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October 31, 2004
US: last days
The US presidential candidates are waging an 11th-hour battle for votes.
Moir
The domestic side of the national security state --Spartacus Tells All.
And bloggers contra the corporate media.
Like Australia the polls are saying that it is too close to call. Some polls give George Bush a slight edge over John Kerry, with Bush ahead in the electoral college votes.
The swing states now appear to be down to eight: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico and Nevada.
Once again Florida features in the news with claims of intimidation, illegal voting, missing ballots and other irregularities. The stain of 2000 (the "Florida fiasco") remains.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 30, 2004
Iraq: a judgement
Courtesy of Body and Soul. A disturbing report on civilian deaths in Iraq. It can be found here.
Stavro
Farnaz Fassihi, The Wall Street Journal’s Middle East correspondent, has kept a journal of her life in Iraq. It is well worth reading. Courtesy of Abu Aardvark.
History's judgement? Australian deceptions.
It is not too difficult making a judgement about the US in Iraq.
If Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein then the US is worse off -- 1,100 dead soldiers, billions added to the deficit, and the enmity of much of the world.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 29, 2004
Reality dawns
It has taken a while to sink in amongst the corporate media, but it finally has:
Moir
Did Australians vote strategically in the Senate to give the Coalition control? Was it just a mistake? Would citizens have voted differently if they believed the Coalition would achieve a majority in the Senate? One answer.
The new Senate will not just pass all the government legislation that has banked up over the last six years. We can also expect the roll back of the modifications to the government's legisation the Coalition did not like by the minor parties; or the roll back of the bits that the Coaltion had to back down on to get its legislation through. Remember the industrial relations legislation attached to the universities legislation last November?
Guess what? It'll be back. Sooner rather than latter. And lots of new stuff about university governance--the states handing over their powers over universities to Canberra--- and industry-driven vocational training that bypasses the states. Are we going to see a fully market-based tertiary sector?
What will suffer is the environment. There is little hope for any movement towards renewable energy manufacturing in Australia. The National Party has increased its power over environmental reforms. Will they work to roll back the environmental reforms of the past six years?
The new ALP Treasurer Wayne Swan says that Labor's top priority was keeping the economy strong, creating economic wealth, and pushing for a second round of productivity reforms. Nothing at all about a sustainable economy. Since Swan is known for a "relentless-staying-on-message" political communication the ALP has well and truely retreated from its earlier sustainable development approach. This is about politics not policy that is good for the nation.
So what will the ALP do in the Senate for the next 3 years? What will its strategy be? Go to ground? Put up token resistance?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 28, 2004
a quote
From an editorial in the New Left Review by Alexander Cockburn. Cockburn is commenting on the US Presidential elections:
"As now constituted, presidential contests, focused almost exclusively on the candidates of the two major parties, are worse than useless in furnishing any opportunity for national debate. Consider the number of issues on which there is tacit agreement between the Democratic and Republican parties, either as a matter of principle or with an expedient nod-and-wink that, beyond pro forma sloganeering, these are not matters suitable to be discussed in any public forum: the role of the Federal Reserve; trade policy; economic redistribution; the role and budget of the cia and other intelligence agencies (almost all military); nuclear disarmament; reduction of the military budget and the allocation of military procurement; roles and policies of the World Bank, IMF, WTO; crime, punishment and the prison explosion; the war on drugs; corporate welfare; energy policy; forest policy; the destruction of small farmers and ranchers; Israel; the corruption of the political system; the occupation of Iraq. The most significant outcome of the electoral process is usually imposed on prospective voters weeks or months ahead of polling day—namely, the consensus between the supposed adversaries as to what is off the agenda."
Does not a similar (Lib-Lab) consensus apply in Australia? So similar that we can talk about a neo-liberal governmentality?
Is not the theatrical conflict between the two main parties who vituperate against each other in great style in Australia mostly done for show, for the purposes of assuaging their respective blocs of voters? It is a spectacle.
The ALP crowd may weep their tears of despair, but a Latham ALP would have adopted many of the LNP positions. They would sell poor single mothers, working people, regions, Telstra and protections against the negatives of free trade down the river whilst doing little to save the ecology of the rivers.
It is not the leader. The ALP have done this convergence number over the past two or three years. In the senate they huff and puff for the cameras, then quietly pass the government's legislation when the cameras are turned off. It is standard operating procedure.
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October 27, 2004
Israel: out of Gaza
As I understand it that graffiti says we've got Rabin and we'll get Sharon. It is an example of the work of right wing militants spraying graffiti on walls in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem calling for Ariel Sharon’s assassination. This refers to Sharon's plan to remove 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip and eliminate four West Bank settlements.The ruling Likud Partyand Government is irreparably fissured with the disengagement rebels in the Likud preparing steps to topple Sharon's government.
I heard Barry Cohen on the ABC's Religion Report this morning. It was very onesided. Basically it was all up the Palestinians. The Palestinians were identified with the militant Islamic organizations (Hamas & Islamic Jihad), the Israeli nation was equated with Jewishness not citizenship and the killings of many Palestinians in the Israeli military incursion into the Gaza Strip were acceptable. The settler movement was never mentioned.
Cohen said the solution was that the Palestinians had to accept Israeli's right to exist, and they were at fault because they turned down all peace deals in the past. Cohen finished by saying that it was not a complex issue. It was a simple one. It was up to the Palestinians to accept Israel's right to exist.
It was a very superficial piece by Toni Hassan. Why the silence about messianism and the Israeli settler movement on the ABC? Surely the Religion Report is the right place to discuss Jewish messanism. And the deep conflict between Jewishness and Israeliness in the Israeli nation-state was skirted over rather than explored. Why the silence about the theocracy of the religious fundamentalists in the settler movement? Why the silence about the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem.
It was a pretty poor effort by the ABC.There was very little probing of Cohen's assumptions.
Cohen's rhetoric is out of touch. The Israeli Parliament (Knesset ) has authorized the removal of Jewish settlements from lands (the Gaza strip) the Palestinians claim for their state. This limited form of disengagement has deeply divided the ruling Likud party. The Knesset vote was a decisive victory.
Does Cohen stand with the settler movement that is opposed to any dismantling of any settlements in Gaza? Around two-thirds of the Israeli public support the disengagement.
Cohen is also out of date because he does not address the strategic point of the withdrawal Both Ariel Sharon and his adviser, Dov Weisglass, speak openly that the plan is designed to freeze the peace process, to bypass the public and international support the Geneva Initiative gained after it was signed on December 1, 2003 and to prevent the formation of a Palestinan state.
That is what Cohen evades: Israel is opposed to the formation of a Palestinian state. That is what the peace process means for Sharon. That is why 190,000 of the 240,000 settlers will continue to remain in the occupied territories.
John Quiggin has more
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October 26, 2004
the guardians
I'm trying to work on dialup in a coastal town in South Australia on an old computer. It is dam near impossible to read the newspapers online since everything takes so long to upload.
In the short-term we have this comment on economic governance and political power in an open market-based economy and a changing political culture:
Leak
The cartoon highlights how much the ALP surrendered the economy as an issue to the Coalition; and how much John Howard and Peter Costello have positioned the Liberal Party as the guarantor of rising living standards for both the working and middle class. They are the guardians who, as the new centralists and nationalists, keep the economy strong and protect family living standards and values.
Maybe the ALP will become a little less centralist, more respectful of federalism and more considerate of the concerns of those who live outside the eastern metropolitan heartland. Maybe its bright young policy makers will stop seeing the outlying states as provinces full of hillbillies with deep prejudices, low moral tone, running noses and dirty feet living in shabby suburbs.
Maybe they will start to confront the ALP's deep anti-federalist prejudices now that the ALP is in power in all of the states in the federation. Maybe they ease up ontheir old policies of financial brutality and legislative mugging.
Maybe the ALP will start to think in term of regional differences, regional development and fostering green manufacturing to help address the need for a more sustainable economy. The ALP has little by way of energy/industrial policy other than signing up to Kyoto, increasing Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) to 5%.
Good policies for a sustainable economy would be more useful than all the hairychested tough economic talk about making savings by eliminating all the waste, duplication and inefficiency of federalism; or the gilded rhetoric about these savings being the golden key to overcoming poverty, unemployment, low education and disease.
Here's hoping the ALP makes contact with the realities of federalism and stops trying to make the states the clients of the commonwealth.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2004
Anti-Semitism
Barry Cohen, a former Minister in the Hawke/Keating Labor Government, says that anti-semitism is rife in Australia and in the ALP. He also says that he is sick of the calumny heaped on Israel - most of which is a pack of lies--that is put out by people who march behind banners equating Israel with Nazism.
