Forty things I know at forty.

The challenge was to write these forty things in eighty minutes. I was interrupted, so it was written in ninety minutes over two days. Also, I can not claim to actually 'know' any of these, they are just a brain dump of things that I'm pretty sure are true. I hope to be able to laugh (or cry) at them when I'm eighty. Also, I absolutely admit these are almost certainly not my own ideas, but in 90 minutes I have not had time to hunt around for attribution. 

1. Everyone is due empathy, and forgiveness, at some point in their lives. 

2. Happiness is more likely realised than attained.

3. No one needs you to be rich, but they do need you to be there.  The continuation of society, family, friends, and loving relationships does not require for you to be wealthy, but it does require that you help in some way.

4. Playing music with other people is one of life's sincerest joys.

5. For fearful things, the anticipation is most often worse than the reality.

6. Know which of your friends would help you move a body BEFORE you have to move a body.

7. The most powerful thing the rulers have is the consent of those they rule. The most powerful thing the ruled have is their ability to withdraw their consent, but only if they do so en masse.

8. The second most powerful thing the rulers have is their ability to contextualise violence as either right or wrong.

9. Poverty is really, really bad, but having wealth does not equal success.

10. No matter how bad off you've been, and how far you've come; there's always someone else who started out worse off and has done better than you.

11. One thing most people have in common is that they think they are different.

12. Numbers are an idea we invented and impose upon the world. They do not exist in the world independently of our thought.

13. The two things the world really should learn this century are: We must not take from the forest at a rate greater than the forest can itself replenish regardless of the size of the forest. And: We must get off this planet. We can not allow this planet to be the sole site of consciousness in the whole of known existence. We know this planet will eventually be destroyed by the sun. We simply must find somewhere else for consciousness to exist, and send at least some of it there.

14. Growing your own food, engaging in the food cycle, is a kind of love.

15. It is actually less hassle to do the dishes, cleaning, washing and other chores than it is to have a dirty house.

16. People are incredibly good at justifying their actions when those actions result in some kind of benefit to themselves.

17. One can not be intelligent, knowledgeable, informed and ethical; and at the same time support the Liberals. Anyone who supports the Liberals lacks at least one of these attributes.

18. Philosophy/Science is just as often about proving we don't know something as it is about proving we do know something. Both achievements are worthy.

19. Love does not conquer all, and is not some kind of all powerful nicey-thing all the time. Someday someone you love will betray you. That's part of life. Love is sometimes hard, sometimes wonderful.

20. The past and the future do not literally exist in the same way as the present. It's all just one big NOW. It's just that it's a somewhat changeable NOW. We live in the same changing NOW as all our ancestors and all our descendants.

21. Happiness is not contingent on  having an ownership relation to a material thing, except perhaps a house, or a musical instrument.

22. People are not rational beings, and this is especially so when encountered in groups.

23. There is no god, people who believe in god are deluded, this delusion can be dangerous because it vacates believers of a need for independently ethical standards. All their ethical standards are dependent on the word of their god, and the word of their god is absolutely malleable to their own desires. In effect, they do not have an independently justifiable ethics. So beware of them.

24. The loss felt at the death of a loved one does not go away. You just have to grow around it.

25. Children are joyous and make us happy.

26. The decision to have a child is not an abrogation of any other responsibility, like having a career or whatever. We are meant to have children. Having a child is our greatest responsibility. The world does not care if you have a career. If no one has children we all disappear really quickly.

27. In the normal course of events your parents will die before you, and you will have children, and then you will die on them. That is the best you can hope for.

28. The best days in your life are those when you set out to do something you thought was probably beyond your reach, but through hard work, inspiration and luck you actually achieve it.

29. If you're hungry, a buttered piece of toast is absolutely amazingly delicious.

30. It is simply not true that someone who is the best at something will be the most rewarded. Access to networks of powerful people and self-promotion will almost always beat knowledge and skill. Perhaps sport is an exception, and maybe that's why people like to watch sport.

31. Simplicity is harder than complexity. Beware of those people though, who will urge a shortcut to simplicity with a lie.

32. People really can destroy the thing they love.

33. Liberty is not necessarily the same thing as democracy.

34. Beware of domain creators. People often use one word as a supposed symbol for the combined meanings of a lot of other ideas. It is seldom a true reflection of the world, and especially untrue when applied to supposed categories of people. For example, when someone says: 'Business thinks lower taxes are good,' don't believe them. There is no such thing as 'Business' that can think that. Likewise, 'Technology' can not 'advance'. 'Government' can not 'believe'.

