Your proper 2014 starts here. Sorry.
Hot-Dutton issues!
It's been six days since we got shot of 2013 and you are hopefully enjoying that wonderful blissful feeling that comes from seeing friends, getting adequate sleep and remembering the healing power of regular booze, all combining to give you that sense that people are generally good, that world makes some sort of sense and deep down things are going to be fine.
So: let's start by getting shot of all that nonsense.
See, while you've been kicking back with Xmas, family, friends, and watching the Australian cricket team embarrass the Poms with both superior on-field performance and borderline nonsensical commentary, the elves in our Federal toy factory have been busily tinkering away in the hopes that journalists aren't taking much notice and that there aren't any readers in any case.
For a start, your health minister Peter Dutton - a man who has hitherto existed only as a shadow lurking on the outskirts of the front bench like an unkind rumour, or the sour smell of a milk spill in your car boot that no amount of scrubbing can completely remove - has decided to join his colleagues in announcing unpopular policies in keeping with the government's policy of hurting those in need for no good reason.
Expect to hear a lot more about Dutty-P, because he's going after one of the biggest successes in Australia: Medicare.
You remember how your family wasn't evicted into the street that time your dad got sick or your mum was injured, and how your grandparents were given care rather than told they could die since they weren't profitable risks for private insurers? That's because in 1975 the Whitlam Government thought it might be a good thing if all Australians could access health and medical care because we're a wealthy country with a solid tax base, and this seemed like the sort of thing in which everyone paying a bit meant that nobody was either bankrupted by medical costs or died simply because they could no longer afford medicine.
It's also one of the cheapest health systems on the planet, because there's one large purchaser - the government - meaning that drug companies can either accept lower prices for their goods (which are then subsidised to the citizenry) or they can choose to go sell to some other schmuck nation.
In other countries - like, say, the US - companies deal with individual hospitals and HMOs and make off like bandits. That's one of the several reasons why health costs in the US are so insane, and also why people die of cancer nice and quickly because they run out of money very quickly. Hell, Breaking Bad was pretty clear on that point.
But the Abbott government are nothing if not ambitious, and the fact that the phrase "Whitlam government" was used a few paragraphs ago should indicate just how keen they are on Medicare generally and hurting people for idealogical reasons specifically.
Medicare is broken, Dutton is insisting, and so it's getting an overhaul. And it has to - it's just too expensive. Why, the costs have jumped by 120%! That's more than 100%! You see how scary that is?
Of course, that figure - an increase from $8.1 billion to $17.8 billion - involved comparing budgets from ten years ago (the first figure was 2002-3, the second 2012-3). So yes, that's a jump - but we're hitting the baby boomer bubble where the largest generation are leaving the workforce and needing to be looked after, and also things are a bit more expensive then they were a decade ago. You know what I was paying for rent in 2002? Jesus, we lived like kingsback then.
"In the end, we want to strengthen Medicare and we want to strengthen our health system," Mr Dutton fibbed, "but we can't do that if we leave change to the 11th hour. The threshold question is whether people want the health system of today strengthened for tomorrow, because at the moment the health system is heading to a point where it will become unmanageable."
So: how is Dutton going to fix the costs? Almost certainly by instituting up-front fees when you visit the doctor. That way you get to be taxed for the medical service and get to pay out of pocket as well, sort of like a tax increase except with none of the built-in pay-what's-appropriate-on-what-you-earn tiers that you get with actual taxation. It's win-win!
Of course, the beauty of flat upfront costs - the number being bandied about is $6, which seems churlish to even complain about - is that if you're doing OK, it's a tiny amount. Hell, that's not even two coffees – right, inner-city Green types? What, you're going to bitch about not being able to afford a single tap beer from a darling local microbrewery? How many times do you see a doctor every year? Like, twice? That's $12! You can't even buy second hand vinyl for that these days!
Of course, if you're a parent of a child with special needs, or an elderly person on a fixed pension with a chronic condition, then that adds up really quickly. Also, at the risk of getting all public health research on you, the poorer you are, the sicker you are: high stress, poorer lifestyle options, worse housing conditions - these all have enormous impacts on someone's wellbeing. That's one of the reasons why your neighbours, on average, are going to be dead long after those folks currently living in remote indigenous communities.
Dutton also made the point that putting a fee in place would actually save $750 million by discouraging "avoidable" GP visits, because a) people just see doctors for kicks, and b) it's far, far better to let small, cheap and easy disorders grow into huge, expensive and time-consuming ones if you want to both save money and serve the population. Why treat a chest infection today when you can hospitalise someone for pneumonia later? That just makes good sense.
Statistics: making them work for you!
It's not just health where you can make arbitrary comparisons between different years to get a nice round scary-sounding percentage. You can also use numbers to make it look like you've followed through on something - say, an election pledge to create a million jobs - when you haven't come nearly as close as the electorate might have expected simply by changing a few definitions.
