The de-aboriginalisation of of our old people’s country at its beginning in South Australia: humouring, trinkets, food, blankets and Naomi A Klein 2007 man-made Disaster-capitalist humanitarian aid-station management yarda-yarda everyone.
by Major O’Halloran
❛Accordingly, on the morning of Wednesday the 2ⁿᵈ instant, your Excellence was pleased to order Inspector Tolmer with half of the mounted men to scour the country inland, whilst I proceeded downwards with the other half along the shores of the Coorong, Mr Pullen and the boats keeping abreast of us. Between eleven and twelve o’clock my party discovered the remains of mangled remains of two Europeans, a male and a female. The hair of the former was light brown, and he must have been a tall and powerful man. The skulls of both were frightfully fractured, especially that of the female, whose lower jawbone was likewise broken. Three of the teeth of the jaw on the left side and two on the right nearly in front were decayed. Those of the upper jaw were perfect. The man had lost only one tooth, the left front one of the upper jaw. On questioning the native Tom whether he was aware before of these two likewise having been ᵖᵘ murdered, he said no, but that this place belonged to the murderer ‘ {sic ≠ ≡ = ≣ thank the lord jesus christ and his serried ranks of manically garrulous ‘sinking-to’ Echolalic-psychosis elves, Sammy Altman gnomes, Pixel-pixies & Chick-fairies for pilapp.com [∵ the Revo.. is ‘here / nyangatdya, naga,’ et Set-era fin fin fin de siècle\ joie joie joie] } Mangarawata. Whom we had hanged and who had been given over by his tribe.❜
Ngahrrhendjiri
Goodday from Red Creek Rd and MANY killing fields in the Adelaide Hills Anangu Pihramangkagu and to all the Raukkan formerly Point McLeay Christian Mission people who successfully explained all this stuff to the wahdjulas all over Australia around the time of the Hindmarsh Island real estate agents’ romp the South Australian Government Royal Commission established on 16 June 1995.
John Blundell
• The once and future personage fighting very very effectively yet against all odds for life on earth, beginning under the historical birth-time tree – at home in the south- central Australian Region C6 in ghe new global #Economics
• the 🦘🌏 humanisation project
The Awesome vile BILLIONAIRES’ Cabal Obstacle-course: ‘searching for’ ♯:≣:☷
ᴺᴰ I studied this ancient usage called a gerundive, a subjunctive, or some guna in early “1st-millennium” Ruling-caste Rome in Year 9 – spinout man
That Twentieth Century sure was a zinger for our universities and professors and shit.
READER NOTE
You might be persuaded a child who spent five ➡ every day (s) of the week – barring special little tours around the ex 1850s City of London colonial province of South Australia (his dad being a gun mechanic and traveller) on the premises of country general hospitals (regulated by the Sth Austrln government Hospitals Department no less..
remember this was the Australian state that by the agency of its Education Department i think in1870 but dates are rubbish and don’t count any more that’s just the way human history, counting ‘shit’ – guhna – producing utterly nonsensical artificially compartmentalised (obscenely siloed) or arbitrarily sectorised Doctors of Philosophy theses & cockamamie studies/ D movies on the affairs of Great Men has (bed-) panned out, right, gave you all the rousing sublime ‘Thousand dyes’ Song of Australia..
iah- iah- ia-a-A-A-aa
and subsequently his entire teenaged years plus two waking up every morning (other than during brief excursions-out of up to a week or two) on the same property and premises of a virtually fully Commonwealth of Australia funded and AustralianTaxation Office rorted ‘to the proverbial back teeth’ private 4 profit sector Nursing Home, who subsequently moved to an 18 year career in both federal and state human services (‘social’) policy delivery, development and government advisory followed by enquiry duties during the Hawke period would know a bit about mental illness – not to mention its flipside in a dialectically bonkers world of light & darkness that catastrophically forgot to study heat & cold – mental health.
You’d be right about that.
“Edvard Munch Was Haunted by Physical and Mental Illnesses—but He Was Also Fascinated by Them”
Known as the painter of “The Scream,” the Norwegian artist and his loved ones spent many years suffering from health conditions. A new exhibition explores how the world of medicine influenced his art..
Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy, Edvard Munch, 1886 Juri Kobayashi / Munchmuseet
The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was well-acquainted with the world of medicine. He was the son and brother of doctors, and he suffered from medical and psychiatric illnesses throughout his lifetime. These experiences informed his depictions of ailing bodies and minds.
“Lifeblood: Edvard Munch,” a new exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo, explores Munch’s fascination with illness through paintings and artifacts. The show examines not only the artist’s life, but also the history of medicine in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
Quick facts: Why did Edvard Munch paint The Scream?
The painting was inspired by a walk the artist took with two friends in 1882.
“My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature,” he later wrote.
