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July 31, 2005
question mark over NSW ALP
What we have in Australia is a cluster of solid, pragmatic Labor governments at state level, many with solid electoral cushions. Within the state level of federalism in the last decade there has been a great transfer of power and influence to NSW (financial and corporate) in the history of Federation.
Sydney is now pre-eminent. It has become a global city in the Asia-Pacific. Melbourne and Brisbane are provincal cities. Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart are country towns. Perth I presume is a provincal city.
Mike Steketee, writing in The Australian, says that all the state ALP:
"...premiers have attracted the criticism that they run do-nothing governments, a perception that seems to do them no harm politically although it is an oversimplification. Carr took key policy initiatives in education and the environment as well as in less heralded areas such as drug treatment and early intervention programs for disadvantaged children.
Does that mean NSW is still the engine room of the Australian economy?
Steketee says thatsocial justice has gone missing in NSW:
"...particularly for a Labor premier, there was much that was neglected. Gary Moore, of the NSW Council of Social Service, says less has been done in NSW than other states to supply affordable housing for low-income earners, although the problem in Sydney is much worse. The same applies to public dental programs and mental health, he says."
And the disabled, it should be added. Unsuprising really, as we are talking about the NSW Right machine. They have a reputation of the self-interested power holders being more concerned with diving up the spoils of office than the long term interests of the state.
The NSW Carr government has become managers and administrators with Carr's administration being marked by mismangement.The style of politics It looks set to continue with that after Carr kisses politics goodbye.
Update: 3 August 2005
I see the NSW Labor Government is trying to look refreshed and different. Despite the cleanout it looks a weak government to me--not a reformist one. It is one living in fear of losing the next election, and so it will be steady as she goes, don't upset anybody, buy off the sectional interests, keep the punters onside. Smile smile smile.
The work of the NSW Right has always struck me as being like that of the mafia. It's about business of spoils, not better public transport, shorter hospital queues, and less water restrictions.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 30, 2005
a historic moment?
The IRA has announced that it's war with Britain is over.
We should remember that the IRA had a political wing, Sinn Fein, which operated as a political party whose objectives could be addressed by parliamentary means of negoitation and compromise.
Pity about the Ulster paramilitaries. The loyalist paramilitaries show no signs of giving up their guns and their ceasefires have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 29, 2005
Iraq: the political process continues to go positively
The present as the past. It has only made things worse. The Shiite Iraqis are under siege from the Sunni guerrillas.
The committee drafting the cosntitution appears to be deadlocked, due to the rejection of federalism by the Sunni Arab delegates who want a centralized government.
A possible future
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 28, 2005
politics as administration
The politically elegant Bob Carr defined the strategy of politics as administration for the state Labor Governments.
Nick Greiner's op. ed. in The Sydney Morning Herald defines the style as:
[Carr] brilliantly masterminded the minimal risk, masterful inactivity model of politics, which suited a time of strong national economic growth and increases in state revenues and has been substantially copied by other state ALPs... Carr's term will be seen as an outstanding example of modern politics, of the supremacy of perception over performance and spin over substance.
I couldn't agree more. Carr kept the wheels the machine ticking over whilst doing a bit of repair and maintenance, with a political focus on reaction, short term solutions, working the media headlines, law and order and budget surpluses.
That approach meant neglect of infrastructure.
That is the model followed by the Rann Government in SA. Its current political dominance is also going to be wasted in terms of health energy, and sustainable urban living.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:18 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Health: unions rule don't you know
One of the key problems in the Australian health system is the way doctors protect their turf through their union--the AMA. The AMA acts to make sure that doctors are the only gatekeepers to the public health system.
This restriction on trade is crucial because the health system is beginning to shift from a focus on treatment of acute disease to prevention of sickness.
The AMA blocks increased competition from nurses, allied health professionals, and pharmicists in the name of cutting corners, and second rate medicine, and finite budgets.
The problem is that through the AMA criticizes others for being anti- competitive--the pharmacists for trying to block the entry of the Woolworths in to their sector--they lobby against any extension of Medicare to other health workers. The AMA hides its standover union tactics of holding governments to ransom behind the aura of being concerned with better health care.
The pressure is building in the health care system with poor medical care, increasing costs of public health budgets, workforce shortages and closed training shops designed to limit supply.
The cracks will appear in the rural regions where the shortage of doctors means bad health outcomes. There are suggestions of an appraoch that would train a new type of rural health worker who could diagnose and prescribe certain drugs thereby circumventing doctors' traditional monopoly on prescription rights. The new rural health worker would be a doctor-nurse hybrid. This roll back of GP monopoly would require would involve a new training course.
Another way to tackle the GP gatekeeper approach to health care is to devise alternative pathways to preventive health care than the GP drugs approach. That approach can be developed by allied health professionals.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 27, 2005
media: changes on the way
There is no need to comment is there?
The Howard Government's proposed new media laws will decrease the diversity of the media. The reforms will scrap foreign ownership, allow TV networks to offer viewers multiple digital channels, and give pay TV the right to broadcast more major sporting events.
This deregulation of the media industry will enable media companies to control more than one form of media in the same metropolitan market. Does that not mean increasing concentration of the media?
The Communications Minister Helen Coonan says that she intends to introduce a "diversity" rule that would ensure there were five large media companies in each capital city. Crikey's Daily Report points out that five large media companies in each city means greater concentration, as there are currently nine large media companies operating in Sydney and Melbourne.
That means the changes in existing media rules are not going to disadvantage the big media companies and owners.It is to be expected as that is the rules of the game.
No doubt this means even greater scope for the partisan commentary of the Murdoch media, (The Sun, Fox News, Daily Telegraph), and using the various media outlets in Australia, the US and the UK as pro-war propaganda machines in the war on terorism. Crikey debated this reecently, Stephen Mayne said that:
"Fox News is not journalism. It's propaganda that has blindly endorsed the Iraq war strategy and amazingly misrepresented the Australia-US alliance."
In response, Christian Kerr said:
Fox News not journalism?...All commercial media is a product flogged to consumers to get advertising to make a profit. Always has been, always will be.. If people don't like Rupert's products, then don't consume them...This is business. Fox has a winning formula. If it goes out of fashion, no doubt it will change.
Kerr says nothing is wrong about mass deception or the way that Murdoch is a part of the counter enlightenment. It is just business. Money is all that matters. Anything else is being idealistic for Kerr.
Nothing much in this debate about the media, democracy, public debate there. Mayne suggests that propaganda by the media is wrong as it is not journalism. But he does not explicitly connect the failure to be balanced in their coverage to the importance of public debate on public issues in a liberal democracy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:55 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 26, 2005
a seismic economic shift?
Last week the Chinese revalued their currency and linked it to a basket of currencies. The revaluation is modest (a mere 2%) and a long way from the 27.5% revaluation that some politicians in the US Congress are demanding. Nor is a 2% revaluation very much for a country that is likely to run a current account surplus of 6 or 8% of GDP. It won't have a huge impact on trade flows between China and Europe and China and the US.
Is it enough to deflect political pressure from the US protectionists, who posed a threat to geo-political stability? No doubt they see the yuan as being undervalued by 10-25%. Is it enough to deflect the European protectionists from putting restrictions on Chinese imports?
Does the revaluing mean that the Chinese will shift away from holding their foreign reserves in US Treasury bonds and notes?
