Like many Victorians, I have a deep seated and long standing affection for the long gone State Electricity Commission of Victoria. My father was involved in building its headquarters, Monash House, in William Street in the early 1970s, and then worked in its maintenance team for a decade.
That building still stands, under a shiny new facade, but the only trace of its SEC history is the continued presence of Mervyn Napier Waller’s Prometheus mosaic in the foyer:
The SEC was created in the early 1920s by General Sir John Monash to utilise our abundant sources of brown coal in the Latrobe Valley to provide the people of Victoria with cheap reliable clean electricity for generations.
Sadly, a decade of profligate spending by the Cain-Kirner government from 1982 to 1992 forced the incoming Kennett government to sell off the SEC to pay off the mountain of debt.
And now Premier Andrews is going around wearing a new jacket with the iconic SEC logo on it, having announced his intention of creating a new electrical generating body under the old SEC name.
But this will not be the SEC. It will not be about cheap and reliable electricity. It will be about supposedly renewable energy through solar panels (arguably not a sustainable technology) and wind mills.
This energy will not be cheap, and it will not be reliable. It will represent an irresponsible and doctrinaire overreach by an autocratic leader.
And it is hypocritical. Since becoming Premier, Andrews has not ceased privatisations when it suits him – the land titles office being one which I would expect would be more antithetical to most people than that of utilities infrastructure.
Yet Andrews talks about how the SEC should never have been privatised. A decade of seriously irresponsible financial mismanagement by his predecessors in Labor government forced the privatisation of both the SEC, and the sell off of the much beloved State Bank of Victoria.
I am reminded somewhat of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In order to industrialise Communist China, Mao went and forced all sorts of absurd cottage industries which were unsustainable to start up, such as backyard iron smelters. His economic ignorance ended up (as even Homer Simpson has reminded us) costing some 50 or 60 million lives.
Continuing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the way that Andrews is doing, along with the creation of an erstatz SEC to destabilise our electricity supply, is sheer economic vandalism on a Maoist scale. The lobbyists for Communist China whom Andrews was prepared to listen to on the Belt and Road deal must be pleased with their pupil.
But I too am familiar with Maoism, and I am fond of quoting from the Red Book:
“We must see to it that all our cadres and all our people constantly bear in mind that ours is a big socialist country but an economically backward and poor one, and that this is a very big contradiction. To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practise strict economy and combat waste, ie the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality.”
A $200 Billion state debt is a very high price to pay for the likely re-election of this petty autocrat.
Joseph Conrad has been one of my favourite novelists since my late teens, when I first read the novella Heart of Darkness. He could be hit and miss sometimes – Under Western Eyes is brilliant, but the similarly themed The Secret Agent seemed a mere shadow of his greatest works.
His best work is in his Marlovian stories – the ones which feature the sea captain Marlow as narrator. Those are Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Youth, and Chance.
And it was Chance which I was thinking of these past few days. In particular, I was thinking about the part where de Barral, the father of the heroine, is sent to gaol for his mismanagement of Thrift, a financial institution which turns out to have been what we would now call a Ponzi scheme.
After de Barral is sentenced, he cries out in protest at the world: ‘You haven’t given me enough time. If I had been given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.’
As Conrad through his avatar Marlow sadly observes: ‘And this was awful. Just try to enter into the feelings of a man whose imagination wakes up at the very moment he is about to enter the tomb….’
The collapse of FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges during the past week, has had me pondering such matters. There are now considerable accusations being thrown around by both the newly appointed administrator and the main rival to FTX of corporate governance failings and all sorts of irregularities.
It could well turn out that, when everything is done and dusted, FTX was little more than a Ponzi scheme or some other similar financially irregular operation, warranting serious criminal prosecution.
But am I surprised? I regard cryptocurrency as a giant bubble, probably more similar to the Tulip Mania of the Netherlands some 300 years ago than to the various stock market bubbles in the intervening centuries. The only reason why I don’t consider cryptocurrency itself to be a Ponzi scheme is because it is not really being run by any one individual or institution – it is more a madness of crowds and our society, a situation where the Greater Fool Theory has been unleashed to its full destructive insanity.
Which is not to say that Ponzi schemes cannot be run within the realms of cryptocurrency. Anywhere people are going to believe that something has value as an investment is going to be a place where the unscrupulous can run a Ponzi scheme. That is one of the dark aspects of human nature.