“[The show] allows visitors to explore the history of healthcare through Munch’s powerfully expressive work, to feel and reflect on our bodily vulnerabilities, and to better understand our persistent quest for health,” says exhibition curator Allison Morehead, an art historian at Queen’s University in Canada, in a statement from the museum.
Born in Norway in 1863, Munch is known for his paintings that explore psychological themes, such as The Scream. But some of his earliest artworks depict mundane medical matters. He spent much of childhood in poor health, and he sometimes ran errands for his father, who was a doctor. When he was a young teenager, he painted small watercolors of medicine bottles, some of which are included in “Lifeblood.”
Munch’s loved ones were also plagued by illness, which provoked his fear—and inspired his art. As Mai Britt Guleng, a curator at the National Museum in Oslo, told Scientific American’s Jan Dönges in 2021, “There [were] hereditary diseases in Munch’s family—mental, nervous illness and tuberculosis. … Munch and his siblings were worried about this.”
Medicine Bottle and Spoon, Edvard Munch, 1877 Tone Margrethe Gauden / Munchmuseet
Munch’s father struggled with depression, and his sister Laura spent time in a psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5, and his older sister Sophie perished from the same disease when he was 14. His sister’s death inspired his 1886 portrait The Sick Child, which depicts a pale girl with red hair. Munch’s brother Andreas also died of pneumonia as an adult.
In 1919, Munch was 56 when he contracted the Spanish flu, which was ravaging Europe. During this period of illness, the artist painted Self-Portrait With Spanish Flu, which shows Munch staring toward the viewer, struggling to breathe. In the exhibition, this painting is displayed beside the equipment Munch used to help him breathe during his illness.
Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait With Spanish Flu (1919) alongside breathing equipment the artist used during his illness Ove Kvavik / Munchmuseet
Also on display is a piece called On the Operating Table, which depicts a man surrounded by doctors, nurses and an audience of observers during surgery. This painting is connected to a violent encounter between Munch and his fiancée in 1902, which left him with a bullet wound in his hand. According to the Art Newspaper’s Louisa Buck, experts aren’t sure who fired the shot, but the surgery he endured afterwards inspired the piece.
The exhibition displays On the Operating Table beside an X-ray image of Munch’s hand—a new technology at the time—in which a bullet can be seen in his finger. Other medical artifacts on view include glass sputum bottles, a baby incubator, stethoscopes, a nursing uniform and contraceptive devices.
On the Operating Table, Edvard Munch, 1902-03 Juri Kobayashi / Munchmuseet
Munch’s work often reflected women’s health concerns, such as “melancholy, hysteria, syphilis, contraception, childbirth and infant care,” per the statement. Consider his painting Inheritance(1897-99), which depicts a coughing mother holding a sickly newborn. It was inspired by Munch’s visit to a Paris syphilis hospital, where he recalled watching a mother learn that her baby had been infected with the disease, according to the Art Newspaper.
“‘Lifeblood’ reveals a lesser-known side of Edvard Munch—where art becomes a vessel for the fears, hopes and compassion that surround illness and care,” museum director Tone Hansen says in the statement. “By intertwining Munch’s work with the history of medicine, this exhibition invites us to reflect on our own health and vulnerability in a time of deep uncertainty.”
“Lifeblood: Edvard Munch” is on view at the Munch Museum in Oslo through September 21, 2025.
Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.
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Email Powered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Privacy Notice / Terms & Conditions)Edvard Munch Was Haunted by Physical and Mental Illnesses—but He Was Also Fascinated by Them
Known as the painter of “The Scream,” the Norwegian artist and his loved ones spent many years suffering from health conditions. A new exhibition explores how the world of medicine influenced his art
the unofficial two micro-behavioural and two ideational mental constructs (macro) of human empowerment we nutted out under the guidance of the late Connie Benn and John Tomlinson on the fringe of the Australian Council of Social Service national conference of Sepotember 1978¹
John Blundell
The global humanisation project Australia
Neurocognitive Health
Quantum-relations 2 – 5 set series logic
Immediate reform 25,000 universities worldwide
Economy
Ma-thematics Neurolinguistics Standard Ψ spiritual social relationships Cultural Studies
21072025
Shut Up Kevin.. oawhh sorry mum
¹ readers may be assured I actually went to Sydney once, entirely at my own expense though the tax deductions helped
¹ᴬ rumours he will visit Canberra, ACT, for the first time “any time soon” have no basis in fact
• The politicised world suddenly pulls itself up hard of a Friday morning to ponder mental nutrition for human empowerment strictly for YOUNG PEOPLE OVER 12 yrs and adults
• Notes of mine after rabbi Martin Buber say 1966 and Connie, John & a couple of others whose names i have not remembered September 1978 some southern hemisphere Spring that.. And you may figuratively throw in Paul Keating for his 1995 Bell Bay Tasmania, eep, gag Great in practice never work in theory
• ❝ Begin, Menachim ❞
~ ϟϟ ψψ ❝❞ (Are you kidding me Kevin what even is that no Mother it’s emblematic of the triumphalist Twentieth Century scientism and technobabble/ -dazzle Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 1687 Renaissance classical manly figure’s Newtonian ‘4 Corners’ Quadratics because it’s got four bits in it and now we’ve realised these were mental sets all along – kind-of ways of conceptualising rather than the ubiquitous and ultimately human-culture-smashing Hollywood Era ways-of-seeing that is to write barking-mad functionalist sociology, global accountancy houses and machines that save our stressed youngsters from having to write anything leaving them free to grunt and, you know, get moist Oh Right why couldn’t you have said that in the first place Kevin? Well it’s a bit long-winded Mum. – Brevity the soul of wit/ clarity, Alanis Nadine Morissette/ Succinct is quick).