All this emphasis on China indicates that the US is not the only economic (global trading hub) in the world. China second trading hub is forming in Asia, and is centred around China. Does Beijing's move from a $US peg to alignment with a basket of currencies signify a step toward an Asian currency network controlled by Asia, and not by the central banks of the US and Europe?
If so, then that is a seismic shift. The US is excluded from the East Asia Summit.
What does that mean for Australia? Can Canberra afford to be Washington's advocate in Beijing, especially when the Pentagon has gone paranoid about China threatening the US empire in Asia?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 25, 2005
condemning multiculturalism
I've mentioned here about the way the conservative discourse around national security is targeting multiculturalism. I've been keeping my eye out for more. An example by Joel Kotkin downloaded from the New American Foundation into the op.ed. pages of the Sydney Morning Herald.
I know very little about the New American Foundation other than this, so I am just working off the op.ed. Kotkin's big argument is failure to deal with security leads to urban decline:
Though the fashion is to blame energy, food and water shortages for urban decline, far more cities have fallen due to a breakdown in security. Whether the menace is internal disorder or external threat, history shows that once a city can no longer protect its inhabitants, they inevitably flee, and it slides into decline and even extinction. While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security--and addressing it aggressively---that they will be able to survive and thrive.
That is reasonable, especially in the global city of Sydney. We do not want the city to be shrouded in fear and a growing sense of dread from being unable to deal with a concerted campaign to wreck havoc and destablize everyday life.
Then Kotkin slips in something else and it jarrs.
We have this:
Sadly, many metropolitan leaders seem less than prepared to meet the terrorist threat head-on, in part due to the trendy multiculturalism that now characterises so many Western cities.If cities are to survive in Europe or elsewhere, they will have to face up to the need for sometimes harsh measures, such as tighter immigration laws, preventive detention and widespread surveillance of suspected terrorists, to protect the urban future.
The twilight zone of lurking danger is connected to multiculturalism. Presumably protecting the urban future requires that trendy multiculturalism is dumped, ethnic communities are to be targeted for surveillance and assimilation (integration) becomes the governing order of the day.
Why so? The conservative message is that Australians are way too soft when it comes to tolerating other cultures in their cities. Australians are all about feeling warm and fluffy, making bliss out of ignorance, and so lost in their reveries that they forget that cultural diversity means Sydney gang rapes, German honour killings and suicide bombers. So argues Mark Steyne in an op ed in Murdoch's The Australian.
Tis time the multiculturalists faced reality.
Update: 26th July
A defence of multiculturalism in The Age by Petro Georgiou, the federal Liberal MP for Kooyong.As he observes:
Multiculturalism's embrace of cultural diversity built on Australia's liberal democratic traditions. The policy was never without limits. Multiculturalism has always explicitly expected all Australians, new and old, to make a commitment to Australia and Australia's interests, to the basic structures and principles of Australian society - the constitution and rule of law, parliamentary democracy, tolerance and equality, freedom of speech and religion and English as the national language.
So the attack on multiculturalism can be interpreted as an attack on liberalism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:17 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 24, 2005
Iraq & Iran as allies?
The neo-cons, who launched the Iraq war, imagined that building a secular federal democracy in Iraq, would ensure Iraq's close ties to Israel, that Iraq would be a close ally of the US, that it would be a model for democracy in the Arabian Peninsula, and act as a buffer against Iran, the so-called axis of evil in the Middle East.
Whilst the Iraqi Constitution continues to be drafted, it increasingly looks as if the Shiite Iraqi Government is aligning itself with Iran, which is an enemy of the US.
Does this mean that the US is losing control of the situation?
The US/UK presence is not really a stabilizing factor, as it's presence is seen as a prolonged foreign occupation and fosters the insurgency. Trying to defeat the insurgency militarily only encourages the insurgency.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 23, 2005
not really
This Tandberg cartoon kinda captures John Howard's understanding of the connection between the US/UK/Australian invasion and occupation of Iraq and the London bombings:
Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, counters this. He says:
The war on terrorism is heading south. The key reason is that the West's strategy for this war is fundamentally flawed. It presumes that suicide terrorism is mainly a product of an evil ideology called "Islamic fundamentalism" and that this ideology would produce campaigns of suicide terrorism wherever it exists and regardless of our military policies. This presumption is wrong, and is leading towards foreign policies that are making our situation worse.
He adds that the principal factor driving support for suicide terrorism among British Muslims was not an evil ideology, but deep anger over British military policies on the Arabian Peninsula.
That brings multiculturalism to the foreground doesn't it.
In returning there we encounter the conservatism of Miranda Devine's account of fundamentalism in the diaspora:
The increasing permissiveness of Western culture, coupled with a multiculturalism that encourages ethnic ghettoes, can only fuel the inner conflicts of alienated young Muslim men.
Wow.
By 'increasing permissiveness of Western culture' she means an erasing of the:
"..long-established culture of Australia, permanently rooted as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and replacing it with vapid, secularist nothingness is not going to help. It simply creates a vacuum for radical Islam to rush in and fill.
Gee, we'd better not mention Derrida at this point. Do not the cultural conservatives accuse Derrida of being a foreign agent who has destroyed the humanities; taken the "human" out of the humanities: reduced everything in the world to texts and signifiers, and erased the subjectivity of the individual.Even worse, Derrida has reduced the world to language, to the relativity of linguistic signs—---thereby making the world "meaningless," and so promoting nihilism. Why, Derrida stands for nothingness, in this conservative discourse that would like to see the humanities purged of the "postmodernist cancer."
And by multiculturalism Devine appears to mean "the unreasonable demands of intolerant minorities trying to impose their will on the majority." A secular liberalism is fingered as the problem. Saying that a political and cultural liberal culture is sick and infected, and so lies at the center of the storm, is far more strident than Pauline Hanson ever was.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 22, 2005
insider trading
Renee Rivkin is jailed for one count of insider trading. Steve Vizard receives a slap on the wrist for his three counts of insider trading, whilst he was a director of Telstra. So he was dishonest.
I reckon Pryor misses the point on this:
It is the corporate regulator, the ASIC, who should be in the dock for striking a cosy deal and for letting Vizard walk.
Why not jail--periodic detention---like Rivkin? The ASIC wimped: it requested only a five year ban on directorships and less than the maximum fine per offence of $200,000.
Commentators talk about Vizard being punished through the loss of reputation in political and business circles. What about the reputation of ASIC as a regulator being in tatters? Didn't Vizard create an elaborate corporate structure to avoid detection? Doesn't that indicate intent?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 21, 2005
a little insight
Whilst on holidays and watching DVD's I've been dipping into the news here and there-- a quick grab on Radio National Breakfastin the morning; a fast look at the 7.30 Report in the evening; and a glance at the AFR and a scan of some online newspapers during the day.
It is hard to miss all the publicity about John Howard as the global statesman that puts Kim Beazley in the shade.
However, I did notice the way the Minister of Health, Tony Abbott, has lost his reforming zeal.
Indications are is that he is buckling under the pressure from the the big drug companies in relation to the government's generic drugs policy. It's been four concessions/exemptions from the Government's decision to pay 12.5% less for all medicines in a therapeutic group when the first generic drug entered that group.
