Public Opinion

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February 29, 2004

Islam and the Other

I've little time to post as I'm back on the road again. This article by Tariq Ramadan is interesting. The link is courtesy of Abu Aardvark.

Tarig says that in the Middle East :

"The temptation is high..... to blame the collapse on the Other, the exploiter, the rich, the West and no bones are ever made about, throughout the Arab and Islamic world, eliciting all the arguments available to "explain" the situation this way. From old political colonisation to the modern forms of economic control, from the divisions maintained to the cultural imperialism imposed, from governments to multinationals who dictate their will to dominate from their Western base, the causes are clear and the situation understood: Muslims are suffering from a multi-faceted form of oppression."

His argument is that instead of blaming only the West, Muslims need to start to criticise themselves in order to strengthen their position.

My immediate reaction was that Muslims do so. The Arab cartoons that I have seen are deeply critical of current Arab rulers.

When I have a moment tomorrow I will post some and come back to Tariq's article.

Update
I never did get that moment. Here is a cartoon that shows the critical edge of Arab cartons towards Arab rulers:

Jalal Al-Rifa'i, Ad Dustour, 3/4/04, Repairing the Arab League

As well as blaming the Other (the West) for the poor situation Arab nation state find themselves in, the finger is also pointed at the Arab League.

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February 28, 2004

The Israeli wall

Nasser Al-Ja'afari, Alquds, 2/26/04. A Palestinian child dreaming about how is he going to jump over the cement barriers that Israeli occupation forces have placed on his way to school.

Israel claims the wall will prevent suicide bombers from infiltrating the country. The Palestinians claim that it's meant to create a fait accompli and to usurp more Palestinian land.

It appears that the Sharon solution to the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israeli's is to fragment the West Bank into an archipelago of unattached lands. This end result of the Likud strategy is the dismantling the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, exiling Yasser Arafat and the destruction of Palestinian nationalism.

This rejects a two state solution. That presupposes an independent Palestine emerging, and it implied that a Palestinian state needed to be established to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel.

Nor is it an unilaterial disengagement. The Sharon strategy appears to ensure that the deteriorating security and economic situation is so bad that surrender becomes the Palestinians' only option. They will give up resisting the Israeli occupation of their lands. The settler option means Israeli ruling over a recalcitrant Palestinian population. However, the vast majority of Israelis do not want to rule over a hostile Palestinian population.

Hearings on Israel's security barrier took place at the International Court of Justice, the Hague this week. The issue concerned the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (request for advisory opinion).The court is related to the UN and it works according to its Charter, resolutions and international law. The United Nations General Assembly asked the court to provide an advisory opinion on the legality of the route of Israel’s wall.

The Palestinian case focused on:

"... the obligations of an occupying power to the occupied people and how Israel has violated those obligations... If Israel wanted to build a wall on the green line, that is certainly within its right. It does not, however, have the right to build it within occupied territory and in such a way that violates the rights of the occupied people whom Israel is obligated to protect and not harm."

Israel did not take part in the hearings. The dominant power of the region-- a nuclear power---is stood outside the Court playing the poor victim.

The Court has begun its deliberation.

Peter Philipp says that

"....the issue encompasses much more than just construction of the barrier. For most people don't seem to find much fault with the construction itself, if only the wall or fence ran along the 1949 ceasefire line and not onto Palestinian territory. If the barrier's course didn't carve up villages, destroy fields and further harass the Palestinians. And if the construction wasn't there to protect illegal settlements, and as such represents the basis for a possible border in the future.

Altogether this contravenes international treaties, such as the Hague Convention on war or the Fourth Geneva Convention, assuming one holds that the territories Israel conquered in 1967 are, in terms of international law, "occupied territories." Israel, however, has vehemently repudiated that issue for years, saying the territories are "disputed" not "occupied."

Thus, the International Court of Justice will also have to decide, whether they like or not, if under international law this is an issue of occupation."

The political reality is that the Palestine Authority has been shattered and can no longer provide security for the people of the occupied territories. And under the Sharon leadership the settlement activity in these territories has been stepped-up. At the same time Sharon talks in terms of unilaterial disengagement and withdrawing behind the wall.

Confusing? Yossi Alpher explains that Sharon's strategy is played with two hands:

" It could have been different had Prime Minister Ariel Sharon allowed the fence to fulfill its original anti-terrorist purpose and not hijacked it for his own objective of territorial gain. Now he's trying to do the same thing by hijacking another good idea, unilateral redeployment and dismantling of settlements, with the ultimate goal of annexing parts of the West Bank."

The separation wall is part and parcel of the Israeli policy of settlement expansion.

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February 27, 2004

Iraq war: some sense

This article by Hugh White in The Age is of interest. It is about the role of the intelligence agencies in the Iraq war. White says:

"They played no key role at all. The Government's decision was not based on intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or about anything else. It was based on judgements - policy judgements - about our alliance with the United States, and the kind of role the US should play in the world."

Precisely.

And we can put the old furphy of 'significant threat' from Iraq's WMD's aside. As White succinctly says:

"....no one inside the Australian Government seriously believed Saddam's WMD posed such a clear and present danger to Australia, to our interests or to our allies, that there was no alternative but to invade Iraq. Saddam and his WMD had been successfully contained for a decade by a combination of sanctions and deterrence, and there was no reason to think this would change. Whatever pushed us to war with Iraq, it was not WMD."

White says that were two policy judgements that underpinned the Howard Government's decision to go to war. The first is the one that was argued argued by this weblog: -----support for Washington in Iraq would further strengthen our alliance with the US. Or, as White says, a decision not to help in Iraq would have seemed to Canberra to risk sending a chill through Canberra's relationship with Washington. This is the insurance policy justification.

The second policy judgement was the view that "a quick, clean American victory in Iraq would have some valuable side effects for Australia, by confirming US global pre-eminence. Back then, in early 2002, this was buttressed by an expectation that once the wagon started to roll most countries - and the United Nations - would jump aboard. No one expected that we would end up invading Iraq as one in a coalition of only three."

I'm not sure what White reckons the Ministers had in mind there. A good deal on a free trade agreement?

Once all the spin and nonsense is cleared away the focus shifts to the political decisions made by the ministers. White says that what is uncovered are some the big issues: - about the management of Australia's alliance with the US, about the role of force in international affairs, and about Australia's strategic priorities. These issues are rarely addressed in Australian public debate.

It these that we should be debating.

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February 26, 2004

election issues

John Quiggin's article in today's Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 26 02 04 p.70)) builds on this post in his weblog. He says that the forthcoming federal election (held in October) will probably be fought on domestic issues:

"Barring a big foreign-policy shock the question dominating the 2004 election will be whether any budget surplus accruing to the government should be returned in the forms of tax cuts or as higher spending on services such as health and education (there's a third option---keeping the surplus and paying off debt---but neither party seems likely to propose this)."

That is the right judgement at this stage about the sort of domestic issues.

The public strongly support spending on health and education according to the recent Newspoll survey and the surveys undertaken by Senator Meg Lees in SA. (See the SPENDING THE BUDGET SURPLUS post on her weblog).

These findings can only help to reinvigorate the ALP in its battle to get its hand on the levers of power. Hence the need for the Coalition to bring the poltical battle back to the economy.

But the implication is broader than this electoral bun fight. The findings suggest that there is more to policy life than the dry economics of balanced budgets, low interest rates, tax reform, competition policy and the efficient allocation of scarce resources.

The Australian ignores the Newspoll and argues in favour of using the budget surplus to fund tax cuts. By ignoring public opinion it is running a political campaign under the slogan of 'too much tax.' What is the politics here? Is the policy one of a flat tax of 30%? Is it a policy of stopping Australia from slipping into a welfare-state syndrome and preventing bludgers climbing aboard the welfare gravy train? Is it a policy of the government wastes money? Is the bogey looming welfare costs? Its about economics--not health or education. Murdock's Australian is fighting on behalf of Howard.

Sitting behind the health issue sits aged care, the aging of society and the rising costs of aged care.

Peter Costello's suggestion is to encourage older Australians to work part time, whilst being able to draw on their superannuation benefits. Sensible. But hardly the big fix for ageing.

Many older Australians (both blue and white collar) have been thrown on the scrap heap, and they find it very difficult to retrain and then obtain another job. You can only work on if you have, or can find a job. There's the little problem of ageism there. (Older people are unemployable).

Oh, another thing. Is there not a huge gap between what we save and what we need for retirement? More money is needed. That we workers need to save more is what Costello seems to be saying here.

But are not we taxed on money into superannuation, taxed on the money as it accummulates and taxed on the money when it goes out?

So the Costello message is that we citizens need to work longer and save more. That's a tough message when we are 64.

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February 25, 2004

the decay of public language

As a result of reading Don Watson's Death Sentence I've become sensitive to public langauge. Here is Janet Albrechtson having a swipe at Australian feminists in the ALP:

"On the home front, proud feminist agitators such as the ALP's Carmen Lawrence and Tanya Plibersek push for women's participation in politics. They agonise publicly over the plight of Iraqi women and children in Australian detention centres. The stentorian sisterhood had plenty to say about the Iraq war but have gone quiet over the good news coming from Iraq.

