ALP tackles the private health system in the stupidest way imaginable

You've probably gleaned by now that I'm intractably opposed to the whole notion of private health insurance - a system predicated on the idea that access to doctors and hospitals should not be the same for everyone, regardless of personal wealth.

I think a two-tiered health system is frankly an affront to human dignity. It's not just the idea that the poor in a first world country should suffer second-class medical treatment, and that a doctor should check your wallet before he or she checks your pulse; it's the reality that having a second tier means that the people who make the decisions about the public system - including many voters - don't personally have to rely on it, and thereby have little incentive to make sure it's well-resourced and well-run.

So you'd think I'd be pleased with Labor getting rid of the Medicare surcharge for single people on up to $100,000 a year. After all, it's making the private health insurance companies scream, and that's usually a sign that something's going right.

But I'm not pleased. Because it's actually going to cost the public health system money. What's been scrapped is a source of funding, not a form of expenditure. And that takes money out of the budget, money which should be spent on public hospitals and doctors.

See, there are three ways the Federal government props up the private health system;

• The medicare surcharge - a net source of income for the government, income which can be spent on public health services;
  
• The Orwellianly*-named "Lifetime Health Cover" (that punishes you for your whole lifetime if you take out private health cover after you're 31) - no specific cost or benefit for the government); and
  
• The 30% private health rebate, which costs FREAKING BILLIONS of taxpayers' dollars.

So, if you're wanting to wind down the private health system and boost the public one, which of those three would you tackle first?

Might I suggest that, if you had a functioning brain and were being both principled and economically prudent, you'd start by getting rid of the ridiculously expensive 30% rebate, and instead pour those billions into the public hospitals. You'd keep the Medicare surcharge and, if anything, have a second level for people on more than $50,000. To help pay for Medicare and the public system.

Instead, all Labor's done is create more pressure on the public health system whilst simultaneously cutting out a significant part of the funding for it.

That seems counterproductive to me.

PS: While we're on the subject, why does Australia still not have a national dental scheme?

*It's a word now, dammit.

Switching sides

I read someone the other day explaining why they became a conservative. The story was something along the lines that they grew up with parents active in the ALP, adopting their views by default, then going to university and being confronted by lefties who were also, personality-wise, dickheads. So, said conservative completely abandoned progressive politics and went with the side that was fighting against the people he personally disliked.

In other words, he couldn't separate a principle from the person holding it.

I think this is very sad. How can you live in such a way? You can't think too closely about issues, because someone you don't like might come along and agree with you and then you'll have to abandon them. Or, conversely, you might have to suddenly start agreeing with something you haven't really thought your way through, just because someone you like has said it. An you can't consider the people on your "side" too carefully, because they're now on your team. If you've grown to like a particular argument, you have to like all the people who share it, no matter what they say or do, because otherwise you won't be able to hold it any more...

I suppose for all the unpleasantness of, well, having to act like a bit of a tribal moron, this approach would have its benefits. You'd feel some sense of belonging, which could be valuable if, deep down, you were insecure about your own worth. And you'd always have allies who'd come to talk with you, so you could each bolster the other's sense of how right you both clearly are because you are in such firm agreement. And you wouldn't have to think too deeply about a subject - you could just read what your friendly allies have written and parrot it.

Wouldn't work for me, I'm afraid - I wouldn't be able to get past the suspicion that I was being an idiot. But I'm glad it's working for so many out there.

Guy marriage

Yes, I'd like to stop posting on this subject too. And will, as soon as common sense prevails and we stop needing to even have such a debate.

Guy Rundle wrote in yesterday's Crikey about the effect that the Californian Supreme Court's recent unexpectedly logical and sensible decision on the subject of gay marriage (namely, that there is no compelling social reason - as there would be in a ban on incest or polyamoury - to exempt the legislature from the state constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law*) might have on the upcoming American federal election.

His musings on that subject were interesting, but his attempt to explain just why non-gay middle Americans could conceivably get so interested in something that has, pretty much by definition, little to do with them, was bizarre. So bizarre that I'm going to do a little quote-and-reply:

Nevertheless, the issue could still get well out of the box and become a major rallying point. For no matter how much left-liberals argue that same-s-x marriage has no inherent effect on marriage as an institution, it undoubtably does, and people feel it.

