Public Opinion

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August 31, 2003

Iraq: more violence

It seems that things get worse in Iraq. A senior Islamist cleric, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, has been targeted with a car bomb just outside Shiite Islam's holiest shrine. The shrine--the Tomb of Ali--- was only partly damaged, but Bakir Hakim is dead.

Hakim, 64, a member of one of Iraq's most prominent clerical families, headed the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an opposition group he founded in 1982 while exiled in Iran. Though he stood for an Islamic state in Iraq, and was supported by Shi’a fundamentalists sympathetic with Iran, he cooperated with the Americans and allowed his brother to go onto the Governing Council.

Who did it and what is the significance?

Opinions differ on the former. River's comments on the Najaf bombing can be found here at Baghdad Burning. She thinks it could be dissidents within his own movement ---- rival Shi'ite factions opposed to Hakim's moderate stance could be to blame. This article (link courtesy of Shi'a Pundit) explores the divisions between the Shiite groups. Let us call them moderates and radicals (fundamentalists).

Salem Pax, whose house was raided by the Americans searching for terrorist cells, downplays the nasty side of Hakim's Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Salem says they were moderates playing by the rules. He draws attention to the more dangerous anti-American Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been getting his own militia together. His radical Shiite fundamentalism holds that women should not even go to shops and their and their 'moral police' have been behind the bombing of shops selling alcohol and behind the threats to cinema owners.

Christopher Allbritton over at Back in Iraq reckons the Najaf bombing could be the work of Al Qa’ida operatives, who are Sunni, did they did this in a bid to spark a civil war. Juan Cole over at Informed Comment thinks it was Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. He says:

"The Najaf bombing looks an awful lot like the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the bombing of the UN headquarters. I now think all three are the work of Saddam loyalists, not of Sunni radicals with al-Qaeda links. All three targeted key de facto allies of the US, and have resulted in isolating it further. The Red Cross, Oxfam, and other aid agencies have much reduced their operations after the bombing of the UN headquarters, and IMF and World Bank officials have left, postponing important economic measures. Major Shiite clerics other than al-Hakim and his brother Abdul Aziz have refused direct contact with the Americans, and this reluctance is likely to have just been reinforced."

The identity of the bombers is still up in the air.

That leaves us with the significance of the Najaf bombing. Despite the claims of Bremer that Iraq is not a country in chaos and Baghdad is not a city in chaos, the situation does not look good for the US. As Christopher Allbritton observes, the Najaf car bomb attack has the political aim aims to show the Arab world that American troops aren’t up to providing security and can be put on the defensive. It means America will likely remain pretty much on its own in Iraq.

You can see this isolation in terms of rebuilding Iraq. As River describes the rebuilding, the Bremer administration is bringing in thousands of foreign companies that are going to want billions of dollars. She asks:

"...why aren’t the Iraqi engineers, electricians and laborers being taken advantage of? Thousands of people who have no work would love to be able to rebuild Iraq… no one is being given a chance.
The reconstruction of Iraq is held above our heads like a promise and a threat. People roll their eyes at reconstruction.... a few already rich contractors are going to get richer, Iraqi workers are going to be given a pittance and the unemployed Iraqi public can stand on the sidelines and look at the glamorous buildings being built by foreign companies."

The significance of the isolation is that Iraq is becoming a lawless country. The Americans are now protecting themselves rather than the Iraqi people, and the police they have created cannot do the law and order job.

The other area of significiance of the Najaf car bombing relates to theUS continuing the old British doctrine of Sunni favoritism by insisting that the Shi'a religious leaders would never be allowed to come to power. The implication is not only the point made by Tacitus, that the Shi'a-on-Shi'a factional war is on, and it's going to be messy. An article listed on Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs The Clipboard concurs. Entitled, 'Civil war brewing' it says that Shi'a fury will be directed at the Sunnis to the north and toward the United States as the occupying force. It is what the Tehran Times does.

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August 30, 2003

right hand left hand

This article by Geoff Kitson highlights the way the Howard Liberal Government dealt with the political threat posed by the populist anger to economic reform. You have the right hand of Prime Minister co-opting populism, whilst the left hand of Tony Abbott, a senior Minister, is used to undermine the financial capacity of Pauline Hanson's One Nation's to promote the right wing populist policies.

It is called honest politics.

It is a broad movement. Another example is the ALP's hypocrisy for feigning outrage now about Abbott's "secret slush fund" to undermine One Nation populism. As Geoff Kitney observes:

"Labor's hypocrisy is undeniable: it did nothing and said nothing at the time of Abbott's fund-raising activities, which were known publicly, because it would have been the first to celebrate success by Abbott."

The ALP defined this regional populism as a blacklash emotive conservatism with nativist and racist overtones.

It is the honest politics described above that once fueled, and continues to fuel, the populist attack on Canberra-style politics. It talks a political language of democratic deficit at a time when democracy is equated with the free market. Both professional parties acted to exclude and defeat the populist insurgency to top-down economc rule; a rebellion based on grassroots opposition to oppressive political and cultural elites. Populism argues that the ordinary person is not the master of his or her fate, that the political system imperfectly reflects the popular interest and that the popular interest should be supreme, in contrast to narrow elite interests.

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August 29, 2003

Avoiding New York-style power failure

I see that Australian Business Council for Sustainable Energy is calling for a smarter approach to the use of energy in Australia through better demand management. It says that encouraging greater energy efficiency was a better way to avoid New York-style power failures that only rely on building additional capacity to meet growing national consumption. They call on CoAG to address the issue.

It is unclear what greater energy efficiency means. Less airconditioners? A levy on airconditioners? Greater use of solar power?

An editorial in the Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 26 08 03, p. 62) also calls on COAG to get stuck into energy reform to make the National Electricity Market (NEM) operate more efficiently. The AFR envisions a world where:

"...generators would compete with each another to supply electricity into a seamless national transmission grid. This grid would deliver lower prices to businesses and households across eastern Australia, averaging out demand and supply to make blackouts less likely, with a thinner margin of reserve capacity, and constributing dramatically to national welfare."

Hmmm. I presume that non-eastern Australia--eg., South Australia--would subsidise the lower prices in eastern Australia, and that national welfare is equated with eastern Australia. No doubt the bureaucrats and economists can crankout the numbers on the utilitarian calculus to justify such inequities.

But the AFR does have a point. As it points out the reality is that the electricity market is a fragmented one comprising a series of regualtory fiefdoms, with insufficient transmission capacity connecting them, and muted price signals. Unlike the Business Council of Australia, the AFR has no concern at all with the ecological sustainability of the national electricity market.

Update
Nothing happened with respect to electricity at CoAG. The state premiers did a symbolic political number. They walked out in protest at the reduced public hospital funding by the Howard Government, which shows little willingness to discuss reforms to address an increasingly dysfunctional health system. So the rest of the CoAG agenda was not addressed.

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August 28, 2003

Iraq: the lowdown

In case you were wondering how the US appointed Governing Council of Iraq appears to a young Iraq woman who loves her county, then Riverbend's post, Let's Play Musical Chairs..., over at Baghdad Burning (links don't work) gives you the lowdown.

The interim Governing Council of Iraq does not inspire confidence. It is seen as a front organization for the US occupation. And the corrupt expatriate financier Ahmad Chalabi, the Defence Department/Pentagon's 'man in Iraq' is treated as a joke and has little support inside Iraq, It is hardly a good way to win the hearts and minds of Iraqi nationalists.

As Juan Cole wryly observes, the "US shouldn't dawdle about handing civil administration over to an Iraq government as soon as elections can be held."

As George Paine from
Warblogger.com says, in commenting on this story in the New York Times, the US is in a difficult bind. "Conducting urban guerilla war without completely alienating the population you are fighting among is next to impossible."he adds:

"Iraq is America's West Bank. Iraq is America's Gaza. We are an occupying army in a hostile nation. We are attacked an average of twelve times a day. That's once every two hours. We lose an average of two American soldiers per day. We kill an unknown — but undoubtedly relatively large — number of Iraqis on a daily basis."

Christopher over at Back to Iraq has highlighted an Adelaide connection in this war: the death of Paul Moran, a television cameraman on assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in northern Iraq? He was killed March 22, 2003 by a suicide car bomb at a PUK checkpoint by an alleged member of Ansar al-Islam. He is from Adelaide and worked for the Rendon Group.

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would you trust a journalist?

I have come across this story about the decline of journalism by Michael D'Antonio. The link is courtesy of Rhetorica. Tis a sad narrative with a lot of nostalgia for the ethos of traditional journalism that has been swallowed up in the bright new world of communications.

The text starts by saying that journalists take bribes and that readers doesn't believe much of what they read in the press in general because its all biased and deceptive. This is a big fall from the watchdog role of the press in uncovering truth and cutting through partisan propaganda with its journalist ethos of fairness, honesty and independence.

What caused the fall from trust?

Several things according to the article. The tabloids came to the fore and the television networks began reporting secondhand what the tabloids were saying. Then the television networks began developing more "news" programs devoted to celebrities, lifestyles and other soft features whilst the newspapers, faced with stagnant or declining circulations, trimmed the number of pages devoted to hard news and expanded feature sections. Thus the drift toward infotainment.

All this is well known. But it does not account for the personality journalist with attitude---the Andrew Bolts or the Miranda Devines. Michael discusses this under 'buzz':

"Buzz is the publicity and chatter that hovers around a hot book, article, film or TV program. Buzz can raise newsstand sales, get your article optioned by a film company and turn a journalist into a hot commodity. One of the best ways to generate buzz is to write with edge, with an attitude."

Buzz displaces speaking truth to power in favour of journalists becoming celebrities. The desire is now to become noticed.

Buzz becomes transformed by radio and television. They turn it into shrill, in the form of news talk radio or loud television disputes that sought to entertain not with fluff but with fury. Well known examples in Australia are Alan Jones and John Laws. These hyper-aggressive, politically-driven white male shockjocks, such as Stan Zemanek at Radio 2UE, have gradually commandeered much of the AM band with programs that are a hybrid of entertainment and political advocacy. The nationally syndicated talkers have replaced local programming, and the network format has turned much of radio into a clubhouse for listeners who share the same views and has reduced radio's role as a source of straight journalism.

Michael then draws attention to what is beginning to happen in Australia. He says that the:

"... success of conservative radio hosts inspired cable networks to copy them..... They are not journalists but performers... The success of opinionated fast-talkers has led TV news departments to hire a parade of glib political figures as analysts and show hosts....Few of these people have ever spent a day gathering straight news. But all of them are skilled at spinning issues to present their point of view in a startling way."

Michael says that the Fox News cable network is an example of this paradigm. Fox openly mixes conservative opinion with news and taps the core audience devoted to conservative talk radio. In Sydney Australia that is 2GB and 2UE.

So there we have it. The decline of traditional, independent journalism speaking truth to power is due to both the rise of politically biased, high-profile analysts who distort the truth for rhetorical effect, and the blending of entertainment, news and opinion. As Tim Porter observes Micheal D'Antonio's text has the funereal air of an obituary for traditional journalism. If journalism -- the system by which we get our news -- is being subsumed by communications then what is going to replace it?

We have news outlets being owned by larger media corporations who use "journalism" or television programmes to promote their conglomerate parent's products, to engage in subtle lobbying or corporate rivalry and to intermingle journalism with advertising to boost profits. These pretty much encourage and promote market capitalism, with this self- interested commercialism posing as news discourage participation in public life and disconnected from a responsibility to provide citizens with good information.

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Water: three legged reform

Whilst the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) continues to rail away (also here and here) in public about green groups pushing governments to their democratic limits, the Council of Australian Governments (CoAG) is addressing the need for water reform.

The CoAG meeting tomorrow may be a crucial one in terms of the reform process in water politics. Expectations have been raised that the states and the commonwealth will agree on a national policy that will allow water "rights" (entitlements) to be held without owning land.

This will allow water trading of these entitlements, ensure greater efficiency in the use of water and provide financial security to water users.

We should not get too carried away. That is only one leg of water reform. The are two other legs.

One of them is protecting river health. The issue is simple. There is not enough water to go keep going the way we have done on the past. There is not enough water in the Murray-Darling Basin system for all the entitlements of water that have been allocated by state governments. The over-allocated rivers and groundwater systems need to be bought back into balance by recovering water for the environment. There needs to be a shift in emphasis to ensure that the envvironmental needs of our river syems have the first call of the water required to keep them healthy. There needs to be a reduction of around 25% in water use.

The third leg of water reform is engaging local communities to determine catchment mangement priorities and strategies through a devolution of decision making. People who are required to give up water should be told what environmental assets are being protected and the volumes of environmental water is needed to protect them. We need to ensure a fair transition to sustainablity so that no group (eg., farmers) in the Murray-Darling Basin bears an unreasonable burden. That means, for instance, that there needs to be less dependence in the River Murray for urban water use and a shift to greater recycling of storm and waste water.

It is more than likely that CoAG will only address the first leg of the reform stool.

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Iraq: war is needed now

I heard this piece on the ABC Radio National's AM program yesterday morning. I did not have time to link to it even though it was interesting piece because it highlighted the limits of the standard US view of Iraq. First, we have the US view as outlined by Geoff Thompson who is reporting from Baghdad.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In his most recent press conference, the leader of America's presence in Iraq, Ambassador Paul Bremer, made clear the context in which he believes last week's suicide bombing of the UN's Baghdad Headquarters should be placed.

PAUL BREMER: It's part of a global war on terrorism which was declared on the United States September 11th, two years ago, and it is now unfortunately the case that Iraq has become one of the fields of battle in this global war.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Later in the same press conference, Ambassador Bremer was asked whether it might be more accurate to say that perhaps it was the presence of American forces in Iraq which had turned Iraq into a new battleground in the United States war on terror.

PAUL BREMER: No, it would be completely inaccurate because Iraq under Saddam Hussein for 20 years was identified as a state sponsor of terrorism, correctly in my view. This was a state which sponsored terrorism, it is no longer a state which sponsors terrorism, I don't sponsor terrorism, I try to defeat it.

So the US is fighting a global war on terrorism and Iraq is just one bit of the big picture. That line will sell well in the US during a presidential election campaign. It counters the anxieites of an electorate increasingly worried about the rising numbers of body bags.

Then we have the differing views from two members of the Governing Council.

GEOFF THOMPSON:...But two Council members interviewed by the ABC also believe that the presence of US forces here is attracting foreign terrorists, easily able to cross Iraq's poorest borders from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. Council member, Younadem Kana says the US presence is a magnet for terrorists.

YOUNADEM KANA: Yeah, for sure it's a magnet for terrorists, yeah. For sure it's a magnet for terrorists and especially the most fanatic extremists, let's say, bin Laden's group al-Qaeda, for example – yes, it's a magnet.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Because they see Iraq as a place where they can attack America?

YOUNADEM KANA: Yeah, for sure. It's more easy for them to reach. For Americans, not only for Americans, for all Coalition forces, even allies.

GEOFF THOMPSON: It's an opinion also held by the Council's Secretary-General, Muhyi al-Kateeb, a former Iraqi Ambassador to the United States who has spent the last 24 years running a petrol station in the US.

MUHYI AL-KATEEB: Because we have no control of our borders yet, so it is heaven for terrorism.

GEOFF THOMPSON: As long as there is an American presence here it's going to be an attractive place for terrorists looking to target Americans?

MUHYI AL-KATEEB: I agree.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Do you see a certain irony in the fact that America's war on terror, in a sense, made the invasion of Iraq and the ousting of Saddam Hussein possible politically, and now in fact it's attracting, it's attracting people who wish to battle America on that front?

MUHYI AL-KATEEB: It is ironic. But this is the reality of it. I mean, our borders are open and they're very long ones too, and we have a lot of neighbours that don't like what is going on inside Iraq. So I assume that they are going to use that to, maybe to send some signals to the Americans on the Iraqi soil, unfortunately.

The American occupation is actign as a magnet. It takes two to wage a war.

So what is the American neocon response to the war being waged by what Michael Ledeen calls the terror masters? Since the US is surrounded by regional enemies---Iran and Syria--- it is time to return to neocon basics of waging war against the enemy. Ledeen spells it out:

"...we cannot win in Iraq without defeating the other terror masters as well. Simple common sense required that we do what President Bush proclaimed shortly after September 11: move forcefully against the terrorist organizations and the states that sponsor and support them.....

...So long as President Bush remains entrapped by the false vision of the "peace process" and plays defense in Iraq, initiative passes to the terror masters. He often speaks as if he understood his peril, but his diplomatic and military policies remain paralyzed by false vision. Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia organize, fund, and support the terror war in Iraq, but instead of supporting freedom fighters in Iran to topple the world's major sponsor of terror, we plaintively implore the mullahs to hand over some al Qaeda leaders so we can get on with lifting sanctions and "normalizing" relations. Instead of bringing real pressure to bear on the Baathist regime in Syria and the cunning Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, we plead with the tyrannical leaders of those countries to behave better, so we can have better relations.