(v) We will rock you. O Stop it, Kevin.
A typewriter repair man say 1970 Alice Springs Australia
Names are dsrcrs sgnfrs idntfrs1.. categorisers labels.. entities or identities – theyre macro quanta not things or objects (micro quanta) at all.
From our mentally pre operarional toddler period through primary school to Year 6 we revel in learning the names of real things – these are. Of the concrete.
Becoming adult or “growing up,” which wise professor Jean Piaget – himself (conceptually Ego) on Day x in locarion y with thoughts, mental constructs ideas a, b and c in conversational trust- and relationship-growing exchange with teenaged and adult persons L,M and N conceptualised, explained, hypothesised and determined as law or truth of.. emerging independent agency authority and adult self in readiness, social alertness and self- and other-respecting for adult participation in the activities, pursuits and political outings, sortees and campaigns of geo-community life & affairs helping inspire, influence and shape new ways of social doing, being and becoming by creative, imaginitive purposeful peaceable engaged co-operative conversational engagement with the adult Other (conceptually or ‘academically’ Alter)
Macro quanta have no micro concrete material existence. They are not manifest or explicit but are “not.” Discrete.
THEN media-eval European philosophy gave you guys the Yes and the Not Shut-up-Kevin-oawhh-Sorry-Mum
Masjid al Noor مسجد النور
John Blundell
Thematics maths
Neurolinguistics renewed
Neurocognitive-health
2-5 set series QR logic
Immediate worldwide educational reform sensorimotor stage through senescence no i don’t work for Mr Take-a-dump 0K
1 DSCR SGNFR and at a mental stretch that is as an even more derivative arcane readout or falsely objectified ‘redoubt’ IDNTFR – oh dem bones dem bones dem clahncky capital Greenspan Friedman Geckoe Soros 1990s values – were components of a typology i brieflly considered during my first months in virtual exile in a gangster, Government Blackfella, OMCC ex British Empire frontier town in 1998 (Ceduna Sth Australia – the federal government price for that outrage against an Australian citizen remains at $10m, without prejudice as to the inputs that may be found or evidence that may be discovered by any court in this matter in the near future)
For all the people-muga of ‘Far Western’ Eyre Peninsula my home a long time and birthplace of my daughter Zoe – līf.. ζωή zoí
Absent-minded professor-style I did actually in the concluding paragraph of the following essay omit the punchline which is that some 20 years ago when my life was at least direly constrained by gangsters and halfwits in an ex British colonial “frontier” Garrison-town (place de sûreté in the French language) I heard on the Australian Broad & Bloke Casting Corporation’s Science Show that as a matter of pride to us simple folk the ‘Wi-Fi’ was discovered by two jokers in Sydney (?) seeking black holes: hoo-oo-whee; you ain’t goin’ nowhere..
Ooh-wee, ride me high Tomorrow’s the day that my bride’s a-gonna come Ooh-wee, are we gonna fly Down into the easy chair
Genghis Khan and his brother Don Couldn’t keep on keeping on We’ll climb that bridge after it’s gone After we’re way past it
Around 1977 – which actually was a shithouse footy year 4n mih
“Blinded by the Lightⱽ,” decades ago when I was say a mega-fit prime (ho—ho-ho) of life 30ish Australian Rules Football player and regional manager of government services charged with seeing out the 9th of May 1901 British Empire crap – see the photo i have of myself of that time.. that was time, not Time, my cherished audience of students. Capital values? Oh bring back capital punishment man for judgment is actually me you dumbarses sayeth your lord god of hosts occasionally given to burning down backpackers’ hostels and evidently continually given to mincing the tiny bodies of of the descendants of the sons of Shemp, Larry, Moey & perhaps CURLY – Curly’s a real person who grew up in Redfern, Sydney, NSW 🦘🇦🇺 so GOD MORNING ftrnn vnng v nght Curly 4ROM Hotshot boarding house 2012 & 2013 John in the rapidly destabilising Brian Cox ancient animist and lunatic Julius Sumner Miller objectivist domain^.. you deadset not fake TV or podcast #History students must at this truly terrible moment for our country get a mental grip on the corruption of mainstream Australian culture by USA men with money in the 1940s and 1950s morons and business criminals – there was this Blinded-by-the-light ditty, OK❓
Let me Relate to you, dear reader (s) that despite scores of occasions (temporo-spatial events, c’est) of that Manfred Mann songline burbling blathering and blustering away in a rebellious adolescent (that means Teenager in toffy social list post GWF Hegel inspired & engineered language and shit, young people) Socratic pre First-millenium stand-off i never mentally Digested³ the content beyond the second line which ran “wrapped up in a dream da-di-da-di 123” or some shit.
