The effective workings of a democracy is not limited to the putting a piece of paper in a box every four years. It involves having an apolitical public service that carries out its duty “without fear or favour” and this is particularly importrant for organisations such as the military, police and security organisations.
“Keeping the bastards honest” as the democrats used to say is also the role of various committees and independent bodies within the government.
However, in “Silencing Dissent” Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison argue that in the last decade these democratic institutions have slowly been eroded by the Howard Governement and how the situation has worsened since the Liberals gained control of the Senate. A number of writers are used throughout the book writing specialist chapters on the media, the Senate, the Military and the Public Service.
It seems the complete contempt for the rule of law expressed in incidents such as the “children overboard” affair, the AWB scandal and the illegal invasion of Iraq and just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course the greatest fear is that once these institutions have been eroded or politicised they will stay that way even if there is a change of goverenment. I sincerely hope this is not the case.
Silencing Dissent is published by Allen & Urwin. I highly recommend it.

When I was studying Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at university as part of my business degree I was always puzzled by the approach that this so called science took. It would use models that were based on unrealistic assumptions about a single product in a single market and then extrapolate the results to apply across the vast complexities of the real world. They would constantly speak of “the perfect market” in which no single buyer or seller could influence the market, there was no cost of entry to the market and all buyers and sellers had the same level of knowledge. They said the closest you got to this state was the stock market, by even a rudimentary glance slows that none of these conditions apply.
Clearly any science that bases its theories on such fantasies is bound to be a very flakey and non-scientific science. But it these theories on which our governments make decisions that influence the lives of millions of people every day.
In Debunking Economics, Steven Keen meticulously takes each of the modern dominating schools of economic thought and picks them apart exposing the gaping holes in the theories and the irrational adherence to easily disprovable concepts such as market equilibrium which prevade their beliefs.
It is not an easy book to read, as Keen makes clear at the start and in fact there are whole sections which he suggests can be skipped unless you are a glutton for punishment (I am).
A prior knowledge of the subject helped me through and for someone fresh to economics, the eye might glaze over quickly. This is unfortunate, because the average person in the street will probably take at face value the utterances made by expert economists on TV sound graps and believe what they say when their “expert” advice is based on a very flimsy foundation.
In this sense economics is very much like a religion. It adherents have rarely read the original texts or questioned their contents and simply follow the belief of their fellow economists.
If you can get through the slog of finishing this book it is well worth while. It is high time that the people running the world look for an alternative to neo-classical economics as an explanation for how the world works as its foundations are about as solid as a belief in virgin births and people rising from the dead. But then again , it explains why so many followers of conservative neo-classical economic are also devout Christians.

Dunking Ecomincs can be purchased on-line via http://www.debunkingeconomics.com/.

Well, for most people a long weekend is a chance to relax and put your feet up, go camping, or catch up on jobs around the house. That was my intention as well, but the onset of winter storms changed all that.

On the Friday night we spent most of the night cleaning up a large tree that had fallen on a Volvo and was blocking a driveway. Then throughout Saturday and Sunday various fallen trees and roof jobs had to be attended to, including pulling down a TV aerial on a 3m tower which was threatening to come crashing down in the wind at any moment.

The highlight here was a three storey block of flats that had had a large tree fall down on the roof. The tree had been removed by arborists, but the gaping holes in the roof remained. At first we thought we would need a cherry-picker to place a tarp on the roof, but looking at the access to the property, this option was soon ruled out. Then we came up with the idea of laying the tarp from inside the roof. We gained access from the manhole in the ceiling and set about rearranging the tiles so we only had one or two big holes to cover. Running a safety line along the ridge capping and anchoring it back through the holes in the roof, I was able to safely move around on the roof and roughly position the tarpaulin. Once the guy lines were thrown down to my team mates on the ground, it could be move into a more ideal position. As the last corner went into place I crawled back under the tarp, and back into the roof cavity. Read the rest of this entry »