ABC Green bias is becoming blatant
Issued 10 August 2010
The ABC is guilty of blatant bias towards The Greens, the Liberal Democrats believe, with a recent news broadcast proving the point.
Liberal Democrats National President Peter Whelan reports that on the 11 am news on Saturday 7th August (ABC 702 Sydney) there was a lengthy news item about how The Greens would bring back trams to Sydney, to cut pollution. That was followed by a long interview with Lee Rhiannon, NSW Senate candidate for The Greens.
Whelan phoned the ABC and asked the reporter who did the story whether it was a paid political advertisement. The reply was, “Of course not, it was a press release from The Greens.”
Whelan then asked if he could also be interviewed, as such outrageous claims should not go unchallenged. He protested that Lee Rhiannon didn’t explain that the trams would be powered by electricity, but The Greens want to shut down the coal industry meaning the coal-fired power stations that supplied electricity to Sydney would be closed, so how would the trams be powered?
The ABC reporter defended Rhiannon, saying, “Oh but they would be powered by solar and wind”. Whelan then explained that as an electrical engineer, “It fails the technical test; trams have to run when the sun isn’t shining and when the wind isn’t blowing.”
Whelan explained to the reporter that on the NSW electrical grid, only about 20% of power could ever be supplied by “switched” temporary power, like wind and solar, and that any more could cause system instability and lead to outages. For the trams to “reduce pollution” as The Greens claim, the base load should have to come from a “clean” source like nuclear power.
The ABC reporter strongly defended The Greens position, saying, “But isn’t it a good idea to be using the resources of Australia, like wind and solar, which we have in abundance?”
Whelan’s reply: “Yes, but we should also be using resources like uranium, of which Australia has about 40% of the world’s known reserves.”
Inevitably, Whelan was not granted an interview.
“It is clear that the broadcaster we all pay for is not meeting its charter of balanced and unbiased election coverage,” said Whelan.
“The nearest the ABC comes to ‘balanced and un-biased’ is when it presents a comment from Lee Rhiannon followed by another from Bob Brown!”
The policy of the Liberal Democrats is to privatise the ABC through a public share giveaway, on the grounds that it is an unnecessary drain on the hard-working taxpayers of Australia.
They didn’t interview the LDP for the same reason they didn’t interview the bag-lady on the corner.
“The policy of the Liberal Democrats is to privatise the ABC through a public share giveaway, on the grounds that it is an unnecessary drain on the hard-working taxpayers of Australia.”
“What do we want?”
“Tax cuts.”
“When do we want them?”
“TAX CUTS!”
Hi David,
First and foremost, awesome work with the site. Good to see someone is going to the effort to let the minor parties be heard. Keep it up.
I’ve been reading the site since you set it up. I’m just curious – why do you feel the need to so childishly bag out any party that doesn’t appear to align with your views? It detracts hugely from the quality of the site. Furthermore, it doesn’t exactly reflect very well on you.
While I share your liberal perspective on social issues, I feel as if you come across as incredibly naive on your economic knowledge. Your attack on the free market is a perfect example of this. That said, a few years ago I’d probably agree with you, and run with the ‘greed, selfish, evil profiteer’ mantra that is the standard response from (traditional) left-leaning perspective. But the fact of the matter now, is that we haven’t had ‘free’ markets in over 100 years. Much (if not all) of the bad wrap that capitalism gets can not be traced to a free market at all, but from corporate influence on government regulation. Some call it corporatism, or crony capitalism. The multinational corporations hate the free market, because it would mean that the special treatment they get from the government via subsidies, regulations (greased of course by lobbying and endless campaign contributions) would be removed, and they’d have to compete on a even playing field.
Reading Paul Krugman’s NYT column each week does not make you economically savvy. Quite the opposite: Krugman, Stiglitz, and all those Keynesians are trying to spruik a theory that has failed time and time again. Don’t be fooled by the ‘Nobel Laureate’ tag, it is merely an elitist prize given to those who continue to define ‘normality’ in the hope the rest of the world follows suit.
Anyway, you might enjoy this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
Nonetheless, keep up the good work. If you are willing to reassess your own indoctrinated views on economics (as I did two years ago), then I’d be happy to point you in the direction of many fantastic sources of information.