The Treasurer's response was spot on:
"...we don’t want to pay any more than we have to. So if there is a generic pill then we ought to encourage the use of the generic rather than a brand. The PBS is not run for the benefit of pharmaceutical companies. It is run for the benefit of the patients. We have now got a co-payment in there but we have got to be rigorous about testing the new medicines, bringing to market generic brand alternatives, making sure that we don’t have unnecessary medications on that scheme."
That gives a little indication of the way health has become dependent on drugs rather than primary health care.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 20, 2005
it's like a movie script
Here we go again doing empire duties in the war against against al-Qaeda.
Weren't we in Afghanistan before? Wasn't that part of empire sorted? That is why we the moved on to do our duty in the borderlands of Iraq. Now are returning to do counter-insurgency duties in Afghanistan, cos there is ongoing Taliban troubles on that part of the empire's frontier.
Maybe the troubles never went away? I understand that the Taliban has lot of support from within Pakistan, an ally of the US. Why don't they send in their troops to help with the counterinsurgency? Or has the US aligned itself with India against China and left Pakistan out in the cold?
No doubt Australia will be required to do more in Iraq to help settle things down, and establish a client state within the empire. Funny I thought that the way things were going is that a democratic Iraqi regime run by the Shi'ites would align itself with Iran. That has to unstable and a threat for empire. Doesn't that outcome defeat the purpose of going in there in the first place?
Hugh White thinks through some of the consequences of Australia's empire duties.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:41 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
July 19, 2005
Israel divided
As the conflict between religion and the state re-ignites in Israel, this representation of Israeli internal dialog gets to the point:
1. - We keep the settlements
- No, we don't keep them.
2. - We destroy Gaza settlements
- No, we don't destroy them.
(Khalil Abu Arafeh, Alquds, 7/9/05).
The debate is about the Jewish colonialism in the territories. The right are defending the violently established colonial settlements, as the Israeli state begins the withdrawal from the Jewish colonies in Gaza. The process of decolonisation is a familar scenario.
Overlaying this is another kind of violence. Israeli troops, tanks and armoured vehicles have massed, ready for an offensive into the Gaza Strip, in retaliation for the continuing Hamas rocket and mortar salvoes, despite an appeal by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for them to stop.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 18, 2005
Crikey on the Palmer Report
I've just read Crikey's Daily report, that was sent out to subscribers last Friday. In it Michael Pascoe makes a good comment about the Howard Government's spin around Palmer Report. It stands in contrast to the conservative response which is content to fill in the details of the Government's spin.
Pascoe says that Vivian Alvarez and Cornelia Rau are relatively lucky because they are Australian citizens. He reminds us that what has been conveniently forgotten is the cases of thousands of non-Australian citizens abused and maltreated by DIMIA, who have been kept under the carpet. Pasco says:
Palmer was excluded from examining the much bigger and no-doubt uglier picture, leaving Howard and Vanstone to pretend these were two unfortunate mistakes instead of being the natural outcome of government policy.The message sent by Howard and Vanstone is that it's not a rogue department at all, that the good servants of DIMIA have been doing just what their political masters have wanted. Under the policy of deterrence, Australia is to be a fearsome place for non-citizens. DIMIA thuggery is not only tolerated, it is encouraged by the government's words and actions. No-one is sacked when such behaviour unfortunately comes to light. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.
Mistakes? Palmer talks in terms of failure---of culture, process, management, instruction, executive leadership, training, record-keeping, diagnosis, treatment and duty of care. This is a Department doing what was required by the Howard Government. It is government policy to have mandatory detention centres that function as camps in which detainees, or rather prisoners, are maltreated as routine practice.
'Mistakes' highlights the banality of evil involved in public administration.
A state of emergency (the boat people) required such deterrence. Even though the emergency has actually passed (ie., no more boat people) the deterrence, camps, maltreatment and brutality remain. They have become a normal feature of the political landscape.
The state of exception is now the normal. In the light of this Andrew Bartlett's observations are on target:
The notion that you can overhaul the culture of an entire Department without reforming the laws and policies which are the air that Department has breathed for the last decade (and more) is farcical. It is also a convenient way of blaming the public servants, who have basically just delivered the system the Government has demanded.
The law and policies remain firmly locked in place. Still, the public servants should be held responsible for the harm they have caused to Australian citizens and to the refugees.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:47 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 17, 2005
a new non-liberal world dawns
'Tis a new everyday world that has formed as a result of 'the war on terrorism', and its domestic use by conservatives to legitimate the national security state:
Matt Golding
The conservatives are playing politics with terror. John Richardson over at Webdiary describes this politics as a fear meme, in which:
"...our political warriors employ the best of darkest-hours rhetoric to paint the enemy as fundamentalist Islamic jihadists: barbarian hordes at the gate; savages determined to destroy our freedom and liberty."
The fundamentalist Islamic jihadists want to wind back the gains of the enlightenment and to destroy our civil liberties and freedoms.
Ted Lapkin, director of policy analysis at the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, runs this conservative discourse about the destruction of western civilization with its 'we will never concede defeat to terrorism' etc. However, he links the war against the barbaric enemies abroad with up the enemies at home, with phrases like 'appeasement', 'anti-Americanism' and 'refusal to recognize the existence of the conflict' to highlight the 'radical left's blindness and stupidity in linking terrorism to the war in Iraq.
No doubt we will shortly hear about more proposals to lessen our liberty in the name of the state of emergency, because of the cancerous cells of traitors residing within the body politic. And more talk about the end of multiculturalism, the blind embrace of moral relativism, and dismissal of the liberal tolerance of non-Western values because it provides excuses and rationales for terror.
A state of emergency is required because we Australians are caught up in a war of necessity to defend western society from those in an alien civilization who 'despise our values and want to destroy 'our way of life'. Liberty needs to be sacrificed to ensure security in this endless war. So speaks conversatism.
Update: 20 July 2005
It didn't take long for the move against freedom of speech. The tabloids (eg., Daily Telegraph) attention is firmly focused on Islamic bookshops in Sydney and Melbourne selling extremist,inflammatory literature (such as a book carrying an endorsement by Osama bin Laden on the cover). Attorney-General Philip Ruddock is now talking about possible new measures against bookshops.
Hate books they are called. Hate books promoting terror acts. We are that far from fascists burning of books they didn't like. Liberalism is under the gun from the conservative tabloids., who seem to have fogotten that they are supposed to be defending the values of a free society.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 16, 2005
Israel: thinking differently in Australia
The discourse on Israel in Australia is broadening with posts such as this by Evan Jones over at Alert and Alarmed and by this by Antony Lowenstein. These posts challenge the hegemony of the neo-con discourse of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) that sanctions the harsh neo-colonial Israeli measures against the Palestinians in the occupied territories and acted as an apologist for the settler movement.
It has always suprised me how much Australians have gone along with this conservative Jewish discourse with its hostility to those sympathetic to Palestinian national aspirations; even though they are aware that the settler movement is a land grab, which has been subsidised and legitimated by the Jewish Israeli state. In doing so these Australians have supported, and been comfortable, with the idea of Israeli sovereignty over all of Palestine and with the completion of the settlement grid is a major element.
Though Israel is effectively a client state of the US, it has had a lot of say in the way empire functions in the Middle East.
The US supports the two-state solution as a way to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet it knows that this probably means that the Palestinians will eventually end up with only 12-15 percent of their land, made up of disjointed ghettoes over which they will have no effective sovereignty.
