Once again Australian banks do well

Unlike banks in the USA, their low-doc (sub-prime) loan portfolios were fine and now this

NAB and Commonwealth Bank say they have no direct exposures to a collapsed pyramid investment scheme operated by US investment broker Bernard Madoff. "CBA has no direct exposure,'' spokesman Steve Batten said.

Prosecutors allege the 70-year-old Wall Street veteran confessed to losing at least $US50 billion ($75.24 billion) in the scheme run by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, which collapsed due to the global financial crisis. "It's not the business we're in in New York, and he had a fairly limited client list, so we're 99.9 per cent certain we don't have any direct exposure,'' NAB spokeswoman Felicity Glennie-Holmes said.

Banks and financial authorities across the world are scrambling to uncover the scope of losses related to the pyramid scheme, which is one of the largest financial scams to hit Wall Street. The firm's assets were frozen on Friday in a deal with US federal regulators and a receiver was appointed to manage the firm's financial affairs. Top European banks are reported to be clients, according to Agence France Presse (AFP).

US hedge funds and charities have been hit hard, along with Royal Bank of Scotland, and Swiss private bank Reichmuth & Co which has $US327 million at risk, it told investors. A spokeswoman for Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK told AFP the bank had "some exposure'' to Mr Madoff's company, but declined to give details. Spain's largest bank Santander said on Sunday that customers of its hedge fund, Optimal, have an exposure of _2.33 billion euros ($4.63 billion) to the alleged fraud. Meanwhile, France's BNP Paribas, HSBC of Britain and Union Bancaire Privee of Switzerland are rumoured to have billion dollar exposures that are yet to be confirmed by the banks. Spain's second larest bank, BBVA, said it had not commercialised "any Madoff product''. Swiss bankers face losses of up to $US5 billion, Geneva's Le Temps newspaper said.

Source. Update: The ANZ now says that it too is OK but Japan's Nomura Holdings took a hit





Kevvy not Green enough

Kevin Rudd became a target himself today after he announced modest and conditional targets to cut greenhouse gases, thought to be responsible for global warming. As the Prime Minister saud there would be an unconditional 5 per cent cut in emissions by 2010, which could increase to a maximum 15 per cent if the rest of the world agreed to a similar target, a single female protester screamed: "No!" It was a sentiment shared by the Australian Greens, scientists, environmental experts and other protesters, many of who had advocated cuts of 25 to 40 per cent to avert catastrophic climate change.

Meanwhile business labelled the proposed scheme "high risk" at a time of global recession despite billions being handed out to cushion the economic blow for the power industry, other businesses and consumers.

Critics complained the compensation measures would effectively cancel out the scheme's effectiveness at modifying behaviour and also left next to no money to invest in energy efficiency and green alternatives.

Mr Rudd said today's white paper targets represented a responsible course of action. "We are not going to make promises that cannot be delivered,'' he told the National Press Club in Canberra today. "We are starting the scheme with appropriate and responsible targets, targets that are broadly consistent with other developed countries.'' The targets deliver necessary reform to tackle climate change while supporting Australia's economy and securing jobs during the global recession, he said. "Treasury modelling demonstrates that we can deliver on this 5 to 15 per cent commitment while maintaining solid economic growth.''

As Mr Rudd spoke a female protester screamed "No!'' and kept shouting as she was removed from the National Press Club in Canberra. The protester is believed to be Annika Dean, who released a press release earlier in the day detailing the planned protest. "This announcement means the Australian Government is willing to sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef to appease the big polluting companies that are fuelling global climate change,'' Ms Dean said.

In Brisbane protesters from the Brisbane Southside Climate Action Group staged a sit in at the foyer of Kevin Rudd's local electorate office, describing today's targets as "weak". This afternoon Australian Greens leader Bob Brown called the plan an example of Mr Rudd's "dismal politics" and a "failure of leadership".

Leading scientists also expressed dismay. "The 14 per cent cut in our total emissions by 2020 announced today is such a pitifully inadequate attempt to stop dangerous climate change that we may as well wave the white flag now," climate scientist Professor Barry Brook, from the University of Adelaide, said.

Environmental activists Greenpeace also accused Mr Rudd of betraying Australians with a pathetic emissions reduction target "The Government's target of 5 per cent by 2020 is totally unacceptable and cannot be allowed to stand," Greenpeace climate campaign co-ordinator John Hepburn said. "Mr Rudd has betrayed the science, betrayed the community and betrayed the next generation who will have to live with climate change impacts. "He has caved in to the bullying tactics of the coal and other polluting industries," Mr Hepburn said

Despite the modest targets and a compensation package worth more than $1bn to help business and community groups adjust to emissions trading, Australia's leading business group labelled the scheme "high risk" during a time of global recession. "But it does beg the basic question and that is whether or not these costs can be borne by business in the first place at a time when Australia is going through an international economic firestorm,'' Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson told ABC Television. "We need to come through that economic firestorm with a strong economy and placing domestic stress on the economy is going to just make that more difficult.''