Understand that while we say we're at war, we're certainly not waging it at the moment. Unless we escape from the trap, it is only a matter of time before our soldiers and diplomats in Iraq fall prey to the terror masters on a greater scale. The longer we delay the inevitable reckoning, the more costly it will be. It's time to get out of the trap and resume the war."

There is no political solution. There is only a military one of permanent global war against the terror masters.

The reverse image to Ledeen's neocon account of the Middle East is this one from the Arab world. Each mirrors the other. And the flip side of Ledeen in the US Ann Coulter's war against the enemy within: a war to expose and fight liberal treachery inside America against (Republican) America.

Ledeen and Coulter are very American. It's all much more reserved here in Australia. But you can hear the muted tones in a text like this by Alexander Downer. He is responding to Peter Carnley, the head of the nation's Anglican church saying there are blowback consequence of Australia's outspoken support for the US and particularly its preparedness to take unilateral action against Iraq.

"...church leaders... ignore their primary pastoral obligations in favour of hogging the limelight on complex political issues – and in this case a national tragedy....I will always defend the right of the churches to enter the political debates of our time. But they have special responsibilities – to the facts, to their congregations and to their faiths. Too often, it seems to me, the churches seek popular political causes or cheap headlines. And this tends to cut across the central role they have in providing spiritual comfort and moral guidance to the community"

Those words, "hogging the limelight", "seek popular political causes or cheap headlines", say the churches should not intervene to articulate what is right and wrong on foreign policy.

Is not expressing such views expressing moral guidance on public issues?

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August 27, 2003

softening the sharp edges

There is an editorial on social capital in Monday's Australian Financial Review Review (no link, subscription required, 25 08 03, p. 62). It says that:

"Social capital----mutual trust, tolerance and civic engagement--- is the medium that lubricates market capitalism and helps it run smoothly within, rather than outside, society."

This is bleeding heart territory. So it is nice to see the money boys acknowledge the existence of civil society that stands between the state and the market. They also acknowledge that social capital is in decline as the state and the market colonize civil society, and that the lack of social capital increases the cost of doing business and inhibits social and economic opportunities. No doubt they have been reading the Productivity Commission's Report on social capital.

The editiorial mentions Peter Costello's few speeches and Mark Latham's work on social capital and the contest between them.Then it says:

"The new battle of ideas is over how to rebuild social capital to soften the sharp edges of capitalism and help it function more smoothly."

It concludes by saying neither side of politics has convincingly explained how and in what form civil society and social capitals can be revived in a 21st century market economy.

How about another possibility? A critical conception of social capital: putting some sand in the gears of the machinery of market capitalism and the state. It is what green ngo's do isn't it?

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Water reform: its only a tiny step

This article on water reform by Tim Colebatch gets it about right. He describes the new policy framework which has achieved a consensus as the way to go and what needs to be put into place:

"The new framework, which builds on work by the NFF, the ACF and the Wentworth Group of scientists, would give a clear legal basis to farmers' water rights, so they can be mortgaged as collateral for loans. It would replace their historic entitlements to a certain volume of water with a more realistic entitlement to a share of the water available.

It would set up a water market for the entire Murray-Darling Basin, in which water rights could be traded across states and catchments, regulated by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. And it would establish environmental trusts as players in that market, bidding for water rights so as to increase the environmental flow."

But as always in this we have reform on the cheap. We have a $500 million commitment to the Murray when $1.5 billion is required, and the Commonwealth is only putting in 25% of that $500 million.

What does that mean? It indicates that the emphasis is long on market reform and short on the environmental side. The Commonwealth wants a deal on the market framework at CoAG with the states without a matching long-term plan to fund the buyback of environmental flows. The buy back of water allocations is not going to be properly funded.

Of course Allan Woods will have none of that. In writing a blurb about this forthcoming policy forum on water pricing by the Melbourne Institute for Applied Economic and Social Research this neo-liberal says that the real problem is the environmental lobby:

"The danger is that politicians will too readily pander to the demands of an unsophisticated environmental lobby, just as they did with the earlier equally unsophisticated irrigationist and protectionist lobbies."

Hardly. According to the neoliberal view of Australian history the old style irrigationist and protectionist lobbies were anti the self-organizing market. They were into command and control regulation. So too the environmental lobby.

Wood is wrong. In contrast to the old style irrigationist and protectionist lobbies the environmental lobby gives qualified support to the creation of a water market; provided there is a commitment to restoring 1500 gigalitres of environmental flows to ensure the ecological health of the River Murray. It is that commitment that is in doubt.

What Wood is saying is lets get the free market working and to hell with the ecological health of the River Murray.

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August 26, 2003

Iraq: fighting the big one

The small picture of Iraq is concerned with the entrenched divisions within the majority Shiite movement, and how the Shiites will place their bets in the coming months. This is still unknown at this stage. But it appears to be a time bomb waiting to go off.

The big picture is the US one of freedom versus totalitarian conflict with freedom expanding and totalitianism resisting. Robert Kagan and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard articulate and develop the Washington neocon vision, briefly mentioned at the bottom of this post, by linking the big picture terms of American national security. US security is at stake with what is happening in Iraq.

Kagan and William Kristol say that :

"President Bush recognizes that, as is so often the case, American ideals and American interests converge in such a project, [rebuilding Iraq] that a more democratic Middle East will both improve the lives of long-suffering peoples and enhance America's national security.

For all our admiration for this bold, long-term vision, however, there is reason to be worried about the execution of that policy in the first and probably most important test of our "generational commitment." Make no mistake: The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq. Indeed, there is more at stake in Iraq than even this vision of a better, safer Middle East. The future course of American foreign policy, American world leadership, and American security is at stake. Failure in Iraq would be a devastating blow to everything the United States hopes to accomplish, and must accomplish, in the decades ahead."

Iraq is defined as a pivot point. An affirmation of this neo-con big picture view of things comes from Thomas Friedman, who says that the US is Fighting the Big One he says:

"We are attracting all these opponents to Iraq because they understand this war is The Big One... They know this is not a war for oil. They know this is a war over ideas and values and governance. They know this war is about Western powers, helped by the U.N., coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq — a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. In short, America's opponents know just what's at stake in the postwar struggle for Iraq, which is why they flock there: beat America's ideas in Iraq and you beat them out of the whole region; lose to America there, lose everywhere."

The apocalyptic tempo in Washington is definitely lifting into another gear.The US has to win in Iraq. Western civilization depends upon it. It is heady stuff Is it a selling the war for domestic consideration of the forthcoming Presidential elections?

So how is it all going in Iraq now that Amrican world leadership and the security of the West hangs in the balance?

This report from the International Crisis Group (link via Abu Ardvaark) is useful. It says:

"The CPA until now has retained quasi-exclusive authority, with Washington’s approach translating into an unwillingness to involve seriously either the Iraqi people or the international community. Since its early missteps, the CPA appears to have engaged in some salutary self-correction and has registered some real successes. But fundamental problems remain. Policing troubles are mounting and they have not been addressed with policing solutions. Instead, coalition troops unsuited to the task have been called in, leading to inevitable mistakes at the cost of both innocent lives and Iraqi national pride. Basic infrastructure has not been rebuilt. Iraqis lack jobs and subsistence income. The CPA lives in virtual isolation, unable to communicate effectively with the Iraqi population. It has yet to correct some of its most counterproductive decrees such as the disbanding of the entire 400,000-man army and the large-scale de-Baathification. Meanwhile, the occupation’s U.S. face has heightened suspicion and anger in Iraq and parts of the Arab and Moslem worlds where many view it as part of Washington’s agenda to reshape the region."

There are lots of practical proposals to improve governance in Iraq, given the lack of legitimacy of the Governing Council. It says that the burden of transtional adminstration needs ot be shared more widely. This means a greater role and responsibility for the UN during the transition period; and devolving more power to the Governing Council to handle security, infrastructure and administration.

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Don't you worry about that

I'm just catching up with the weekend newspapers. In the Weekend Australian I noticed an old interview with Joh Bjelke Peterson, the former Premier of Queensland, by a Fitzgerald commission investigator around 1988. Bjelke Peterson was an ex-Premier by then.

Bjelke Peterson ruled Queensland with an iron fist in the 1970s and 1980s with a style of heroic leadership who proclaimed that he was doing something good for Queensland. He did so in the name of developmentalism---a develop at all costs mentality that damaged the environment. This era is known for the abuse of power, political chicanery, blindness to institutionalized corruption and an overlooking of the dirty history of the state's police. Queensland became as "The Moonlight State".

I'd always wondered how he understood democracy---The Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. Not in the sense of procedure to elect politicians through majority voting but in the more substantive terms of citizenship. In response to a question about police brutality the Gray Street demonstrations during the Springboks tour Bjelke Peterson says:

"And I could see then that we were running into some very very turbulent times ...I said that's going to be the biggest problem Australia have because that's the tip of the iceberg, there'll be a lot of blood shed on that one for sure. That's further down the road, but I warned them right in he beginning and tried to Stop it. Just as I tried to stop this business of going soft and all these demonstrations and street marches because I could see ahead leading to. complete anarchy. I used to say to these mobs, the characters, I said 'I can't walk up against Queen Street at knock off. time and block the traffic, neither am I going to let you people do it."

There is nothing about civil disobedience, rights, freedom of speech, freedom of information and the citizen's right to know. We have an authoritarian regime that sees things in terms of the rule of law and does not allow for democracy determining what the law will be. Democracy is only tolerable if it remains in strict bounds.

The words 'bloodshed', 'complete anarchy', 'mobs' are all anti-democratic ones. Democracy was seen as a threat despite the undemocratic gerrymander. Couple that with his favourite lines , such as "feeding the chooks" "southern socialists and "you're not going to stop us" and "Don't you worry about that!", then we have democracy in name only.

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August 25, 2003

Afghanistan: little reconstruction happening

This description of what is happening in Afghanistan is courtesy of Walter over at Idols of the Marketplace. Ben Ehrenreich says:

"In other words there is no electricity, running water, telephone service or medical care anywhere but in the largest cities, few government officials, and certainly nothing that resembles that ethereal state that international relations wonks like to call 'the rule of law.' In all but a few places outside Kabul (and to some extent, even there) political authority is a simple question of who is holding the gun."

From Ben's report it appears to that remote sections of the southeast have reportedly returned to Taliban control. Assaults on aid workers have become more common and increasingly bloody. Consequently, several NGOs have been forced to suspend their operations in the southeast. The U.N. has ceased reconstruction work in much of the south, and requires its staff to travel there only in convoys with armed escorts.

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Iraq: views from inside

The individual voices within Iraq provide different perspectives to the standard neo-con script. That script says the US has established security throughout Iraq; the economy is up and running; Arab public opinion is pro the US as it has embraced the liberation of Iraq from tyranny; the escalating violence is from a few Baarth leftovers and the Governing Council is seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people.

Given the script, we then have the public debate with sceptical lefties. And David over at Oxblog sees himself as winning the debate with the likes of Josh Marshall.

Winning the debate? It is more important to understand what is actually happening in Iraq.

We can gain a little insight into this from the individual voices in Iraq. First there was Salem Pax over Where is Raed? weblog. He also has some photos posted taken by his friend Gee. Salem also writes for the Guardian and is known as the Baghdad Blogger.

And we have this linking of the heat in Iraq to that in New York. I can understand the heat. We have it in Adelaide. It is around 40 degrees for a couple of months---but with cooling periods in the low 30s. It's been 4 months in Iraq. That would be very hard to live with.

Now we have this very interesting weblog from Iraq called Baghdad Burning. It is written by a now unemployed female computer graduate. (Link courtesy of Allan over at G'day Cobbers).

Both Salem Pax and Riverbend give us the human experience of life in Iraq. Riverbend, for instance, offers us a perspective from a liberal Iraqi who is a moderate Muslim, proud of her own culture and nationality, and lived in jeans and cotton pants and comfortable shirts. She provides a useful perspective to contrast with David's stance of winning the debate against lefties critical of the US policy. David says:

"Remember the good old days when our big concern about postwar Iraq was the potential for Shi'ite resistance to the occupation?
Well, even back then OxBlog was pointing out that anti-American violence was coming from the Sunni community, not the Shi'ites. So? The bottom line is that only that small minority who benefited from Saddam's rule seems interested in resisting the occupation."

In contrast, Riverbend experiences the current situation as an occupation, she wishes the UN would take control and the Americans move out. She describes the increase in increase of fundamentalism in Iraq which she finds terrifying. It is organized by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI):

"...whose main goal is to import the concept of the “Islamic Revolution” from Iran to Iraq. In other words, they believe that Iraq should be a theocracy led by Shi’a Mullahs. Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, the deputy leader of SCIRI, is a part of the nine-member rotating presidency and will soon have a go at ruling Iraq.

Ever since entering Iraq, Al-Hakim has been blackmailing the CPA in Baghdad with his ‘major Shi’a following’. He entered Iraq escorted by ‘Jaysh Badir’ or ‘Badir’s Army’. This ‘army’ is composed of thousands of Iraqi extremists led by Iranian extremists and trained in Iran. All through the war, they were lurking on the border, waiting for a chance to slip inside. In Baghdad, and the south, they have been a source of terror and anxiety to Sunnis, Shi’a and Christians alike. They, and some of their followers, were responsible for a large portion of the looting and the burning (you’d think they were going to get reconstruction contracts…). They were also responsible for hundreds of religious and political abductions and assassinations."

Poor Iraq.
Juan Cole has a paragraph or so on feminist organizations In Iraq speaking out on abductions (for slavery) and a substantial percentage of government jobs being reserved for women.

It's all a bit more complicated than winning the debate with lefties. It is the individual Iraqi voices that are silenced by the freedom versus totalitarian script coming out from Washington these days.

That script says that we're in a war on terrorism. When the civilized world expands democracy it's a challenge to the terrorists' totalitarian vision. And so they strike back with increasing terror. They're hoping the civilized world will flinch. But we're not going to flinch. We will stand firm etc etc.

It's more worthwhile to read the individual voices.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hocus pocus

I sort of knew that the script about elites versus the mainstream circulated through the public sphere. And that it was a weapon used by the warriors of the right as an exercise to gird their loins before they went off to fight the culture wars, attack the ALP and prove themselves to be heroes for the damsels back home in Toorak or Sydney's North Shore.

I accepted that this script for political theatre was something along the lines of mythmaking because we all need to be clothed. This was the conservative's current set of clothing. I didn't go for the mythological fashion myself, but, hey, we all need something to protect our naked bodies in public. So what if the Liberal/National Party attacked Menzie's old moral middle class as the chattering classes, the chardonnay set and the elites.

I never seriously thought that the polemics was taken seriously when used by the likes of Andrew Bolt. I thought they understood that their polemics was all a bit of smoke and mirrors to entertain the readers. You know, infotainment to keep the circulation going up.

Then I read this junk by David Flint. My God, I thought. The conservatives actually believe what they have been peddling for the last decade.

Flint starts off alright:

"In his book, The Revolt of the Elites, US author Christopher Lasch describes as elite the opinions of the typical upper-middle-class small-l liberal left wing on social and cultural issues. In Australia, the media, the university humanities faculties and the arts are replete with elite opinion."

Fine. Lasch is engaging with cosmopolatian lefty liberalism (not socialism) that turned its back on the nation. He writes from within a populism that is wary and suspicious of professional politics of Canberra. And the populists had good reason to be suspicions. As Flint observes it was because so much of the elite agenda [eg., deregulatory market reform] "was achieved during the past three decades without the consent of the people and even against their wishes." He is pretty on that. You have have to remember Pauline Hanson's populist account of why the country had gone downhill under the Hawke/Keating Labor Partyand the demonizing of economic rationalism in the regions.

Then Flint makes two crucial moves that are necessary for his politics. Two moves that take him down the greasy slope to the land of hocus pocus.

The first move is this:

"The so-called elites are the modern equivalent of the guardians in Plato's Republic who, because of their self-assumed superior knowledge, intelligence and morality are entitled, indeed destined, to guide the ship of state."

Flint is right in his interpretation of Plato's account of the guardians but wrong to equate left liberals in the academy with Plato's guardians. Why? Because the latter are the real rulers of the polis. They have real political power and they ran the ship of state. Lefty academics do not have that political power. Canberra does in Australia. Or Murdoch and Packer, if you prefer. Not the philosophers in academia. Flint is living in cloud cuckoo land.

The second move Flint makes is this:

"Meanwhile, the mainstream, while accepting gradual change, remains attached to our traditional beliefs and institutions. Along with Edmund Burke, they believe that society is a partnership, a partnership between those who are alive today, those who have gone before us and those yet to be born."

