It is a public holiday in NSW today – Labour Day – to celebrate the 8-hour day although for many workers that victory is now a thing of the past as labour market deregulation bites harder on the hard-won conditions that workers enjoyed during the full employment period. I am also ailing (with “the bug” that is “going around”) and I have two major pieces of work to finish (one completed this morning). There is also a birthday in my immediate family and so I am partying tonight (in relative terms). So all that means a shortish blog. I was giving a talk in Perth last week about the absurdity of state (non-currency issuing) governments running down public infrastructure because they refuse to borrow all in the name of preserving their AAA credit rating from the corrupt ratings agencies. The obvious question seems to evade people – why have AAA credit rating if you refuse to borrow. The ridiculousness of the ratings game raised its head again last week when one of the ratings agencies threatened to downgrade the British Government’s rating. It is clear that the agency is probably needing a revenue boost so tried to attract some publicity. If I was the Chancellor I would have told them to buzz off and to stress how irrelevant they really are. But the reaction was typical – angst and worry. For what? Nothing. The only thing it demonstrated was how mislead the public are and how mindless this “dark age” that we are living through at present really is.

I am in Perth today speaking at a public service employees union congress. The talk is based on a major report we have just finished tracking the implications of public spending cutbacks in Australia on the volume and quality of public service delivery. We did several case studies – one of which was child protection – and the cutbacks will lead to increased child abuse in Australia without doubt. The story is pretty grim and I will write about it once the Report is made public by the commissioning party. But with travel (Perth is a long flight from anywhere and I have to get back to Newcastle tonight – 6 hours) and commitments I haven’t much time to wax lyrical on my blog. But I have been meaning to write about the upcoming Scottish referendum on independence from Britain and it fits a nice theme with yesterday’s blog – The demise of social democratic parties – they are all neo-liberals now – where I argued that good intentions come to naught if the economic policy paradigm used is erroneous. I would recommend the Scots vote yes at the 2014 referendum. But only if they introduce their own unpegged, floating currency and avoid any talk of joining the Eurozone. Further, the yes vote should be conditional on the government committing itself to achieving full employment on the back of their newly created currency sovereignty. Then the yes vote will improve welfare for the Scottish people. If they continue to use the British pound – then nothing will be gained.