#Australia – everything you never wanted to know about the IPA

Apologies to my international friends, this rant is predominantly for Australians.

The IPA has been on the news a lot lately, but I didn’t really know what the hell it was. Until just now. IPA stands for ‘Institute of Public Affairs’.

Sounds kind of official, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. The IPA is a Liberal Right Wing think tank/lobby group that believes it knows what’s best for Australia. Those views are set out in a boring document called ‘Be Like Gough’:

https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/ipa-review-articles/be-like-gough-75-radical-ideas-to-transform-australia

Right at the end, however, are 75 suggestions for how Australia should be changed. I have not altered those 75 suggestions in any way. I have simply highlighted the ones that shocked me the most. Read them for yourself:

Since writing this post, I’ve been tweeting the List on Twitter and someone kindly let me know that The List is now 100 strong. The following is now the updated 100:

1. Repeal the carbon tax, and don’t replace it. It will be one thing to remove the burden of the carbon tax from the Australian economy. But if it is just replaced by another costly scheme, most of the benefits will be undone.
2. Abolish the Department of Climate Change
3. Abolish the Clean Energy Fund
4. Repeal Section C of the Racial Discrimination Act
5. Abandon Australia’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council
6. Repeal the renewable energy target
7. Return income taxing powers to the states
8. Abolish the Commonwealth Grants Commission
9. Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
10. Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol
11. Introduce fee competition to Australian universities
12. Repeal the National Curriculum
13. Introduce competing private secondary school curriculums
14. Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)
15. Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be ‘balanced’
16. Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law
17. End local content requirements for Australian television stations
18. Eliminate family tax benefits
19. Abandon the paid parental leave scheme
20. Means-test Medicare
21. End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education
22. Introduce voluntary voting
23. End mandatory disclosures on political donations
24. End media blackout in final days of election campaigns
25. End public funding to political parties
26. Remove anti-dumping laws
27. Eliminate media ownership restrictions
28. Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board
29. Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency
30. Cease subsidising the car industry
31. Formalise a one-in, one-out approach to regulatory reduction
32. Rule out federal funding for  Commonwealth Games
33. Deregulate the parallel importation of books
34. End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws
35. Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP
36. Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit
37. Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database
38. Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food
39. Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities
40. Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools
41. Repeal the alcopops tax
42. Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including: a) Lower personal income tax for residents b) Significantly expanded Visa programs for workers c) Encourage the construction of dams
43. Repeal the mining tax
44. Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states
45. Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold
46. Cut company tax to an internationally competitive rate of 25 per cent
47. Cease funding the Australia Network
48. Privatise Australia Post
49. Privatise Medibank
50. Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function
51. Privatise SBS
52. Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784
53. Repeal the Fair Work Act
54. Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them
55. Encourage independent contracting by overturning new regulations designed to punish contractors
56. Abolish the Baby Bonus
57. Abolish the First Home Owners’ Grant
58. Allow the Northern Territory to become a state
59. Halve the size of the Coalition front bench from 32 to 16
60. Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade
61. Slash top public servant salaries to much lower international standards, like in the United States
62. End all public subsidies to sport and the arts
63. Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport
64. End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering
65. Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification
66. Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship
67. Means test tertiary student loans
68. Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement
69. Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built
70. End all government funded Nanny State advertising
71. Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling
72. Privatise the CSIRO
73. Defund Harmony Day
74. Close the Office for Youth
75. Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme
76. Have State Premiers appoint High Court justices
77. Allow ministers to be appointed from outside parliament
78. Extend the GST to cover all goods and services but return all extra revenue to taxpayers through cutting other taxes
79. Abolish the federal department of health and return health policy to the states
80. Abolish the federal department of education and return education policy to the states
81. Repeal any new mandatory data retention laws
82. Abolish the Australian Human Rights Commission
83. Have trade unions regulated like public companies, with ASIC responsible for their oversight
84. End all public funding to unions and employer associations
85. Repeal laws which protect unions from competition, such as the ‘conveniently belong’ rules in the Fair Work Act
86. Extend unrestricted work visas currently granted to New Zealand citizens to citizens of the United States
87. Negotiate and sign free trade agreements with Australia’s largest trading partners, including China, India, Japan and South Korea
88. Restore fundamental legal rights to all existing commonwealth legislation such as the right to silence and the presumption of innocence
89. Adhere to section (xxxi) of the Constitution by not taking or diminishing anyone’s property without proper compensation
90. Repeal legislative restrictions on the use of nuclear power
91. Allow full competition on all foreign air routes
92. Abolish the Medicare levy surcharge
93. Abolish the luxury car tax
94. Halve the number of days parliament sits to reduce the amount of legislation passed
95. Abolish Tourism Australia and cease subsidising the tourism industry
96. Make all government payments to external parties publicly available including the terms and conditions of those payments
97. Abandon plans to restrict foreign investment in Australia’s agricultural industry
98. Cease the practice of setting up government-funded lobby groups, such as YouMeUnity, which uses taxpayer funds to campaign to change the Australian Constitution
99. Rule out the introduction of mandatory pre-commitment for electronic gaming machines
100. Abolish the four pillars policy which prevents Australia’s major banks from merging

As you read through these 75 100 points, you may recognize some that have been accomplished already, while others, like the privatisation of the ABC, have only just been aired in public. Taken as whole, however, these suggestions are aimed at two things:

1. reducing or repealing anything that provides help or support to individuals, and
2. promoting changes that will allow private industry to do whatever the hell it wants.

That, my friends, is not, and never has been, the Australian way. We don’t let people sink or swim on their own. We don’t put shareholder dividends above the well-being of the people, and we don’t believe corporations will do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts. We made it through the Global Financial Crisis [GFC]so well precisely because our financial institutions were regulated and couldn’t do whatever they wanted.

This all boils down to trust. The IPA seems to trust the Robber Barons. Who do you trust?

Meeka

For further reading go to:

https://thesnipertakesaim.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/ipa-agenda-to-re-shape-australia/

The article is written by Barry Tucker and it’s thought provoking to say the least.

 

Natural language processing – or the future of chatbots

Natural language is what we humans use with each other, and it is not always logical and straightforward. That is why we have had to learn to rephrase our queries so Papa Google knows what we mean.

But most people don’t know how to search effectively because they are still stuck in natural language. Hence the rise of chatbots.

For now, chatbots are stupid, irritating pieces of code that work by leading us through a long, tedious process of questions and answers. If this article is right, however, chatbots of the future will use natural language processing [NLP] to work out what we want, and give it to us with the minimum of fuss and bother [on our part]. Machines getting smarter? Or humans dumbing down?

Meeks

 

Chatbots don’t quite understand us yet. We speak and they process our commands. In a chatbot like Yahoo Weather, you ask about the forecast in Seattle and the bot returns an answer. Natural Language Processing or NLP can read what you say and interpret some meaning. You don’t want to know the current temp in…

via Pat.ai chat technology is a step in the right direction — VentureBeat