My Drum piece from Wednesday is here. It looks at Abbott’s proposal to get the Productivity Commission to look at extending the child care tax rebate to nannies. It must be so gratifying to the PC that from now on every one of their recommendations will be put implemented by a future Abbott Government. Here comes pokies reform… Yeah right.
It has five graphs. Matt Cowgill, ever the data nerd, has created graph of my Drum posts comparing the number of graphs with the number of comments.
My Drum piece today is here – it looks at the rather odd assessment by some in control of our economy that we are “at trend growth”. Bollocks says I.
Among the graphs is one that looks at GDP growth after going into a recession.
I only used the 1981-2, 1991, Dotcom and GFC ones as it started to get too confusing with many lines in there.
But here on Grog’s Gamut confusion is not something we worry about, so here is the same graph with the growth in GDP for the 12 quarter after entering a negative period of growth since 1960.
The growth out of the GFC still looks pretty weak.
These graphs take the starting point the quarter prior to entering the recession. The next graph looks at cumulative growth starting from the bottom of the recession. It really highlights the way the economy booms out of some recessions:
Astonishingly, taking the low point as the start, the past 12 quarters have been the worst 12 quarters of growth in GDP post a quarter of negative growth since 1960.
Yeah we’re at trend.
A couple things – look at the 1960 growth – that is a boom. No wonder George Megalogenis refers to the period as “the golden age” in his book, The Australian Moment (by the way – go buy it, highly recommended). Also The second best period if the Aqua line of growth out of the 1982-3 recession. This is a bit of a cheat, because as you can see, the 1981-2 recession was actually a double dip recession, and the blue line takes it's starting point the second of those dips (yeah that’s not complicated). But either way – the mid-1980s were boom-time AUS. Which was nice, given the 1970s had been pretty shite, and the early 1980s were the worst periods of negative growth since the Great Depression.
Also here is the graph again of the decline and eventual rise in the Employment to Population Ratio across all the recessions since 1977. Geez the 1990s were an awful time to enter the workforce.
As a special treat here is the 1991 line by itself with the actual dates, so all you who bought a copy of “Nevermind” and who watched Twin Peaks, Melrose Place and Seinfeld can relive the joys of unemployment:
What is really cool is that when it got back to square in July 200, the Dotcom bubble burst and the went down again and didn’t get back to square until November 2002!
Happy memories Gen X.
My Drum piece today is on the wonders of productivity – how it can apparently be many things, mostly what it is not actually.
Today it was also announced that the 2012 Best Australian Blogs Competition is all set to get going. It is run by the Sydney Writers Centre. You can find all the info here. I am to be one of the judges – primarily for "the category of “commentary”:
Commentary
Blogs that share your opinion and comment on developments in an area of your interest. Commentary blogs can focus on any issue or industry including the media, politics, law, fashion, art, theatre, feminism and human rights.
You’ve got till 13 April to enter; finalists announced on 26 April, and the winners on 10 May.
Good luck. (And yes I did see “fashion” in the category. Don’t laugh, I am an absolute doyen on the fashion world. Hypercolour t-shirts are still in right?)
So today, capping off a wonkarific week, the ABS released the Labour Force figures.
The skinny is that on seasonally adjusted terms the unemployment rate increased from 5.1% to 5.2%, on trend terms it remained steady at 5.2%. The trend rate has actually been steady for 7 months.
OK. Let’s get to the graphs.
First the “perspective” one. The long term graph:
The, “Hey America and Britain: How you Doing?” Graph
So yeah, things have been worse and are worse elsewhere. But let’s not get too cocky. OK let’s have a closer look at thing.
First the changes in employment:
The seasonal rate bounces up and down pretty drastically, and is useful for looking at corners turning, but the trend shows the picture quite starkly – flat. There hasn’t been a rise (or fall) in employment number of greater than 0.1% in the past 12 months.
Next there is the changes in total hours worked. I won’t bother with the seasonal changes as they really jump around, but a comparison to employment growth shows what is happening.
For the 5th straight month the trend of hours worked has fallen – though the decline is slowing. This suggests that while people are being kept in work, their hours are being reduced. So hours are down, employment flat, why is the employment rate steady? A look at the next graph gives an indicator
The participation rate has been declining since November 2010 when the seasonal rate hit a record 66 per cent.
A look at the employment to population ratio takes into account all things such a whether one is “looking for work” (ie “Participating”) and I think is a better metric than the actual employment rate:
As you can see the trend has been declining in the past 7 months while the actual employment rate has been flat.
And finally in episode 245 of “Why does the data not conform to our ‘unions are killing the nation’ narrative”. The latest Industrial Disputes figures came out. The number declined from last quarter’s spike (which was due mostly to NSW public servants not covered by the Fair Work Australia Act).
As an aside, given the GDP figures came out yesterday and thus also the productivity rate here’s a graph of the rolling 2 year average of Industrial Disputes and of the GDP Per Hours Worked (Productivity)
Curiously as the number of disputes has declined, so too has the productivity growth. I’m not suggesting a link, but more observing that perhaps the problems of productivity in this country are a bit more complex than just worrying about unions.