There is a malevolence to this muteness. Theirs is a new hierarchy of evil. Once driven by misandry, feminism in the wake of Iraq is ruled by the hatred of just one man -- US President George W. Bush."

...'a new hierarchy of evil'. It's hardly a moral equivalent to the gulag.

It's a good example of the decay of public language, is it not?

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cracks in the health system?

Health continues to bubble along as an central issue in public policy circles. It's an issue that continues to favour the ALP. Bulk billing rates are declining; doctor's costs are rising; and attendances at doctor's practices are down. So what is going on here? What is happening if people are not going to see the doctor when they are sick?

Some---concessional card holders----are accessing the emergency departments of public hospitals. The others? The inference is that many of the working poor are not accessing the public health system. But it is not as simple as bulk-billing rates are disappearing and more people are turning up at hospital casualty departments, placing greater financial strain on a system funded federally but administered at state level. It means that people remain sick until they are faced with an emergency.

Here is the speech of Julia Gilliard, the ALP's Shadow Minister for Health, to the Australian Financial Review's 6th Annual Health Congress.

The AMA says that the key to evaluating our health system for patients, is being able to see a doctor when we need one.

Well, they've got that right. Speaking at a speech to the Financial Review's 6th Annual Health Congress Bill Glasson, the President of the AMA, goes on to say:

"It’s not as easy to get hold of a doctor when you need one these days, especially in country or outer-suburban areas. The concept of universal access to health care has eroded. Many Australians are paying more for their health care because Medicare has been neglected. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If we can find money for border protection and offshore detention centres, we can properly fund our health system."

That is a perspective that is widely shared by public opinion. Whilst the Howard Government talks about spending the budget surplus on tax cuts, the majority of Australians (around 72%) want the budget surrplus to be spent on health and education.

Glasson then socks in the hits:

"Medicine has traditionally been the top of the heap of career choice for our best and brightest students.That reputation is slipping away.
Why?

Too many bloody hurdles. Too much intervention.

The doctor-patient relationship does not want or need a Treasury official as note-taker. The doctor-patient relationship does not need the ACCC to brand rosters and job-sharing as anti-competitive. Student doctors should not be press-ganged into serving in country areas. A doctor should practice where he or she wants to practice, but incentives are needed to attract them to work in more remote areas.Red tape is strangling general practice. The Medicare patient rebate is dudding the patient.

These are causing massive damage to the system."

This is the restrained response by Tony Abbott, the federal health Minister. The Howard Government is doing a good job of managing the massive health system in a responsible and innovative way, despite the expense and cost blowout.

However, Abbott is reported in The Australian as being more provocative. He is reported as saying (p.5) that instead of the states laying blame on Canberra for the things that go wrong, the states should hand responsility for health to the commonwealth in the spirit of co-operative federalism.

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February 24, 2004

the politics of power

I see that Alan Moran from the IPA has an article on electricity in the Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 23 02 04, p. 63). The IPA has little credibility in environmental policy making circles these days, so I was curious to see what Moran had to say beyond the usual shooting rubber bands at Platonic fictions for a fee. They have a brief. and act like lawyers for a client.

Moran starts well enough. He says the issue raises questions about:

".... the appropriate role of government. Is it the servant of the people or is the master and of the people?"

I take it for granted that citizens don't exist for Moran. Still he raises a reasonable question. A question with only right answer. The government should be the servant of the people.

Moran answers the question in a roundabout way. He says that:

[Canberra's] "... Mandatory Renewable Energy Target [MRET] is forcing an increase of $350 million per year in electricity prices....Canberra is resisting calls from the green lobby for a further expansion of the renewable energy targets."

So the government should refrain from doing those things that would increase prices. That is very bad governance. An example is the subsidy of the MRET by the Carr Government in NSW. This is bad because increasing prices because of the need for new investment in electricity infrastructure:

"The Victorian government is....aware that the state will require new base-load electricity plant in the next few years, investment that will be discouraged if it foists additional costs on industry."

If industry doesn't invest in new infrastructure then consumers have blackouts. Look what happened to WA last week.

However, the green policies of the Brack Government will increase the costs for the electricity industry. The Government is:

"...demanding additional carbon-dioxide emission targets for the LaTrobe valley Hazelwood power station as a condition of planning approvals. These would reportedly cost Hazelwood's owners about $250 million."

That's bad. Real bad.

So government should not do anything to increase the costs to industry to meet the demands of the green lobby. Consumer sovereignty requires cheap power. So the government be the servant of consumers who are the people.

Impeccable logic you might say. The free marketeers would say true, so true. Moran nails it once again. The greens are skewered yet again. Moran is our boy. Yeah yeah.

One question. Why is it good for the national electricity market--- the electricity industry--- to raise electricity prices by 25-30% for consumers in South Australia? Was that not the result of the free market? Are not energy companies making big profits by withholding power at peak periods to drive spot prices through the roof? Is that not bad too?

Oh, is not an increase in MRET a significant way for Australia to encourage the development of a $1 billion renewable energy industry? And that is bad?

As I said the IPA are presenting a brief. The clients are the energy intensive industry.

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February 23, 2004

Tim Blair's darned sock

I'm currently reading Don Watson's Death Sentence:The Decay of Public Language. It got me thinking about writing a post on the eloquence and inventiveness of Australian journalism in reshaping our language. It was to be a little something that played around with the metaphor of electrify, as in madness.

Then I came across this passage in Watson's text:

"Pictures rule. To the extent that TV rules, pictures rule; and to the extent that TV is the most important medium of public life, the public language is at best a secondary consideration, and at works indistinquishable from the language of marketing and entertainment." (p. 64).

And I was sidetracked. I thought: Tim Blair! Our man from the IPA is a classic exponent of marketing and entertainment that disguises itself as good journalism.

Truth is something you don't think of when you read Tim. His words kinda ring true in a strange way, but the rhetoric of truth disguises the political purpose that drives his work.

But I'll give him something though. Fluent Tim is more than a medium for the flows of entertainment. His 'soft talk' markets American Republican politics in Australia with far more finese than we find in Murdock's ragtag Australian. And our Tim is not all gloss. He loves to coerce you into believing that there is no choice but to buy the Republicanspeak and product he's hustling in the media marketplace.

You can't really say that his stuff is as nourishing as mother's milk. Too cynical. It activates our instinct to distrust. Nor does the jokey rhetoric take wing and soar, for all its stylistics and self-concious poetics. It's more a bit of this and that gone stale. Short on depth and ideas, you might say, after a few South Australian wines have made you feel relaxed and comfortable.

After a few more SA wines (ugh the salt!) whilst watching the father of the nation on television expound on nothing in particular, and you start to see that Tim's finely honed words are linked by bits of barbed wire. You detect the dog whistling behind the craft. This is what Watson calls the "...trick of tapping the political potential of suppressed prejudice, fear and envy through apparently harmless but carefully 'coded' words and turning it against the rest of the country."

A few more wines and you start thinking of darned socks, unwashed.

And so it goes........I'll spare you the drunken shift to Bataillian imagery.

You see, I got side tracked. And the stock stuff does not sit too well with petrol, carbon fibre, rubber.

I should have stuck to my post about the filtering of truth in Australian journalism.

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populism divided

I think that this account of the recent shift in national politics by Robert Manne is roughly right.

Manne says that over the past fortnight the atmosphere of Australian party politics has experienced significant change. One chapter was closed; a new one opened up.

The chapter that has closed is John Howard's unchallengeable ascendancy through the use of the populist sword. This sword was a conservative, populist cultural rollback campaign - concerning multiculturalism, Mabo, the republic, reconciliation and, finally, refugees. As a conservative populist, Howard focuses on the threat of national disintegration, social cohesion and on questions of ethnicity or race. He used the sword by making direct contact with the people through almost daily appearances on mass-audience commercial radio. He avoided the the Canberra Press gallery. Howard saw off both One Nation and the ALP

Things change. The chapter that has been opened up is Mark Latham's capacity to answer the challenge of Howard's new populist age. Latham he is capable of making vivid, direct connection with the public through his plain speaking and effective use of the radio. Latham is also capable of identifying the kind of populist issue that can destabilise his political opponents.

As Manne points out this is a Laborist kind of populism; a social democratic populism, with its traditional hostility to abuses of privilege and undeserved wealth, on banks, the big end of town and parliamentary rorts.

Thus we have a conflict between these two kinds of populism. What has happened to neo-liberalism of the technocratic economists with their obsession with management and control to create a deregulated market society?

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February 22, 2004

It's dated but I 'like it'

Stavro

There is political pressure because the logic of the imperial presidency's case is flawed. Even the conservative talk show hosts in the US are scrambling to unravel truth from fiction in the bulletins pouring out of the White House.

That political pressure is just a bit of stir and shake within Washington. That movement against a Republican America has yet to question the fall of the republic to militarism.

