Australian Politics
The spoilt generation
I suspect that this story was deliberately designed to stir up oldies like me. When I was young and saving money, I breakfasted regularly on porridge, toast and Weetbix and felt perfectly happy about it. And anybody who is serious about coping with economic hard times would do that to this day.
I do however know what he is talking about. I have breakfast at a cafe or via Doordash most days these days and appreciate it greatly. But I am in my 81st year and lived frugally for many years while I was building up "rainy day" money. And those days have now arrived and I can live a bit indulgently in my old age
The guy below wants to run before he can walk and he is actually eating his own future by his indulgences. I do feel a bit sorry for him. Perhaps he should learn to enjoy a nice bowl of porridge. I still do occasionally. It costs mere cents
Cash-strapped Australians are turning to meal prepping to save money amid the cost of living crisis - but Gen Zers are fuming at being 'robbed' of the simple delight of enjoying brunch at cafés.
A recent Lighthouse 2024 hospitality report found that menu prices have increased by as much as one third in the past 12 months.
'There's something about meal prep,' he said in a video posted to social media. 'I could buy this from a café and be happy as Larry but just because I know that I've made it and I'm doing this to save money, something about it ''icks'' me. 'I don't want it. I want to go and spend $30 on an overpriced meal.
'I hate the economic crisis... this sucks.'
Many others agreed that eating out had become an unaffordable luxury but they were unsatisfied with home-made alternatives.
'I'm the same... I thought I was the only one,' one person said.
'I will literally bring something from home and then go and buy something to eat anyway because my container of food depresses me,' another said.
'I'm so poor but I spent $80 on Door Dash tonight because I wanted cheeseburgers,' a third said.
'Is it too much to ask for just a salmon bagel and almond latte every day?' a fourth said.
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When victimhood is main currency, we’re the ones who will be stuffed
Gemma Tognini
I can’t remember the last time a politician of any ilk said something that made me stop what I was doing and turn around. In a good way, that is.
Oh, there have been plenty of moments where what has come out of the mouths of some MPs has prompted a less than ladylike response from yours truly.
That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about something said last week that made me stop, listen and, as it happens, start writing.
This week, David Crisafulli, the man who would be Queensland premier, held a media conference to announce the state Liberal National Party’s proposed policy on youth crime should his team be elected in the October poll.
The detail of that policy, which focuses on strengthening penalties and more effective rehabilitation, is actually the supporting act here. Some have criticised it, some say it’s what’s needed. Let others fight that battle. It’s what he said when delivering the policy that I want to pick apart.
Crisafulli declared that soft policing of young people and a dearth of consequences when they committed serious crimes had created “a generation of untouchables”.
A generation of untouchables. What a statement. And broadly, what a truth.
Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli has pledged there will be fewer victims of crime under his leadership.
Crisafulli may have said this in the context of a catastrophic youth crime issue in Queensland, but I want to talk about it more broadly and tease out why any of us should care.
As a starting point, come with me, if you will, to Perth in the early 1980s. I’m in the car with my mum driving past Lake Monger, a large, thriving wetland a few kilometres north of the city.
I don’t know what I did on this occasion to find myself in strife. I was a pretty straitlaced kid, to be honest, so I imagine it was something to do with my unbridled tongue. On this afternoon I was learning a tough lesson in behavioural relativity.
“Hate me all you want, Gem,” Mum said, after delivering the consequences to my actions. “But I’m not here to be your friend, you’ll thank me one day.”
Most of my maligned Generation X peers have similar stories and we laugh about them. The irony, 40-odd years later, is that for the most part our generation produced millennials, which is arguable where the slippery slope started.
Our boomer parents knew a thing or two about cost and value and hard work. They passed that on to us. What did we do? Wrapped our kids in cotton wool and gave them a medal for getting out of bed. The millennials took that baton and ran with it. Next stop Generation Z, custom-made with hides softer than butter on a January afternoon.
Sure, you could dismiss me as an “old lady shakes fist at sky” or similar, but hear me out. There is so much conversation right now about societal decline and the shredding of social cohesion. What happens when we have generational decline? We have entire cohorts who are experts in rights but no clue about responsibilities. Who value victimhood above everything else. And who despite being elected to serve the Australian people in the Senate, complain about not having a “support person” to go and front up to the Prime Minister and explain yourself after launching a missile at him and the party that put you in your $280k a year job in the first place.