35. It is not important, nor even best, to be the smartest guy in the room. It is usually far better to be the second smartest guy in the room. It is dangerous to be the third smartest.

36. We tend to think that the consciousness we all experience is the same sort of consciousness, but that we as individuals have a unique consciousness. We are somehow uniquely different emanations of the same kind of thing, and that consciousness is both universally uniform and yet not fungible.

37. Ruling groups believe they have their power because they deserve it, and that subordinate groups don't.

38. Integrity costs something. If you have not had to forgo something it is not integrity. Also, contrary to popular belief, no one is born with integrity, it has to be earned.

39. 80% of people don't care about your problems, and 19% of people are glad you have them.

40. Doing the best you can at whatever it is you are doing brings its own satisfaction.

How the Liberals won Brunswick . . . for Labor.

It is usually assumed the Liberal Party decision to preference Labor before the Greens prevented the Greens from winning up to four seats in the recent Victorian election. In Brunswick this was very definitely the case.

This election saw a reversal of previous Liberal preference activity which very clearly 'saved' Brunswick for Labor.

And becuase Labor had already decided it was more important to beat the Greens in the inner city than preserve their middle suburban seats, the Liberal's late decision to preference the Greens last completely wrong-footed the Labor machine, which suddenly found itself having invested heavily in seats it would now almost certainly hold, and not into the seats it eventually lost.

In a big way, the Labor Party was committing the same mistake for which the suburban voters punished the Labor government. That is, faced with an inner city threat more sharp in perception than reality, the Labor party poured money into the inner city and ignored the suburbs, where their lack of commitment to solving real problems cost the Labor party government.

First to Brunswick. This chart shows the first preference votes in Brunswick elections 1999 to 2010:

Obviously there are serious qualifications required in discerning meaning from this chart. For example, the electorate has changed size and there has always been a brace of independents and smaller parties running. But Blind Freddy can get the drift.

In practice crunch time comes after all the independents' and minor Parties' votes are distributed and the Liberal preferences come into play.

In 2006 before Liberal preferences were distributed Labor had 16,295 votes to the Greens' 10,823. The Liberals by then had 6170, and these went 4612 to the Greens and only 1558 to Labour. The Greens were never going to win that one.

In 2010 the story was different. Before the Liberal preferences were distributed this time Labor had 14,538 but the Greens had 14,556. That's right, the Greens were actually ahead by a mere 18 votes before the Liberal preferences were distributed. This time the Liberals had 7350 votes by the final round, and these went 2477 to the Greens but 4873 to Labor. In 2006, 25% of Liberal preferences went to Labor. In 2010, 66% of Liberal preferences went to Labor. While it is worth noting that 1141 of these Liberal votes had not originally been 1st preference Liberal votes, it is still clear that it was Liberal voters who delivered Brunswick to Labor.

The next issue is about money. The rumour currently doing the rounds in Brunswick is that Labor spent about $300,000 on the Brunswick campaign, and the Greens about $20,000. I have no idea of the exact amounts but it was clear that Labor was spending a seriously big bucket of dosh here during the campaign. It did them no good. It was, in fact, a big mistake. If the aim was to get Green voters to vote Labor it clearly failed, as once again first preference votes decreased for Labor but increased for the Greens. There was even an increase in the Liberal vote. Whatever the aim of that spend it was wasted. Worse, it was money that was not spent on campaigns in the middle suburbs, where Labor was hammered, and where they lost government.

Obviously resources are always limited and the Labor Party had to decide where to prioritise its spending. If, as seems likely, the Labor Party thought it more important to defeat the Greens in the inner city than to ward off the Liberals in the middle suburbs this strategy was an absolute failure in both those aims. The first preference votes show it was not the money that saved them in Brunswick but Liberal preferences. These are preferences that are unlikely to be changed by Labor advertising, as to be a Liberal in Brunswick must require a particularly solid loyalty to the Liberal faith. This loyalty is evidenced by the relatively disciplined march of preferences away from the Greens in 2010 compared to 2006. No number of billboards will change those voters' minds.

The sad reality for Labor is that had they spent the money they wasted in Brunswick (and I assume likewise the other four inner city seats) in the middle suburban seats that were clearly pissed by the government's ignoring their problems the Labor Party might still be in power.

