Anidav posted:

Is there regulation against pseudoscience products or does the government simply not care because it doesn't harm anyone? Like there's nothing stopping me from putting bath custard on shelves?

Anidav posted:

quote:

IPA REVIEW ARTICLE

| John Roskam, James Paterson and Chris Berg
If Tony Abbott wants to leave a lasting impact - and secure his place in history - he needs to take his inspiration from Australia's most left-wing prime minister.

No prime minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam. The key is that he did it in less than three years. In a flurry of frantic activity, Whitlam established universal healthcare, effectively nationalised higher education with free tuition, and massively increased public sector salaries. He more than doubled the size of cabinet from 12 ministers to 27.

He enacted an ambitious cultural agenda that continues to shape Australia to this day. In just three years, Australia was given a new national anthem, ditched the British honours system, and abolished the death penalty and national service. He was the first Australian prime minister to visit communist China and he granted independence to Papua New Guinea. Whitlam also passed the Racial Discrimination Act. He introduced no-fault divorce.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy has been the increase in the size of government he bequeathed to Australia. When Whitlam took office in 1972, government spending as a percentage of GDP was just 19 per cent. When he left office it had soared to almost 24 per cent.

Virtually none of Whitlam's signature reforms were repealed by the Fraser government. The size of the federal government never fell back to what it was before Whitlam. Medicare remains. The Racial Discrimination Act - rightly described by the Liberal Senator Ivor Greenwood in 1975 as ‘repugnant to the rule of law and to freedom of speech' - remains.

It wasn't as if this was because they were uncontroversial. The Liberal opposition bitterly fought many of Whitlam's proposals. And it wasn't as if the Fraser government lacked a mandate or a majority to repeal them. After the 1975 election, in which he earned a 7.4 per cent two-party preferred swing, Fraser held 91 seats out of 127 in the House of Representatives and a Senate majority.

When Mark Steyn visited Australia recently he described political culture as a pendulum. Left-wing governments swing the pendulum to the left. Right of centre governments swing the pendulum to the right. But left-wing governments do so with greater force. The pendulum always pushes further left.

And the public's bias towards the status quo has a habit of making even the most radical policy (like Medicare, or restrictions on freedom of speech) seem normal over time. Despite the many obvious problems of socialised health care, no government now would challenge the foundations of Medicare as the Coalition did before it was implemented.

Every single opinion poll says that Tony Abbott will be Australia's next prime minister. He might not even have to wait until the current term of parliament expires in late 2013. The Gillard government threatens to collapse at any moment. Abbott could well be in the Lodge before Christmas this year.

Abbott could also have a Fraser-esque majority after the next election. Even if he doesn't control the Senate, the new prime minister is likely to have an intimidating mandate from the Australian people. The conditions will suit a reformer: although Australia's economy has proven remarkably resilient, global events demonstrate how fragile it is. The global financial crisis, far from proving to be a crisis of capitalism, has instead demonstrated the limits of the state. Europe's bloated and debt-ridden governments provide ample evidence of the dangers of big government.

Australia's ageing population means the generous welfare safety net provided to current generations will be simply unsustainable in the future. As the Intergenerational Report produced by the federal Treasury shows, there were 7.5 workers in the economy for every non-worker aged over 65 in 1970. In 2010 that figure was 5. In 2050 it will be 2.7. Government spending that might have made sense in 1970 would cripple the economy in 2050. Change is inevitable.

But if Abbott is going to lead that change he only has a tiny window of opportunity to do so. If he hasn't changed Australia in his first year as prime minister, he probably never will.

Why just one year? Whitlam's vigour in government came as a shock to Australian politics. The Coalition was adjusting to the opposition benches. Outside of parliament, the potential opponents of Whitlam reforms had yet to get organised. The general goodwill voters offer new governments gives more than enough cover for radical action. But that cover is only temporary. The support of voters drains. Oppositions organise. Scandals accumulate. The clear air for major reform becomes smoggy.

Worse, governments acclimatise to being in government. A government is full of energy in its first year. By the second year, even very promising ministers can get lazy. The business of government overtakes. MPs start thinking of the next election. But for the Coalition, the purpose of winning office cannot be merely to attain the status of being ‘in government'. It must be to make Australians freer and more prosperous. From his social democratic perspective, Whitlam understood this point well. Labor in the 1970s knew that it wanted to reshape the country and it began doing so immediately.

