Richard Farmer’s chunky bits

A sensible union decision. There is, as the conventional wisdom has it, no point throwing good money after bad. Hence the understandable decision of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) to devote its electoral fighting fund to helping the Senate campaign of the Greens rather than donating to the ALP.

The NTEU voted yesterday to spend $1 million on its own campaign ahead of the September election to support the Greens in maintaining the balance of power in the Senate. “This is a watershed decision for our union,” said national President Jennie Rea in confirming what my Crikey colleague Andrew Crook predicted a week or so back.

Other trade unions are surely contemplating spending their money in the same way. With Labor only a very outside chance of remaining in government, trying to stop the Coalition and Coalition-leaning independents and minor parties getting a Senate majority should now be the main game for the union movement.

The polling doom and gloom continues. A variation on the internal party polling this morning that a political journalist turns to when bereft of a poll of his own. The Australian brings us some “confidential” ACTU polling showing results the paper describes leading union officials as calling “diabolical” and “disastrous” for Julia Gillard. Goodness knows what it actually means but it’s hard to interpret it as good news for Labor.

A popular scapegoat. I’m sure there would be more votes in this than in Gonski:

A UK Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, set up by Chancellor George Osborne last year after various scandals involving the industry, reported that senior bankers guilty of reckless misconduct should be jailed. The BBC reports that the Treasury has welcomed the report, calling it “a very impressive piece of work” and promising to provide a response before the summer recess.

“Where legislation is needed, we have said we will support it, and the banking bill currently before Parliament can be amended to ensure they are quickly enacted,” a spokesman added.

Let us go loopy loo. The signature of US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew before his appointment earlier this year:

That will never do for the banknotes, said President Barack Obama. You’d better change to loopy lah. So now:

My tweet of the morning.

News and views noted along the way.

• Technology that traced Osama bin Laden now used to extend life of cakes
• Biggest protests in 20 years sweep Brazil — “As many as 200,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Brazil’s biggest cities on Monday in a swelling wave of protest tapping into widespread anger at poor public services …”
• Obama’s soft totalitarianism: Europe must protect itself from America — “Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that assumption into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.”
• 7 important examples of how markets can fail
• The gift of doubt: Albert O. Hirschman and the power of failure — “Is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition for it? The economist Albert O. Hirschman, who died last December, loved paradoxes like this. He was a ‘planner,’ the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to …”
• High spirits — Who drinks most vodka, gin, whisky and rum?