But Labor couldn't do that, because it was too wrapped up fighting a perceived enemy in the inner city, and ignoring the middle suburbs. Their election loss is itself a neat summation of their government's failure.

Of course, hindsight is easier. But even before the Liberals announced their decision to put the Greens last the Labor Party was wrong to fight so expensively in Brunswick. If the Liberals had not put the Greens last Labor may indeed have lost a number of inner city seats to the Greens. But they would have had a better chance in the middle suburbs they subsequently lost. Had they held some of these seats the result could have been either a returned Labor government or a minority Labor government with Greens holding the balance of power. The Greens would have supported a minority Labor government because if they didn't they would be crucified at the next election.

In the end the Liberal decision to put the Greens last, because it came so late in the campaign, nullified this possibility. But only because by that time Labor had already spent itself fighting a series of battles it didn't need to fight, and thus losing the bigger battles it really needed to win.

Source for voting numbers is the Victorian Electoral Commission website.

Senator Milne's Motion 17th Nov 2010

This is from p62 of the Senate Hansard from yesterday. You can find the full Hansard here:

http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/hanssen.htm

This is the text of a motion Senator Milne (Greens) wishes to put to the Senate. It is a clear example of the hypocrisy of the ALP when it comes to the environment, and of their cynical manipulation of the electorate through base propaganda.

"Senator Milne to move on the next day of sitting:

That the Senate—

(a) notes:

(i) that the planned Wandoan coal mine in Queensland

would, at its peak coal production, contribute

the equivalent of 0.17 per cent of total global

emissions according to Xstrata's own numbers,

(ii) that approximately 108 of the 186 world nations

have annual domestic emissions less than what

will result from this single mine each year,

(iii) that the emissions from burning this coal would

neither be affected by a domestic carbon price nor

be relevant to the mine's assessment under the Environment

Protection and Biodiversity Conservation

Act 1999 (the Act),

(iv) the statement by the Prime Minister on 17 November

2010 that 'it is up to this generation of

people and the generations coming up fast behind

it to take the action necessary to tackle climate

change', and

(v) the hypocrisy of approving new coal mines while

arguing that climate change is real and urgent; and

(b) calls on the Government to give itself the power to

stop such hugely polluting developments by introducing

a long-promised greenhouse trigger into the Act."

Short thesis summary: Government regulation of the private sector in Australia.

This is an extremely shortened version of the thesis proposal that was accepted. It is meant only as a basic summary.

Introduction

This thesis will analyse the growth and decline of that part of the international education industry aligned to the migration desires of its students to investigate ways in which governments go about creating regulatory and legislative frameworks to encourage and guide commercial activity in the furtherance of social aims while operating in a global economy.

Governance, Globalisation and Education:

Since the late 20^th Century the process of framing legislative and regulatory conditions to foster commercial activity in the furtherance of the social aims of a singular polity has become more difficult for a number of reasons, and particularly in the new service sectors. The rapid development of technology as driver and result of globalisation has meant that commercial entities in the services sectors are particularly nimble in creating systems to capture opportunities across individual polities as opportunities arise. In education, this has lead to conflict between the inherently national interests of single states and the international interests and capabilities of commercial entities and markets.

Farrell (2003) notes the anxiety about international trade in education services that arises in the national perspective held by singular polities:

There is concern among national education authorities over whether greater openness to trade in international education services through the GATS mechanism of the WTO represents a threat to the nature of education as a public good. (Farell 2003, p. 244)

While he notes that:

International education has grown rapidly over the last decade, driven by technological change and a growing demand for increasingly specialised education and training in developed countries. (Farell 2003, p. 247)

He also notes that individual polities generally sense that internationalisation can potentially present a threat to their own interests:

Most barriers to trade in services take the form of domestic regulations. In the area of education services, typical stated objectives of the regulations in place are to promote or protect culture and national traditions, as well as to provide training and education for consumers. (Farell 2003, p.247)

The enduring sovereignty of governments over different specific regional areas means regulatory changes in one polity, and in the interests of one polity, will impact upon the nature and scope of the commercial activity within that polity. But because of the international nature of commercial activities, government regulation in one polity can also change commercial activity in other polities, which can in turn have varying effects on the people of that other polity. The gap then between the capabilities of commercial entities to capture opportunities and government capabilities to create regulatory frameworks designed to foster or guide commercial activities has both national and international ramifications, while the polities themselves generally only feel accountable to the people who make up the individual polity. At the same time, the commercial entities themselves are becoming faster, more effective, and more integral to the provision of services nationally and internationally.