The time pressure on a new government - if it is to successfully implant its vision - is immense. The vast Commonwealth bureaucracies and the polished and politically-savvy senior public servants have their own agendas, their own list of priorities, and the skill to ensure those priorities become their ministers' priorities. The recent experience of the state Coalition governments is instructive. Fresh-faced ministers who do not have a fixed idea of what they want to do with their new power are invariably captured by their departments.

Take, for instance, the Gillard government's National Curriculum. Opposing this policy ought to be a matter of faith for state Liberals. The National Curriculum centralises education power in Canberra, and will push a distinctly left-wing view of the world onto all Australian students. But it has been met with acceptance - even support - by the Coalition's state education ministers. This is because a single National Curriculum has been an article of faith within the education bureaucracy for decades; an obsession of education unions and academics, who want education to ‘shape' Australia's future. (No prize for guessing what that shape might look like.) A small-target election strategy has the unfortunate side-effect of allowing ministerial aspirants to avoid thinking too deeply about major areas in their portfolio. So when, in the first week as minister, they are presented with a list of policy priorities by their department, it is easier to accept what the bureaucracy considers important, rather than what is right. The only way to avoid such departmental capture is to have a clear idea of what to do with government once you have it.

Only radical change that shifts the entire political spectrum, like Gough Whitlam did, has any chance of effecting lasting change. Of course, you don't have to be from the left of politics to leave lasting change on the political spectrum.

Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan proved conservatives can leave a paradigm-shifting legacy. Though Thatcher's own party strayed from her strongly free-market philosophy, one of the major reasons the British Labour Party finally removed socialism from their party platform under Tony Blair was because of Margaret Thatcher.

Ronald Reagan not only presided over pro-market deregulation and tax cuts during eight years in the White House, but also provided the ideological fuel for the 1994 Republican revolution in the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, which enacted far-reaching welfare reform.

Here we provide a list of 75 policies that would make Australia richer and more free. It's a deliberately radical list. There's no way Tony Abbott could implement all of them, or even a majority. But he doesn't have to implement them all to dramatically change Australia. If he was able to implement just a handful of these recommendations, Abbott would be a transformative figure in Australian political history. He would do more to shift the political spectrum than any prime minister since Whitlam.

We do not mean for this list to be exhaustive, and in many ways no list could do justice to the challenges the Abbott government would face. Whitlam changed the political culture. We are still feeling the consequences of that change today. So the policies we suggest adopting, the bureaucracies we suggest abolishing, the laws we suggest revoking should be seen as symptoms, rather than the source, of the problem.

Conservative governments have a very narrow idea of what the ‘culture wars' consists of. The culture of government that threatens our liberty is not just ensconced in the ABC studios, or among a group of well-connected and publicly funded academics. ABC bias is not the only problem. It is the spiralling expansion of bureaucracies and regulators that is the real problem.

We should be more concerned about the Australian National Preventive Health Agency - a new Commonwealth bureaucracy dedicated to lobbying other arms of government to introduce Nanny State measures - than about bias at the ABC. We should be more concerned about the cottage industry of consultancies and grants handed out by the public service to environmental groups. We should be more concerned that senior public servants shape policy more than elected politicians do. And conservative governments should be more concerned than they are at the growth of the state's interest in every aspect of society.

If he wins government, Abbott faces a clear choice. He could simply overturn one or two symbolic Gillard-era policies like the carbon tax, and govern moderately. He would not offend any interest groups. In doing so, he'd probably secure a couple of terms in office for himself and the Liberal Party. But would this be a successful government? We don't believe so. The remorseless drift to bigger government and less freedom would not halt, and it would resume with vigour when the Coalition eventually loses office. We hope he grasps the opportunity to fundamentally reshape the political culture and stem the assault on individual liberty.

1 Repeal the carbon tax, and don't replace it. It will be one thing to remove the burden of the carbon tax from the Australian economy. But if it is just replaced by another costly scheme, most of the benefits will be undone.

