JC Political Thread - For All Things Political Part 2

[Reaper]

Anyone have anything to say about "Ms don't drink or smoke and work hard and you can inherit half a billion like I did Rinehart's" comments? I find the comments rather off saying they work for $2 a day in Africa, just after the shooting of striking workers in SA, that that is what Au should compete with. Maybe she should leave our resources here, take her money, buy an African country and exploit it whilst sitting in the Colonial Club she builds in honour of herself. Her name lacks the letters Va that would politely express the word I have in mind for her.

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Rinehart says some very stupid things sometimes. Clive Palmer is another one. Actually they say them often. The underlying message of Australia needing to be more competitive is very valid and relevant though. $2 per day in Africa is a silly thing to say that does her own argument a dis service. If nothing else, all the lefties and bleeding hearts who can't see the forest for the trees jump right onto it and miss the wider point. As evidenced here:

I think its time the bottom 99% just ignores Ms Rinehart.....she has nothing intelligent, constructive, or meaningful to say. Kinda like Lord Monckton and Clive Palmer. With a few billion laying about has she thought about getting a personal trainer? Oh wait, we shouldn't be exercising, we should be making another billion to throw onto the pile.

Do yourself a favour and think about what they say. Have a crack at the slave labour rates by all means but at least acknowledge the underlying message to yourself.

Lol mate I am with you all the way dont worry. The hardest work she has ever had to do was face courts to try and keep her money away from the rest of the family. She might be one of the worlds richest women, but hard not to get rich when you own half the Pilbara surely?

It's easy to dismiss it but she has made some extremely smart decisions often. Smart decisions once in a while can = luck. Smart decisions over and over and over = research & hard work.


Reaper

 

[minux]

Rinehart says some very stupid things sometimes. Clive Palmer is another one. Actually they say them often. The underlying message of Australia needing to be more competitive is very valid and relevant though. $2 per day in Africa is a silly thing to say that does her own argument a dis service. If nothing else, all the lefties and bleeding hearts who can't see the forest for the trees jump right onto it and miss the wider point. As evidenced here:

Reaper, you of all people i thought would not have done a Gillard like many posters here and said what she said was silly.

Labour costs are typically 35 per cent higher here than on the United States Gulf Coast, where they can also lower labor costs further if they utilise ‘illegal’ labour from Mexico and the south…

Business-as-usual will not do - not when West African competitors can offer our biggest customers an average capital cost for a tonne of iron ore that’s $100 under the price offered by an emerging producer in the Pilbara.

Furthermore, Africans want to work and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future...

Now in context, how is what she said silly? She is spot on, we need to find ways to be more productive or companies will just move to Africa and employ cheap work to make even more money. So no, I do not beleive what she said was silly, she is making a damned valid point, Africa could be the next China, it started out exactly the same and when the people with money warned of it decades back people scoffed and called them silly.

 

[DAKSTER]

Why is she silly? Firstly, she is wrong. African miners do not get paid $2 per day. Only the very poorest countries in Africa, like the Congo, get anything like that low a wage. They arent mining iron ore in those countries so its hardly relevant is it?

In the broader context, absolutely, Australia needs to find ways to compete better. And we do. African mining may cost less per man hour, but there are a LOT more man hours involved. We mine the modern way. Sure, the more efficient we become, the better we compete, no argument there. I think you will find Reaper agreed with you there too actually.

The truly silly thing she has done is stand in front of a camera, covered in expensive jewellry, with a personal fortune developed from a huge inheritance, and tell Joe Public he needs to give up smoking, drinking and sleeping and knuckle down to work harder if they want to be successful like her. Make some sacrifices.

Joe Public looks at her and wonders if she has ever got her fingernails dirty in her life, and finds it very hard to take her seriously. He knows damn well that she has never had to sacrifice anything in her life to get to where she is.

The truth isnt actually that relevant in either case. The stupidity is the fact that she stood up and said it. Of course she is going to get a bad reaction. She has, just as Reaper pointed out, alienated the majority of the public by telling them they need to work harder and cheaper, and make lots of sacrifices if they want to be rich like her when they all know damn well she hasnt had to do anything of the sort. Glibly tossing out the $2/day figure was pretty bloody silly. How to win friends and influence people? No.

 

[Reaper]

Reaper, you of all people i thought would not have done a Gillard like many posters here and said what she said was silly.

Now in context, how is what she said silly? She is spot on, we need to find ways to be more productive or companies will just move to Africa and employ cheap work to make even more money. So no, I do not beleive what she said was silly, she is making a damned valid point, Africa could be the next China, it started out exactly the same and when the people with money warned of it decades back people scoffed and called them silly.

WTF?? It was silly. I also defended the underlying message which was spot on. Are you advocating Australia lowers our wage to $2 per day?

Reaper

 

[minux]

WTF?? It was silly. I also defended the underlying message which was spot on. Are you advocating Australia lowers our wage to $2 per day?

