There’s this lady in AMERICA, we guess, who boasts One-hundred and 74 thousand bored loney cyber-sucks – whom she gaily INFLUENCES..

“I have always believed — as most mothers do — that the first three years of a child’s life are absolutely crucial. And now or rather, and again, neuroscience and child psychology confirm what our instincts already told us: young children need consistent, loving care from their mothers in those early years to develop emotionally and neurologically. This isn’t sentiment — it’s science.

“So why do we have a system that forces mothers to walk away from their babies before they’re ready?

“Everywhere you turn, politicians and pundits talk about the “childcare crisis.” But what they really mean is a labour crisis — not enough adults in the workforce. Their solution? Push more mothers into full-time employment and expand state-funded daycare. It doesn’t matter whether the mother wants to return to work, or whether the child is ready. It doesn’t matter whether the job is fulfilling or soul-destroying. What matters, to them, is productivity.”

open.substack.com/pub/kelliejay/…

John Blundell

•The dude dumb enough to believe on Satirday 20th May 1992 that western liberal democratic society was actually not a monstrous ‘glow-ball’ investment & Accountancy-house fraud guaranteeing ecological meltdown, preposterous educational, technical, philosophic and moral (ex Austrian priest Ivan Illich-read & predicted deskilling (dumbdown) of 1971 and permanent real-estate investment development warfare was me.

•A philosophic & ideologic Maimonidean

•Neurocognitive health & birth through death educational reform

•I do the formatting

•You all STFU & get busy

“The Economic Ideas that Guide the Hands (paraphrase, Young-people)”

MICHAEL STUTCHBURY

Nov 29, 1990 – 11.00am

JOHN Maynard Keynes wrote that the world was ruled by little else than the ideas of economists and political philosophers, be they right or wrong.

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” he suggested in his General Theory more than half a century ago.

[In Australia, the levers of economic power are still pulled by practical men (yes, men).] But these days, their hands are heavily guided by the powerful orthodoxy of contemporary economics and economists.

Many of the divisive political economy debates of the 1970s have been resolved in favour of the so-called rationalists: the ACTU agrees that wage blow-outs are bad for jobs; no-one today dares call for higher tariff protection; and no-one is now calling for Budget pump-priming to avoid recession.

The influence of economic rationalism has been extended further by the broad agenda of “microeconomic reform”, and Australia’s historic change of course during the 1980s to expose its protected industries to the discipline of world producer and finance markets.

It is symbolised by the rise of the econocrats, the economics-trained bureaucrats who have made major territorial gains through the Canberra Public Service in the past decade. Their world view is reinforced by the financial markets, the intellectual dominance of rationalist think-tanks and the opinion-makers in the up-market media, who subscribe to a similar orthodoxy.

[Although business pulls the levers and presses the buttons] which set the production lines going and the cash registers ticking, Canberra’s policy decisions influence the key prices and markets faced by the corporate sector: the price of money, the exchange rate, the degree of import competition, its debt-servicing costs, the buoyancy of the domestic market and so on.

And, in a relatively small economy dominated by oligopolies, Canberra’s regulatory framework literally guides the flow of billions of dollars in industries such as telecommunication, aviation, banking, superannuation, motor vehicles and broadcasting.

The rise of the econocrats affects all these areas and has paralleled the spread of rationalist economic criteria from the power centres of Treasury, Finance, Prime Minister & Cabinet and the offices of the key economic ministers, to departments primarily responsible for public policies ranging from education, training and transport to social welfare, immigration and telecommunications – just about every portfolio except defence.

According to one survey of Canberra’s senior executive service, more than half of the top bureaucrats can boast qualifications in economics, business or accounting.

Even the trade bureaucracy has had its protectionist elements of McEwenism cleaned out.

After the heated disputes of the 1970s, the Tariff Board of Alf Rattigan (an early honorary econocrat) and the Industries Assistance Commission has now intellectually defeated the protectionist policies which have greatly shaped Australia’s economic development.

