Australian perspective

Many say there is a productivity crisis in Australia, but what is the root cause of this really?

Productivity is about efficiency, being better when getting more output for a given input. It is easier to visualise this with labour, and see that training and better equipment will improve their productivity. Across a society, there are many ways to improvement, and governments can help by providing better infrastructure along with policies and regulations that facilitate everybody working more efficiently.

But the real problem is that businesses have not been investing in improving their own infrastructure, which is their R&D, better equipment and staff training. Instead they have been wanting more government support for their bottom line, but they haven't invested any of it wisely. They have wanted socialism for themselves but not for anybody else, leaving workers with low wages for decades. Instead, businesses have become vehicles for perks rather than as a benefit to societies, from tradies getting heavily subsidised utes to CEOs with extremely generous bonuses and stock options.

If we are to really boost productivity, there needs to be a refocussing upon businesses as a vehicle for generating prosperity for all in society, rather than a personal rorting mechanism. Thus we need to curtail excessive CEO salaries and benefits as it sends the wrong message to every other business that extracting the most personally from the business is the highest priority. That is not what society needs to get from businesses for all the infrastructure and subsidies that governments give them. In turn, governments need to produce better and streamlined policies and laws.

In a news conference on 11/08/2025, PM Anthony Albanese and FM Penny Wong gaslighted the Australian public about a two-state solution for the Middle East.

What we heard was a lot of platitudes that still basically peddled the two-state solution that Israel has effectively scuttled by destroying Gaza and taking over Palestinian homes in the West Bank. Their emphasis in on Hamas not being allowed to take any part in negotiations because they are classed as a terrorist organisation, that the Palestinian Authority has commitments to keeping peace, yet nothing was said about any commitments being required of the terrorist Israeli state, nor any curtailing of its military.

Basically they focussed on Hamas as being the impediment to peace, while totally ignoring that it is the creation of the Jewish apartheid ethno-state of Israel that has been trying to genocide the Palestinians since it was created, with the help of most Western countries, that is real root cause of all the trouble there. The supposed two-state solution rewards Israel for the genocide by giving the Palestinians no ability to defend themselves against a violent and revengeful Israel that has not been given any limitations on the IDF's ability to keep terrorising Palestinians.

This is the continuation of the gaslighting that we have heard from politicians all over the world that has been feeding their own populations a continuous diet of pro-Israel propaganda. This is hypocrisy of the highest order because no one was willing to stop Israel kidnapping Palestinians, including children, from their homes and off the street for years, or the periodic mass bombing of Gaza for decades. But this is all just to distract from that the only real solution is to have a land from the river to the sea that is a true democracy that does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity.

The peoples in that land need more than a perpetuation of apartheid but with two states. The world came around to forcing South Africa to give up its apartheid, but now that is the preferred solution now? That is nonsense, and we know that it puts Israel in a commanding situation, the type of which we know they will abuse. Israel is the problem here and always has been. Not because it is Jewish state, but because it is a genocidal ethno-state. Do not accept that it is a real solution to rampant settler-colonialism because it was not for other nations with such a past.

For some reason, too many in government are still trying to placate Sky News commentators when they are almost completely ignored by Australian voters.

For the last couple of federal elections, Australians have largely ignored right-wing candidates, finally showing they are not interested in hollow culture-war propaganda and want some real solutions to climate change and the economy. This is even with the Murdoch empire controlling 70% of Australian print media, and 100% in Queensland. Yet, politicians and some government entities like the ABC still seem to want to placate their nonsense. Australian voters even ignore the plentiful Murdoch press hit-pieces of candidates that they do not want, or even support them more.

The ABC is the frequent target of the Murdoch media for supposedly being biased against conservatives, but with the right-wing side of politics increasingly focusing on distracting and largely irrelevant culture-wars nonsense, the ABC is finding it hard to find people who can be the so-called alternate voices when trying to have rational political debates. The problem is there is no debating with delusion and deliberate obscuration by vested monied interests, so we should not be taking those with such bad faith seriously, especially now that Australians are side-stepping them.

It is time for organisations and governments to stop listening to the obvious nonsense of right-wing media and pundits. Then we can see more clearly their nefarious backers that are trying hijack democracies all over the world, but fortunately Australians are not taking on their bullshit. Unfortunately, our current politicians are still beholden to the Dark Triad executives of the fossil fuel companies, and while that continues there is an ideological brick wall that tries to distract from the real actions required to rebuild our democracy from the damage already done.

