You know, I was originally going with some friends for lunch today at Arundel Farm Winery somewhere on the far side of Keillor, where the flight path is the only clue that you’re not out in the country somewhere.
My friends are doing lunch as I write. As for me, I am isolating thanks to having finally caught Covid. I won’t be going anywhere before Monday night.
To make it worse, TISM is doing a gig in the city Saturday afternoon and I won’t have a chance to see them.
Hopefully the TISM reunion lasts a few more weeks – they are in their early 60s now and must be looking to top up their superannuation with this series of surprise gigs.
My mother has very sensible instincts. After two decades or so of exposure, as a Maribyrnong ratepayer, to the municipal intrigues of the Cumming family, local landowners and perennial council candidates, she is very cynical about Catherine Cumming.
After all, as a long time councillor and erstwhile mayor of the City of Maribyrnong, ‘Doctor’ Cumming does not seem to have done much good in reducing council rates, which seem disproportionately high compared to other local government areas in Melbourne.
The last straw for my mother was when ‘Doctor’ Cumming got elected at the 2018 election on the Deryn Hinch Justice Party ticket (my mother loves Hinch) and then resigned from that party just after the poll was declared.
That action really showed a deep seated commitment to the principles and policies which Hinch had been espousing (whether or not you find him dogmatic or annoying, Hinch is sincere and courageous, which is more than one can say for many other political figures).
[I recall that someone had taken a red Texta to a corflute poster of Cumming on the corner of Gordon Street and Ballarat Road during that election campaign and transformed her to resemble a vampire. Rather apt perhaps.]
Ever since then, my mother has a tendency to put any candidate named Catherine last on the ballot paper in any election, in case that that it might be Catherine Cumming.
I cannot fault her reasoning.
In the middle of last year, I commented on the sudden appearance of a Catherine Cumming MP fridge magnet in my letter box as a sign that she was starting to think about reelection.
Until that point, her main claim to fame in her parliamentary career was providing employment to various of her family and friends.
Since then, to her credit, she has usually voted against the various emergency powers over-reach bills which Dictator Dan has put before the upper house. This gives her slightly more sympathy in my book than those very irresponsible and lazy cross benchers from the Animal Justice Party, the Reason Party and the Transport Matters Party, who were quite happy to abandon their duty as legislative councillors to place strict limits on the length and extent of such powers.
Our Catherine is not really a party girl though. She was recently unsuccessful in getting her own ‘Independence Party’ registered. However, when nominations closed, we find her running for the ‘Angry Victorians Party’, a local franchise for the recently formed ‘Australian Values Party’.
Having a low profile as she has, aside from being resented by Deryn Hinch and Maribyrnong ratepayers alike, ‘Doctor’ Cumming took a stand on the weekend at some rally of the Angry Victorians. She made some very silly comments about Dan Andrews needing to disappear in ‘red mist’ – an allusion to the ‘pink mist’ of a shot to the head.
I dislike Dan Andrews as much as most sane people do, but he does not deserve thinly veiled threats of extreme violence like that. And as a parent, ‘Doctor’ Cumming should see what sort of impact such rants would have on Andrews’ children.
Of course, the Angry Victorians and others at the rally would have lapped it all up.
I am a lot more skeptical than that. ‘Doctor’ Cumming is mostly interested in maintaining her marginal political career. Having started it by exploiting the trust of Maribyrnong ratepayers and then Deryn Hinch, neither of whom have done their due diligence, she then failed to set up her own party (which shows a lack of organisational skills and charisma given one of her fellow local MLCs, once expelled from the ALP, had no problems in getting her own new vehicle set up despite her own colourlessness), and has now grabbed a ride on the Angry Victorian Party.
Personally, I think that ‘Doctor’ Cumming is about as ‘Angry’ as she is a ‘Doctor’ – she has a B.AppSci in alternative medicine, which is a degree of similar length to what a nurse studies.
I would have put her last on my ballot the way that my mother did, except that I think that the Reason Party, Animal Justice, and Transport Matters all revolt me slightly more.
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.
