WA Potato Marketing Corporation bites the dust

Cartoon: By R May 

It looks like Western Australia is sliding off into anarchy with the removal of another regulator.  The Potato Marketing Corporation appears to be heading towards the chopping block on the recommendation of the Economic Regulation Authority (ERA) apparently at the behest of the Labor opposition.

Fears of rogue potato growers doing whatever they want and street vendors selling illicit potato products to unwary addicts in dark alleys have been dismissed: 

Arguably an anachronism in today's capitalist world, WA's Potato Marketing Act of 1946 - and its subsequent regulator, the Potato Marketing Corporation of WA - trace their history back to the shortages of the Great Depression and post-war food security. 

The corporation not only controls what potato varieties can be grown and sold, but who grows them and how much they are paid. 

It has the power to search premises, confiscate equipment and crops, and prosecute farmers - as rebel southwest potato grower Tony Galati has found over the years after being threatened with legal action for overplanting and trying to sell excess spuds cheaply. … 

… ''The Potato Marketing Corporation and Western Australia's absurd laws have stifled competition and denied choice to growers and consumers,'' Mr McGowan said.  ''No other Australian state has a body that decides what varieties of potatoes can be grown, who can grow them and at what price they can be sold. 

''It should be left to the growers to decide if they will grow a particular variety of potato.''Mr McGowan said the restrictive laws were responsible for some of Australia's highest potato prices and, of the 66 commercial varieties grown around the nation; only 13 were permitted in WA. 

''It would be comical if it wasn't so damaging to WA's economy and consumer and grower choice,'' he said. ...

Marketing authorities and regulations became popular after World War 2, possibly as a reaction to the demise of wartime rationing, fears of a free market renaissance, and a need to find spots for all of those bureaucrats likely to be left with nothing to interfere with.

Both Labor and the Liberal and Country Party, (now National Party or LNP) were very keen on the idea; the difference being that while Labor aimed to control production, distribution, and marketing of products, the conservatives chose to regulate it.  There was little difference in the result.

During the 60s, and 70s, the most heinous crimes you could commit in Queensland on the basis of penalties, were breaches of national Party orderly marketing regulations. 

Leyonhjelm inspires another cartoonist

Giving inspiration to cartoonists can be a mixed blessing, frequently a negative one, even a brutal experience.  Still, if it is a good likeness, your name is spelt right, and whatever it is highlighting is not a really bad, it can be as good as a big advertising budget for getting your name out there.

LDP Senator, David Leyonhjelm has come off very well, getting the cover of The Spectator Australia on his election.

It is understood that the original is proudly displayed in his office.

Recently he was seen commenting on how we have a government he likened to Godzilla, a reasonable assessment of the enormous burden of the state on the population with its attendant pernicious imposition of itself into every aspect of our daily lives as well as our wallets in order to fund its depredations.

This appears to have inspired well known cartoonist Stephen Zeg Gunnell (Zeg) to come up with his offering on the subject, which rather than Godzilla uses the theme of David and Goliath to illustrate this situation and David's role in opposing it.

 

Since when was driving a privilege???

Nothing any good ever came out of Victoria – Old Queensland adage

Victoria seems to be offering stiff competition for other nanny-state regimes with their latest stupidity.  Magistrates will now have the power to take away your drivers license for being drunk while walking home after a night at the pub.  It is not explained why being on foot has anything to do with driving but hey, with slogans like, ‘if one life can be saved,’ its said, it will all be worthwhile.

Effectively, this means that if you are out at the pub, get a bit pissed, and are a bit worried about how to get home a few blocks away; if you think you can still keep the car on a straight line, you might be better to take the risk on driving rather than leave it in the car park and walk.  You will be visible for longer on foot, and there is no difference in the penalty.

The government tells  the public that driving is a privilege, not a right and the editorial comes up with the same words: 

… The provisions broaden a judicial officer’s ability to suspend, cancel or disqualify an offender’s licence or learner permit for any matter, regardless of whether driving is an element of the offence. 