And is it some remarkable Ronald Reagan Disney Ford Foundation Cultural-studies stinger or what that i can’t find the “Dreamland” Type-thing even now. Talk about Footnotes of Human-history!
The @NVIDIA corporation and barking-mad Sammy of course have this logging of nonsensisation well in hand – along with their stupored little🐓🐓🐓s – hey it’s a trinity – must be the Father, the Son and the Billy Gates’ Billygoats then.
It became clear to me this morning as i procured a “Wired Fidelity,” or some shit, signal with which to connect Wonkadoodle HP Pavilion x 360 Convertible: 14 dh1xxx Rename-in-a-rather-fetching-emphatic (dark-ish) powder-blue, to the Internet that the proverbial proton, or positively charged ‘particle’ is like zero – as genuine mathematicians have known since the 9th century (FM) no quantum – and that if the 19 teens European physicist musing about the sunlight on the walls of the buildings (or wherever) as he sat in a Vienna tram-car had not been monumentally befuddled by the light and may even at some fiurther point in his studies have mentally cracked onto Heat and unlike a now five generation string of Vanity-project mental troglodytes realised fiery ‘holes’ cannot be black.
You bet your while, brown or black arse this – what you’ve just been so fortunate as to ‘digest4‘ – represents phenomenological explication (de text. blah, blah Greta-thun early 20thC Anglo-american blah (Literary Studiesn my darlings my flaneurs my wonks and my James Dean September 30 1995 priapistae) meriting the Nobel Prize for Physics 2025 – give me Nobel-lit and I’ll shut you down for the monstrous Normalisation-era of History objectivist global societal parasites you have been.
John Blundell
Australia
We are your servants team.. but, ahm, don’t obstruct our work, will you?
Blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night Blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night Blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
Madman, drummers, bummers Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat In the dumps with the mumps As the adolescent pumps his way into his hat With a boulder on my shoulder, feelin’ kinda older I tripped the merry-go-round With this very unpleasin’, sneezin’ and wheezin’ The calliope crashed to the ground
The calliope crashed to the ground!
But she was blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night Blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night Blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night Blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
Some silicone sister with a manager mister Told me I got what it takes She said, “I’ll turn you on sonny to something strong Play the song with the funky break” And go-kart Mozart was checkin’ out the weather chart To see if it was safe outside And little Early-Pearly came by in his curly-wurly And asked me if I needed a ride
Asked me if I needed a ride!
But she was blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night Blinded by the light
She got down, but she never got tired She’s gonna make it through the night She’s gonna make it through the night
But, mama, that’s where the fun is
But mama, that’s where the fun is Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun But mama, that’s where the fun is
Some brimstone, baritone, anticyclone, rolling stone Preacher from the East Says, “Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone That’s where they expect it least And some new-mown chaperone standin’ in the corner Watchin’ the young girls dance And some fresh-sown moonstone was messin’ with his frozen zone Remind him of romance
The calliope crashed to the ground!