The background context to this situation in the US can be found here. The background context to the debate in Australia can be found here and here. The current political situation in Israel.
The case Cohen makes is this.
He says that the handful of pro-Palestinian supporters in the ALP "has grown steadily as the party has become dominated by the education mafia; former public servants and party union apparatchiks. There are Labor MPs who are vigorous supporters of Israel but their numbers are diminishing and they are being drowned out by the more vociferous members of Labor's hard Left."
He says that when "Australian Jews respond to the grotesque exaggeration about Israel, we are accused of being part of the "Jewish lobby....Israel's opponents in Australia now include those who support the Palestinians not for ideological reasons but because of the increased number of Arab voters in their electorates."
He then describes the mentality of the hard left as one that says the cause of September 11 was America's Middle East policies and their failure to rein in the Israelis. This is repeated ad nauseam by one left/liberal commentator after another.
Cohen says that the (left-liberal crowd in the) Labor Party can "support the Palestinians providing the case they put is not based on the lies spouted by the Palestinian propaganda machine." He adds that "silence on these issues isn't good enough for me. If people want to criticise Israel, fine - plenty of Israelis do. But let it be reasoned criticism, and if they want even-handedness let them also berate the Arab world for its denial of basic human rights for any of its citizens."
That is Cohen's case.
I notice that nowhere in the article does Cohen acknowledge that the Palestinians have a case. Cohen does not even mention the Israeli settlements in Palestinan territory of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Those territories are occupied by the settlers who are supported by the Israeli state. Cohen says nothing about the fundamentalist, xenophobic and anti-democratic settlers opposing Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories. Cohen assumes a unified Israel not a deeply divided one.
Nor does he mention that the Israeli right's policies are aimed at preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state. They are designed to make the West Bank Palestinians stateless persons, who have no civil rights and no recognition as persons in the law. So their lives are spent petitioning for things other people take for granted. Their property and lives can be taken at will.
The failure to acknowledge this case --Palestinian national self-determination and citizenship via a two state solution---means that Cohen is equating criticism of Israel under the Sharon government with anti-semitism--- the standard ploy of the (neo-con?) Israeli right. The right (religious settler movement) is not equivalent to Israel as a Jewish nation.
Their argument is that the Israeli people have the right to defend themselves; they should defend themselves; and they also have an obligation to prevent Israeli children being killed by suicide bombers, from being killed by Palestinian terrorists.
Granted.
But what is not said, or acknowledged, even in times when Israel launches bloody incursions into the occupied territories, is that the Palestinian people have similar rights and obligations. They also have the right and an obligation to defend themselves and their children from being killed by the Israeli military. And they should do so.
Would Cohen accept that? Would he accept that as a legitimate response to his case?
I have my doubts. Cohen says that he doesn't "want even-handedness when it ought to be obvious to all but the blind that there is no moral equivalence between a country that seeks to defend its citizens from thousands of terrorist attacks, and the terrorists themselves." Fine. But his language implies that he aims that criticism just at the Palestinians.
If you change 'terrorist' to 'military', then you can aim the statement back at Israel. The sentence would read: it ought to be obvious to all but the blind that there is no moral equivalence between a country that seeks to defend its citizens from thousands of military attacks, and the military themselves.
Is that reworking of moral equivalence acceptable? If not why not?
Note that my left liberal hard left argument does not equate Israel with Nazism. It is an argument based on a colonial (Israel) colonized (Palestine) relationship. Maybe that relationship is not the right one to make sense of this conflict. If it is not, then an argument has to be shown for why the self-determination of the Palestinian people is inappropriate claim re a two state solution.
Cohen fails to persuade. He fails to acknowledge that both sides are responsible for the violence, the sense of drift towards chaos, and the deep foreboding.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:05 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 24, 2004
doing the Ali shuffle
The ALP never really fought the economic issue in the media all that well did they? They allowed themselves to be boxed into a corner and kept there. They couldn't do the Ali shuffle and dance their way out.
Bruce Petty
It was tactics at the expense of strategy. What happened to the knowledge-based economy, and the failure of Australia to become an innovator in high tech manufacturing?
Michelle Grattan concurs:
"That it failed on economic credibility is a good, simple and true point for Labor to latch onto. But how to fix? Economic credibility is not something that you can pick off the policy shelf, as Labor seems to have done (not all that wisely) with Medicare Gold."
She then says that:
"Latham makes Labor's problems sound like the car crashed because it had one loose wheel. A dash to the repair yard, find that sound new part, and everything will be fine. This ignores that much of the accident was due to driver fault, and there were plenty of problems with other bits of the vehicle."
Then she gives some indicatation of the difficulty the ALP faces in fighting its enemy on this terrain:
"The scary thing for Labor is that it knew before the election its weak spot was its economic credentials and it put a lot of effort into trying to shore up these. Yet it still failed to convince the public."
And yet the economic boom we are currently experience was the work of the Hawke/Keating ALP Government in reforming the economy. That's a good story.
How come the currrent ALP neglects to argue that case?
Why the silence about the dumbing down of the Australian nation, because of the failure to innovate and make money out of our intellectual capital? We import other people's intellectual property rather than export our own.
What happened to those kind of stories?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 23, 2004
partisan economics
This is an old article by Paul Krugman on Alan Greenspan the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the US. It makes for interesting reading, even if Krugman's New York Times' articles are increasingly seen as partisan by the US economic profession.
I had always assumed that the Federal Reserve was above politics. Krugman confirms this interpretation:
"As an institution, the Federal Reserve is set up more like the Supreme Court than like an ordinary government agency. Members of the Federal Reserve Board serve for long terms; chairmen typically serve across several administrations from both parties. There's a reason for this: economists often argue that the Fed, like the Supreme Court, must be insulated from the political process so that it can make necessary but unpopular decisions. The quid pro quo for this insulation, however, is that the Fed must stand above the political fray. Like Supreme Court justices, the members of the Fed board undermine the rationale for their independence if they use their power for partisan purposes."
Do they?
Krugman argues yes. He says that Greenspan transgressed this tradition of standing above the political fray, when he supported President George Bush's tax cuts in 2001 in the name of reducing budget surpluses. Krugman notes that Greenspan:
"...didn't call for a reconsideration of the 2001 tax cut when the budget surplus evaporated. He didn't even offer strong objections to a second major round of tax cuts in 2003, when the budget was already deep in deficit."
Krugman says that since then, Greenspan has gone back to warning against the evils of budget deficits. But he failed to call for a reconsideration of recent tax cuts; on the contrary, he has endorsed Bush's plan to make the tax cuts permanent.
Krugman then advances another argument for his partisanship claim. He says that instead of calling for a reconsideration of recent tax cuts Greenspan calls for spending cuts, emphasizing the need to trim Social Security benefits:
"The sequence looks like this: he pushed through an increase in taxes on working Americans, generating a Social Security surplus. Then he used the overall surplus, mainly coming from Social Security, to argue for tax cuts that deliver very little relief to most people but are worth a lot to those making more than $300,000 a year. And now that those tax cuts have contributed to a soaring deficit, he wants to maintain the tax cuts while cutting Social Security benefits. He never said, ''Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so that we can give big tax cuts to the rich!'' But that's the end result of his advice. "
Krugman considers a couple of possiblities for why Greenspan took this path. He ends by saying that the overall consequence is that after becoming "a symbol of America's economic turnaround in the 90's, and anointing himself the nation's high priest of fiscal probity, [Greenspan] lent crucial aid and comfort to the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history."
I interpret that to mean that the Republicans have made economic policy a direct extension of their political strategy. Is saying that the Republcians are trashing the Fed's independence too strong?
What does the lack of independent economic governance mean, given the possibility that the US's twin deficits can only be resolved by some sort of crisis?
Oct. 24
John Quiggin has two good accounts about the US's looming trade crisis here and here. He argues that it is unlikely the current account deficit will be stabilised at a sustainable level, (the balance of trade on goods and services returning to surplus in a decade) though the soft option of a smooth market-driven adjustment. Where does that leave the US?
Quiggin links to a bleak US account. This is Guy's interpretation of Lawrence Summer's speech. The possibility is that "Asian governments could decide that the low rates of return on US treasuries aren't particularly appealling and start selling them. This could lead to a balance of payments crisis in the US, since it could no longer finance the current account deficit by borrowing abroad. This could lead to a collapse in the dollar, significant interest rate hikes, and protectionism."