It "undoubtably" does? Please, Guy, explain how some gay person getting married has the slightest effect on your life-long sworn commitment to your wife. Please, please Guy. Help me understand you. What you are saying simply does not make sense.

Put simply, the social meaning of marriage has always been fertility and lineality -- the interlacing of society between different family groups by ensuring that they will have shared objects of devotion, i.e. kids they know they're related to.

That's it? Oh, please, you cannot be serious. That hasn't been the "social meaning of marriage" since marriages stopped being annulled by reason of infertility. The suggestion that it could be the meaning today is beyond farcical, since there are many people who get married with either no intention of having children, or indeed, no ability to have children. It's profoundly insulting to many, many married people to patronisingly argue the contrary.

Indeed, someone who'd pretend that marriage is inherently about fertility and children would have to logically object to one of their widowed parents remarrying in old age. THEY SHOULD BE HAPPY TO JUST LIVE ALONE OR IN SIN, THE OLD FREAKS.

To summarise, arguing that people who can't have children shouldn't get married is fairly conclusive proof that said person is a self-righteous git.

The plain fact is that you can't change the meaning of marriage to include same-s-x couples -- with children acquired by adoption, surrogacy, basting implements, Chinese mail-order whatever -- without changing its meaning, and that observation is prior to any question of whether you think that is a good idea or not.

That's not a plain fact. That claim - not gay marriage - is a complete redefinition of what marriage means for many people today. The ability to have children is not a pre-requisite or compulsory attribute, and hasn't been in our lifetimes. Marriage clearly means the things that all marriages have in common - love between two people and a commitment to form a permanent partnership together for as long as they both shall live. To care for each other in sickness and in health, in poverty and wealth, etc etc. Not since considerably more barbarous and cynical times has the production of offspring been a mandatory component.

And anyone who thinks two gay or lesbian people getting married somehow necessitates a major adjustment of the entire institution must either not know all that many happily married people, or think gays and lesbians are inhuman monsters incapable of abiding love.

Proponents of s-s marriage can fairly be accused of hypocrisy on this, knowing or otherwise -- on the one hand, the initiative is presented as a small thing, not likely to change much. On the other marriage, rather than civil union, is defended as something required, as having meaning above and beyond its purely administrative status.

That's not inconsistent - it's a staggeringly minor change for those of us who aren't gay (unless we're actually gaining some kind of self-righteous pleasure in keeping them down). It - the end of government treating you as a second-class citizen - would, presumably, be a significant change for the gay people themselves. But you know what? I can be happy for them. I have no idea why the bigots can't.

Which it is -- and which is why so many people feel threatened by it.

How many times is Rundle going to introduce these highly arguable propositions with definitive declarations? "It undoubtedly does." "The plain fact is." "Which it is." No, Guy - it doesn't, it isn't, it isn't. None of these claimed absolutes stand up to even the most superficial examination.

Not threatened in a psychological sense, but in a literal and rational sense, because same-s-x marriage de-centres the entire basis on which culture, any culture, has subsisted. It's an enormous shift, which is why it's enough for people to decide their vote on, even when their kids are in Iraq, their house is in repossession, and their truck is in the garage cos they can't afford to run it.

Sorry, but "rational" is about the least applicable word Rundle could have used in that paragraph. Don't give the bigots credit. They're not opposed through any genuine concern about their own marriages - they're opposed because they only know gays as people who according to Fred Phelps are sick perverts who enjoy activities in the bedroom that Decent People find somewhat distateful to imagine. If you press the bigot enough they'll reveal their problem is more with the (I imagine) uncomfortable mechanics than anything that deserves to be called a principle. And, also, it's nice to have someone further down the ladder than you. Essentially, it's the same idiotic human fear of people who are different that has contaminated the species' entire history.

Back to the election - even if you personally think homosexuality is something to be stamped out, you can surely at least concede that it doesn't really affect you in any tangible sense. Which makes anyone who'd rank oppressing gays as more important than any of these other issues either a religious fundamentalist with a peculiarly selective reading of their religious tome of choice**, or a dimwit.

*You should have known that would come back to bite you, bigots. You wanted to pretend to believe in equality whilst still denying it - finally someone called you on the contradiction. About fricking time.

**And if you're basing your objection on one of these religious tomes, not wanting marriage to be applied to people who are, in your view, sinners on their way to hell, then shouldn't you oppose marriage for all non-believers? We're on our way down there too, presumably.