Honestly, Fatima Payman is the embodiment of what I’m talking about. Deluded enough to refer to herself as the “voice of West Australians”. Deluded enough to think she is in parliament because she’s special or talented and not because of the machinations of the ALP and the West Australian union movement.
Bet they’re high-fiving themselves now. On behalf of the rest of Australia, go to your room and have a good hard think about what you did.
It gets better (or worse) because this week the ALP’s youth movement publicly threw its support behind Payman. This is the kids telling Mum and Dad to go get stuffed. While this is primarily and for now a problem for the ALP, I want the rest of us to think about why it matters. Why it does, and why it will continue to.
We are running out of time to turn the ship. Ever the optimist, I think there is still time but, when you think about how long it takes for societal erosion, the clock is ticking, loudly.
It’s not just soft policing that has created this. It’s soft parenting. Soft teaching. Soft leading. All of it. And by soft, I don’t mean the alternative is harshness or hardness. What I mean is that you cannot remove consequences, in any context, and expect to produce young people of character and substance.
It’s like anything: you get what you pay for. If a young person knows the worst they’ll face is a Monty Pythonesque you’re not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy or girl, they’ll do what they please. I’m sure I would have.
You can’t fast-track experience and you can’t learn discipline, leadership and sacrifice any other way than being disciplined, led well and having to endure sacrifice. This matters because one day, when members of the generation that are the same age as my niece and nephew are in the Lodge, we want them to be well formed. We don’t want needy brats who were told everything they ever did was spectacular and that microaggression is real (it really is not) and that there is a back door out of every situation because they’ve never had to face or wear a consequence.
The ridiculous charade of Payman’s crusade for self is such a brilliant, helpful and instructive example of what I’m talking about.
Farther afield, another terrifyingly potent example of what I’m talking about. After holding the prestigious Columbia University campus hostage to vile anti-Israel protest for weeks on end, law students petitioned administrators to cancel exams because they were so “irrevocably shaken” by the protests. And they were serious.
Back at home, the pro-Palestine useful idiot student activists from the University of Melbourne’s equivalent who made the campus unsafe for Jewish students and defied administrators for weeks on end look set to escape with a warning. A generation of untouchables, indeed.
Forget the culture wars; perhaps the real battlefield is the generation wars. Perhaps the failure started with us, the Gen-Xers.
Either way, when victimhood is the primary currency of the emerging generation, well, we’re the ones who’ll be stuffed.
We are doing this generation a disservice by allowing this softness to guide, by depriving them of the lessons that can be learned only by going through difficulty.
As for junior Gemma and her education in the area of choice and consequences, well, Mum was right. I did thank her, and have done many times since that day.
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Take note, Libs: UK shows lurch to left is no way to win votes
Peta Credlin
For all the media obsession with the upcoming Trump v Biden contest, the electoral race with the most influence on Australian politics was last weekend’s British general election.
Not only are we both parliamentary democracies but our two major parties have strong historical links with their British counterparts that continue to this day, ensuring shared policy and campaign learning. In the Blair years, a lot of British Labour’s policy initiatives found their way into Labor’s opposition manifestos and, similarly, David Cameron’s climate change rebranding of the Conservatives was picked up here by Liberal moderates.
The new British Labour government has a record majority but a minimal mandate, given that it secured only 34 per cent of the overall vote in an election with a dismal turnout of under 60 per cent of eligible voters. It can’t be good for democracy when 40 per cent of voters don’t turn up and, of those who do, more than 40 per cent vote for neither of the two parties.
Although compulsory voting and the preferential system somewhat mask the public’s disillusionment with politics as usual here, the fact our two main parties now struggle to win two-thirds of the primary vote between them suggests Australian democracy is on a similar path.
With one side obsessing over climate and identity and the other torn between moving left to hug the centre ground or taking risks to run against the zeitgeist, Australians are hardly less likely than Britons to feel let down and politically homeless.