The US does look to be in a bad way.
The options are either tax hikes or cuts to government (social security) spending to address the yawning budget deficits. And we know that the Republicans will take the latter option.
More on the US deficit here.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 22, 2004
ALP: a slow decay?
An Allan Moir cartoon from earlier in the week:
There is no soul. The ALP has becoming a factionally-driven machine preoccupied with clever tactics for fighting elections, and less and less a political movement that expresses the desires of Australians for a better kind of life.
Barry Jones in The Age makes some good points. The first is about tactics verus strategy:
"The ALP has a thousand tacticians - and no strategists. Giving ALP Senate preferences to Family First in Victoria and Tasmania is a classic example of a tactical decision that would have probably looked clever if it helped Labor win seats at no cost to itself. But clearly this decision was never considered strategically - when Labor's vote collapses, would the party really prefer a Family First senator to a Greens senator?"
Rightly said.
Why is this important? Jones makes another point:
"The ALP is not, and should not be, simply a machine that organises election campaigns every few years - it needs to provide spiritual, ethical and intellectual nourishment to the Australian people, and promote a creative, generous nation. Labor must promote an inclusive agenda, not an excluding one.
At present, there is a significant disenfranchisement of Labor's traditional vote, people who feel lonely and alienated from the party they have always voted for. If Labor does not bring them home, the party's heart and mind will die."
Well said.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 21, 2004
US elections
It is difficult to judge the US Presidential elections from Australia and I struggle to interpret the significance of the opinion polls.
What I hear here in Australia is the strong rhetoric of freedom, fighting tyranny, liberating the enslaved peoples of the world and bringing democracy to the Middle East. I also hear the voices that express a fear of foreigners, American chauvinism and a belligerence that finds criticism had to accept. What links the two is Middle America; an America that accepts the assaults on American liberties in the name of security or patriotism. A middle America that accepts the national security state, is easy with the US being a global power, and comfortable with a global power losing its heart and minds war in Iraq and turning the US into an armed fortress.
I cannot make much sense of it all against a backdrop of a sanitised rosy image of Iraq and the chaotic dangerous violence on the ground.
Has Middle America public grown tired of a war whose rationale has disappeared along with the weapons of mass destruction. I have no idea. I hope that Bush does not win. I mostly recoil from a political rhetoric animated by a kind of fear and political anxiety,and talks about foreign policy in terms of crusades against evil doers. I hope Kerry wins but I fear Bush will.
I am pretty much in accord with Alan Ryan writing in the New York Review of Books. He says:
"From almost anywhere outside the United States, it is impossible to understand how Mr. Bush has even a remote chance of reelection. In most of Europe, two thirds of the population has never weakened in its opposition to the war in Iraq—not out of affection for Saddam Hussein, but out of a well-founded understanding that Iraq was irrelevant to the war on terrorism until President Bush turned the country into a terrorist's playground."
Ryan says that many see President Bush is a threat to world security. He goes on to say that on the domestic front:
"Under President Bush, the US economy has shed jobs; there are fewer Americans employed today than when he took office; fewer Americans have guaranteed health care than when he took office; his tax cuts amount to the organized looting of the public purse for the benefit of his friends and funders; and his fiscal irresponsibility makes Ronald Reagan look a model of prudence."
So how come Bush will be re-elected?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:39 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 20, 2004
US: conservatism
I'm sitting having a morning coffee and reading the New York Review of Books. I was catching up on the work of David Levine. This is one of my favourite political caricatures:
It is of ex-President Richard Nixon circa 1975.
I do not think Levine's caricatures of President George Bush have captured what so disconcerts us: a fundamentalist Christian warrior using the power of an imperial state to fight a holy war against another civilization.
So we turn to words from concerned Americans. The liberal philosopher Ronald Dworkin makes two points after describing what has happened under the Bush administration:
"We have been governed, for many decades, from somewhere in the broad center of opinion rather than through a winner-take-all contest of extremes. ....The Bush administration has replaced every part of that centrist philosophy with a strategy of ideological partisanship aimed at two groups. It subscribes to the principles and causes of the religious right .....It relies ....on the support it has bought from powerful mass media and business groups by sponsoring huge and economically perilous tax cuts, and by virtually abandoning past bipartisan initiatives to protect the environment and improve public safety."
The first point Dworkin makes concerns the role of the Supreme Court. He says that America is very lucky to have survived one Bush administration without a single new Supreme Court appointment, but a second term without more than one new appointment seems unlikely. Dworkin says:
" Even during the last few years, when the Court has been dominated by relatively conservative justices, it has done more than any other national institution to protect American principles of equal citizenship and individual fairness. It has refused to abandon affirmative action; it has insisted on rights for homosexuals; and it has held that even aliens whom the President declared to be enemies of the United States are entitled to the due process of law. But each of these important victories was won by one or two votes, and each was denounced by the fundamentalists Bush has assured of his support."
It is likely that Bush will appoint conservative judges who support the Christian fundamentalist agenda in his second term.
The other point that Dworkin makes is about the language President Bush uses to justify an imperial war:
"The administration defends its military actions in theological terms whenever it can—Bush once called the war on terrorism a crusade—and America sometimes treats its prisoners with the special humiliation and cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition. These policies are as divisive domestically as they are in the larger world. Bush has sacrificed shared pride in American values—a unity that was itself a source of protection in danger— for the militancy of fundamentalist religion."
Are we on the threshold of something similar happening in Australia?
Discussions can be found at John Quiggin's place, at Chris Shiel'sBack Pages and at Troppo Armadillo
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:43 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
a note on water
Despite making a shift to accessing water from a reverse osmosis desalinisation plant that need not be driven by coal-fired power, the NSW's State Government's Metropolitan Water Plan is shortsighted.
Moir
It is a forlorn hope because it rains more in Sydney than in the dams' water catchment.
The editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald asks the right question:
"The State Government's Metropolitan Water Plan - like the rain sweeping Sydney - is welcome. And like the rain, it's not enough. The plan's emphasis falls too heavily on accessing more water and not enough on better using the water we have. How can a government hope to persuade the people to value water when "the plan" is to go on dumping most waste water and stormwater in the sea?"
How can a state government that says it is committed to a sustainable city when it goes on dumping most waste water and stormwater in the sea?
The argument against recycling is an economic one. It is too expensive to send recycled water back into the supply system and so reduce Sydney's ecological footprint. Less than 2% of total water used in Sydney is recycled and 1999 effluent recycling targets have been abandoned.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 19, 2004
urban water reform
It is well known that the effect of global warming means less rain for south eastern and western Australia--the seaboard arc running from Sydney around to Perth. Less rainfall means less water in the resevoirs of the cities. These are already low, periously low in Sydney. Sydney is running out of water. It increasingly requires more water that the rains will provide.
If that is the future, then the solution needs to be clever and innovative. More than likely this innovation will need to involve recycling our storm and waste water, instead of letting it flow out to sea as waste.
All this is well known in policy making circles, and it has been so for 10 years or more. The solutions are also well known.
Yet nothing happens apart from spin and tapping water further up the catchment or digging deeper to tap declining underground water. Meanwhile it rains less and wasteful urban water use continues. Sydney, like Adelaide, is living in cloud cuckoo land, hoping for the day when the rains will return and the reservoirs are full once more.
What stands in the way are the poorly governed public water utilties who block long-term change for short-term profit and the state governments who cream of the profits for the general treasury. The neo-liberal hand of Treasury means that no money is ploughed back into greening and modernizing the infrastructure to ensure the recycling of water. SA Water and the Rann Government in South Australia is a prime example, as is Sydney Water and the Carr Government in NSW. They resist reform.
These utilities (SA Water & Sydney Water) are corporations selling water to make a profit. Their business is not the conservation of water. If a utility is in business selling water to prop up a state government, then this makes it incapable of promoting and instituting measures like recycling, stormwater harvesting and demand management.
Ticky Fullerton explores the above issues on the ABC's Four Corners
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 18, 2004
a partisan media
We increasingly live in a media-driven, commercial culture, where it's hard to escape the ever-increasing waves of advertising and infotainment. And our public spaces are eroding as our schools, museums, libraries, parks become sites for commercials of the media/entertainment industry.
The corporate media is becoming increasingly partisan. Witness the denunciations of "liberal bias" in the media, that indicates "a political strategy" to something that was wrong with news media--that somehow, somewhere bias found its way into reporting. An elite liberal bias. That strategy means that it is the conservative media which appear as balanced and fair, and not partisan. Fox's entire editorial philosophy revolves around the idea that the centrist mainstream media have a liberal bias that Fox is obligated to rectify. The centrist mainstream media just don't tell the conservative side of the story, and the country has grown so accustomed to the left-leaning media. So says Fox.
