As one of the longest and hottest days of the year dawned, Australians woke up to the news that two volunteer fire fighters, Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O’Dwyer, are dead. The photos, published by the NSW Rural Fire Service, of each man smiling proudly and holding his baby for the camera are gut wrenching. They are western Sydney dads in their 30s, Aussie everymen.
Michelle Grattan from The Conversation puts it best.
Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has an opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review today, the complete article can be read on the Treasurer’s website.
What I have written below is a re-write of the Treasurer’s article from a Modern Money and Australian Real Progressive frame. Let’s see what the Treasurer really has to say.
Originally posted at Australian Real Progressives
By now you have probably noticed Australian Real Progressives has a rather heavy focus on jobs. This is because 2 million Australians are looking for work or more hours.
“So far as it can humanly contrive, never again will the dole queues be seen in this country. Never again will competent workmen stand idle for months and years while limitless work remains to be done. Never again will young men drift hopelessly from town to town and from State to State, searching for the jobs which, in all this wide land, did not exist for them.”
Ben Chifley, 1949.
In my previous post I outlined why jobs don’t come from rich people: capitalism runs on spending (sales), not savings. Job opportunities appear naturally when businesses forecast sales growth and expand output accordingly (and similarly disappear under reverse conditions). When viewing the economy as a whole, we can observe that private sector investment responds to rising incomes and spending as entrepreneurs expand output to match market demand and banks have confidence lending. In the absence of spending growth, accumulated savings do nothing.
The thing is, Democracy will end.
At some point the current dominant expression of Democracy – Universal Franchise with mass political parties and redistributive taxation – will fail to deliver solutions to urgent problems: Climate; Migration;War; National Sovereignty – and it will be discarded for something else.
Talking Politics
I have just discovered the excellent Podcast Talking Politics which discusses UK, US and European and International Politics.
You must subscribe to Talking Politics. It is put together by David Runciman of Cambridge University and provides commentary and analysis in the best British academic tradition – informed, fair, objective, funny. It is absolutely brilliant.
I have awoken with the urge to blog for the first time in many moons and offer you this otter doing a backflip at Capron Park Zoo in Massachusetts.
The NSW government’s planned Aerotropolis is conning residents of western Sydney. It’s more about useful politics than plausible policy Will the Western Sydney Aerotropolis really deliver on jobs?
The only surprising aspect of the Victorian government’s decision to terminate Melbourne Bike Share is that it took so long Is ending Melbourne Bike Share the right decision?
A shorter version of this post (with proper spoiler alerts) was first published at ACRAWSA blog on 7 June 2019. Many thanks to director Partho Sen Gupta and to Prof Alana Lentin for entrusting me with tix to a film on a Sunday night in Randwick (in the pouring rain! see review, below).
Love in the Time of Terror: Slam at Sydney Film Festival
Review by Ingrid Matthews
[Alert: Spoilers]
Fringe suburbs have historically always had fewer jobs than workers. What policy makers should focus on is providing good transport links to the more central parts of the city where most of the employers want to be Is labelling the outer suburbs as ‘job deserts’ helpful?
We can learn lessons from cities like Paris, but we must be wary of the dangers in importing solutions that might work well elsewhere but aren’t matched to local circumstances Is Paris the right model for the Sydney of 2050?