‘The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design’ -F.A. Hayek
Yeah, we haven’t had a real free market since there weren’t regulations and children worked in coal mines. You’re being *entirely* unreasonable, Dave.
Hi sdh,
Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it.
To answer your question : “why do you feel the need to so childishly bag out any party that doesn’t appear to align with your views? It detracts hugely from the quality of the site. Furthermore, it doesn’t exactly reflect very well on you.”
The two main ideas of the site are to give minor/micro parties a voice they wouldn’t normally otherwise have, and to let everyone share their political views without comment moderation or editing, something I don’t think you’ll find anywhere else on Australian politics sites.
If I feel particularly strongly about something, or I think there’s a joke waiting to be told at the article’s expense, I’ll comment, usually with a citation if I think it’s required.
If you can’t deal with the idea that someone has a differing opinion to yours, or is more comfortable letting you know about it in a sarcastic fashion, there’s not a lot I can help you with.
I don’t claim to be economically savvy, but at least I can recognise that massive deregulation and reduction of oversight is a fundamentally bad idea, given that that recent global financial crisis was caused by… drumroll please… massive deregulation and reduction of oversight.
You can either accept that, or you can keep reading Ayn Rand.
I’m all for taking the piss, but provided it is based on fact. Here is a fact for you-
When ten central bankers in a smokey room decide amongst themselves what the price of credit should be, they invariably get it wrong. It is in the interest of their investment/commerical banking mates to keep rates low, to encourage (mal)investment through more loans. When you have artificially low rates for extended periods of time (say, 2001-2006), you create an artificial boom in many asset classes. Sound familiar?
And say, perhaps, during this boom, the Wall St scumfcuks think it would be a good idea to gamble on these government guaranteed mortgages via a myriad of complex debt instruments. So what if they’ll go bad, the government will cover the losses. Win-win, right?
Glass Steagal should have never been repealled, because these casino banks were gambling with government-backed debt that was proliferated by artifically low rates. Neither of these important aspects of the GFC are at all reflective of a free market. Quite the contrary.
“Wall St scumfcuks” doing stupid shit seems like a pretty good description of the free market to me. The government didn’t force anyone on wall street to do stupid shit. They did stupid shit because they were motivated by greed. When that greedy stupid shit blew up in their faces, yes, it’s the government’s fault for not stopping them. With regulation.
I also think it’s quite bizarre that you are lauding the free market, and saying that the lack of free market caused the GFC, while at the same time complaining about the Glass-Steagall Act being repealed. You realise that Act was regulation right? Restriction on the mighty free market? And you’re basically admitting that removing restrictions from the market introduced faecal matter to spinning blades?
Chris,
Read my last post again. The FDIC guaranteeing the mortgages drove the reckless behaviour: the profits were privatised, the losses socialised. This is not capitalism. And had the interest rates been set by the market and not by central bankers the housing bubble would have never occurred in the first place.
The Wall St Cartel (which includes the Fed) has ursurped the regulators and the legislators: crying out for more regulation will not solve the problems, the game will be further rigged. Webster Tarpley (whose solutions I don’t agree with, but his analysis is spot on) talks here about the Financial Reform Bill just passed in the US senate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZObHXWbWlk
So, you’re saying the poor defenceless traders were tricked into doing patently stupid things? Sure.
Yes, there were issues with the regulatory system. And some of the schemes set up were stupid. But no-one in government forced people to take up stupid risks. Regardless of what triggered the risk-taking, the risk-takers are still ultimately at fault for taking those risks. Those risks, driven by greed, are at the heart of the free market.
You’re also conveniently ignoring that a lot of those losses were socialised only after the private sector started collapsing.
“crying out for more regulation will not solve the problems” Didn’t you say the Glass-Steagall act was a good thing?
this place is like the internet of intnernet politics… and that’s how i like my internizzle.
on the other side of things, remind me why we still have money? or was it the same reason we’ve had for the last 50 years; that there’s been copious ammounts of curruption within the superpowers…. funny about what they say power does…
last i checked, money has been redundent for a minimum of 30 years.
David, how is your characterisation of the Liberal Democrats any different to a characterisation of the Greens that goes:
“What do we want?”
“Save the Trees”
“When do we want it?”
