compare ourselves to in this regard is Canada. They have exactly the same issues. They've gone the selective privatisation route as well, with mixed success like us.
 

Ash

Michael Lynagh (62)
Unfortunately, regulation to protect against monopolies and oligopolies is one thing that our government has not done particularly well. Government regulations exist to protect the consumer and other businesses against unfair practices. Sadly, too often ASIC and the ACCC are toothless tigers.

Other areas are providing services to rural areas where it just isn't econimcally viable for private industry, and protecting against tragedy of the commons (another area where the government has failed too often - Murray Darling system, failed environmental regulations, etc).

Securitisation and financial markets are prime examples of where government regulation is required to protect against predatory practices and risk taking. Lessons learnt from the Great Depression which took 50 - 60 years to unlearn before the final repeal of the Glass-Stegall act.

Regarding government ownership, governments owning national infrastructure makes sense to me, even if they can collect a "rent" for its use. This may include highways, national rail lines, power distribution, telecomm networks, etc. The retail or wholesale arms, though, can and perhaps should be privatised. There is no reason why private industry infrastructure should not exist and compete with government provided infrastructure, providing it is econimically sound to do so and the government isn't funding the private industry, but the there's no way private industry should be allowed to have a monopoly over critical infrastructure (such as Telstra's physical network). There's also no reason why a lot of infrastructure can't be government owned but privately run (on tenders) to avoid gross public service ineffeciencies.

The trick is not to have the government regulate, dominate or subsidise a market which will result in lack of competition or innovation. Like aiding the rent seeking robber baron retailers like Solly Lew, Gerry Harvery and Bernie Brookes. Or subsidise a crap local car making industry, resulting in a lack of innovation. The straight-six engines that we produced locally for the shitty Falcadore cars, for example, were a prime example of lack of local innovation and not even bothering to try to improve quality through research thanks to government grants subsidising the industry. This means that eventually international innovation will highlight just how bad our product really is, making it uncommercial even with the government subsidy - which is what eventuated.

I have digressed to the point where we arrive at Australia's embarassing lack of innovation and research and manufacturing. The Scandinavian countries have companies like Nokia, Saab, Volvo, Ikea, and more. The Dutch have Philips, etc. Hell, even NZ has Fisher and Paykel. These countries are all much smaller than we are. And we have nothing.
 

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
Ash, I agree almost 100% with that. Government subsidy of industries where the private sector should be standing on their own two feet is in my opinion a bad, bad, bad thing. That's one of the reasons we pay so much for our cars. I can accept the government owning key pieces of infrastructure, like roads, ports, rail lines and telecomms exchanges. The stuff that "faces the customer", however, should be provided by the market IMHO. They almost invariably do a better job of it than government instrumentalities.

Don't get me started on those rent-seeking pricks like Gerry Harvey. I haven't been properly riled up about an issue for a while (since the internet filter really) and these guys make me want to go around to their respective houses and smack them multiple times about the head with a copy of the Wealth of Nations.

With respect to innovation, I part company with you there. The Scandinavian countries have these global tech companies, because they don't have much in the way of natural resources, small land masses and higher population densities. In other words, the complete opposite of the pre-conditions we have in Australia. We mine things, we're very good at it and other people want the product. If we don't sell it to them, somebody else will. In Sweden, Finland and Denmark, they really only have a minor mining industry by comparison and their other primary industry products come mainly from forestry and fishing. They have to invest more in higher tech industry than we do because it's vital to their economic interest. But look at Norway. They have the North Sea hydrocarbon fields and before they had those, they were a comparatively poor nation. These days, through sound economic management and abundant natural resources, they have one of the highest per capita GDP's in the world.

And it's not like we don't have high tech manufacturing of our own. I happen to work for one such company. We're medium sized, but we make market leading downhole tools for the mining and hydrocarbon industries and we're international. There are many more like us that don't get a lot of recognition in Australia.
 

Ash

Michael Lynagh (62)
TBH; I also work for an R&D tech company. Unfortunately in our industry (computer hardware/IT related, primarily image processing) we've seen lots of big R&D centres close down in Australia over the past decade, and not many open up. Others have downsized, like the one I work for recently did. I think companies and individuals that innovate in Australia should get more recognition, like ResMed for example, yet most Australians will not know nor care about any innovation we do. Sadly, it's much the same for the majority of our politicans. It's great that you work for a company that does innovate and provide solutions, but in Australia I still think they are too rare.

I have strong feelings about our mining industry. It's great for the country if well managed - look at Norway, the example you cited. They have half a trillion dollars locked up for their nation's future, thanks to the resources boom. In contrast, Australia has nothing for the future saved - zip, zero, nada. We are facing Dutch Disease in a big way as our other industries suffer. Mining should be great for the nation, but its inherent problem is that it distorts the economy badly if it dominates or is not controlled by the government: it requires a very large amount of capital, it employs a comparatively low amount of people for the capital it uses, and those it employs are paid very very well.