Fox is a central hub of the conservative movement's well-oiled media machine in the US. Together with the GOP organization and its satellite think tanks and advocacy groups, this network of partisan outlets--(including the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative talk-radio shows like Rush Limbaugh's) forms a highly effective right-wing echo chamber where GOP-friendly news stories can be promoted, repeated and amplified.
The rhetoric is based on the proven populist formula of waving the flag, hitting the hip-pocket nerve, banging the drum for anti-intellectualism, mocking liberals and playing on suburban fears, prejudices and frustrations. It is practised well by Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and Tim Blair in Australia.
In the US the world of right-wing corporate media in the US is dominated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and its cable mouthpiece Fox News. One gets used to the spin and rightwing punditry in magazines such as the Weekly Standard. What sits behind this political spin is the aggressive political stance of an ideologically conservative media corporation, which recycles the media bulletins from a Republican Whitehouse. This challenges the persistent view that the Murdoch media is committed to "fair and balanced" reporting. It is this disingenuous claim to objectivity that corrodes the integrity of theMurdoch news business. Fox refuses to admit its political point of view.
We do not have an Australian version of Fox News full of tabloid sensationalism. But we might well have with the media consolidation arising from the proposed changes in the cross media ownership laws.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 17, 2004
fissures factions families
I guess the election defeat is a bit of shock for the ALP. So we can expect exhaustion, depression, explosive recriminations, factional brawls and strange happenings amidst the train wreck.
The election was pretty much decided in the outer suburban seats of the capital cities. The outer suburban middle classes in the mortgage belt rejected the ALP, despite Latham's talk about aspirational votes, easing the squeeze and providing ladders of opportunity. Remember all those Green Valley homilies about me and mum?
Leak
It is not about Latham and Beazley and the leadership tussle. Maybe it is about the role of the backbench?
From where I sit on the outside looking in, the key problem is the factions run by the factional headkickers who control their group in such a way that the the energy and ideas is drained from the party. The ALP is a political machine without a heart.
For it is within, and between, the factions where we find the disciplined partisan politics bile, hate and recrimination. True, the wheeling and dealing of the factions are a way that an undemocratic ALP deals with the deepening fissure between its traditional working class base and its social liberal, professional middle class one. Yet the effect of factional politics is a choking of renewal within the ALP. Selecting party hacks is just one example. It leads to demoralisation amongst party members.
The consequence of the ALP defeat and its preference deals with Family First is that we are confronted by the family values movement, one in which mercy is hoarded within families, leaving outsiders to damnation and torment. Family values mean that people are loyal to their own kin and pursue familial interests with little concern for the larger civil society. As it is families that matter, not civil society, so fallen angels become malignant devils.
This social conservatism turns our heads to looking backward, toward a better, nostalgic past beyond the radicalism of the 1960s. It asks us to sleepwalk through history, whilst it places iron constraints on the freedoms won in the struggles of the 1960s.
What is suprising is how deep this socially conservative family values movement is within the ALP. When you listen to the ALP right you hear stories about one conservative cause after another. They are often singing from the same song sheet as the social conservatives in the LNP. Strange isn't it, the way the election tacticians have handed control of the Senate to the conservatives.
October 19th
The rise to the front bench of Joe Ludwig - the favoured son of veteran Queensland political thug, Bill Ludwig - exemplifies the negative effects of (Queensland) factionalism in the federal ALP. It indicates both the lovely mix of nepotism, union favouritism and bullying that is often driven by revenge and resentment and the way that where endorsement to the Senate is now generally a reward for factional fidelity.
Let us hope that the talented young women are given positions of power to highlight the progressive face of the ALP. That may counterbalance a divided caucus entrapped up in pessimism.
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October 16, 2004
indeed
Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer, has a new Cassandra role to play, now that the federal election has been sown up and the LNP has retained its hold on the levers of power.
Pyror.
More here. Friday's Australian Financial Review (p. 4) revealed that the Prime Minister, "John Howard, had opted to announce all of the $6 billion in spending promises that had been proposed by the Liberal Party campaign office, rather than just one or two, as was expected in the campaign launch."
The Treasurer's new sour, prophetic note means that it is time to rollback some of the campaign promises. Hence the new messages sent through the old leak/drip feed media network. These said that the PM drifted off message and that he panicked so badly that he went on a massive spending spree, thereby undermining the coalition's economic management creditionals.
So the struggle begins.
Speaking of factions, the social liberals in the Liberal Party of South Australia seem to be continuing to lose ground to the conservatives. So the conservative's control over the Liberal Party increases. Does that mean Tony Abbott succeeds John Howard rather than Peter Costello?
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October 15, 2004
US: The twin deficits
Another day. Another coffee. More newspaper scanning. Another cake. The sun is shining, it is Friday and a weekend beckons. But I'm feeling gloomy.
The Senate news just keeps on getting worse.We can thank the ALP throwing its lot in with social conservatism in Victoria and Tasmania, thereby helping to pacify the Senate and undermine the checks and balances of federalism. Yet the ALP continues to spin itself as a progressive party. Who are they kidding? Themselves? The ALP's drift to the right has meant that it is now in bed with, and snuggled up to, Family First.
I'm also reading the financial press. The 3 Presidential debates hardly mentioned the twin deficits in the US or the rising protectionist sentiment in the US.
Yet the US trade deficit just keeps getting worse under the Republican administration. In August it was $US54 billion. And the US budget deficit just keeps getting bigger. It was $US24.36 billion in September, taking the fiscal year budget gap to a record $US413 billion. This represents 3.6 per cent of the total output of the world's biggest economy.
The US is an indebted superpower kept afloat by foreign investment by Asian central banks (formerly Japan, now China) who continue to finance the US' trade and budet deficits. When will the U.S. Treasury have to increase the interest rate on its debt to attract more foreign capital to fund its twin deficits?
The twin deficits are a sign that the United States is consuming more than it is producing, and requiring foreign investors to fill the gap with capital. Is this not unsustainable? Will it not further weaken the dollar, erode US living standards and destabilize the global economy?
Meanwhile the US labour market is showing few signs of creating new jobs, whilst the rising oil prices are going to place downward pressure on economic growth. And neither the President nor Congress are willing to make the tough decisions.
What in the heck is going on in the US? Surely the mood on Wall Street is becoming ugly? Surely. Big twin deficits. How come Wall Street is not calling for strong and resolute adjustment? Surely Wall Street realizes that the twin deficits could begin to slow down economic growth as interest rates begin to rise and as fewer benefits can be gained from global trade and investment due to the devalued dollar.
Surely Wall Street realizes that Japan may well determine that it no longer needs to support the dollar to protect its economic recovery. So who will continue to pick up the slack? China?
And Australia has hitched its wagon to the US wagon train with free trade agreement; we have integrated ourselves with an economy facing high interest rates, inflationary pressures, and low economic growth.
You can see why I'm feeling gloomy in spite of the glorious spring sunshine.
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October 14, 2004
US: 3rd Presidential Debate
Apparently, the US presidential race has tightened with Kerry edging ahead.
The video of the third presidential debate at Arizona State University in Tempe.
It was moderated by CBS's Bob Schieffer, who devised and asked the questions. A summary of the debate is here. The full transcript of the debate is here.
I'm listening to the video. Though this 90-minute debate is focused on domestic issues it opened with national security, terrorism and the war. Then it stayed on Kerry's turf, domestic policy especially health care, where Bush did badly.
Bush argued that the tax-and-spend liberal conception of a government run Medicare is bad. The proof? The US' privately run system is better than the government ones in countries overseas. I guess President Bush forgot about Australia. No doubt he would say it has rationing, therefore it is bad. But it covers all Australians whereas many Americans do not have medical insurance because it is expensive. Yet Kerry is not proposing government run Medicare in the guise of a federal takeover. You can choose to take it up or not. So Bush distorts to soften his position.
Keryy looked far more presidential and confident on health, abortion, social security, jobs and minimium wage. Bush was defensive and attacked the big government tax-and-spend liberal senator, and so he opened himself up to the charge of lack of fiscal discipline.
Iraq kept on coming up again and again. The environment and energy never even came up. Why not?
Bush did better than Kerry on immigration. But Kerry won on health care and jobs. Kerry sure talked a talk a lot about his religious faith, but he consistently distinquished faith from constitutional rights.