Nope the mainstream of Australia lives with the house of liberalism. It is elites such as Flint, Tony Abbott and John Howard who live in the old house of Burkean conservatism.

And it gets worse as we continue to slide down the slippery slope. Flint says:

"So those who dare present the traditional views of most Australians are inevitably branded as conservative, or worse. But members of the elite commentariat are presented to the public as if they are mainstream – which of course they are not. If you believe in cultural relativism, or that crime should not be followed by punishment, or that our borders should be thrown open – in sum if you oppose traditional institutions and values – you are hardly in the mainstream. "

The concern with tradition, traditional institutions and values is a part of what constitutes conservatism. And I thought that the cultural left commentariat attacked the liberal mainstream for being soft on racism when Pauline Hanson was making her big performance. It was the old script about enlightened knowedge versus prejudice and ignorance from memory. And, surely it is only the libertarians who favour open borders.

And so it goes, all the way down the slippery slope to cloud cuckoo land. This is a dishonest and self-delusionary conservatism. Conservatism has enabled the LIberal Party fo Australia to talk about something more than dr market economics and to reconnect with ordinary with our everyday Australian experience in our common life. Hence Howard's conservative talk about egalitarianism fair go and mateship.

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August 24, 2003

think tanks & water politics

As usual P.P. McGuiness can be relied on to miss the main point in the debate about think tanks. He sees the criticism of right wing think tanks as an attempt to "demonise those who espouse free market ideas or innovative ideas in social policy." He adds:

"Think tanks are once again in the gun, because apparently there is a sinister network of right-wing think tanks which accept money from commercial enterprises to advance the ideas put forward by the late Friedrich Hayek, and so to serve the interests of business and the rich."

Then we have screeds on what a wonderful fellow F. A. Hayek was.

It's hardly a case of the demonizing of sinister networks in order to block innovative ideas. It is more a case of bad ideas and politics in relation to the dying wetlands of the River Murray.

In an earlier post on water politics I asked:

"So on whose behalf is the IPA [Institute of Public Affairs] firing the salvoes in the water wars with the gloom and doom environmentalists? The think tank is getting money for the environmental project but they are turning out such poor work that their ideas won't spread much. The faith in think tanks by those funding this IPA project is misplaced. They may get the headlines but that old developmentalism is well and truely dead, even when it wears the new market clothes."

On behalf of the farmers, is the answer judging by this address by Dr Mike Nahan, Executive Director, of the IPA In the light of the Howard Government putting up money ($125) for environmental flows for the River Murray, we have these polemics by Nahan about undemocratic green groups who have influence over the liberal state. These radical groups are:

"...seeking to exploit environmental concerns as a means of revolutionising society and controlling commerce...[they are] fundamentally at odds with the broader interests of society...They have now shifted their focus from forestry to farming, and are busily spinning their destructive web...we have allowed the spin merchants to present themselves as experts, summarising the 'received' research on biotechnology, diagnosing the state of the Murray River and lecturing farmers on improving farm management. We have allowed the spin to masquerade as science."

The green groups are a minority group. Their interests are sectional ones and stand for the inevitable destructiveness of commerce and modernity and the end justifying their means. They are ensconced in positions of influence in the bureaucracy, research institutes, advisory bodies, and regulatory agencies and have sway over the mainstream parties. The liberal state has become an environmental state.

So who speaks for the public interest these days? It is the farmers! As Nahan says: "One thing is clear: the farming community must confront the Green movement."

The farmers must fight the green campaign to save the mighty Murray because this at the expense of the farmers.

Why the need for confrontation, given this process? Nahan says that is because:

"The Greens are developing a 'victim versus villain' scenario, where they play the role of saviour. In the latest version of this drama, farmers are the villains and the victim is Mother Nature. The Greens have convinced large sections of the public that you---the farmers---are the villains raping mother-earth."

This is polemics, crude polemics at that. It has very little to do with public policy. It is the politics of a farmer fightback against the the liberal state's policy of restoring the environmental flows for the River Murray.

What is this fightback? It is farmers defending their property rights against the liberal environmental state and reclaiming science to confront spin.

Which farmers have to fight back? It cannot be all farmers, since compensation for reduced allocations is a part of the recovery of environmental flows for the River Murray. It is those farmers who are opposed to the recovery of environmental flows for the River Murray.

It is a sectional interest group pretending that they speak on behalf of the economy, agriculture and farmers. So the IPA does the job for them.

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Iraq: The New Order

This article highlights the way the US is rebuilding Iraq. It says that:

"...it is coming increasingly clear that as a matter of policy, most of the beneficiaries will be US-led firms, while neighboring Arab countries look as if they will be frozen out. There is a strong belief in the Arab world that post-Saddam Iraq was completely planned in Washington as a country free to be shaped under the US administration, culturally, politically and economically... The new dominant influences are free trade and representative democracy, which the Americans clearly expect to be remarked upon in neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Syria."

The conclusion it draws is that the new Iraq would be another outpost of US interests in the region, or certainly another US client state that represents an expansion of business opportunities for US companies.

If that is the case, then the US will face an uphill battle in persuading the international community to help out with troops and dollars to finance the rebuilding of Iraq. The first signs indicate this.

And consider this statement by John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, about the United States was exploring ways that the [UN Security) council could better tighten Iraq's borders to deter terrorists and their supporters from entering the country. As Juan Cole asks:

"...what borders need to be policed? Kuwait, Jordan,Saudia and Turkey are all US allies. The Iranian border is all that is left. And if the plan is to have US troops go mano a mano with the Revolutionary Guards along the Iraq-Iran border, that is a recipe for disaster."

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August 23, 2003

Cartoon

The Iraqi people at the table (Jalal Al-Rifa'i, Ad Dustour, 8/19/03).

This highlights that America has an image problem in Iraq. Might does not make right.

The cartoon highlights the flaws in this article, which views the Iraq situation solely in military terms. If we stay within these terms then, Peter Bergen says, al Qaeda is "fighting a war of attrition against US soldiers that will eventually lead to a humiliating withdrawal of American forces. It is only a matter of time before al Qaeda is able to pull off a significant terrorist operation that kills a large number of American soldiers." The lessons from Vietnam do matter. What Vietnam highlights is that the guerilla aim is to demoralize American soldiers and at the same time increase the already unbearable distress suffered by the population, thus nourishing resentment against the occupying power.

Yet the Americans cannot simply cannot leave Iraq. As soon as the US leaves, a democratically elected, Shi'ite-dominated, anti-American Iraqi government would come into power. And the Pentagon and Department of Defence are not interested in democracy because they know that in any free and fair democratic elections the Iraq people would switch towards a Shi'ite-dominated, probably Sharia-ruled, and certainly anti-American government.

So the US has a de facto installed military system in Iraq. This military system is controlling the political structure and the new US-subsidized economic order. Iraq in takign the path to become a US colony. The guerrillas appear to be winning the public relations war. Without the UN the US looks like another neo-imperialist power. This has an interesting perspective. And Josh Marshall has a good interview with Peter Bergen.

As Juan Cole points out it is about rebuilding Iraq not just gunning down "terrorists" and deploying it s awesome military power. Yet the US simply cannot afford to undertake reconstruction on its own. It needs the UN and the world community to help.

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August 22, 2003

Madam, the charge is treason

I have always suspected that the political unconscious of Australian conservatism equates criticism of the Howard Government with being the enemy within.

During the Iraqi war the enemy within was generally charged with anti-Americanism. At one level that meant the critics were only against the conservative America of George Bush. At another level in Australia it also signified the critics were anti the Anerican alliance. Thus it signified being on the side of those who challenged America's geopolitical interests.

The conservatives operate with a conception of politics based on the existential friend/enemy distinction. During the Iraqi war that conception of criticism came close to equating criticism of the US pre-emptive strike policy, and its desire to reshape the whole of the Midlde East, as siding with the external enemy. Siding with the enemy meant supporting Saddam Hussein.

It meant supporting totalitarianism. It meant supporting brutal repression of the Iraqi people. It meant being anti-democracy and opposed to freedom. It meant being anti-Australia. It meant supporting the threatening Other. That meant militant Islam and terrorists who were laying seige to Fortress Australia.

The "logic"---the emotional structure---of the political unconscious equates that with treason.

John Howard emotionally implied as much. He deployed his political code that addresses the political unconscious without ever actually saying as much in words.

But now the political unconscious has surfaced in a parliamentary debate over Telstra. A National Party hitter, De-Anne Kelly, has accused two NSW independents Peter Andren and Tony Windsor of supporting Saddam Hussein.

According to Radio National this morning both Andren and Windsor supported Australia going to war with Iraq under the UN flag.

You only see the political unconscious surfacing every now and aqain. But surface it did with de-Anne Kelly. The word treason is not mentioned. It doesn't need to be. The conservative political unconscious translates the accusation of supporting Saddam Hussein as treason.

How do we interpret what surfaced? For starters, we can say that conservative Australia is not unconsciously and compulsively wedded to liberal political values. It rejects these in relation to democracy. It is deeply suspicious of criticism; to the point of detesting political critique, even though it frequently launches a critique (political criticism ) of the activist High Court from Parliament in an attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and authority of the High Court.

And they have often done so without the conventions of restraint so that their "political criticism" amounts to a political attack. Conservatives have consciously broken the legitimate boundaries of debate and conduct between the judiciary and Parliament as defined by conventions of restraint by making the criticism personal and attacking the integrity of judges. The classic example is the attack on Justice Michael Kirby.

Domestically, conservatism is excessively frightened of ideological or political challenge, producing what can only be called 'McCarthyism'---hunting the enemies-of-the-people with the pretence that the enemy within is under the bed. De-Anne Kelly indicates that Australian conservatives are deeply and excessively threatened by ideological challenges. Their very identity as a people is at stake in them and they are unused to defending themselves ideologically.

Their conception of freedom in Australia is limited by a deep conformitarian ethos. This ethos is profoundly anti-individualistic, because the common standard is its core and deviations from that standard inspire it with an irrational fright.

We can see this with the reaction by conservative Australia to the challenge thrwon up by the neo-liberal mode of governance of the 1980s and 1990s. Conservatism asserts the preeminence of tradition in American life in opposition to an an anti-historical rationalism of economic liberalism. Australian conservative typically expressed the desire to preserve a valued way of life against disruptive and alienating changes. It characterized society as an organic whole, knit together by traditions and the institutions through which they are sustained. It regarded with deep skepticism, and latent hostility, the market liberal's proposals for sweeping transformations of social life.

So what is de Anne Kelly doing here? What is being bought into play is the special mission for an elite ---ie ., the National Party vis-a-vis the populist independents. As a member of this elite, De-Anne Kelly is acting not only as a guardian of cultural traditions and dominant institutions but also as the conscious bearer of tradition. She is acting as one of the elites chiefly responsible for initiating whatever modifications to our public institutions the altered circumstances of globalization seem to require.

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August 21, 2003

thoughts on Pauline Hanson

I have to admit that I thought that Pauline Hanson was harshly dealt with by the law. Her populist policies, which were a response to the negatives of neo-liberalism of the ALP, were pretty much incorporated by the Howard Government and are a key to his electoral success. Hanson ends up in jail for electoral fraud whilst those in the ALP who commit electoral fraud are on track for have stellar careers as machine organizers. Double standards are operating here. But they always do with the political establishment.

My judgement is that a populist Hanson was more than a shooting political comet who put in a good populist performance. She had an enormous impact on Australian political life. In John Pasquarelli's words this impact:

"....is because, when Labor people abandoned Keating to vote for her and subsequently became disenchanted with the shambles that One Nation became, they didn't go back home, but went off and voted for John Howard."

We are living with that consequences of that shift today. My assessment of the significance of populism as a political philosophy can be found here and here.

Here are some quite different thoughts from public opinion's guest blogger Rose Farrow.

Following our chat about Pauline Hanson today, I unravelled a few of my thoughts on the question of whether the sentence was just, and how much I should compensate for my disgust of her message. Obviously, a bit, because she is pretty foul. And she had a big impact in giving the racist shadow of our very white, western culture a voice. We can argue about whether she just burst a boil or fed a cancer, but she wasn't really on trial for that, anyway. She was on trial for fraud. So.

When a decision is made to imprison a person for a crime, the judge and ultimately the community must decide whether it was 'fair' of not. When coming to a decision on fairness, we often do a measure based on similar cases where the punishment seems more lenient, or contrasting cases when the punishment was lighter for a 'worse' offence.

Other things to consider are the position of the perpetrator, in terms of their knowledge of the law and their obligations, their power within the situation relative to others, their power in society and the responsibility that that power brings with it. For example, is a policeman stealing worse than a salesman....is a priest abusing an orphan worsethan a stranger abusing a child.... is robbing from a pensioner worse than robbing from a wealthy person... And then there is the issue of harm to be considered. Is the crime victimless? Who are the victims? How much harm? Is white collar crime ever as harmful as violent crime?

In the Hanson case, there seems to be a case to say that worse crimes have attracted lighter sentences. This 'relative' argument can go either way. Should the fact that unfairly light sentences for worse crimes have been given by other judges on other days for other crimes, be used to meter out an overly light sentence in any given instance?

With regard to the position of the perpetrator, Hanson is a lawmaker, a position she sought willingly and deliberately. She felt she was up to the demands of the job, whether you or I think she was or not. She took its privileges and sought to use it to persuade people to her philosophy and goals. In partnership with others, she became part of a company which she paraded as a political party, structured expressly to be able to ditch the political vehicle at any given time of her/their chosing. The company even went so far as to get undated 'resignations' from people who thought they were joining her political
party, in case they ever strayed from the company's agenda. The fact that this structure ultimately had unintended consequences does not necessarily mitigate the conscious act itself.

Hanson sought power through the political process, yet sought to avoid the political limitations, that is the need to bring people along with you in sufficient numbers to be relevant. She is probably walking on thin ice, too, if she seeks to avoid the responsibility being a lawmaker brings, ie., to set the example by obeying the law. It really is her responsibility to at least attempt to ensure that her partners and supporters do not step over the legal line.

With regard to the issue of harm, we need to look at the reason why the law is there in the first place. We have strict laws about how political parties are structured and how they must represent themselves, and where the money goes, and who is in charge of what, and how they conduct themselves because this accountability goes to the heart of the democratic process. If we don't monitor and enforce this, why should anyone, powerful of not, co-operate with the system, obey the laws, etc. So when Hanson subverts the intent, letter and spirit of the law, the law has little choice but to be enforced----even if we can all find instances when this has not occurred----especially if it is in the public glare.

And Hanson certainly welcomed the glare! And she also advocated a strong law and order policy, particularly with regard to the least powerful in our society---- Aborigines and migrants. The words hoisted on her own petard spring to mind.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

here's a thought

I thought Adelaide, like Brisbane or Perth, was in pretty poor shape because it was a one newspaper town. Adelaide only had the Murdoch-owned Advertiser, which most people treat with contempt. It's a tabloid rag. We all hope that something different can develop to challenge it and introduce some different ideas and views about what is going one. I guess people listen to the radio in Adelaide.

On an historical note. Murdoch started in Adelaide with a tabloid called The News-- now long gone. Today the whole of Australia is small fry in a global News Corp that seems to get bigger and bigger.

So I looked in envy at the two newspaper towns of Melbourne ( The Age and Herald Sun) and Sydney (Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph). They meant media diversity. And the war between Fairfax and the Murdoch News Ltd meant competition and a diversity of views on public issues.

Then I thought. Newspapers are not big growth businesses in terms of the communications industry. That is television. What if Adelaide is actually Melbourne or Sydney's future? They too could be on their way to becoming one newspaper towns.

The Age is the weak link in the Fairfax chain, and from what I can gather from reading the media News Corp has launched an attack on Fairfax in Melbourne. It's the first front in the war so to speak. Fairfax is surrounded. Media analysts say that The Age is in danger of losing critical mass. When I reading The Age online I notice that it is beginning to increasingly look like a clone of the flagship Sydney Morning Herald. What comes through from The Bulletin on the media is just how News Corp dominates the Australian newspaper scene.

Hence the powerful political weight that News Corp has. So it increasingly looks as if the one newspaper standing in Melbourne and Sydney will be a Murdoch owned one. If a global News Corp would then have been a monopoly in these towns, then that means the end of the liberal print media as we have to know it. You can feel the ground shift under your feet.

That was my thought.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

educational reform

An article in the Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 18 08 03, p 60) indicates that using the market to reform universities is having the desired effect. Gone are the days when the liberal university was primarily concerned with the public good, was taxpayer funded, entrance is based on academic achievement and was free from the usual market pressures. That was what the social democratic university once was in the 1970s.

Today, the elite universities with a brand name (Sydney, Melbourne, NSW, Queensland, Western Australia and Monash) are corporations.They see themselves as big business and as a part of corporate Australia.

