Comments on: Australia’s least cynical weekend?

By: pommygranate

pommygranate — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 08:09:22 +0000

Chris – i posted on the similar topic before i had seen your article.

By: Jim Fryar

Jim Fryar — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:14:52 +0000

Good one Fleeced; I dont tend to go over to Catallaxy much, but the comments on the idea of a bill of rights is valid.

By: Fleeced

Fleeced — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:13:07 +0000

Bolt has some good stuff to say about it. I like his conclusion:

The summit was always likely to encourage people to think government was the answer - which is the reflex of the Left. And indeed, the vast majority of ideas assumed exactly that - that the answer was more government money, more laws, more quangos, more bureaucracies. Rudd, our Chief Bureaucrat, has triumphed.

There's also a thread going at Catallaxy

By: DavidLeyonhjelm

DavidLeyonhjelm — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:08:02 +0000

I agree the policies being trotted out in this exercise are both predictable and based on discredited assumptions. I similarly doubt any of them will be taken seriously – the Labor Party has been hearing them for a long time. The “public intellectuals”, left/progressives to a (wo)man, are merely excited because they have a new forum.

Perhaps I am being a Pollyanna, but I don’t think that makes the exercise a complete sham. The process itself may have the positive effect of encouraging people to believe they could (if they wish) engage with the government. That’s important, whatever the size of the government.

The smarties who blog hear already know they can make themselves heard at a political level. But I know many people who are quite disengaged from government and consider themselves utterly powerless.

From the perspective of the LDP that is a problem. We need people to believe their opinion counts, and to be searching for a way to be heard. They won’t get a chance at the summit and in any case won’t have a high opinion of most of its participants. But the fact it occurred may make them recognise that it’s possible to be heard. Even if it only makes them think more carefully about how to vote, it won’t hurt.

I suspect a cost-benefit assessment might show there are plenty of cheaper ways to achieve such an outcome, but I’ll leave that to the economists.

By: John Greenfield

John Greenfield — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:39:29 +0000

Every single word that came out of the mouthy of these participants was about signing some toothless motherhood statement cooked by African tinpot dictators and Islamofascist nutters (tragically the same intellectual source of most the Aboriginal Industry hawkers) or the government handing over huge chunks of money to ghettoised “cultural identity” interests. I hate to sound like my grandfather but none of them seem even remotely concerned with “where’s the money coming from?”

By: John Hasenkam

John Hasenkam — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:38:03 +0000

Cynicism is a euphemism for realism. Seeing things the way they really are, instead of the way we’d like them to be.

*Hans Selye

He was a pioneer in endocrinology. Brilliant.

——

Did anyone notice the way Rudd referred to Peter Garrett during his closing speech? I got the distinct impression there was some antagonism there. Anyone else sense that?

By: Fleeced

Fleeced — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:00:51 +0000

Yes… I often hear people complain that “people are so cynical these days” – but a healthy cynicism is a good thing. I’m surprised to see the number of people who have fallen for this con – not just people I would normally deride as “lefties.”

Clearly, people aren’t cynical enough… or perhaps they’re cynical about the wrong things (namely, the notion that individuals can’t be trusted to do the right thing, but if you centralise everything, it will make it all better)

Most of the ideas are, predictably, about controlling people – getting them to make the “right” choices. Parliamentary quotas for indigenous; a “junk food” tax; ban smoking; subsidising the arts, and on it goes.

I was initially surprised to read that they’d suggested tax reform, until I read further on the reforms they had in mind.