Along with the considerable level of unease about the effects of globalisation, particularly on higher education (Yang 2003), there has grown an understanding that globalisation may require a new way of thinking about the role of the state, or the way the state goes about playing its role:

While the problems of orthodox economic liberalism have become increasingly apparent, it is also evident that older orthodoxies that placed the state in a dominating economic role are not viable. (MacEwan 1999, p. 3)

This disconnect between the international capabilities of commercial entities and the national interests of singular polities creates great complexity around regulation when individual governments seek to design regulatory systems aimed at utilising commercial activity to further social aims:

Over-regulation can be as damaging, and even more damaging, as under regulation, especially in the new services sectors, where the dynamics of technological change and convergence between sectors make it particularly hard to regulate in a timely manner. Regulation has to be flexible enough not to stifle development . . . Regulators need to understand the consequences of the regimes and regulatory structures that they have erected. The political economy approach to regulation needs to define major interest groups engaged in regulatory rent-seeking, while the public interest approach is aimed at correcting various market failure situations. (Findlay & Sidorenko 2003, p. 3)

Concern about this is not necessarily new. Grant (1997), says:

The development of economic globalisation has not been counter-balanced by the development of appropriate mechanisms of governance. The 1980s [!!] have seen an accelerating process of economic globalisation, but a relatively limited development of political structures that can regulate this process . . . International firms create the need for improved international governance, but they do not and cannot provide it. (Grant 1997, p. 319)

Rogers Hollingsworth and Boyer (1997) have noted:

The old but pervasive dichotomy between states and markets has to be discarded, to be replaced by a broader array of institutional arrangements, which mix in varying degree the pursuit of individual self interest and social obligations, relations among equals, and power symmetries. . . Because each type of institutional arrangement simultaneously exhibits strengths and weaknesses, its performance and viability depends on the precise context and configurations of interests within which it is embedded. No single institution can pretend to have universal or eternal superiority – even such a celebrated institution as the invisible hand of the market. . . In the real world, any economy consists of a combination of institutional arrangements, all of which complement each other and thus acquire some efficiency. No institutional configuration can simply be borrowed and implemented in any given social setting. Institutional arrangements evolve according to a distinct logic within each society . . . Institutions are not static entities defined once and for all, but they continuously respond to changing contexts and emerging structural crises. This is of special importance, given the present transformation occurring in social systems of production and the changing status of sub-national regions, nation-states, and the world economy. (Rogers Hollingsworth & Boyer 1997, p. 53)

Governments are thus faced with the task of creating regulatory regimes that attempt to control or guide commercial activity but can generally only do so for spaces within their borders, while at the same time entities involved in commercial activity are becoming increasingly transnational either in themselves or through networks of entities.

Commercial and governmental organisations in the end fundamentally rely on each other, the one in order to pursue its commercial interests and the other to build the very polity it seeks to govern. The continuing acceptance of the sovereignty of governments means their ability to have populations and commercial entities generally obey their legislative and regulatory regimes will continue, but the increasing internationalisation of commercial activity means these regulations will need to be designed and implemented in ways that understand their effects and can in practice optimise social advantages through guiding and leveraging the increasing technological and international abilities of commercial entities. As this process of internationalisation and technological change continues, the way government goes about regulating may also need to change, and this thesis explores this issue.

The creation of the Education-Migration pathway as a case study in Government intervention in markets in a globalised economy:

The history of the creation and closure of the education-migration pathway provides a very useful and vivid example of governments designing legislative frameworks that foster commercial growth in order to achieve social aims. In addition, it is an example of governments doing so in an area of activity known to be highly globalised. Indeed one might even say that because it is to do with migration it is definitively globalised.

Governments in Australia have a long history of facilitating opportunities for commercial growth as a means of furthering social aims (Wells, 1989). The forms of these opportunities have varied from directly funded incentives such as the old assisted passage or the modern funded traineeships, to the deliberate construction of legislative and regulatory frameworks designed to advantage (or disadvantage) various modes of commercial activity.

In the late 1990's there was a widely held view that Australia was suffering from a skills shortage (DEST, 2002). Though there is some debate about the veracity of claims regarding the extent of the shortage (Mitchell & Quirk 2005), the perception in government that the skills shortage did exist was strong (Birrell, Hawthorne & Richardson, 2006, p.10).