For anyone to lose a licence for public drunkenness would be an extreme use of the new power. Offenders can lose their licences for road rage and magistrates have wide powers to impose conditions on them.

“From today, offenders can lose their driver’s licence for road rage offences or for any other offence where the court considers doing so will better protect the community or send a clear message to the offender,” Mr Clark says. … 

…  “Where a court considers the best way to pull an offender into line is by taking away their licence, it will have the power to do so.” 

A senior North East traffic policeman welcomed The Road Safety and Sentencing Acts Amendment Act 2013.  Wangaratta highway patrol Sgt Michael Connors said anything that deterred offending was welcome.

“The possession of a licence is a privilege, not a right, so if these offences are going to be committed where they shouldn’t be driving on our roads, say hoon driving or evading police, then their licence should be suspended or removed,” Sgt Connors said. ...

A drivers licence cannot really be considered a privilege, given that the roads are publicly funded and citizens are entitled to freedom of movement whether sober, pissed, or even meeting with the disapproval of the public at large, provided they are not acting in an aggressive or coercive manner.

Were a road to be privately owned, and that owner restricted the right to drive on it to friends, gay partners, climate change skeptics, or whatever, then driving on it would indeed be a privilege.

A drivers licence is given subject to meeting certain requirements in driving ability, knowledge of the road laws, and an understanding that while traveling, the driver has the ability to do so safely.

It is not an absolute right; otherwise it would arrive in the mail at the predetermined age.  It is however, a right to all who can meet the basic qualifications for receiving it, and can conduct themselves in a manner consistent with safe road use.

Any legislation that takes away the right to drive on public roads for reasons unrelated to road safety is an anathema to liberty and has no place in a free society. 

An alternative to Chris Berg’s views on breaking election promises

Statements on a theme:

“Voters need to ask themselves who they trust to protect jobs and guide the economy through a new age of uncertainty.” – Kevin Rudd

"This election will be about trust." – Tony Abbott

This election, like never before, is about who you can trust - Christine Milne

“From this day forth, you put your trust... in me.” – Lord Voldemort.

During the 2013 election, the economically literate were dismayed as then opposition leader, Tony Abbott in question after question ruled out any action that would reduce the profligate waste of taxpayers money that had been occurring under Labor, to the point where he was willing to embrace every big spending ‘initiative’ that Rudd came up with.

The reality was that with Labor less popular than a dose of clap and major concern in the electorate at the ever-increasing deficits and escalating national debt, he pretty much had carte blanche to offer to take the hard decisions necessary to pull the nation back into gear.  He would have been cheered for it.

He didn’t have the courage to do it and now has to tread the tightrope between the need for action, and his ruling out most of those very actions.

Cartoon: By R May 

Chris Berg has offered some helpful tips: 

… Here's one answer. Parties don't see election promises as promises in the plain English meaning of the word. Instead, promises are signals designed to express a deeper character of the political party. When Abbott promised not to change the pension and not to cut public broadcasters he was trying to signal that his would not be a radical government; that he was firmly targeting the median voter. 

After all, why give the SBS promise? Did it win any marginal votes? Surely not. But it did suggest to the electorate he had no secret plan to burn through Australia's institutions. Promises like that increase the political cost of radical action. 

This practice is of course deeply deceptive - election promises as signals rather than genuine commitments - but it's a deception we're used to. 

Voters are rational. We know campaign nonsense when we see it. As this interesting 2004 paper points out, voters infer the true policy position of candidates for office despite the thicket of untruths. 

Obviously Coalition failures deserve to be treated as harshly as Labor failures were. Perhaps more. The Coalition swore to be guided by higher ethical standards than its predecessors. 

But let's not pretend to be surprised. Australia is one of the world's oldest democracies. We've been voting for broken promises for a very long time.

To some extent Berg is correct, although normally incoming governments find an excuse to break their promises as early as possible in their tenure.