I do not really understand Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, nor do I know how you can store or trade it, so I steer clear of those things. It all seems far too complicated, particularly the encrypted electronic wallets you hold them in.
I suppose that is where exchanges like FTX and Binance come into the picture – to make it possible for mug punters like me to hold onto those magic beans without the stress of having to remember a very complicated password. I might be wrong, but then, I have not paid too close attention to how these things work.
Where the Ponzi element seems to have crept into the picture is the cryptocurrency which FTX itself created – FTT. Where an exchange is creating its own cryptocurrency, it is very similar to when the reserve banks print more money, except that the reserve banks have government backing for what they do. The self-created cryptocurrency only has the backing of its creators and the mass hysteria of that part of the human race who fleetingly ascribe value to it.
And now FTX has collapsed, and the recriminations are flying.
I have one question:
Why have people waited until this institution collapsed to discover that it was all smoke and mirrors?
I get the feeling that everything around cryptocurrency and such exchanges has had more red flags than Moscow on May Day for quite some time. I expect that if anyone had bothered doing some digging into FTX, they would have found out all about the weird polyamorous circle running it and their rather crazy ideas which they expressed online. More importantly, why did someone not call out the creation of FTT and it’s subsequent leveraging as a viable asset base as some sort of seriously dodgy practice which is probably unethical, immoral and illegal?
But that is how Ponzi schemes operate. The red flags are only discovered retrospectively after the failure becomes public. It is just like Bernie Madoff – a man who was able to get away with running a giant Ponzi scheme for decades. Madoff kept reporting consistent high returns year after year to his investors – something which was statistically impossible. Regulators kept hearing rumours of irregularities, but turned selectively deaf. They wanted to believe that it was all real, right up until the whole edifice came crashing down in a major collision with reality.
Just like the fictional de Barral, and the not so fictional Madoff, it appears that there is another figure about to join the Pantheon of Ponzi scheme villains. And there will be more to come, for as long as (to borrow from Joseph Conrad) the old earth keeps rolling!
The only good thing about the Soccer World Cup being awarded to Qatar after the payment of mucho bribes to FIFA delegates was that it stopped Australia from getting hosting rights ( yes I hate soccer that much).
But after spending billions of dollars and uncounted lives of guest workers to build the stadia, did anyone really think that Qatar was going to honour its word to FIFA about the beer deal?
There is no honour among thieves, and the corrupt FIFA delegates who have Qatar the World Cup only have themselves to blame.
I truly hope that the beer sponsor withholds a proportion of their sponsorship dollars to hold FIFA accountable.
I am not too familiar with American Football, suffice to say that my NFL team of choice, the Cleveland Browns, are renowned for their lack of success.
I do however know what a ‘Hail Mary Pass’ is. As it is, there have been two times in living memory where the Cleveland Browns have won a game through the miracle of a Hail Mary Pass, such a miraculous high risk and almost impossible to achieve play that it has arguably required divine intervention to succeed.
The people behind the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), usually my favourite minor party, are mostly good Catholics, and would appreciate the origins (Notre Dame University) of the term Hail Mary Pass, although they most likely would be ignorant of the term in common parlance.
But they have now adopted a Hail Mary Pass strategy in the Victorian Election, in the hope that they can capitalise on resentment against Premier Andrews and name recognition of their two renegade star recruits to win seats in the Victorian Upper House.
The two star recruits I speak of are Bernie Finn, recently expelled from the Liberal party (rather belatedly in my opinion if they were to bother) for making more than usually tone deaf anti-abortion comments, and Adem Somyurek, recently expelled from the Labor party for industrial scale branch stacking.
The strategy appears to be that each of these people may be able to tap into the demographics of the seats where they are running, Finn in Western Metropolitan and Somyurek in Northern Metropolitan, and get reelected on the DLP bandwagon.
As there are 5 seats available in each Upper House electorate, and preference flows from the many minor parties to each other can help to get someone over the line with a 17% quota despite very limited primary vote, this is not necessarily an unrealistic prospect.
Western Metropolitan, where Mr Finn has sat as a Liberal representative since 2006, has some highly conservative and Catholic areas, and some areas, such as Melton and Werribee, where the anger towards the Andrews government runs very high. The DLP were in fact able to get an MLC elected from here in 2006 and again in 2014.
Northern Metropolitan, where Mr Somyurek is running, has some areas with a large Turkish population and some more generally Muslim voters. These people usually vote Labor, but it is possible that they, combined with an Anti-Daniel Andrews wave, could turn in sufficient numbers to Somyurek and get him over the line.