One of the strategies adopted by the Commonwealth to ameliorate the effects of the skills shortage was to create a new skilled migration pathway for international students studying in Australia. This pathway required prospective migrants to become qualified, in Australia, in any of a number of specific trades.

Australia obviously has a long history of immigration, and so a long history of governmental regulation of immigration. The idea of international students happening to subsequently become skilled migrants is not in itself a new idea, but the creation of a specific pathway for this stream of skilled migrants, for the fulfilment of specific skill needs and thus social aims, was new, and held several key advantages. Ziguras and Siew-Fang Law (2006) nominated four:

First, they [international students who subsequently become skilled migrants] increase the recruiting country's pool of highly trained workers, who are increasingly important for economic development. Second, most economically developed societies have low birth rates and ageing populations, and recruiting young people who are at the beginning of their working lives helps to sustain the number of working-age adults needed to support the growing pool of retired elderly. Third, graduates of the recruiting country's own tertiary institutions are more readily employed than foreign graduates. Fourth, the prospect of migration gives some countries a marketing advantage in recruiting fee-paying international students, which is particularly significant in countries in which education is a major export industry. (Ziguras & Siew-Fang Law, 2006, pp59-76)

For parts of the private sector of international education in Australia a number of factors were aligning. Providers who were able to effectively bring together the large demand for the ability to migrate to Australia with the new pathways enabling people to do so, would benefit.

At the same time, advances in technology made possible the creation of new processing systems, both commercial and governmental, that meant the procedure for prospective migrants applying for student visas and enrolling in registered courses became significantly less burdensome in terms of time and money. Also, the rapid rise of the middle classes in India and China, along with the spread of better ICT and financial instruments in those countries, meant the number of people with both a desire to come to Australia and the means to do so was increasing (Das, G 2002).

In terms of achieving the social aim of increasing the number of prospective migrants using this new pathway, the scheme worked. In 2001-02 the number of onshore applicants who nominated their occupation as Cook or Hairdresser was 70. In 2004-2005 it was 470 (Birrell, Hawthorne & Richardson, 2006, p.15). In 2007 - 2008 more than 5,000 skilled migration visas for Cooks and Hairdressers were granted, and in 2010 there are currently 17,594 valid applications made by people nominating their occupation as Cook or Hairdresser (House of Representatives, 2010).

However, this astonishing success in terms of numbers of people attempting to access this migration pathway brought with it a number of problems. Not the least is the plain number problem that while the Commonwealth is issuing 61,500 skilled visas in the 2010 budget year, there are already over 147,000 applicants for skilled migration awaiting a decision on their application, the vast majority of whom are graduated international students (House of Representatives, 2010).

The Commonwealth government has been acutely aware of this problem for some time, and has progressively changed the requirements for onshore skilled migration applicants since 2008. The cumulative effect of these changes is to close the pathway previously created. This has resulted in a number of social ramifications that were perhaps unseen and even unseeable at the time the legislative framework was implemented (Maley, 2010), (Bachelard, 2010).

While the program itself may be regarded positively or negatively depending on the varying ethical schemas one might apply, this thesis seeks to explore the ways in which the creation and closing of the program illuminates issues around how governments might go about regulating commercial activity in the new globalised world across the broad spectrum of attempts to achieve social aims by fostering commercial activity.

Australia, House of Representatives, 26th May 2010, Hansard (Laurie Ferguson, MP Reid)

Bachelard, M (2010, 6th June) 'Student Drop Hits Economy', The Age

Birrell, B, Hawthorne, L and Richardson, S. 2006, Evaluation of the General Skilled Migration Categories, Dept of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Canberra

Das, G, 2004 India Unbound: the social and economic revolution from independence to the global information age, Anchor Books, New York

DEST, 2002 ' Nature and Causes of Skills Shortages', Reflections from the Commonwealth National Industry Skills Initiative Working Groups, DEST, Canberra

Farrell, R 2003, 'Barriers to trade in education services', in A Siderenko and C Findlay (eds.), Regulation and Market Access, Asia Pacific Press, Australia, pp. 244 - 277.

Findlay & Sidorenko 2003 (eds.) Regulation and Market Access, Asia Pacific Press, Australia, p3.

