speaking of tolerance, must be harsh having a mother named after the Special One.

Burnwinter wrote:
qs! wrote:

TBH half the reason I wouldn't want to go to Australia is because of the type of Irish person who emigrates there.

Because you don't like poor people? 😉

I dunno, I'm assuming most are not skilled labour, because most I see are working cafés or pubs. I work with a nice bloke from Limerick now though.

The sheer scale of the recent Irish influx is impressive, in that it's actually noticeable.

They're probably all tradesmen and people with degrees. Funny thing is people are perfectly happy to work in a cafe or whatever in Australia but I bet they never applied for those sort of jobs here.

And yeah everyone is leaving Ireland. Australia seems to be losing popularity though, probably due to over saturation already. Everyones going to Canada now.

Yep, a lot of the younger ones seem happy enough doing backpacker style work, but I can't see that lasting if they mean to stay: cost of living here means it's a bugger to get ahead on a hospitality industry income.

I have no idea how hard it actually is to get PR if you're one of these young kids, but I suspect many will be heading back if things improve in Europe in a year or two.

Burnwinter wrote:

Our national shame is the life expectancy gap between indigenous people and everyone else … still 17 years

Come on Burnsy you know its much more complex than that, federal governments have been throwing money at it for years, theres only so much authorities can do.
Many migrants (myself included) arrived penniless in Australia knowing nothing or nobody, but within a short time assimilate and thrive because their cultural backgrounds and the psychology of migrants (adventurous ambitious etc) prepares them well.

Many aboriginal leaders have tried to end the victim mentality of dependence, but the problem for aborigines is that they are a stone aged people expected to live in the modern world, their culture of tradition and place ill prepares them for the capitalist rat race, and their bodies don't metabolise western food or alcohol very well- hence the spiral into ill health/poverty/alcohol abuse, you know the depressing story well.........

I was quite surprised to learn that aboriginal claim to their primacy in Australia wasn't even enshrined in your constitution yet.

I'm sure this is something I'm going to learn a lot about in future. By the way, are any of you guys in Sydney or Canberra?

Again it's got more to do with with the political system than attitudes Asa, it's almost impossible to pass an amendment to the constitution because of the make up of a state based federation.
70% want a republic instead of ER 2 but no republic.
70% agree to gay marriage but no gay marriage, (not that I think Burnsy wants to get hitched any time soon).

Biggus wrote:

70% agree to gay marriage but no gay marriage, (not that I think Burnsy wants to get hitched any time soon).

Wow. That's the most romantic thing I have ever heard from you Gus! I am sure Burnsy feels flattered. 🙂

Yeah? What part?

Just spent a month (more or less) in Mosman, down on Balmoral beach. Bloody awesome place. Travelled round a little (including over to Lord Howe, which was sensational), but really loved it there.

i'm down south, towards cronulla - not all that much different to the northern beaches (balmoral, etc), whole eastern seaboard is fairly similar in terms of appearance, culture and what not.

sydney is pretty good overall, most people with half a brain have no problems finding a decent paying job and affordable living in reasonably nice areas. you thinking of moving out here permanently?

Biggus wrote:

Again it's got more to do with with the political system than attitudes Asa, it's almost impossible to pass an amendment to the constitution because of the make up of a state based federation.
70% want a republic instead of ER 2 but no republic.
70% agree to gay marriage but no gay marriage, (not that I think Burnsy wants to get hitched any time soon).

Yeah, most referenda here are set up to fail, and the sclerosis of our Constitution (and hence the inability of our democracy to adapt to the massively changed information environment of the electorate) is probably going to be the biggest challenge to good governance in Australia over the next century or so.

Asa: I'm in Perth, but I visit the eastern states regularly, perhaps 3-4 times a year. I try to go to Melbourne though, because as Biggs will tell you, it's better than Sydney. But Australian cities are all similar, the main differences between them are in population and transport infrastructure. Avoid living in Canberra, I've done that, wouldn't recommend it.

a system where referenda are set up to fail is a good one. people are dumb as rocks, and when given the power to make decisions, they will make the wrong ones. california is the perfect example of this.

True, but we've got to do something about our democracy, it's a joke. Give it a quarter century we'll be as bad as the US.

For starters a 3/4 year electoral term before voting on a pair of party "platforms" (that is, a grave-digger's grab-bag of unsatisfactory, incompatible policies Frankensteined together by a cadre of marketing nerds and lobbyists) is better suited to an information environment where news is delivered by a lazy town crier.

Add that to the mechanism of "representation" by geographical electoral division, which basically means you're disenfranchised by whatever the majority of the citizens you happen to have to live alongside think, and you've got a recipe for total intellectual disengagement.

With every citizen having basically continuous access to the Internet, we should be able to give our individual views on policy, taxation and budgeting in a finer-grained way - yes, the people don't think hard about policy issues right now, but they can't learn in a system that gives them no incentive to do so.

Also, as Biggus points out, in Australia public opinion seems to lead the Parliament by decades on most issues of conscience.

would you advocate proportional representation instead? that seems to have its own issues when it comes to ineffectual coalition gov'ts. i can't say i have answer or an opinion. i have a pretty dim view of democracy (and of humanity in general - i'm a hobbesian in that respect), but then again, i live in a country that elected dubya twice. that said, representative democracy is the least bad of several crappy alternatives.

personally, i think appellate jurisprudence and macroeconomic policy should both be run by committees of the best minds in those respective fields, appointed for life. partly because even well above average minds lack the knowledge to have any say in those fields, partly because those fields should not be subject to fleeting whims and idiotic mobs, and partly because without the need to get re-elected (and with no second career afterward), the chance of corruption or institutional capture by business interests is minimised.

social policy and civil liberties are perhaps best left to referenda or something close to it, but even that should be subject to the high court and the economic council, as public opinion can often contradict a nation's core principles in times of distress (again, because people are myopic and can't separate their emotions from sound judgment).

as for internet news, i don't think the avg person learns about liquidity traps, the colonial history of pakistan, and the economic history of the great depression online. they watch know-nothing talking heads spew misinformation and nonsense. because you can choose what to see, and because content providers have to cater to their audiences, the internet just ends up reinforces existing views. the balance between content pushed out to you v. you pulling in content has gone too far in the latter direction.

would you advocate proportional representation instead?

I think a two-phrase legislative review in which one phase considers each citizen's vote on a roughly equal basis and the other groups citizens by specific interests (including, but not necessarily limited to geographic colocation) is desirable.

Proportional representation gets closer to giving everyone an equal say: they're still stuck with the positions taken by their elected representatives, but at least those representatives are there relative to a fixed weight of the population.

On the whole, I think representative democracy belongs to an era prior to mass media and mass communication, and is the prime cause of the near total disengagement of the electorate from the political process.

I'm also against any sort of Plato's Republic style technocracy (your "committees of the best minds in those respective fields, appointed for life") in any field. Comfortable corporatism in the intelligentsia results in confirmation-bias-prone, nest-feathering sufferers of the emeritus disease.

Economics, in particular, is a field dominated by ideologically driven theories with a relatively weak predictive capacity.

Once the lads sort out global economics here I'm pretty sure they'll be able to convince Robin to stay.

TBH though this conversation is alot more interesting than us repeating the same stuff about Robin. There's no new info and TBH there'll be nothing that matters until he signs a contract with us or someone else.

Yeah, pretty much. Sorry to anyone getting shat off by excess thread-bumping though.

I use TBH way too much.