That is neo-colonialism is it not?
Does that not mean that the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza? Does that mean that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed? Does that now mean that a single, secular polity that would encompass both Israel and the Occupied Territories is now looking increasingly attractive?
Does that mean that the one-state solution, in whatever form (binational or ethnically cleansed), is now the only option. Does that mean that that Israel should confront its obsolete ethno-nationalism and face a post-Zionist vision for the country, however hard that might be. The alternative --the forced transfer of Palestinians out of the territory---does not look to be attractive.
An argument for such a singular secular entity.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 15, 2005
Palmer Report--buck stops where?
I missed the release of the Palmer Report in Canberra yesterday afternoon, just before the press conference attended by the PM and Minister Vanstone.
I did watch Amanda Vanstone being interviewed by Maxine McKew on the ABC's 7.30 Report last night, and heard her again this morning being interviewed by Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast.
It was all about a boots and all report, the culture of DIMA being the core problem, and the Minister making the necessary changes before she was required to. Minister Vanstone is doing a good job in other words. That was her defence in relation the Westminster tradition of ministerial responsibility.
A good job? Some think otherwise:
Oh yes she has. Her denial of moral responsibility. The Minister was a part of Cabinet and so a party to the policies that gave rise to the problems at DIMA. She is as equally responsible for them as Minister Ruddoch, or the PM.mandatory detnetion is a foundation stone that enabled the Howard Governemnt to retain its power in 1991.
The Minister's strategy is put a firewall between the bad department and the good Howard government. Therein lies te denial of moral responsibility for causing harm to others.
In listening to the interviews I was reminded of Hannah Arendt's understanding of the banality of evil whilst listening to the evasive spin about ethical responsibility.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 14, 2005
a different narrative
The political rhetoric of empire in response to the July 7 London bombings:
I listened to John Howard on the airwaves this morning. It was a replayed segment of this interview on the ABC's 7.30 Report. The PM was using the caricature of al-Qaida fanatics to run the quiet political stirring about possibilities and 'could be's' about homegrown terrorists and suicide bombers living in Australian Muslim communities. It was about us becoming alert and alarmed.
The tabloid Murdoch media takes the cue. Andrew Bolt dumps on any Muslim cleric who links the bombings to US/UK policy in the Middle East, or questions that policy, as wrong. The scaremongering with its language of social sickness, vile perversion, nests of violent extremists infesting our communities, monsters lurking with in, soft liberal ideology, is rolled out by the Daily Telegraph. Piers Ackerman is on the integrationist meme with his 'Vipers who live off our warmth' column directed at Australian multiculturalism.
The strategy of the One Nation conservatives is to divide Australians one from another.
The on-the-ground reality in the UK is that the suicide bombers were cleanskins with no convictions or known terrorist involvement.They were foot soldiers who do not fit the standard caricature of 'al-Qaida fanatics'. Madeline Brunt says:
It must be an agonising moment to be a British Muslim. This has been their worst nightmare come true: British-born young men from families who were well established in this country committing a suicide bomb attack... the actions of these four men have thrown British Muslims into the biggest crisis of their community’s history. It makes of the 7/7 atrocities a completely different narrative to those of Madrid or New York: our enemy is in our midst. It puts the British model of multiculturalism - which until now has been the source of considerable, quiet admiration across Europe - under unprecedented scrutiny. It was always obvious that British multiculturalism had some major inadequacies - 70% of all Pakistani and Bangladeshi children grow up in poverty and nearly 40% leave school with no qualifications - but never before have we had to consider whether it has failed. And if so, in what way?
As Madeline Bunting observes the strategy of an intrusive, aggressive state tearing into local Muslim communities of British/Australian citizens, who mostly favour reform and liberal democracy, is not going to work.
The One Nation Conservative response ignores how the Islamic diaspora in Britain and Australia has largely rejected radicalism, extremism, and jihadism of al-Qaeda. The latter, just like our One Nation Conservatives, understands the debate between Islam and the West in terms of the clash of civilizations, with its inevitable conflict between the West and Islam, of war and mistrust and fear.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
tales of hope, freedom and prosperity
A conference on industrial relations reform, but none of the speeches are online. So what was said?
I have found this op. ed. by Geroge Williams about the constitutional implications and the relevance to federalism. Williams talks about the legal hurdles in establishing a much-needed national industrial relations system without the co-operation of the states.
Presumably the government taxpayer-funded campaign on workplace reform will highlight the economic benefits of a deregulated labour market leading to paradise regained. Will this be similar to the NZ experience? Kenneth Davidson says that the:
"...economic impact of the NZ reforms was plummeting productivity as bosses switched from capital-intensive methods of production to cheaper labour and a growing skills deficit as the incentive for employers to invest in a disposable labour force diminished."
Does that not then that many working poor Australians will be left behind, as the country increasingly pursues wealth creation and prosperity through a self-regulating market, which works to privatize benefits and socialize harms.
Presumably, the St Vincent de Paul Society will have to continue sticking up for those on the margin as those on the drip feed regale us with tales of hope, faith, freedom and prosperity.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:54 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 13, 2005
G8: bye bye?
It seems as if the G8 just faded from view. Was its irrelevance covered by the saturated media coverage around the London Bombings?
The eight leaders of the industrialised world promised a doubling of aid to Africa worth $25bn by 2010, as well as a debt relief package covering an initial 17 countries. But there was nothing on trade liberalisation (ending US and European subsidies).
And we cannot expect much from the WTO in the future Doha round.
I heard very little about global warming. Oh, they did agree that to agree that climate change was a problem, that human activity led to greenhouse gas emissions and that emissions had to be stabilised and then reduced. Good oh, that's a start. A solid start you might say. Oh, and they are going to have a new dialogue when Kyoto expires in 2012. That should please the big energy users in the US and Australia.
But there was an action plan to address the possibility of global decline.
Was there anything about international economic governance to address the serious economic imbalances in the rapidly changing world economy? I heard nothing on this. It seems as if the G8 nations are not interested in international coordination. Then again, maybe they took advice from the Reserve Bank of Australia: the imbalances (eg., China's surpluses, the US & Australia's deficits) are really nothing to worry about. Things are looking good. Global economic growth will continue to expand. Any problems for Austtralia are manageable.
Have things shifted beyond the power of the G8? Is that what the irrelevance of the G8 means?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 12, 2005
political corruption SA #2
Does the Ashbourne political corruption trial and inquiry mark South Australia's loss of political innocence?
The Ashbourne Affair in SA refers to the deal that had been reportedly done for former Labor party Deputy leader Ralph Clarke to be found some government appointments in return for Clarke agreeing to join Attorney General Michael Atkinson in abandoning libel actions they had been pursuing against each other.
The Premier's senior advisor Randall Ashbourne had supposedly cut the deal. Ashbourne was charged with improper conduct (abused his public office), which lead to the recent trial and the acquittal of Ashbourne.
Political pressure from the opposition parties has forced the Rann Government to promise an inquiry into its initial handling of the Ashbourne disclosures back in 2002. It is seeking to confine the scope of the inquiry to prevent any timebomb exploding about the covering up of the possibility that cutting the deal was a breach of crimiinal law.
The Australian Democrats are demanding a wide, public inquiry into allegations of corruption within the Rann government. The fact that the Rann Government does not control the Legislative Council means that the various opposition parties and Independents can act as a counter to the general tendency in this Westminster derived political system to allow the political executive to dominate Parliament.