Source





Leftist tyranny on the World Wide Web

The champions of mandatory filtering are not Australia's Christian Right but its PC, feministic, leftish elite

Guess who really kickstarted the current push for mandatory ISP-level filtering here in Australia ? No, it wasn't the Christian right; it was Clive Hamilton and the supposedly left-of-centre Australia Institute. The Australia Institute is a think tank established by Hamilton in 1994 to lobby for increased government regulation over market forces. It `participate(s) forcefully in public debates', with the express aim of developing policy initiatives which `reassert the place of ethics' by prioritising `justice, equity and sustainability' over economic efficiency.

Hamilton himself could well be described as `the King of Australian whinge lit', or perhaps `Hairshirt Hamilton'. He feels miserable in the modern world and wants to spread the message. In recent years, he has produced a string of books, with titles such as Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough, Growth Fetish, and Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change. They are all variants on the theme that modern consumer society has turned us into helpless hedonists, duped by the market into indulging our basest desires (and stupidly destroying the planet as we do so). Remarkably, he is regarded here as a leading leftist intellectual.

Hamilton and the Australia Institute began their campaign for internet censorship back in 2003, with a deliberately targeted media splash, based on some rather spurious research supposedly documenting the evil effects of porn on Australian youth (for more detail see here). This is all written up on the Electronic Frontiers Australia website (see here and here), but has remained largely unmentioned by the major `left' blogs in Australia, which have tended to oppose the censorship scheme anaemically, at best.

Back in 2003, Hamilton did manage to get the attention of the conservative Coalition government led by the then Liberal Party prime minister, John Howard. Senator Richard Alston, then minister for communication, information technology and the arts, promised to look into Hamilton's ideas for online censorship. Religious `family oriented' groups then took the opportunity to raise their voices, making extensive use of the Australia Institute's material in their lobbying on the issue. However, in 2004, the idea of ISP-level filtering was rejected by the Howard government, which argued: `Given the limited benefits of an ISP-level filtering system, the costs of a mandated requirement to filter do not appear justified.'

While Howard remained PM, the only action taken was the establishment of the Net Alert website which provided advice about net safety and free downloadable filters, for those who wanted them. Shortly before the 2007 election, the Liberal Party did try to pander to the Christian Right by offering to establish ISP-level filtering, but only for those who wanted it (that is, it was a non-mandatory filtering proposal). That was as far as it went under Howard. However, with the election of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and Kevin Rudd as prime minister last November, the Hamilton/Australia Institute campaign found itself with a far more sympathetic government.

The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were. In his election campaign, Rudd quite consciously targeted `market fundamentalism' on the basis that it undermines traditional family values. He publicly (and opportunistically) embraced some of the communitarian ideas of David McKnight (author of Beyond Right and Left) in his speeches to the intelligentsia, noting in his November 2006 lecture at the Centre for Independent Studies (at which he was introduced by McKnight), that `market fundamentalism has split the political right down the middle along the traditional fault lines of conservatives versus liberals, and. this in turn provides Labor with fresh political and policy opportunities for the future'.

Hamilton, like McKnight, is a communitarian who believes that capitalism creates a level of wealth, freedom and choice which corrupts us. In a number of his books, he has hijacked part of the earlier (and far more interesting) analysis developed by Daniel Bell in his 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, arguing that economic growth engenders a consumerist mentality which destroys `normal' human relationships, creates the desire for instant gratification, manipulates us in ways over which we have no control, and so on. We would be happier, and morally better, if we were poorer, and forced to live more simply and locally.

Hamilton's crusade against pornography is driven both by standard political correctness (it `objectifies women', `subverts healthy sexual relationships', `incites male violence'), and by a more generally puritanical attitude toward sex. He riles against the `pornographication' of everyday life, and chastises `the libertarian left' for continuing `to invest so much in the freedoms won in the Sixties'. He says:

`The ideas of the libertarian left have become a reactionary force, for they have substituted an uncritical defence of the freedoms won in an earlier era for a real politics of social change.

`Like young people everywhere I thought we were freeing ourselves from the shackles of oppressive convention and sexual hang-ups. We thought we were creating a new society and we knew our opponents were being defeated. The conservative establishment lost cause after cause and could no longer sustain the institution of social convention: Victorian morality, women's oppression, the unbearable constraints of social convention. But while the battle against social conservatism was being fought and won, the real enemy was getting on with business and savouring the new commercial opportunities that the radical were opening up.