Some favourite tricks include redefining "job" to mean "doing anything, including not being paid" and thus bumping up numbers by including Work for the Dole participants or volunteers. Others have rounded down unemployment to only mean those doing zero work for over a year, say, thereby neatly sidestepping things like nasty recent industry collapses. But the Abbott government isn't docking around with these sorts of rubbery figures. No, they're standing by their "1 million jobs in five years" pledge.
And how are they doing it?
By comparing it to the employment rate under the Howard government.
That's the claim, anyway, because Finance Minister Mathias Cormann is being tantalisingly coy about which arse that number was pulled out of. It certainly wasn't an economist's rectum, though: even before the election financial analysts pointed out the tapering off of the mining boom and went "um, yeah, nah". And you might recall that something happened recently in our car industry which seemed not entirely job-createy.
The SMH are quoting a "Coalition insider" as revealing that "that no modelling or detailed calculations were done to reach the figure of 1 million jobs. Rather, then-opposition leader Tony Abbott's office took the employment growth rate of about 2.2 per cent year-on-year under the Howard government and used it to extrapolate its own job-creation target."
It's the sort of thing that's going to bite the government on the arse, since the situation under Howard was wildly different, but maybe the Abbott government can trumpet other successes, like their significantly reduced occurance of bushranger attack (compared with rates in 1880) and the far lower risk of taxpayers having their homes damaged by herds of Diprotodon (when compared to insurance data from the late Pleistocene).
2014: the year we stopped pretending accountability was a thing
Holidays, eh? You know how you had no interest in checking your work email even though you knew your first morning back was going to be nothing but deleting crap? Well, your pal and immigration minister Scott Morrison feels the same way, except instead of reading emails he's expected to front up before the press and answer questions about how, say, female asylum seekers are being sexually assaulted or miscarrying because they're being denied medical care or self-harming in detention. And he doesn't want to answer those questions, they make him look as though he really doesn't give too much of a shit.
So he's made a New Years resolution: to no longer do weekly briefings about Operation Sovereign Borders, aka Operation You Just Shut Up Now, and will instead possibly rely on a weekly email blast.
We say "possibly" because, in keeping with Morrison's resolute determination to maintain a seductive veneer of mystery and intrigue, his office hasn't confirmed anything as yet beyond that email updates would continue as they have for the last few weeks (Mozza announced that the briefing on 20 December would be the last for the year). However, he's not confirmed when or if he'll front the press again to allow journalists to have questions refused, and to give viewers the chance to watch an incipient heart attack happen in real time.
Hope he's got $6 ready for when he loses all feeling in his left side.
More pay-as-you-crisis budgetunities!
It's an expensive business, having international consulates. They sit there in all those foreign lands, with their fancy desks and pens and photocopying and security and stuff, and hey - that shit adds up. And not only that, every so often someone will expect some help - say, for being arrested on dubious grounds, or because one of their family has gone missing, or because their heart has stopped working or they're trapped in a war zone - and that means phone calls and meetings and sometimes even MORE photocopying.
Well, your foreign minister Julie Bishop has had enough of you people using consulates like your own private link to the government that supposedly represents your interests in emergencies, and she is now ready to start charging you for consular help.
See, 11,927 people expected help last year and that's almost 12,000 more than Bishop gives a shit about. After all, if you love Australia so damn much, what are you even doing overseas, traitor?
"Of course the Australian government is going to support those in trouble but there are circumstances where questions are raised why taxpayers should foot the bill," she said with the trademark empathy for other human beings that has become the defining feature of the Abbott government.
And what are those circumstances? Well, one is Colin Russell, the Greenpeace activist imprisoned by the Russian government for protesting in the Arctic. He's been released as part of Russia's hasty amnesty for non-violent prisoners, aka "we have a winter Olympics in a few months and all the international headlines have been about us beating up gays and imprisoning Pussy Riot, so let's get some positive PR out there before our tourism industry collapses".
He was charged with being a terrorist and held in freezing, rat-infested conditions in Siberia before his eventual release, and has criticised the government for not actually doing a damn thing to secure his safety.
Bishop's argument is that he knew that Russia doesn't like protestors and that if he's so worried about being arrested on patently false charges for protesting environmentally catastrophic actions carried out by a corrupt government in collusion with larger criminal private industries in an already-precarious ecosystem, then he should have maybe just shut the fuck up instead. After all, that's what the rest of us are doing and why should we foot the bill?
She indicated that the government not doing anything for Russell had already cost $35k, and she'd be looking at how best to issue him an invoice for the amount.
So remember kids: crises are a luxury, not a right, and you should only indulge in one provided that you've earned enough to afford it.
And while we're on the subject of emergencies…
Speaking of things that you shouldn't do because dealing with them is expensive for departments specifically tasked with the job of dealing with them, a US ship is en route to the Antarctic to save the Chinese ship trapped in ice after coming to the rescue of the Russian ship on the Australian scientific expedition trapped in ice. It's like the United Nations of getting trapped in ice!