Though their CEO's still talk in terms of embracing the market (ie., being business-like) in order to keep the traditional values of scholarship and research alive and well, they do not see themselves as public educational institutions. They are entrepreneurial driven, and talk in terms of business booming and doubling in size in a growing market. They are bottom-line driven in the new commercial environment, they draw full-fee business and commercial research funding and increasingly rely on private income.

They derive their income from research companies or consultancies, fee paying students and service based ventures. Hence they are businesses operating under competition laws and so will increasingly come under the Trade Practices Act.

What has happened to the non elite ones? Some, such as Wollongong University, Queensland University of Technology and Curtin University of Technology, have successfully cultivated a niche markets through good strategic management. Finding a niche in the market is central to an a non-research intensive university.

The other smaller regional universities will struggle to survive given their weak opposition in the higher education market. They are primarily public institutions operating according to the academic goals of research and teaching, and they find it hard to enter the commercialisation race that relies significantly on research credentials and prestige.

The planned university shakeup by the Howard Government will widen the divide and entrench a multiered market.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

bit of a round up

This post is a bit of a round up. Philosophy.com has a post on whether we can apply 'neo-con' in Australia and on the confusions of the libertarian understanding of liberalism and conservatism. It is a reponse to this article by Andrew Norton who argues that neo-con is positively confusing in the Australian context. It does not apply.

There is no equivalent to the US Manifest Destiny (civilising mission of democratising the world on the back of free markets that now takes an imperial form) in Australia. However, the US shift to an American empire is supported by the Howard Government, which defines itself as the Deputy Sherrif to the global cop. In Australia we do have a more activist foreign policy, a more assertive nationalism and an impatient with the constraints imposed by treaties, multilateral action and Australia's membership of international clubs like the UN and a desire to see Australia hit back when attacked. This group of assertive nationalists is fostering more nationalism, more assertiveness and a greater readiness to go it alone with tacit US backing.

On an another note Abu Aardvarke links to this article in Foreign Affairs by Marc Lynch taking Arab public opinion seriously.

The article is entitled Taking Arabs Seriously. It starts from an argument made here at public opinion that the Bush administration's own strategy, which links U.S. security to a democratic and liberal transformation of the region, is undermined by its practice. The central argument is that the Bush team's practice has worked against its stated goals, largely because it has been based on misguided assumptions about the Arab world.

It then usefully lists these assumptions:

"One such assumption is that Arabs respect power and scorn attempts at reason as signs of weakness -- and so the way to impress them is to cow them into submission. Another assumption is that Arab public opinion does not really matter, because authoritarian states can either control or ignore any discontent. Still another is that anger at the United States can and should be disregarded because it is intrinsic to Islamic or Arab culture, represents the envy of the successful by the weak and failed, or is simply cooked up by unpopular leaders to deflect attention from their own shortcomings. And a final, increasingly common notion is that anti-Americanism results from a simple misunderstanding of U.S. policy."

It then spells the consequences of these assumptions which makes sense of what is happening in Iraq.

"Together, these concepts have produced an approach that combines vigorous military interventions with a dismissal of local opposition to them, offset by occasional patronizing attempts to "get the American message out" (through well-intentioned but ineffective initiatives involving public diplomacy, advertising, and the promotion of radio stations featuring popular music). Not surprisingly, the result has been to alienate the very people whose support the United States needs in order to succeed."

Marc Lynch then recommends that the US engage in a dialogue with the Arab and Islamic world:

"The United States needs to approach regional public diplomacy in a fundamentally new way, opening a direct dialogue with the Arab and Islamic world through its already existing and increasingly influential transnational media. Such a dialogue could go a long way toward easing deep-seated anger over perceived American arrogance and hypocrisy and could address the corrosive skepticism about Washington's intentions, which colors attitudes toward virtually everything the United States does. "

And this is a roundtable on American power, the international concern about the US use of that power and its impact on US culture.

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August 20, 2003

Iraq: from low level insurgency to?

In the light of the bombing of the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, which was the United Nations Headquarters in Iraq, this policy brief is timely. It can be read against a background of increasing numbers of Saudi Arabian Islamists crossing the border into Iraq in preparation for a jihad, or holy war. Abu Aardvark has good comments on this. And have a quick look at East WestNorthSouth Blog for the farce happening inside the Iraqi Governing Council. (scroll down to August 20)

The policy brief is written by Ahmed S. Hashim. It is called "The Sunni Insurgency In Iraq," and it is from the Middle East Institute. (Link courtesy of Juan Cole).The policy brief is well worth reading.

Hashmin describes the ongoing conflict as a "low-level, localized and decentralized insurgency". The insurgency as something more than acts of violence by regime supporters but is still something less than a classic guerilla war. It is a mode of resistance in which a diverse number of political groups engage in widespread acts of violence in order to disrupt and remove the U.S. presence in Iraq. The threat is the shift from a local insurgency to a war of national resistance.

The brief suggests that the US priority is the military one of rooting out the remnants of the former regime, rather than the reconstruction of the country or restoring minimal basic services. It is more concerned with strong force protection with heavily armored and mechanized units that step over the edge, than it is with peace-keeping and policing as initial steps to building a politically stable, democratic and reconstructed Iraq.

Meanwhile, back in the world of the media it's life as usual. Oh, and have a look at Elton Beard's wonderful Busy Busy Busy. It has lots of lovely ironic insights into things media, especially here

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A half smart Rann Government

There is in article in The Adelaide Review by Paul Chapman that provides a good evaluation of the Rann Labor Government. He says that:

"... it has tactical elan...it is increasingly confident that it can do enough to get itself re-elected....is well organized, responsive and self-preserving....but it has yet to prove that it is innovative and original."

Chapman argues that this Government's strategy has borrowed heavily from Tony Blair in Britain: fiscal constraint, strident law and order and health and education being the focus of the agenda. Yet the Government is controlled by the powerful tough guy neo-liberals--- Rann, Foley and Conlon---who control the purse strings. It is the women who are given the soft issues of health and education and are expected to implement the ideas with budget cuts.

It is half-smart because it is not very good at joined up big picture thinking. Though we have lots of ideas floating around about making Adelaide a sustainable city, none of these have been linked up with fostering economic development. There is nothing in terms of industrial an policy that actively fosters new Green businesses through retrofitting houses, manufacturing and installing solar panels, replacement of electric hot water systems zero water management program.

Though there is a lot of emphasis on being innovative and dynamic, there is little emphasis on facilitating innovative green technology let alone exporting this technology for income. Instead of incubators to encourage green entrepreneurs we will more emphasis competitive national electricity market. There will be no greening of competition policy.

What is depressing is that there seems to be little understanding in policy making circles that ecological modernization would provide more jobs in South Australia than the car industry. Instead of an increased regional investment in education, training and research to lift inventiveness and creativity, we get showpiece exercises, such as solar panels on the SA Museum and the Art Gallery and the protection of the old car industries.

The title half-smart is deserved. So why is SA half-smart? A report in The Australian Financial Review (19 08 03, p. 7) suggest why.

SA is chasing a coveted AAA credit rating from the interantional ratings agency Standard and Poor. That means ongoing and increasing budget surpluses over three years. It needs a AAA to attract national and international investment capital. So it has to reduce state debt and to cut expenditure to achieve budget surpluses. Dancing to the tune of international capital means less money on health, education and sustainability. It means smaller government.

Hence we have the Blair strategy of intensive media spin on the Rann Government being so wonderful, innovative and dynamic. The reality is that even in the biotech field there is little in the way of incubator programs that would help start-ups move from techno-science to risk taking, swashbucking entrepreneurs. But SA does have a biotech thinker-in residence.

More excellent ideas to cover up the lack of action.

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August 19, 2003

Coral reefs under threat

The BBC has a story on the slow bleaching of coral reefs around the planet. (Link courtesy of kenrufo This is Not a Blog). The background to the mass bleaching can be found here.This si the Townsville Declaration. It says that:

"Marine protected areas are currently the best management tool for preserving coral reefs, especially for extractive activities such as fishing. To be effective, 30 - 50% of the available reef area should be no-take (no fishing) for long-term protection of coral reefs and their services."

Coral bleaching is now recognised as probably the primary threat to coral reefs anywhere. That includes the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, as the 7.30 Report indicates. The Reef has long suffered from the negative impact of agricultural activity along the coast.

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August 18, 2003

Iraq: opposition to US unites

This article by Anthony Shadid in the Washington Post is a followup to an earlier post on the organizations behind the anti-US violence.

Shadid highlights the political organization amongst the strands of the Islamic Shiite and Sunni groups. Shadid says:

"Both of these figures [Ahmed Kubeisi, a fundamentalist Sunni cleric from a prominent clan in western Iraq, and Moqtada Sadr, the 30-year-old son of a revered Shiite] were left out of the Iraqi Governing Council named last month and, in their own religious communities, they have emerged as influential if still minority voices of opposition to the four-month-old occupation."

Both want the US out of Iraq and are opposed to the Governing Council established by the Americans. Presumably, we can expect a crackdown by the US in the name of law and order in the near future. If what Juan Cole says is true, that Sunni-Shiite cooperation for anti-imperial purposes has a long history in Iraq, then are going to get a US POlicy that combines counterinsurgency capabilities with pacification forces?

It helps to remind ourselves of the background to this situation. The background is one of the neocons saying that total war needs to be waged by the US. Iraq is the launching pad for the roll-back of militant Islam throughout the Middle East.

The imperial strategy appears to be one of fighting the Iraqi's, imposing the will of the US on the Iraqi people; or capturing or killing the resistance until the US has imposed law and order on Iraq. It is a strategy of military domination.

This ignores a fundamental reality. The US presence in the Iraq is becoming the problem. That is a political problem.

The scenario then becomes one in which the US is engaged in an endless guerrilla war in a foreign land against the Iraqi people. That military struggle undermines the political goal of establishing democracy in Iraq.

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August 17, 2003

The green touch when the lights go out

I have just come across Drew Hutton's Greenblog. Drew rightly fingers the Beattie Government for its decision prior to the 2001 election to build the Paradise Dam on the Burnett River as pork-barreling. That dam is going ahead even though environmntal flow targets will not be met. Developmentalism rules. This time it is propping up a failing sugar industry.

As Jack Robertson notes:

"The truth is that neither mainstream party in Australia is truly serious about Green issues...Conservatives and neo-conservatives increasingly dismiss them outright, while Progressives usually still pay patronising lip service only, seeing such matters as just another opportunity to rope in a few extra bleeding heart votes by cynical, opportunistic default....I realise that the gap between the expressed ideals and the dirty daily realities of traditional political groupings has been rendered too wide by the entrenched habits of pragmatism. There is always a 'reason', an 'excuse' for the jettisoning of principle by our two mainstream political groupings, and the net result is two mainstream political groupings that operate according to no over-arching principle at all."

Jack argues that the Left and Right that so animates the OZ bloggosphere is a dead division as ther is only the fight for raw power with a little half-hearted window-dressing to disguise that fight.

What does Drew Hutton offer? He has given a recent speech to the trade union movement. In it he connects the Greens to the social democratic a political tradition in a critical way. Drew says:

"...many Greens would argue that traditional social democracy has difficulty incorporating environmental arguments into its perspective, is not oriented towards the rights of future generations and is often too concerned with saving capitalism from itself rather than transforming it."

Drew says that the Australian Greens work within the social democratic tradition because:

"..green politics asserts that the market, of itself, is inherently destructive and cannot deliver social justice or environmental outcomes and therefore, it is only through government regulation and intervention in economic planning that the public interest, rather than merely private profit, can be served."

He argues that a renovated social democratic strategy is still there pushing industry in the direction of innovation and sustainability will not come from the ALP.

To see this you have to look at the support the ALP has given to the establishment of a national electricty market with little to no commitment to sustainability. They bought the vision that the deregulation of the power industry would enable the discipline of free markets to generate just the right amount of electricity at the right price. Yet what we have experienced in South Australia are rolling blackouts and US owned NRG ripping money out of the state from a shortage of supply during demand peaks during the summer.

As Southerly Buster notes the recent blackouts across North America highlight the flaws of the deregulated market. Robert Kuttner says thare are three main flaws:

First, there is a fairly fixed demand for electricity and generating capacity is tight, so companies that produce it enjoy a good deal of power to manipulate prices.

Second, the idea of creating large national markets to buy and sell electricity makes little sense as it consumes power to transmit power across vast distances.

Third, under deregulation the state utilities no longer have an economic incentive to invest in keeping up transmission lines. Antiquated power lines are operating too close to their capacity. The more power that is shipped long distances in the new deregulated markets, the more power those lines must carry.

What we have in both North America and Australia is a is an ancient electric grid that's obsolete if not obscene.

"It is a massively fragile ... device that dangerously and inefficiently carts around electricity from expensive, polluting and extremely unsafe central generating plants to buildings that waste massive amounts of energy and generate none."

As Harvey Wasserman argues the whole electricity system demands a green deconstruction:

"Solar technologies are ready to make energy self-sufficiency a tangible reality. Photovoltaic cells on rooftops and embedded in windows can produce grid-free electricity, with battery or fuel-cell backups. Geothermal power can heat and cool with nothing but the power of the earth's crust. Methane digestion can turn waste into usable gas. Basement generators can use biomass fuels like ethanol and soy diesel for off-grid self-sufficiency."

It's a more decentralised approach. The aim of the green technologies is not to:

"... provide 100% of a building's energy, but can gradually make them increasingly self-sufficient. Meanwhile more efficient heating, lighting and cooling systems can reduce demand. Windows that actually open and close can balance usage, building by building."

Instead of this green public sense, we have the celebration of the swashbuckling, risk taking entrepreneur. This is oen who is willing to hazard everything, takes immeasurable risk and calls foreth an endless stream of invention and enterprise. This is the ethical subject of capitalism par exellence, and it takes us beyond the thrifty, utilitarian world of rational calculators.

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August 16, 2003

Saturday's Cartoon

An article from Al Haaretz on the "deterrent loop" in which all the parties stand there in a circle with their guns drawn, each one aiming at the next guy. All are waiting for one little movement before they all start blasting one another.

And things take a turn for the worse inside Israel for Israeli-Palestinian citizens. Israel is discriminating against Palestinians specifically in terms of citizenship on ethnic grounds. This is a mirror of the way Jews were once treated in Europe.

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Iraq: behind the violence

This report by the BBC explores the organizations behind the steady stream of attacks on utilities, oil facilities, personneland US troops. The link is courtesy of Juan Cole over at Informed Comment

The BBC report is the best that I have seen on this issue. It covers the middle ground between the US conception of the atttacks being the isolated and fragmented acts of Baath Party remnants, and the popular Arab conception of the attacks as an expression of a widespread national resistance movement.

We need to keep in mind that the US troops' relationship with the Iraqi people is highly unsatisfactory. It often involves actions that invite retaliation. The situation on the ground is not good in terms of food, water and electricity. It's been described as a shambles. (link courtesy of Juan Cole)

The relationship between Iraq's and Anglo-Americans is increasingly being structured by an imperial relationship; one that is an integral part of the history of the West's (France and Britain) relationship with the Arab states.
It is slotting into an familar historical pattern.
Abu Aaardvark has an interesting post on a debate between Arab intellectuals discussing the prospects of reform. His links are to Arab texts. I could not find the English translations in al Hayat. So we need to read Abu.

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August 15, 2003

dirty electricity markets

The current mess in the national electricity market has to do with competition policy that opens up formerly regulated markets to a myriad of competiting industries are regulated to prevent one form from unfairly achieving and exploting market dominance.

The success of competition policy in terms of the criteria of economic efficiency and community welfare/public interest is usually judged by utilitarian economists in terms of price. If the price of airline or telcommunication services fall overall, then the policy is judged to be successful. The word 'overall' is important in the electricity case as the game played is to say that prices have fallen overall, even though they have dramatically risen in South Australia. It's the old utilitarian greatest happiness for the greatest number criteria that is being deployed here.

Economists, including the critics of competition policy, such as John Quiggin, (eg. in his Dilemmas of Competition Policy paper, no link) rarely move beyond price as the critieria of success. The assumption is that economic efficiency gives rise to lower prices and this gives rise to increased community welfare. This indicates that much of the debate is conducted in the economic domain, with little analysis and debate on the political, social (job losses) and environmental dimensions of competition policy The public interest is defined very narrowly. How can it be broadened out?

The broader environmental dimension would explore the increasing carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector since the establishment of a national electricity market, due to the increased use of brown coal. Why? Because of the cost minimising pressures of the competitive market. Carbon dioxide emitting brown coal is used for electricity production because it is cheap and so it is used to minimize short-run marginal costs.