The polls show that Kerry did better. Now the spin comes into play.
I guess the Republicans knew that Kerry would do better than Bush in this debate. So Bush came across as kinder, more concerned and compassionate and he talked a lot about education. Bush only dropped his mask when he spoke openly about the importance of religion in his life at the end.
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yep
A day off. A quiet coffee in a cafe near the Central Market whilst reading the newspapers. I'm enjoying the cool weather after Monday's horror day of wind and heat. Don't you just love this guy. He so lightens the burden of life for us greens.
I'm thinking about the changing mediascape in Australia due to the reforms in all the media laws, the role that blogs can play and the way politics is organized in terms of the government versus the media.
Leunig
And I'm thinking about the remaking of Australia, now that Australia leans right and conservatism has gained dominance. It is less the ideas and more the underlying emotions that underly conservatism's long rise to hegemony.
I'm reading about oil prices are going up and up and their deflationary impacts. Does that mean federal budget deficits in the near future?
I'm also reading about the inflationary pressures on an overheated economy from the massive government spending. Does that mean rising interest rates?
I dunno. I do know about weakening house prices and high household debt. It is that squeeze that makes one fearful about the future.
But I reckon that there will be no more tax cuts in the near future for the middle or working class. And there will be big cuts to welfare through the welfare to work reforms.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:56 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 13, 2004
Troubled times in Israel
The Israeli Prime Minister is having a rough time. His state of the nation address was rejected by the Parliament.
What was rejected was Sharon's disengagement plan to uproot all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four of 120 enclaves in the West Bank next year in an attempt to reduce conflict with the Palestinians.
The elected Likud politicians and their rightwing voters working inside the party are deeply and bitterly opposed to Sharon's disengagement plan.
Is this a first step by Sharon to break the perpetual and ever deepening cycle of violence; a first step by Israel to take the possibility of peace seriously? Is this a pathway that could lead Israel out of the quagmire of the Gaza Strip and its own internal crisis?
There is an internal crisis when you have the Labor Party, the party of peace, placing itself in opposition to Sharon's disengagment plan by voting against Sharon's nation address.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12, 2004
staying in tune
One thing I've puzzled about over the last couple of years is the way that Howard's LNP has been so clearsighted in terms of its political strategy of keeping its changing constituency onside and retaining power. The ALP, whether under Beazely, Crean or Latham, look as if they are floundering in contrast, since their core bits of their electoral constituency continues to drift away to the LNP and the Australian Greens.
This was graphically expressed by the image of Tasmanian timber workers cheering John Howard as he announced that, though he would place limits on the logging of old growth forests, his primary concern was to ensure that the workers' jobs would be protected.
He was bang on target for his electoral constituency. It was well crafted campaign politics.
This article by Kevin MacDonald in The Age addresses this problem of being in tune with the public mood. He says that:
"John Howard's great political achievement has been to forge the two potentially contradictory cultural movements of moral conservatism and "I'm worth it" individuality into a political constituency."
Howard is in tune with the reconfiguring of the political culture, which is currently taking place in Australia due to the impact of the global economy.
The broad cultural shift combines moral conservatism with a free market philosophy that reduces civil society to a deregulated economy. The free market philosophy is expressed by the new middle class in terms of a new form of individuality that has its roots in the "because I'm worth it" ethos of consumer culture. The former is the social/moral conservatism (expressed by evangelical Christianity, the Family First party and a significant number of the younger generation of successful Liberal candidates) that reduces community to the family.
And the ALP. Once---in the 1980s and early 1990s---it was in tune with its combination of a competitive economy, social justice and nationality. McDonald says that:
"Over the past decade the conservative side of politics has constructed a vision not only of the economy, but of moral purpose. The great drama we face in Australia is the weakness of a counter model. Labor is obviously weakened given the decline of working-class communities and culture, with their ethic of justice based on fairness and sameness. Were it not for the funding arrangements and electoral system, it is not clear that the ALP would be progressing into its second century."
I agree with him.
Latham had a go at being in tune with the new political culture with his aspirational suburban middle class that linked back to Menzies' forgotten people. But his political narrative was not convincing in terms of the public mood and the political unconscious.
Apost-election the ALP is confused:
Leak
The party is deeply factured by the sundering of its blue collar constitutency and the inner city urban middle class constituency. Most of the commentary is structured in terms of the friend/enemy opposition of the bluecollar and the trendy inner city lefties, rather than the political crafting to combine the two constituencies into a movement.
So the ALP tears itself apart, as it is doing now around the Tasmanian forests. In contrast, Howard crafts his two constituencies into a political combination that he keeps together, talks to and looks out for.
That is why Howard is a master political strategist whilst the current ALP leadership group are journeymen.
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October 11, 2004
US: 2nd Presidential Debate
I missed the Edwards-Cheney vice-Presidential debate in the US. I was too caught up with the Australian election. But I understand that 43 million Americans tuned in to watch; down on the 63 million Americans who had tuned in to watch the first Presidential debate.
Impressive. As Larry Sabato says at his Crystal Ball website debates matter.
President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry debated one another last Friday night in a nationally televised encounter town hall style meeting at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.
This is a novel and good idea that can, and should be, used in Australia. Mark Latham, the Opposition leader, did a big and successful townhall meeting on his own in Hindmarsh in Adelaide towards the end of the election. The format needs to be broadened to bring in the Prime Minister.
Will we see that in Australia?
The video of the debate is here, as well as the list of the questions from the audience. Here is the transcript. Watchign the video the debate is better than reading the transcript.
The video is well worth watching as it was full of cut and thrust on some good questions from the undecideds on Iraq and domestic issues----foreign policy, fiscal policy, the economy and health care. There is no skirting around these issues here, and the debate almost entered the threshold of a free-form debate. The audience remained hushed at the show. It was a more even affair than the first one.
The standard conservative US spin is that Kerry is an aloof patrician who lacks a common touch, whilst a folksy Bush is better at connecting with regular Americans.
I did not see that with Kerry. Kerry looked and sounded pretty good as he worked from his base in the Congress to roll back the Bush smear of being a tax and spend liberal Senator. Though I did get sick of Kerry's "I have a plan''. Bush also sounded good and persuasive over and above just being folksy selling well-honed, one line hackneyed messages. He performed well.
The debates have revived Kerry's campaign. He has surged in the opinion polls since the previous debate, with the latest ones showing him moving into a slight lead over President Bush. The election race has become very close to call.
I'm not in a position to assess the post debate spin wars that seem to surge through the partisan US media as a normal part of the political campaign. Bush took a huge beating in the liberal press for his performance in the first presidential debate. The spin was all about slouching onto the podium, the eye-glazing, over-repetition of the same hackneyed phrases and the odd facial expressions during the cutaways. I think that he did a lot better than the liberal spin has made out.
A question. How can the Kerry-Edwards ticket surge from being 12 points behind the Bush-Cheney ticket to level pegging in the horserace findings in a matter of a few weeks or so? Are the pollsters partisan as well?
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October 10, 2004
singing the blues
The Sunday television talk shows were full of excuses now flowing freely from the ALP. It was the interest rate fear campaign that did it some said. It was a new leader (L-plate) ten months out from an election, others said. John Howard was so dishonest and outrageous in running his scare campaign on a lie. It was saving the forests and being too close to the greens. Or it was the late release of policy.
And so on and so on.
Pryor
It was a trainwreck. Pryor is right. The ALP's primary vote of 38.2 per cent would have to be one of the lowest votes ever. (The second lowest since preferential votin was introduced, in 1919, says Louise Dodson in the SMH, quoting the Parliamentary Library). Labor cannot win from a primary vote of just 38.3 per cent. With no Liberal marginal seats left in Victoria and a number of ALP ones, Labor is probably facing two terms in opposition.
The problem with the above excuses is that they deny the responsibility of the senior leadership group who were in charge of the campaign strategy and tactics. Shouldn't the finger be pointed at them?
For instance. Why did the ALP not vigorously contest the interest rate campaign run by the LNP from the beginning rather than give it away? Why did it not claim credit for Australia's economic prosperity by appealing to the Hawke/Keating economic reforms? Reading to school children captures headlines but it does not adddress the fear about debt-laden families losing everything from rising interest rates. That is a very real threat considering that most people are living on the financial edge with high mortgages.
Another example. The scare campaign over Peter Costello's leadership aspirations was a feeble joke. It says behind Howard stands Costello who is the economic manager who delivered the economic good times. The ALP reinforces Howard's message. Bizarre.