And even the director of the National Institute for Economic and Industry Research, Peter Brain, has accepted Labor’s tariff cuts after providing the most vigorous academic pro-protection arguments in the 1970s.

And, although the Minister Industry, John Button – an IAC sceptic – was the politician who pulled the levers to dismantle protectionism, the IAC won the intellectual debate by using essentially the same simple theoretical framework devised two centuries ago by Adam Smith: that is, that economies should concentrate on what they do best and not attempt to prop up uncompetitive industries.

Protectionist business leaders of the 1970s such as Repco’s Neil Walford would look antique amid the dominant rationalism of the 1990s.

The Tariff Board’s current manifestation, the Industry Commission, has been given a wider brief – to search out and expose regulatory inefficiencies throughout the economy – and a powerful econocrat to lead it in the form of ex-Keating adviser Tony Cole.

The rationalist econocrat advice going to politicians can be boiled down to more market deregulation, more reliance on competitive price-setting to allocate resources, less government regulation, more user-pays funding for public services, and greater exposure of the economy to the discipline of competition on world markets.

The balance-of-payments and foreign-debt crises have added to the push for micro-economic reform, itself a buzz-word for applying textbook economic principles to market regulation and public policy.

The orthodox response to the balance-of-payments crisis of markedly tightening fiscal policy and reducing the Federal Budget surplus has dovetailed into this by seeking to get better value for public spending – a classic example of the economists’

focus on maximising the use of limited resources.

Yet it is not entirely laissez faire. The Reserve Bank, for instance, has little regard for the intelligence of the financial markets or the infallibility of the banks.

It continues to intervene in the foreign exchange market to “dirty” the float. The Reserve Bank’s head of research, Ian Macfarlane, provided the earliest critique of the 1980s debt boom in terms of an “overshooting” of asset prices, particularly in the equity and property markets.

The Piaget 4 stages of human mental deveopment going to another 4 and notionally 5 – to WHOLE OF healthy well-norished life educational reform and the “revolutionary” removal of idiot Social-universe dialectitians & Marxian praxis nutters from Twenty-five Thousand universities

And Treasury has never suggested that the Australian economy, described by Paul Keating as a “bucking bronco” because of its exposure to commodity price shocks, should be “unguided”.

Under Chris Higgins, the Treasury is still prepared to go along with the deal-making of Labour’s wage Accord.

The ex-Treasury head and current Reserve Bank Governor, Bernie Fraser, has stressed the need to gain political acceptance for policy change and also qualifies as an econocrat “Accordian”.

The econocrats remain “can do” policy advisers – and in Fraser’s case, a puller of levers. Unlike the hard-line Treasury in the days of John Stone, they are prepared to tailor economic reform to political “realities” while, at the same time, musing over how to maintain the pace of economic reform outside a period of crisis.

The Department of Finance head, Michael Keating, has approvingly described the Hawke Government’s approach as “bargained consenus” or “a unique blend of deregulation, aimed at improving the operation of markets, and a ‘new’corporatism, aimed at more closely embracing business and unions in the policy formation process”.

This, in essence, is the Australian response to the 1970s collapse of Keynesian-influenced aggregate demand management under the twin evils of high inflation and high unemployment.

While maintaining elements of “consensus” reform, it has been heavily influenced by the international emphasis on supply-side efficiency as the key to improved economic performance – a shift climaxed by the Eastern Bloc rejection of central planning.

The vague push by the Employment, Education, and Training Minister John Dawkins for some sort of government assistance for exporters is unlikely to have much support from his econocrat advisers, who are led by the rationalist Greg Taylor, a former IAC chairman.

The Australian embrace of rationalism has not been as zealous as”Rogernomics” in New Zealand, where the Treasury was heavily influenced by the extreme free marketeers of the University of Chicago to spark an unedifying brawl with the economists at Wellington’s Victoria University.

Even in NSW, where economic rationalism has made its greatest inroads at a State Government level under Premier Nick Greiner, to establish a moral high ground over the discredited interventionism of the Cain, Burke and Bjelke-Petersen governments, the reform program is tempered by “dry and warm”political considerations.

