בנק הזרע הפרטי הפועל בביה"ח הוא היחיד בישראל עם הקריטריון יוצא הדופן; "זה מאפשר סינון נוסף, אין קשר למניעים אידיאולוגיים", אומרים בבנק

בית המשפט העליון הפך את החלטת השופט סולברג נגד אילנה דיין בפרשת סרן ר', וקבע הלכה חדשה בהגנה על העיתונות החוקרת

הזובור של שופטי העליון לעמיתם לעתיד היה רק הקדימון לפסיקה מהפכנית; לעיתונאים יש "שליחות לפרסם", והם יהיו מוגנים מתביעה אף אם ישגו

בשעה שהמשק בישראל מושבת, התחילו העובדים בהליך החתמה של ועד יציג במטרה לחבור להסתדרות. אחת העובדות: "לא נפקיר את המאבק לחזקים"

באופן חסר תקדים קראה סיעת חמאס בעזה תיגר על הנהגתו של ראש הלשכה המדינית משעל והודיעה כי לא תכבד את ההשגות עם הפתח

בכירה באו"ם תקפה את מועצת ביטחון שלדבריה מעודדת את הטבח במדינה. דיווח בטלוויזיה הסורית: נשק ישראלי נתפס אצל מורדים

נשיא ארצות הברית משתעשע בירי ממתקים כדי לקדם את המדע האמריקאי, גם אשתו לא נחה - ומתחרה במירוץ קפיצה בשקי תפוחי אדמה. צפו בסרטונים

מחקירת המשטרה עולה כי אלמוני התווכח עם בעל העסק בן ה-43 ודקר אותו. הוא נפגע באורח אנוש ומת מאוחר יותר מפצעיו

בשש בבוקר תחליט שופטת ביה"ד לעבודה באשר לעתיד השביתה. עיני: "הפערים בינינו לבין האוצר עמוקים". היכנסו לרשימת השובתים

על פי דיווח בערוץ 10, לדרור אידר מוענק שכר בגובה של 50 אלף שקלים בשנה עבור "כתיבת נאומים והרצאות". לשכת רה"מ: הוא אינו כותב לנתניהו

The Government and Opposition have begun the parliamentary year by staking out the battleground they both wish to fight this year’s political battles on. It’s the economy.

For both Labor and the Coalition, economic policy poses plenty of opportunities.

For Labor, the economy remains the Government’s potential strong suit: one the few areas of public policy where voters grudgingly admit it is doing a decent job. Labor’s efforts to see the country through the worst of the GFC with only one quarter of negative growth may not win it too many plaudits in the community — Labor in fact still trails the Opposition in poll figures on questions about which party is best at managing the economy — but compared to the unpopularity of issues such as asylum seekers and the carbon tax, the Government at least sees the economy as favourable territory in which to manoeuvre.

For the Coalition, the economy is similarly conducive terrain. The last recession in this country was under Paul Keating in the early 1990s. Since then the country has enjoyed a long boom that coincided with most of John Howard’s reign. We can never be sure exactly why, but perhaps this is the reason the conservative parties enjoy a natural advantage with voters, who seem automatically prepared to believe that the Liberal Party in particular is a better manager of the economy that spendthrift Labor.

Labor has been dealt a rather more tricky hand of cards than the Coalition thanks to external economic events. Sure, the Coalition navigated the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2011, but neither can really compare to the worst economic downturn in the northern hemisphere since the 1930s. That’s what confronted Labor in September 2008, only 10 months after John Howard was thrown out of office. The turbulent and unsettling years following 2008 have seemed very different to the sunny years of the mid-2000s.

The actions that the Rudd government took in response to the GFC in late 2008 and early 2009 form the backdrop to the current economic debate. Simply put, that response was a triumph of pragmatic economic policy-making. Australia went hard and early with fiscal stimulus accompanied by a big drop in interest rates. This pumped money into the economy at a time when consumers could have been frightened into putting away their credit cards. It also helped strugglers in the mortgage belt with a windfall reduction in their fortnightly mortgage repayments. Despite some significant corporate failures from over-leveraged companies like Centro and Babcock and Brown, Australia didn’t see a massive wave of corporate insolvency, and the fiscal stimulus took up the slack of falling private investment. As a result, unlike most of the western world, Australian aggregate demand therefore held up, and the country stayed out of recession.