The flow of excuses all assume that elections are won or lost during election campaigns. The commentators reinforce this when they analyse every nuance in the campaign in an attempt to make sense of the result. Shouldn't we looking beyond the spectacle and theatre of the campaign? Shouldn't we be looking at bedrock public opinion, emotional templates, political unconscious, public mood and changing political patterns? Isn't that where elections are lost and won? It is more a long term campaign--a war of position--- than a question of tactics in a day to day battle.
For instance, should not the ALP be trying to deal with the conservative blue collar workers continuing their drift to the LNP as the left decamps to the Greens?
An example. In Adelaide the Liberals now hold the new seat of Wakefield. That means the Liberals are representing traditional rock solid working class areas such as Elizabeth and Salisbury. That is a huge shift.
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aftermath
Well the results of the federal election have certainly turned out so very differently to what every one had predicted, apart from the bookies.
See this ALP dreaming (Latham by 8 seats) over at Road to Surfdom. Tim says that the dead hand of Howardism would be overthrown and Latham would renew and reinvigorate the body politic with a win by 8 seats.
I had reckoned that Howard would be returned to a historic 4th win with a reduced margin and without the control of the Senate. Others held to the cliffhanger position.
How so very wrong that cliffhanger judgement was.
I had never imagined that the LNP would be returned with a big swing to it (around 3.5%), an increased majority (probably greater than 7) and control of the Senate. It is a resounding victory. A huge win for the LNP. Devastation, tears and recriminations for the ALP (especially from Tasmania).
The election expresses a major historical shift. The centre of electoral politics has collapsed completely and then polarized into conservative and progressive. Social conservatism is in the ascendancy in a now deeply divided nation. Chris at Back Pages sees himself as an exile on main street.
The Greens won less than expected: 8 per cent of the lower house vote across the nation. They failed to gain any lower house seats which was expected, but they did not do as well as expected in the Senate. It is unclear how many Senate seats they will get in addition to the won by Christine Milne in Tasmania.(Or will it also be one each in NSW, Queensland, WA and SA? Will they become the new political force?)
The Howard Government only needs one extra vote to pass its legislation in the Senate. That will come from the Judaized Christian conservative Family First, after it gained a Senate Seat in Victoria. The 4 Democrats in the Senate are irrelevant in terms of balance of power. They are now on life support for the next 3 years, when they quietly fade to black.
So why Family First and not the Greens as expected in the Senate?
Suprise suprise. The ALP preferenced Family First ahead of the Greens in Victoria (in order to prop up their social conservative Senator Jacinta Collins?) The Greens have only half a quota in Victoria. If they had gained the Labor preferences from the .6 surplus (after the ALP failed to gain a third Senate seat), then the Greens would have gained the Senate seat in Victoria. So a socially conservative ALP (remember the DLP mentality?) helped put Family First into the Senate, thereby giving Howard the control of the Senate. The ALP preferred Family First to win the seat than the Greens.
So it is not simply the case that the Labor Party didn't make a convincing enough case to bring people around to the need for progressive change. Why do people keep on seeing the ALP as socially progressive? That is only one strand within the party. Why is the dead hand within the ALP ( its anti-progressive, pro-life, Catholic strand) ignored.
And the upshot of a Senate without a balance of power? Telstra will be sold, industrial relations reform will go through, as will cross media ownership and disability pension reform. After June 2005 a massive agenda of social change will take place during the next three years. That is the significance of this election.
So the ALP has shot itself in the foot. It's strategy should have been to block Howard gaining control of the Senate, not help to give him control. Their party machine is concerned with short-term tactics at the expense of long-term strategy.
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October 9, 2004
Election day
I will be handing out how to vote cards all day in the Liberal heartland of the Barossa. I won't be back in Adelaide until latter tonight, just in time to catch Antony Green's election trend predictions on the ABC's Australia Votes.
Here is a view of what happens underneath the glossy media surfaces:
We have got richer and more prosperous. But we have become meaner, less kind and generous to one another and more afraid as well.
That has been the tradeoff. That tradeoff has now become part of the nation's political unconscious. Free markets + religiously informed social conservatism.
Leunig hopes that this will change today. Alas, truth in government (refugees and Iraq) has not been a key issue in this federal election.
Update
It was all over by 7.15pm apparently. By then it was realized that it was impossible for Labor to win the election and that the ALP was likely to emerge with fewer seats than before. That is what I heard around 7.30pm when I got back from the Barossa and turned on the TV. Then it was only a question of how bad it was going to get for the ALP; and whether it could make gains in SA and WA.
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October 8, 2004
Election Eve: it's the economy
I cannot call the election. It is beyond me. I don't have the skills or the knowledge to do so. I reckon its still line ball. It could go either way. The Coalition will lose seats and the ALP will gain some. From what I can gather it still depends on the large number of undecideds.
I fear the worst.
But do check out Poll Bludger Mumble. And Back Pages, as Chris has the ALP surging ahead. Scott Wickstein over at Troppo Armadillo punts for the ALP
The Canberra Press Gallery is saying that Howard will win despite the lift in the primary vote for the ALP and the surging green vote. The ALP just cannot get the 13 seats required. So argues Laura Tingle in the Australian Financial Review. The ALP may win 13 but lose 5 says Lenore Taylor in the AFR. (I concur.) A narrow Coalition win says Crikey.
From what I can make out most of the newspapers are siding with the LNP. The reason they give is economic prosperity and economic growth, despite the lack of a fourth term reform agenda by the Coalition, and it looking very tired. I concur. The economy is the key.
The Australian Financial Review is typical, as it acknowledges these flaws, but then pumps iron for the LNP. The LNP's platform it says:
"... appeals more than Labor's to the qualities Australia needs to overcome the competitive challenges of the 21st century. Mr Howard at least makes the link between past sacrifices and present prosperity. Labor takes the fruits of reform for granted, and concentratres on doling them out to favoured groups----lower-income earners, two-income families public services --rather than than on ensuring future harvests."
Oh, the pork barrelling and handouts to all and sundry by Howard is conveniently forgotten. Were not the handouts the real golden thread of Howard's campaign? This is spin not analysis.
The AFR goes on after praising Peter Costello as experienced and capable: "Labor's front bench has too many weak links especially in economic policy.When the pork and regrets are stripped away, the Coalition would do more to reward effort and enterprise and promote growth than Labor's resort to the retro-fashions of redistribution and ever larger public services. That, and Labor's cynical obstruction of reform in opposition, should be enough to give John Howard his coveted fourth election win." The neo-liberal Latham just disappears out the window. So does the big tax and spend Howard Government described by John Quiggin. What can we say? The AFR has embraced cartoon politics.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:30 AM
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The news reports are carrying a story saying that the top US arms inspector has reported that he found no evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991. Saddam Hussein's weapons capability was weakened during a dozen years of UN sanctions before the US invasion in 2003; Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war began; and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing. So Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. So says Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group. Our intelligence said otherwise, John Howard responded on Radio National Breakfast this morning. The Prime Minister added that he had acted in good faith on the basis of that intelligence. Well, that intelligence from the US and the UK was dead wrong. It did not even come close to the truth of the matter. However we know that the the Defence Intelligence Organisation advised that Iraq could only have limited, degraded stocks of WMD; not enough to constitute a significant threat. The prewar justifications for invading Iraq, which centered largely on the contention that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, are without foundation. What the Duelfer Report also says is that the U.N. sanctions that prevented Saddam Hussein from getting the materials neeeded for his weapons of mass destruction programme; Hussein intended to reconstitute weapons of mass destruction programs if he were freed of UN sanctions; that Hussein had hindered and evaded international inspectors to preserve his weapons of mass destruction capabilities. Iraq did not pose a serious threat to Australia. Hence the war was not a just one. Meanwhile, the PM is continuing to run fiction that the war in Iraq is the centre of the war of the war on terrorism. Evoking 'national security' in relaton to Iraq (eg. its terrorist threats to us) is meaningless. The job national security is really doing is to evoke fear within the Australian people--and then harness it as part of a huge fear campign run by the Coalition to retain power.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:21 AM
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Now a timber worker would understand the philosophy stated in this cartoon, and the way that it works against their short-term interests: Hence yesterday's strident reaction to Latham's $800 million forest policy package:"we've been sold out to shore-up Labor's support in the mainland marginal electorates." It is outrage tempered with a hope that the LNP will come good and look after the industry. That is the job of governments. Some of the writing in The Australian is so biased that it is a distortion of what is going on. Consider this piece by Denis Shanhahan: "LABOR'S forest policy was unravelling and John Howard was thinking about just standing back and letting it form a tangled mess at Mark Latham's feet...After dangling expectations in front of Latham and the electorate, the Prime Minister considered sitting back and letting Labor implode ... Labor is living in fear and expectation that Howard would delay committing himself and would just slip through to the election without harming the Liberals' chances of picking up a Tasmanian seat."