Whitlam claimed that the problem with the economy was that we had too much money sloshing around in our pockets and the responsible thing for government to do was to increase taxes to absorb that which we didn’t need.

Malcolm Fraser was too arrogant to give us a reason to break his, but Hawkie and Keating came up with a budget ‘black hole’ and offered us consensus.  Under consensus, the government would negotiate with the opposition in order to decide the position they would like us to be in, and what to do with us when they had us there.  The result was, that rather than being screwed by the government, we were gangied by the parliament as a whole.

It hasn’t gotten any better since.

One of Tony’s options is the use of the term core, and non-core promises.  That though has been done already.

On the serious side though, there are plenty of options available.

While Abbott promised not to reduce the funding for the ABC and SBS, he said nothing about keeping them in public ownership.  Fairfax already provides left wing bias quite effectively in the private sector, so there is really no need for the government to duplicate that service.  There is nothing wrong with the ABC that couldn’t be fixed by Kerry Stokes, James Packer, Rupert Murdoch, or Gina Rinehart.

The Department of Climate Change could be abolished.  It would simply require an acknowledgement that the government hasn’t the competency to change the climate, certainly not for the better.  

While doing this, forget the idiotic climate action plan, abolish the ‘Clean Energy Finance Corporation’, the renewable energy target, subsidies on wind, solar, etc, and mandates on the use of renewables.  This would save billions.

There is considerable scope for the abolition of all federal government departments that duplicate state government ones.  The states themselves can run their own affairs in ways that are better suited to their individual circumstances better and more efficiently than can be done by a distant bureaucracy,

Where coordination is needed, the relevant state ministers can do this.

All of the departments left will probably go out on strike in solidarity with their fellow public servants.  When this happens, the government should examine the effects, and abolish all of those, which cause no inconvenience to the public by their absence.

By this time the budget crisis would be solved and we would be back in surplus again, but we can go further.  The SPC issue proved that there is really no need for taxpayers to pad the profit margins of Coca Cola Amatil.  There is no reason why any corporate welfare should continue; the government having made a nice start here.  It should then look at the inefficient churn of middle class welfare which would no longer be required as everyone would benefit from the substantial tax cuts the above would make possible.

Plain packaging not doing so well

Plain packaging appears to be one of those things that must have seemed like a good idea at the time as a knee jerk reaction by a government that felt the need to be seen to be doing something.

When plain packaging legislation was mooted, it was criticized by the tobacco industry as likely to encourage counterfeiting of cigarettes. This claim was dismissed by the government as ‘big tobacco’ propaganda.

Recent reports indicate that ‘big tobacco’ was right and big government was wrong: 

THE volume of illegal tobacco on the streets of the Sunshine Coast has grown at an alarming rate, according to the results of a new survey. 

Conducted by KPMG UK, the survey looked at the number of discarded illegal cigarette packets on the Coast. 

A sample of 300 packs last year found 6.7% were illegal - up from 0.5% in 2012.The report showed Australia's total consumption of illegal cigarettes had climbed to its highest rate. 

British American Tobacco Australia spokesperson Scott McIntyre said the country's total black market was continuing to boom, with a 20% rise in illegal tobacco since plain packs had been on shelves. 

"If the criminal gangs who illegally imported 2.45 million kilograms of illegal tobacco into the country last year had paid the tobacco excise they should have to the Government, then we would have around $1.1 billion extra in the budget," he said. 

"Due to high excise rates Australia is a very lucrative target for illegal tobacco smugglers and it's made more attractive as there's no real enforcement at the retail level to stop them once they hit the streets. 

"Around 70% of the price of a legal cigarette pack sale goes to the Government in taxes. Criminal gangs obviously don't pay tax, making smuggling illegal cigarettes in from Asia and the Middle East so profitable. 

"It's why dodgy retailers sell illegal cigarettes for around half the price of legal cigarettes.”