The rise of independents is a hope, but many are just disaffected conservatives still beholden to non-humanistic agendas, and lobby groups like those from Israel that should have been banned from having such high-level access to politicians. The Greens seem to be the only political party taking a more principled stand against such interests, but while the lobbyists with their corrupting agenda are still allowed to poison political actions, they too are facing the same wall of ideological thuggery that stifles genuine efforts to make lasting changes that suit people and not monied interests.

Tony Abbot and Peta Credlin have been scheming to take the Liberal Party further to the right. Good on them.

Despite two successive elections where Australians rejected the Liberal Party for leaning too far to the right, the dynamic duo have been working on a plan to make sure the party doubles-down on it. This is good news for Australians because if they are successful, the party will finally cease to be a viable political force come the next election. Of course that would upset the National Party which has been moving in that direction for decades and probably wanted to be the doyens for right-wing thinking in Australia.

Having two parties fighting over the same ever-diminishing voter demographic will ensure that neither present a real alternative government. Between them, they will tie up the die-hard right-wing voters and effectively neutralise them. This leaves the Labor and Greens parties to start taking the country in a fairer direction without having to placate the so-called middle ground voters who have been wanting more real action on cost of living and climate change, and so abandoning the Liberal Party.

This is all helped by Trump showing the world just how pandering to billionaires destroys our societies and economies. It is far more effective at shifting voter thinking towards supporting policies that will actually help so much more than stupid fake culture issues. While the right-wing parties will try to make a lot of noise with the help of the Murdoch media, everyone can see what the real outcome of what they are pushing plays out in the US. Nobody will take their voices seriously, and other news outlets can just leave them off discussion invite lists.

We have an opportunity to really make Australia a voice for sanity in the world and finally take a stand for democracy. The Greens and independents will need to keep on Labor's heels so that they don't just appease vested corporation interests that sells us out. This is our opportunity to make a real contribution to healing the world of the folly of the extreme selfishness that neoliberalism has been fostering for billionaires. We are seeing how they do not care about us at all, but we can change how much influence they have by pushing our politicians to ignore them.

Labor won the 2025 election on a wave of anti-Trump sentiment, leading to the slim margin that lost the Greens their lower house seats.

The Greens have been criticised by the major parties as being obstructive just because they are not rubber-stamping the government's legislation. The Greens are trying to fix decades of neglect on social housing and genocide, both of which the majors are shirking their duty to humanity on. The current leaders of the majors both supported Palestine before they rose up the ranks, but now stand firmly with the psychopaths in the Israeli government and fossil fuels companies. They need to be held to account.

While voters may have been reacting to Trump and their obviously damaging tariff policies, there is lot more damage being done to the US itself, and a lot of that is from letting the current economic system run wild rather than any radical changes. The Greens are the only ones in a position to push back against those same forces in Australia, as the majors all support the policies that are driving the US now. The Greens have to articulate the issues and why they are taking their positions on them much more clearly. Now is not the time to lay low, as the issues they have stood on need attention.

While preferential voting is by far the fairest in the world, it does sometime produce quirky outcomes.

In the Australian federal election of 2025, the Greens Party lost three of their four seats in the lower house. This was due to the general swing to Labor putting them as the second party in those seats, whereas it was the Liberals second in 2022. When Liberals were second, in the process of distributing preferences to get to two parties, as third, the Labor preferences generally went to the Greens, getting them the majority.

Conversely, in 2025, with Labor second, it was the Liberal votes as third that had their preferences redistributed, and they mostly went to Labor, taking them over the line. All this was with only a few percent difference in the numbers of votes. It is a quirk, and it shows just how important preferences are, and is why some creative preference deals between minor parties in the past have resulted in some like the Shooters Party getting a senate seat when their first-preference vote should not even allowed them the possibility of a seat.

This three-way tussle in lower-house seats will probably happen more often in future due to the Liberals becoming less relevant and the Greens vote increasing. Independents do complicate the mix depending upon which of the majors they are ideologically aligned to and how much of the primary votes they get. A lot depends upon how voters list their preferences, especially if there are several independents. An alternate vote is going to be more effective if the majors are well down the list, but ahead of the most abhorrent candidates.