This is a high risk strategy, and hence I call it a Hail Mary Pass.
Changes to federal electoral laws, including increasing the number of financial members of a party from 500 to 1500, caused the DLP to be federally deregistered this year and unable to run in the recent federal election. Getting parliamentarians elected on its ticket in Victoria would be a way around those obstacles and lead to a revival in its fortunes.
In its ongoing fight for survival since the double dissolution election of 1974, the DLP would be able to breath a giant existential sigh of relief for the next four years if it were to get one or both of these gentlemen elected. Indeed, if both were elected, this would mean that the DLP were at their most relevant since 1974, when they held 5 seats in the Senate.
The prospect of success and a guarantee of survival is what has tempted the DLP into this strategy.
But the stakes are high and the DLP has wagered its very soul for this prospect of success.
The DLP, formed from two splits in the Australian Labor Party in the 1950s (one where the predominately Irish Catholics controlling the Victoria executive were expelled in 1955, and one shortly after where most of the Queensland Labor government were expelled after refusing to implement an unrealistic policy), has been predominantly an Irish Catholic grassroots party.
It is working class and Irish Catholic in origins, mostly devoutly religious and socially conservative, rabidly anti-Communist, and with social democratic economic policies based on ideas current in the Catholic Church in the 1930s. It is also, if what I read in NewsWeekly applies to the DLP, very pro-coal and nuclear in terms of energy policy.
But it mostly is a party of true believers, people who trust their priests and like-minded political leaders to tell them who and what they should support in Australian politics.
Into this mix, we now put Bernie Finn, who supported the DLP in his long forgotten youth, and now again in his dotage, and Adem Somyurek, a former Labor party machine apparachik who has vowed vengeance on Premier Andrews for. the wreckage of his career.
Both are highly self-serving individuals, and have only joined the DLP so that they can pursue the continued platform of the upper house (with its assorted trappings) in the case of Finn, and the agenda of vengeance against a former friend (in the case of Somyurek).
This does not strike me as without significant risk. Neither has the integrity or idealism which normally represent a DLP candidate (as a contrast, I refer to Phil Semmel, candidate for Eastern Province, a long term DLP stalwart of great decency and idealism), but represent a blatant lack of principles and a proven disregard for ethical behaviour in their public life (Finn in his Good Friday ‘pairing’ stunt and Somyurek in his branch stacking).
If either was to be elected, who is to say that they would not then desert the DLP for another opportunity later down the track? Or even worse, were to remain as DLP MPs whilst repeating their history of reprehensible behaviour.
[For those who are not aware, the DLP lost all 5 of its seats in the Senate in a double dissolution in 1974. The resignation of Vince Gair, a former DLP Senator Leader, to accept the ambassadorship to Ireland from Gough Whitlam, was considered as the main reason for the general wipeout at that election.]
There is a lot of risk for the DLP. The best outcome would be that they win two seats in the Legislative Council (although I would be much happier if those two lost and someone like Phil Semmel were to win elsewhere), and those two newly rebadged MPs then advocate in a principled way for the ideals of the DLP, fostering regrowth and reengagement within its grassroots base.
The more likely outcome is that the DLP do not win any seats, but appear discredited and cynical through the cold and calculated decision to gamble their principles and ideals on two tired old renegades. This could end up costing them support amongst their existing members.
Hence the Hospital Pass, which needs no explanation, is the more likely outcome.
We have all been rather bemused and befuddled recently by the rather unnecessary drama around the sponsorship of Netball Australia.
To recap:
Netball Australia announced that a company connected to Gina Rinehart was going to sponsor them for $15 million.
Netball Australia is close to bankrupt and otherwise would find it difficult to raise the salaries for players of this niche sport.
A player revolt, based on the premise that Gina Rinehart’s father, the late Lang Hancock, expressed some views in 1984 most kindly described as eugenics, raised criticism of the sponsorship deal.
Gina Rinehart then, in rather measured language, decided not only to withdraw her sponsorship offer, but also to abandon her pre-existing sponsorship of Netball WA and the Perth Super Netball team.
All was not lost however. Our Maoist leaning Premier, Dictator Dan, leapt into action with a $15 million sponsorship package from Visit Victoria.
So… now we are all caught up and I can start my various rants on the subject.