In Australia, the main rationalist impetus has not come from the academic economists who, during the 1980s, lost the sort of prominence gained during the Whitlam days.

Yet the university economists are making a quiet comeback to policy influence, most notably through such commissioned government reports as by the Australian National University’s Helen Hughes (which questioned the effectiveness of export assistance) and Ross Garnaut (which praised the virtues of free trade).

Professor Hughes also was a member of the FitzGerald committee which recommended giving a “greater economic focus” to Australia’s immigration programme.

As well, the role of university economists is being revived because they speak much the same language as the ascendant econocrats – at least at the ANU which runs the closest thing in Australia to a US-style graduate school. Increasingly, ANU economists are involved in the Canberra policy chat sessions with econonocrats organised by the Economic Planning Advisory Council secretariat.

And the ANU’s Bob Gregory holds the academic economist spot on the Reserve Bank board.

Whereas Treasury economists in the 1960s were most likely to have been educated at the University of Melbourne, today they and the econocrats elsewhere in the bureaucracy tend to have received their post-graduate training, if not their first degree, from the ANU. The other main econocrat-academic link is between the Industry Commission and the University of Melbourne, where both the ORANI econometric model project and the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research are based.

The ANU’s economics department is noted for its high technical and mathematical rigour and perhaps best represents what Peter Groenewegen and Bruce McFarlane complain in their new book (A History of Australian Economic Thought) to be the Americanisation of university economics teaching in Australia.

This, they suggest, is based on the methodological assumption of individual choice; with perfectly informed consumers maximising their utility; businesses maximising their profits; where economic agents operate in competitive markets and so are typically price-takers; and where government intervention is tainted by definition.

“Hence deregulation, competition and anti-monopoly policy become essential prescriptions to turn the textbook vision into real life,” bemoan Groenewegen and McFarlane.

“Much of this North American market economics is now fully absorbed into Australian teaching of economics. The older traditions of a positive role for government in ensuring those social goals the market was seen as unable to achieve have been relegated to the background”.

True, the emphasis of American university economists on highly abstruse mathematical techniques to model sometimes dubious assumptions about human behaviour has spread to the younger generation of Australian academics.

But, in the Australian context, “rationalist” economics does not necessarily conflict with a more mainstream or even social democrat perspective.

Parts of the microeconomic agenda, such as waterfront reform and more user-pays road pricing, are unexceptional reforms which have been given impetus by the rationalist programme. Even a left-wing Labor politician such as Brian Howe has been prepared to introduce more “stick” into the social welfare system – a hobby horse of the rugged pro-marketeers.

Level-playing-field arguments support the taxing of non-wage income such as capital gains and fringe benefits – and possibly even wealth and bequests. And as the University of Sydney’s Judith Yates pointed out in work for the Campbell Report more than a decade ago, financial deregulation did not benefit the poor.

Thanks to Paul Keating’s deregulation, the big demand for economists has been in the financial markets.

Most of the leading finance sector economists have been poached from the training grounds of Treasury or the Reserve Bank and lured by the basic economic enticement of money. Top-level examples include Westpac’s David Morgan from Treasury and Bain’s Don Stammer from the Reserve Bank. Examples at the chief economist level include the Macquarie Bank’s Bill Shields from the Reserve Bank and the National Bank’s Julian Pearce and BT’s Andre Morony from Treasury.

These ex-econocrat market economists have an influence on macroeconomic policy mainly as articulators of the financial market’s conventional economic wisdoms.

But, increasingly, they have been relegated to short-term economy watchers required to give the money market dealers split second “buy” or “sell”responses to the latest Bureau of Statistics release. Paul Keating is no longer obsessed with “trumping” market expectations over the Budget bottom line as in the mid-1980s, when he was trying to hold the $A up. They have lost their role as the chief anti-inflation “hawks” because of the high interest rate pain reflected in their banks’ mounting bad debt provisions. And they shift between alarmist doomsaying and libertarian indifference to Australia’s foreign debt build-up.