But she was blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night Blinded by the light Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
blinded by the light (Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat) revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night (In the dumps with the mumps) blinded by the light (As the adolescent pumps his way into his hat) revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
blinded by the light (I tripped the merry-go-round) revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night (With this very unpleasin’, sneezin’ and wheezin’) blinded by the light (The calliope crashed to the ground) revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
blinded by the light (And throws his lover in the sand) revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night (And some bloodshot, forget-me-not said daddy’s within earshot) blinded by the light (Save the buckshot, turn up the band) revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
blinded by the light (Told me I got what it takes) revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night (She said, “I’ll turn you on, son, into something strong”)
She got down but she never got tired She’s gonna make it through the night
ⱽ students ‘go’ Demesne one of those very old people’s words young people had never heard of maybe until Year 12 if they loved doing English literature study (which many of them ‘hated’ for the entire period of their exposure to the works of late 16th and early 17th century Wheelright – my maternal grandfather was first in his adult career apprenticed as a wheelright i mean seriously, kids, uh-oh, Playwright in the challenging if not miserable five ( ‘go’ lower-case because of course numbers are not capital values but you all knew that) years prior
3 What, oh Master? Are you going to eat my poo directly out of my neatly euphemised homologated homogenised (?) proverbially literarilly-flourishing b-a-d metaphor-wielding rear orifice again? Students may refer to Mad Molly by Erica (Fear of Flying) Jong c 1980 of Mad-molly-had-a-child-damn-thing-went-wild fame OK
4 there’s an extraordinarily educative early post WWII book read by virtually every English-speaking adult interested or personally ambitious in public affairs – A PELICAN ‘paperback’ BOOK – written by R. H. Barrow which will explain ‘digesting’ as an epoch-marking indeed youkneeversal poesis False-equivalence rhetorical Culture-bomb for you all. There’s a Quintillian quotation to build or destroy civilisations with as its ‘frontispiece’
You give me, reader, with the honour of your readership, the opportunity to study and expand and teach new thematics for the benefit of everyone..
Therefore don’t take the categorisations thrown up by this mental exercise to be ‘Writ’ or complete as they are merely a first-outing or a beginning for me in this ‘corner’ of my scholarship: the terrible Age of Romance when in the eminent Alex Miller’s terms the socially-prescribed Conditions of Faith were inimical to Locke’s 325 year-old and others’ Human-understanding per Reason, and learning itself was obscenely and psychotically promulgated to be the scripture of the patriarchs, is dead and gone.
SUNRAYSIA DAILY I May 06 2022
‘I think the conservative tone has done more harm than good, as it seems we are all OK with going along with the idea that “it’s OK, we will get to carbon neutral by 2050 [.”]
‘The world meteorological organisation has recently declared that limiting a temperatur rise to 1.5 degrees [is] unattainable. At the same time the Australian Bureau of Meteorology states that Australia’s [average 24/ 7/ 52] temperature has risen 1.47 degrees.
‘While Australia is heating faster than the global average (but not as fast as the polar regions), it is obvious that the world met has been extremely conservative in [its] announcements – I guesss to avoid turning people away.
‘I think the conservative tone has done more harm than good, as it seems we are all OK with going along with the idea that “it’s OK, we will get to carbon neutral by 2050 [.”]
‘The mallee is likely to lose so much productivity it’s not funny, yet we hear nothing from our representative who says [he or she is] here to support us farmers.
‘It’s very simple, we need strong representatives saying we will be neutral by much earlier than 2050.
‘We have no more time for politics and scaremongering. As evolution shows us, only the most adaptable will survive – never those that cling to old habits.‘
Carl Young,
Wernen
STUDENTS
Would you be so kind as to leave aside Mr Carl Young’s content – at least as presented by the Mildura (Vic) newspaper and put in say 10 or 12 minutes examining the communication process ploys and techniques used.
..the meso or word-sequentia operations of grammar, linguistic pairings, syntax..
..macro or global-reach ideational framing, formatting or ‘construction’ incl paragraphing with acute observation on various common tropaic (or utterly tedious Aussie FTA television anodyne stand-up larrikin gag) or psycho-cultural religious or so-called atheist belief or superstition sweeping through electoral politrics in countries like Australia please
I’d be delighted to receive emails of your notes – to “Billionaire Monkeys with Olivetti Group at @MIT Typewriters” or of course the ‘electric’ – Zip zap kerpowie – @greeneconomyact (GEA)
Enchanté 9
John Blundell
AUTHENTIC Post 1890s Groves-of-political-class-academe QR Logic, Economy, Neurolinguistic Health, Worldwide Educational Reform, the Human Project
Australia
6 in French means enchanted, delighted, overjoyed, smitten, or bewitched and please no chicks’ naked bodies or Australian 1960s drunken Papua Niugini Patrol Officers’ Masturbation-rings or theme songs ‘come’ 2 think of them
Hands up all would-be scientists who reckon the meso & macro are for rabbis, politicians, radio & podcast hosts 2 b/s about. Now go.
..and finds to its delight that there is a place in neurolinguistic phenomenology after this hundred years of “supply-side” Ideas are Things mechanomorphic HRE Semitic “mind-fuck” for the ideational construct Sub-conscious Mind’ – it can only refer to fuzzed or contrary ((dialecticised, oppositionalised or in the terms of mediaeval European Philosophy The Yes ‘Notted’) recall of peripheral data/ stimuli/ percepts in a high & wide micro-sensed visual field, but that, however revolutionary in mathematical science, is rather a macro digression at this proverbial moment in time.
..every mental home should have around 200 thousand of those daily, right?