To do all this, the government had to engage is some good old fashioned Keynesian deficit spending. The stimulus package amounted to roughly 2 per cent of GDP, and made a huge impact at the time when it was needed most. Indeed, contrary to the criticisms that the stimulus would take too long to roll out, the stimulus appears to have been almost perfectly timed, tapering off over the course of a couple of years while the rest of the economy is by no means going gangbusters. But it meant that the government borrowed money. And for many people, government debt is always a bad thing.

The textbook response to the incipient economic downturn proved a difficult task for Labor to explain politically. Borrowing modest amounts of money has had absolutely no impact on Australia’s credit-worthiness or bond yields, but it has provided the most politically effective line of attack for the Opposition. As Alan Kohler pointed out yesterday, the political orthodoxy in Australia has settled around the notion of a budget surplus as the measure of good economic policy-making. For many in the community, the Coalition’s line that Labor simply can’t stop spending is a potent one.

Unfortunately for Labor, even if the claim isn’t true, it’s proving hard to convince the electorate that it is fiscally responsible. Australia is actually not a high-taxing, high-spending country by any international measure. If you rank us in the OECD on things like overall tax levels and share of government as a proportion of GDP, we’re down towards the bottom. One of the key reasons is the stinginess of Australia’s social safety net. Australia’s welfare payments are in the main very targeted (Family Tax Benefits notwithstanding) and they are paid at miserly rates: just look how the dole has not kept up with rising costs of living in recent years.

But over the term of the Rudd-Gillard Government, the Coalition’s attacks against Labor’s so-called "waste and mismanagement" have been very effective. The home insulation fiasco certainly helped, but even a very good policy, the school halls program (or the "Building the Education Revolution", to give it is full Orwellian name), came to be seen by the general public as expensive and not very effective.

Because of this, Labor has a credibility problem when it comes to selling its economic policy successes. The Government is returning the budget to surplus faster than at any other time in modern history, a program of tight budgeting and various efficiency dividends aimed at returning some — any! — kind of stimulus for the May budget. This is actually hurting the rest of the economy, at a time when consumers are saving and not spending, retailing and manufacturing are struggling, and the expected extra interest rate cut from the Reserve Bank has not materialised. Managing the multi-speed economy is difficult enough. Explaining it to ordinary voters is even tougher.

But if the economy poses risks for Labor, it poses equal perils for the Opposition.

The Coalition has some real issues of its own with fiscal credibility. After enjoying the marvellous resources of the Treasury for 11 years, Coalition politicians were unprepared for the slim resources of the opposition benches. They have struggled to adequately cost their proposed policies since losing office.

Their nadir of dodgy accounting was the 2010 election, when Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb flailed in response to perfectly reasonable questions about how much Tony Abbott’s various promises would cost. Refusing to submit their costings to the Treasury until 48 hours before voting day, the Coalition instead relied on auditors WHK Howarth, who were later fined by Institute of Chartered Accountants after being found to have breached professional standards by signing off on the cooked books. Worse, when the figures finally came back from Treasury, it turned out Robb and Hockey had indeed got their sums wrong — to the tune of billions.

You would have thought that chastening experience would have prompted the Coalition to be a bit more careful when making various claims about spending and savings. But no. This week, Robb was again flubbing his lines about when, and whether, the Coalition would return a surplus. It doesn’t matter that Robb was making an entirely sensible point, in response to a hypothetical question, that he’d like to wait to see what the true situation before committing; "there is so much uncertainty around the numbers," he was reported saying. The problem here is that Joe Hockey has been telling anyone who will listen that the Coalition will of course return a surplus bigger than Labor’s, any time, anywhere, no questions asked, so the two key spokespeople were not quite reading from the same play book.

