Uncle Albert's Cafe and Ǽ-Theory Bistro

Surely the key ( current ) question is what else is going on now? These are people with the vaguest of boundaries on their behaviour. This sort of rubbish is one reason why I've never bothered with superannuation - it's a wing and a prayer, basically a long term bet on the honesty of strangers with a large bag of my money. The concept ( DownUnda at least ) of Federal Government supervision has simply turned out to be an expansion of the set of strangers. Presently the super payouts for those retiring now are largely funded by those paying in now, and not on increase in net worth of the funds paid in earlier by said retirees. It's just a fancy rotating debt queue, a modern day Pot O' Gold At The End Of The Rainbow myth, without any essential benefit to those outside the superannuation industry's management .....

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) The power of words. It's amazing how many people I've met think that 'super' is a special type of improved investment, like 'supercharged'. Very few realise that there is no requirement ( that one can litigate against ) for the repayment of any funds whatsoever.

What happens when you teach monkeys to use money..

Laurie Santos (Primate Psychologist) gives an interesting TED Talk on

How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality

Edit: If you have Loss most times it is better to suck it up than to make it up..

Well, have a government DownUnda! A minority one. An inevitable outcome really, as the Labor side was always bound to woo the independents harder. They had more face to loose, particularly having brought the first woman to the top job over a party room knifing. Mr Abbott has always been a harder character ( I've met him - a real baby faced assassin ), so I guess he didn't bend enough towards the minority pleadings. Probably won't matter much in any case, our problem for the last four to five decades has always been the Senate scuttling the plans of whoever holds power in the lower house. Mining money has been leaving the country all year, the overseas money will retract from the local markets as per prior left-wing wins. We lost sovereign power with ownership a generation or two ago, and have been living off the proceeds since. All that remains is to argue with our government about how they spend our taxes. I'll give it six months tops .... maybe if we could have an odd number of electorates, life will be simpler in the future.

Cheers, Mike.

You may not have to hold your breath on that yet. :-)

It looks like the Gillard crew have promised some 10 billion dollars ( of our money ) in order to bribe the independents ( ahem .... take their minds on policy direction ), which works out to about three billion per compliant vote. No wonder the Abbott side lucked out at only 1 billion each, the joke is that the Tasmanian guy who knocked him back said he thought Tony was bribing him !!! Shameless spin, come on in. On the upside Labor and the Greens have formed a 'coalition' ie. one (1) Green and seventy odd Labor. Since the Greens have rarely voted down Labor legislation in the last 20 years, nor supported conservatives, then this simply means they are subduing the pretense of appearing to be 'different' parties.

The greater challenge for Julia is holding down each and every backbencher, with which she doesn't have signed agreements, much less combat the opposition ( this is a chronic Labor side problem, the worst enemies are always within ). At least twenty are sitting in close margin electorates where nine out of ten Labor voters did not direct preference votes to the Greens - and a poll late last week of these electorates showed some 75% want a return to the polling booth. And there are recent examples where breaking away from a party isn't necessarily a career killer. Tony Abbott will probably have to rethink policy ( or the selling of it ) because he didn't make it over the line in the presence of a government that was well on the nose. Like many elections there are many more ways of going wrong than right, budgie smugglers aside. I hate to say it, because it makes us all look pretty dumb DownUnda, but I think Tony would have run much better as a female.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) A preference vote is a number against another candidate's box, after the 1 you put in for your preferred choice. So if you have 6 candidates, say, a valid vote ( amongst other criteria ) is that all boxes on the paper have some sequence of the numbers 1 through 6, each aside one candidate. A voter must use all numbers, you can't vote against any candidate, you have to vote for all six candidates but in some personally chosen order. 1 is best, down to 6 is least. If less than 50 % of primary votes ( the number 1's ) is achieved for the highest primary vote candidate then you discard the candidate with the least primary votes and the look at his/her ballots. They are now out of the race, but the next preference is examined ( the number 2's ) on those ballots and distributed accordingly to the remaining 5 candidates. Has the most primary&secondary voted candidate reached 50%? If yes - you declare a winner. If no - then take the least voted remaining candidate, which you now exclude from winning, but look at his/her third preferences now ( so the 3's ) and distribute .... looking whether the most primary&secondary&tertiary voted candidate exceeded 50% etc. So overall the preference votes get examined from the least favoured candidates first and on upwards through successive cuts in the field of candidates. I simply used an initial field of six, which it typically is about that for most electorates. Obviously if you only have one nomination you declare the seat without a ballot ( it's never happened ). If you start with only two what happens? ( yes, it would be an interesting case as the second preferences for one candidate have to go to the other or the vote isn't valid - but the algorithm requires that you first exclude the other candidate, before examining the now irrelevant preferences, and declare a winner. Also you may reach the stage of still considering two candidates after all others have been excluded ... don't worry, huge volumes have been written about this preferential system. Which is why hardly anyone uses it. And why it costs several hundred million dollars to actually conduct a poll. )