How odd. Latham is all about reward and effort in the classic neo-liberal style. He is willing to move beyond the Hilmer reforms of the public sector to a reform of the Trade Practices Act, so as to stop big companies from using their market power to damage competitors. It is the Coalition resisting increased competition to protect the big end of town.
October 7, 2004
confirmation
October 6, 2004
The trees are the winners
Pryor
The economy is in conflict with the environment. So any attempt to protect the environment undermines the economy is the timber worker's position. The Greens will close down the forest industry. Laatham is aiding and abetting that.
The piece is all about the ALP's unravelling and imploding and Howard's Cheshire grin at the waves this is causing. Not a hint of acknowledgement that the ALP's forest package was good public policy; or that it was good public policy to protect the old growth forests in Tasmania.
The news reports are carrying stories that John Howard is expected to unveil his forest policy to protect core areas of high-conservation old-growth in Tasmania. Richard Herr, a University of Tasmanian political analyst, suggests that a middle-ground forest policy by Howard would allow the LNP to minimise defection of green-conscious Liberal voters (eg.,the doctors wives) while maximising support amongst the disenchanted timber workers in Tasmania.
Whichever the way this goes, the old growth native forests in Tasmania are going to be the winners. There is no turning the clock back now. Despite industry claims that the ALP policy would shut Tasmania down, logging old growth forests deserves a similar fate as damming the Gordon-below-Franklin River for hydro. Logging is ruled out by any cost benefit analysis that puts a realistic value on the environmental qualities of the region.
October 7
Howard has now come out as a friend of workers, loggers and the Tasmanian Government. Howard's forest plan is a minimal one: it would preserve an extra 170,000 hectares of Tasmanian old-growth forest; it would ensure no job losses for timber workers; it does not alter the Regional Forest Agreement signed in 1997;and promised to spend $50 million on initiatives including research into alternatives to clear-felling, saving the Tasmanian devil and improving forest workers' skills.
The irony is the television footage of timber workers cheering Mr Howard as their saviour. They see the Coalition's forest policy represented a much better deal than Labor's policy. It locks up around 140,000 hectares of the forests that can't be logged under existing forest management; are located on the steep-terrain North Styx which would always have been very difficult to log; or are lined streams and rivers, or forests at the top of mountains already excluded from logging.
So the Coalition appears to be protecting forest that, under the state-federal agreement, the forest industry was not going to touch anyway.
Will this strategy swing at least two Labor seats in the Tasmania (Bass and Braddon) to the Liberals? Many are saying that Howard has been shrewd in his forest gamble in wedging the ALP's traditional blue collar workers. Ah the judgement and timing they say. The forestry branch of the CFMEU has split off and has sided with the National Party (in Gippsland) in the name of resource security. The views of these timber workers are little different from that of the foresty industry, including Forestry Tasmania.
But will Howard's policy swing the Liberal seat of Adelaide to the ALP through the anti-John Howard sentiment in Adelaide's leafy,"small l" liberal eastern suburbs? Or has Howard done enough to win back the disaffected liberals?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 5, 2004
Tasmanian forests
Well, well well. The ALP has done it.
It's forest policy is basically another review. Yet it is a review with a known outcome. The result is likely to be more old-growth native forest protected, around 240,00 hectares of old growth forest.
Latham has pledged to outlaw logging in virtually all of Tasmania's old-growth forests, and offered $800 million in compensation to help timber companies and their workers, families and communities cope with having a large slice of their resources locked away. The $800 million would be spent on "skills, retooling and upgrading". So workers who lose their jobs would be rehabilitated by being reskilled to go up the value-added chain".
And the ALP has flagged that it would be willing to use the commonwealth's legislative powers to override the ALP Tasmanian state government if necessary.
Good on them. Full marks. The ALP has managed to make health, education and the environment the key election issues and to make the Coalition react negatively.
I presume that playing this green hand means that in the last week of the election the opinion polls are still showing Labor behind in the crucial marginal seats. Otherwise why bother deepening the split within the ALP itself? However, Back Pages is still calling it as the ALP in front. So why the need to play the forest hand now? Why not continue to play the cat and mouse game?
Is it the emotive magic bullet to wound the opponent that John Wanna says is now required?
Leak
As Louise Dodson observes the concern for Tasmania's forests in this campaign is primary political: it is more about gaining tactical advantage and less about saving the old growth forests.
Is it merely a figleaf to secure the inner city marginal seats on the mainland? A a bid to win the light green vote while not losing support in the 5 seats it holds in Tasmania?
The ALP's move does reopen the 20-year regional forest agreement signed by the commonwealth and Tasmanian governments in 1997. That agreement guaranteed the timber industry a sustainable supply of 300,000 cubic metres of sawlogs every year for the next 20 years.
The ALP policy says that a new scientific panel to assess which parts of Tasmania's high conservation value old-growth forests should be protected from logging. The panel would examine areas including the Tarkine Wilderness in the state's north-west, the Styx Valley north of Hobart, the Great Western and Eastern Tires, the north-east highlands, the Tasman Peninsula and the Ben Lomond Extensions and would report by September 2005.
The panel would carry out its scientific assessment on the basis of eight different bio-regions in the state rather than treating the whole state as a single bio-region as occurred under the 1990s RFA scientific assessments.The bio-region approach would guarantee that more areas are scientifically assessed as warranting conservation.
There is no immediate protection for Tasmania's old-growth forests. There is only to be no extension to the logging area whilst the scientific assessment is under way. The loggers are not shut out. A review without a commitment to end logging gives too much room for the forestry industry to roll back a divided ALP.
Though the ALP policy does mention sustainable forestry, value-adding and downstream processing, there is little detail about what is involved in a transition to sustainable forestry? What makes the forestry industry sustainable?
The 400 (or is 320?) timber workers and their union do not want to know anything about sustainability. Nor are they willing to acknowledge that what is involved is stopping them cutting 90-metre tall native trees down and getting to them to cut down radiata pine trees in a plantation instead. Or better management of existing plantations.
Yet the forest industry threatens a capital strike, the Tasmanian federal ALP parliamentarians continue to do their kneejerk reflex and the Tasmanian Liberals re-discover state rights.
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October 4, 2004
Onward the Greens
Steve Lewis in The Australian has made his call. He says:
"It's time . . . to declare Mark Latham the winner of this election campaign. Barring some extraordinary mishap over the next five days, the Labor leader will finish this marathon a clear points winner over John Howard."
I reckon so too. The tide is flowing Latham's way in a fear and bait campaign played by both sides. It has done so in spite of this counter to the ALP + Greens electoral alliance:
Leak
Has the tidal flow been enough? Or will the Coalition just hang on? Will the LNP lose the campaign but win the election?
You can sense the vulnerability of the Coalition. Medicare Gold highlighted that. Howard's messages during the campaign have largely been reactive, homing in on Latham's inexperience and running a scare campaign about the "threat" of higher interest rates under a Labor Government. Howard has been playing catch-up to his Latham, in spite of the hint of a forward-looking fourth term agenda: on building vocational skills, a stronger emphasis on vocational education, and the national water initiative. So are we going to see a big Coalition advertising campaign that is overwhelmingly negative in the final week?
Steve Lewis qualifies his call. He says that his money still remains on a narrow Coalition victory. Ken Parish concurs.
Does that mean a polarised electorate, one supporting the Coalition in the House of Representatives and favouring the Greens in the Senate to put a brake on the Government. The Greens have become the new "third force" in the Senate, and they have done so at the expense of the ALP and Democrats.
That is my reading of the desire for change, as of this moment. It's still the prosperous economy that is blocking the underlying desire for a more sweeping change across the political spectrum. John Howard is also blocking the desire for change by his shift from the minimal government (of neo-liberalism )to the big government (of conservatism).
John Quiggin describes the philosophical shift by John Howard's Government this way:
"The new position, most evident with Medicare, but also indicated in his education policy, might be called "Universalism + Choice". In relation to health, this means ensuring universal access to bulk billing and public hospitals while also encouraging private health insurance. Similarly, for schools it means "easing the squeeze" (Sorry!) on the public system, while still providing support for private schools across the board.
Universalism + Choice has some appeal. But, done properly, it's going to be expensive. Unless Howard stages a full-scale "promises overboard", it's unlikely we'll see significant tax cuts any time soon under a re-elected Liberal government."