Yet it is in the public interest to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in a country that has put on notice by the international community that it needs to lift its environmental performance. Promoting renewable energy technologies and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a solution and federal policy. But this green turn is ususally dismissed by the free market economists because it involves state intervention and is more expensive way of producing electricity.

We are back inside the economic realm where price is the key criteria. And this where the politics come in. Consider this scenario. Private investors developing the brown coal fields in the La Trobe Valley in Victoria will eventually incur a greenhouse gas tax for carbon dioxide gas emissions (around 2012). This will make their enterprise unprofitable, unless the industry is subsidised. How to do this? Why the Victorian taxpayer can pick up the tab for the carbon dioxide emission costs in order to protect jobs. It would be best to leave coal in the ground and shift to renewable energy.

What we have here is politics. A reluctance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions because this will impact on economic growth and the viability of the fossil fuel industry. The politics is pretty straight forward.

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Trash at the Centre for Independent Studies

The Centre for Independent Studies markets itself as a high quality, independent think tank. It's self-advertisment says that it is one of the best think tanks in Australia and that it's got the intellectual goods (quality).

Jason Soon, in responding to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald says that about half of membership of CIS is libertarian and a significant percentage of that would be quite opposed to the neo-con foreign policy agenda. I presume, judging from a quick read of the material, that the other half of the membership of CIS is neocon and politically conservative. Maybe this mix gives the Centre the intellectual oomph that is so often missing in the media.

Taking it at its word, I've started wandering through the CIS website. Some of the foreign policy material has been appearing in my posts here and here The material provides something to work with, even if some of it is polemics disguised as scholarship by Daniel Pipes. So I've been digging into back copies of its Policy magazine.

I was interested in this review of Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left edited by Imre Salusinszky and Gregory Melleuish. My concern is not for the content of the book---I won't be reading it---- but for the way the reviewer handles the conflict over the Iraq war inside Australia, and more broadly, the war on terrorism.

The reviewer is someone called Martin Sheehan and he opens his review review with this insight:

"The image of the left has undergone a profound change in the past 50 years. Rather than being a working class hero, the typical leftist ...nowadays ....worships the Other, which is any culture or society radically different from their own...They are thus not so much in rebellion against poverty and oppression, but rather against conventional morality and common decency. Thus the contemporary left takes its cues from counter-cultural critics and bohemians like Friedrich Nietzsche ... rather than from stodgy Victorians like Marx or Engels."

It's a rough account as you can take your cues from Marx and Nietzsche. But we can let it pass. But note the left 'worships the Other'. That is a sign post of what is to come. The Other stands for the enemies of Western civilization--militant Islamists on Daniel Pipes reading.

And come it does. The political unconscious pours out. I will quote it to give you the flavour:

"The contemporary left sympathises with, if not openly supports, radical nihilists like Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement, for their rejection of the liberal capitalist order, and for their defiance of western attitudes and beliefs, particularly those embodied in the political and economic system of the US. In the minds of these people, the Other is always to be identified with, even if that means going against one's own society."

The contemporary left-----not a section of the left mind you----openly supports radical nihilists like Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement? Can that be taken seriously? And the contemporary left, as a critic of current policies of the Howard Government, is equated to identifying with Osama bin Laden? Even worships terrorists such as the Bali Bombers? And criticism=treason?

We are meant to take this as an example of quality work by the think tank in Australia?

I have to report that it gets no better. The reviewer goes on to say that he is disgusted by the open cynicism of many left-wing commentators in Australia and by the utter heartlessness of many on the left to mass murder and the plight of the survivors and their families in America after September 11. And, presumably, to the families and friends of those Australia killed in the Bali bombing.

There is a saving moment of redemption in the review. The moment comes when even Sheehan cannot swallow some of "the contributors writing as if any and every criticism of the US foreign policy is somehow tantamount to support for Osama bin Laden." Well, that moment of insight requires a bit of self-criticism, given that Sheehan has already made the equation of criticism=treason above. What is required here is an enlightening reason working on his prejudices.

Alas, self-reflexivity is not Sheehan's forte. Lacking the liberal virtues for public debate Sheehan quickly concludes. Blaming Ourselves he says is an:

"...excellent counter to the type of left-wing intellectual thuggery and hate mongering that has dominated the debate in our media since the attacks of September 11. It is time to call a spade a spade as the editors say in their introduction, and reject the anti-liberal and anti-Western tendencies of the left once and for all. This book is an important shot in that coming cultural war for the soul of the West."

The irony of this, which is lost on Sheehan, is that the whole tone of the book and his review is an expression of anti-liberal tendencies. No attempt is made to engage in debate and dialogue. We have a condemnation of the contemporary Left as the violent hateful Other; certain of its own rightness; and engaged in a violent purge. It is this book which is contemptuous of all discussion and compromise. It is an example of the sneering tone of dismissal.

Okay, the review is junk. Junk is useful as it gives you an insight into the dark and violent political unconscious of Australian conservatives.

But what is trash doing in the pages of a high quality, independent think tank that says it has the intellectual goods?

If they are what they say they are----Australia's leading independent public policy research institute that produces quality work--- then the editors should have refused to print this trash. That they didn't is an indication that the CIS is not what it claims to be.

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August 14, 2003

The West holding the line: two views

This post from yesterday was accidently deleted by me. I am reposting it with new material and have reworked it a bit. The comments on the original post have been lost.

Hugh White argues that Australia's foreign policy under John Howard is realistically based on its national interest and that it is conducted with prudence and restraint. White says that it has less "to do with following George Bush's lead around the world ...[and] much more about taking the lead ourselves in our own backyard."

Hugh White says that means:

"...there have always been clear limits to how far Howard has been willing to engage Australia in American global strategy. One demonstration of this has been in Asia itself, where Howard's consistent priority has been to build up Australia's relationship with China. This placed him at odds with many in the US, and especially in the Bush camp, who have seen China until recently as a strategic competitor."

So Howard, on White's interpretation is trying to reposition his country in terms of its national interest as best he can in the light of American global dominance. His key strategy priority is neither Asia nor America, but Australia's immediate neighbourhood.

I find this White's account of Australia as a regional power acceptable in contrast to the claim that Australia is a global power and that it should act globally. It is similar to Kim Beazley's account of a distinctive Australian approach to the region around us. It opens up for public policy discussion the question of well the Howard Government has prepared Australia for its new strategic role after Spetember 11. And this is what Kim Beazley does. He not only matches the government on national security, but he also criticizes the government for not doing enough to counter terrorism, boost our intelligence capacity and strengthen the defence forces. Very effective.

However, White's realistic account is not the only one on the table since we have a fluid situation in the making of Australia's foreign policy. Consider Tony Abbott's recent speech on the West holding the line against the Muslim world to the Centre of Independent Studies at the annual public policy conference or Consilium (it is listed under events).
A CIS consilium is the conservatives taking counsel with their associates in a group. It is closed to general citizens and the media but you get the sense that they reckon they are on the cusp of conservative intellectual renaissance.

So what are they saying? Abbott's speech provides a way for us ordinary citizens to glimpse inside the consilium. Why Abbott? Abbott is a Burkean conservative and he's known as a solid thinker who goes beyond the sneer of dismissal of a Tim Blair. So 'taking counsel as a group' means that Abbott phrases what he has to say in a common language.

This common language has three parts. Abbott's talk is premised on the clash of civilizations. I have previously argued that this underpins the conservative's understanding of the post 9/11 world. Abbott says:

"The hallmarks of Western Civilisation are scientific and cultural curiosity, belief in the equality of man, freedom under the law, and a sense that diversity is a potential source of strength not weakness. Unfortunately, what the contemporary West takes most pride in: pluralism, libertarianism, feminism and multiculturalism, is what much of the Muslim world most stridently rejects, even to the extent of cheering when passenger jets are flown into civilian skyscrapers."

The West must stand firm in the face of this challenge says Abbott:

"It's not enough for Western Civilisation to demonstrate its technological prowess, military strength and material abundance. It needs to show moral strength which even its critics can recognise and come to admire....The war on terrorism is not primarily a test of military technology or of social service delivery. It's a test of character."

How is the enemy defined by the conservatives? I suggest this account by Daniel Pipes constructs the picture of the enemy of western civilization.

In so arguing Abbott implies a unitary Western civilization, another key conservative theme. According to Abbott the Iraqi war showed a sharing of the burden of upholding common values. And:

"Historically, America, Britain and Australia's instinctive responses to foreign challenges are almost identical. A common language, similar cultures, entwined histories and countless personal links mean that there will be a tendency to think and act as one people rather than three countries."

This unitary theme of 'The West' is difficult to maintain given that historically, the West has often been historically characterised by discord, conflict and wars, not to mention the current fractures between America and the leading European nation states such as France and Germany? Abbott does not address this. So 'The West' refers to a particular interpretation of the West.

Abbott does address the divisions on the domestic front. It is here that the particular conservative definition of The West as a civilization is challenged and so have the conflict of the culture wars. Abbott refers to the "down with us" brigade--by which he means the cultural left, its political correctness and its negative historical narrative of the nation (as a people).

The cultural wars is the third key conservative theme. Abbott says that the influence of the 'down with us' groups in civil society has been marginalised because:

"...there is a new tendency to stress responsibilities over rights and unity over diversity.... The sensuality, licence and frivolity... is still on display but at least some countries have shown a newfound ability to call things by their true name and take commitments seriously...[and there is] a rediscovery of sterner and higher virtues... "

Its a bit thin. It begins with Edmund Burke and ends with T. S. Eliot. Unity is the overriding theme. It is unity at home (social stability) and abroad (the Anglo-American Coalition that pulls together.) The West holds the line through unity. That is the common language of the conservatives who cast themselves as the protectors of the nation in a terrifying and evil world.

What are we to make of it in terms of a different account of foreign policy to the one given by Hugh White above? In contrast to White's realist interpretation of Howard's foreign policy based on national interest, Abbott is all about culture and values. There is no mention of what Owen Harris addresses: namely, national self-interest, prudence and restraint, or Australian and the US national interests diverging. Harris, for instance, says that if there was conflict between China and Taiwan over the US military supporting Taiwan, and the US asked the Australian government for help, then we should say no. And say it firmly. If asked for a justification we would say that Taiwan is not like East Timor, and that Taiwan's independence vis-a-vis China has little to do with our national interest.

That example nicely highlights the constraints for the Howard Government's foreign policy: is it to be prudence and restraint in the national interest rather than tokenism? Or are we obliged to do the token number to cover the divergence between the national interest of the US and Australia? Or are we obligated to do the biddign of the US?

What Abbott's common culture and history account tacitly embraces the way the US turns the 'common character' of the US and Australia into Australia taking an international role. This is what is being argued by Richard Armitage, the US Deputy of State, (The Australian Financial Review, subscription required, 14 08 03, p.63) in a speech to the Asia Society in Sydney. Armitage says that Australia is a global power with a global role and global responsibilities. Thus the US and Australia stand together against the international terrorists and break new ground in freedom's defence. This is imperial conservatism that presumes the world is there for the US to remodel and redeem as it pleases.

That Washington Beltway “Hard Wilsonianism” is quite quite different from Hugh White's account. Since I much prefer White's account, I think we should tell Richard Armitage to get lost. We have no desire to coerce other peoples to be free. We should rip into him for telling Australian critics of the US

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in for the long haul?

There is a good post with pictures on the way the Americans are trying to win the peace in Iraq at EastSouthWestNorth. (Scroll down to, How to win friends and influence people)

Looking at the pictures you can see why its proving to be so difficult for the Americans to create a democratic Iraq based on a long-term building of a relationship with the Iraqi people by adressing their real concerns. The Americans are acting like an occupation force in a foreign country. And Kenrufo over at This is not a blog links to this essay by Michael Kagan in Policy Review called War and aftermath. Kagan says:

"The U.S. has developed and implemented a method of warfare that can produce stunning military victories but does not necessarily accomplish the political goals for which the war was fought."

Kagan then adds that:

"If the US is to undertake wars that aim at regime change and maintain its current critical role in controlling and directing world affairs, then it must fundamentally change its views of war. It is not enough to consider simply how to pound the enemy into submission with stand-off forces. War plans must also consider how to make the transition from that defeated government to a new one. "

The consequences? Civilians become the enemy. The US becomes an occupying force. Here is a description of everyday life by Salem Pax the Baghdad blogger now writing in The Guardian

This sort of relationship will only fuel an Iraqi nationalism that wants the Americans to leave their country. It is also helping to turn Iraq into a new battlefield. Another Afghanistan looming? I presume that a lot of the new guerrillas are angry about foreigners over-running and being in control of Iraq.

How to explain this sort of resistance? Well we have Daniel Pipes being bought to Australia by the Centre of Independent Studies to inform us about Islam. So what is Pipes saying? Consider this article from their Policy Journal (Autumn 2002).

Pipes says that Islam is in a state of shock. One it ruled the world, now Muslims are in a bad way. There are three Islamic responses to modernity----secular, reformist and Islamist--that offer ways of navigating the shoals of modernity. Secularism is a minority postion under seige, reformism is intellectually bankrupt but functions well as a political strategy, Islamism is in the ascendency. So what does Pipes tell us about Islamism?

He says that Islamism, with its devotion to sacred law, rejection of Western influences and the transformation of faith into ideology, aspires to create a new order. It is not the traditionalism of the village elder as it is an ideology that uses the state to promote a programme to tame the West. The tactics of Islamists are murderous; then they take power as in Iran or Afghanistan the result is a disaster and the Islamist state is a rogue state by definition as it is a ruthless institution that causes misery and home and abroad and operates in terms of expediency and power.

This is very negative account of Islam. It is designed to justify open conflict between Islam and the West as the inevitable clash of civilizations. Pipes does not leave open the possibility of co-existence between the West and Islam since he is emphasizing the worst about Islam. It is the violent Other full of hatred and antagonism.

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August 13, 2003

Water politics and faith

Despite the recent rains the Murray's mouth remains closed. The river is not a river. It is a series of irrigator pools. And while the dredging of the mouth continues, little action is being take on keeping 20% of the flow in the Murray-Darling in the river. It's a tough one.

Let us pick up on a previous debate with John Quiggin. Water politics is not about whether pre-modern or modern societies are more sustainable. It is about the way we in modern Australia have given priority to wealth creation at the expense of protecting the environment.

The use of science and technology to reshape nature to make our deserts bloom has given rise to the current situation where there is not enough water to satisfy both the needs of farmers and to ensure the ecological health of the environment. It is not just a question of shortage of water--the starting point for neo-classical economics---as there has also been a huge mismanagment of our natural resources. So why the mismangement?

Some say it was due to ignorance and that we know better now. But that is contestable. The policy makers had enough knowledge about the environmental impacts of the Snowy Mountain Hydro-electric Scheme, but they thought that science could fix the problems. They had a big faith in science and the technical fix to solving problems. This faith in Enlightenment progress covered over a flawed Baconian Enlightenment. The old utilitarian conception of developmentalism had no understanding of the ecological limits of the Basin. Nor is nature akin to a piece of plastic that can be moulded by the human will in any way that is desired. Nature, or the ecology of the Basin, has its own dynamic and tendencies, as we are now discovering with dryland salinity.

Peter Cullen, the public face of the Wentworth Group, talks about getting the policy framework right. If we do---he means creating an open market where landownership and water allocation are separate issues---then agricultural production in the Murray-Darling Basin could double on half the water used now. It's an entoxicating vision. As a knowledge broker he has the ear of governments. They accept his way forward. He is very persuasive.

Those old agrarian socialists, The National Party of Australia, has embraced the free market. Buy water, sell it, do want you want with it. You can make money from it. The new message is: the days of command and control, of governments telling farmers what they can and cannot do, have are gone. That's history. Let the marketplace decide how our rivers run. When you hear them speak in Canberra you can be forgiven for thinking that they have got religion.

Farmers are worried. They hear this message about the free market sorting out what farmers can and cannot do through the price mechanism. The farmers think about it and ask: what if all the water from a particular region is traded away? Do the people in the region then pack up and go and live in Sydney? Aah, say the free marketeers. Our farmers are now more efficient in the use of water. That is good for the economy. And good for the environment. But how that will be so is rarely made clear. No worries. What you need is faith. Faith in market forces to sort things out for us.

There is so much faith amongst the economic enlighteners. But it is not a case of keeping the government out of the way to let the spontaneous market work its wonders. The old command and control bit refers to the government impeding the production of wealth and causign impoverishment. That overlooks the little problem of how the state intevenes to achieve environmental flows that is so crucial to the health of our rivers. The National Farmers Federation (NFF) and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) have come up with some principles for a strategic policy framework. And the Wentworth Group has just released a Blueprint for Water Reform. The iron cage of liberty beckons.