2 Abolish the Department of Climate Change

3 Abolish the Clean Energy Fund

4 Repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act

5 Abandon Australia's bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council

6 Repeal the renewable energy target

7 Return income taxing powers to the states

8 Abolish the Commonwealth Grants Commission

9 Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

10 Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol

11 Introduce fee competition to Australian universities

12 Repeal the National Curriculum

13 Introduce competing private secondary school curriculums

14 Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)

15 Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be 'balanced'

16 Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law

17 End local content requirements for Australian television stations

18 Eliminate family tax benefits

19 Abandon the paid parental leave scheme

20 Means-test Medicare

21 End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education

22 Introduce voluntary voting

23 End mandatory disclosures on political donations

24 End media blackout in final days of election campaigns

25 End public funding to political parties

26 Remove anti-dumping laws

27 Eliminate media ownership restrictions

28 Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board

29 Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency

30 Cease subsidising the car industry

31 Formalise a one-in, one-out approach to regulatory reduction

32 Rule out federal funding for 2018 Commonwealth Games

33 Deregulate the parallel importation of books

34 End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws

35 Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP

36 Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit

37 Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database

38 Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food

39 Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities

40 Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools

41 Repeal the alcopops tax

42 Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including:
a) Lower personal income tax for residents
b) Significantly expanded 457 Visa programs for workers
c) Encourage the construction of dams

43 Repeal the mining tax

44 Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states

45 Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold

46 Cut company tax to an internationally competitive rate of 25 per cent

47 Cease funding the Australia Network

48 Privatise Australia Post

49 Privatise Medibank

50 Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function

51 Privatise SBS

52 Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784

53 Repeal the Fair Work Act

54 Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them

55 Encourage independent contracting by overturning new regulations designed to punish contractors

56 Abolish the Baby Bonus

57 Abolish the First Home Owners' Grant

58 Allow the Northern Territory to become a state

59 Halve the size of the Coalition front bench from 32 to 16

60 Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade

61 Slash top public servant salaries to much lower international standards, like in the United States

62 End all public subsidies to sport and the arts

63 Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport

64 End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering

65 Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification

66 Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship

67 Means test tertiary student loans

68 Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement

69 Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built

70 End all government funded Nanny State advertising

71 Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling

72 Privatise the CSIRO

73 Defund Harmony Day

74 Close the Office for Youth

75 Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme

quote:

FWC is an independent body with the power and authority to regulate and enforce provisions relating to minimum wages and employment conditions, enterprise bargaining, industrial action, dispute resolution, and termination of employment

Pred1ct posted:

What the hell, there are NSW Liberals campaigning in Leichhardt today. This is for the seat of Balmain, an electorate that is so left it has a Green as its current representative.

To be fair though on the poster their candidate looks no more than 5 years old so they can't be taking it seriously.

ewe2 posted:

A nice twitter person made a screenshot of the full list of agencies the government will chop, it could be your workplace:



edit: it's 251 agencies not 175 and you can get the full pdf here

Lid posted:

Alkaline water is a really dumb one as it began because of its use in high end fine dining restaurants in food, most famously Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Fennan Adria's elBulli, and the only reason why was because at their level of scientific cooking alkaline water has the lowest pH and impurities so as not to affect the flavour of the other ingredients with things like minerals or metals. It was solely a flavour reason. Of course that now means people rebranded it to be a superfood when all it does is make your food taste better. Scientific cooking, meet pseudoscience health chemistry.

Sanguine posted:

I think they're half to blame, or maybe it's community misconception. If your water is alkaline it most certainly has impurities, pure water is, by deffiniton, neutral (neither alkaline or acidic). Practically speaking pure water will tend to be mildly acidic due to atmospheric CO2 mixing with it, which forms carbonic acid and lowers the pH.

If they have certain compounds in their cooking that are masked by acidic water then they may want to add something to the water to keep it alkaline, but then they are adding impurities for a specific reason. Those impurities are likely metal salts. Also the buffering capacity (ability to change pH) of most drinking water is pretty mild, especially fresh purified water, so unless it is some next level flavour targetting poo poo you're having a tug. I think there's a fair amount of 'this sounds so scientific' going on, especially given people having trouble telling the difference between pasturised and UHT milk in blind tests.

In the long run there's nothing wrong with alkaline water, providing it is very mildly alkaline. It's perfectly true that a cup of drain cleaner in a glass of tap water is 'alkaline water'. Charging hundreds, or thousands, of dollars for a water alkaliser and claiming health benefits? Welllllll... Public figures should be more cautious about the poo poo they push because it can look a bit silly. Still, hardly their fault snake oil salesmen exist.

ABC posted:

'Victorian electricity users to pay increased charges for smart meter cost blow-out'

Anidav posted:

Does unemployment ever make its way into neocon economics or are we invisible?

Anidav posted:

Was the list literally penned by demonic forces?