Unfortunately, any system that is trying to distill everyone's' votes down to a much fewer number of representatives will involve some compromise, but preferential compulsory voting does the most to ensure that everyone's vote is counted and that the general will of the majority of people are reflected in the results. A large part of the problem with our electoral systems is that the so-called winners are given exclusive right to control the bureaucracy and set its agenda, claiming a mandate but conveniently forgetting that a perhaps substantial minority of voters did not choose them first.

Of course, every representative still gets to vote on any legislation, but minority representatives not being able to participate in governmental policy discussions unless their vote is crucial means that a pool of opinion that does represent a substantial part of the population is ignored. That is a big loss for getting actual consensus. While South Australia does have one independent MP as a cabinet minister, that is the rare exception.

Every elected member should be considered part of the government, with an opportunity to be a minister, as that would increase the pool of skills available for optimal filling of those posts. No Australian federal or state constitutions recognise political parties, yet electoral laws have entrenched parties as the principal recipients of exclusive access to their bureaucracies. This is another aspect of having a party with the majority of votes railroading the means to favour themselves as being exclusive, and both major parties do nothing to change this exclusivity.

We see this self-favouring of parties in how they exempt themselves from spam and privacy laws. It is important that while there does need to be some exceptions for politicians to express countering opinion in parliamentary forums, exempting them from the regulatory restrictions applying to every other individual and organisation is overreach.

Australia is planning to ban under 16s from using social media, but will that really help them?

Unfortunately, politicians often see legislation as a sort of panacea for societies ills, but legal measures will often fail if other complementary measures are not done in parallel. However, this measure seems to be taken out of total ignorance of what under 16s will actually need. Banning until 16 just delays the onslaught when they really need to learn how to handle the onslaught, and from a very young age. Finland leads the world in media studies for children, starting at kindergarten, training children in critical thinking and all the methods used to manipulate public opinion.

Of course, Australia's education system is more geared towards producing good and obedient employees rather than critically thinking citizens, which is why such simplistic so-called solutions like banning are on the table. The government does not want to really revamp the education system to make citizens more resilient to manipulation, because that would be self-defeating for their own attempts at manipulation. Changing education systems requires a long-term approach, for which there is little political will.

What banning social media for under 16s would do is restrict their access to information and images that would expose what Australia et al are doing to continue the suppression of other peoples, or anything else that they do not want children to know about. Israel from its founding used propaganda in schools to justify their apartheid, even resorting to recounting Biblical passages to justify taking all the lands for Jews, despite the leadership not being religious. Israel is an educational template that many Western countries would like to emulate, and to a large extent the US already has.

Anti-propaganda studies would undermine all those efforts. We have already seen how the Australian government is trying to suppress whistle-blowers exposing the country's own war crimes and hijacking the NACC to coverup the illegal robodebt scheme. Letting such corrupt and psychopathic politicians prevent the next generation from avoiding making the same mistakes should be resisted. Banning rather than educating will fail. Such media studies is now a required core skill, just as essential as reading and writing, while also enhancing them with analytical skills.

However, sometimes what may seem short-sighted may just be the clear vision of some who have seen what the future may bring. We have seen social media platforms capitulate to be the propaganda and abuse arms of those who wish to subjugate us, and getting some legislation on the books that opens the door to halting that within a nation quickly may be what has happened here. Certainly, those nations that want to halt the propaganda and abuse will be looking to see how far Australia gets with this attempt to curtail the malign influence of social media on our societies.

The Australian government does not like people knowing about war crimes, whether of Israel or their own soldiers.

Covering up war crimes seems to have become a popular pastime for the Australian government. Not only has there been backlashes against any publicity for Israel's war crimes and genocide against Palestinians, but the jailing of David McBride for revealing war crimes by Australia's SAS soldiers is an attempt to stifle others coming forward with their own accounts. This is bad for a nation, as it covers up what was done in their name, and that should not be hidden from a country's citizens.

A lot of bad stuff happens in the fog of war, but when military forces do despicable actions, they should be held to account. Given the veil of secrecy that those who took part, and their superiors, place over all who know about them, whistle-blowers are only means for such actions to be properly dealt with. But punishing the messenger is only allowing future miscreants to get away with similar actions because the messengers are getting punished worse than they would.