Yet the pressure within Washington is linked to the blow back against the US as a hegemonic empire. Consider the 4 tendences mentioned by Chalmer Johnson, which form part of his case. He argues that the new militarism in the US is transforming America and compelling its people to pick up the burden of empire:

"First is endless war... As it stands right now, since 9/11, Articles 4 and 6 of the Bill of Rights are dead letters. They are over... Second, imperial overstretch...

The third thing is a tremendous rise in lying and deceit... The difficulty to believe anything that the government says any longer because they are now systematically lying to us on almost every issue.

The fourth is bankruptcy. Attempting to dominate the world militarily is a very expensive proposition... The United States, for the last 15 years, has had trade deficits running at 5 percent every year. We are on the edge. If the rest of the world decides not to cooperate with us or just the rich people of East Asia decide the Euro is a better currency to put their money in than the dollar, we become a junkyard almost at once. The stock exchange would collapse and we would have a howling recession.

All four of those things are likely to prevail... [The United States suffers from an] inability to reform. I think it is quite easy to imagine the defeat of George Bush as president. I do not find it easy at all that any successor to George Bush would make any difference... That leads me to the conclusion that we are probably going to reap what we have sown. That is blowback."

Johnson calls them the Sorrows of Empire. The book argues that the former American republic has already crossed its Rubicon with the Pentagon leading the way.

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February 21, 2004

Saturday Cartoon: The Canberra bubble

Is Mark Latham poking a hole in the Canberra bubble?

Alan Moir

The Canberra bubble is what Australian political leaders, their advisers and the full-time political media live in. Shaun Carney describes the bubble:

"What makes up the bubble? Transcripts, opinion polls, hair-splitting games of gotcha based on what someone said yesterday compared with what they said four years ago, the substitution of tactics for ideas and policy, and the wholesale acceptance of clever politics, lawyers language and sly campaigning techniques ahead of telling the truth. Politics as an enterprise has become unmoored from everyday life."

Inside the bubble it is mutual abuse in the bear pit that drives the day-to-day political behaviour. That is not Latham. At the moment he is tallking about the crisis of masculinity, why boys need good masculine role models, or why parents should read books to their kids. To do so is to step outside the Canberra bubble.

You can adopt a jaundiced view to this. Graham Young does. He says:

"One can see a series of plays developing as Latham floats one populist idea after another and the Prime Minister adopts them. Latham’s eventual pitch to the electorate would then end up being – do you want the original or the counterfeiter; the boy who won’t grow up, or the one who doesn’t know he’s too old? On the other hand, how many populist plays can Latham make? Howard takes this one away and it is forgotten in a month or so. Latham then has to find another which is as effective. As we get closer to the election it becomes harder and harder."

That's the perspective from within the Canberra bubble. What if we step outside the bubble?

That would gives us another perspective on what is happening. Instead of getting into the pit and wrestling with the attack dogs as if were a gladiator, Latham is talking directly about some of the concerns of those living in everyday life. Latham says that most of the questions he got from people in his town hall meetings in NSW:

"....were about people: the quality of our society; the breakdown in community relationships; loneliness, isolation and stress; youth homelessness and the drug problem; disabilities and the aged-care crisis; male suicide, mental health and the need for mentoring programs.

These are the concerns of mainstream Australia. After 30 years of globalisation and economic change, people are asking: what has happened to our society? How do we relate to each other now? How do we help each other and create stronger communities? How do we rebuild the identities and relationships of a good society?

The questions are about society, community, a sense of belonging and social relationships. They refer to what exists between market forces and state bureaucracy. It's a different way of talking.

Latham's messages are bits of policy fluff based around stunts. But there are getting through. And they are deadly. They continue his momentum. And the well-oiled Howard Government machine is faltering.

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February 20, 2004

Overheating: That is the news

The main political news this week is not what is happened in the bubble of federal parliament. Nor is the crisis of masculinity, or why boys need good masculine role models, even if the work-life balance/conflict is one of the most pressing political questions for Australia.

It's the soaring temperatures and the two week plus heat wave in Southern Australia.

The place is warming up. The airconditioners are not coping. People are stressed from the heat. Cities like Adelaide just bake day after day. Its been blackouts in Perth.

State energy managers hustle to ensure an adequate power supply as Australians suffer from what is likely to be the hottest stretch of weather for quite some time.

And its been a similar story in California.

It brings the issue of global warming to the fore. It's getting hotter and its getting drier. This has not been factored into the forward planning of a national electricity market. And the public and private electricity infrastructure is decaying.

Despite the warning signs, the US, Canada and Australia are seeing an overall increase in their greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing temperatures. Now just think about the implications of climate change for Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

It means a bleaching of the coral caused by rising water temperatures. What will be left are bleached coral skeletons. That's a heavy knock for the Queensland tourism industry.

The inference? The coal-fired power stations are a big source of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause the heating of the climate and water and so are responsible for the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

Update
A report on the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef can be found here. Called 'Implications of Climate Change for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef', it is a comprehensive study on how Australia’s Great Barrier Reef may look in an overheating world. It explores possible future scenarios for the Reef.

The best case scenario for the Reef is recoverable loss if global temperature increases remain below 2 degrees. The worst case scenario is one of coral populations collapsing by 2100 with the re-establishment of coral reefs being highly unlikely over the following 200-500 years.

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February 19, 2004

Political atmospherics

I mentioned here that the political ground in Australian politics is shifting. Here is another indication of the shift:


Bill Leak

The Howard Government is looking ragged. Some time ago Leunig was saying about how the man of steel had become the man of stale.

Perceptions. Politics is always about perceptions. And the perceptions have shifted. Howard looks vulnerable. The atmospherics have changed.

Update
Even Dennis Shanahan has noticed the shift. He says:

"John Howard is having trouble with his intelligence. ...It's the intelligence failure about what his Coalition colleagues are thinking.

For Howard, the breakdown in his internal intelligence would be the most alarming of all. Not only because of the immediate and damaging consequences of such a failure, but also because of a deeper malaise it represents in personnel and policy. Howard must confront this challenge of re-energising his political machinery and ideas or face a rampant Labor leader."

The deeper malaise is the tiredness of a long-term government, where the leader becomes disconnected and reliant on like-minded individuals and supporters for advice.

Shanahan's judgement?

"All of which smacks of a leadership that doesn't have its finger on the pulse. It's not alert to political disaster of even the most obvious kind. And it's lacking a vitality and willingness to face yet another election campaign."

Does that mean the Coalition does not have much in the way of a third-term agenda.

Of course, it could be only a passing moment that the Coalition is wrong footed politically. Atmospherics can, and do, change rapidly.

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Iraq

Let's face it. Iraq is a mess.

The war wasn't about WMD at all. What we have discovered behind the war rhetoric was weapons of mass deception.

The war was about redrawing the geopolitical map of the Middle East. Australia went along with it.

And the neo-con scenario of the liberation of Iraq being followed by a democratic Iraq that would quickly recognize and embrace Israel is not working out as planned.

Daily life is not good.

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Telstra's political folly

What's going on with Telstra these days?

It's network needs renovating, rental fees are soaring, faults are increasing across the nation, the broadband service is poor, it lost billions in growth investments in Asia, and its shares are languishing. It has big problems with being just a telecommunications company. They have big media ambitions that go way beyond a content hungry Foxtel. Remember the plans to buy the Nine Network in 2000? (A $10 billion takeover of PBL.)

Now its senior mangement want to buy into the newspaper business! Spend $3.5 billion to buy Fairfax for heavens sake. They have a big desire to take control of a low growth Fairfax.

So the Government ends up owning a major media organization. The Prime Minister was briefed and he okayed it. Isn't the Government supposed to be getting out of the marketplace not crowding it out? Yet here is Telstra trying to become more of a gorilla in the marketplace.

I would have thought that it would have been politically impossible for a half-owned government Telstra Fairfax. It was political folly to try and do so in an election year.

I can understand the problem. The core business ---mobile phones--is not growing. And it is indifferent to developing high speed broadband. Optus is making the running there. Hence it needs a strategy of growth.

It's growth strategy seems to be that content revitalizes telcos. It was presupposed in AOL-TimeWarner merger, and in the current Comcast bid ($75billion) for Disney. Content plus distribution= increased long term shareholder value as a result of convergence.

Does Fairfax provide the right content forTelstra? Was it the live streaming news content for mobile phones?

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February 18, 2004

US elections: The slanging match starts

I've stayed away from the American electoral cycle and the way the Democrats have gone about selecting their candidate to knock the Republican imperial presidency off its elevated perch. One by one they've fallen away. It was Wesley Clarke last week.

Howard Dean just couldn't swing it. He had the cash, the subscribers, believers, workers, and the recruits for his insurgency. From over here in Australia the former Governor from Vermont looked so good at the beginning. Now the writing is on the wall. His campaign staff are drifting away---Dean has lost his campaign chairman Steve Grossman on top of losing his campaign manager Joe Trippi in January after the New Hampshire primary. And the money is drying up. It all took just a couple of months.