As has been repeatedly demonstrated, Hockey has a tenuous grasp on economics and is liable to wander off on meaningless tangents when pressed to explain Coalition policy. There was a prime example of this on Tuesday night, when Lateline’s Emma Alberici tied Hockey in all sorts of knots as he tried to clear up the confusion about whether the Coalition plans $50 billion or $70 billion in spending cuts. Nor do Hockey’s posturings about job losses seem very consistent with his oft-repeated pledge to cut 12,000 jobs from the federal public service.

So if there were any policy area where the Government should fancy its chances to land some punches, it should be on Hockey on the economy. But there’s the rub. Wayne Swan, for all his policy nous, has not been a very effective Treasurer in political terms. The same may well be said for Penny Wong in Finance.

Hence, the battle over the economy shows every sign of petering out into a stalemate, albeit for contrasting reasons. Labor has the runs on the board in policy terms, but can’t sell its message. The Coalition can’t make its numbers add up, but still cuts through with effective slogans. Welcome to economic policy in 2012.

"From greener buildings and lightweight buses to strong aeroplanes and the iconic aluminium can, Alcoa continues to lead the way. What makes it all possible? Aluminium — the most versatile, sustainable and infinitely recyclable material in the world — and the people who perfected it."

While flashing around a fist-sized lump of bauxite ore during an exclamation-point heavy address to the American Chamber of Commerce just over a year ago, Alan Cransberg, the managing director of Alcoa in Australia, assured his audience that Australia had a strong future in producing aluminum, "our miracle metal".

Today Cransberg is in talks with employees from the Port Henry smelter, whose jobs are at risk under a pending "review" of the Geelong site, which has become unprofitable due to "a combination of factors, including metal prices, input costs and exchange rates," according to the company. He was unable to give comment to New Matilda as a result, but Alcoa’s global figures tell the story for him.

Alcoa’s media release tells a gloomy tale of global cutbacks in aluminium production because of market conditions, but their finances say otherwise. The company made a profit of $25 billion in 2011, up 19 per cent from 2010. Its operations generated $614 million in income, more than double the previous year’s take.

Significantly, $221 million of that was productivity gains — squeezing more work for the same pay — something the Australian Workers’ Union Victorian Secretary Cesar Melhem acknowledged in his response to the Alcoa announcement. 

"The Alcoa workforce has consistently responded to requests made across the company internationally to reduce costs. They have proved themselves to be highly skilled and committed workers, just as successive Victorian Governments have supported the operation."

Here’s the clincher though: the fourth quarter loss recorded on Alcoa’s balance sheet was $193 million, $159 million of which was "restructuring". Chief Financial Officer Chuch McClane said in a 9 January conference call that those restructuring costs were predominantly caused by "decisive action to close or curtail 531,000 metric tons of smelting capacity. These closures and curtailments represent $141 million of the total restructuring charges."

The lion’s share of the company’s fourth quarter losses were caused by shutting down plants, not the other way around.

Some more stats from Alcoa: global aluminium demand is tipped to grow by 7 per cent this year. That increase means a "global deficit in primary aluminium supply", according to CEO Klaus Kleinfeld. He predicts that "growing demand for aluminum, combined with market-related production cutbacks, will result in a global aluminum industry deficit of 600,000 metric tons in 2012."

The third-largest aluminium company in the world predicts there will be a shortage of 600,000 metric tons, after culling 531,000 metric tons of its own production.

Explanations for the "review" have focused primarily on costs: the high dollar, high electricity costs (which comprise about 30 per cent of smelting costs and in Australia are heavily subsidised) and so on. But a Reuters report on Alcoa’s fourth quarter loss from January explains why the production deficit is so important:

"On Monday, Alcoa reported a fourth-quarter loss, citing slumping aluminum prices and announced smelting capacity cuts that it believes will prompt a global deficit and push up metal prices. It also forecast 7 per cent growth in global aluminum demand this year, especially in the aerospace and automotive markets."

