THURSDAY (26 April) will be the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. It is perhaps timely to reflect on it, given the emphasis on bombing in the past couple of weeks: the bombing of Syria “in retaliation” for the use of chemical weapons; the Mother of All Bombs being dropped in Afghanistan; and the threats by North Korea to pre-emptively use nuclear bombs. Continue reading “80 years on, Guernica has lessons about bombing for us”
80 years on, Guernica has lessons about bombing for us
THURSDAY (26 April) will be the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. It is perhaps timely to reflect on it, given the emphasis on bombing in the past couple of weeks: the bombing of Syria “in retaliation” for the use of chemical weapons; the Mother of All Bombs being dropped in Afghanistan; and the threats by North Korea to pre-emptively use nuclear bombs.
GOVERNMENTS, at state and federal level, are only looking at a half the “housing affordability” crisis, if that. The missing bit is that we have to go beyond merely discouraging investors from buying more houses to taking action to encourage existing investors to sell and move their money into more productive activity. 
THE Government would like us to measure its success on the “jobs and growth” illusion. It points to 103 quarters without a recession (growth). It points to increasing job vacancies and lower unemployment (jobs). And the ministers smile smugly. 
Yesterday (31 March 2016), Australia equalled the Netherlands’ record of 103 consecutive quarters of economic growth, as measured by Gross Domestic Product, without a recession. So why aren’t the champagne corks popping? The Netherlands’ boom came with gas in 1982 and ended with the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. 
MOST economists regard hypothecation as a Bad Thing. In the financial (as distinct from the legal) world, hypothecation is where a government agrees to apply all the money raised by a particular tax to a particular area of spending. 
AS OUR agile, innovative, laissez-faire, small-government Prime Minister grapples with the contradictions of regulating gas exports and propping up the dying coal industry with public money, people might ponder anew the question of who has been the worse Coalition Prime Minister in recent history. Malcolm Turnbull himself? Tony Abbott? Billy McMahon? 
HARDLY a week goes by without the publication of some well-thought-out, evidence-based paper recommending solutions to some of Australia’s pressing economic and social problems – tax, education, health, defence, energy and so on. But very few of them come out of our Parliament. And if they do, they come out of parliamentary committees which are usually not evidence-based but rather dependent on submissions by usually self-serving interest groups. 
YOU have to go back to 1829 to find the beginning of a presidential term as chaotic as the one this year. In 1829 Andrew Jackson entered the White House after a handsome electoral victory. He thereupon removed 919 government officials – about 10 per cent of the administration – so he could fulfill numerous promises made to people during the election campaign. And so began the “spoils” or patronage system in US politics which has ebbed and flowed ever since and is now flowing “bigly”.