And the environment, which is usually forgotten by the justice-orientated social democrats? Will the promise to save the Tasmanian forests keep the tidal flow going on the contested ground of the marginal inner city seats? The ALP has to play this green hand first. But it will be minimal change. It will not say no to logging the old growth forests now. Will another promise (to a sustainable forestry industry?) will be dangled in front of us? Will it be one with lots of wriggle room?
What is of long term policy interest is that the signs increasingly look as if the time is up for the ecological vandals in Tasmania. The tide is flowing against the logging industryand timber workers at long last. A Green Senate will keep the pressure on the major parties to do the right thing in a corporatist Tasmania to save the old growth forests.
5 October
Malcolm Mackerras makes his call in todays Australian Financial Review. He says that the Coalition will win by eight seats with the Coalition having 37 seats in the Senate, where the Greens will be a bigger party than the Democrats.
In the same issue Nick Economou says that Victoria will continue to be stalemated electorally with a minimal transfer to the ALP or no transfer at all.
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October 3, 2004
Iraq: civil war
As I understand it Falluja, a besieged city of 300,000 people, is under daily aerial attack from the US; parts of Sadr City, the poorest neighbourhood of Baghdad, are being reduced to rubble; and US forces have launched a military offensive to seize back control of the Sunni Muslim city of Samarra. Many Iraqi civilians are being killed as the popular resistance to US occupation grows, as the US tries to regain control of insurgent areas.
It is perfectly clear that Chalabi's puppet regime cannot handle situation by taking it off Bush's hands.
Steve Bell
Britain is morally and politically responsible for the current US bombardment of Iraqi cities. Britain could announce a phased British withdrawal. Yet Tony Blair has not done so.
The Iraqi resistance is challenging the authority of the West, I heard John Howard say on the radio the other morning. The tough leader on national security continues to back the continued bloody occupation. His lines are those of the imperial president: We will stay the course, I'm tough, I'm not going to take it and I don't need to deal with international summits and all that UN stuff.
It is doubtful that razing Fallujah will end the carbombings and restore security.
Insurgent areas being re-taken to restore normalcy implies a guerrilla war. In this kind of war, as we learnt over in Vietnam, the real struggle is over popular support. This is a struggle that the Bush administration, Blair and Howard are badly losing. A guerrilla war implies civil war.
In a guest spot over Informed Comment Keith Watenpaugh writes:
Keith says we (the US and its allies) are at war with Iraqi society and Iraqi society is a war with itself. He adds that "this statement should be the central principle for understanding what is happening in Iraq and contribute how we respond to the needs of Iraq’s people.""The daily car-bombings and drive-by shootings, the assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings, the guerilla attacks on coalition and pro-US Iraqi forces, the establishment of no-go areas in central Iraq, precise and not-so precise bombing raids on civilian urban centers, intense ethnic tensions in those areas bordering Syria and Turkey and the cold-war between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq may not as yet fulfill the normative definition of civil war employed by political scientists, but it must be close."
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October 2, 2004
in the land of the free
Iraq looms large over the US. It is only background here in Australia as domestic issues have dominated in the federal election, even if the Murdoch papers rave on about Latham's policy of bringing home Australian troops serving in Iraq by Christmas being "cut and run." The Murdoch press is largely pro-Howard and anti-Latham.
I was unable to see the first US presidential debate. The video is here and the transcript is here. This debate was all about foreign policy and national security: 90-minute forum about foreign policy, dominated by Iraq, with Jim Lehrer, a professional journalist, asking the questions. He also composed the questions, which the candidates had not seen. But why have an audience there when they are not allowed to play any part?
Kerry engaged, Bush defended himself. Mr Kerry declared Iraq a "colossal error of judgment", separated the War on Terror from the War in Iraq, and said that the US should do more to assure international support for pre-emptive military action to show the the world that the US intervened in Iraq for legitimate reasons. Kerry's strategy is that the US will leave Iraq and does not want bases is a positive step toward easing the angst of the regional Arab powers.
The consensus says that Kerry won, but it is unclear just how much of Bush's lead he has managed to claw back. The 24-hour news cycle in the US will inform us.
Hm. In the land of the free, the brave and the beautiful the war against terrorism is seen by the Republicans in theological terms as a battle between "the forces of good" and "the forces of evil." The US President often speaks of American policy as proximate to the will of "the Almighty."
In the land of the free the most dynamic political force in America is the Protestant right.This openly seeks to lessen the liberal gap between the political assembly and the pulpit. As much as any Muslim cleric, the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson are both political leaders and religious leaders. One of the most important political alliances in America unites right-wing Protestants and orthodox Jews. For theological reasons, both support the state of Israel.
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October 1, 2004
behind appearances: fundamentalism
The political campaign, as reported in the media, appears to be like this:
Moir
The ALP has spent around $10.8 billion whilst the Coalition has spent $12.7 billion. The bait, in which each side matches the other throughout the campaign, is boring. It has become a turnoff. What all the detail means has turned into a blur. I've tuned out of the bait campaign. The buckets of cash make no sense anymore.
Moir's view, is misleading, as we have this innovative policy which cuts through the LIB-LAB election bait. Latham has yet to do anything about forests though. He is still waiting for Howard to play his hand.
What is happening behind the appearances of the election bait is the re-entry of fundamentalist religion into politics. We saw this initially with the appearance of Family First. Then we saw it with faith being used as a criteria of public policy with the intervention Sydney Archbishop George Pell his fellow Catholic, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen and his fellow Anglican Archbishop, Melbourne's Peter Watson, who criticized the ALP schools policy because it "is likely to benefit schools of one faith background largely at the expense of another".
The Roman Catholic Church has jump into bed with their well-heeled Anglican counterparts to openly campaign against Labor's education policy. John Quiggin comments on this, as does Ken Parish. I interpret the remarks to mean faith not reason (policies based on need) is should be used to decide public policy options If that is what being said, then it is quite disturbing.
Michael Costello, writing in The Australian, is also disturbed. He asks:
"Was that the ghost of Daniel Mannix who walked the political stage this week? Or was it just a muted echo of battles long ago? Archbishop Mannix famously vilified Labor after World War II, putting the fear of God into Australian Catholics who wanted to vote for the party of the working people...What turned these men of the cloth back into Mannix-style marauders against Labor?.... their intervention seems to be part of a larger and extremely worrying mosaic of religious involvement in this federal election.
From the Hillsong Church in Sydney's west to the Assembly of God in Paradise, South Australia -- yes, truly -- there seems to have been a marshalling of faith forces, and all against Labor. The Family First Party associated with the Assembly of God church could well keep several marginal seats across Australia in Liberal hands after the preference deal done with John Howard."
A conservative and authoritarian Archbishop Pell as the new Archbishop Mannix? It's a good image, even it if is a party political one.
A defence of Family First by Piers Ackerman. He talks about the commonsense values that made this country and gave the rest of the Western nations the basis for their moral and cultural global leadership. I presume this is this what he has in mind.
Saint has some worries. Some excellent background by Natham at Baliset Palimpsest. Also check out Alans views over at Southerly Buster.
I too have worries. Mine are not about a religiously informed social conservatism centred on the views of the Assemblies of God church eg., increasing censorship, the reshaping of tax and family benefits to favour single-income families with a stay-at-home mother and the Marriage Act. Mine are more about the fundamentalist's crusading black and white, good v evil mentality that is ultimately based on blind faith about the forces of God v the dark forces of the earth.
Why do I worry? This authoritarian mentality, because it is intolerant of difference, sees public reason as the enemy that needs to be destroyed. Reason corrodes faith. Faith is the touchstone. That may be okay as a guide for private life, but not for public policy formation.
It is not just the evangelical Christian's fundamentalism and worship experience I have in mind. A fundamentalist mentality has already entered our political discourse with the Right Wing Death Beasts. These are on a Lefty-bashing crusade to kill off their political enemy. This tabloid style is entrapped within the political party divide, and it has the effect of muffling public debate across the mediascape. The attack dogs include Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun, Piers Akerman of The Telegraph, Tim Blair of The Bulletin.
The fundamentalist political mentality sidesteps arguments on issues from different perspectives to smear and mock the opponents’ politics. This fundamentalist mentality is always about winning through destroying the enemy. I wonder what their worship experience is? Squashing a booted heel into the bleeding body of the ALP?
The religious fundamentalist have lots of the vision thing. They want to roll back liberalism and erode the liberal church and state distinction. That is not a vision I share.
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