Reaper

Where have I advocated a $2 wage? Where did Rhinehart advocate it? We as a country are unproductive and need to do something about it ASAP before we have nothing making money to pay the mounting bills...

WORKING days lost due to industrial disputes have hit an eight-year high, with 101,700 working days lost in the June quarter.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics said it was the highest level of working days lost in one three-month period since June 2004.

A perfect example of our work practices...

 

[Reaper]

Where have I advocated a $2 wage? Where did Rhinehart advocate it? We as a country are unproductive and need to do something about it ASAP before we have nothing making money to pay the mounting bills...

Actually that was her inference. Bitch about our uncompetitiveness by all means. Find other ways of illustrating examples though. Our growth (carbon) tax & the super epic mining profits (anything over 6%) tax are good places to start.

A perfect example of our work practices...

No arguments on that one what so ever. The disjoint between the workforce and world reality is at a all time high. Granted much of Europe is significantly worse but still.

Reaper

 

[c2105026]

I do appreciate that when it comes to most things using cheap labour in the developing world makes business sense (but regarding ethical, safety and environmental sense, as well as quality of product, jury is still out). But then for company XYZ then try to say to the average Australian worker (who is on say $60k/yr) 'to maintain international competitiveness we will cut your pay to $20k/yr' when our housing market and retail sector relies on people making $60k/yr...it'll all end in a giant tailspin. Forget the 100,000 working days lost...it'll all grind to a halt...... I do believe workers have a right to wage rises along the lines of CPI, and indeed deny those that are overpaid (taken into account responsibility, supply/demand, training) but whilst there are some dodgy unions there are also some dodgy employers and corporations.

 

[Reaper]

I do appreciate that when it comes to most things using cheap labour in the developing world makes business sense (but regarding ethical, safety and environmental sense, as well as quality of product, jury is still out). But then for company XYZ then try to say to the average Australian worker (who is on say $60k/yr) 'to maintain international competitiveness we will cut your pay to $20k/yr' when our housing market and retail sector relies on people making $60k/yr...it'll all end in a giant tailspin. Forget the 100,000 working days lost...it'll all grind to a halt...... I do believe workers have a right to wage rises along the lines of CPI, and indeed deny those that are overpaid (taken into account responsibility, supply/demand, training) but whilst there are some dodgy unions there are also some dodgy employers and corporations.

Thats the point though. Most of them in the mines are earning well north of $150k per year for unskilled labouring and a heck of a lot more for semi skilled. Same goes for building sites. FFS - the lolly pop guy who holds the stop/slow sign at the road being built near my factory is on $110k per year :bang:. If it was $60k then I'm sure it wouldn't be an issue.

Reaper

 

[DAKSTER]

This entire post pasted from an article by Matt Cowgill on ABC's 'The Drum'. He is a unionist, which lowers the value of his opinion to me, but the numbers appear informed.

The original article came from HERE and was written on 12th May 2011.

What this article does for me is demonstrate how people can have the wrong idea simply because they read the wrong newspapers.

Papers such as the Australian certainly use accurate figures, but they are carefully selected figures which back the point they want to make. I am sick of hearing about the huge wage Australians supposedly make. It reminds me of our former mate Dufus who supposedly knew no-one who earned less than 80K annually. Here is the reality.



There are a couple of pieces in the News Ltd papers yesterday which advance the view that the Government is practising unconscionable ‘class warfare’ by reducing the benefits paid to families with incomes above $150,000 a year.

In The Australian’s piece, a couple on $200,000 a year (who admit they pay only 18 per cent tax) complain that they may be forced to get a nanny if their childcare subsidy is reduced.

Now, The Australian itself has called for reductions in ‘middle-class welfare’, so either the editors have changed their mind, or they have a misguided sense of what constitutes a middle income in modern Australia.

I don’t doubt that the family featured in The Australian’s story genuinely thinks they’re more-or-less typical, but they’re wrong. We all tend to judge what’s normal, or typical, with reference to those we work and socialise with. This leads the poor to underestimate the wealth of the rich, and leads the rich to overestimate the wealth of the poor. It also means that a lot of us tend to think we’re ‘middle class’ when we’re not.

Andrew Leigh (before he was an MP) wrote a great little paper on the effect that this misperception has on our public debate, called ‘The Political Economy of Tax Reform in Australia’. In it, he argued that:

Opinion leaders [do] not properly appreciate the distribution of income in Australia. For the most part, the taxation rates applying to most politicians, journalists, business executives and think-tank staffers (and indeed, to academic economists) are not those that apply to the average voter. In all these professions, six-figure salaries are common. Yet only 4.5 per cent of Australian adults have an income that exceeds $100,000 per year, and only 1.5 per cent have an income that exceeds $150,000 per year.

(The paper is from 2006, so the figures are a little out of date, but the principle hasn’t changed).