Firstly, I think that Midnight Oil, in one or other of their rather whiny songs, quotes from the Bible about the Sins of the Father being visited upon the Son. Gina Rinehart is not Lang Hancock, simply his daughter, and blaming her for some eugenically themed comments of her father’s from four decades ago is similar to blaming the modern Labor Party for the White Australia Policy.
Secondly, the reporting around those comments by the late Lang Hancock did not bother to actually repeat what he said, which meant that the new publicity for his previously forgotten unpleasant utterances has been distorted considerably. Whilst his statements were about eugenics in relation to half-castes, they have been, through abbreviated reporting, been implied as advocacy for genocide, which they were not.
Thirdly, the gracelessness with which the elite player group of the national team rose up to reject the sponsorship announcement, combined with the clumsiness of their back pedalling which it appeared clear that they had viciously bitten the hand that was feeding them, does not do any of them any credit. Netball is a niche sport, with little popular backing outside of the grassroots where it is played. It has little commercial appeal to attract sponsors.
That the Diamonds first denounced Mrs Rinehart and her family business en masse, and then tried to retreat from their vicious attack when it appeared that this was going to hurt them in their purses, was most unbecoming. I think that the team could perhaps rename themselves from the Diamonds to the Karens.
Fourthly, the rhetoric around the search for a new sponsor showed, amongst the supporters of Netball, a great deal of self-entitlement. Given that they cannot denounce Mrs Rinehart, who pays all the taxes that she legally should and donates generously to charity, for being a freeloader on the community, the ‘Netball community’ (or should I simply call them Karens) chose to turn their attention to those other billionaires, such as the owners of Altassian, who pay few taxes, and make demands that they sponsor Netball.
[Karens, turning on your woke brethren in Altassian is most silly. If you were not aware, Cannon-Brookes et al are busy trying to take over (or shut down) AGL as part of their campaign against global warming at the same time as Altassian is in dire commercial straits. Can you choose to criticise some tax minimising billionaires who are less woke please?]
The result of this debacle is that Victorian Government owned body Visit Victoria now is the main sponsor for a supposedly national sport. The grand final for this niche sport will now be played exclusively in Victoria for the foreseeable future. The reigning super netball premiers and their state body are left without a sponsor. I doubt that either of these two developments is good for Netball as a national sport.
I have occasionally talked about and denounced sports washing in this blog. If I were of the belief that Mrs Rinehart sponsoring a sporting team was a form of sports washing, I would call it out. However, there is no reason to consider that the operations of Hancock Prospecting or any other Rinehart owned company are any more open to criticism than any other Australian owned miner, and far less so than Rio Tinto. Mrs Rinehart pays her taxes and makes generous donations to charities and community groups, and appears to do so from a desire to contribute, rather than to legitimise dodgy business activities.
If I were advising either the AFL, or Mrs Rinehart, I would be looking at this as an opportunity. AFLW has emerged as the leading competitor to Netball as a professional team sport for women. Perhaps Gina Rinehart could be encouraged to divert that $15 million to sponsoring the two AFLW teams in Western Australia? That would repay Netball Australia far more severely than the mere withdrawal of sponsorship from the sport in WA.
Speaking out is a good first step. But I would have much preferred if they had mentioned the Doha Airport incident and had announced they were boycotting the tournament entirely.
Back in early 1996, I was planning to buy a flat. Maribyrnong was the suburb of choice. I really liked one which I inspected in Newstead or Navigator Street – the floor plan was much better than that of most other flats.
And it was about 3 minutes’ walk from the Anglers Tavern, a riverside pub with one of the best beer gardens in Melbourne.
There was just one thing which held me back from buying it – the flat was on the ground floor in a location not too far from the river, on what could be considered the flood plain.
Being sort of a ‘Local’ (living then on the edge of what is now considered part of Maribyrnong, but back then was alternately Maidstone North or Footscray, depending on whether you spoke to the council or the post office) I knew all about the floods. After all, how could I not forget the flood of 1983 (the night of my cousin Johnny’s wedding) which closed the bridge, or the one of 1987, or the one which filled the Anglers Tavern in 1993.
Hence I decided not to put in an offer, and instead bought a flat on the upper level of a block on higher ground, opposite the Maribyrnong Community Centre (which incidentally is the emergency flood evacuation point for Maribyrnong township).
For the six and a half years that I then lived in the Maribyrnong township (isn’t ‘township’ a much more charming name for a place than ‘suburb’) there were no floods, and nor have then been any major flood incidents there in the 20 years since, when I have lived on much higher ground in Avondale Heights.