Senator John Kerry has a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination, as the states (Wisconsin today) continue to fall his way. They've jumped ship and are running a weblog to help with the grassroots campaign to change America for the better---meaning restoring democracy and citizen participation. That means strengthening the prrogressive wing of the Democratic Party, and developing an effective grassroots movement that is independent of the party establishment. --

Tim Dunlop has some brief comments on party professionals running weblogs.

By all accounts it is now Bush v Kerry. And the presidential campaign has already started . Dirty tricks are beginning to fly. The Republicans realize that they have a battle on their hands.

And Dean? Was it not he who turned things around? He was a shooting star.He took Bush on over the Iraq war when the Democrat establishment in Congress was acquiesent and seeking compromise. He tapped into the deep dislike of Bush and the Republicans within the Democratic electorate by confronting the Republican establishment proved and highlighted how America is deeply divided. He devised an Internet-based fundraising and organizing model. The result? A revitalised and optimistic Democratic movement.

That's Dean's legacy. Its a good legacy. He has a future in politics.

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February 17, 2004

Health: the politics of fear

Listening to Radio National this morning I was suprised at how the political topics of conversation had changed. It's health, education and work/family with terrorism, defence and the national security state now hovering in the background.

Health policy is going to become a key election issue. It's a strategy by the Howard Government to cut the ground from under the ALP; to claw back the traditional advantage of the ALP on this issue.

Now sitting behind the froth and bubble of the election sound bites is the Federal Treasury's Intergenerational Report (2002), which estimates a doubling of federal money on health over the next 40 years due to the aging of the population and new technology. That effect of the process of aging on health means big pressures continuing to build up on public funding of health care. That means health costs will have to be maintained once the election is out of the way.

My interpretation of the Intergenerational Report is that it is is going to be used to drive policy after the election. It begins to lay the groundwork for the 4th term policy agenda, and that goundwork has been carefully prepared in the name of fiscal sustainability. This is the prognosis: slower economic growth over the next four decades, lower productivity are forecasted; spending is projected to exceed revenue after 2014 largely because of health and ageing; and that means higher taxes or reductions in government spending.

It's an overload thesis. Sound management is required. So we have to cut health spending on Medicare and PBS (in small steps) over the next decade.

This raises the corollary issue of the public funding of private hospitals through private health insurance (rebate and lifetime cover). Why this mechanism? Should we not question this way of funding in the name of economic efficiency?

It seems to be an axiom of politics that a public subsidy ($2-$3.3 billion) of private health insurance must be maintained in order to sustain the private health system. Without the 30 per cent rebate and lifetime health cover private health insurance would fall to very low levels. The private health insurance industry would collapse, and federal government budgets would come under enormous pressure. So private health insurance shifts the burden of health service delivery from the public to the private sector.

It's the fear argument. Ignore the fear rhetoric and one can see that there are other ways to fund private hospitals. It is no longer the case that reducing subsidies for private health insurance is doing away with the private health system. That is the line of the private health insurance industry.

The private health insurance industry is a high cost financial intermediary protecting its corporate welfare.

Why not fund the private health hospitals directly--say through a bed subsidy? Why not cut out the private health insurance industry? Take its snout out of the public trough, and force it to stand on its own feet and embrace the discipline of the market.

The problem is not Medicare. It is the private health insurance industry. Subsidizing the insurance industry is a high cost way to fund the services provided by private hospitals. It sucks up a lot of the public subsidy to run itself.

The article on health policy, 'A healthy use of public funds', by Ian Harper and Chris Murphy in today's Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 17 02 04, p. 55) defends the public rebate of private health insurance. It amounts to a defense of corporate welfare for the public health insurance industry, under the guise of limiting the looming blowout in government health costs.

Defending the corporate snout in the trough is a rather strange line of argument for hard nosed neo-liberals who love the free market. Isn't the market meant to be about the survival of the fittest?

Maybe these hard nosed neo-liberals have gone all weak in the knees. Or maybe these economists don't know that much about health.

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February 16, 2004

Free Trade: A sense of betrayal

There is a little piece in the Australian Financial Review (subscription only, 16 02, 04, p. 63) by Oliver Yates on the Free Trade Agreement. This is not an example of Ken Parish's "carping and whinging of the lefties and the arts industry luvvies". Yates is a free trader who supports the integration of the US and Australian economies. Yet Yates feels a sense of betrayal at the deal that has been cut.

Why so?

The point Yates makes is that the agreement is not a comprehensive agreement with the US. Yet this is what was sold to the public by the Howard Government, despite all the signs indicating that a protectionist US had no intention of embracing full free trade. The Howard Government''s line was that a comprehensive agreement could be achieved because of Australia's "special" relationship with the US.

What resulted was not a comprehensive agreement, due to the limits placed on the agricultural package:--eg., the quotas on beef and dairy remain and there is no access for sugar. So much for the "special" relationship. Hence the sense of oversell. A $4 billion oversell by the boosters, as the Senate transcripts show.

Now, many would say 'take what we can get, ignore the overselling, take the reduced economic benefits and embrace economic integration.' But why this pathway, rather than saying 'we gave it our best shot, it's an election year in the US', and then walk away? Ken Parish response is to advance the trade isolation argument. He says:

".....there is an increasing likelihood that the developed world may split into a series of trade blocs from which Australia could easily find itself excluded: Australia isn't a natural partner in either the EU, NAFTA or ASEAN, and is unlikely to be admitted to any of them in the foreseeable future. In the absence of a successful push to re-start the DOHA Round, Australia's best chance of avoiding increasing trade isolation lies in pursuing bilateral trade deals with the largest developed nations (i.e. the US and China)."

The strength of this argument is its awareness of the geopolitics of trade.

What if China is developing a regional trade policy that includes Australia? Does not this negate the Ken's threat of trade isolation?

So what geopolitics of trade is opened by Australia being a part of China's regional trade policy?

Peter Gallagher argues that Australia can strike a high-quality bilateral deal with China and also work on multiplying the trade-creating benefits of our regional agreements while reducing the economic costs due to trade-diversion. China's bilateral agreement with Australia would as a first step in a broader strategy to open regional markets.

Peter says that this strategy is more or less a re-visiting the 1994 "APEC" agenda; only this time it is as part of a more pragmatic reciprocal, rather 'unilateral', program of trade liberalization.

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February 15, 2004

Sunday cartoon

Last weeks cartoon on Ariel Sharon's policies, which was based on Goya's black paintings (Saturn devouring his children), proved to be too tough for some.

So how about a lighthearted one based on a playful reworking of a children's fable?

Steve Bell

Who could get upset with a cheeky reworking of Humpty Dumpty?

This Humpty Dumpty has resolutely stood for undoing the developments created by the Oslo agreement; regaining direct control over the Palestinian territories; ensuring a greater Israel, and dismantling the Palestinian Authority because of its potential development into a Palestinian government or state. The Israeli illegal settlement expansion policy has been one of the major tools for achieving these strategic objectives.The long term goal is a Jewish minority ruling indirectly over the Palestinian bantustans.

The International Court at The Hague is going to rule next month on the legality of the network of concrete wall, razor-wiretopped fences and security trenches that Israel currently justifies in the name of the right of self-defence from Palestinian terrorism.

The effect of the wall is to make a two-state solution the only option; it gives up the Biblical dream of a recreation of ancient Israel (the Likud vision of a greater Israel); the settlers on the wrong side of the wall (eg., Gaza) will have to move; and it pushes the Israelis into a ghetto; and it leads to the strengthening of Israeli control in strategic areas, including Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, to ensure border control.

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February 14, 2004

Saturday Cartoon

Last weeks cartoon on the policies of Ariel Sharon & Likud created a bit of a fuss. It was seen as anti-Semitic and fascist. So was I for posting it. There was little discussion of the merits of Ariel Sharon's attempt to pull two peoples apart or his go-it-alone strategy.

In the comments Ariel Sharon and Likud were identified as Israel. Israel was ethnically defined as Jewish. Hence all criticism is denounced as anti-Semitic (racist) and then identified as a part of national socialism. The black and white mentality of the right then tied itself up in knots: they said that the "leftist ideology" of the cartoon is fascist. The circle is closed. The strategy is designed to ensure that there is no space for a public debate about what is happening in Israel.

In contrast, the black humor of this cartoon will pass by without any comment:

Leunig

Cannibalism in Australia? Think Peter Weir's horror-comedy The Cars That Ate Paris (1974). Paris is a small town isolated in the middle of 'nothing'. It cannot tolerate change or difference. In reality, it feeds on strangers. Parisian women do not bear enough children for the town to survive: so, like the mutant cars that terrorise the streets, Parisian patriarchy reproduces by making over the remnants of the car-crashes caused by the men.

Is not The Cars That Ate Paris a macabre and black humoured parable about a paranoid, exclusionary society with a cannibalistic immigration policy?

Now that opens up a whole series of scary narratives.

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River Murray & the IPA

I notice that the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) has published a booklet on the River Murray. I have yet to read this contribution to the public debate.