Grant, W 1997 ' Perspectives on Globalization and Economic Coordination' in J Rogers Hollingsworth and R Boyer (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 319 - 336

MacEwan, A 1999 Neo-Liberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets and Alternatives for the 21st Century, Zed Book, London

Maley, P (2010, 17th of May) 'Hairdressers out as migrant skills list gets a trim' The Australian

Mitchell, W & Quirk, V 2005, Skills shortages in Australia: concepts and reality, Centre of Full Employment and Equity, University of Newcastle, Australia

Rogers Hollingsworth, J & Boyer R 1997 'The variety of institutional arrangements and their complementarity in modern economies', in J Rogers Hollingsworth and R Boyer (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 49 - 54

Yang, R 'Globalisation and Higher Education Development: A Critical Analysis', International Review of Education, 2003 pp. 269 - 291.

Wells, A 1989, Constructing Capitalism. An economic history of eastern Australia, 1788-1901, Allen and Unwin, Sydney

Ziguras, C and Siew-Fang Law 2006, Recruiting international students as skilled migrants: the global 'skills race' as viewed from Australia and Malaysia in Globalisation, Societies and Education Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 59–76

The Independents' Long Weekend

Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Life throws us moral quandaries, and Oakeshott and Windsor (O&W) are certainly in the middle of one now. I can not speculate re Katter because I can not imagine what penguins slip around that man's brain and also because I have a history with him which I can not go into right now but in summary involved a heated argument and physical contact at about 3am at a hot dog stand in Canberra about fifteen years ago.

But I will be very interested to see how O&W go. In essence they have to decide between their jobs and their consciences. If they support Gillard they will almost certainly be thrown from Parliament at the next election. If they support Abbott they will need to convince themselves in some way that he is not the whacko nutjob they both know he is. They have been waiting two weeks for the Liberal party to convince their consciences that it would be ok to support Abbott, and for two weeks the Liberals have fluffed the opportunity.

The constituents of their seats are as anti-Labor as Adam Bandt's Melbourne constituents are anti-Liberal. If you can for a second imagine what would happen to the Green vote at the next election if Bandt had supported the Liberals, then you must understand that the same rapid evaporation of support will follow for O&W if they support Labor.

The problem is O&W are more politically engaged than their constituents. While they obviously understand they have a duty to represent the views of their electorates, they concurrently realise better than their constituents what a fruitloop Abbott really is. The most morally smooth way out for them would be if they could be convinced (or even just find an excuse to justify the belief that) Abbott is not going to be such an absolute baboon in office and that therefore O&W, as rational, experienced, non-fruitloop human beings could possibly countenance supporting him. Unfortunately for them the Liberals have not been able to provide the necessary lubricant to make this intellectual and moral transition viable for a thinking person.

And this is sharp in the souls of O&W because they must be imagining the counter-scenario. If they support Gillard they will be deluged with blame for every Labor pinko policy that comes out. And be sure of this - someone in their electorates will call every Labor policy pinko-commie rubbish. And also be sure of this - that being called something is often the same as being something in politics. The facts don't matter. What does matter is the being-together-with-a-common-enemy. In their electorates the common enemy is Labor. If the independents support Labor, they are joining the common enemy.

The National Party would have a field day. They would heap curse and blame upon the independents who have stolen their votes. They would seek to rebuild legitimacy by doing this. It would be very ugly indeed, but providing the electorate with a figure of hate upon which they can heap the blame for everything the government says and does will not be a tactic that fails to draw support in their seats. O&W, of all people, know this already.

The Coalition knows it has lost the intellectual argument over who would be better to run the country. That's why they have switched to their red-baiting tactics today. It is an appeal directly to the constituents of O&W, and a very clear reminder to O&W that they will lose their seats if they support Labor.

It is also by default an admission that when the conservatives present their arguments in detail to people who have the time and intelligence to understand and judge their arguments, their arguments fail dismally. All they can do now is pander to the base prejudices of the constituents and by that appeal to the base instinct of O&W for political survival, and hope that trumps any conclusions O&W may have come to through rational thinking.

Lastly, there is the Parliament itself. Eventually Julia will almost certainly ask Quentin for permission to try to form a government. On the floor the conservatives will then put up a motion of no confidence. The independents will then be put solidly on the spot to support one or the other. If they support Julia they will be signing their own political death warrants. If they support Tony they will be betraying their own consciences.

That will be an interesting moment.

What they are not mentioning about immigration.