The current surge in commodity prices has led to a massive investment in mines, in Australia, Africa, South America and elsewhere. The demand from China is possibly unsustainable, and in a few years once production from the new mines comes online and commodity prices revert to long term norms, then we are in real real trouble. What happens when commodity prices drop?

I think the key is what you mentioned: sound economic management. Something we sadly lack as we prop our country up by selling rocks overseas, and selling houses for ever increasing amounts by borrowing ever increasing amounts of money from overseas. I am not saying that we should curtail our mining efforts at all, but we should be using our windfall mining profits (like Norway did) to secure our nation's future, whilst taking steps to keep our economy balanced. Which is why I was actually in favour of the resources rent tax (which I guess you probably aren't, being in WA and related to the mining industry, which is fair enough), but the proceeds from the tax (which prevents a two or three speed economy) should have been set to growing other industries for life after mining (like Norway). I fear for our nation's future once the mining boom peters out.
 

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
I've got no real problem with the concept of a sovereign wealth fund, rather like what Norway has. The issue we have in Australia is that of federalism, both in a positive and negative sense. Mining royalties are not the domain of the commonwealth, the States own the mineral rights, as is laid out in the constitution I believe. That creates a bit of a problem in that the states will say hands off, the commonwealth will say it's for the good of all Australians and the mining companies in the middle of all this will say stop taxing us twice. It's a bit of a mess.

If we are to make something like this work, then I think we need some governmental as well as economic reform.

One thing I am absolutely against are punitive taxes against specific industries or companies for political reasons, which is one very key reason I am against the MRRT. Added to the strong suspicion I have that the money would go to general revenue and not into a trust fund. It would just pay for more government largesse. The Greens are already talking about it paying for "free" university education.

Great debate BTW.
 
C

chief

Guest
One thing I am absolutely against are punitive taxes against specific industries or companies for political reasons, which is one very key reason I am against the MRRT. Added to the strong suspicion I have that the money would go to general revenue and not into a trust fund. It would just pay for more government largesse. The Greens are already talking about it paying for "free" university education.

Great debate BTW.

The MRRT tax is a fair tax. I may remind us all it is a super profits tax, all it will affect is Gina Rienhart, and Clive Palmer's television ads against the tax. Why not have a tax on an industry that is incredibly bad for carbon emissions, and destroys the environment. I'll sleep fine tonight knowing Palmer and Rienhart, from hopefully next year have to pay for a Carbon tax, and an MRRT. It's a fair game they were originally Australia's (Aboriginal's) land, and they should receive the profits. My beef with the MRRT, is that it's paying off a surplus when the surplus could be simply cut by abandoning basic services.

I choose not to listen to the Greens on many "serious" things, basically only the environment I listen to them. I don't want to make this a rant on The Greens, but they are incompetent on issues such as the economy, education, defence. This "free" education rubbish is not sustainable, and the MRRT isn't the way to go about it.
 

WorkingClassRugger

David Codey (61)
I've got no real problem with the concept of a sovereign wealth fund, rather like what Norway has. The issue we have in Australia is that of federalism, both in a positive and negative sense. Mining royalties are not the domain of the commonwealth, the States own the mineral rights, as is laid out in the constitution I believe. That creates a bit of a problem in that the states will say hands off, the commonwealth will say it's for the good of all Australians and the mining companies in the middle of all this will say stop taxing us twice. It's a bit of a mess.

If we are to make something like this work, then I think we need some governmental as well as economic reform.

One thing I am absolutely against are punitive taxes against specific industries or companies for political reasons, which is one very key reason I am against the MRRT. Added to the strong suspicion I have that the money would go to general revenue and not into a trust fund. It would just pay for more government largesse. The Greens are already talking about it paying for "free" university education.

Great debate BTW.

Must say I quite like that idea.
 
C

chief

Guest
Must say I quite like that idea.

The idea is good, but it's not feasible. University is an industry which is going to be extremely important in a few years, and will be a huge part of our economy. Hopefully governments can get the idea, that less student immigration is better because right now we could have many students come over, but I know for a fact that so many of them are heading to Canada.

PS, sorry to make the issue about immigration, I just don't understand!!!
 

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
The idea is good, but it's not feasible. University is an industry which is going to be extremely important in a few years, and will be a huge part of our economy. Hopefully governments can get the idea, that less student immigration is better because right now we could have many students come over, but I know for a fact that so many of them are heading to Canada.

PS, sorry to make the issue about immigration, I just don't understand!!!

Chief, they pay full fees, which is a good thing. Every overseas student coming here subsidises a local one. Or at least it did when I was a student.
 
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