Governments like to be able to get away with what they can, and the same leeway is given for allies. That our soldiers and those of Israel are allowed to commit war crimes with impunity is despicable, as is punishing those who let us know that they are happening. Israel is showing us that those who support them cannot be trusted with our lives, and so we must remove them from representing us as soon as possible, otherwise, we will be at risk from their quest for power at any cost.

The ABC seems to be basing more of its news items around a person or two.

Showing how people are personally affected by what's happening in society does help to ground how such things affect people. However, without a wider context, and that means statistics showing the extent of the issue in numbers affected, the news item is just anecdotal and thus loses credibility as a possible source of fact for people to make value judgements on. Statistics have to be based upon a 1000+ people, with a rigorous testing methodology.

It is worrying that the ABC has been getting far less funding over recent years, especially given its high support among the general Australian population. This has been largely due to pressure from conservatives who heavily utilise the Murdoch media to hound the ABC and try to discredit them whatever they do. Accusing the ABC of bias for reporting widely seems very hypocritical given that Murdoch owns 70% of all newspaper mastheads in Australia, and 100% in Queensland, while being largely a propaganda outfit for conservatives with no attempt at being unbiased.

The ABC management should be pushing back at such hypocrisy, and pointing out that without the ABC Australians would be poorly served by Murdoch and other media that don't have a mandate and an obligation to be reasonably fair in their reporting. However, the ABC has been progressively moving towards centre-right positions, like with their almost non-existent coverage of the genocide in Gaza until almost every other outlet had to acknowledge some of what has been going on.

This, and their softly-softly, low-key and constricted coverage of systemic problems, is what will make Australians trust it less, but that is what the many who want to exploit us want. The ABC, along with SBS news, is respected among Australians, but unless it fights back against the extremely aggressive and malicious Murdoch campaign against it, it will be gutted by management decisions that weaken its focus and subvert its ability to keep us informed and cover the issues that affect us in sufficient depth.

The coalition is pushing for nuclear as the way to go for tackling climate change. It's a scam for extending fossil fuel usage.

All the evidence about nuclear energy is that power plants take much longer to build and substantially overrun costs, compared to what was planned, and that is for those countries that have been running nuclear for decades. This is obviously unworkable when wind, solar and batteries substantially undercut all other energy sources in cost and installation time, and are only getting better at both. So what is the coalition up to?

Given the coalition's opposition to anything to do with renewables that don't consume chargeable resources in operation, and that nuclear will most likely mean we will have to rely upon whatever energy sources are around for a while, it is obvious that the going-nuclear ploy is a cynical effort to keep fossil fuels around much longer so that those companies will continue to rob us of our wealth and health, and fill their party's coffers. It is the same cynical contempt for the wellbeing of their constituents that drives Labor's gas-led spruiking for the fossil fuel industry.

Renewables that don't require paying for ongoing energy sources, other than the upkeep of the equipment, are the obvious way to continue tackling climate change, especially given their continuing and substantive reductions in capital costs. However, rather than placing hopes of viable carbon sequestration that isn't anywhere near ready for larger-scale testing, let alone actually handling the enormous quantities of current and future CO2 production, we need to be reducing our overall energy consumption if we are to keep temperatures down.

When all these parties are willing to stand with Israeli psychopaths and our own war criminals for free, we can see why they are so blinded by such small donations from these psychopath-led fossil fuel corporations just to keep their pathetic careers going. They have lost perspective on what democracy is, and what their part in it should be, so it is time to throw them out of office whenever we can.

PM Albanese is now standing with psychopaths, and that is a betrayal of the values their mother taught them.

Albanese has mentioned several times in the past about how their single mother brought them up, and taught them their life values. We can see how they argued in support of the persecuted Palestinians in the past, but now stand with their persecutors. This is a complete abandonment of their claimed values, and is perhaps why they are so willing to throw those doing it tough, like their mother did, under the bus, in their thorough adoption of neoliberal exploitation of Australians by the wealthy and greedy corporations hijacking Australian politics and common wealth.

The Greens now seem to be the only Australian party standing for something resembling human-centred values, all the others having long since abandoned them for their lives of bourgeois comfort and supplementing their general taxpayer-paid remuneration with rental income from their properties. Principles hijacked by material success, leading to abandonment of their responsibilities to the Australian people.