If you are under the impression that lowering skilled immigration to around 180,000 per year will result in our population being less than 36 million in 2050 you're wrong. The numbers both parties are using come from the Intergenerational Report 2010 (IGR). That report says that if we increase skilled immigration to 180,000 per annum we should reach 36 million by 2050. Opposition Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison actually acknowledged this in the initial immigration debate on the ABC. But somehow, in the general spin of an election campaign the message of the IGR got twisted into almost its exact opposite.

The IGR is also quite clear in showing that if its predictions are right, even this level of immigration will not necessarily ameliorate the effects of the problem the IGR was set up to look at in the first case. That is, the problem of Australia's ageing population.

Using migration and total population estimates from the IGR while failing to realise the framework problems the IGR is actually reporting on gives the electorate only half the story. The small half of the story.

The big part of the story is that even if we keep up that level of skilled migration, by 2050 there will be only 2.7 working aged people to every person aged over 65. Today there are 5 working aged people per aged person. And in 1970 there were 7.5 working aged people per aged person.

This is the reality that underpins our population problems. We need more people in order to support our ageing population, yet we are unwilling to accept more people if that means more congestion and further harm to our natural environment.

But unless we can more than double the productivity of every working aged person by 2050 we really have no choice other than to grow the population.

Of course, we could figure out some way of removing more old people. Labor have gone somewhat down this path by simply raising the retirement age for anyone who is currently under 52. But even this measure, implemented between 2017 and 2023, will not give us anything like the space we need to solve the problem.

It is also worth noting that we are not alone in this. Most of the Western World faces similar problems with an ageing population. This means the people we bring into the country to fill the gap will almost certainly come from China, India and South East Asia. Recent changes to migration rules are not doing anything toward making us a more attractive, or even viable, destination for people from these regions.

But in the medium term we must engage with these people. It is also in our long-term interest to design and implement a steady and predictable migration program, not one that changes with the short term election cycles as its primary motivation. The sooner we start bringing these people in, the longer their communities will have to assimilate and settle into the broader Australian community.

We also need the time to build infrastructure, and avoid the environmental impacts of having more people here.

The problem then is not about if we want to have a population of 36 million in 2050, but how we can reach that number while preserving our natural environment, providing adequate infrastructure and, while we're at it, doubling the productivity of the people. That is a challenge. Pretending to simplify this problem to mere number trading and racial dog-whistling does the electorate no service.

On Emotions

First up, to even use the term 'emotion' is to perch barefoot and precarious upon a stalagmite that has beguiled philosophy for millennia. From Plato's Forms to Russell's Paradox about classes and to modern versions of 'qualia' that problem is about the idea that there is a thing, and then there is the idea of a thing. 'Emotion' is not itself an emotion. Modern philosophy continues to do good work on objects and ideas like 'table', 'The King of France', 'red', 'word', 'meaning', and even 'goat'; but emotion and words like 'happiness', 'regret' or 'impatience' have not received anywhere near the amount of serious attention as word relations and meanings like 'red', 'bat', or 'meaning'.

Emotions are different to things in two ways. Firstly, they are considered to be existentially different things to physical things. Secondly, they attract different judgements than do things.

But even regarding the first, there is considerable room for overlap about the way emotions and things are considered to be different things. For example, the emotion 'disgruntled' is not considered to exist in the same way as this computer, and that difference is largely to do with the perceived physicality of the different things. The computer is hard-sided and exists in space, while 'disgruntled' does not seem to have any edges, and exists not-in-space, and comes and goes, while the computer seems to obtain a certain permanency by its separate physical existence.

Yet actually the 'computer'-ness of this intricately arranged mess of plastic and wires is like an emotion I seep through the physicality of those bits and pieces that make up the computer in front of me. And the 'computer'-ness of these bits and pieces is transient. One day this computer will come apart and be a less usefully coherent tangle of wires and green boards. Being a 'computer' is the transient 'emotion' I impose on all those bits and pieces at the moment.