“Save the Trees”
The LDP is talking a lot about the size of government, because that is core to our position and philosophy. As a classical liberal party, civil liberties and taxation are going to be our primary talking points.
Shem,
I think the prime divider would be that sometimes, just sometimes, a Greens’ press release won’t contain information about ‘save the trees’.
But it’s obviously getting on your nerves, so I guess my characterisation is also more effective. =)
I guess I’ll need to send out an anti-filter or pro-gay marriage press release that has nothing to do with taxes, then.
While I think you’re mostly right sdh, like Ayn Rand, you make bold claims about the devious and evil purposes of the bureaucrats (in this case central bankers). However, rather than being a conspiracy, I think central bankers simply didn’t have a clue what was going on prior to the GFC because their economic theory didn’t take into consideration debt and because what was going on was unprecedented (I’m not sure whether incompetence or deviousness is worse!).
I’d also like to point out Chris that it wasn’t the dodgy banks, their subprime loans and greed that caused the GFC, but rather it was, as sdh says, too much debt generally caused by too much money supply: the subprime was merely the catalyst. Indeed, subprime loans were not that large a part of either the mortgage market or US bank balance sheets: how on earth did they cause such a catastrophy to the whole financial sector and economy if everything else was healthy? Rather it was China using its massive budget surpluses to keep its exchange rate well below fair value by purchasing US government bonds (among other things) and the central bankers failure to recognise what was going on that caused the GFC. China’s policy flooded the US with cheap money at the same time as keeping a lid on consumer price inflation (due to the low Chinese currency keeping the price of imported consumer goods down). Given that central banks’ policy was that if CPI is kept under control then everything is grand, then as CPI was kept under control easily, the central bankers thought that everything was grand.
Like the central bankers everyone else also thought that all was great as well. Many economists believed that the ‘control CPI’ policy introduced across the globe from the early to mid 1990s had eliminated the possibility of serious downturns and this belief was accepted by most business executives. Thus, when market interest rates were exceptionally low (due to the large amount of money supplied by China), businesses everywhere took advantage of the low rates to increase their leverage (or debt), which increased their returns while things were good.
To digress: While one may argue that this is simple greed, it is usually not exploitative (as the subprime loans were for example), which surely removes it from the category of greed. Is greed not when you seek profit at the expense of doing something unethical. If not then you must remove profit motive entirely (or greed motive if you’d prefer) from the political system, which means you’re left with communism and the resultant economic stagnation and decline, and the guns or concentration camps to force people to work for no return.
Returning to my main line of argument: While higher leverage increases returns in good times it also increases risk, and it is the higher risk that ultimately led to the GFC (and I argue necessarily led to a financial and economic crisis of some description). If the residential housing market had have held out longer it could’ve been the commercial property sector that went bust first: if it wasn’t the subprime it would’ve been something else.
The epicentre was necessarily in the financial sector though. The financial sector is where all debt originates from and so all debt crises must effect the financial sector hardest and first. Thus it was that the financial sector copped the blame for the GFC as it copped the blame in the 1930s. Yet in both cases the situation was much more complicated and ultimately caused by government intervention (China in the 2000s and the British and US Governments in the 1920s).
So, while I agree that the banks in the US should not have been allowed to fool people and give out subprime loans, claiming that more regulation would have prevented the crisis and will prevent future crises is nieve in the extreme. If there’s another boom in money supply that the central bankers fail to notice or control then the same outcome will occur again, regardless of how well or poorly banks and financial institutions are regulated. So before advocating potentially cripling regulation, it might be worth trying to understand what caused the problem, think about how much damage each new piece of regulation will do, and ask ourselves how to stop another financial crisis from happening again. We can only answer this last question by understanding what caused it rather than jumping on the first band wagon that comes along.
Moreover, looking at history shows that it’s government intervention that has caused the vast majority of financial crises, and so it is therefore logical to demand that governments don’t play games with financial markets and foreign exchange, but rather restrict themselves to consumer protection from loan sharks and other dodgy dealers. So before we line up the bankers as scapegoats for crimes they didn’t commit, it might be worth realising that the world is a bloody complicated place and that those responsible (the Chinese Government and central bankers) were simply trying to manipulate something they didn’t understand.