Richard Farmer’s chunky bits

Little difference in the real world of politics. A seat or two in the lower house is of no real consequence when it comes to the influence the Greens will have on Victorian politics after this month’s election. If anything the decision of the state Liberals to follow the advice of John Howard and deny the Greens their preferences will just strengthen the attractiveness of the Greens as the party to vote for in the Upper House. And it is there, in the multi-member electorates, that the Greens will do well enough to have a major influence on what things actually become law whoever wins.

The growth of the Green vote in the Victorian state sphere has already been strong as actual figures from the 2002 and 2006 elections and the November figures from Newspoll show.

The gain appears to have been largely at Labor’s expense and I expect that the trend has not yet stopped.

Signs of distinction. An appearance by George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston is injecting some fresh faces into the Victorian election campaign. The National Disability Services is using the Hollywood stars on posters calling for all parties to support increased funding for disability services. I’m sure there is no other point to the choices other than to make the message odd enough so that people like me publicise it.

Well, I guess it has worked, hasn’t it?

Personally my favourite poster of the campaign has to be the one that The Sunday Age featured yesterday:

It might not be slick but there’s no doubting the truth of the message.

A jittery financial world. More depressing reading this morning on the dismal science of economics. Some extracts:

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winning economist:

The basic situation in today’s world isn’t mysterious: we’re in the midst of a deleveraging crisis, in which those who ran up large debts during the Great Moderation are being forced to pay them down, rapidly. The trouble with this situation is that someone has to make up for the decline in debtors’ spending, or the world will be pushed into a deflationary slump. … almost the whole world has turned against doing anything that might actually help. Fiscal policy has been killed by the Pain Caucus; and now they’re coming for monetary policy. China’s predatory policies are hurting everyone else … The sad thing is that this is entirely gratuitous. With clear thinking and a little political courage, we could have ended the slump by now. Instead, however, it seems likely that the whole advanced world — not just the United States — is headed for years and years of stagnation and mass unemployment.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Daily Telegraph:

Unless the ECB takes fast and dramatic action, it risks destroying the currency it is paid to manage, and allowing a political catastrophe to unfold in Europe. If mishandled, Ireland could all too easily become a sovereign version of Credit Anstalt – the Austrian bank that brought down the central European financial system in 1931, sent tremors through London and New York, and set off the second deeper phase of the Great Depression, the phase when politics turned ugly. …

The eurozone’s fiscal fund (European Financial Stability Facility) is fatally flawed. Like Alpinistas roped together, an ever-reduced core of solvent states are supposed to carry the weight on an ever-widening group of insolvent states dangling beneath them. This lacks political credibility and may be tested to destruction if – as seems likely – Ireland is forced to ask for help. At which moment the chain-reaction begins in earnest, starting with Iberia. …

It is clear by now that IMF-style austerity and debt-deflation is not a workable policy for the high-debt states of peripheral Europe, since it cannot be offset by the IMF cure of devaluation. The collapse of tax revenues has caused fiscal deficits to remain stubbornly high. The real debt burden has risen further. The ECB is the last line of defence. It can halt the immediate Irish crisis whenever it wishes by buying Irish bonds. Yet instead of pulling out all the stops to save monetary union, the bank is winding down its emergency operations and draining liquidity. It is repeating the policy error it made by raising rates into the teeth of the crisis in July 2008.

A European diplomat speaking to the International Herald Tribune about Ireland’s problems on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue:

There is a risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even a denial is seen as some sort of affirmation that there is something to deny.

Stopping or attracting militant Muslims? The Danish Peoples Party has come up with a novel suggestion to scare away fundamentalist Muslims from becoming immigrants. The party’s spokesman Peter Skaarup wants a new introductory film about Denmark for prospective immigrants to include pictures of bare female bre-sts.

“There are of course a lot of other things that show what it is to be Danish, and I’m sure that the film-maker has found them. But I reckon that if you can’t stand seeing a couple of Danish bre-sts, you probably won’t come here,” Skaarup tells Berlingske Tidende.

The Conservative Party’s Integration Spokesman Naser Khader has a different view. Mr Khader, co-founder of an association of globally known Islam critics who work to promote freedom of speech and inspire moderate Muslims worldwide, believes that pictures of t-pless girls on a Danish beach would hardly scare extremists away from applying to stay in Denmark.

“Bare bre-sts are not a protection against fundamentalism” Khader says on his Facebook page. “Quite on the contrary. Fundamentalists as so s-x crazy that bare bre-sts would make them flock to the country. Perhaps one should try naked pigs and pork – that’ll keep them away…”.

Not on the ballot paper but winning. The power of Palin might not be as great as Fox News would have us believe. In her home state of Alaska, Sarah Palin successfully backed Joe Miller, a decorated war veteran and Yale law graduate, in the Republican Primary against the sitting Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. In a staunchly conservative state that should have ensured Miller had a comfortable election victory but that has not proved to be the case. Ms Murkowski took the unusual step of becoming a “write-in” candidate.

At the weekend, when 15,000 write-in votes remained to be counted, the trend was continuing to lean toward the incumbent Sen. Murkowski.