The summary of their Myth & the Murray booklet makes two points. It says that things are not that bad and it criticizes the environmental movement:

"We have all heard about the declining health of the Murray River, including poor water quality, dying red gums and threats to the continued survival of the Murray cod---this is the popular view in urban Australia. Along the river, communities believe that the end of commercial fishing, a substantial restocking effort, improvements in on-farm practices and the construction of salt-interception schemes have resulted in a healthier river. The available evidence supports the local view and suggests that, with the possible exception of native fish stocks, the river environment is healthy.

Many of the scientific reports that have led to the perception that the Murray River is in poor health make their comparisons with a natural river, which is one without dams and locks, one that gushes and then runs dry. Such comparisons are misplaced. If the ultimate objective of the conservation movement is a natural river, then we must reject the cultural heritage and economic wealth created by the engineering works, including the Snowy Mountains Scheme. In its natural state, the Murray River could not provide for Adelaide's water needs and it could not support the irrigation industries that have made the region the food bowl of Australia."

I have commented on the anti-environmental flow irrigators here; on the three pronged water reform here; and on the IPA here.

Two comments. The environmental movement, along with most government agencies and ecological scientists, has suported the idea of a healthy working river not a return to a natural--- ie., a pre-Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme----River Murray. The IPA is fighting fictions on this in their attempt to roll back the public policy consensus that the River Murray needs 1500 gigalites of environmental flows to ensure its health as a working river.

In so fighting the fictional enemy, the IPA plays the 'enlightenment card' when they construct the ngo environmental movement as a religion in contrast to their market-driven and empirically based science. Jennifer Marohasy says:

"Indeed, environmentalism is emerging as a new religion, with Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the World Wildlife Fund representing the new church, complete with charity status and tax exemptions for their multimillion-dollar earnings."

This representation of green ngo's conveniently ignores the way these think tanks are involved in the public policy process through their reports and advocacy.

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February 13, 2004

National politics: the ground is changing

I arrived back in Adelaide this morning. A quick glance at the morning papers whilst having coffee at the airport indicates that the Canberra Press Gallery has summed up the week of political conflict in Canberra. Their judgement is that the political ground has shifted from under the Coalition.

The best account is given by Laura Tingle in the Australian Financial Review (subscription required; 13 02 04, p. 7) She says that John Howard lost control of the national political agenda during the Parliamentary week. He was wrong footed by Latham over politician's superannuation; is having to mix it with school kids rather than military personnel; was not able to control the political agenda with the overselling of the Free Trade Agreement; and had his authority in the partyroom challenged by coalition backbenchers over his cave in on politician's super.

So much for the Coalition's macho promises to cut the political ground from under Mark Latham's feet by wounding him; and then enjoy watching him slowly bled.

It didn't happpen. It was the Coalition who looked blood splattered by the end of the week. It's distraction and spoiler tactics had backfired.

Behind the froth and bubble of the parliamentary conflict the reaction to the free trade agreement with the US continues to swirl and churn. And for good reason:

Alan Moir

The hype does not accord with reality. Have a look at this fact sheet published by the US Trade Representative. Australian sovereignty is reduced in areas such as the PBS, Australian content in the media, the vetting of US corporate takeovers, government procurement, quarantine etc as the price for access to US markets.

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February 12, 2004

Senate: Medicare Plus

There is a political judgement buried in the daily media flows that a deal will be done over the Howard Government's Medicare Plus. What has been introduced into the Senate today is the safety net legislation that is part of the revised $2.4 billion Medicare Plus package.

The political background to this legislation is the Howard Government's slow strangling of Medicare and public hospitals over the last 7 years and Medicare’s continued popularity with Australian citizens. The Howard Government has continued to cry poor when funding Medicare, public hospitals and subsidised medications. It argues that the costs are becoming too great for any government to bear, hence the need for co-payment (out-of-pocket charges at point of service). Yet the Howard government happily pours ever increasing billions into the private health system. Medicare is worth defending despite the problems of uncapped fee-for-service medicine and inadequate rural medical services.

Abbott's MedicarePlus legislation is quite narrow. Most of the Package was implemented through regulation. It involves thresholds for all Medicare health expenses (safety net). The thresholds are $500 and $1000. Once reached an 80% rebate comes into play. The $500 threshold only applies to concession card holders and lower middle-income earners, whilst the $1000 threshold applies to everyone else.

Will the working poor be able to afford the $1000 of medical expenses? Is the effect of the rebate on specialist fees inflationary?

I was able to catch a bit of the Senate debate on Medicare Plus this morning. I'm trying to get a sense of how it all works. How are the deals done? What actually takes place in cutting a deal? How do the deals relate to the Senate debate?

There seems to be a ritualistic political debate between the Coalition and the ALP Senator's going on over safety net versus universal health system. I saw a bit of Senator Linda Kirk is more reasonable in presenting the ALP case. Of all the speakers Ursula Stevens was the most informed about the issues involved.

I saw nothing in the media about the negotiations. All I that I can see is the public debate in the Senate, which finished around lunchtime. The negotiations take place behind closed doors away from the public eye of the media. All we have is the odd news reports. One states that Tony Abbott is saying that he has ruled out making concessions on the Medicare safety net that were not in line with Government policy. Another states that the Independents are saying that they were keen to see Medicare returned to a universal health care system.

At the end the day nothing much had happened. Early reports said that negotiations were continuing and that progress was being made. That bland statement says nothing about whether the Independents have managed to pull Medicare Plus back to a universal health care system, let alone introduce some innovation into Medicare to break the doctor/drug style of medicine.

Update
Media reports on Friday morning represent Abbott as saying that he was frustrated but confident. He was going to the hard work to get his package through. Abbott is looking at the Independent Senators proposal to extend allied health (podiatry, physiotherapy and dietics) to more people under Medicare. And so he should. It is innovative.

The ACTU is reported as saying the legislation should be blocked in a last ditched stand to save bulk billing. They do make some good points about the discrimination towards singles and the working poor in the Medicare Plus package.

However, the "Custer's last stand" means that everyone should side with the ALP. The ACTU assumption is that only the ALP has the right policies on health. Anything that is not in accord with the health policies of the ALP represents a sell out.

Why not good criticism of the public subsidy for the private health insurance industry. A large percent of money passing through private health insurance failsv to make it to private hospitals - it goes onancillary services, excess "gap" payments to medical practitioners, and to bureaucrats in the private health insurance industry. A criticism of subsidizing private insurance that accepts supporting private hospitals.

Why not a few ideas on how to bust open the power of the doctor cartel as well? Many Australians go to allied health professions to seek help for their aching wounded bodies. Why cannot we open the door to a multidisciplinary course of treatment under Medicare? Why not a broader conception of primary health care, which is the most important sector of any health system.

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February 11, 2004

the bio-security state

I caught a bit of Tony Abbott's press conference today. He was launching a report, Protecting Australia from Communicable Diseases, produced by the Department of Health and Aging.

The Canberra journalists were not interested. They were concerned with the political issue of the day---eg., Senate negotiations over Medicare Plus. The TV cameras were even photographing the TV cameras photographing the Minister. How's that for a closed media loop?

What was said about communicable diseases was important. It went something like this. Germs are invading Australia. We need protection from the nasties. So the national security state needs to become a biosecurity state to deal withe the immiment threat.

Remember the Spanish flu? Well, 65% of the population in the US and the Uk wipped out. Well Bird Flu could be the next big pandemic. It is more of a threat than bioterrorism.

The line at the press conference was predictable. The bio state is well placed to deal with the threat on the other side of our borders. The communicable diseases in the past were bought under control with public health, scientific research and eternal vigilance. We have learnt from the past. We know whats going one. The bio-security state is ready to deal with the threat of bird flu. Trust the biosecurity state.

Interesting how the Canberra journalists were more interested in the health politics of the moment than the bio-security state.

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February 10, 2004

Free trade: its all go go

I'm on the road for a few days.

From the news headlines I can see that all the buzz is about the Free Trade Agreement with Australia. Free trade is the main story of the day, even though some of the journalists are running with the Latham's hare of politician's superannuaton in Australia. It is the main story because it is about Australia's alignment with the US, Australia's turn away from the regionalism of East Asia and the growing integration of Australia with America.

The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is a win win deal say those in Australia who support the free trade agreement. It's all benefit with no negatives. No doubt they will say that the opposition will come from the protectionists who are all doomsayers. However, the gains from the FTA are likely to be small for Australia.

There are different spins in different countries about the significance of the FTA.

What can be said about significance or benefits of the free trade agreement for Australia? Anne Caplan says:

"Judging by the media statements from both countries, there is a gross imbalance in this FTA. Australia already suffers from a $US9 billion ($A11.7 billion)-a-year trade deficit with the US, and this looks set to worsen. The US manufacturing sector alone expects to achieve export gains of $US2 billion a year, thanks to the FTA. By contrast, Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile spoke yesterday of millions of dollars of benefits for Australia - a far cry from the $A4 billion figure that was touted by the Government for the past three years."

Caplan then goes on to give a negative interpretation of the FTA. She says that:

".... the gains [for Australia] are truly few and far between.