The echo chambers of the insular elites ring with self-congratulations at yet another great idea that will stop the great unwashed from harming themselves and make Australians safer in spite of ourselves.  The problem with being insular though, is that you tend to lose touch with the real world and come up with ‘solutions’ that create the opposite effect.

Plain packaging is a boon to those who are prepared to counterfeit the product, while the increases in excise makes the cheaper product even more attractive. 

When will these self righteous idiots ever learn?

Brandis supports limited freedom of thought but not of deed

With the rise of libertarianism the Liberal Party are becoming rather fond of getting back to their supposed roots in classical liberalism.  One of the problems they have in doing this is that they are not very good at it.

In 2010, now treasurer, Joe Hockey gave a speech to the Grattan Institute in which he lauded John Locke and John Stewart Mill and spoke at length on his avaricious reading of everything they had to say.  While there is no reason to doubt his reading of them, given his actions since, there is room for considerable doubt as to whether he had a clue as to what they were on about.

George Brandis is better in his actions on freedom of speech, but in an interview with Brendan O’Neill quotes John Stuart Mill as his inspiration while maintaining that the government has a right to be the arbiter of what people can do: 

So currently, Brandis is on a mission to reform Section 18C. He wants to remove the words ‘insult’, ‘offend’ and ‘humiliate’, but he is willing to leave in the stipulation against ‘intimidation’ of a person or group on the basis of their ethnic origins. … 

… Brandis says there are two reasons he’s bent on overhauling Section 18C. The first is because it expands the authority of state into the realm of thought, where it should never tread, he says. ‘There is a deeper question here, about the role of the state. To what extent should the state be the arbiter of what people can think? 

Now of course, the state is the arbiter of what people can do. The state, to use the most straightforward example imaginable, prohibits murder. It is the role of government to protect the weak from the strong. But this is about whether it is the role of government to tell people what they may think. In my view, freedom of speech, by which I mean the freedom to express and articulate beliefs and opinions, is a necessary and essential precondition of political freedom.’ … 

… As another bottle of wine arrives, he returns to Mill: ‘He said the only limitation on the freedom of the individual should be when he causes harm to others. Hearing views that you find offensive or outrageous or insulting is not a form of harm. If it is admitted to be a form of harm, then freedom of speech, freedom of discourse, intellectual freedom and political freedom become impossible.’

Brandis deserves kudos for his effort to reform the racial discrimination act, even if he fails to go far enough.  There is no real reason why section 18C (the hurt feelings law) should not be repealed in its entirety, however he seems to be hung up on keeping the section relating to intimidation of a person or group on the basis of their ethnic origins.

There are already adequate laws against intimidation in Australia which apply whether there is any racial aspect or not, thus making this section unnecessary.  To suggest that there should be a special one to handle complaints where a racial aspect is claimed means that the court is required to decide what an offender was thinking at the time.  This appears to go against his assertion that the state should not be the arbiter of what we think.

To have special laws, either for or against particular racial groups is a form of apartheid and have no place in a free society.

The problem with George though, is his assertion that the state should be the arbiter of what people do.  He offers no ifs, buts, nor even maybes on this. 

His statement on the right to regulate murder is a no contest, but harks back to the arguments of the religious right that were the state not to enact the ten commandments in full, then murder and theft would be legal.

The state has a right and function in preventing coercive acts in society but that is where the right to regulate human actions ends. From a libertarian perspective, we are OK with laws that prevent murder, theft, or the bearing of false witness, but we would have problems were it to enact them against adultery, graven images, or working on the Sabbath.  This does not indicate that we support such behaviors, but they are moral decisions that are not the place of the state to govern.

The Brandis/Hockey state sees no reason to steer clear of regulating our personal behavior. The mere fact that someone somewhere can do something without a license and without breaking a law, is seen as a compelling reason for an act of parliament to correct this.

Brandis is moving in the right direction, but needs to totally reevaluate his commitment to classical liberalism and try to go the whole hog.

