• Business spending goes off a cliff

It's not even three weeks old, but after a happy birth, Joe Hockey's second budget has been sent to the sick bay by the latest private fixed capital expenditure data.

Various budget clinicians are shaking their heads, some even daring to offer a gratuitous R-word diagnosis, albeit couched more softly and somewhat oddly as "recessionary".

Maybe that's a reference to a recessional – the hymn sung on the way out of church.

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In any event, Mr Hockey is likely to be doing lots of praying over his budget, begging for a miracle of the loaves and tradies, asking for the Reserve Bank to be wrong and his Treasury forecasts to be right.

That's what the budget's welfare depends on, along with the welfare of the Treasurer and Prime Minister.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/joe-hockey-waiting-on-a-tradie-miracle-20150529-ghcus1.html

 

Australia faces more than decade of uninterrupted deficits according to an updated assessment by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office that shows Senate intransigence will carve a $100 billion black hole out of revenue between now and 2025-26.

Savings not realised as a result of parliamentary gridlock suggest the budget prediction of a near fiscal balance by 2018-19 is overly optimistic because it is based on budget repair initiatives that have not been legislated and, in many cases, are unlikely to ever pass the Parliament.

The PBO's assessment lists out the proposals such as welfare cuts and major higher education reforms already factored into the current budget projections as savings but which are not yet approved, in a table entitled "unlegislated measures carried forward from the 2014-15 budget".

The finding means Treasurer Joe Hockey's lower-than-expected deficit estimate of $35.1 billion for the coming financial year may already be out of date. Without a legislative breakthrough, and leaving aside other variables such as a further decline in revenue from iron ore, company tax, and personal taxes, that 2015-16 deficit jumps from the $35.1 billion stated just a fortnight ago to $38.3 billion thanks to the cumulative impact of un-passed savings measures over the next 13 months.

And the following year's deficit of $25.8 billion blows out to $30.6 billion, assuming no movement.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/deficit-decade-tony-abbotts-100-billion-black-hole-20150529-ghckxn.html

 

 

While wilful deception must necessarily remain a kind of unforgivable sin within our political life - precisely because of the grievous damage it does to our very capacity to trust - perhaps we need to become more tolerant, more forgiving, of political hypocrisy. As Runciman insists, what is important is to keep hypocrisy and conviction in a precarious sort of tension: "The real danger arises if sincerity never has to answer for itself in the face of a crabbed and hypocritical insistence on the evidence, just as it would be dangerous if reticent and secretive politicians never had to confront publicly the question of what they really believe."

Without such a tension - and without a kind of prevenient preparedness to trust, and to forgive, on the part of political commentators and public alike - politicians will remain vulnerable to concealment, self-deception and vainglorious ambition; the chattering class will continue to wallow in their own cynical self-assurance; and the best and most principled among us will remain reticent to enter to[sic] moral minefield of public life.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/05/15/4236251.htm

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What a lot of twaddle-pop from a religious man trying to protect his side of politics... Unforgivable sin that we have to forgive and accept? This annoying little (he could be 6-foot-four for all I know but his intellectual wingspan is tiny) man, Scott Stephens, the ABC's Religion and Ethics Editor, and co-host (with Waleed Aly) of The Minefield on RN, gives us the very good reasons to hate and flagellate ourselves. This is intellectual turpitude and philosophical sewerpipe on the way to a septic tank, blocked by the roots of a big weedy tree. 

Runciman (if we are talking about the same Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman) was an expert on the middle ages... I bloody hope we're not going back there. So, if I understand well, according to Stephens we should accept Joe's crap as a fecal transplant... Hell no. 

 

 

 