This Friday morning I awoke to the ulcered tones of perhaps a more senior genital man (in the employ of Britain’s riotously successful owhh we are not the stolid turgid boring BBC telling you all how these black chicks in the Cameroon are doing underwater coastal marine conservation by learning to swim and dive and do stuff in the sea that you suckers actually have to pay an annual licence fee to sustain LONDON’S BEST CONVERSATIONS1) suggesting to a rather senior white-skinned lady from a Not 4 Profit Non Government – BRAND, brand, brnd, Children – Civil-society Organisationthe trouble with men watching child and infant penile rape audio-visual recordings was very likely the big corporations
Learn how to make ChatGPT create images – use AI Chat powered by ChatGPT AI.
This LBC chap then changed the.. topic.
John Blundell
A dead-end to Neokeynsian Economic Theory and 1890s USA Ivy League Socratic Logic
Radical and immediate regulation of the American internet engineered human cultural apocalypse
Australia 11072025 ‘Westpac’ Melanesia Java HK Far-east россия/ rossiya Time
SPECIAL NOTE
Mr Blundell sends his powerful if not omniscient respects to every single one of his serious-minded and psycho-emotionally “With-it” as his toughened and tempered Early 20th Century Dad used to c’est\ say students these magnificent 33yrs & 6 weeks since he ran for the state parliament of SA against.. the entire crazy-asked/ crazy-arsed British Colonial Office.
You have done so well
Now next.
! @LBC – now with an an internet electronic communications ‘app’ which of course Oh Lord of Hosts, oh Barb ( Bob nasally accented as with the world’s madman 4ROM Madison Avenue Manhattan having his promotions guys & girls run the ever-popular mid 20th century song Barb-Barb-Bahbb-Bhbb-bra-Barbra-ann to revel in the pinpoint strikes of B-2 Spirit.sometimes referred to as the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB) long-range stealth strategic aeroplanes built by Northrop Grumman on the freaking Ayy-habb the A-rabbs this time in Iran ) Sternfels1A enables a veritable explosion of Kantian1B-Drumpfean Imperator Rex categorised disjoint, disconn, inane, vacuous, vapid, hollow and spiritually mentally empty siloed-by-topic electronically splattering and disrupting the electronic fields and safe clean “78%” Oxygenated air of Earth’s 7 (at the poles) -17km altitude lower atmosphere of several thousand cubic km volume knowledge incredibly or (should we tergiversate in the Australian Bogan, Hipster, Private School-girl/ -boy or 1980 Mary-Anne Fahey (actress and comedian) and worldwide diseducated Societal Outsider manner) unbelievably “useful” to human society to be ‘stored’ in “perpetuity .. say for 5-7 years because that’s all that the world’s leading and indeed “best” Global Heating scientists tell us we have left
1a CEO of the Global Human Culture Death Ray Corporation @McKinsey and @McKinsey_MGI McKinsey Global Institute
1b all Interpolator-educators in Pop-culture media-comms and journalism should give humany society a macro (ideational, ideologic & historical) readout on the 18th century perorator Immanuel Kant’s mother’s surname having been Reuter
Dad & Little Me who figuratively worshipped his ground say 1951
kIND-oF – WHAT’S THAT WERRD – analogous or perhaps more aptly and sharply BARKING-MAD EMBLEMATICALLY IDEOLOGICALLY NEOLIBERAL re The Rape of Lucrece 1594 — 1994 – falling within the Age of Romance 1509 Cortes to the Sub-prime Places of Residence-Geckoe-Greenpan-Soros Ripoff Mortgage Documents Crisis 2008
Oh John, we all knew you would spill the cosmic geopolitical beans eventually.
◐ It’s been a great ride, Curramulka Kid, and it is not of course only Australia that stands, sits, lies down and suppurates in your debt.. ◑ – سلام; AND Hello to this guy ⋰
“Couldn’t we go upstairs? Do we have to do it on the sofa?”
“Oh for God’s sake, Annette!”
“Sorry, Spicer,” said Annette. “We’ll stay here.”
“You are so inhibited,” said Spicer. “But perhaps that’s why I love you. I as Zeus the seducer-lover-divine you as Danaë.”
“Just call me sweet-as-pie,” said Annette, “and I’ll answer to it.”
“Those bracelets are practically sinking into your arm. You can’t have got fatter since yesterday.”
“Water retention,” said Annette.
“Don’t be so unglamorous,” said Spicer. “Don’t they hurt?”
“Yes,” said Annette.
“I quite like the thought of that,” said Spicer. Turn over.”
“Dr Rhea told me you were leaving me,” said Annette.
“I’m beginning to think Dr Rhea’s nuts,” said Spicer.
“But did you tell her that?”
“I tell her all kinds of things she wants to hear,” said Spicer. “From dreams I invent to scenarios of the future.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m easily bored,” said Spicer. “And she drones on and I like to get her to change the subject, or at least the archetype.”