If water reform in the Murray-Darling Basin continues in terms of ever more plans that may be implemented at a CoaG meeting, then the level of public debate is low. Two examples will suffice. There is an article in The Advertiser about water politics called Water Raids Across Border. Written by Catherine Hockley, it refers to the effect of water trading on South Australia. Hockley reports:

"Irrigator Tony Sawers, who also owns a Flinders Ranges station, has bought six farms near Jervois with water allocations totalling up to 3000 megalitres. He is already destocking the land of dairy cattle in the hope of temporarily transferring water this season to irrigate more high-value crops on hisproperties in the drought-stricken Goulburn system, in northern Victoria."

Fair enough. South Australian winemakers have been buying interstate water for their vineyards. This is a shift from low value users (dairy farmers) to high value ones. It is what the market does best. So why should the unmetered Lower Murray dairy farmers on the reclaimed swamps between Mannum and Wellington be exempt from this water trading?

Hockley takes a different stance. She says:

"It means that a vital water flow for the struggling upper South Australian reaches of the River Murray will not enter the state."

Now she cannot be referring to environmental flows as there are none. Nor can she mean that the irrigators in the Riverland will go without water as they have their own allocations, and the sale water had been already allocated. It is not free. This can only mean that Hockley thinks that allocated water flowing down the river to the Lower Murray Swamps is akin to an "environmental flow" until it reaches the lower Murray Swamps.

I presume what Hockley means is that it is better to have more, rather than less, water flowing down the river into South Australia. Yes, but that it is parochial whingeing. Why don't South Australian's start addressing ways to increase environmental flows for the River Murray through recoverying water from within their boundaries? Why don't they start getting serious.

The Lower Murray Dairy farmers are very vulnerable in the marketplace. They do need to clean up their act: they are very inefficient in their use of water; do not prevent pollution from the farms flowing back into the river; and their farms are need for rehabilitation. They are in the process of being rationalised as farmers sell off water allocations and properties. So they are vulnerable to being bought out by the more entrepreneurial interstate irrigators.

If South Australians do not like this, then an opportunity exists for the SA government to buy out the water allocations of Lower Murray dairy farmers for environmental flows. Then we can have water trading within environmental limits. But don't hold your breath for the Rann Government to intervene in such a way. They continually evade any action within their territory.

Going beyond media events and grandstanding means taking on SA Water to prevent them from buying up the farms in the lower Murray swamps and then onselling the water for profit. The Rann Government should direct SA Water to put that water in a water trust to help restore environmental flows for the Murray. They will avoid it making any moves under the cover of saying that environmental flows are a national problem in need of a national solution.

Another illustration of the low quality of public debate is the intervention by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) with the claim by Dr. Jennifer Marohasy of their Environmental Unit that the Murray River is doing just fine. Who are they trying to kid, when even the Howard Government understands that salinity is a bread and butter issue.

Marohasy's argument is that salinity levels at Morgan are decreasing. That's true---it is diue to the success of Salinity and Drainage Strategy. What Marohasy fails to address is the threat of dryland salinity that is rendering widening areas of land unusable, the lack of river flow, the near extinction of various aquatic species from pollution, erosion and reduced water flows. Nothing is said about our highly subsidised and unsustainable farming practices. These are subsidised by cash for droughts, floods and poor markets. Unsustainable because of the acceptance of high levels of degradation to our groundwater, rivers, wetlands, esturaries and coastal waters.

So on whose behalf is the IPA firing the salvoes in the water wars with the gloom and doom environmentalists? The think tank is getting money for the environmental project but they are turning out such poor work that their ideas won't spread much. The faith in think tanks by those funding this IPA project is misplaced. They may get the headlines but that old developmentalism is well and truely dead, even when it wears the new market clothes.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:25 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

enter the market

In my earlier post on the ABC I mentioned Robert Manne's judgement that the ongoing reduction in the public funding of the ABC meant that the public broadcaster would be forced to find other income streams. I quoted Manne:

"...my political judgement [is] that there is no prospect that either the Coalition or Labor will substantially increase in the budgetary allocation to the ABC."

I suggested that this need to find extra income would be the way the competitive market will increasingly impact on, and shape the direction of, the ABC. Manne suggested between program advertising as a way to find that extra income:

" With a revised charter, requiring the ABC to maintain its independence from both government and business, and with a truly independent board, I do not see any reason why between-program advertising need compromise in any way any activity of the ABC."

Christopher Pyne has jumped on the bandwagon:

"...the ABC must find an additional revenue source, by introducing "between-program" advertising.The ABC cannot sustain its current reckless programming priorities unless it is prepared to find supplementary income.... Governments and government bodies are operating in a new paradigm. The days of funding largesse and blank chequebooks are long gone....Creating a new revenue stream would help the ABC face the reality that its appetite for government funds is greater than the Government's capacity to sate that appetite."

That is the Liberal Party response to the ABC cutting children's educational television programs in response to ongoing reduction in public funding. Cutting the Behind the News program has obviously touched a raw nerve: it has cut into its core programming responsibilities. Pyne talks about "The ABC's belly-aching", its "more esoteric programming", and the dumb downing" of the ABC is caused by the ABC management. And the headline refers to stopping Aunty's whingeing.

There is nothing here about the ABC being the watchdog of democracy or the media as the fourth estate. Its about the market. The purpose of the core responsiblities of the public broadcaster is neatly sidestepped by Christopher Pyne in his capacity as chairman of Federal Parliament's Communications Committee.

He evades a core issue: that big and important issues like the Howard Government's first pre-emptive war in Australian history should have been debated more thoroughly in Parliament; should have been covered more extensively and critically in the news media, and the options better presented to Australian citizens before our nation made such fateful choices. What we got was misleading Parliament and a weakening of the honesty check in the political system that gives Parliament a few teeth against a dominant executive.

The politics of this is pretty clear --discredit the ABC as a critical voice in the formation of public opinion. The politics is best expressed by Tapped:

"If a politician seeks to implement policies that he or she knows will have negative or unpopular consequences, it's important to discredit those institutions the public relies on for accurate, fair-minded assessments of how the policies will play out."

Of course, the claim that the ABC's AM program was accurate fairminded assessment of the Iraqi war is hotly contested. But it is the politics that is crucial as it is the main game.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:13 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 12, 2003

A note on Aboriginal self-help

Comments have fallen off at late at public opinion so I take it that everyone agrees with what I have been saying.

I did receive this email from Rose Farrow as a response to this post. Rose draws attention to this speech that was given by Tania Major, a young Cape York woman, who addressed the Prime Minister of Australia directly when he visited Cape York last week.

I have reproduced Rose's email in full.

Richie Ah Mat has lobbied John Howard to stay on indefinitely as PM. His traditional land is rich in minerals and he has been involved in arrangments or deals with mining companies Comalco and Alcan. I think the PM picked Cape York because he has significant support there - from Richie Ah Mat and Noel Pearson. They are both being very instrumental in the establishment of partnership programs with business and the community. The jury is still out on whether this will bypass or overcome the conflicts over resources occurring in ATSIC.

The idea of looking beyond the 'welfare' system is hard to fault. While the needs are great, and government funding for health, education etc is essential to continue, so is there a need for enterprise building within indigenous communities, to start the long process of building an economic base independent of government. This is the beginning of true self-determination and real self-empowerment.

I agree that the attraction to the conservatives is in response to the perception that 'progressive', left-of-centre policies have failed to 'progress' the welfare of indigenous communities. Self-reliance is seen as the answer to this failure. It is also more likely to garner local non-indigenous support in conservative regional Australia.

However, a balance will still need to be struck between the local leadership support, conflicts of interest, and nepotism. There are still few people on the ground in the position to generate the kind of commercial backing required to create successful enterprises, and the kind of atmosphere conducive to responding to market forces etc. Hopefully, training and experience, and a few successes, will give oxygen to the notion of creating new enterprises, within an ongoing process of economy-building.

Couched in terms of 'practical reconciliation' the idea of economic partnerships is attractive to a conservative government seeking to address the dismal failures of successive governments, and the shameful degree of social harm occurring in many impoverished and disenfranchised communities. Lets hope cluey indigenous leaders like Noel Pearson can negotiate and generate real economic growth in their communities, out of a conservative need to at least appear to 'care'.

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just a few blind spots

Tim Blair has an interesting post here. It is about intellectuals in public life. It is worth a read, even though it is basically a series of quotes from an article by Jean Bethke Elshtain. The article is called The Dissenters Club and it is published over at ChristianityToday.com

Tim's style, which is much copied and admired, is to offer little by way of commentary. But there is enough to get the general idea of his argument. There is the pose of being anti-intellectual (academics and intellectuals talk crap); his standard reference to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas as an example of crap (see here and here and here);and an affirmation of Elshtain's point about the intellectual as a negator. She means that intellectuals are always against whatever it is. The intellectual is a negator of the staus quo, who is free from accountability and who distorts the very meaning of dissent (as freedom of speech).

Tim titles his post 'stupid intellectuals'---by which he means lefty, anti-war intellectuals. But his anti-intellectual mask means that all intellectuals are stupid. This includes Tim because he affirms Elshtain's point about intellectuals who supported the Iraqi war. True, Elshtain is referring to intellectuals as academics; but intellectual is broader than that. It means performing an intellectual role in civil society. So journalists such as Paul Kelly and webloggers such as John Quiggin are intellectuals. So is Tim Blair.

Alas Tim has a problem. To see his problem we need to remind ourselves that Tim's argument is twofold. It is based on him tacitly affirming Elstain's concept of an intellectual assenting to something the Howard Government is doing or that Australia is undertaking. And it is based on his explicit support for Elstain's attack on the received understanding of the intellectual as automatically negating what is.

But our dear Tim is so so iconoclastic in his own cultural practice. He is forever dissenting from a left liberal hegemony; and he is forever negating the cultural left that still dominates public life. He seems himself as being in the conservative minority resolutely fighting off the dead hand of the tradition of the cultural left. Tim is one of those types whose social role it is to fashion a critique of the social, moral and intellectual culture of Australia and its social institutions. Tim is a troublemaker and stirrer, albeit a right wing one. He wears his iconoclasm was a badge. It gives him a certain aura.

So in shooting arrows at the intellectual as negator, who is so free from accountability and who obscures the very meaning of dissent, our loveable Tim is shooting himself in the foot. We at public opinion hope that he earns enough money from his journalism to afford the private medical bills.

One last point. The Righties have a problem here. They define intellectuals by definition, as being Leftist in orientation and so engaging in social critique of what is. They conveniently ignore that a federal democracy is grounded on critique (each of the institutions criticise the other). So what is overlooked is the positive role of critique over and above lefty/righty politics.

Though Righties do acknowledge the existence of right wing intellectuals and so tacitly undercut their anti-intellectual pose, they would deny that the Tim Blair's of the world do anything more that just criticise lefty intellectuals. Righty intellectuals, they say, are different by definition from lefty intellectuals who negate everything that is. This account conveniently ignore their whole slash and burn critique of the instititutions of social democracy. On their Hayekian account, these institutions had to be destroyed to make room for the spontaneous workings of the competitive market and a liberal market order.

It is sad to see these illusions. They --eg., the Jack Stroochi's of the world----do not even understand their own lived history. They are blinded by their old models. They continue to pull them out from the archives of the 1950s, even though they tell the rest of us that the world began anew on 9/11. Presumably, they are blinded by the light of the birth of the new world and so they have forgotten the pathway that led them from the old world.

Historical amnesia its called. It's a terrible condition to have. It leads to the abuse of history.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 11, 2003

wielding racism

One of the charges that the right in Australia often make of the left is that the left accuse the right of being racist. Righties say that race is used as a weapon. It's a debate stopper as it is used to stop the discussion and shut people up. If you are a racist then you have legitimacy.

I concur. This tactic has been used. It denies that you can defend conservative values (eg. integration or assimiliation) without being a racist.

But check this report from Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor to President Bush. Link courtesy of Iraq War Watch

The report says that Rice said two things. First, the push to bring democracy and free markets to the Middle East was "the moral mission of our time", to be compared with the civil rights movement that ended racial segregation in America. Secondly, she said that those critical of the Bush administration's ambitions in Iraq and beyond deploy the "condescending" argument that some races or nations (ie., Arabs)were not interested in, or ready for, Western freedoms.

The tacit charge, given that this was a speech delivered to a black American audience (the National Association of Black Journalists in Dallas), is that the critics of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq are racists.

Odd. Very odd. It is the US that is constraining democracy in Iraq. Currently there is an appointed Governing Council that is controlled by the US. Iraqi's have very little say in policymaking or in running the country. This article quotes an advisor to a Governing Council member saying:

"The population of Iraq perceives correctly that it is the occupiers who are running things. Everybody else is there in some secondary or subservient role..."It's just like in the old days under the British mandate... Technically, you had an Iraqi minister. But it was the senior advisor, who was always a Briton, who was running things. If you wanted to get things done, you went and saw the fellow with the blue eyes, not the Iraqi. That is very much the situation as it's perceived today."

And Rice charges the critics with being anti-democracy! She is claiming that the left are saying that Arabs like American Blacks are not ready for Western freedoms, when it is the actual practice of the US in Iraq that implies that. What an inversion. And it was the American right, not the left, that said American blacks were not ready for democratic freedom. The American left sided with, and supported, the civil rights movement.

Me thinks Condoleezza Rice lives in an inverted world. Or she lives in a world full of distorting mirrors.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tim Blair watch

I mentioned here that the latest round in the ABC bias debate was pretty thin. I was working off a Crikey.comreport/notes on the speech that Tim Blair had given on the ABC at a recent Quadrant dinner.

Well Tim has published a version of the speech in The Australian. An appropriate place given for the article given the Murdoch line about the ABC's hissy fit:----ie., the ABC using "its budget cuts as a way of embarrassing the Howard Government, rather than as an opportunity to redefine its core tasks."

So what is Tim Blair saying? A couple of things. First we have the skirmishes, then the substance. I'll outline them and make a few comments. Consider this post to be a placeholder for the Tim.B. Liar blog to return from holiday.

The skirmishes have two fronts. Tim says that the standards of the independent quality broadcaster are slipping. The reason? The ABC went tabloid during the war with its over the top rhetoric about a humanitarian crisis in Iraq that never eventuated. And the ABC makes blunders in terms of factual errors as in its reports of the "looting" of the Baghdad museum.

It is a cheap shot. Take the humanitarian crisis. It did not happen. But the ABC was not alone in being concerned about such a crisis. The Pentagon was as well. It's postwar planning concentrated on dealing with a widespread humanitarian disaster, as well as massive oil fires and the use of weapons of mass destruction. They got it wrong too.

Secondly, there is the bias of Media Watch in pursuing media errors. It concentrates on right wing journalists, it lets left wing journalists off the hook and it does not pick up on the falling standards at the ABC.

Okay that is a problem with the balance of one programme. As I said it's a skirmish. The flaws of Media Watch stand for something bigger.

That leads us to the main line of attack. Tim says that:

"... the real limit at the ABC is its worldview, which places the Australian Democrats somewhere near the centre of the political spectrum, with both the ALP and the Coalition on the far Right and the Greens only slightly to the Left of mainstream...Persist with that view for long enough and you'll end up with the audience that you deserve."

At least this recognizes that the ABC is a participant in the culture wars, and not somehow standing above them being neutral and balanced.

So why should we citizens worry about the ABC's world view? Different media organizations have different world views and different politics. Tim says that:

"The danger for the ABC is that eventually, unless it does something about abundant biases and cultural narrowness, the debate over its future will creep beyond broadsheet opinion pages and into wider venues, as is happening with the BBC in Britain."

After this diagnosis of the ABC's affliction Tim offers a remedy:

"The response of the ABC....is simple and has been often stated. It must engage more with the mainstream and not reflexively vilify the large section of it that agrees with strong border protection, free market ideals, private education, the war on terror and our closeness to the US."

Funny that. I seemed to remember that all the fuss created by Senator Alston's claims about the anti-American bias against Linda Mottram on AM came about because that AM program did critically engage with conservative views in its coverage of the Iraqi war. Tim is recommending yet more engagement. More critical engagement by the ABC with the views of the conservative side of politics will draw more flak from the Howard Government.

Of course, critically engaging is not how Tim understands the ABC's role in the culture wars. He understands the ABC as "reflexively vilifying" the large section of the mainstream with conservative political views. That means engagement for him is giving expression to conservative and be neo-liberal views.

So, how do we achieve an ABC more to Tim's liking----an independent quality broadcaster? Tim implies that the free market will do the trick.

"The ABC's challenge is to somehow accomplish this [engagement with conservative part of the mainstream] without the guidance of market forces. It's like driving at night without any headlights. Since they're spending my money, I wish them luck".

How is unclear. What is clear is that you need headlights. Hence the deregulated, competitive market is the key. Though the article does accept the existence of an independent quality broadcaster, the missing word here is 'public'. So the implication is that the effect of market forces will ensure the privatisation of the ABC. Doing away with an independent quality public broadcaster is implied and is not made explicit. It is a minority/fringe position and not part of the conservative mainstream.