For instance, Australian beef producers will get duty-free access to the US - in 18 years. Australian dairy exporters will make marginal gains, but will still be adversely affected by massive American subsidies that contribute to global market distortions. Sugar has been excluded from the agreement. We are still not able to export our world-class high-speed passenger ferries to the US.

And as for Australia's services sector, the jury is still out. There appears to be a great deal of unfinished business in the services negotiations, which means the FTA is likely to become a platform that will enable the US to continue to press its demands in areas such as education, training and culture."

Given this platform the PBS is a real worry. What have the politicians agreed to? More expensive drugs? We will have to wait for the Senate to uncover what the Howard Government is keeping a veil on.

And we should expect there to be lots more subsidies for the sugar industry from the Howard Government. Industry restructuring is the order of the day. The National Party will have be in damage control on this.

Update
Michelle Grattan spots the difficulties the National Party is in over the Free trade Agreeement:

"One of the Government's handicaps now on the FTA is what it said previously. Nationals leader John Anderson famously claimed it would be "un-Australian" to do a deal that excluded sugar. It was silly hype. Yesterday he was left to explain why it would have been un-Australian not to do it.The Nats especially are juggling a double line, crying in sympathy with the sugar growers, but extolling the virtues of the agreement generally."

That highlights the hype over the FTA, does it not? Ross Gitten's deflates the hype. He says that:

"... this deal is the result horse-trading between the protectionists on both sides of the Pacific. The object of the game was to persuade the other guy to give up more of his protection than you gave up of yours."

It's more a preference deal between the US and Australia than a free trade agreement. No doubt, one that will lead to an increase in Australia's trade deficit because we will buy more manufactured and cultural goods than the Americans will buy off us.

And what about those cheaper Asian goods?

Paul Kelly highlights the significance of the FTA. when he says that "the new US deal... [if] realised...will become one of the half dozen defining elements of Howard's prime ministership and integral in his gearing towards the US in terms of security, economics and values. The conundrum lies in the complex assessment of the gains and risks in this strategy."

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February 9, 2004

blow torches and human bellies

Federal Parliament starts tomorrow after the summer break. Just a few days of heat and action to help boost the election campaign that is now rolling along.

The Canberra Press Galley must be rubbing their hands with glee with the return of Parliament. Fireworks have been promised. The Liberal Party is promising to finish Latham's honeymoon with a king hit from an all out government attack. Latham will be a moving target. So the Press Gallery will have plenty of copy as they analyze the political game that wil be played out around free trade.

There is some important legislation due to be introduced----most notably Tony Abbott's Medicare reform package that is all about providing a bit of safety net for the deserving poor. Abbott is going to make a last-ditch effort to get the government's Medicare safety-net legislation through the Senate after negotiations with the Australian Democrats broke down. His credibility hangs on getting a win.

It is not just about doctors. Somehow we have forgotten about the allied health care professionals, such as dentists, podiatrists, physiotherapists and dietiticians. Why not us this opportunity to shift away from the doctor/drug model of primary health care? It is a very limited model.

As the Senate picks up from where it left off, Costello is talking about using the budget surplus (projected to be around $3.2 billion) to provide tax cuts to pre-empt the need for increased spending on public services and infrastucture. That move is designed to cut the ground from under the feet of the ALP.

Update
Negotiations are well underway on the Howard Government's Medicare Plus package. It would seem whilst Minister Abbott is denouncing wishlists and ruling out price controls on specialist prices he is giving some ground. The package is slowly being made fairer.

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February 8, 2004

Sunday cartoon

Stavro

A mild comment on what is happening.

Arial Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister does have Yasser Arafat in his sights--he wants him to go into forced exile. Why bother? The Palestinian Authority is in a state of collapse due to bad leadership, chaotic administration, corruption, infighting and disaffection.

Of greater concern is Israel initiating unilateral disengagement that would lead to a decision to begin a process of separation between the two peoples. This go-it-alone strategy involving the evacuation of Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip and West Bank:Ariel Sharon's plan is to evacuate 17 of Israel’s 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and transfer their populations to communities yet to be established in the Halutza sand dunes of the northern Negev. It was Sharon who instigated and promoted many of the communities he now proposes to uproot.

Who would pay for all this excauvation?

What would happen to the Palestinian economy? How is that going to keep going? Does not the Israeli economy depend on Palestinian labour?

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February 7, 2004

the unmaking of a PM

This is by one of the better cartoonists working in Britain today:

Steve Bell

Blair's porkie was full of ambiguity as to whether the 45 minutes claim applied to battlefield or strategic weapons.

No matter. The fallout from the Iraq war is breaking Tony Blair rather than making him. the point of going towar was to preempt the use of to pre-empt Iraq's use of WMD. No weapons. So Blair was either wrong or dishonest. Trust in Blair declines.

I'm glad that political cartoons have a higher profile in broadsheets (less in the tabloids). They express an anger that is missing from a lot of journalism and so continue the tradition that dates back to Hogarth.

The political cartoon is an editorial in pictures. The best convey the politically unsayable through graphic images:

Dave Brown

This reworking of Goya's Saturn took out the best British political cartoon in 2003

Both cartoons show just how powerful images are in political argument. The effect they have is far more powerful than words, don't you think?

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February 6, 2004

Media: lapdogs, watch dogs, attack dogs

We live in a culture of media spin by the media companies (Packer, Murdoch and Fairfax) as well as a culture of political spin. Liberal democracy is a world of public relations as well as media wars.

Larry Sabato, an American political scientist, devised an evolutionary account of US journalism to describe what happened to US journalism before and after Watergate. His account is a three stage process of the meda: from being a lapdog (1941-66) to a watchdog (1966-84) to an attack-dog (1984 onwards).

Can we apply this account to Australian journalism? I'm not sure as I do not enough about the history of the Australian media. What I can do is give current examples of the different kinds of journalism.

This is the attack dog. More here.

A lap dog.

A watch dog

Each reader would have their own examples of the media's relationship to political power in our liberal democracy.

My own sympathies lie with the media as a watchdog since this connects with the role of citizenship in a democracy. I recognize that most of the media in Australia does not play this role anymore. Hence the narratives about the decline of traditional journalism the decline of the public sphere and the hollowing of citizenship.

The media are more concerned with their own power than truth these days with most commentators thinking of the media in market terms: the media are commerical enterprises and readers are consumers. Deliberative democracy is an alien concept for many.

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February 5, 2004

too good to pass by

Bill Leak's got a good one today:

Bill Leak

Leak's right. The estimated leaders of the Coalition knew. The WMD's were just a way to sell an unpopular war to the public. This justification now looks paper thin. So a new line is needed that is more plausible than "I just misunderstood."

It's inquiries and backtracking all round by the Coalition of the Willing triggered by the recent David Kay testimony to the US Congress. We were wrong says Kay. Iraq's WMD were a mirage. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the US or any other country.

A year ago Colin Powell gave the UN security council a big exposé of Saddam's terrifying arsenal. Now he admits that, had he known that Baghdad had no WMD, he would have had his doubts about going to war. It would have been a changed the "political calculus".

The new line is blame the spooks. Of course, Alexander Downer is slow to learn the new lines. I watched the performance about stockpiles without any mention of imminent threat. Downer looks more and more the clown these days. Maybe that is his role.

And the spooks aren't buying the new political line. They are saying that the intelligence officials were overruled by their political masters.

Lets close with Leunig:

What is really needed in Australia is an inquiry into the way the government made use of the intelligence that had been gathered and evaluated.That would be a challenge to those who think its right for ministers to dissemble and who regarded it as their duty to cover up the dissembling of the government of the day. An inquiry that would avoid blaming the intelligence services and would scrutinize the political decision-making process that committed Australia to go to war with Iraq.
Update
John Hewson in his column in the Australian Financial Review (a subscription required) is also calling for:

"....a full-blown, independent and probably judicial inquiry into the government's decision-making process---including the role of intelligences--that to our (Australia's) commitment to war."

We need something more than silence about the role of Government ministers and staffer, or the current spin from the national security state that it was all the fault of the US and UK intelligences services. It is the flawed political machinery of the national security state that needs looking into.

At the moment we only see the odd crack in the edifice. The pressure on those cracks is coming from the disclosures overseas: the flow of information from the UK and the US is feeding into the political institutions.

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February 4, 2004

Energy: botched attempts

I've been looking into the electricity reforms of the 1990s associated with the privatisation of public utilities by the Kennett and Olsen Liberal Governments in Victoria and South Australia.

The neo-liberal rhetoric was about competition, empowering customers, and freedom of choice. Underneath the spin the governments were more concerned to use the sale of the public assets to overseas consortiums to repay state debt and regain the lost AAA credit rating. Hence the emphasis was on the commercial attractiveness of the sale whilst consumer interests were downplayed. The privatisation process was then sold as an outstanding success. However, the high prices paid for the assets meant that private industry was saddled with servicing high debt.

In South Australia the Olsen Government opposed the construction of the new NSW SA interconnector, even though NSW had excess capacity and South Australia a shortage. Why the oppostion? The interconnector would have halved the value of the generation in the state if it proceeded, and so reduced the money the Olsen Government would have received from privatisation to repay state debt.

