Also, attempting to be tax payer funded public servants (politicians) who make legislation whilst claiming to be against tax, public service, government and wanting to reduce legislation is an oxymoronic sham or idiocy.

The main problem for the LDP electorally was that they were basically not Australian in the traditional Menzies/Curtin sense of the word.
Almost everyone associated with the party was either born overseas, or had not made their names pronouncable, or was basically an outsider ie net addict or from Perth or sporting a fruitcake style postmodern literary fraud type of personality.
In a sense, too western for an eastern outpost of a monarchic imperium.

They had no electoral appeal and did not understand the basic sensory concept of a quiet, peaceful, pollution/smoke free environment as an ideal (however unlikely).

Basically, a bunch of web-weirdos glued to each other by unpopular ideas in a world they don’t understand.

Humphreys is too nice a bloke for politics and too much of group thinker for libertarianism. The others have been a bad influence on him.

Send the next patient in..

Get it? Property owners set the rules and conditions of entry. No one forces you to passively smoke in a pub, house etc you don’t own and are a guest of.

They fight for the right to smoke anywhere they like, but the reason smoking is being kerbed is because passive effects impinge other peoples’ individual right not to smoke.

Surely individualist freedom should be judged on the extent to which is affects others’ individual freedom?

I really think many of the policies, in an effort to not compromise have become very blinkered.

How come monopsony wages aren’t paid in the most monopsonistic industry of all - the mining sector?

“The LDP is joke” - the people who are saying this are bigots like Andrew Elder (his despicable attitude to gun owners is no different to homophobia or xenophobia) or conservatives who can’t hack the idea of a real liberal party (like Harry who is lukewarm about markets but wants the sheer lunacy of a national smokers register - yet he has the gall and lack of irony to call us “loonies”).

“I’ll join the LDP once you look more professional and start getting more votes” …. maybe we don’t want career politicians whoring us as a political spitoon to power.

The point of the theory is not that labour demand curves don’t slope downwards but that the individual labour supply curve faced by firms slopes upwards. This means there is a “wedge” between MC and MR. It’s often referred to as a monopsony model, though in fact it crucially depends on forward looking behaviour that is absent from traditional models of monopsony.

The practical implication is not that wage levels don’t matter to employment, but that they often matter much less than the neoclassical theory would predict and that they are in set in quite a different way to the tatonnement of the traditional approach.

That’s the reason that Australians are so attached to the industrial safety net, Medicare, and the welfare state in general. And, whether they are right or wrong, they prefer for those protections to be centrally organised rather than have to go out and provide all their own protections. But while life it going well, they are also happy to go it alone, knowing that the safety net is there to fall back on (which is, after all, the purpose of a safety net).

The trick, as always, is how to provide people with the minimum level of security they need while minimising adverse effects. I’m sure it can be done better than it is at present, but it is not and never will be something that is amenable to simple solutions.

I agree with Harry, too, that policy always involves compromise - while some policies are better than others, I sincerely doubt that there is any such thing as a perfect policy.