Few have much of substance to say about wider economic policy issues: it’s not what they are paid to do. The exceptions include the Chase AMP’s Garry White, whose background in the old Industries Assistance Commission gives him an expertise in trade and industry matters, and the HongKong Bank’s Jeff Schubert, an ex-Prime Minister & Cabinet econocrat who has enthusiastically pushed his idea of a variable rate consumption tax as a way to reactivate fiscal fine tuning.

Similarly, the business economists have relatively little impact in public policy debates, although one of their most prominent members – CRA’s John Macleod – is the current president of the Economic Society. While economists appear to have a surprisingly small influence within Australia’s major industrial companies, the increasing role of business leaders in public policy debates perhaps is reflected by the appointment of a former Australian Industry Development Corporation economist, Carol Austin, to BHP.

However, the Business Council, these days headed by former senior Treasury official Peter McLaughlin and employing ex-Canberra econocrat Mathew Butlin, continues to shoulder much of the burden of trying to educate corporate leaders in economics.

The Business Council has taken the lead in labour market reform, but has left the Confederation of Australian Industry to make the running in the industrial relations theatre of the Industrial Relations Commission.

It has also concentrated on policies to reform transport bottlenecks, but has found it difficult to take the policy lead on issues which conflict with its constituencies’ self-interest, such as telecommunications reform, lower tariffs and tax reform.

Until its recent decline, Michael Porter’s Centre of Policy Studies at Monash University represented the cutting edge of the ruggedly pro-market think tanks which continue to push the spread of rationalist criteria. These include Porter’s new Tasman Institute, John Hyde’s Australian Institute for Public Policy in Perth, Greg Lindsay’s Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and, getting well into polemics, Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs.

So far, there has been no strong counter from the social democrat Left, apart from the revival of the labour movement-oriented Evatt Research Centre in Sydney led by Peter Botsman.

A newer source of economic analysis has come from consultants such as Access Economics, headed by ex-Treasury officials Geoff Carmody, David Chessell and Ed Shann, who have sought to compete with Melbourne’s Syntec on macroeconomic policy and business-cycle advice to the corporate sector. Carmody and Chessell, in particular, are closer to the “Stone-age” Treasury than today’s “can do” Keating econocrats, and have advised the Liberal Party on tax issues.

Also prominent is the Canberra-based Centre for International Economics set up by a former Bureau of Agricultural Economics director, Andrew Stoeckel, and staffed with like-minded ex-IAC officials. Stoeckel has carried out major international studies on the costs of agricultural protectionism and, in another sign of the rationalist times, is now heading the analytical attack on the rural socialism of the reserve price scheme for wool.

For the rationalists, however, some of their early policy wins have produced some sobering realities in practice. The first big win was Paul Keating’s decision to push through a startled Labour Party the financial deregulation recommendations of the Campbell Committee.

But the pro-market economists behind financial liberalisation clearly did not pay enough attention to prudential supervision of a liberalised banking sector, nor to the securities regulation of a corporate sector which was suddenly much freer to borrow. They overestimated the strength of the challenge from foreign bank entry to the established domestic oligopoly – an empirically depressing result for the theory of “contestability” which does not bode well for domestic airline deregulation.

And they were not prepared for the speculative volatility of financial asset markets. The famous US economist, Milton Friedman, thought that speculation would not be destabilising as this would require people to irrationally buy high and sell low. This is exactly what the corporate entrepreneurs did in the mid-to-late 1980s, by both initiating and then being swept along and finally under by the psychology of the herd and the boom-bust of asset prices.

In contrast, the labour market provides an example where the rationalists continue to drive the intellectual debate but where practical men still have their hands on the levers of reform. Rationalist academics such as the sometime utopian founder of Flinders University’s National Institute of Labour Studies, Richard Blandy, and the author of the Greiner Government’s industrial relations reforms, John Niland, have been pushing for a less centralised labour market policy since the 1970s.

But, it has only been since the shock of the mid-1980s balance of payments crisis and the “New Right” challenge of disputes such as Mudginberri and Robe River, that the Government and the ACTU have been forced to try to squeeze supply-side labour market improvements from their centralised wage Accord.