Leigh also, correctly, notes that “reporting of ‘average’ income in Australia focuses on a measure of earnings which is not that of the typical voter”. Journalists often use average weekly ordinary time earnings for full-time adults (AWOTE) as a measure of a typical income. This is misleading for several reasons.

First, not everyone works. AWOTE measures only those who have earned income. Second, people have sources of income other than employment (transfers from the Government, dividends, rent, capital gains). Third, AWOTE excludes part-time workers, and therefore excludes a lot of low-income earners.

Fourth, AWOTE represents mean earnings, not median earnings. This is a very important point. The mean income of drinkers in a pub goes through the roof if Bill Gates walks through the door, but the typical drinker has become no better off. For this reason, the median is a much better measure of a typical person’s income, as it is not distorted upwards (or downwards) by large changes in the tails of the distribution. This is a point that we all should recall from Year 8 maths, but for some it is apparently a difficult point to grasp.

So, what does the typical Australian worker earn?

If we’re only interested in wages, and only interested in people who work, then that’s a fairly easy question to answer. AWOTE is $66,445 per year. However, we know that’s a problematic measure of the earnings of the typical person. Instead, we can look at the median earnings of all full time workers, which is $54,750 per year.

See how much the figure drops just by looking at the median instead of the mean? In case the whole mean v median thing hasn’t sunk in, this figure means that half (50 per cent!) of all full time workers in Australia earn less than $54,750 per year, or at least they did in August 2010 when this survey was taken.

What if we broaden our scope a little, to look at all employees? After all, politicians aren’t only concerned about full-time workers. Well, the median earnings of all employees is $44,146 per year. Half of all workers earn less than $44,146 per year.

However, we don’t all work. In fact, a lot of us don’t.

So, what is the typical Australian’s income?

To answer this question, I like to use the tax statistics from the ATO. These tell us that taxpayers at the 50th percentile in 2008-09 earned somewhere between $43,898 and $44,546 in the year. Let’s take the mid-point of this and call it the median, $44,222 a year.

Half of all Australian taxpayers had taxable incomes below $44,222 in 2008-09.

It’s starting to seem as if $200,000 is quite a lot of money, isn’t it? In fact, 98 per cent of taxpayers have incomes below $180,000. Mr Gray, the man in the Daily Telegraph’s story, earns $150,000, which would put him in the top 3 per cent of taxpayers by income (or at least it would’ve in 08-09). Quite how this makes Mr Gray a “middle income earner” escapes me.

One objection at this point would be that I’ve been talking about individuals’ earnings or incomes, rather than households. After all, families tend to pool their resources and spread their costs.

So, what is the typical Australian family’s income?

The latest ABS figures on the distribution of household incomes are for 2007-08. They show that the median gross household income was $67,003 a year, less than half what the $150k-$200k “battlers” of News Ltd’s imagination scrape by on.

Note that the mean gross household income was $85,983, which shows you again that using the ‘average’ can give you a very distorted idea of what is typical or ‘middle’.

However, there’s a problem with using these figures. The problem is that these ‘gross’ household income figures don’t take into account the fact that we all live in households of very different sizes. A household with two adults and no kids will face lower costs and have a higher standard of living than a household with two adults and two kids, even if their incomes are the same.

We need a way to compare the living standards of people across different household types, to get a measure of how much income a person would need to maintain the living standard of the typical (median) Australian. This is known as equivalised household disposable income.

So, what is the median equivalised disposable income of Australian households?

The median equivalised disposable household income for Australia in 2007-08 was $36,082 according to the ABS, and $35,664 according the Melbourne Institute’s HILDA survey.

This means a single person, living alone, would need around $36,000 in disposable income to sustain the typical Australian’s standard of living. Following a widely-accepted methodology, each additional adult adds $18,000 to this figure, so a childless couple would need a disposable income of $54,000 a year to enjoy a median standard of living. Each child adds $10,800 to this figure.

A couple family with two children would therefore have needed $75,600 disposable income in 2007-08 to have the same standard of living as the typical Australian. The family in The Australian’s story has a gross income well over double this amount, and disposable income that is still more than double the median. They are far from typical.

 

[vr94ss]

Thats the point though. Most of them in the mines are earning well north of $150k per year for unskilled labouring and a heck of a lot more for semi skilled. Same goes for building sites. FFS - the lolly pop guy who holds the stop/slow sign at the road being built near my factory is on $110k per year :bang:. If it was $60k then I'm sure it wouldn't be an issue.

Reaper

I have no idea what they get paid in the mines but you just have to be wrong about the lollipop guy. I was looking through the jobs in the paper the other day and there was a job for Network and IT Systems Administrator for the council, pay rate was $59k to $68k. Surely the lollipop dudes that work for the council don't get paid more. I would have though they got maybe $45K. If they do get that sort of pay, I'm up for a change of job.

Edit: Just went and googled up pay for mine workers and I think you might be a bit off on that also.
http://www.payscale.com/research/AU/Coal_Mine_Workers/Salary
http://www.miningreference.com/miningjobs/search_result.php?cid=4