Because of our different electoral system it may take longer but, sooner or later, as in Britain, if the centre left is neglectful of the bread-and-butter concerns of aspirational voters and if the centre right is a weak echo of the other side, there will be an earthquake as voters dump first one party and then the other that has taken them for granted for too long.
Sir Keir Starmer and his team would be too euphoric to feel vulnerable just yet but an electorate fed up with excuses from one government is hardly going to be patient if its successor spends more money and recruits more civil servants without making much practical difference to voters’ lives.
While seismic changes have lessons for both sides, defeat is usually more instructive than success. Sure, part of the Conservatives’ problem was they’d been in office for 14 years and the “it’s time” factor was running against them. Having five prime ministers didn’t help, and neither did making promises about reducing immigration that the government simply wouldn’t or couldn’t keep.
Brexit aside, the basic issue was successive Tory prime ministers have governed more from the left than the right. Under the party’s most recent leader, Rishi Sunak, taxes reached a post-war high. There was some late resistance to peak leftism, such as the trans push, but Sunak continued Boris Johnson’s climate fixations, including bans on fracking, making electric vehicles and heat pumps compulsory, and making Britain’s last coal-fired power station burn wood instead.
The Conservatives promised to reduce illegal migration and stop the boats, but the boats kept coming, migration reached record highs, and no boatpeople were deported to Rwanda. The party even was weak on defence, slashing the British Army to its smallest size in 200 years.
The result of Tories moving to the left was not grateful Labour voters saying “thank God we now have a moderate Tory government”. Left voters kept voting for Labour. But right-wing voters deserted the Tories in droves via the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which claimed to be true conservatives and cannibalised the centre-right vote.
At nearly 40 per cent, the combined Tory-Reform vote would have been enough to succeed in a first-past-the-post system, but a split centre right meant Labour won many seats with scarcely a third of the vote.
Of the 106 electorates where Reform came second, 93 were won by Labour.
This is what happens in a first-past-the-post system when centre-right votes are split between the mainstream conservatives and a breakaway party of the right.
And yes, in our preferential system, at least some of those votes would come back to the biggest centre-right party (although never as many as the more disciplined preference flows on the left deliver). That doesn’t alter the fact the British Conservatives made the fundamental mistake of thinking the way to win was to hug the other side rather than to create a contest.
That’s a mistake too many Liberals make in this country. Think Scott Morrison embracing Labor’s net-zero target, even though he’d won his miracle victory in 2019 in part by opposing Labor’s then 45 per cent emissions reduction target as unachievable and ruinously expensive. Think former NSW premier Dom Perrottet whose energy policy, likely driven by Matt Kean, was even more renewables-dependent than federal Labor’s. Ditto Victoria under two-time moderate loser Matthew Guy; the South Australian Liberals who lost government in a term under wet Steven Marshall; and don’t even get me started on Western Australia with Liberal Zak Kirkup trying to out-green the Greens and losing official opposition status to the Nationals.
In Britain, the Liberal Democrats are a bit like our teals, targeting Conservative seats and using Labour supporters to vote tactically to flip them. Last weekend they won 72 seats with just 12 per cent of the national vote. Contrast that with Reform which, from a standing start, garnered a higher national vote at 14 per cent but won just five seats.
And while it has been the Reform insurgency that has grabbed headlines, the rise of “Gaza” candidates on the left – one of whom displaced a Labour shadow cabinet member – has been no less significant. Thanks to Muslim bloc voting, there are now five British MPs who were elected campaigning more about Palestine than their own country.
The London Telegraph reports that in seats where Muslims were more than 10 per cent of the population, Labour’s vote fell by an average of 6.8 per cent. By contrast, it rose by 3.3 per cent in seats where the Muslim population was under 10 per cent. At 6 per cent, Muslims in Britain are about double the percentage here, but a local version of an entity called The Muslim Vote is similarly trying to mobilise voters on the basis of religion and is similarly pushing Labor for pro-Gaza policy change.