My Drum piece today is here. It has a lot of graphs, but the clarity of them is not real good. Pretty sure this is due to transfer from Excel to Word to them whatever is done to put it on the web (yeah I’m real techy). It’s annoying you can’t click on the graphs to see them bigger. Any advice on what I can do to improve this is appreciated – though bear in mind I don’t have anything to do with the actual posting of the post on The Drum – that gets done by the ABC.
I also right at the last minute re-did the graphs to make them (ironically) clearer, and I mistakenly put the same graph in twice.
Anyhoo here are all the graphs in a clearer format:
My Drum piece today is on a few things, but mainly the ongoing call that a wages break-out is imminent. Rather oddly this ongoing call occurs despite all evidence failing to support it. But such is the way of the work in this era where facts just seem to get in the way.
I also reference Dickens' Hard Times. It is not may favourite of his works though. My top 3 of his novels would be:
I have a few on the shelf waiting to be read – Little Dorrit is the next most likely. The problem is that Dickens’ works are generally on the weighty side and I am finding it harder and harder to find the time to read the big tomes.
In other news, in Crikey today Derryn Hinch was giving his views on good journalism. His response contained this line:
I don’t read amateur blogs, I read the real blogs
“Real” obviously no longer means what it used to….
So many media reports for so many months for so few votes.
All of that for 31 votes. Less than a third of the vote.
Back in September last year, Michelle Grattan wrote a report with the headline:
Rudd only nine votes short of top job: opposition
It began:
“SPECULATION about Prime Minister Julia Gillard's leadership has been re-ignited by claims Kevin Rudd canvassed with a Labor MP whether he would run for the job.”
All last year and this year so much speculation has been “reignited”, has been “mounted”.
Last week oh so many press gallery journalists took to Twitter with glee to tell everyone it wasn’t a beat up (or actually many chose to use “made up) such as SBS Karen Middleton:
“Hey you know I think there might be something in all this leadership talk. But then I could just be
#makingitup”
As the blogger of the site “Things Bogans Like” tweeted in response:
“a great deal of replacing 'beating up' with 'making up' by journos today...”
It is almost churlish to single out Middleton, because there were many many other in the press gallery agreeing with her.
Sorry folks. It was media driven, not caucus driven.
How long has it been going? Well April last year The Daily Telegraph ran a story on Rudd “conducting a street walk with the member for the marginal seat of Banks, Daryl Melham”, which had this subtle headline:
Rudd's run for Labor revival
And yet the article by Simon Benson and Alison Rehn contained this line:
“Senior Labor sources maintain the caucus is unlikely to ever entertain putting him back into the leadership.”
Unfortunately those “senior Labor sources” (who have been shown to be spot on) were forgotten and replaced by other “senior Labor sources”.
But this was just the end of so much wind. In September last year a third candidate was being thrown around (though in the meantime we also had speculation about Peter Beattie coming back), and then the classic:
Coalition leader Tony Abbott prepares for Kevin Rudd
By the start of this year, the reporting went from predictions of a challenge happening sometime in the next 6 months to it a case that a challenge will happen – it must!. I said on Twitter at the start of February that it seemed like Gillard had entered “the killing zone” – and she had – there was absolutely no way “the story was going to go away”. It was a self-fulfilling proposition. Every press conference contained questions about leadership – she was being told in opinion pages that she had to bring things to a head – that if she didn’t call a spill it would be a sign of weakness – The “PM knows this farce cannot continue” type story.
And so a leadership vote was held and Rudd by all reports got one minister to change sides – Albanese and that happened on Saturday – ie not last year when “cracks were appearing”. Had there been any actual momentum building inside the caucus for a spill? Well Rudd got 31 votes, and given reports are that he had a bit over 20 votes back in 2010, we can quite clearly say the answer to that is no.
All this for 31 votes.
Once Gillard called the leadership ballot, it became so obvious that Rudd wasn’t going to win that the media needed a new narrative. This is the classic win-win for the media. Best of all for the press gallery, journos like Simon Benson, who has been the prime banger of the leadership-speculation drum, are now able to write:
THE outcome of today's leadership ballot no longer really matters. The damage has been done.
The spear throwers of the Labor Party have done their work well. They have mortally wounded not only Kevin Rudd but Julia Gillard as well.
And this apparently, was the point of it all.
Contempt is the emotion that most comes to mind.
And thus seamlessly the media shifts into the third-candidate story or the Rudd being drafted as leader story. Here’s hoping this time they wait to see if there are more than 31 votes for this option before shifting their reporting into overdrive.
A nice little insight in to how many in the press gallery think came on Saturday just prior to Albanese holding his press conference to announce which side he was taking, the ABC’s Latika Bourke tweeted:
Very likely Anthony Albanese will back Kevin Rudd.
#respill
The Australian’s Lanai Vasek replied:
I hope he does, for the sake of a very good yarn.
Yep – who gives a sh*t, so long as they can write a good story.