Most politicians have thrown themselves in with Israel, but Peter Dutton, in comparing a pro-Palestinian protest to the Port Author massacre, has shown just how psychopathic he is.

While they claim that the comparison was supposed to be about how John Howard had shown leadership at that time, but Anthony Albanese hadn't stood up for liberal democratic values during the 9 Oct 2023 pro-Palestinian march. This shows just how much Dutton is actually working against the values he supposedly espouses. He is standing with the psychopaths of the Israeli genocidal regime and hoping to make Australia just as undemocratic and inhumane as Israel. They are a psychopath and should be excluded from ever being Prime Minister.

The legitimate comparison is of the Port Arthur massacre to that carried out by Israel in Gaza, both being examples of people being massacred by an overwhelming force bent on their destruction. That Dutton refuses to see such parallels shows their incompetence in being able to provide any leadership for Australians, other than also leading us to be like the Fascist regime in Israel. They don't understand democratic values at all, which is why they are so willing to deny climate change or do anything to alleviate the suffering of Australians, let alone anyone else in the world.

Real estate agents treat renters like shit and favour landlords.

In a normal retail market, a retailer buys goods from a seller and then sells them to customers. Neither set of transactions is directly dependent upon the other set, though not enough of the latter will affect the ability of the retailer to buy more goods.

When it comes to rentals, without a renter there is no payment for the landlord. When the renter pays the agent, it goes into a trust account from which the agreed majority value goes to the landlord and the agent keeps the rest. Both the agent and landlord are totally dependent upon the renter for their livelihoods, but the renter is treated like shit by the agent in favour of the landlord. Agents will ignore contact from the renter unless it is to sign a lease or get the property fixed where legally required. Otherwise, renters are ghosted.

This is a strange situation as in most other transaction arrangements, those who pay call the shots. The landlords don't pay the agents at all, so why are renters treated so poorly? This isn't rhetorical question as I just don't know. Perhaps renters need legislation to require agents to have an explicit duty of care towards renters and landlords equally. That is, they become an agent of the partnership between renter and landlord, not just an agent for the landlord. It is time renters received some respect as without them, no one gets paid. No one wants rent strikes.

The politically-motivated cruelty that was robodebt shows just how much psychopaths are being allowed to run free in our society.

Robodebt was a dubious scheme using ATO-derived average income to claim thousands of debtors had to immediately pay back monies owed. It was illegal and the PM, government ministers and senior public servants signed off on it anyway. It was a deliberately draconian measure used to bully welfare recipients into paying back money they didn't owe, and dissuade others from making claims. It led to suicides and a lot of unnecessary stress.

Of course, anybody of wealth does not get treated like that if they take government money that they are not entitled to, as evidenced by businesses such as Harvey Norman not being forced to return multi-million JobKeeper handouts despite record profits. Keeping the rich wealthy while unjustly tormenting those far less well off is the modus operandi of psychopaths, aided by politicians who seek their favour.

The royal commission into robodebt recommended that the language used to portray welfare recipients at the height of the scheme needed to change, but that is unlikely to happen in a politico-economic system like neoliberalism that rewards and applauds psychopathy. They are to society as paedophiles are to children, and the only way to undo their nefarious influence is to disconnect them from power in public life. They are not the people we should be allowing to pull society's levers, just like we do not want paedophiles near our children.

Society needs to work for all people and not just the few to get exceedingly wealthy from. We owe that to ourselves, our children and the planet.

The Australian government wants to overhaul Medicare by focusing upon getting more GPs into the system.

Australia's Medicare has been used by US media as an example of a pseudo-universal government-run health system, though the UK's NHS is much closer to a universal healthcare system. However, like the NHS, Medicare has been suffering from such significant funding cuts that it is becoming dysfunctional to the point of dissuading citizens from seeking medical care.

The part of Medicare that is promoted as one of its benefits is bulk-billing, where a GP only charges a patient the rebate for the service it receives from Medicare. This suited patients because it meant there were no out-of-pocket expenses. However, the last few years have seen the rebate covering so much less of a GP practice's costs of providing services that they are suspending bulk-billing for most patients, meaning that patients must pay the full gap between the rebate and what the GP charges, being now AU$25 on average.