Kevin Donnelly is a silly old duffer

If you're going to weigh in on the tedious "debate" on "violence in video games", please make sure you have something new to say. I'm looking at you, Kevin Donnelly in today's Hun.

You see, you're going to look like a goose when your commentary is meaningless noise, and boils down to nothing more than -

• making unfounded claims about games being "dangerous" without presenting any evidence of same (infantile contradiction of opponents doesn't qualify, Kevin - an argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition; it's not just saying "no, it isn't"!);
  
• flat-out lying about the content of the games you're condemning (according to Kevin's quote, games "reward players for killing innocent bystanders, police and prostitutes" - they do? Which ones? Certainly the ones in Kevin's list don't);
  
• relying on a facile non-argument - it takes time away from reading literature! - that could be applied against any other form of entertainment or indeed any activity at all;
  
• repeating misconceptions you've never bothered testing by, you know, talking to someone who knows about the subject on which you're pontificating - such as the following mystifying gibberish:
  

  Literature is also essentially ethical in nature, readers learn about right and wrong, and the consequences of good and bad actions.
  
  Compare this with video games, where the prime motive is to outsell competitors and to make a profit.

  
  Implausibly, Kevin has apparently heard of trashy, violent books or video games about "right and wrong" and "the consequences of good and bad actions".

Because you don't really want to look like one of those laughable old idiots in the middle ages who thought the printing press was going to destroy the minds of the young and ruin civilization, do you?

After all, although not understanding - and, consequently, objecting to - things developed since you were young is a long-held tradition (witness Socrates' famous complaint about the insolent little punks); so is the speed with which such specific complaints are made ridiculous by history. The novel, the penny dreadful, the phonograph, the cinema, rock and roll, television... remarkable how quaint the flimsy and unsubstantiated objections to the above look now, isn't it? You can see the pattern, right? So why ensure that the generations coming after you will view you as the same kind of primitive nincompoop as the Chicken Littles who railed against those media?


Young people! With your stuff you enjoy!

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, Kevin, than to open your mouth...

Definition of chutzpah

I missed this last week, what with being in remote country Victoria and all, but did you see the tale of the 13 year old and his mates in Texas who stole a credit card and went on a $30,000 spending spree, ending with playing Halo at an expensive hotel with $1000/night prostitutes?

Definition of chutzpah:

Ralph and Co. told the working girls they were people of restricted growth working with a traveling circus.

Who was that Melbourne kid with the stupid sunglasses whose name now deserves (even more than it did originally) to be promptly forgotten? Dude, you've been pwned.

UPDATE: ... by a fictional character! Turns out the story was a hoax. In my defence, I'm not a paid journalist, so it's not my job to fact-check stories in mainstream newspapers. Boy would my face be red if I were!

(Note I haven't made any calls to fact-check the claim that the story's a hoax, so maybe it's true and the hoax link is the hoax. If only we had people whose job it was to chase up leads and report back to the public. Wouldn't that be great?)

If it's so wonderful, why do you have to force us to use it?

Don't get me started on eBay's anti-competitive attempt to use its dominance of the online auction market to manufacture a dominance in the online payment market by compelling all its users to use PayPal PayPay (a subsidiary).

The company is using Australia as a giant guinea-pig to see what it can get away with, and has pre-emptively applied to the ACCC for immunity from prosecution under the parts of the Trade Practices Act 1975 that it is arguably breaching (such as s47). It received a lot of submissions by the cut-off date of 2nd May. Ebay has until 23rd May to respond to those submissions. It will undoubtedly continue to argue that, hey, PayPal is the only way to protect consumers from being ripped off according to these highly suspect figures we're waving about, even if they're too stupid to choose that "protection", and in fact are so stupid as to actively argue against being forced to use it, and who needs competitors in the online payment space anyway, how's that to anyone's benefit, and what's wrong with us triple dipping* on every single one of the millions of transactions on our online auction site that has a practical monopoly on the market?

What I'm trying to say is, eBay sucks. But type in "alternative to eBay" into Google and what do you get? A fragmented morass of smaller sites, none of which have - or can effectively ever obtain - critical mass to challenge the monopoly business. Buyers won't go where the sellers aren't, and vice-versa, and because no-one can really jump ship without everyone else doing the same, we're all stuck.

Using, if ACCC lets eBay get away with it, a system that apparently none of us want enough to choose without being forced to.