To recap: a bunch of scientists and a handful of tourists were on the Akademik Shokalskiy, travelling to the Antarctic to replicate measurements taken by Douglas Mawson a century ago. You may have heard about that global warming thing that our PM doesn't believe in andthat has given us Australia's hottest year on record? Well, because of that a huge amount of ice that would otherwise be making up Antarctica has instead chosen a solo career and is floating in the ocean, and that's what is now busily trapping our proud ships.
The Russian ship became trapped in ice just before Xmas and still has 22 crew onboard. Everyone else was rescued thanks to the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, which evacuated all the Australians to the Aurora Australis. And then got trapped itself.
Now the US's Polar Star is en route to save the Xue Long. Reports on which icebreaker will respond to the likely distress call once the Polar Star gets trapped could not be confirmed at press time.
Iraq War part III goes into production
The Coalition are not the only ones looking back on the Howard years with fond nostalgia. Remember the invasion of Iraq, when we as a nation joined together and said "unseat a dictator who, while clearly corrupt and venal, has successfully prevented his unstable nation from splitting into endlessly warring religious factions? Why, that sounds like a great idea"?
Well, get ready to reap the bounty from that rich harvest as Iraq descends into chaos with bits of the nation falling to al-Qaida-affiliated forces, including areas along the Syrian border and the city of Fallujah.
It's another love-tap in the ongoing idealogical tussle between hardline Shia and Sunni Muslims in the region (Sunnis are an oppressed minority in the largely-Shia nation, and al-Qaida are essentially a Sunni organisation). And, once again, the large majority of Muslims who are not utterly mad are pointing at the Quran and suggesting that maybe the prophet Mohammed would prefer that his people weren't killing each other over comparatively minor differences in interpretation of his doctrine.
Al Qaida have now rebranded as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (aka ISIS, not to be confused with the main intelligence organisation in the TV show Archer) and are promising to take back the nation, while also kicking things along in the continuing shitfest that is the Syrian civil war.
Julie Bishop has expressed "deep concern" over the way things are playing out, because saying "oh deep holy fuck, this is a fucking nightmare" doesn't have the same diplomatic zing to it. And also because acknowledging more crises might sound like we're giving the OK for refugees, and that makes Scott Morrison's already-terrifying blood pressure get even higher.
She did add that Australia had "no plans to provide further military support", mind, although anyone in Baghdad thinking of contacting the Australian consulate about fleeing for their lives might want to bring proof of income.
Panama! Panama-ha!
The expansion of the Panama Canal is in doubt as the Italian and Spanish companies who tendered for the job have turned around to the Panamanian government and gone "um, yeah, about that low bid we gave you? It's about half what we'll actually need, thanks."
In the great tradition of private contractors making up ridiculously unrealistic budgets in order to get huge jobs and then admitting they might have been a smidge optimistic once there's a massive hole in the ground that can only be filled by money, the consortium rebuilding the canal to be accessible to the new generation of cargo ships have said that things turned out to be US$1.6 billion more than they thought. Oh, and that the government could stump up the difference inside of 21 days or they were taking their canal elsewhere.
The Panamanian government aren't super chuffed about this somewhat extortiony turn of events, and currently they and the consortium are locked in a very public argument about whose fault it is, presumably before the government sigh and pay for it because what the hell else are they going to do? So much of the country's economy is dependent on the canal providing a shipping link between China and the US that they can't exactly chalk this up to a valuable lesson in the perils of public tendering and keep the less-than-functional canal as a living testament to transparency in budgeting, surely?
Volcanowatch 2014: hunka hunka burning Indonesia
Things are excitingly dynamic in North Sumatra where Mount Sinaburg has erupted rather more violently and suddenly than expected. Residents have been fleeing on motorcycle down the side of the mountain, coughing their way through clouds of ash in a scene that Michael Bay is already putting a team together to recreate, probably with some sort of giant robot in the bargain.
So far there have thankfully been no casualties, but an evacuation zone of four miles around the mountain has been declared and 20,000 people are currently in emergency accommodation. Reports that an elderly grey-robed man had been seen waving a stick at a Balrog in the region could not be confirmed at press time.
Can't help myself, baaaaad hobbits…
Which film was the most pirated in 2013? Take a bow, The Hobbit! Yes, even as film #2, The Desolation of Smaug is topping the local box office, the first film - An Unexpected Journey - was apparently illegally downloaded a record-breaking 8.4 million times, thereby confirming humankind's deep love of films that are far too long, egregiously padded out with stuff not in the books, and contain Martin Freeman.
Second and third on the list of most-downloaded were Django Unchained and Fast & Furious 6, with Iron Man 3, Silver Linings Playbook, Star Trek Into Darkness and, inexplicably,Gangster Squad not far behind. Gangster Squad? Seriously? Downloaders, don't you people even read reviews?
source: http://www.thevine.com.au/