Coalition of eco-loons and anti-market fanatics

Daniel Hannan presents another glaring example of how both incarnations of the modern authoritarian left combine to screw things up in the name of the environment and consumer protection:
 

 Eco-loons and anti-market fanatics tend to be natural allies in inflicting greater and more intrusive regulation on all of us in order to advance their own jaundiced view of the kind of society they would have us become.

Council global warming planning decisions suffer court setback

Local authorities in Australia have been moving increasingly towards becoming another arm of big government, micro managing local affairs.  One area they have entered with gusto is including hat tips to big eco in planning decisions.

Woe betide any resident with a tree threatening his house that is deemed to be ‘of significant biodiversity value’.  Old houses that have gone through a number of evolutions in the last century must not change in any renovation beyond some time in the past deemed appropriate by cultural censors, and must not have anything modern done with them.

The latest plaything of councils is to plan for global warming induced sea level changes with building restrictions on waterfront property.

A recent court decision may provide some relief: 

A NSW judgment has castigated a local council that permitted a couple to build a house on a beachfront plot, on condition they tore it down in 20 years assuming UN predictions of sea-level rise and coastal erosion come true. 

NSW Land and Environment Court senior commissioner Tim Moore struck down the condition, saying in his judgment that Great Lakes Council had held a "Damoclean sword" over Greg and Lesley Newton, who had sought to build on a vacant block at Jimmys Beach on the mid-north coast of NSW. 

The judgment has been hailed by a lobby group representing coastal home owners in the region, who are facing similar "time-limited consents" based on dire UN International Panel on Climate Change predictions of rising sea levels. 

It comes when, as revealed by The Australian, the NSW government, infuriated that some coastal councils are unquestioningly adopting the IPCC predictions and imposing often severe planning restrictions, is preparing to issue instructions for them to apply common sense.It is a victory for the deputy mayor of Great Lakes Council, Len Roberts, who led a minority of councillors against a majority headed by Mayor Jan McWilliams who voted to impose the time-limited consent on the Newtons. 

Commissioner Moore struck down Condition 7 in the development approval, which was limited to a period of 20 years, at which point the owners would have to hire a consultant to re-examine coastal hazards. Unless the council decided sea-level change and coastal erosion were not developing as predicted, the owners would have to abandon the house. …

Council climate change planning decisions are based on the precautionary principle in the wake of the sort of climate modeling that inspired a group of climate scientists to get caught in Antarctic sea ice that according to modeling, wasn’t supposed to be there, costing millions for their rescue.

While it is reasonable to prevent residential building under known flood levels, it is idiotic to base decisions on what are essentially unproven theories promulgated by the same sort of people who were predicting a CO2 based ice age back in the 70s.

Much of the issue of building approvals could be handled by the private sector. In order to get finance to put up a building, it is first necessary to make the banks feel secure by having insurance.  If the owner cannot convince any company to issue a policy on the construction, it simply will not be built unless the proposer is able to pay for it and take the risk of losing it.

‘The Guardian’ calls for food rationing and more big government

Elitists in the halls of power in government, or in academia, think tanks, media, and elsewhere all share a love of deciding what is good and bad for us and what to do about it whether we agree or not.  Normally this involves the invoking of the good old “My will be done” clause of the authoritarian rulebook.

In Australia we have what former libertarian, John Singleton referred to as ‘the great aorta, which in its own way is the vessel that provides the blood flow to whatever the state uses in lieu of a brain, from the beating desires of those who think they know best.   They orta stop people saying, … they orta make a law to …, they orta provide more ……, they orta encourage the use of …, and so on.

In Britain, Zoe Williams of the Guardian is getting on the bandwagon of national wish lists with a call for the government to halt obesity by bringing back the sort of  rationing from the good old days of WW2: 

It's always presented as a happy accident, one of those cute paradoxes in which the second world war specialised, that rationing, in a bid to stop us starving, also stopped us getting fat. In fact, while obesity may not have featured in the planning, this isn't an accident: in order to be the kind of government that can effect that kind of public health improvement, you have to start by being the kind of government that cares whether or not your people are hungry. You have to be the kind of government that takes what people are putting on their tables every night as its most urgent and pressing business. 