My 'disgruntle', while not apparently physically separate from me, has some advantages in existence not held by basic physical objects. It moves around with me. When I turn away from the computer I no longer see the computer, but my disgruntle is with me whichever way I turn. Not many physical objects have this ability to exist wherever I am, regardless of where I look (except my body itself). In this sense 'disgruntles's' existence could be more 'real' than the physical existence of the computer. Taking the analogy one step further, perhaps just as 'computer' is like the 'emotion' that defines and creates something out of the bits and pieces in front of me, perhaps the emotions I have running through the wobblier mass of my organic existence are just the same – a creating and defining set of characteristics that go toward me being. Disgruntled (or 'Human') does exist in space after all: it is to my flesh as computer is to the plastic bits in front of me. One day my body will cease to be in its current form and my disgruntled-ness will cease to happen to it, just as 'computer'-ness will cease to happen to the computer once it falls apart. After all, my body predates my consciousness and will continue to exist for some time once my consciousness ceases. I remember Joel Marks writing about this somewhere.

The point is that drawing a simple line between things and emotions and saying the difference is somehow in the existential differences between these two phenomena is problematic to say the least. Perhaps happiness happens to me in the same way as 'apple' happens to that roundish red thing over there.

But it is true that things and emotions attract judgements in different ways. We might say that table is 'bad', but what we really mean is that it does not conform with the way we wish the table to be. We don't mean the table is evil, or somehow morally delinquent. Nor do we call a table 'mopey' or 'bored'. Of the two things, we are more likely to make normative (in the ethics sense) judgements about emotions than about things. Strictly speaking, saying a table is bad is an understandable kind of non-ethical normative statement, but the crux here is that it is non-ethical. But once we understand the murkiness around the idea that emotions are non-things, as argued above, it can also seem sometimes uncomfortable to make ethically normative statements about emotions.

For example, most people would probably agree with a general statement like: 'Happiness is good'.

For me this is a pretty difficult statement to come to grips with. Firstly, there is no consensus about what 'happiness' actually means. And if we can't agree on what it is, we can hardly go adding normative descriptors to it and expecting agreement. Secondly, what does 'good' mean here? It could mean morally good, or it could just mean that it somehow feels good. Often there is a conflation of these two senses of good when it comes to feeling, well, good. Some are perhaps more comfortable with this conflation (see John Stuart Mill as an example) than others (see entire history of Catholicism as example). My point is that from an analytic point of view this conflation is probably epistemically unnecessary, even if it is morally twisty.

Of course one could theoretically necessitate 'good' with 'happiness' in a kind of Kripkean meaning-shackle, that is, define one as being necessary for the other's existence. But this would require us to either decouple normative ethical concerns from the term 'good', or else submerge all normative ethical concerns into the idea of happiness.

That is, we can either have meaningful statements like 'It's sometimes bad to be happy', or we can not. If we can that's cool, but we then have to reject the statement that 'It's good to be happy'. But if we can not have bad happiness, if we can only say 'It's good to be happy'; then (so long as we grant that sometimes people can feel good and happy about doing morally wrong things) we have to allow for there to be instances when good does not equal ethical righteousness, or else we have to define happiness as being in itself an ethically righteous thing to be, or define happy as being itself ethical righteousness, regardless of other conditions.

And that is just too slippery for me.

We know there is something that happens physically when someone says truthfully that they are happy. And if you were to concurrently ask that truthful person if they feel good, they will almost certainly answer in the affirmative. But I would posit that they are merely repeating themselves when they do so, and not taking into their sphere of current experience any ethically normative concern outside of the idea that it feels good to feel happy. They feel good, they feel happy. The person means the same thing, but they do not necessarily mean (intentionally or not) that it is good (ethically) to feel happy.

This is just an example, and it obviously revolves around the duplicitous nature of the word 'good'. But you will find that this problem occurs with many emotion words. The problem arises because we are treating emotion words, and emotions, as something other than objects. We seem to wish them a position on a ladder of meaning that we do not wish upon physical objects. We require that 'happiness' or 'boredom' have some non-physical ideal relation to a matrix of ethical or religious or philosophical ideology. This in effect treats emotions similarly to the way philosophers used to treat 'meanings', and yes I am thinking of early Wittgenstein here. It leads to similar contradictions, and yes I am thinking of Russell and of later Wittgenstein here.

Instead, we need to free emotions of their 'meanings'. It is neither 'good', nor 'bad', to feel happy. Or better: 'goodness' or 'badness' has nothing to do with 'happiness'. There is no necessary connection between good and happy, or sad and bad. Sometimes you will be happy. Sometimes you will be sad. These need no more than that in order to exist.

Thinking that they do, and saddling them and us with ideologically fraught value judgements merely confuses the issue of meaning, and causes all sorts of grief in many ways. And that's bad.