The company’s share price, which tanked in 2008, is tied directly to the price of aluminium, which has been rising slowly since the crash.

Alcoa share price

Aluminum price

The company is understandably impatient to see the price rise, and was the beneficiary of a scam run by Goldman Sachs that saw huge quantities of aluminum stockpiled in London Metals Exchange-sanctioned warehouses in order to artificially restrict supply and drive up prices.

In its fourth quarter report the company recorded a huge spike in inventoried stock in LME facilities, which earned it an estimated $100 million in extra profit. "Major aluminum producers make out like bandits under the Goldman warehouse regime," Daily Finance reported at the time. 

Port Henry may be under review, but globally it’s nothing new.

Alcoa smelters in Italy, Spain, Tennessee and Texas with a total of 531,000 metric tons of capacity have also been mothballed in favour of more amenable conditions at facilities like the 2008 Fjarðaál smelter in Iceland. Directly fed by a hydro-electric plant, the Iceland outfit produces 350,000 tons off the back of Polish immigrant labour and cheap electricity. Only about 20-25 per cent of workers were Icelandic, the rest were temporary FIFO workers — sound familiar?

None of this changes the truth of the economic costs of manufacturing in Australia, but let’s be upfront. The company’s aims and shareholder obligations mean that despite AWU protests things probably won’t work out well for Alcoa workers down at Port Henry.

על פי התכתובת בין לשכת אסד ומרטין אינדיק ב-2009 שהגיעה ל"הארץ", אינדיק ניסה להפגיש בין נשיא סוריה לנשיא ארה"ב לשעבר - אך נכשל

Arms sales from China and Russia are fuelling serious human rights violations in Darfur.

Amnesty International has again warned that the policy of locking up asylum seekers indefinitely is unsustainable, inhumane and is causing devastating effects for the mental health of detainees.

Is it sexist anytime anyone ever criticises any woman?

Can anything any female politician ever does be shielded from criticism on the grounds that to do so is sexist?

If a female politician who happens to be a Prime Minister screws up royally and appears to make a habit of doing so, can she ignore all the slings and arrows that come her way because they’ve all been hurled by sexist bastards who want nothing more than to see a good woman fall?

The answer to all of these questions should obviously be "no".

The latest brouhaha over sexist treatment of Julia Gillard by the media has exposed some fundamental misunderstandings. Just how did the idea take hold that any criticism of a woman is sexist? That’s a preposterous notion and at heart, it’s anti-feminist, suggesting as it does that women should be held to a lower standard of criticism than men.

So how did we — again — get to this point?

In an interview with Mike Willesee on Sunday night, Julia Gillard was asked about leadership and her leadership style. She said, "I’m a woman running the country, I don’t ask people to come to the view that they want to have me round for dinner on Saturday night, that’s not what I’m here to do. What I’m here to do is to do some tough things, some hard things that make a difference."

Fair enough. Willesee asked her straight out whether her job would be easier if she were a man. Her reply?

"Look, I think it’s different and I’m not surprised about that. I mean I grew up watching the Prime Ministers of this country and if you’d asked me then ‘close your eyes and imagine a Prime Minister’ I would have imagined a bloke in a suit."

"Now I’m the first person to not be a bloke in that suit, exactly the same sort of suit as you’re wearing."

"It’s a different image of leadership."

This is hardly controversial.

Later in the interview, Willesee asked Gillard about her "lack of emotions" and whether she loosened up a bit at home. Kevin Rudd was also accused of being robotic in public life and faced similar questions about his personability. As far as I can recall, he never got asked by a host whether he cried much — as Gillard did on Sunday.

It didn’t take long for a response from the Coalition HQ. Abbott accused Gillard of playing the "sexism card because she sees the endgame coming". She must have had it up her sleeve the whole time! This is a particularly noxious comment because it plays so readily into the misogynist myth that women call out discrimination (or harassment) in the workplace to get ahead — rather than because it actually happens.