Will the Liberals act with the other opposition parties to bring about a strengthening of Parliament at the Executive's expense so as to fetter the Executive?
Where we stand at the moment is State Parliament's Legislative Council now conducting its own investigation, after a deadlock over legislation establishing a judicial inquiry.
This is not going well with the Rann Government. Its conduct with Stephen Pallaras, the Director of Public Prosecutions, indicates a tendency for mauling and discrediting those with whom it has differences.
The Atkinson-Ashbourne Affair increasingly looks to be a can of worms. Will the codes of silence be prised open to reveal political corruption? Will the inquiry be damaging to public trust in the Rann Government? Will the alarm bells start sounding?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 11, 2005
Muslim diaspora
One theme in the media discourse around the London bombings over the last day or so is that the most likely perpetrators were Muslim British subjects with UK passports, rather than al-Qaeda. The vulnerable and defensive Muslim diaspora is being fingered: the diaspora has radical Islamists, who believe in Islam as an ideology of political and social transformation and the use of violence under special circumstances to achieve their objectives. These radicals are seen as equivalent to neo-fundamentalist terrorists.
Little evidence is given for this Muslim diaspora claim. What it does do is block and deny the real political connection between the London bombings and the UK invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The message is that there are cells of radicals and neo-fundamentalists within the country we live in and that we need to flush them out. Hence we have a state of emergency on our hands.
Behind the media flows you can find the neocon military drum beat: we have to do everything it takes to crush the terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe and elsewhere. We have to deter or remove regimes that co-operate with terrorists. We cannot be seduced by the call to surrender as the Spirit of Madrid mobilizes. This truth behind this sophistry is that the state of exception is no longer a state of emergency. It is a normal state in the global struggle (light) against terrorism (darkness).
After reading that rhetoric from the war party, you can do yourself a big favour and read this report about how Britain and the US are privately planning to withdraw most of their forces from Iraq by early next year. Maybe the Australians can help out? As President Bush said when he laid down the gauntlet: you're either with us or with the terrorists.
It is dawning on the British state that an imminent strategic defeat is looming in Iraq. That throws a new light on the Weekly Standard's war rhetoric doesn't it.
The best strategic move is to give back Iraq to the Iraqi people.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 10, 2005
a digitalized Adelaide Festival of Ideas (2005)?
The Adelaide Festival of Ideas is taking place this weekend. As I noted at junk for code yesterday, very little of the Festival material is online; even though the activist ethos of the festival is all about the public discussion of ideas that help make Australia a better place. In 2003, the conservative response, as expressd by Tim Blair, was to sneer at the social democratic ethos. The Festival has become caught up in the culture wars.
Suprisingly, very little of the discussion at the Festival appears to be devoted to the new digital world disclosed by the internet. Or to the importance of intellectual property rights, fair use of ideas and images, the creative commons, the public domain or sphere, and the public conversation of citizens in a liberal democracy.
John Quiggin is the honourable exception. He is talking about these issues at the Festival. I'm sure whether he took the step to digital democracy.
I'm suprised by the lack of the connection of the ethos of public discussion of ideas and informed debate to the flaws of liberal democracy. It is as if the intellectual property aspect of the US Free Trade Agreement with Australia has been forgotten. There were some big negatives there beyond the FTA being not such a sweet deal for Australia.
It is as if the way that the corporate media is moving to close down public access (subscription only) to their content and commentary is irrelevant to the public discussion of ideas; or seen as not being important for the informed debate amongst citizens
I'm suprised by this blindness given the number of academics. They would realize that most of the academic material is closed behind the walls of subscription only journals, inaccessible and the domain of the privileged. They would be aware that few of the little magazines that sustained the civic conversation in the past have palced their archived material online. And they would know the critical edge of the Senate has been blunted. So Australia's democratic deficit is going to worsen.
Should not the face-to-face public discussion of ideas that matter in the Festival be linked to the newly forming digital world, given the Festival's ethos of a general open community of people who can agree to civilly disagree about important issues?
What the 2005 Festival of Ideas discloses is that it has not stepped into, let alone embraced, our digital world. It is suprising because people in Adelaide now have access to genuine high speed broadband, way beyond what Telstra is willing or prepared to offer us consumers. Those festival talks should be online for people to read and to comment on.
The pre-digital world of the village townhall, with its face-to-face human contact and personal human interactions can be contrasted with the digital world of the bloggers who work from online material that is accesssible to all those with an internet connection. When you've gone digital, and live in that world and think about in terms of the public discussion of ideas, then you start to notice what is now happening behind your back. Let me describe this by pulling out some comments I made here:
Copyright protection and the public interest are seen to be diametrically opposed. That is the consequence of thinking the public domain in terms of a bundle of individual property rights. Standard academic convention is no longer acceptable. You pay or else with the new IP copy right laws the US is imposing on all it cuts a deal with. The "public's" interests should be subordinated to the private interests of the US companies. What has happened is the public commons is being squeezed and the idea of fair use is being removed.
As the bloggers break new ground in the digital world we realize that this world is overwhelmingly driven by the natural marketplace desire to make a money profit, not the desire to enhance democracy.
Cameron Riley observed here that the bloggers need to keep pushing the boundaries. He says:
It is my opinion some of the more trafficked Auian blog sites should make the transition from blog to community site; such as LP, Catallaxy, troppo, surfdom etc. Blogging software has its own limitations, and scoop is the next step from blog to community.
That is probably right as the blogs tend to develop their own little community groupings of readers and commentators. Those little electronic communities represent the public discussion of ideas in the digital world. The blogs can be seen as the innovative use of information technologies by people to educate and empower themselves and so foster the civic conversation upon which the strength of the democracy depends.
The digital flaw with the Adelaide Festival of Ideas highlights the pressing need for public information, ideas and discussions to go online and make them the raw material for the public conversation in the digital world. Without that you get very narrow debates about a narrow set of issues as is happening over at Quiggin's blog
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:53 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
July 9, 2005
London bombings+ war on terror
We should mourn the loss of civilian life and express deep sympathy with the injured and the bereaved who have lost family and friends:
The security analyist account is that Iraqi resistance forces have taken their insurgent military operations to enemy territory, Britain. The "chickens were coming home to roost" for US and UK politicians who continue to obscure the nature of the al-Qaeda struggle by maintaining that the organization attacks the West because "they hate our values" and not because of specific western policies, such as US/UK military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq or US/Uk support for Israel against the Palestinians.
Should we not try to avert or avoid greater civilian tragedy by starting the serious and difficult process of rethinking the conduct of this "war on terror"? Is that not a better response to the bombings than flexing the muscles, or saying we won't be intimidated, we need to show solidarity with the Bush administration in order to strengthen the US-[fill country in as required] security alliance, etc, etc.
Let's look at this editorial from Murdoch's Australian, entitled 'Standing firm in the face of Terror'.
It says:
What deserves universal horror is the way they presumed the right to take life, and all its promise, from people who were going about their business in London on Thursday morning. This was more than an attack on London, it was an assault on the billions of people around the world who share Londoners' values, and today sympathise with their suffering....These attacks are the work of misanthropes who have no faith in humanity, no hope for the future, outcasts who compensate for their own inadequacies by killing innocent individuals who have done them no harm. The attacks are all the more monstrous for the utter absence of any achievable objective...This was a senseless slaughter, another attack in the terror war perpetrated by people whose only objective is to kill, and to keep on killing - because it is the only way they can assuage their odious anger with all who will not bow to their will.