The private energy companies paid big prices for the generation, transmission and distribution assets in Australia. That meant they expected to make big profits. Were were those profits to come from, if not from prices increases and service cuts.

Yet South Australia needed interconnector capacity to draw on cheaper electricity from Victoria and NSW, because the poor quality of the Leigh Creek lignite meant higher costs incurred in generating energy. In particular South Australia needed access to the relatively low cost surplus energy generated in NSW.

What this little account suggests is that the states had their backs turned to the development of a sustainable and effective national electricity grid. They were more interested in limiting interstate competition than the economies of expanded interconnection, open access electricity supply, or building new capacity through renewable energy.

We begin to see why deregulation and privatisation had not delivered the promised benefits. Yet the liberalisation mantra continues.

Instead of a national electricity market we still have a series of separated regional markets with weak interactions. What happens is illustrated by the crisis of 2000: Customer load was shed in Victoria and SA (blackouts) for lack of 500 MW of capacity. Yet NSW had 2000 MW of spare serviceable capacity but no means of delivering it into each state.

SA has plenty of wind and sun. But it has no renewable generation to meet the peak demands on hot summer days.

Not a satisfactory situation all round. A botched attempt? How about a confidence trick?

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Queensland: a puzzle

A 10% swing against the governing ALP in Queensland (Team Beattie) is a big ask, especially when it is the weak, ineffective and divided Coalition parties that have to do the job.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I did not really understand the south-east coast of Queensland. My image was that it was the heartland of the old National Party, the heart of the white shoe brigade developers and peopled by socially conservative retirees with a lot of money.

It was all about a 'develop or die' ethos. Development ravaging the country. The Gold Coast. The sunshine belt was resolutely anti-Labor.

So why did this region go over to Beattie in 2001 (he won 7 out of the 9 seats). Were they attracted by the aspirational slogan of Queensland as the Smart State-- eg., biotechnology, film production, high tech business? Queensland stands for the future not the past?

Or was it more likely that something had shifted on the ground?

Such as a dramatic demographic shift. A big migration of young people and families from interstate (Sydney and Melbourne) and I presume from Brisbane. seeking a new start in the sun.

If so, I cannot see these south east coast seats returning to the National Party.

And Beattie's strong support for coastal development in areas earmarked to be a marine park means that it is the Labor Party wearing the white shoes these days. That means "acting responsibly" by ensuring minimium controls on development in south east Queensland to ensure urban growth. It's called keeping the growth machine ticking over. Proeprty is the engine room of development.

It's probably a different story in the seats in the sugar belt though. It's protest votes all around there. A rural backlash? How many seats will Labor lose there?The sugar farmers are going to have to face the realities of globalization some day, start learning to value add and start finding new markets.

Update.
Graham Young's article confirms what I'd suspected from seeing and hearing Beattie on national television and radio. Graham says:

"Voters are not particularly happy with Beattie. They see "Cheshire Pete" as self-satisfied and smug, manipulative, using smoke and mirrors to cover for the fact that after six years he hasn't done much. They also don't like his team."

Not that different from the Rann Labor Government in SA.

Graham downplays the significance of the protest vote:

" I think the protest phenomenon is also a thing of the past. Electors understand it, partly because Beattie has inoculated them by explaining it. In the process, their cynicism is reinforced. It also depends on a lot of negative advertising. Voters are less susceptible to that now. They're also sceptical about promises....A protest vote campaign is one of the few available to an Opposition when electors are happy with the government. Even if the Queensland Coalition had got its message right, it isn't there for it in 2004. Voters have given up trying to make a difference. Times aren't what they used to be.

"Sunshine Pete" is doing enough to stay in power. Pity about the lack of an upper house though.

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February 3, 2004

oh my my

Are those freedom loving conservatives who love a sunlight country going sour on John Howard?

Here's the Murdoch variety----one Andrew Bolt:

"THE fog of terror has lifted and John Howard's weakness is again exposed. The Prime Minister seems like an actor who's lost his lines. No wonder he's been urging his ministers to think up ideas for him to discuss....Labor leader Mark Latham, however, says a lot that's colourful, and quoted, even if it's as profound as graffiti. He sells optimism, and uses the word "opportunity'' as often as Howard says "terror''. I don't say Latham has the policies, smarts or appeal to win an election. But I do say Howard looks like a man who's run out of things to say."

Howard is running on empty and he lacks what it takes to be our leader. That's from Bolt. My my.

The spin doctors in Howard's office will not be pleased. Tony O'Leary is probably stunned. Isn't Bolt meant to be welded-on to the spin machine? No doubt O'Leary will dig into his bag of tricks to continue the mix of intimidation and bluster against perceived opponents, and the background briefings and extra access for the more compliant journalists. The resentful Canberra Press Gallery is offside with Howard because he bypasses them and talks to the electoral heartland via talk back radio ( John Laws & Alan Jones) and television (A Current Affair).

Rust never sleeps. Ya gotta remember that distrust and paranoia rules.

Is that just another little sign that the political landscape is changing? A landscape in which the repetition of lines of the imperial Presidency's White House war script is no longer working in Australia as it once did.

Remember that The MAN OF STEEL has admitted that there may be no WMD's in Iraq after all. Blaming the intelligence services for the bad information is not going to do much work in regaining the needed electoral momentum. What has been opened up is the Howard government's use of intelligence (ie., their deceptions and manipulations) to try to justify the Iraq invasion.

Blair can try to use the violation of "journalist standards" by the BBC to blur or conceal the national security state's own deceits. Not so Howard. With its head in the fog of fear and feet in the swamp of deceit, the spin machine of the Australian national security state cannot get very far with relentlessly pounding the line that its lapses in judgment can be pinned on the ABC's alleged lapses in journalistic standards. No doubt, Alexander Downer wil continue to bluff and bluster and look more of the clown

The issue is becoming clear. As Peter Osborne writing in The Spectator says that:

" There are three possible explanations for this tragic dereliction. The first is that the WMD did exist, but have not yet been found. Most intelligent judges now rule out that possibility. The second is that they never existed at all and that the intelligence services made an enormous blunder. The third is that intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic yielded to political pressure. The most likely answer is that a combination of the last two were at work."

That means the invasion of Iraq took place for no reason and the Australian people were misled.

So what is John Howard going to do to regain traction?

Try working the fear & law and order couplet in WA. Selling the image of being strong on national security and tough on drugs--the old Man of Steel.

How about a good old fashioned spending spree that buys the swinging voters in marginal electorates: big money to shore up Howard's position?

Underneath that the conservative mesage is plain: national security, a strong economy and social stability. Oh and strong and united families. No reason to take risks or fret about the holes in the welfare state.

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Media wars

I do not normally read Philip Adams, that darling of all those right thinking conservatives who take a concerned interest in the world around them. What he normally says is not of much interest.

I confess I did read his Messenger shot in war sideshow article this morning. This is part of the fallout in the media wars. We have wars when Australian commentators write that the "BBC, in its overweening institutional arrogance, killed David Kelly." That punk journalist Tim Blair loves the snap in the standard Murdoch line.

Recycling the scripts of others as their own work seems to be standard practice of Australian journalists and the Howard Government's spin culture.

Someone has to pick Adams up, now that Tim Blair has taken his eye off the ball and let it wander. Tim noticed the article, but his imagination got side track into some strange stuff about war and apologies that only he and his readers inside the culture of contempt can understand.

More recycled lines?

I found a bit in the Adam's text that was of interest because it develops yesterday's deeper issues post:--especially the conflict between the public broadcaster and the free marketeers. On this Adams says:

"The Beeb's critics don't like the way the organisation enjoys comparative freedom from government by having an income stream from licences. They'd prefer to have the organisation on the drip, so that it can be punished for perceived misdemeanours. In much the same way as funding has been employed to bully Australia's public broadcaster. But for others that's not enough. The organisation's competitors are calling for the Beeb to be sent to the scrapyards, for it to be dismembered and/or privatised."

Similar calls get made in Australia re the ABC.

Adams is fairly upbeat about the outcome of the media wars in both the UK and Australia. He says that the dismembering or privatisation of the public broadcasters:

"....won't happen there – and can't happen here – because of a small problem. Overwhelming public support for the principles – and the practice – of public broadcasting. In its analysis, its findings and its recommendations, the Hutton report is inept. Either extraordinarily naive about the way media operates in a democracy or a piece of deliberate malevolence. Either way, a clear majority of the British public isn't buying it and there's a growing backlash."

This is too upbeat in the light of this account by Michael Wolff over at New York Metro.com Michael says:

"....The historic polarity in British society has been upper class/lower class, Labor/Tory, Thatcher/anti-Thatcher. The polarity was now more precisely BBC/Murdoch. But the themes were the same. The BBC was the Establishment. Murdoch, the rude insurgent. With a certain historical inevitability on his side. Indeed, the success of Murdoch’s multichannel BSkyB—not just a satellite operation but a Murdochian news and entertainment network—was possibly the most significant business development in the UK since Murdoch and Thatcher together broke the unions."