What is mainstream though, is the ongoing reduction in the public funding of the ABC and the public broadcaster being forced to find other income streams. As Robert Manne observes:

"...my political judgement [is] that there is no prospect that either the Coalition or Labor will substantially increase in the budgetary allocation to the ABC."

This is the way the competitive market will increasingly impact on the ABC. Whip the public broadcaster into shape through reducing public funding. Force the ABC to embrace the market. That will dampen down dissent.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2003

Sunday's Arab cartoon

Just for the record folks. The Carnegie Foundation has compiled the major statements by senior Bush Administration officials on Iraq's capabilities to manufacture and hide chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Whatever Iraq had in the way of WMD weapons programs and WMD weapons stockpiles, these did not represent an imminent threat to the United States, the UK or Australia. Nor did these powers prevently attack Iraq because Iraq was on the verge of going to war against any of the Coalition powers. There is no evidence of that. It was a unilateral war primarily waged by the US (with the UK and Australia tagging along) on the basis of hyped up "intelligence."

So the Senate needs to challenge the power of the Howard Government to make war at will. Parliament needs to reassert its authority over the executive.

This is more interesting:

Arab rulers can't see even the largest dots. (Hamed, Alittihad, 8/8/03).

Transforming the current Arab regimes in the Middle East to liberal democracies is a big ask, even of a super power such as the US. The US is still very much concentrating on the military side of the equation. The Anglo-American Coalition is slow in getting basic services going. However, it does appear that the deep divisions amongst the major religious currents in Iraqi Shiism and the differences between Iraq’s religious, secular and tribal groups have proved a boon to US administrators in Iraq. As Juan Cole observes:

"... it is giving them [ US admisntrators]breathing room. A united Shiite community could likely force the Americans out of the country by holding huge, urban demonstrations, as happened in Iran in 1978 as a prelude to the Iranian revolution."

On the other side of the equation the Arab League has been likened to a luxury car without an engine. So nothing much happens.

And it gets worse. As this article asks:

"Why do the Arabs [governments] refuse to participate in helping Iraq achieve stability and prosperity, even though some of them effectively contributed in the war that overthrew Saddam's regime?"

I have few answers to that question. I'm not a Middle East expert. However, the article does provide something by way of an answer:

".... it is not strange that the Arab governments did not convict the former regime for its crimes and its mass graves. It is not also a coincidence that these "highly democratic" governments refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the transitional ruling council in Iraq. By keeping silent on what was going on, they in fact recognized the legitimacy of the crimes perpetrated by the toppled regime against the members of the [transitional ruling] council and their families, under the pretext of the need to "avoid interfering in the internal affairs of neighboring countries."

It would seem that the Arab Governments cannot see the large dots of needing to help the Iraqi people. Some, such as Syria and Iran, are intervening to influence the situation in Iraq to suit their own interests. It appears that Arab people in Iraq are cast aside as being of secondary consideration, since there is little in the way of Arab aid and practical help to enable Iraq to achieve stability and prosperity.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 9, 2003

Saturday's Australian Cartoon

Nicholson

Such a simple message.

How to interpret it? That's the trick.

Here's one attempt. It places the emphasis on civic entrepreneurship – using the resources of government to make a difference. It is hard to disagree with a bush camp program that enables indigenous urban youth the opportunity:

"...the young participants sell their products to locals and tourists from their market stalls in Cairns and Kuranda. All the profits are shared according to individual productivity. Boys are taught about marketing, labelling, price formation, operational efficiency and selling methods. Young men learn that true Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men do not take drugs and commit crimes – they are strong, resilient and earn money the proper way."

It is along the lines of social entrepreneurs who argue that solutions to unemployment or a lack of services can come from communities themselves in partnership with business. Empowering communities can come from communities themselves in partnership with business.

And this is how the criminologists see it:

"The approach utilises re-integration shaming and elements of narrative therapy. Re-offending, laziness, drug and alcohol abuse are proclaimed by the group to be the behaviours of weak-minded children who have no respect for themselves and others. Relapses of these behaviours are openly challenged however the individual is subsequently forgiven and accepted back into the group. The alternative story is where all young participants are strong, hard-working young men with pride and self-respect who earn their money the proper way."

Sounds as if its a viable alternative to the topdown ASTIC approach advocated by Ray Robinson on this recent Four Corners Program.

Is Noel Person's understanding of self-help the underlying philosophy for a new kind of policy direction by Aboriginal Australians away from the comprehensive dependence upon passive welfare for their livelihood.

Self-help for Noel Pearson is making the break from a welfare income provisioning for people dispossessed from the real economy. That is the “Aboriginal industry” that is preoccupied with servicing dysfunctional communities. Making a break involves taking a step into economic employment in the regional economy a viable one. Is it also a viable way for indigenous Australians to deal with their social disintegration and instability of Aboriginal communities?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Indonesia: Marriott Hotel bombing

I am presuming that the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta is by the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyya. (Presume because that connection is contested. I also presume that the aim of the bombing is to hurt Indonesia's tourism and the flow of foreign investment. No doubt the combination of the current bomb blast with the Bali bomb a year ago is certain to reinforce tourist perceptions that Indonesia is a dangerous destination for a relaxing fun-filled holiday.

I presume the goals of Jemaah Islamiyya is to get the Indonesian state to back off from cracking down on militant Islamism, to destabilize President Megawati Sukarnoputri's administration, and to induce a rage against the West within the Islamic diaspora. Indonesia is difficult to secure against the worldwide anti-American jihad, as it is a string of islands spread out over the sea for more than 5,000 kilometers. That geography helps make Indonesia a prime target for al-Qaeda and a fragile link in the security terms of the US-led war on terrorism. As Richard over at Peking Duck reports Indonesian security can be improved.

I interpret Islamic fundamentalism of Jemaah Islamiyya as a Saudi-backed politics that uses some of tenets of Islam; a political ideology (Islamism) whose goal is an Islamic state and which uses the jihad as a weapon to achieve an Islamic state.

That arc of western security from the Middle East to Australia confronts a global al-Qaeda, and the conflict varies from the US facing a national liberation struggle in Iraq, that is led by Iraqi Sunnis and Shi'ites, daily attacks in Afghanistan to skirmishes in Indonesia. We are then warned that the regional terrorism in South East could spillover into Australia.

So what are Australia and the US going to do in terms of fighting the war on terrorism. Cooperate with the brutal Indonesia military (TNI), despite its appalling human rights record in East Timor and Aceh and hostility to democratic values? You don't hear much about Canberra putting pressure on Indonesia to reform the military, or bring the military officers who were responsible for the bloodbath in East Timor to justice Even Greg Sheridan acknowledges that the Indonesian military has bloody hands. So why cooperate them? Here are some more plausible suggestions.

My fear that is that the Marriot Hotel and Bali Bombing will only reinforce the traditional Western hostility towards Islam, and activate the sterotype of Muslims and Islam as menacing militant fundamentalists. It is all about threat, clash and confrontation between civilizations. From the western side, the sense of dread and hatred of Islam and Muslims has a tendency to view Muslim immigrants as isolationists and separatists and so hostile to mainstream Australian culture. This is how the great civilization divide between Islam and the West manifests itself within Australia.

Islamic fundamentalism is seen as being a negative reaction to the democracy, science and securalism of modernity with little by way of recognition of the similarities with Christian (Protestantism) fundamentalism that gazes at the modern secular western world as a hell drained of sacred and moral significance.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 8, 2003

it's oh so thin

Michael Keating puzzles me. I read his op. ed columns in The Australian and often wonder what I've read. What is the argument. Often I cannot work out what he is saying. His content seems to be as thin as a lot of Australian journalists.

This one is no different. Costello says:

'John Howard ... recognised he had to fight the "culture wars" and challenge Labor's interpretation of history if he was to establish his political ascendancy. Howard is winning that war. Indeed, his campaign against "political correctness" has turned into a rout of his opponents. One of the most successful parts of Howard's use and abuse of history was his statement that Labor, from 1996 onwards, was a policy-free zone, which had retreated on the core Hawke-Keating economic reform agenda. The media, by and large, bought this myth. It is still buying it.'

Costello then shows that the ALP is committed to a reform agenda to internationalise the Australia economy and creating an market order. It has even developed the new reform agenda devoted to research and development, education and training, and innovation.

Okay. So the media don't this. They are ensnarred in the myths spun by Howard's machine. And that's it.

So what is the problem?

It is this. Costello reduces the culture wars to economic reform and the market. There is very little here about civil society, the welfare state, culture, the media democracy or our cities. Nothing about sustainability--but that is to be expected from a neo-liberal who thinks that wealth creation is the end of government policy. There is nothing about the quality of public debate and discussionve rpublci policy, and no mention of citizens actively participate (beyond the simple act of voting) in the political life of the country.

In short, there is nothing about innovations in governance to improve the capacity to govern, even though governance is central to ongoing economic reform in a global world. Yet, as is pointed out by by Carmen Lawrence:

"The 'business of government' is very sick indeed....In Australia there appears to be a growing conviction that the fundamentals of the democratic contract have been corrupted."

She adds that:

"....most MPs are largely unable to influence the legislative or policy agenda except behind the closed doors of party rooms. Even then, there is often little room to manoeuvre because decisions have been made by the executives. Matters which deserve free and open consideration are often submerged because of anxiety about dissent. The media feeds this paranoia by portraying even the most minor disagreements as tests of leadership or signs of party disintegration. Indeed, the opportunities to speak openly are becoming more and more constrained."

Costello's reduction of the culture wars to economic reform and the market. that means that he sees reinventing government as making governments leaner and more efficient. What is ignored is the way the culture wars are also a conflict of future shaping--the way we shape the future. We can see that shaping the future is about if we ask, governance for what? For Costello the how of governance --the techniques to deliver productivity growth-----matter more than the what.

If you then ask what is the point of all this ongoing reform you hear stuff about creating jobs, raising the standard of living, wealth creation etc. Maybe ulitility is dropped in. But anything about an ethical life or vlaues is avoided, even shaping the future involves conflicts over values--wealth creation versus sustinability---whilst he valuies involved in libving happy lives is shunted off into the private life.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 7, 2003

interesting reads

My posting at public opinion will be light today as I have to do some research on CoAG and the reform of water utilities.In the meantime you can read some interesting posts. The first is oppositions over at the visually-orientated junk for code. It is about the reaction to the corporate modernist architecture, urban living and the design of cities. The architectural forms in our cities are pretty bad, and our cities do need redesigning. The post explores the different pathways out of the corporate architecture that dominates our major cities. Few in public policy wonks are interested in such issues as they asume that the free market and shareholders can take care of it.

The other posts a moral hole and its the same old song over at philosophy.com explore the ethics of the anti-war crowd that have been raised by Norman Geras, Brad de Long and Abiola over at Foreign Dispatches.

For those who want their daily foreign policy fix then I suggest this article by Josef Joffe in yesterdays Australian. It is about America as the new Empire. Joffe's thesis is:

"America is unique in time and space. Others might be able to defy the US, but they can neither compel nor vanquish it – except in the meaningless sense of nuclear devastation that will be mutual. The sweep of its interests, the weight of its resources and the margin of its usable power are unprecedented."

This causes a reaction:

"But history and theory suggest that this uber-Gulliver cannot last. In the international system, power will always beget counter-power, usually by way of coalitions and alliances among the lesser players, and ultimately war, as in the cases of Napoleon, Wilhelm II and Adolf I. Has this game already begun?"

You can find more Joffe articles here at In the National Interest and here at Foreign Affairs.

If you want some a post on right wing journalists, then try this one over at Hector Rottweiller Jrs Weblog. The fans are becoming disenchanted with Anne Coulter. For some critical analysis about Coulter, culture and journalism, see Dave Rush's, 'Newspeak and Fascism for the masses!' over at Orcinus.

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August 6, 2003

free trade?

The image signifies a turning away from a liberal multilateral trading system in favour of a preferential trading agreement with the US whilst retaining barriers to other countries. It signifies that Australia sees that its interests lie outside the East Asian region and lie in being strongly orientated towards North America.

Is this in Australia's interests as the Howard Government assumes?

There was an article in yesterdays Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 5 8 03 p. 63) on Australia's free trade agreement (AUSFTA) with America that questions the Howard Government's position. It is entitled 'Farmers look to Mexican experience', and it is written by Robert Leeson & Simon Vito from Murdoch University. For the background to the free trade agreement, see here

The free trade agreement is being sold as a clever and sound way to bring about an export bonaza for Australian products through opening up access to new export markets. All the local entrepreneurs are going to get rich. It's a win win situation because of greater access to US markets, which are the engine room of the world. And sitting behind all the rhetoric about increasing economic growth and ever more and better jobs is the neo-liberal equation of free trade and democracy.

The article in reinforces my forebodings.

The article says that Australian farmers will not be on an equal footing with their US counterparts. The latter will be able to sell their goods at below cost for sustained periods. So Australian farmers will be forced to compete with heavily subsidised local produce.

And the implications? Well, if the US farmers can sell their products in Australia, their income and market share will decline as they struggle to compete with subsidised goods from the US.

Is this a possibility?

Yes, if Australia makes major concessions on reducing import restrictions and regulations in return for a marginal improvement in the ability of Australian producers to penetrate the closed world of US agricultural markets. The US, by all accounts, has no intention of radically changing the levels of protection and assistance to its farmers.

That is the scenario. One way of checking that scenario out is examine what happened to farmers in Mexico, Canada and the US, as a result of NFTA in the early 1990s. This report, Down on the Farm: NAFTA’s Seven Years War on Farmers and Ranchers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, provides backing for the Leeson/Vito scenario.

The Report suggests that it is US agri-businesses that will benefit from free trade as AUSFTA's corporate-managed trade terms wil enable them to operate internationally. AUSFTA will also strip away many safeguards for Australian l farmers who produce raw agricultural products; reinforce the shift in the relative power and leverage going to large conglomerates; and enable these conglomerates to exert more pressure on both farmers and consumers.

And this report examines the impact of free trade on Mexico and Canada.

The response by the proponents of AUSFTA is construct this objection as saying that it is pointless because the US will not expand agricultural access,which is Australia's biggest trade interest in the US. Their response is simple. Australia can expect to secure additional access to US agricultural markets. Mexico secured such rights in NAFTA. The US has indicated agriculture is on the table.

However, the argument of this post is not one of don't sign, embrace isolationism and return to the protected past. It is highly like that the free trade agreement wowudl give a net benefit to Australia if the protective a wall around US agriculture was dismantled; and give a net benefit to the US if the protective wall around Australian services were dismantled. Is that likely to happen? The argument is no; the free trade agreement is going to contaminated by protection on the US side. For all its free trade rhetoric, US trade policy works within the constraints of the domestic politics of protection and subsidy for sugar, wool, meat, and grain that is defended in the US Congress. So there may well be negative impacts on Australia farmers from a free trade agreement. If it is the case that many family farm farmers are worse off, then the net economic benefits for Australia in a free trade agreement with the US may be rather small.

We can build on this point about the failure of bilateral negoitations to secure free access to US markets for agricultural products by bringing in wider considerations. We do need to factor in the consequences of any discrimination against East Asian countries from Australia buying less imports in favour of gains from its export trade to the US. What would the East Asian countries do about opening up access to Chinese, Koran and Japanese markets for Australian wool and meat? Is there not a danger of Australia's established policy in East Asia being put at risk?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

things are warming up

If this report is right, then it is not good news. (Link courtesy of kenrufo over at This is Not a Blog). Alaska and the Arctic are warming up fast.

This is the website where the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment can be found. It is an:

"... international project of the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), to evaluate and synthesize knowledge on climate variability, climate change, and increased ultraviolet radiation and their consequences."

I'm trying to find similar work on Antarctica. I remember seeing images of ice sheets cracking and falling into the sea just recently. I presume it was a part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheets that was disintegrating. Or was this on the eastern side?

I have come across this old report and a more recent one.

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anti-Americanism

In a previous post I referred to Alexander Downer, Australia's foreign minister, dismissing criticism of his government's foreign policy as anti-Americanism. This is the quote:

"The left-wing intellectuals] are obsessed with anti-Americanism...It doesn't worry me, to tell you the truth. But if you're a policymaker, you have to think about consequences. What sort of world would we live in if the U.S. took the advice of the gratuitous left and said it would wash its hands and go back to an earlier tradition of isolation? What would happen to nuclear proliferation? The anti-American mob are emotionally driven, not intellectually driven."

No attempt was made to define anti-Americanism. Such civility is not forthcoming from Downer these days. He's fighting the culture wars and so any opposition to American policies and attitudes is sufficient to contitute anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism means hating America.