If the Tory party is to have any hope of a swift comeback, the first task of the battered survivors will be to heal the breach with Farage and his supporters. And if the Starmer government is to prosper, it will have to curb the green-left enthusiasm of many of its activist MPs and marginalise anyone who wants religion and ethnic tribalism to drive politics. Both sides of politics will need to work out more compelling ways to build a stronger and more cohesive society as well as a stronger economy and to rekindle the enthusiasm once generated by leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
In a depressing echo of politics here, no big figures campaigned on a specific plan for more excellence in education, getting better healthcare from the National Health Service, making the military more potent or making energy more affordable and the economy more competitive. It was a campaign based on personalities, trivia and mud-slinging rather than clear competing visions on how to make the country better.
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Senators discover middle Australia set to be hit hard by super bill
Robert Gottliebsen
The infamous superannuation bill which taxes unrealised capital gains for the first time in the western world was expected to be passed through the House of Representatives last week. But strangely it was postponed.
Speculation about a looming deal in the Senate was naturally widely canvassed. That may be right, especially as last week passing the bill became just a little harder.
Until last week the government and the Greens could muster 37 Senate votes so needed only two Senate crossbenchers to pass a bill. Last week Fatima Payman left ALP ranks and became an independent Senator. That means the government now needs three crossbencher votes.
It is highly unlikely that the superannuation legislation has been on Senator Payman’s agenda. It is not seen as a Muslim issue. But like other parts of middle Australia, Senator Payman will discover that many Muslim Australians are set to be hit hard.
Many are shopkeepers, may own their business premises via their superannuation fund and will find themselves paying tax on unrealised capital gains.
The same applies to farmers, including struggling Tasmanian farmers where Jacqui Lambie has a special concern.
When the government first announced the superannuation tax rate would rise from 15 per cent to 30 per cent on income from superannuation savings above $3m, the government’s proposal naturally had its opponents but was widely accepted.
In its original form, plus indexation of the $3m trigger, it would have passed the Senate without a great deal of problem.
I have pointed out previously that the industry funds have antiquated bookkeeping systems and it was discovered that they could not provide the information necessary to levy the proposed tax.
The government didn’t want to back down so used the figure that the industry funds could provide – there would be a tax on gains in the total market value of superannuation funds above $3m including unrealised capital gains. The $3m trigger would not be indexed so quickly it will capture middle income Australia.
It was an outrageous proposition particularly as it will hit farmers, shopkeepers and other families that have their business premises in their superannuation fund.
It was a thinly disguised attack on small and medium sized enterprises – not an area that is high in the government agenda.
Around Canberra last week among the crossbenchers there was discussion about ending indexation, but that was a basic claim.
Many crossbenchers actually want to return to proposals that as far as possible match the government’s initial aim.
Accordingly, one plan was that those who had superannuation funds with modern accounting systems and could provide real earnings for their funds would be taxed at 30 per cent on realised income earned over $3m.
For members in funds that could identify and report actual taxable earnings, the proposed amendments completely removed unrealised capital gains from the tax calculation.
This is also the suggestion made by my readers.
Those that could not provide that data would have their funds above $3m taxed on the basis of a deemed earning rate related to the 90-day bank bill rate.
Those who were in funds that had antiquated accounting systems would not have to pay tax on unrealised gains but would have a deemed earning rate.
But of course, industry and retail funds currently unable to provide the data would almost certainly set up a separate fund that used modern accounting systems and members would then have the same investment choices as are currently available. Relatively few people would be linked to a deemed rate of return.
As I understand it, a number of crossbenchers are looking at a proposal along these lines. Whether they are strong enough to stand up to the government is yet to be seen.
But it will be fascinating to see if the new crossbencher Fatima Payman stands up for middle Australia, including a great many Muslims who aim to be in the middle Australia bracket and don’t want to be smashed.
On the government side my guess is that they will throw in indexation but Treasury see taxing unrealised gains as a huge long term money spinner which will be extended to many asset classes.
In the words of the Self Managed Superannuation Fund Association: “No other pension system in the world taxes unrealised capital gains, and it’s not the way the Australian tax system works either.”
“As soon as you depart from actual taxable earnings as the basis for the calculation, there will be plenty of unintended consequences and unfair outcomes, and that’s exactly how this proposed new tax will play out.”
“The only way to remove unrealised capital gains is to use actual taxable earnings.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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