This is a significant increase in costs for most families, prompting them to forego medical treatment and especially so for preventative visits. This is reducing the profitability of medical practices to the point that it dissuades medical graduates from becoming GPs, not helped when practices overwork their GPs and decrease appointment durations to increase patient throughput. Thus, it all comes down to money, and no amount of tinkering with enticements to increase GP numbers will make up for that.

This all comes from Medicare being used as a political football by those who oppose government spending on healthcare on principal, as they have failed to keep funding apace with practice costs when in government. Medicare did not cover a lot of medical services like dentistry and some specialist services, so it was far short of the NHS, but the lack of adequate funding has come to thoroughly undermine the effectiveness of Australia's healthcare system.

This will undermine the effectiveness of the nation, as when many cannot afford to get early preventative health care, we all pay for the vastly increased health costs when severe conditions result. It is time to properly fund Medicare to be a true national health scheme by dispensing with propping up a fake private health care system that only provides profits for insurers, and including all medical services under its purview. Then the nation will pay the lowest costs for medical care which come from a fully-integrated health system.

Such healthcare should be seen as part of a nation's critical infrastructure, as it underwrites the capacity of the nation to adapt to changing world conditions, be they political or climatic. Treating health as just another means of making money is sabotaging the nation.

Amid all the fallout from Australian politicians having dual citizenship, making them ineligible to hold office, the real issue is that that dual citizenship can be triggered by foreign governments.

For many of the affected politicians, their dual citizenship was automatically conferred upon them by their, or their ancestor's, birth in the other country. While the foreign laws by which they have a residual citizenship are quite old, it highlights the possibility that a foreign government could change their laws at any time to make Australian politicians that have ancestry from that country automatically become citizens without their consent.

This exposes the stability of the Australian government to too much risk. That means Section 44 of the Constitution needs to be amended to close that risk off. The most obvious mitigation is that dual citizenship must not be allowable, at least where it is conferred solely by the laws of the foreign government, without applications from the affected politicians. Currently, a person must rescind the other nationality, but that is according to the laws or regulations of the other country, and so might not be possible, especially if the other country is trying to manipulate the government.

While the novelty of the situation seems to be entertaining the politicians, as they indulge in crazy conspiracy theories, the possibility of real nefarious conspiracies to undermine our government needs to be thwarted. This all means we will need to vote on changes to the Constitution, so our politicians will need to stop focussing on themselves and their parties, and join to protect the country, by having a bi-partisan approach to specifying the changes, and presenting it to the population.

The moral of the story is that a country must not frame its constitution or laws to have dependencies upon those of another country.

The Australian Labor Party just claimed that they would close the tax splitting advantages of family trusts. Conversely, maybe trusts could be extended to all of us.

Splitting income among members of the same family is probably more equitable per person across Australia than the current tax arrangements. It seems silly that two people that are in a family relationship, but only one works while the other is doing home and childcare duties, is taxed more than two flatmates with the same total income, so getting the lower costs of shared living while not being in a relationship. Of course, there would be some debate about whether children would be allowed to be included. I would say no, but there may be situations where that may be legitimate.

Administratively, the Australian Taxation Office already uses both partners' income in calculating the individual tax assessments, so it only involves a change in how the tax is calculated, because the rest of the assessment infrastructure to support shared tax is already there.

The idea could be taken further, and be applied to any group of people that want to support some others who would be performing unpaid work otherwise. One example is for supporting one or more people who need to work on an innovative idea, but long before they are ready to get funding, either from venture capitalists or government grants.

This is the way for governments to support innovation, rather than just giving large enterprises more money to incrementally expand their current business model. Innovation happens in garages, not well equipped development teams.

Much is made of the salary and parting package for the former CEO of Australia Post, Ahmed Fahour.

While it was certainly at the seemingly excessive level many CEOs get, yet, given that, Mr Fahour certainly earned it more than many CEOs for transforming a loss-making and tradition-bound government corporation into a profitable and modern business. The problem with the whole remuneration scale for senior executives is that it increases rapidly with each level up, while low and middle management typically don't get much extra for taking on a whole lot more stress compared to those they manage.

For those whose political spin depends upon the belief that government cannot do management, Mr Fahour's success will probably be a thorn in their side. That's because it shows that it can be done, but also indicates that the problems that do occur may not necessarily be with the public service, but with their de-facto CEOs, the Minister responsible for them, which implies that the politicians themselves cannot be trusted.