And it is reform on the terms of the power brokers in the labour movement -chiefly ACTU secretary Bill Kelty – who retain the close support of Paul Keating. The mainstream rationalist economists continue to give grudging support for the Accord’s ability to dampen the inflationary bias which stems from Australia’s labour market rigidities.

But they are reserving their judgement on the Western European style “award restructuring” reforms designed to increase the job market’s “functional flexibility”. To survive, the Kelty plan eventually will have to deliver the economic goods.

Finally, the fascinating and controversial new challenge to the orthodoxy of economic policy-making has come not from the Left but from two rationalist ANU economists.

Professor John Pitchford has argued that the balance-of-payments blow-out of the 1980s is not necessarily a “problem” and, in particular, nothing that justifies driving the economy into recession with high interest rates to try to cut off import growth. A current account deficit is just as likely to represent foreign capital inflow in search of investment opportunities in Australia as any decline in the economy’s trade performance.

And Peter Forsyth has argued that micro-economic reform may increase economic efficiency and national income, but also will not solve any balance-of-payments “problem” because it will not change the gap between national investment and saving which, by definition, equals the current account deficit.

Yet, while these two closely allied ideas have swept through the universities to gain acceptance from probably the majority of university econo mists, they have yet to influence the political debate substantially.

Nor is it clear how they will, given that both Pitchford and Forsyth support the pro-market thrust of the rationalist economic reform agenda, but not for the reasons claimed by the econocrats and politicians.”

Jonno, Adelaide Hills 🦘🌏

• Restoration of NON military-industrial-scientistic Complex Objet-sujet¹ scientific enquiry not least in honour of DD Eisenhower 1951

• Neurocognitive Health

• IMMEDIATE ADOPTION of 2-5 set series quantum relations self-consciously deliberatively macro metally conceived ordered sequentia logic by some 250 governments de jurê & de facto around the collapsing world

• The conscientised, fully explicated.. pre pubescent kids “go” Yeh 🙂 .. planned, implemented “9 ⭕️” micro through meso through macro economy after Community Economist independent journalist’s newsletter Australia 1995

• Futures at least hypothetic

Sunday 23062025 Mt Barker South Australia

¹Object-subject

Using public library Wi-fi for a week REFUSING TO PAY AN EXTRA PENNY to any grandly titled Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Data-salesman that/ who thinks it fair, sane or ethical to charge a simple writer who actually never watches videos running > 1 minute for 25 G of data in 3 wks flat for ‘oceans’ of coded stinking crap letters, conjunctors & numbers of no use to man, woman or beast.

I am fighting you people AND winning and you bloody well know it.

John (Kangaroo & Eastern global longitudinal hemisphere dude)

Convict testimony and memoirs certainly influenced the chaplain Thomas Beagley Naylor’s writing about Norfolk Island during and after Maconochie’s administration.

Naylor arrived in 1841 soon after Maconochie’s appointment and became a keen supporter of the reformist regime: he declared the mark system and its reform principles to be ‘above all other means the best, if not the only means of uniting the conflicting interests of the criminal and justice.’¹

Ward considered him an able and kind teacher.² Carey suggests Naylor and Maconochie together ‘achieved a kind of spiritual liberation’ for some convicts, although her study does not take much account of the convicts’ writing³

Rob Wills suggests that the musician and surgeon James Aqinas Reid, whom Maconochie employed on Norfolk Island, was also highly involved in convict memoirs.

It was most likely Naylor who strongly influenced the religious tone of many of the Norfolk Island narratives. Both he and the commandant were adept at using print culture to influence public debate, although their interests were sometimes adjacent, rather than perfectly aligned, especially after Maconochie’s 1844 recall.

Naylor used his personal experiences and connections with prisoners to mount an influential print campaign on penal matters in official (and explosive) correspondence, such as his 1845 -1846 letter to Lord Stanley.

Naylor’s letter was titled ‘Norfolk Island, the Botany Bay of Botany Bay,’ evoking a long-standing image of Antipodean moral degradation that is traced in this book through the Revd Richard Johnson and many subsequent writers.