“But why do you go to her?”
“Because I’m in a transitional crisis, because I need to liberate my Perseus from my Polydectes, and slay Medusa, the poisonous feminine, or look at it another way, cast off Medusa and escape Lilith; or simply be the tree, the trunk, the pillar, the stake, the anti-natural which penetrates the cleft hill. Does that hurt?”
“Yes.”
“It’s meant to. Just a bit. Isn’t this good?”
“Yes,” said Annette. “Just call me Tweetie-pie4. Each in their own myth. Personally, I choose Disney.”
Ahmm.. Young People we’re lookin’ after you – now we are
HIGHLY men-tally1 disciplined, non undergraduate though I recall from her entertaining biography i discovered say 30yrs ago2 not unaffected when younger as the rich kid abroad on her gap et-set-era year hankering after the upper middle class resplendency not to say opulence – although the magnanimous Scotsman Adam Smith said it was – or would be – Northern England robust slavery economy as well as the City of London’s architecture AND its marvellous deep drainage works3 post Sir Christopher Wren, respectively – socio-cultural, spiritual and ecological Mistress-deconstructor of mawkish masculinist and phoney feminist disintelligence Fay Double-you, babe..
JOHN BLUNDELL
Economy, Education-reform, Neurocognitive Health 2-5 Set Series Quantum Relations Logic Neurolinguistics Neuroscience (the radical overhaul of 20th century..) plus the Fifth & Final stage of Human-society namely the Human Project – raison d’etat (who the fuck was Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527 Florentine diplomat author philosopher historian?) rushes head-long to a new micro raison d’etre for every man woman young person & child on Earth
• irritated near to death by the Globalist and Screw-thy-neighbour and Mince-those-pesky-babies Christian nutters’ End of Times Antonio Gramsci’s “theory” (theorem or phenomenological law) of cultural hegemony written primarily during his imprisonment, between 1929 and 1935, in the Prison Notebooks) not published as a single treatise but rather emerging from his reflections on the nature of power and social control within capitalist societies since he had been a kid in High School ?
• N-n-n-o RU some Active-yeast, jesus-fork ?
Australia 10072025
Memorial Tribute
Patricia Elizabeth Thomson born 7 September 1940 in London, England – 18 April 1992 in Sydney, Australia was an English-born Australian television and film actress.
Rosanne’s La Boite T in Education confrère Pat visited us at Lobethal Rd just weeks before her death
1 rare in a chick, right
2 “I Think, ∴ I was,” figuratively not literally, students (puto igitur me fuisse)(some early Age of Romance Idiot-savant who delighted in Colorado USA I-am-i-said IM-wott-IM Wott IM Popeye the Sailorman rambunctiousness, and was of course mutatis mutandis and ipso facto Enlightened, man)
3 and those who later – dates, dates, Young-people, you find them up in palm trees, on clothing ownership tags, notated on Grade III children’s lunchboxes, painted on or carved into Five-thousand year old rock art and at the bottom of some slowly rotting-out deep sea benthic zone – what next, young people, timetines, datelines, bylines and songlines3a following upon and indeed from the multifarious works of the Semitic chap who made pulchritudinous and sexually-active Queen Victoria Empress of India The Right Honourable The Earl of Beaconsfield KG PC DL JP FRS ?
3A Alice Springs Stuart3b Arms Hotel lounge bar say late November 1970: I’m off to Dublin in the Morning to Join the I – R – A
3B ⋯ all you hyper busy-asked/ buzzy-arsed but dead-set not manic neoclassical neuorolinguistics Socratic Logic Once-upon-a-Silly-jism (yuck) students note “Stupid” Arms in USIS CIA Pentagon & ADF Canberra Private-schoolkids’ or John Howard’s destested Chaser-boys English usage
4 Yipp-yipp whooh-boop-dih-bomb- dee-eh all students note the resignation of @Xcomms Chief-exective-officer 9th July 2025 over the company owner’s insistence upon favourable reports on the career or at least belief-system and personal philosophy of the WWII leader who effectively (indirectly) dstroyed the German nation and ‘handed it’ on a ‘silver platter’ to George C Marshall US Army chief of staff during WWII (1939–45), later US secretary of state (1947–49), later of defense (1950–51) and to United States of America investors
As the regular Blundell crew of mega-influencers – which reminds me of a kid joke The budgie went missing but hey grandfather (the writer’s own grandpa, a 1920s-on South Australian public educator steeped in Alfred Marshall, Wm McDougall & Albert Venn Dicey was an Oxford University Press pre-publication appraiser) opened the door and influenza, you’ll all be passionate about the fundamental Content : Process dial-out and consequent upon your studies of the last five years champing-at-the-bit to demand that it be mainstreamed in every educational institution on Earth on pain of cessation of public funding (in the breach) AND to the challenges of document titling, ever socially conscious that the mere announcement, presentation and display of a brand or category of study ensures Foucaultian artificial or socially-constructed ex fact compartmentalisation and ‘siloing’ of your written works – as the million so-called posts on X Comms that are 95%, say, lost to reflective deliberation, assessment and decision1 by the public in 30 minutes flat.. to 99.9 recurring beyond 35mins.. So yes it’s shaped up as Content-Enumeration-Process, ahmm.