It’s fair to say that Bob Brown’s comment in a press conference the next morning inflamed the situation. He said:

"She is getting a rough time and let me state this as others might not be quite so blatant. Quite a bit of the criticism is sexist and unfair and unrelenting and the Prime Minister needs a bit of a break from that and it is time she got that break and the Australian people are indicating she should have it."

He went on, "The degree of relentless criticism on this Prime Minister, coming from male commentators, it is probably all subconscious, is sexist and quite ridiculous at times."

This may not have been a precise or helpful way to characterise criticism of the PM. It does not pay to be careless when talking about gendered language, as was revealed in the aftermath of the press conference.

Brown’s comment provoked a quick and angry set of responses from commentators — and it was the specification of "male commentators" that got them particularly worked up. Actually Bob, said John Birmingham, Andrew Bolt and Richard Farmer, you’re the sexist one. Why? Because female commentators also criticise the PM. This is schoolyard stuff. Yes, Brown was vague and no, he didn’t name names or provide any concrete examples of what he was talking about. Still, it’s astounding to hear a chorus of (male) voices on sexism get it so wrong, all at the same time, and in the same fashion.

John Birmingham reckons that Bob Brown sidelines the female commentators who get stuck into Gillard. "Is it the case that their critiques were fair and reasonable, but the harsh words of a few misogynistic male trollumnists were beyond the pale? That’s sort of insulting to professional word slingers like Grattan and Crabb, isn’t it?" Birmingham charges Bob Brown with mounting a "weird, knightly defence" and then goes on to demonstrate his own downbeat "sort of" chivalry in action as he defends female political writers.

Richard Farmer in Crikey doesn’t say much, he just lists some blistering criticism of Gillard by a bunch of female commentators, asking "I wonder what he [Bob Brown] thinks of this lot of commentators?" As it happens, none of the examples Farmer cites strike me as sexist. They don’t pander to the conventions and expectations around gender to advance their arguments and they don’t rely on gender stereotypes to make their point. In my book, that qualifies as non-sexist criticism. There should be more of it.

Both Farmer and Birmingham seem to be suggesting that if female commentators are giving Gillard a hard time, they couldn’t possibly be being sexist. Does this mean women can’t be sexist ever? It’s worrisome too that observers like Farmer and Birmingham aren’t able to tell the difference between tough criticism and misogynist crap.

And finally, Andrew Bolt. "Brown is a sexist, a fantasist and the most brazen hypocrite." Bolt’s spray is hardly surprising, but his indignant parade of rhetorical questions suggests that he too just doesn’t get it.

"When some of those male commentators praised Gillard, were they sexist then? Or are we only sexist now that we’re criticising her for the deceit and incompetence since? And when female commentators criticise Gillard in exactly the same terms as we men, why doesn’t Brown call them sexist, too?"

It’s disappointing to see what could be an important discussion about gender in public life play out in such degraded terms. Unfortunately, Brown’s charge of sexism hasn’t actually prompted a discussion about sexism in the media.

Is there a deluge of sexist criticism of the PM? Does gender play a role in the torrent of extremely negative criticism of Gillard? Does gender have anything to do with the expectation that the PM look tough and suck it up? These are all questions worth — at least — considering. Claims that Gillard has done a bad job should stand or fall on their own merit. There are plenty of reasons to criticise the PM. Commentators who can’t do so without measuring her against rigid gender conventions aren’t trying hard enough.

In the meantime, we shouldn’t need to be reminded that there’s a difference between sexist bilge and legitimate criticism. The current debate so lacks nuance that it’s hard to imagine a level-headed debate about the role gender has played in perceptions and appraisals of Gillard’s performance as PM. Surely we’re capable of having a discussion about the idea that it might be somehow different to have a woman as PM — without hysterical invocations of the "sexism card".

Russia and other countries with influence over Syria must act urgently to stop the bombardment of Homs.

Maldives security forces must stop using violence against supporters of Mohamed Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party, after he was forced to resign the presidency under the threat of violence by the military and police.