Something has been forgotten here. Fallujah.
The sustained assault employing extraordinary firepower that left a city with a good deal more than 1,000 people killed or injured, half the dwellings wrecked, almost every school, mosque or public building destroyed or damaged, and most of the population fleeing the city as refugees.
The Australian refuses make the connection between the two realities. It says that "any argument that Iraq and Afghanistan are the catalyst for this, or any other attack, is a nonsense." It's pathway is one of endless war that will involve thousands more civilian deaths and tens of thousands of ciivlians maimed. The Australian, as the voice of the war party, recommends that we stand firm and strong on our democratic faith amidst a bitter cycle of ever increasing violence.
We citizens should make the connection between London, Madrid and Bali on the one hand, and Iraq and Afghanistan on the other.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:56 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
July 8, 2005
London bombs & G8
It's grotesque in a baroque kind of way, but notice the premonination:
Steve Bell
The Baghad Bomb Suprise was not a question of if, but one of when and how. It is a counter reprisal to the "war against terror" being waged by the UK; a war that sanctions the use of state terror---bombing raids, torture, countless civilian deaths---in Iraq. It shows the reach of the Islamo fundamentalists in a global world.
It happened in the form of a coordinated terrorist bomb attack on morning commuter trains in the London underground. The attack was timed to coincide with the G8 summit in Gleneagles. The whole of multicultural London's underground system was shut down for the day, London was in gridlock as people left work, around 60 people are dead, and over 700 injured.
An unknown al-Qaida cell called 'The Secret Organisation of al-Qaida' in Europe said that it had carried out the series of blasts in London in retaliation for Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Italy and Demnark were given a warning. Australia was not mentioned. It is assumed by western counter terrorists that those who carried out these attacks are linked to al-Qaida. They are also clear about the intent: to kill and maim many people and to do so on the opening day of the G8 summit in Scotland for maximum international impact.
As Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, observed the tube bombing was not a terrorist attack against the property of the mighty or the powerful for waging war. It was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners. That indiscriminate killing of the innocent is what makes the bombing terrible and shocking.
It is quite different from the IRA' bombings that London experienced and it has similar hallmarks to the deadly rush-hour bombings by al-Qaeda terrorists against commuters in Madrid last year. Al-Qaeda never issues a warning and the intent is to kill and injure as many innocent people as possible.
The other side to this is that United States-led forces have disposed of oppressive regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq; around 200,000 foreign troops are now deployed there fighting the insurgencies that have since developed; at least 40,000 people have been killed in the two countries, most of them civilians; many thousands of people are in detention without trial; and rigorous new anti-terror laws have been brought in by many countries including Australia.
Meanwhile G8 leaders continued to work through the day with officials putting the 'feel good' communique on climate change together. The meeting on Africa is tomorrow but a deal on deal on trade and aid may prove impossible to achieve in Gleneagles as it involves the G8 cutting subsidies to their farmers. I cannot see the US or Europe doing that.
The G8 is in the process of becoming irrelevant as a policy making body. Bush has said that he has increased US aid to Africa. What he did not say was that to qualify, recipients had to adopt democratic reform and a free market economy, protect US investment, lift barriers to US goods, and provide a friendly environment for US policies.
Bush continues to promote a US big business agenda. That is the approach of the G8 is it not?
Update: 8.7.05
We have lots of fine Churchillian stoical rhetoric that diplaces the Arab leaders condemnation of the killings. Alas, little mention is being made of this in the western media, despite the frequently drawn distinction between fundamentalist terrorists and moderate Islam, to show that the "war on terror" is not a crusade against a civilization.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:53 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
July 7, 2005
capital/labour
This Petty image of the ALP tearing itself apart is only a few days old, yet it does not quite gell, due to the strong public relations campaign on the industrial relations issue waged by the unions and the ALP.
The ALP has found its line in the sand issue, which allows it to muscle up and look strong and it has been able to place the Howard Government under pressure. People are concerned, if not fearful that employers will use individual contracts to cut wages or conditions rather than introduce new processes or technologies to improve productivity.
The ALP has found a way to win back a majority of the blue and lower white-collar voting constituency in Australia, and regain its grip on what had once been its electoral bedrock.
We can now expect a strong public relations campaign from the Howard Government that goes beyond providing information on the industrial relations reforms and crosses into the territory of public money being used for political campaign.
What will be their theme? Sinking the boot into unions as part of a tough anti-union campaign (Labor lies Union deceptions?) that is judged to be a political winner? That ending essential employment rights gives rise to large-scale job creation? Industrial relations reform is not going to help resolve the skills shortage, nor necessarily reverse the slowdown in productivity in Australia. So how will the IR reforms increase economic growth?
Given the way the ALP/union campaign has already struck a cord, the Coalition will need to show that its unfair dismissal proposals and watering down of award conditions will not undermine job security and hurt ordinary workers with families. Otherwise problems in the Senate loom with Senators Barnaby Joyce and Steve Fielding.
What we currently have is a traditional labour/capital conflict with the ALP representing the interests of the big unions and the Coalition representing the interests of big business.
What has been forgotten is the need for a unitary system of industrial relations to replace the present system of six different workplace relations jurisdictions which is costly, inefficient and damaging in a country of only twenty million people. Is that not common ground? After all, in a federal nation-state employers and employees should have the same industrial rights and obligations regardless of the state in which they live.
I agree with Senator Andrew Murray on this. We need an industrial relations system that can provide for both the systematic regulation of employment practices, whilst maximising and balancing productivity, jobs growth and job security; and ensure a decent wage or just pay, along with fair conditions and treatment for all employees.
Although I have just shifted from wage contract under collective bargaining to an individual contract, from what I have seen so far is that the proposed IR reforms tip the balance of workplace relations to favour employers, leaving many workers vulnerable. The harm comes from reducing employee protections that are needed to protect those workers without the market power to negotiate an improvement in their working conditions for increased productivity.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 6, 2005
Canberra bureaucracy's failure
According to Michelle Grattan, Andrew Podger, a retired Canberra bureaucrat, raised the issue of the politicization of the federal bureaucracy, in his retirement speech. He said that:
"I remain uneasy about public servants trying to hide their legal authority and responsibility and to refuse to hear requests for asylum they would have had to consider; and about senior public servants and military officers continuing to maintain in the Parliament the possibility that children were thrown overboard many weeks after Air Vice-Marshal Houston's advice (that children were not thrown overboard) was given and known to be given."
Such conduct does not imply a degree of independence by the Canberra bureaucracy with a need to be responsive to the Minister's interests. It indicates that the public interest has pushed aside in favour of protecting the partisan interest of the government of the day.
That is the old fashioned view of the bureaucracy--the one in which frank and fearless advice is offered. The contemporary view is the political one in which the bureaucracy is there to than please the government of the day--go with the government's flow even to the point of dissembling before Senate estimates.
The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Afairs (DIMA) is a classic example of a department that trashes good public service values by serving the Minister and forgetting about the public interest. A draft of the report into the Rau case by former police commissioner Mick Palmer, which was tabled in Queensland Parliament yesterday, said that Ms Rau, who suffers from a mental illness, received health care that was demonstrably inadequate by any measure. Ms Rau was simply a person who desperately needed help.