At worst you'll get down to a two horse race, with four horses put aside but the ordered preferences launching forwards ( or not ) the remainder. So it would seem you wind up with the candidate being elected that 'most voters mostly wanted'. By comparison with the others. Or the 'non least preferred' perhaps. Apparently this system was to prevent tied electorates, from a time when populations were much smaller. You can still tie if there is an even number of valid votes and the preferences work out just right. When parties talk of 'directing preferences', and deals b/w parties before elections regarding this, then they mean a recommendation to voters on a party produced 'how to vote card' as to how to sequence the numbers against the candidates. So there is such a voting card per party/candidate for each electorate. As you walk toward a given voting booth one has to run the gamut of party workers who hand them out. As it is an offense to harass voters in any way, shape or form I use (a) the Thousand Yard Stare and (b) Short Expletives. They must withdraw from my person if their approach is not actively welcomed by me. In any case the how-to-vote cards are not binding on any voter in the least, but the tactic is to heavily rely on people's laziness, disinterest or footy team approach to voting ( I barrack for Collingwood and always will ). So how to vote wheeling and dealing is significant by default.

( edit ) We are notionally a compulsory voting nation. Allegedly a pittance fine in the breach, but I've never heard of a prosecution in my lifetime. In any case you don't actually have to vote, the minimum is to have your name marked on the roll as having voted and received a ballot paper. What you do with it after that ( but not by removing it from the polling station ) is up to you .... the classic example is from a referendum/plebiscite in Tasmania in the 1970's for dam construction, where the choices presented were site A, site B or site C. Some 80% wrote 'No dams' on the ballot. Technically each an invalid vote. No dams were built. Indeed the current Greens leader is Bob Brown, the guy that organised that protest vote then - the days of laying down in front of bulldozers.

( edit ) Whoops, my mistake. It was 9.9 billion $AUD for two votes .... and one key point in the independents' choice ( their words now ) was Labor's promise not to call for an electoral mandate if they got into difficulty. They disliked Mr Abbott's option of asking for a further mandate ( within the usual 4 years ) if he couldn't govern with the independents. In essence he said he couldn't/wouldn't necessarily trust them, and might ask the public to decide. They replied by saying he might win outright if he did that, and they did not want that. This was justified on the basis that they would represent their local constituents best by remaining in a position of influence ( as opposed to the irrelevancy that is traditional with non-aligned members ). And now we find out that that Labor got the least primary vote, the least on two party preferred ( ie after the above distributions ), and some 2.5% fewer votes country wide than the opposition. Oddly enough, Julia Gillard herself quoted these parameters ( on election night when it became clear the race would be close ) as being of moral weight/authority in any potential tie break. So the mathematical example mentioned some years ago ( an academic paper ) has now been demonstrated!

( edit ) Sorry to seem boring, but it's a fascinating business presently. At least our Governor General didn't need involvement. There are a few cases where she may have been called upon, as the 'Queens representative', to decide one or other path. However her son-in-law is a major Labor party power broker that is : a card carrying member who sits on significant party committees. So even if she could manage to be totally party neutral she would never be seen to be ..... mind you John Kerr was Gough Whitlam's appointment in the 70's and look what happened then. :-)

( edit ) It's not all bad ! Hey, I might take some of this : you can bet $5 to pay $9 on a fresh poll prior to January 1 ..... :-) :-)

Just to give you example who runs our country. Our prime minister is bureaucrat. The definition of a bureaucrat is to resist change and follow an ideology.

From Macleans
Clerics's address to DND scrubbed