`In the 1950s, middle-class respectability may have been oppressive, but it carried with it a certain deference. Women are the subject of far more sexual objectification now than they were in the 1950s, although men have become more adept at concealing it. And even the need to conceal has been discarded by the crass exploitation of "girl power". Why should a young man pretend that he doesn't lust after the young woman who has just burned him off at the traffic lights, when nubile popstars thrust their groins at the camera and declare "more power to us"?'

The research conducted by the Australia Institute and Hamilton and his colleague Dr Michael Flood concludes that internet porn is a social evil associated with increased levels of misogyny among young Australian males. There's a critical account of it on the EFA website, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it's not too hard to pick apart.

Regardless of any research claims, there is no empirical evidence that Australian men have deteriorated in their attitude towards women. In fact, the social trend seems to be in the other direction.

With regard to pornography, Hamilton casts his net quite wide. He uses the bogeyman of child porn to provoke moral outrage (despite the fact that child porn is already illegal and, since it is hidden, no-one sees it `accidentally'), and then hitches a ride on this to condemn almost all other porn. Michael Flood has even mooted the idea of an `ethical porn', which depicts people engaged in `normal loving sexual behaviour'. The availability of material which shows men ejaculating on women's faces, double penetration, male-female anal sex, bondage or simulated rape scenes is seen as just obviously socially dangerous. `Normal' sex, as defined by Hamilton and his supporters, should be. well, I don't know quite what, but certainly very politically correct and restrained. It seems that the liberal censors would like the government to find a way of censoring sexual fantasies, and imposing the `correct line' on sex.

The whole area of human sexuality is such a complex mix of primitive urges, emotional needs and our higher-level needs for connection on a mental level that at present we don't have the tools to tease it apart. That includes Hamilton. No amount of political correctness can substitute for genuine understanding.

In any case, we already have laws about real-life non-consensual, violent sex. It's outrageous that people like Hamilton would like the state to regulate material that allows people to explore the fantasies which turn them on.

Of course, there is plenty of porn that is distasteful, boring, superficial and (to me) very off-putting. But I don't have to look at it, and if our young people come across it, either accidentally or as part of their natural curiosity, I don't think we need to worry that it will create a dangerous epidemic of `unhealthy' sexual appetites.

Hamilton really ought to be taken apart for his role in attempting to impose his own morality on everyone else. His role in this discussion of widespread mandatory filtering in Australia has been far more significant than that of the Christian Right.

While he is correct when he says that market capitalism has a shallowness which leaves us with an `emptiness' and a desire for deeper, more meaningful lives, his moralistic call for people to accept lower living standards and his (very serious) attempt to have the state step in to regulate various atavistic desires are simply reactionary. The yearning `for something more' is exactly the impulse which will one day lead people to want to step up, take responsibility and run things themselves. I'm convinced that they won't decide that they want to be poorer and have less freedom.

Source






The old, old story again

Fewer dumb girls but fewer very bright ones too (ENTER is the test for entering university in the State of Victoria)

Girls rule overall in the study stakes but boys are still the brains' trust. New VCE data backs up the trend of female students achieving a higher average ENTER, but more boys nail the perfect score at the elite end of the scale. More than double the number of boys (21) than girls (10) received the highest possible ENTER of 99.95 this year. Last year, 19 boys and 13 girls aced their final year of school with the perfect score. The average ENTER for girls in the class of 2008 is 65.51 and 62.63 for boys.

Females also topped males last year when comparing average scores; the 2007 female average was 64.06 and 61.42 for males. Boys outperformed girls at the top level in 2006, with 26 male students getting 99.95 compared with just nine females. For the past three years, more girls have passed VCE than boys. Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre Director Elaine Wenn said girls outperformed boys overall. "However, boys continue to outnumber girls by two to one at the highest level of 99.95," she said.

Source






Is Victoria's ambulance service unfixable?

The complaints never seem to stop

Long delays for ambulance services are putting lives at risk, the Victorian ambulance union says. A log of 291 incidents from August to November showed dangerously slow response times, Ambulance Employees Association Victorian secretary Steve McGhie said. Ninety-six scheduled shifts failed to run on time during that period. In one case, an 89-year-old woman with severe chest pains was taken to hospital by car after waiting 23 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, Mr McGhie said.

"These figures show the ambulance service is failing the community,'' he said in a statement. "People's lives are being put at risk by slow response times and cancelled ambulances. "Paramedics are working massive hours to cover our over-stretched service, and when everyone else is with their friends and family at Christmas, this is their busiest time of the year.''

Mr McGhie said the only way to attract new people to the profession was to offer fair wages and 10-hour rest breaks. "The community needs to be extremely cautious over the holiday season, because this log shows the ambulance you need in a crisis simply may not be there.''

A spokesman for Health Minister Daniel Andrews said the State Government had committed 258 extra paramedics and provided $186 million to services during 2008.

Source