I can be accuse of attacking the "man" (or woman) rather than the ball. My toons seem to be vicious to persons rather than to ideas or quirky circumstances. So they are. But people are ideas. People are actions and deeds. 
Or that I may be lacking subtlety... Subtlety would be the last thing on my mind. 
Once the "European" printing press was invented with moveable type by Gutenberg, in the good old tradition of early authors fighting each others, poets denouncing each others' quatrains, and then that chef's anger in the kitchen, Ramsay's, I reserve the right to do so as well — with good cleansing intentions, I hope. I can be wrong of course, but I can discuss this on a one to one basis over a bottle of shiraz.
People, that is, persons, are not like the anopheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria. Most people don't carry nasty or stupid ideas accidentally, although some do or swallow rubbish without paying attention. 
Most intelligent people choose their ideas carefully. Me included. Often the choice of ideas is limited and my aim here is to try to broaden this choice. So people and ideas are integral to the rusty destroyer to be destroyed in the middle of the sea of mediocre idiocy.
A pig with lipstick is still a pig. The deception is not worth the trouble. For the female of the species (human), hiding blemishes and using rimmel on false eyelashes is not a full-on deception but an accepted part of the process of engaging. We full-on blokes in our tartan flannel shirts or suits-n'-ties can reject or accept this knowingly, because we have been educated to this process of beautification of the female face. But not the pig, as intelligent the beast could be.
I will often be aggressive. Positively aggressive. I learned too many bloody things in sharp detail that I cannot remember, from nuclear physics and engineering to natural sciences, way before the internet was invented, to pussyfoot with a pen in my hand. I knew of genes back then in the 1950s, not as much as we know now of course but this knowledge was at the pointy end of research. 
I know my bible. Well, not mine, I mean the Christian bible, which is a great source of inspiration for deluded wrongness contained within. I must say that during the Sunday school and scripture classes the priests had given up on the independent truants we were and screened Laurel and Hardy movies. I still persevere against the scriptural deception. One needs to know one's enemy's source of weaponry, especially when they DON'T KNOW IT thoroughly THEMSELVES... and quote it with choosy bits only.
But I cannot hold an argument in a verbal sense, to a crowd or a party. Often people will ask me to shut up because I take too long to go to the point... I am hopeless at debate or talk back radio. There is too much information to give out and I cannot defend a particular complex position against a good spruiker who has a witty one-liner, a line that is glib and wrong, but sums up my defeat... As well my voice is crap, having been decimated by a bad bout of whooping cough when I was a toddler.
I suspect the great George Bernard Shaw, if my memory is correct, might have got a similar problem with public debate. Many of his "interviews" were done by questions and answers on paper. Not that I am comparing myself to GBS. 
Though George Bernard Shaw was somewhat bombastic as the threads of his days allowed, he also had a much better way to sharply mould his syntax and ideas. But there was less information then. These days we swim against a torrent of garbage. I must say I learn to swim in the sewers of Europe thus I am good against the flotsam. The water was putrid, there was no local pool, except a big seemingly bottomless long black hole between a reformed church and the meat market. I am thus privileged, unlike the people I know who are in wheelchairs or have motor neurone problems. I can swim well. Everyone should learn to swim or float at least. I could hold my breath under water for more than two minutes by rebreathing air in mouth. Thus I could swim two lengths of that 60 metre long pool underwater. By then my lungs would explode.
George Bernard Shaw knew how to piss people off. He was also the master of the one liner.

To many middle-aged people he remained the disturber of their peace; the man whose works had brought about the breakdown of social barriers, the desire of women to be treated as people, industrial unrest and a lack of the long, hot summers they used to have...
Says Mr Frank Muir
Thank you for the subtle dig, Mr Muir... Of course one knows that summer in England is rarely long and hot, but one could remember a few hots days or two...

Others, such as Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, saw red:
George Bernard Shaw, most poisonous of all the poisonous haters of England; despiser, distorter and denier of the plain truths whereby men live... Flippertygibbet pope of chaos; portent and epitome of this generation's moral and spiritual order... 

Let say here it would be impossible for me to stay quiet, meaning not express opinions on the flying keyboard, when some ratbags are stealing the limelight with what I see is crap.
In the end, life is about surviving and of managing ego, ours and others, with a nice epitaph at the end. The epitaph is not compulsory. 
Nothing wrong with shooting from the hip, relatively. For example, Australia "dissapointed" with Blatter win, is a headline that does not show the complexity of the situation. Personally I don't care if "Blatter wins or not". But I am not part of this "disappointed" Australia. What matters here is the subtext in which the West is trying to heap more crap on Russia and take the 2018 Soccer World Cup from it... Blatter may possibly be the only one to stop that. 


I could be wrong. In the end, in regard to wet lettuce and opinions:
Lettyse doth extynct veneryous [sexual] actes.
Andrew Boorde, (a 16th century defrocked bishop of Chichester who was sent to prison for keeping three prostitutes in his chambers at Winchester)...

And the older I get, the more radical I become... Scott Stephens' demand of accepting political hypocrisy did send me nuts... or mad (see comment above this one).

 

 

The New Zealand government reported an unexpected operating surplus in the 10 months through April as the Crown's tax coffers were bolstered by a bigger inflow from Portfolio Investment Entity tax and strong consumer spending.

The operating balance before gains and losses (Obegal) was a surplus of $448 million in the 10 months ended April 30, compared to the forecast deficit of $555 million in the budget last month, and a turnaround from the year-earlier deficit of $1.37 billion. Tax revenue rose 8.9 percent to $55.05 billion from the same period in 2014, and was $437 million ahead of forecast, with unexpected gains in PIE tax and the goods and services tax.

"With April being the last significant month for PIE tax in this financial year, there is potential for this to be a permanent favourable variance from forecast at 30 June," chief government accountant Paul Helm said in a statement. "Above-forecast GST suggests higher-than-forecast domestic spending as indicated by strong March quarter retail sales.

read more: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11462241

 

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