The Immigration Department aggravated her illness by mistreatment, because it defined her as a visa violator and then treated her as a prisoner not an immigration detainee.
The cowboy culture of DIMA led to the illegal detention of Ms Rau, the wrongful deportation of Ms Alvarez and a failure to provide both Australian citizens with medical care and attention.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 5, 2005
shifting political ground
The Howard Government has now gained control of the Senate. The Democrats have now lost official party status. The Nationals gain Senate party status. The Greens have effectively aligned themselves with the ALP.
Leahy, After the Deluge
Maybe not.
The Nationals are looking pretty frisky with Senator Barnaby Joyce talking the classic Senate talk of House of Reviews, federalism, and Senators representing their region. That checks and balances view is the response the centralisation of industrial relations in the hands of the federal government. Even the WA senators are edgy.
The Nationals are also talking about driving hard bargains on Telstra, industrial relations, voluntary student unionism, and retail competition.
A more flexible labour market may well have a detrimental impact on families. If households are placed at risk through unfair dismissals by bastard employers using the new IR legislation, then that pulls the rug under quality family life. The neo-liberal IR reforms then start to undercut the value of family life in a globalised world. Are not family values resolutely defended by cultural and political conservatives?
Now that discloses a good space for the ALP to play some classic wedge politics. Will the ALP conservatives have the strategic smarts to do this?
Or will it be the Nationals in order to regain lost popularity and rebuild their profile?
Remember National Senators, such as Barnaby Joyce, and Family First Senator Steve Fielding, were elected by electoral Senate constituents traditionally opposed to neo-liberal economic reforms and very wary of the proposed Coalition bills, especially the sale of the core network of Telstra. If both Senators want to be re-elected they will need to keep that constitutency onside.
That means they cannot afford to become clones of a Liberal Party that will contest their Senate seat in 2010. That means they will have to maintain their minority profile to avoid political death.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 4, 2005
a deflating housing bubble means....
Ross Gittens mentioned this a while ago in terms of the consequences of falling house prices. His scenario was built around big problems from rapidly falling housing prices. That looked unlikely because the housing boom was ending with a whimper--running out of puff--- rather than a bang--- being choked off by a steep rise in interest rates, which precipitated a serious recession in 1991.
Gittens highlights the heavy dependence of the Australian economy on housing. We can imagine the negative scenario happening in a more complex fashion.
The Age carries a story that Australians will see their wealth decline for the first time since the last recession of 1991. The argument is that, as housing prices fall, we are entering a period where declining household wealth will play a significant and ongoing drag on growth.
A drag on economic growth means increasing unemployment and that means reduced household income. That means reduced ability to pay off household debt, which has arisen from a decade-long debt binge, fuelled by low interest rates and doubling house prices.
It is not just the slow deflation of the massive bubble in house prices. Households have been extracting large amounts of equity from their homes to maintain their high levels of consumer spending relative to their after-tax incomes. So a deflation of the housing bubble would also have an indirect negative impact on consumer spending.
Secondly, the household sector is now much more exposed to economic shocks than 1991. Households are now more sensitive to higher interest rates and to increases in unemployment; they have to make more provision for superannuation and health; and the elimination of unfair dismissal laws for firms with fewer than 100 employees means that it is much easier for employers to shed workers to protect profits from weak consumer demand due to lower economic growth.
Matt Wade observes in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Australia has not yet fully road-tested this new financial scenario, where households are more responsible for retirement incomes, have an unprecedented burden of debt and fewer employment protections. Because the financial risk borne by households has risen sharply since the last recession in 1990-91, we have moved into uncharted financial waters. No one really knows how households, and the whole economy, will cope when the next big financial crisis arrives.
As the International Monetary Fund said in its recent review of global economic stability, the household sector "has increasingly and more directly become the shock absorbers of last resort in the financial system".
And we have not even mentioned the trade deficit and the failure of the exports of coal and iron ore to cut back the deficit. Exports are increasing, but so are imports. That vulnerability should have Treasury worried.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:56 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 3, 2005
Paul Kelly on the ALP's crisis
I normally skip Paul Kelly's commentary on Australian politics. I'm irked by the pontification, resent the way Kelly treats the rest of us as ignorant fools who have little to offer, and recoil from the narrrowness, and lack of, policy ideas.
This time round Kelly is saying something about the crisis facing the ALP. If he can help us put our finger on this crisis, then he has provided a way to kick the public conversation along. This conversation sure needs to be kicked along as this particular debate has been stuck on endless repeat for some time.
Kelly starts his op. ed. by saying that:
The crash and meltdown of Mark Latham is an agonising episode for Labor, but the party's real test is whether it sinks deeper into the mire or devises a recovery strategy from its catharsis.
True. We do know that. It repeats the speech of John Faulkner when he launched Bernard Langer's The Loner: Inside a Labor tragedy. Still it is a good opening. Maybe the industrial relations protest rallies of last week in Melbourne have opened a new political space for a recovery strategy?
Or is this workplace relations protest a looking backwards that appeals to shoring up the ALP's populist(conservative blue collar unionist) heartland?
Kelly then asks a good rhetorical question:
The media focus all week fell on Latham's anger, his denial and his refusal to accept his responsibility for the loss. It is easy to attack Latham and, of course, his crass indulgence invites this response. But Latham has left politics. And if Latham were the prime problem, then Labor's woes would be over, right?
That puts a lot of the anti-Latham commentary into perspective does it not? Kelly goes to define the nature of the crisis in a negative and positive way.
The negative approach clears away the rubbish:
The tribulations facing Kim Beazley during the past six months suggest a more searching and complex response is needed to Labor's problems than the suggestion that the removal of mad Mark means a Labor revival...Labor is in crisis, yet this crisis is remarkably undefined or rarely discussed. Indeed, any student of politics might think that Labor's crisis was that Beazley was a windbag, or that Crean couldn't communicate or that Latham had too big a chip on his shoulder. These defects are only too true, yet they are discrete personality problems that don't touch the bigger problem.
Is this crisis is remarkably undefined or rarely discussed? See South Seas Republic for a defence of the Third Way.
The positive approach is Kelly's judgement that the crisis is one of ideas and identity. He says that:
It is about how Australian social democracy defines itself in the globalised age of a market economy amid a community demand for restoration of social order and greater personal responsibility. This has been Labor's problem since Paul Keating's 1996 defeat.
This is promising. Note that Kelly says nothing about the environment.
Kelly then introduces Keating's view that Labor's problem arises because Australia has moved beyond the ALP policy framework, and that the Labor Party doesn't understand how much Australia has changed and what the Hawke/Keating economic reforms have delivered. Keating says that the "Labor Party, unfortunately, has returned to its old anvil; its focus now is on low-income earners and minority groups, but that doesn't work any more."
I've noticed this tendency too. The exclusive concentration on the conservative blue collar vote by the ALP right has always suprised me. As has its tendency to define middle class, the upwardly mobile, the self-employed and small business as an enemy. As Kelly observes this strategy only delivers 37 per cent of the primary vote and, short of a recession, it will stay a minority. The ALP has to do more than appeal to the working class heartland.