But that all changed on Friday morning, when I checked the push notices on my phone on my way out the door and saw the details of the evacuation alerts, followed soon after by a bemused call from a friend who lives in an upper level flat in a street which was in the process of getting flooded.
As it turns out, the flood level on Friday reached 4.22m, breaking the most recent flood record of 4.2m set in 1974, and falling just short of the 4.26m recorded in 1916 (the all time record for the Maribyrnong is 4.5m in 1906 according to the SES website).
I am just surprised that this is the first major flood in so long. How could we go almost 30 years without a huge flood?
In 1170, after a falling out with his former friend and sponsor, Henry II, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas A Beckett, was murdered in his Cathedral by four knights from the King’s household.
History since then has generally accepted that Henry’s frustrated utterance ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ was taken as an implicit order to those knights to commit the murder.
I have been thinking a whole lot about this episode in the past week or so, since the former CEO of the National Australia Bank, Andrew Thorburn, was forced to resign as CEO of the Essendon Football Club after only one day in that new role.
There are legitimate reasons why people might object to Thornburn becoming CEO of an AFL club. His tenure at the National Australia Bank came to a premature end soon after the Banking Royal Commission several years ago, where he and the chair of the NAB both appeared to be both tone deaf and most lacking in repentance for the shortcomings of their bank’s highly profit driven conduct to the detriment of their customers.
But his well known career as a banker was not why he was forced to resign from Essendon. It was that it emerged that he was the Chair of an Anglican Church ministry known as ‘Cities on a Hill’. A pastor involved with this ministry raised concerns about abortion and homosexuality in 2013.
Our technocratic premier, Daniel Andrews, saw fit to mount a public attack on Thorburn on the basis of his involvement with this Anglican ministry, arguing that he was not fit to hold office at Essendon due to his involvement with a religious group which had expressed such views.
Andrew Thorburn is no turbulent priest, although he appears to be highly active in the Anglican Church, and Daniel Andrews is no king, even though he has the arrogance, authoritarianism, and haughtiness of one, but I still see parallels between his actions in condemning Thorburn and those of Henry II 850 years ago in implicitly ordering the murder of Archbishop Beckett.
In 1170, when kings actually ruled wielding actual powers, dissent from those elements of civil society which were powerful enough to counter the powers of the state could undermine the authority of the king, sometimes legitimately. The head of the Christian Church in England, Thomas A Beckett, was in a position to do so. Killing him was an attempt at silencing dissent.
Daniel Andrews is a technocrat who controls the state apparatus within Victoria. He has demonstrated in recent years that he does not tolerate any dissent and feels threatened by the very existence of Civil Society, which represents other sources of legitimacy and social stability to that of the state, which he directly controls.
Business, Religion and Sport are all parts of Civil Society which are are vital to our community, and which he has intruded upon during the period of the pandemic. In attacking Thorburn, he has seen an opportunity to assert his post-Pandemic authority over two aspects of civil society that he does not and can not directly control – religion and sport.
Premier Andrews has over reached himself in his role as Premier in condemning the decisions and values of sporting clubs and mainstream religious organisations in criticising the appointment of Thornburn on his religious affiliations. This is the sort of attack on private beliefs and civil society which is best suited to a nation where civil society is much weaker and where the abuses of power of the state are more frequent and systematic, such as Putin’s Russia or Chavez’s Venezuela.
I also find the people siding with Premier Andrews as hypocritical in their talk of greater tolerance. Being a Libertarian, I would love to see greater tolerance for everyone. What I instead see is that there has been a shift in the cultural conversation where those who were oppressed are now joyously embracing the role of oppressors. There is no tolerance, just intolerance from a different source.
It reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs and Yosemite alternate in chasing one another depending on who has the most lethal weapon in their hand.
But it is more serious than that. It is not that long ago that being of a particular religion or not in this country determined whether you were eligible to hold public office or join certain clubs. That Daniel Andrews is prepared to intervene politically and argue that someone of a particular religion should not hold office in a sporting club is a matter of concern for everyone in this state and in this society. It is an intervention which undermines the freedom of expression and conscience of everyone.
His politically motivated religious intolerance is a disturbing step towards a religiously motivated intolerance, whether directed against people who have religious beliefs or those who (like me) are rather skeptical of such beliefs.
Lost For Words! 