At the end of rationing (which was incredibly unpopular, let's not forget – nobody enjoys being told how much bacon they're allowed) not only was there much less obesity, but other indicators of a nation's health – birth weight, infant mortality – also improved. At a recent Women's Institute history night, I saw for the first time a full list of what the rations actually were. 

I concluded ruefully that they were so meagre (one egg a week, 50g of butter) that I don't think I'd bother eating, I'd just live on protein powder and alcohol. But that's not the point; when one discusses rationing, it's in the context of national circumstances so straitened that everybody simply had to eat less, because there wasn't enough. But the next stage of that logical process is never discussed – which is that it was a fear, really, for the poor not having enough that led to a policy for everyone. 

Circumstances weren't so dire that rich people would have starved, or even people in the middle: the concern was a) that scarcity would falsely inflate prices, so people who could previously afford to eat would be priced out; and b) that people would hoard. The hoarding point is interesting as it gives the lie to a narrative often tacitly peddled, that human nature during the war was better than it is now, more self-sacrificing, less demanding, more generous. 

But more important is that point about prices – all markets favour the rich. In times of scarcity, though, the poor are disadvantaged by an amount so stark that you can't count it. Whatever the price is, the entire point is that it will be too much for that group, so that demand is reduced and supply at the top can remain at normal levels. It's like a bully holding a boy's satchel 5cm higher than he can jump. That much was obvious in the 1940s, and you would hope it would be again today, unless 30 years of neoliberalism has totally hollowed out our sense of reason. …

It seems strange to base an argument for rationing to prevent obesity, (which is caused by plentiful food for the entire population) on scarcity.  The author seems to be making an argument for price controls, which accompanied the rationing of that period, making the accompanying black market profitable.

The entire column though is full of authoritarian dogma.  It rails against hoarding; the prudent stocking up of non perishable foodstuffs and products likely to be in short supply.

There is also the quaint belief that ‘markets favor the rich’.  An unfettered free market creates plentiful food to the point where surpluses are exported, and even the poorest can eat well.  In a rationing and price control regime, many products disappear from the shelves but usually will reappear from under the counter if the customer can come up with a suitable offer, or knows someone who has the product for the right price.

It is not the free market which favors the rich, it is the state manipulated ‘orderly’ market that does so while discriminating against those with limited means as an unintended consequence.

Then again, this is a writer who believes that the only reason people would object to rationing in times of plenty is the fault of 'neoliberalism' 'hollowing out' our dense of reason.  Yep, Zoe, they all need your own special brand of good ol socialism.

EU banning E-cigarettes

Anti smoking hysterics are constantly on the prowl looking for ways and excuses to place further bans on their favorite cause.  It almost makes you believe that they want people to quit the habit except for the fact that they attempt to ban just about everything that will help in doing this.

Their latest cause célèbre is the humble E-cigarette, which seems to be on the outer everywhere with the EU joining the rush to stop them.  The only resistance being offered is predictably, from the libertarian aligned UKIP:

Police threaten charity ride

Queensland; beautiful one day, fascist the next!

The Newman/Bleijie anti biker laws are a gross case of legislative over-reach in their own right, with their draconian penalties for being a member of particular groups that the government deem to be undesirable.

When overzealous and petty minded police action is added to the mix though, the authoritarian actions of an unrestrained out of control government are rendered intolerable by its accompanying police state.

Police on the Sunshine Coast have put their insensitivity on full display with their threats towards a charity ride to raise funds for medical treatment of a victim of Lyme disease: 

A CHARITY motorbike ride will go ahead today despite police warnings that any outlaw bikies who participate would risk being arrested and put the event in jeopardy. 

Sunshine Coast resident Marc Revere has organised the event to raise funds for 20-year-old Lucy McGrail, a family friend who is suffering Lyme disease. 