Let's hope the official "consumer watchdog" organisation doesn't let them get away with it.

*Fee to list; fee on selling; fee through PayPay on payment.

What's everyone else likely to do?

You know one of the ways of telling whether your system of "representative democracy" is broken? When voters are trying to pick a candidate not based on who's closest to their views, but when they're trying to pick one they think other voters are more likely to pick over the candidate they dislike the most.

Take the US. Hillary Clinton is asking left-wing voters to nominate her not because she's going to implement any policies they particularly like, but because she's more likely to appeal to centre-right racist voters than Barack Obama (please excuse her while she fan the flames of racial hatred as much as she can without looking like that's what she's doing), and that if they pick their preferred candidate they might end up giving the election to the Republicans. That's seriously her argument - you can't pick the black man! Racists won't vote for him!

Yes, US voters can't simply choose a representative. They have to worry about what other people are likely to do with their vote instead. They can't vote honestly, they have to vote tactically.

To a large extent this is a result of the US not having a preferential voting system, (either in the general election, or in the major parties' primaries process) so the voting thought process goes like this:

1. Which two candidates/parties are likely to get more other people who don't necessarily agree with me to vote for them?
   
2. Which do I dislike the least?

Rather than, as in any democracy where representativeness is the goal:

1. Which candidate most closely represents my views?

For Democrat voters to be left with the choice of a decent candidate who they'd like to actually vote for, or one who can probably get conservative red-necks to vote for her and who has poisoned the well for the one they like - well, it's a pretty serious indictment on their system.

And it's the one they want to export around the world! God*, have mercy.

*Fictional or not

Defiantly

It might make me a taste-impaired bogan to admit this, but I'm going to announce it anyway: I like Viennetta. The vanilla one. With the crisp chocolate on top.

Go on, do your worst, ice-cream snobs.

City slickers

Well, after spending a week in remotest country Victoria, I think I have figured out why country people are so ticked off with the modern world.

Mobile phones don't work properly. Internet access is intermittent (if you're wondering why I haven't commented on anything, that's why.) Everything at the supermarket costs more - including the things that are from the country in the first place. And you would not believe how poor the public transport infrastructure is - I haven't seen a single tram line the whole time I've been down here.

Country Victoria: half a star. (The 1/2 is for having a visible night sky - but really, how many times is it going to insist on rerunning the same programme? Inspiring majesty of the infinite heavens? Bo-oring. Show us something fresh!)

PS It's also forced me to miss a game by my beloved GroupThink F.C.

If it's stupid and tokenistic, Brendan's for it

Apparently trick one for a wannabe populist right-wing politician these days is to try to sell a petrol tax cut to morons. We had Steve "Bong Costume" Fielding run it before the last election. We've seen John McCain and Hillary Clinton both trying to turn around their flagging political fortunes by calling for one over there. And last night, the laughable temporary opposition leader, Brendan Nelson, tried the same stunt:

In his reply Dr Nelson said he wants to see petrol excise cut by five cents a litre, which he said would have a modest downward impact on inflation.

"Watching petrol prices does not bring them down," he said.

"Petrol is now hurting Australians in every walk of life. This is a modest but meaningful way of helping all people."

"Meaningful"? You dolt. It's a transfer of public money to petrol companies that will help motorists not a jot, since it will quickly be subsumed by those companies as the price rises anyway. Ask an economist, Brendan, they'll all tell you the same thing.

Meanwhile, Brendan has finally stood up for the public health system:

Dr Nelson said the Government has perpetrated a fraud on the Australian people and he attacked its plan to raise the income threshold for the Medicare surcharge levy.

"We stand up for private health insurance," he said. "We have always stood up for people with private health insurance, and we will continue to do so. We will oppose this measure.

Ah, sorry, I was wrong. He continues not to give a shit about the public system. He's just worried about the bottom line of the private health insurers.

You poor people who'd rather that money be spent on public health? Don't vote for this doctor. Wait - you didn't! Well, you shouldn't have voted for his party six years ago either. (Bring on July and the Coalition having no power anywhere in the country above council level. I can't wait.)


This Budget, or Mein Kampf as we like to call it, will destroy Australian civilization utterly.

Finally, Brendan blamed anything bad that might happen in the next year on the Budget, including non-existent global warming, male pattern baldness, and the nasty internal Liberal Party processes that are about to result in his losing his job.