In his polemic, Naylor relocated the locus of moral concern to Norfolk Island in the aftermath of Maconochie’s recall [and especially the inversion of social order that accompanied the subsequent breakdown of authority] under Commandant Major Joseph Childs.

Reports of the proliferation of homosexual activity accompanied this and other accounts, with corrupt colonial officials both profiting from the disorder [and implicated in punitive repression of convict violence and resistance].

..met Mrs Naylor and intercepted her husband’s manuscript, suggesting the ‘extreme impropriety’ of publishing it before bringing it to the attention of the government.

An excerpt from the recently published [The Antipodean Laboratory: making colonial knowledge 1770 – 1870, Anna Johnson Cambridge University Press 2023] brought to all you largely excellent grown-up and ‘blessedly’ as the numpties & plodders of this hideously & spectacularly failing world of ours are wont to c’est\ say – the beneficiaries of a western liberal education in the himantities, arts and social sciences particularly New Millennium #Economics at senior secondary school level.. it is s-o-o good to know you.

Did the mind boggle for you too – or those funny-looking clouds go whooshing across the sky with the eastward rotation of the only terrestrial (or perhaps gallivanting oceanic pirate’s struggling audio-visually represented culture with cast and crews of thousands and mentally/ imaginitively humanly overwhelming Production Values⁴ with reference to two standout contemporary themes in Australian national (not Domestic, m’dears – that as you would all have known for THIRTY ONE years now but for the neoliberal corporate neoclassical crap propaganda mind-boggle censorship regime now become the supercharged “AI” + Dalle 3, 4, 5 et Set Era deskilling or Dumbdown & mass mental health crisis macabre global pantomime Billionaire Mental 11 Year-old Boys Global Command & Control Centre.. means household ⁵.

The second one? Do I really have to reference that “mesanathematic” Mara Dusseldorp pre-modern misanthropic mindfuddle? Well no. It’s my global educational blockdbuster journal and I’ll try if I want to\ 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2.

What next jolly old woozy & affluent Addled & Laid? Australian Local Government councils?? New Zealand???

DEDICATION OF DOCUMENT

Hugh Stretton, briefly my friend after the Rann-Olsen sting because he was at least prepared to discuss his much-lauded though in the terms of the concentric circles economy theorem 1995’s erroneous construction of community as merely a sector that was distinguished from the macro and the microeconomic sectors of what was faddishly called ‘glo-cal’ economy in the same historical period (of Geckoeism), the early 1990s. Also referrred to by the idiot brother of the then federal Treasurer – to me, ‘in black & white, in a letter signed by himself of which by some freak-occurrence of usually fully-predictable Australian Packer-era gangsterism i still possess the original – as the Spiritual Sector.

That was ‘Baptists,’ students.

One wonders what the newly elected Pope Nickelodeon would have to say about that particular piece of whacko reductionist-objectivist-Monist-Animist-primitive Earth-centred solar system Carl Sagan pseudoscience. In fact I recommend very strongly that he urgently speak on the matter because no reasonably well (not by TV) educated young person under the age of 30 is listenening to a word the man has to say presently.

John Blundell

The humanisation century – micro resorce & information goes macro decision-making & human adult relationships ..originally off the ACOSS conference, Sydney, September 1978

¹ cited in Barry, Alexander Maconochie, page 168

² Ward, ‘Diary,’ p 128

³ Carey, Empire of Hell, p169

⁴ the construct Production-values emerged in the deadly Rand Samuelson⁴ᵃ Greenspan Friedman Porter 1990s

⁴ᵃ derided amongst all non performing sealed, delivered and virtually microchip-implanted economists around the world when I first studied #Economics at @Flinders in South Australia – though the school gave us a microeconomics supply & demand monster text which was fit – as North americans say – like a glove to complement Samuelson & Bourlag’s (pesticides headbanger) World-trade Ecocide and Permanent-warfare.. Richard Lipsey.

⁵ VG Childe, Australian, suicide at Katoomba NSW, oekòmenè, 1941 What Happened in History