Unfortunately, the innocent event has been caught up in potential pitfalls due to Queensland's strict anti-bikie laws. 

"I just want to see a good day for Lucy. I just want to see people come out and ride their bikes and have a good day with no harassment," Mr Revere said. 

While the event does not need a permit, police have been informed of the ride as required.  "We do know police will be there, undercover, and out on the roads as well, not there to harass, just to keep an eye on things," he said. 

Mr Revere has been warned that, if the event involves three or more outlaw bikie gang members or associates, those riders could risk arrest.  "We will be watched, they will be watching for club members who attend," Mr Revere said. 

"If there's more than three members together - it doesn't matter if it's from one club or different clubs, or an associate - they'll be locked up for six months, no bail, and lose their bikes.”

It has to be questionable at best, just what the problem would be in having members of so called ‘outlaw’ clubs attend a charity event.  Logic suggests that it would be better that they are out there doing good for someone rather than engaging in the sort of activity Bleijie implies, assuming that those present are such people.

It would be nice to think that this sort of situation is an untended consequence of an ill thought out law, but this is not the case.  The way these laws are framed, once the club a person is a member of is declared illegal, that person is a criminal with no scope nor hope of redemption, even by leaving it.  The government has made it clear that even those who have been members in the dim distant past (15 years or more) can still be prosecuted under them.

In civilized countries it is a principle of law that prosecutions are launched on the basis of wrongdoing, not on the basis of associations.  

Libertarians, who would have thought we were so powerful

 Image: SMH take on Abbott

Climate frantic, Ross Gittins is fretting about the election of the Abbott government and the subsequent move to abolish the climate tax.  Ross seems a bit down over this as he hopes to have grandchildren who will want to pay the tax: 

… Australians elected a government that wasn't genuine in its commitment to combating the effects of climate change, and that even abolished the main instrument economists invented for that purpose, I never accepted this complacency. 

Partly because that government's predecessors had done such a poor job of introducing effective measures - and even a party known as the Greens played its cards all wrong - the nation lost its resolve and allowed its original bipartisan commitment to decisive action to be lost. 

The minority of people who doubted the scientists' advice that the globe was warming combined with libertarians - who, as a matter of principle, oppose almost all arguments for intervention by government - to persuade the Liberals to break with bipartisanship.

So, apparently that minority which is usually described as a small group of intellectually impaired ‘deniers’ or worse, has with the aid of libertarians managed to get the Abbott government to stop being bipartisan. 

While this may be a great comfort to Tony who has not been described as bipartisan in more than four years, it seems to hint that libertarians are much more powerful than we had previously guessed.  Liberals, like Gittins, tend to be creatures of the state who tend to believe that the reason that Labor went wrong was in failing to intervene in the economy and personal liberties in the same way as the LNP does.

This means that the small ‘climate denier’ base had to be massively enhanced by the entry of a huge influx of libertarians in order to form the critical mass to force Abbott to drop the climate tax.  Who would ever have guessed that we had those numbers?

Gittins assumes that the libertarian argument against big government and the nanny state is simply a matter of principle.  In other words, we are just a mob of rather bloody minded pricks determined to deny the state its fundamental role as he sees it, of running every aspect of our existence.

The reality is, that libertarians understand the basic principle as described by Ringo Starr, “Everything the government touches turns to shit.”

We do not accept the ‘consensus’ position that a government, which couldn’t insulate houses without burning them down and killing people, has the infinite wisdom to fix the climate.  Out in the real world, home insulation occurs every day without such dramas.

Nor would a libertarian be conned into the government idea of picking winners out of infancy technologies such as ethanol, wind power and solar.  These have a long way to go before they become economical, but owing to subsidies, and mandated usage, are only viable at massive cost to consumers and taxpayers.

Where a government would subsidize business to turn food crops into fuel and order that a certain percentage of all fuel has to be from this source, thus increasing taxes and consumer costs, the free enterprise system would drill more wells.

The libertarian position just makes more sense.