The source of the animus to the BBC (and the ABC) is statism. As Michael says its "a consumer thing. A big-government thing. A fuck-you thing. A tax thing." He adds that it’s a fight for the public heart, control of a big bureaucracy and a fight for opportunities to get a bigger piece of the pie.

And a fight about Murdoch’s piece of the media pie.

In the UK Blair and Murdoch have allied, with the BBC’s battle with Blair being just another proxy battle with Murdoch. However, in Australia, it is not clear that Howard is lining up with Murdoch to give Murdoch a greater slice of the pie through dismembering the ABC (or killing off Fairfax).

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February 2, 2004

BBC & deep conflicts

The conflict between the Blair Government and the BBC over the Hutton Report is still simmering. It is now far more than the BBC (ie. Gilligan) getting it wrong with his ad-libbed comments to a small audience at 6.07 on the morning of 29 May 2003; the slack editorial procedures; the BBC refusing to apologise for that mistake, Gilligan betraying David Kelly, or the BBC reporters and editors needing to do their jobs better.

For its part the BBC is still
not happy with the Hutton Report. It argues that the Hutton Report is deeply flawed.

However, deeper issues are involved than Hutton's rough treatment of the BBC, or the need to reform the BBC. At this stage it is unclear what the deeper issues are, over and above the Blair Government not being trusted by British citizens. But they have to do with how liberal democracy is functioning and the inter-relationships between its different institutions.

Here are two suggestions about the deeper issues. The first is by Peter Preston writing in The Observer. He argues that it is about media freedom:

"....once the BBC is covertly cowed, once the Ofcom sector pauses for breath and goes quiet in turn, then the press itself sees its own freedoms curtailed - not just in some courtroom drone about defective systems, but in a broadcast reluctance to pick up and follow through newspaper stories which, yet again, break news in the public interest. Anybody want to take on another Tory treasurer? Anybody give the Times a helping hand?"

Preston says that he does not belong to a fixed camp in this conflict. He adds:

"Hutton is pretty convincing on Downing Street's bumbling honesty over the naming of Kelly, the relative blamelessness of Geoff Hoon, the irrelevance of what the Prime Minister said in the Far East. But he is absolutely unconvincing when he seeks to champion the cause of free journalism. He seems to come from a different age and a different culture. If he is allowed, egged on by government triumphalism, to define the boundaries of proper investigation, then media freedoms - already shadowed by an unending war against terrorism - face an ice age."

This suggests it is a conflict over the nature of media's role in a democracy when the government of the day placed fast and loose with its intelligence reports on Iraq's WMD's.

Nick Cohen offers another account of the deeper issues buried in this political conflict fingers the judiciary. There is a history in Britain of law Lords rarely fingering the state in their judicial inquiries. Often the judiciary turns away from facing the truth of the matter. The classic examples are Lord Denning's inquiry into the Profumo affair; and Lord Widgery's inquiry into the shooting dead of 14 unarmed demonstrators in Northern Ireland in 1972, which exonerated the Army.

Cohen argues that Hutton is now being judged to continuing to work in the tradition of judges turning away from the truth to please their political masters. Cohen says that:

"His Lordship has invented a novel gambit which Denning and Widgery might have applauded. He used his terms of reference like a mugger uses a doorway. When the BBC walked by, he leapt out and gave it a kicking. When the big boys from the Government turned into the street, he hid in the shadows".

Others concur, including Ron Liddle in The Spectator. How did Hutton manage to pull the above trick? Cohen says:

"....look what happened when Hutton was presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence that Gilligan and Kelly were half-right and the dossier was sexed up. His court heard that the Government knew the intelligence about Saddam having chemical weapons ready to fire in 45 minutes concerned puny shells which could travel a mile or so. But the Government said Saddam had missiles which could hit Jerusalem, Tehran or British bases in Cyprus. Was the misinformation a mistake or a deceit?

The judge refused to pass judgment. Examining how the Government sexed-up the dossier wasn't his job. 'Not my subject, old chap. Outside my terms of reference, don't you know.'"

Hence we have double standards in Hutton's Report. The feeling is that what he has done simply isn't fair. It was unbalanced. Hence the judiciary is now under question.

A third account holds that the deep issue is BBC versus Murdoch.

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Latham: Free economy, strong state

Christopher Scanlon has a piece in The Age that addresses the concerns of the previous post. Given Latham's acceptance of the free market as a good to be fostered extended and encouraged, how does he deal with the political fallout from the bads (social dislocation) flowing from the normal workings of a deregulated market?

Chris suggests that Latham works in terms of Margaret Thatcher's free economy/strong state mode of governance. A strong state does not just refer to the national security state. It has a domestic dimension. With Thatcher it meant the following strategy of governance:

"As the government withdrew from regulating the market, it took an increasingly interventionist role in policing social life. This was usually done under the banner of protecting family values, and instituting draconian law and order policies, that were aimed particularly at those deemed surplus to the immediate requirements of the market (the young and unemployed, for example), and blaming the poor and infirm not only for their own plight, but for larger social ills as well. Increasing social surveillance and management were the order of the day."

Chris, like myself, detects socially authoritarian overtones to Latham's plan for a new portfolio of community relations to be charged with developing policies to combat loneliness, work stress and community breakdown. Social authoritarianism is the political term for the hard edge that I drew attention to in the previous post.

After rightly describing John Howard's mode of governing society as a socially authoritarian one, Chris says this mode is a consequence of neo-liberalism:

"Since nothing is to be permitted to impact on the free running of the economy, a stronger state is required to hold society together. If this means draconian and heavy-handed programs aimed at containing those who are no longer necessary to the economy, then so be it."

Howard's social authoritarian way of deal with those rejected from the free market is wrapped up in a package of mutual obligation, family values, populism and one nation conservatism. This cast Howard in the Thatcher mould.

And Latham? He thinks in terms of the duality of benign market and malign bureaucracy. Hence all the Third Way stuff about community responsibility, social capital and social entrepreneurship to deal with society. Will this duality soften Latham's latent social authoritarianism?

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February 1, 2004

a changing political landscape

There is certainly a lot of fuss currently being made by the Canberra Press Gallery about the new look of the federal ALP. The ALP spin doctors must be over the moon at all the media coverage they are getting from their slick marketing. Michelle Grattan calls it "bathing in glowing media attention."

The ALP factions and union apparatchiks are singing the song of unity together. It's all hope and warm fuzzy feelings in the ALP these days, even amongst the factional knuckleheads. And the fired-up electoral strategists are thinking up ways to keep the ALP's political momentum going. They reckon they've a chance to capture the Treasury benches.

How things can turn around in politics. And so quickly. What was happened yesterday has been forgotten. As Grattan reminds us about Latham, in case we have forgotten:

"Less than three years ago, this man was in self-imposed exile, regarded by some colleagues as maverick or mad. Less than three months ago, he was the shadow treasurer his frontbench critics thought had been bested by Peter Costello. Now he's the Great Chance, even if Labor will need quite a few four-leaf clovers to turn its new Sensation into lasting salvation."

Salvation? That's religious imagery. Well, the ALP had been cast into the political wilderness by John Howard.

I have no idea how much the political landscape is changing, now that the ALP is telling a coherent story, or has a new political narrative about making good through hard work, individual responsibility and education. It has changed though, now that parents reading books to their kids each day is a matter of state.

What I do tacitly know is that there is a hard neo-liberal edge behind all the ALP 's froth and bubble:

John Wright

Adele Horn has seen the hardness in the new face of the ALP right.

The (working) poor have to whippped into shape in the new order of the global market. Remade, so their subjectivities are market ones. This would give them the drive they need to leave the impoverished world of the working class by climbing the ladder of opportunity.

Gregory Hywood redescribes the hardness as the consequences of living in a deregulated, global market economy. The ALP has devise economic policies for living in the global market. However, Hywood has little to say about the losers from economic change apart from a brief gesture to mutual obligation as a way to ensure that society is held together.

Chris over at Backpages contests the neo-liberal commentary. He rightly argues against the neo-liberal commentators pointing the finger at Latham's economic policy. He says that embracing the free market is not where the votes are for the ALP to regain power. As he points out, public sentiment in Australia has always been critical of the wholehearted embrace of the free market and support forms of protection from the chilly economic winds.

That position is primarily because citizens tacitly understand the big fallout of free market reform on their everyday lives and communities. Hence Howard's embrace of one nation conservatism that was presented in the language of populism of the forgotten people. Populism was Howard's way of managing the political fallout from the economic reforms of the 1980s. He understood that the political managers had not handled the political fallout of the economic reforms very well.

Chris is right. We can ignore the free market neo-liberal commentaters in the context of a federal election.

What Chris does not address is Latham's neo-liberalism or the crude market populism that Latham has constructed to deal with the political fallout. What he sees outside the ALP in the neoliberal commentators I see inside the ALP. How will the ALP handle the political fallout from the negative consequences of the free market reforms?

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