Stoca Zola posted:

Recently I had someone ring up for a "survey" regarding solar power, which was answered by my partner. A week later the same company rang up and used the information gleaned from the survey to pressure me into finalising a time for the "appointment that my partner had already agreed to" and all the details they had made it sound fairly convincing. I was mad because my partner hadn't mentioned anything to me about it, and went looking for info online so that I wouldn't be dragged into this appointment blind. Turns out my partner hadn't actually agreed to anything at all, and in trying to find information I managed to attract 2 or 3 predatory solar salespeople trying to apply further pressure "Buy now! We'll help you finance it! They could get rid of the feed-in tariff at any time! They could change the rates and you could lose out! You don't need permission from your partner for us to come and give you some information!" and so on.

I came across all kinds of horrible reviews for various solar installers where they do things like swap out the brand or type of panel or inverter for a cheaper one, hoping that clients won't notice. It just seems like any time there is any government scheme with subsidies or rebates, all the worst dodgey predatory sales sharks appear and make it very hard to trust any information or find trustworthy installers.

I used to be against rooftop solar power; photovoltaic isn't very efficient and I have a feeling that the manufacturing process and collecting the required materials to make solar cells could be making a big mess somewhere else in the world. I don't think power generation should be the responsibility of the individual, it should be produced large scale for efficiency and for ease of maintenance. I prefer wind or solar thermal, however I was starting to warm up to the idea of getting panels on the roof and this experience has really soured me on it all over again.

Is it like this everywhere?

CrazyTolradi posted:

I am not loving shocked these people are anti-medicine, and are likely anti-vax as well. "If it's natural, it can't be bad for us right?!?!?!". While it's arguable the taste between raw milk and pastuerised milk might not be the same, as far as nutritional content goes they're the same. Infact, as an adult, milk isn't really that great for you in a nutritional sense anyway. Sure it's nice, but it's not really what you need. It's not like humans evolved to constantly suckle from a loving cow.

Anidav posted:

Does unemployment ever make its way into neocon economics or are we invisible?

Sanguine posted:

I think they're half to blame, or maybe it's community misconception. If your water is alkaline it most certainly has impurities, pure water is, by deffiniton, neutral (neither alkaline or acidic). Practically speaking pure water will tend to be mildly acidic due to atmospheric CO2 mixing with it, which forms carbonic acid and lowers the pH.

Quantum Mechanic posted:

The ALP won Fisher by 23 votes and, assuming it withstands a recount, will now have a clear majority in the SA Lower House.

T-1000 posted:

"Pure, neutral water has an acid skin...the pH of pure water falls from the perfectly neutral value of 7 within the liquid to just 4.8 or less - about as acidic as beer - where water meets air at the surface."

Tommofork posted:

It was penned by people who worship Ayn Rand and believe themselves to be Randian Supermen.

So yeah same thing.

Quantum Mechanic posted:

The ALP won Fisher by 23 votes and, assuming it withstands a recount, will now have a clear majority in the SA Lower House.

Sanguine posted:

Yeah, that's the influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Over time the acidity diffuse throughout body of water, assuming no other reactions or mixing. Immediately poured, straight from an ultra pure water system, there's no skin - it takes a little time to occur and will decrease to pH 4 - 5 over time. Arguably the act of pouring means you have a largely uniform slightly-sub-7 pH immediately, but now we're talking about measuring foresekin wear on a bee's dick.

Note 4.8 is still fairly mild - coke is 2.8ish. Both will still eat your teeth given time, just coke needs a lot less.

quote:

Whereas H2O molecules typically form four hydrogen bonds to their neighbours, H3O+ can only form three. The three hydrogens can bind to other water molecules, but the oxygen atom, where most of the positive charge resides, can't any longer act as a good 'acceptor' for hydrogen bonds.

So, Voth's team said, hydronium acts somewhat like an amphiphile - a molecule with a water-soluble part and a hydrophobic part, like a soap molecule. The ions gather at the air-water interface with the hydrogen atoms pointing downwards to make hydrogen bonds and the oxygen pointing up out of the liquid.

Nibbles! posted:

How do people argue that the ACCC is a bad thing?

IPA posted:

There's two main duties the ACCC undertakes: things the government has no role in whatsoever and things that can be left to state governments. On the very rare occasions when there is a genuine issue of competition policy, the matter can be decided by the Treasury department or directly by parliament.