Crispin Hull

Lessons from the year of living precariously

As this year of living precariously draws to a close, it is worth reflecting why life in Australia is so much less precarious than in most other places on earth and what we should do to make it remain so.

For a start we should expunge from the lexicon the Reaganite nonsense that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

The things that have made life so much less precarious for Australians than Americans this year are mostly creations of government.

Coercive diplomacy will backfire

The Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping, like Donald Trump and any number of bullying autocrats before them, are playing a self-destructive game.

In a way, Australia should welcome Chinese coercive diplomacy because of its very self-destructiveness.

The idiocy driving road taxes

Short-sighted, uncoordinated, resource-misallocating, inequitable, environmentally destructive, ham-fisted and unhealthy are just some of the adjectives that apply to Victoria’s decision to impose a 2.5-cent-per-kilometre tax on electric vehicles.

Pretty standard fare for much of Australia’s dumb tax system.

Fairer tax is possible, NSW shows

The announcement by the NSW Government that it will abolish stamp duty and replace it with an annual property tax proves that bold tax reform is possible beyond merely giving big socially destructive income-tax cuts to the wealthy.

The tax system is a redistributive vehicle. The vehicle can, on one hand, transfer vast amounts of money from the common wealth to a megawealthy elite or, on the other hand, transfer money from the wealthy to the commons.

Human factor distorts polling

In a week when opinion polls were shown not to have done very well in the US, research into why the polls got it wrong in the 2019 Australian election was published – basically, it was the human factor.

Climate of lies and delusion ends

One of the first things President-presumptive Joe Biden says he wants to do is to get the US back into the Paris climate agreement. Coincidentally, the US’s withdrawal from it became formal on the day after the election.

Dysfunction since 1980 for Biden to fix

The rise of Donald Trump was not the cause of US political dysfunction, but a mere symptom of it.

When Joe Biden gets a clear majority of the vote and Electoral College on Tuesday a side question will be whether Donald Trump goes willingly or has to be militarily crowbarred out of the White House before inauguration day. Either way he will go.

The real issue is whether Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, can reverse not only the excesses of Trump but replace the whole rotten dysfunction of the American polity that set in with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Environment: Labor must get off the fence

Labor in Australia had better watch out. The Greens are coming for them. The results of last weekend’s ACT and New Zealand elections illustrate the point which will likely be reinforced in next weekend’s Queensland election.

Essentially, Labor has to end its ambivalent, two-faced approach to the electorate. It cannot be pro-coal, gas and manufacturing in regional Australia and at the same time hope to be seen as the party of renewable energy and climate action in the cities.

Australia’s losing mentality

Australia’s increasing habit of choosing losers was highlighted again in the past week. Anyone but the most blinkered global-heating denier would know that Chinese demand for Australian coal would fall as renewables got cheaper and that China wants to take some leadership on emissions to fill the vacuum left by the US under Trump.

An abdication of real government

The big questions this week are: what do governments do and why do they do them?

This week’s budget was an abdication of the fundamental reason for government: to do the things that must be done collectively, and cannot be done by individuals acting alone so as to nurture and protect people and society.

Pin It on Pinterest