Beavers
Castoroides (from Latincastor (beaver) and –oides (like)[2]), or the giant beaver, is an extinct genus of enormous, bear-sized beavers that lived in North America during the Pleistocene. Two species are currently recognized, C. dilophidus in the Southeastern United States and C. ohioensis in most of North America. C. leiseyorum was previously described from the Irvingtonian age but is now regarded as an invalid name. All specimens previously described as C. leiseyorum are considered to belong to C. dilophidus.
Yes Everyone it’s a Photo of Sarah Cooper from, Well/ Cromwell, Say Seven Years Ago
GEA 1/6
I see the way ahead to the light, but I could hardly leave my family in the state it is: I love you, Annette, in spite of everything. What kind of man would I be if i just abandoned you? Not much cop on the wheel of life. I’d fall right off, right through to the cockroaches. Laughing?
‘Trying to,’ said Annette.
‘Take another slug of Easy Night. Gilda rang me. She was really worried about you. Go back to sleep, sweetheart. See you later. We’ll bring back fish and chips.
‘And Dr Rhea Marks? Will she come too for fish and chips?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Spicer. ‘You’ve terrified her out of her wits, Annette. I’m not exactly lkng frwrd 2 Rainbow Puppeteers. Don’t make matters even worse than you’ve made them already.’
‘Sorry, Spicer. Is this call being broadcast through the office?’
‘Yes,’ said Spicer, ‘come 2 think of it. But you’re a media personallty. It shouldnt worry you.’
GWA 2/6
‘Mrs Horrocks?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘This is the Oprah Winfrey Show. Amelia speaking.’
‘Oh, hi.’ ‘We mean to record tomorrow and hold over and screen for our New Year show. We like to do things
GEA 3/6
live but even Oprah has to have a holiday sometimes. Can I just say how much I loved Lucifette Fallen? Of course the timing is good for you – Ernie Gromback tells me he’s scheduled publication to fit in with our transmission. isn’t he a charmer?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Annette.
‘We’re building the programme around the domestic row,’ said Amelia. We reckon
GEA 4/6
God and Lucifer had the first one: brilliant of you to have seen that Lucifer was female. After that it was Jupiter and Juno. What can the rest of us poor mortals do in the face of the archetype? We have our pet psychotherapist to help us see through the dark to the light.
GEA 5/6
That’s the bit we’d like you to read from Lucifette Fallen : on page eight of the proof copy. I must say your publisher whizzed ir round to us. The para beginning “Where darkness becomes light” – down to “What can a child do but repeat the experience?” And then sit next to Oprah and chat a bit about your own experiences and what drove you to write the novel,’
GEA 6/6
‘I’m sorry – I’ve lost you. I’m still a bit sleepy – ‘
‘You are very central to the show, Mrs Horrocks, said Amelia. Have you had experience of TV before?’
‘No,’ said Annette.
‘Welcome to the real world,’ said Amelia.
John Blundell 🦘🇦🇺 🌏
In celebration of Fay Weldon 22 Sept 1931 to 4 Jan 2023 with detail from Affliction 1994. Oh that year in John Foster Dulles’s Christendom. Australia? No, too hard.
FW
1 Australia’s ABC Radio National this evening 8th July ran its weekly program The Law Report with four academics in startling explication on certain issues that the institution’s sub-editors figured should be billed ‘AI and Automated Decision-making,’ oh Whoop, oh Lord Jesus, we have been very good and tried our hearts out and stuff
Folk foregather in a geo-community, a suburban, rural or regional residential, industrial, services and recreational projects zone
There’s this lady in AMERICA, we guess, who boasts One-hundred and 74 thousand bored loney cyber-sucks – whom she gaily INFLUENCES..
Who is Kellie-Jay Keen? Why is Kelly-Jay Keen power-driving Australia electoral political decision?
“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?
2023 or not long after the tall lady from the University of Queensland delivered the 2023 Boyer Lectures
“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/…
The FRAUDULENT REBRANDING of Deskilling neatly politically marginalised and COMPLETELY nonsensised & neutralised by 卍 backing-WWII authoritarian Catholic Church patriarchic scribes as ‘Liberation-theology’
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
“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.”
After such an edifying report we have the, uh, pesky hippie environment thàng
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
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Billionaire-🙈🙊🙉🐒s with Olivettis 