Downer's vulgarity does not allow for the possibility of being critical of US foreign policy under the Bush administration yet being pro-American. Secondly, it does it allow for the possibility of a criticism that points how American foreign policy practice does not live up to its ideals of freedom, human rights and democracy and it draws attention to the yawning gap. Thirdly, Downer's conception is also absurd. Consider this. I presume that Downer would be critical of the US drug culture, its inner city violence, its radical liberalism etc. That is America. So Downer is anti-American. So the Australian foreign minister hates America.

Here is an considered attempt to have at defining anti-Americanism. It is by Martin Griffiths, from Flinders University, and it is a review of several books. (You need to scroll down the page).

Just for balance, here is something on shortcomings of the left.

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August 5, 2003

Afghanistan: lack of law and order

You do not hear much about Afghanistan in Australian newspapers. It has faded away into the history of yesterday. What the newspapers say is that the Taliban have been vanquished, a pro-western regime is in place in Kabul and Al Quaedi is on the run in the hills.

Afghanistan has been liberated. That is the image today.

Well, that's the image one gets. There are occasional cracks. It appears that the "remnants" of the Taliban are regrouping and flexing their muscle.

It is otherwise judging by this report from The Washington Post. Violence is on the rise, the country appears to be in the hands of war lords and reconstruction is proceeding slowly. The funds that were offered to Afghanistan for reconstruction have been slow to arrive and are less than promised.

The US may well be the hegemonic power in the region but the old cop on the beat scenario ain't working to control the chaos. (link courtesy of Hesiod at Counterspin Central). There are not enough cops on the ground to ensure law and order and the international cavalry has yet to make an appearance to prevent things from spiralling out of control. Time is making things worse not better.

A democratic Afghanistan, which is a beacon light for freedom in the Middle East, is a western fantasy. The reality is that Afghanistan is run by warlords who are subsidized from the US public purse.

Rebuilding on the cheap?

But Afghanistan does remind us that not everything in the Middle East revolves around the contained Palestinian Israeli war.

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no nuances here

I noticed these remarks in The Australian's Scrapbook. It is unclear who is making the remarks about the emotionally-driven mob. So I traced the article by Ross Terrill to the Los Angeles Times

That makes it clear. It is Alexander Downer, Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister, who makes them whilst spelling out Australia's foreign policy to the Americans. The points Downer makes to Terrill are: that Australia rejects a purely regional role, since Australia's interests are global; that Canberra is willing to act unilaterally on occasion; that sovereignty in our view is not absolute, since acting for the benefit of humanity is more important; and that ultimate security against terrorism will come from the spread of democracy and freedom. It is pretty much an affirmation of the Anglo-American position that comes out of Washington these days.

Downer thinks that Australia should be a leader on the world stage. His dream of a powerful Australia interverning in the world as the deputy sheriff of the US is underpinned by an economy to make it happen.

According to Terrill the Howard Government faces opposition at home. Then the whole tone changes when the opposition is described. Thus:

'Professors and columnists accuse Howard of "military adventurism," "slavishness" toward Uncle Sam and moving toward "a repressive national-security state." These angry scribes disliked Howard before Iraq; now they hate him. They do so above all because he is close to Bush.'

Nothing there about the opposition having a different conception of Australia's foreign policy; that some of the assumptions of Howard's foreign policy may be questionable; or that the various ideas are being debated including a re-engagement with Indonesia. Nope. The critics views are reduced to hating John Howard.

Alexander Downer then makes explicit what is implicit in this text. He says:

"The left-wing intellectuals] are obsessed with anti-Americanism...It doesn't worry me, to tell you the truth. But if you're a policymaker, you have to think about consequences. What sort of world would we live in if the U.S. took the advice of the gratuitous left and said it would wash its hands and go back to an earlier tradition of isolation? What would happen to nuclear proliferation? The anti-American mob are emotionally driven, not intellectually driven."

That makes it pretty clear: it's anti-Americanism, isolationism, mob, emotionally-driven. It confirms the argument made on philosophy.com that conservatives have become anti-democratic; deeply anti-democratic.

How ironic. It was only yesterday that Tony Abbott, the Minister of Workplace Relations, was talking about civility as one of conservatism's most attractive features. That was part of his Foreward to David Flint's, Twilight of the Elites. If we accept Abbott's claim that conservatism champions traditional Australian values, then one of those traditional values is anti-democracy.

A key problem with the Howard/Downer view of international relations is the way it constructs the enemy as the Other. The other is based on a simple taxonomy that has been outlined over at EastSouthWestNorth:

'...the new script seems to that they must be foreign terrorists ....Within the reportoire of the United States, there seemed to be mainly three types of bogeymen:
(1) The communist 'red menace' in the domino theory, as in places like Russia, China, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Grenada, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela ....
(2) Mad and/or evil leaders, as in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, .[and North Korea].......
(3) American-haters, as in Al Qa'eda (as in "Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms--our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.")'

You just need to replace 'communist' with 'international terrorists' to bring the script up to date. This enemy of Australia is supported by evil leaders (Saddam Hussein) and they are American haters. We need to limit our freedoms because the American haters are living inside inside Fortress Australia. What pops out is the new version of the reds under the bed.

What does it amount to? The subliminal level of the text arouses fears about the growth of Islamic extremism and terrorism; it connects this to Indonesia; then so constructs Indonesia as a potential threat to Australia. And they are on our doorstop. And if those who live in the dark under rocks become critical of the conservative government through the use of public reason, then that is UnAustralian.

There is a lack of nuance here in the neo-con political unconscious.

No need to worry says Anne Coulter. Conservatives don't need nuances. Its a liberal thing. They remember the time before angry barbarians threatened our national security. They have the moral clarity to punish outsiders who threaten our cherished Anglo-American worldview with savage terrorist attacks. Its all about loving Australia and kneecapping the left-liberal traitors who hate America. Conservatives have no need for nuance because they are right. (Another softer side of Anne Coulter can be found here.

That redescription of Coulter makes contact with the political unconcious embedded in Downer's text. You can see an analytic philosopher---an ex-Marxist---preparing the ground here. It is done through an argument about the moral failure of the left.

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August 4, 2003

ABC: the debate continues

The debate over the role of the ABC has nosedived with Crikey.com publishing the notes of Tim Blair's speech and an attack on Blair by an ABC insider.

From the material it is difficult to get much sense of Blair' speech. He seems to fire off shots all over the place. But he, along with the audience, want to break the public broadcaster up into parts. It was unclear whether Blair wanted to sell the ABC off, or just put into a box.

The ABC insider does not discuss the ideas---it's a personal attack on Blair for basically being a failed employee. So what? ABC insider finally concedes as much. The argument is that Blair is not a media expert. In fact he has little knowledge on any topic and away we go again in another personal attack.

Pretty poor show allround. The conservatives see the ABC as an integral part of the left-liberal intellectual hegemony of the recent past, and they are determined to use the culture wars to ensure the twilight of left-liberalism on issues such as republicanism, refugees and reconciliation.

Personal abuse indicates an incapacity to argue the case at a time when the ABC is forced to cut programs due to lack of public funding.

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OZ Foregn Policy: Debate Continues

Kim Beazley, the former Federal ALP Opposition leader, intervened into the spluttering foreign policy debate late last week. His key argument is that Howard's foreign policy has damaged Australia. It is a different argument to the one put forward on these pages, that Australia foreign policy is too tied to supporting the US and that it is not independent enough. The above cartoon by Andrew Dyson expresses my position.

It's an important argument. It is a counter to the neo-con claim that a deep silence exists among Australia's Left cultural gatekeepers on the Howard-Downer success in achieving equal vigour in US and Asia relationships. The neo cons, such as Ross Terrill, argue that Australia's national interests are global and not bound by geography; that regionalism has faded within the past decade; that Australia's leadership steps in Asia are called "aggression" and "military adventurism" by the lefty gatekeepers; that the left are isolationists who hold that an inferior Australia is not worthy of a leadership role on the global stage; that the left's creative imagination holds that the Australian national security state is repressive.

Terrill basically argues that our future lays with the US because of the need to confront China by acting to maintain a balance of power equilibrium in the Asia-Pacific that "keeps in check a still-authoritarian China that may be tempted to substitute national glory for political liberalisation." A strong US presence in East Asia would forestall any danger of renewed China-Japan rivalry. Hence a balance of power equilbrium.

I will lay out Beazley's argument out so that we can still access it when the links to The Age go.

Beazley begins by acknowledging the strengths of political opponent--John Howard, the Australian PM. Beazley says:

"John Howard is a skilled political counterpuncher. Years in the business have taught him how to empathise with community fears, tweak them to advantage and rapidly produce apparent solutions that wrong-foot opponents."

Kim Beazley then acknowledges the threat to Australia's national security:

"We confront real problems in our region now characterised correctly as an "arc of instability" around our north. The al-Qaeda extreme Islamist campaign against our allies and us is serious, and is manifest in the South-East Asian region. The troubles with the regime in North Korea could produce outcomes that seriously damage the Australian economy and draw us into a fight."

So far this is common ground on which most of us stand:--the current consensus of public opinion, if you like. Beazley then highlights the flaw in John Howard's strategy:

"This Government's shrewd counterpunching has concealed an erratic course on foreign policy that has diminished, not eliminated, our effectiveness in the region within which we must secure our future."

He then makes two points to justify this claim. The first is about the losing the coherence of the structure of our defence forces through overachieving on the expeditionary side (eg., Iraq, Solomon Islands) and under-achieving on the organisation of our intelligence and policing responses, which are critical for addressing short-term problems.

The second and more substantive point is about the long-term strategy for all seasons in our relationships with our allies and the nations in this region. Beazley argues that Australia could, and should not, shift our burden onto other nations in the region:

"Australian security also [lies] in the goodwill of our neighbours; particularly those in South-East and East Asia, and that military and diplomatic policies should be combined to achieve this."

Beazley argues that Howard drew down on the good will in the region established by the Hawke/Keating Labor Government for short-term domestic political gain. Howard painted the ALP as soft on national security. Suddenly Beazley's tone changes:

"There was no flaw in the US-Australian relationship he [Howard] inherited, and yet he invented one. Straining for a demonstration effect, he temporarily damaged relations with China and, with his deputy sheriff notion, cast doubt over the independent bona fides we had established in South-East Asia. The domestic flirtation with Hansonism, the careless talk about pre-emption, the dismissal of the relevance of the South Pacific Forum, the casual acceptance of our exclusion from many of the emerging regional organisations, such as the ASEAN-plus-three group, would not have been so lightly done. There was a generous response from the Government to the Asian economic crisis, but it was accompanied in the bureaucracy and the body language of the Government by a certain "there, I told you so - they weren't worth much, anyway".

Howard has been using up Australia's good will in the South-east Asian region by turning his back on Asia. And that is crucial mistake because the region is vital to our national security. Our national security lies within Asia and the Pacific and not from it. Beazley puts it this way:

"Security within our region is everything to us. We have to again convince them that we matter. We need to convince them that our relationship with the US is valuable, not as our umbrella or as a statement about our difference, but as an opportunity for the region to have a further channel to the most powerful nation on earth."

Howard, in short, has neglected the nation states in our region. That neglect is costly because our national security depends on the good will of our neighbours.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:17 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 3, 2003

says it well

Nicholson

It's a wall not a fence. Of course, the Israel's call it a fence. But some get all tied up trying to make sense of it. It is big symbol to the rest of the world and its difficult to retain the moral clarity of fighting international terrorism.

Update

I'vre been thinking what the wall signifies. It indicates a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a total separation of the two peoples and lost faith in negotiated solutions. What has been rejected by the wall is two peoples living in a binational state.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:45 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

August 2, 2003

a note on Blair, Kelly & the BBC

In Australia the fallout in Britain over the Blair Government's justification for the Iraqi war is usually seen as a battle royal between the government and the BBC, with David Kelly cast in the role of the lonely whistle-blower, being seen as the fall guy. The murky waters of the Blair Government's management of the issue is overlooked:

Nicholson

The UK fallout is seen through the prism of what is happening in Australia between the Howard Government and the ABC. The conservative's charge that the objective values of journalistic integrity have been undermined by "reporters" (ie., commentators) furthering an ideological or a lefty political agenda. The problem is the lefty bias of the ABC. And Andrew Wilkie who spoke out.

Here is a different view from Airstrip One to make things more complex. Emmanual Goldstein says that:

"This is not really a battle between the BBC and the government, but a battle between some elements (how large we don't know) and the government.

The intelligence services were looking stupid because the dossiers that were supposedly based on their information was tosh, and they wanted the world to know who the real authors of these dossiers were. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were pretty high on the list."
It sure looks so judging from this report.

In Australia the intelligence agencies took the rap by saying that they slipped up in providing shonky information. They have been politicized along with the rest of the public service. The real concern in Australia is the unaccountable power of the ministerial advisors.

Emmanual's observations apply to Australia:

"The dossiers were a pile of tosh, and the fact that they were tosh was not because our intelligence services were hopeless but because our government lied to us, and our government lied to us not out of habit but out of a conscious desire to have an excuse to follow on the slipstream of a superpower."

Being good and loyal friends leads to dirty hands.

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August 1, 2003

Electricity market

I have just come across national electricity market by Sharon Beder. What she says is one in the eye for all those neo-liberals who claim that planning by a central authority is doomed to failure, and that we should trust the dynamism of the competitive market.

Sharon gives the historical background for intervention by the state:

"The need for long-term planning and co-ordination, and the unwillingness of private companies to take on the risks associated with constructing capital-intensive electricity infrastructure were major reasons why governments took control of electricity in countries like Australia in the first place."

She then highlights the different results from government and market planning. On the former mode of planning she says that:

"...when government authorities were in charge of planning there was a tendency to overestimate future demand because of the political consequences of failing to provide a reliable electricity supply. But the costs of temporary oversupply were spread over a large number of consumers over long periods of time."

Then the neo-liberals decided to redesign the Australian economy through using the state (ie., the CoAG process) to yield higher levels of efficiency and increase consumer satisfaction. You know the neo-liberals. They are the ones who think that the market order is the natural system of liberty. Sharon says:

"In the 1980s the need for planning and maintenance began to take second place to the desire to commercialise public services and reduce public service employment. And in the '90s, when electricity was liberalised, privatised and deregulated around the world, the planning function of government bureaucracies was abandoned and surrendered to market forces."

So how does the spontaneous market 'plan'? The theory is that market forces ensure there are enough supplies because the market has the ability to balance supply and demand through competition. As Sharon points out this means is that no one is responsible for planning or ensuring adequate generation or transmission facilities into the future. This can lead to problems in electricity supply because electricity is essential to human welfare and economic activity.

Well, we know the theory. What has happened in practice? Sharon says:

"The National Electricity Market in Australia provides no incentive for generators to invest in new capacity because undersupply keeps pool prices very high and the standby plant necessary to ensure system reliability erodes profits. Also, existing generators have developed a nasty habit of dropping prices when potential competitors are seeking finance to build additional generation facilities. System reliability is therefore compromised by the unwillingness of private companies to maintain reserve capacity in case of sudden rises in demand."

So what are the consequences of this market planning? Plainly put consumer rip off, as South Australians are only too well aware. Sharon says:

"The experience of the electricity market has been that private and state-owned electricity companies have made large profits by charging outrageously high prices when demand is high and reserve capacity low. Because of this, wholesale electricity prices have fluctuated wildly from less than $40 per megawatt hour to $10,000 per megawatt hour. Some companies have even artificially created the features of a shortage by withholding some generating capacity in times of high demand so as to be able to charge very high prices for their remaining electricity. In these circumstances they are hardly likely to invest in extra capacity."

Now I can accept with Hayek that the market is an imperfect instrument of governance due to uncertainity and ignorance and all that. And I accept Hayek's notion of the decentralised decision-making process of market capitalism. But what is not happening is that competition (ie., insecurity, change and economic rivalry) is leading to innovation as a way to increase profits to avoid being driven out of business.

We've been had. What has been created is deeply flawed. A spontaneous market order has not happened. The reality is that the National Electricity Market impedes the production of wealth and is causing impoverishment. The Australian points the finger at consumers for wasting electricity and reckons that a regulator can sort the mess out. The governments who use their electricity utilites as a cash cow (NSW & Queensland) are not very innovative in encouraging a shift to solar power by households.

Update

The Australian reports that moves are being made to establish a national regulator of the national electricty market. It says that is recognition and growing concern that the electricity reform process that began in the mid-1990s is stalling andd now failing to deliver real economic benefits.

That is an understatement. Electricity reform through the competitive market is clearly not the magic pudding that many in the 1990s said it would be. The continent faces rolling blackouts due to aging distribution infrastructure in desperate need of upgrading, distribution is failing to keep up with demand, little investment in power stations and sky rocketing prices in South Australia.

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