What is with bank economists?

Political games with soldiers. It was nice of Julia Gillard to invite Tony Abbott to accompany her to visit Australian troops in Afghanistan. It was not nice that she decided to use the fact that he declined the invitation to try and score a cheap political point.

What is with bank economists? John Peters, a senior economist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, was quoted this morning saying he thought consumers might not remain so cautious given unemployment was low, incomes were rising and household wealth had recovered from the global financial crisis.

That was his judgment on figures from the Australian Industry Group (AiG) and Commonwealth Bank performance of services index showing activity in Australia’s service sector contracted for a fifth straight month in September as firms cut back employment in the face of subdued consumer demand. The (PSI) fell 1.9 points to 45.6 in September, the lowest since July last year and further below the 50.0 threshold between growth and contraction.

Mr Peters seems to be very much in the camp of those who believe pain is good.

Certainly not boom time. Back in the real world you would find it hard to convince ordinary Australians that the country is back in some kind of economic boom time. The retail sales figures or August released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this morning show that.

In current prices, the trend estimate for Australian turnover rose 0.5% in August 2010 following a rise of 0.5% in July 2010 and a rise of 0.5% in June 2010. The seasonally adjusted estimate for Australian turnover rose 0.3% in August 2010 following a rise of 0.7% in July 2010 and a rise of 0.4% in June 2010.

The bookie in charge. How appropriate that with Australia gambling on a minority government that we have a bookie in charge. The most revealing insight from last night’s Four Corners program:

SARAH FERGUSON: It’s three days since the election. MP Tony Windsor is on his way to Canberra after overnighting at a modest pub in East Sydney. Today will be his first meeting with the other independents since polling day.
TONY WINDSOR (travelling in car): My role is really about just keeping people calm and not only the people that are in, that are in the card game at the moment, but people outside that are petrified in this situation.
SARAH FERGUSON: You say this is like a card game, are you a good card player?
TONY WINDSOR: Well I used to be at school yeah, I was also a bookmaker at school.
SARAH FERGUSON: So what are the odds?
TONY WINDSOR: Um, the odds of success? Ah I’d say ah three to one on.

I find myself liking the bloke more and more!

A journalist of the old school. The way things were. An extract from a biography of the British newspaper gossip columnist Nigel Dempster:

And another reflection on the past. Those blogging “outers” of today would have had a field day when I was a lad starting out in journalism. Back then in the 1950s virtually every one wrote anonymously. Racing writers might be known as Carbine and as a special form of recognition political writers might have a piece containing a comment or two appear under the by-line “By our political correspondent.”

I well remember the first story of mine that carried my name. It was at the bottom — that’s right — the bottom, not the top —of a weekly column I wrote for the Tasmanian Advocate that appeared a couple of weeks before a state election. The courageous editor added the words “responsibility for p0litical comment in this article is taken by Richard Farmer of …”

The big difference in those days was that most of the contents of a newspaper were not full of the opinions of the writer but an attempt to explain what happened when, where and how.