Keating's Third Way centres around two alternative ideas that he reckons should guide Labor's tax policy. The first is making Australia a genuinely creative nation and the second is being globally competitive. It is a question of values and votes and unless Labor re-thinks, it won't win the votes of the middle class, the upwardly mobile, the self-employed and small business. This takes us to a contradictory political space we know the ALP is enmeshed in.
Note that there is nothing about the economy and environment in Keating's ideas, and that Kelly merely recycles cliches about the Tasmanian forest issue. The ALP sure has a problem developing its old ideas of ecologically sustainable development.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:33 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
July 2, 2005
Bush's Fort Bragg Speech
I only caught snippets of President Bush's Fort Bragg speech on the news during the week. I read it this morning after returning home from doing the household's shopping at the Central Market in Adelaide.
I presume that Bush's speech, which was give before an audience of 740 troops in North Carolina, was directed at shoring up support amongst the wavering Republican base as the constant trickle of US casualties works its way through the noise of contemporary American politics.
It is a speech to rally flagging domestic Republican for the war---being supportive of the war is patriotic---because the case being made is just not convincing. Consider this link between 9/11 and Iraq:
Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania.
Note how the weapons of mass destruction have been replaced by murderous ideology. Tis an ever changing rationale for the Bush crusade.
This link was then reinforced by Bush:
We are fighting against men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons who are capable of any atrocity. They wear no uniform; they respect no laws of warfare or morality. They take innocent lives to create chaos for the cameras. They are trying to shake our will in Iraq, just as they tried to shake our will on September 11, 2001. They will fail.
There is nothing in the speech about the US about turning Iraq into a bastion of American military power in the Middle East. Nothing about putting empire ahead of democracy.
What is also left unsaid is that Bush created the terrorism groups in Iraq through his little war and continued occupation. It is the US empire that has turned Iraq into the battle ground against Islamic fundamentalism. Under Saddam Hussein the all dissent and rebellion was repressed by a totalitarian police state.
Al lot of the speech consists of American-style freedom and democracy preaching, though there is less emphasis on freedom as God's plan for mankind. There is also is a great emphasis on an exit strategy for the US, though little was said about a phased retreat through negotiations with the enemy. (Who exactly are they going to negotiate with, if not the terrorists?)
Does the exit strategy mean the US will allow Iraq to slide steadily ever deeper into Iran's orbit? I wonder what the Israeli's think of that scenario?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:36 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
July 1, 2005
media & democracy
Sushi Day has an Op.Ed in The Age about media spin by the government and its management of the news. Sushi's account of her experiences of dealing with spin and management in Victoria highlights the role played by the media advisors. She says:
I understand they [media advisors] earn between $60,000 and $120,000 a year. In other words, the government uses our taxes to pay media advisers to obscure the truth, block access to ministers and protect politicians from scrutiny. It keeps the public in the dark. It's worth asking: what are the accountability mechanisms for media advisers? Can they be hauled before committees for questioning like ministers and public servants? Exactly who are these people?
Ex journalists Sushi. That then raises questions about journalism, does it not? These ex-journalists have few qualms about producing media-ised politics. That means they have been well prepared in terms of writing spin whilst they were journos. That suggests something is wrong with the media in Australia.
Let us pose the question: is the mainstream corporate media failing?
Sushi quotes John Lloyd, editor of London's Financial Times magazine on this issue. He says:
"We have created a system in which both parties (politicians and media) collaborate in producing media-ised politics. The problem is that the medias continue to report politics as if they were a neutral, almost invisible observer."
Lloyd argues that as the media co-command the stage with politicians, so any narrative of politics must also contain some kind of narrative about the media.
So true. Do we have that kind of narrative in the Australian media? If so, what sort of narrative would that be? Is 'narrative' appropriate here in a postmodern world?
Sushi rightly says an independent fourth estate is a vital component of democracy, and that ultimately, the news media are essential for our freedom. Just the news media? Surely it should be broader than than news media, if we are talking about narratives, power and political freedom? And where then is that kind of watchdog journalism to be found?
I reckon that many more questions need to be asked about journalism and the corporate media in Australia. Are the journalists asking them? Do they reflect on their own lapdog practices of being on the government drip feed. Do they reflect on how they talk about the news media but write interpretative op. eds?
Update: July 2nd
I've just noticed this op.ed in The Age by Margaret Simmons that defends fact-based journalism. The title says it all: 'Opinion is cheap. Facts rule, OK?' Simmons fails to see the usual contradiction of writng an op ed in defence a fact-style journalism. Her talk is cheap.
Simon's crude empiricism, which resolutely ignores the way facts are culturally constructed, continues the conservative media's attack on bloggers and the alternative media. Simmons says:
The cheap start-up costs of internet publishing have led to publications, such as New Matilda, which was established last year, in the words of the founder John Menadue, in response to "the greatest institutional failure of our time: the media's failure to take its responsibilities seriously".I have sympathy for Menadue but I worry that New Matilda has so far published mostly opinion and little research-based journalism. So too all the bloggers, radicals and others who criticise and attempt alternatives to the mainstream media. This is understandable. Most alternative media survive on the smell of an oily rag and opinion is in every sense cheap.
Talk is only opinion.
Is it? What about interpretation and analysis eg., of the crisis facing the ALP? Or the state of the economy? Or the way Treasury understands healthcare?
Simmons analysis of the Australian media is very confusing. She mixes up facts, news and information; collapses opinion and analysis and is blind to the idea of interpretration and public conversation. See Road to Surfdom for a more thorough account of the confusions. Simmon's dualism---a fact-based journalism that describes society to itself and opinion journalism that interprets society to itself---ignores the role of rhetoric in public life.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Israel: settlers vs the state
The Middle East is becoming ever more turbulent after the American intervention and occupation of Iraq in the name of bringing democracy to the region.
The White House continues to say that things are going real well in Iraq. They are the winning the war. The problem is the media focusing on the bad news. Meanwhile Iraq continues to descend into chaos with ever more car bombs and causalites.
What Martin Rawson's cartoon misses is the situation I mentioned here. The conflict within Israel has got much worse. The Age reports that the:
"...Israeli Government has launched a crackdown on ultra-nationalist Jews challenging its authority, sending paramilitary police to storm a right-wing stronghold in the Gaza Strip.The forced removal of dozens of far-right activists from the derelict Palm Beach hotel yesterday after days of mounting violence and disruption from fundamentalist Jews opposed to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposed withdrawal of settlers from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank."
The settler violence is turning ugly, as right-wing Israel youth attempted to stone to death a Palestinian youth to protest the pending evacuation of Gaza Strip settlements.
Israel is no longer a unified Jewish state. Limits have been placed on the Greater Israel settlement movement by the Israeli state. The rightwing Zionist settlers, who are initiating the anti-disengagement revolt, see the disengagement from the Gaza strip as a unilateral Israeli withdrawal, and as Israel giving the Palestinian enemy territory for nothing.
Where will neo-conservative Colin Rubenstein and Ted Lapkin editorial team of the hawkish Australia/Jewish and Israel Affairs Council's (AJIAC)Review stand on this issue? Rubenstein and Lapkin have been very pro the settler movement, have identified it with Israel, and always talk about 'us' Israeli's. Well 'us' has just been sundered, as the Zionist settler's revolt is challenging the power and authority of the Israeli state. Sharon is not fooled. He says that those in revolt are terrorists. That is very different from this sympathetic portrayal of the rebels in the AJIAC's Review.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack