Public Opinion

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June 30, 2006

The Australian's nonsense

At a time when South Australia announces a target of sourcing 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2014 an editorial in The Australian denouces the whole approach to sustainable energy. It has a hysterical tone:

When federal Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran declared this week that wind farms are a "complete fraud" that "only exist on taxpayer subsidies", he injected the first dose of sanity seen in the renewable energy debate for a long time. Wind power fulfils just 2 per cent of the country's electricity needs, is unreliable even on the gustiest of days and is emblematic of everything wrong with the quest for so-called sustainability.

Huh? McGuaran made the remarks in an attempt to roll back the Liberals and raise the profile of the Nationals. Those remarks are just a launching pad:

It is not just on wind farms where politics and feelings are allowed to trump economic reality. Senator Campbell and his ilk like to be seen on the "right" side of the environment. Meanwhile, so-called progressives try to shut down debate over global warming even though the science is far from settled.....The Kyoto Protocol is far too flawed an instrument to reduce pollution. Australia needs to apply cost-benefit analyses to environmental issues, not sentiment or politics....Recycling plants dump toxic chemicals and salt into rivers – including the Murray.

No point in having recycling plants.Let's stay with dumping raw swerage into the Murray so Adelaide can drink it. So can be done?

It's simple.

Even in a world where carbon use is constrained, technologies such as clean coal and geosequestration make more sense for coal-rich Australia than wind power (or nuclear, for that matter). Feelgood environmentalism may win votes. But not only does it fail to pay the bills – it also doesn't save the planet.

So The Australian is speaking for the coal industry. II doesn't even consider research into solar power, not consider energy mixe.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:08 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 29, 2006

US trade policy & FTA's

As we learned from the bilateral FTA the US negotiated with Australia the objectives of current US trade policy is to use bilateral FTAs to bind signatory countries into extending their national intellectual-property legislation far beyond the parameters of current WTO agreed standards.

The strategy is not to use FTA's as the building blocks of a global free trade system, on the grounds that, in lieu of multilateral trade negotiations, FTAs are the next best thing to promoting global trade liberalization.This article in Asia Times Online says that:

According to a recent US Congressional Research Service report states that the United States' main purpose for pursuing bilateral FTAs is to advance US intellectual-property protection rather than promoting more free trade. The Bipartisan Trade Promotion Authority Act of 2002, the applicable US legislation for bilateral FTAs, states explicitly that Trade-Related Intellectual Property Standards, or TRIPS, are by law non-negotiable and must reflect a standard of protection similar to that found in US law.

FTA's are used to promote U.S. national interests.

The effect of these bilateral free-trade treaties is to reduce access to cheap medicines both for Australia and for developing countries. We know the argument of the big US drug companies: without strong intellectual-property protection, the pharmaceutical industry will not have the commercial incentive to conduct research and development for crucial new medicines. The implication is that US commercial and political interests over ride public health issues.

In the article referred to above Dylan C Williams mentions the United States' political agenda toward vital public-health concerns, ranging from reproductive-health issues to promoting good dietary standards. He gives the following example:

The US delegation to another recent World Health Assembly (WHA) took issue with a WHO-proposed diet and health resolution, particularly concerning the acceptable level of sugar content in foods, which by the WHO's expert assessment would have cast US fast-food and soft-drink companies in an unfavorable light.

Thsi suggests that US national interests in trade policy amounts to looking after the interests of US companies at the expense of the public good.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:35 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

media woes & revamps

I've been watching the tumultuous upheaval at Nine for some time:--the slow decline of Channel Nine from being No 1, the costcutting ($15 million budget cuts), the extensive sackings (100 redundancies in news and current affairs), the cut shows and repeated programs, and the bullyboy blokey culture being exposed behind all the glitzy glamour. It's a pretty big crisis isn't it. Nine looks tawdry with the sheen gone--almost tabloid even.

Bill Leak

Many commentators say that Nine's decline is the effect of the forces of competition in the media marketplace working away. So Seven replaces Nine as No 1 in the battle for news and current affairs supremacy and the ratings race this year, because it is more competitive. Seven rules for now.

Sure, ruthless competition exists in the media industry and this means winners and losers. But this competition is taking place within the overall decline of free-to air television, despite the extensive government protection and the blocking of reform. It is a structural shift as free-to-air television is no longer the centre of the mediascape. This structural shift is also affecting newspapers: their circulation continues to drop, classifieds move online, and they too engage in costcutting.

Has Nine thrown in the towel? Or will Chanel Nine's news and current affairs programmes be revamped or remodelled. How so? Go the middle class tabloid route? They were already on their way there weren't they? However, that would make them one of a pack. How about becoming an Australian version of Murdoch's Foxtel in the US? That would distinquish them from the pack would it not?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:29 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 28, 2006

skilled migration

Have you noticed the way that immigration is changing. It used to be about family reunion. Now it is more about skilled migrants working in Australia to help overcome the skills shortage and ensure Australia's economic growth continues with the commodities boom. Business is pushing the expansion of the skilled migration programme. The Philippines is one major source of immigrant labour.

It is argued that immigrant labour increases productivity and the gross national product (GNP). So skilled migration is beneficial to Australia and should be expanded. Here is Alan Wood writing in The Australian:

The local availability of labour simply can't meet demand, and domestic labour supply can't be expanded via training and apprenticeships to fill the gap quickly, however much Labor and the unions like to pretend otherwise. And a lot of this demand, particularly in the resource industries, is for construction workers and it is temporary. Temporary skilled migration is the ideal solution in these circumstances, allowing Australia to expand its resource investment and do so without the usual inflationary boom and bust and without an overhang of excess labour. In the longer term, labour demand and supply will adjust, and governments should help it to do so by supporting education and skilled labour supply.

After all, we live in a globalised world, don't we. Many Australians work overseas ---the Australian diaspora is around 1 million people, the same number of people who live in Adelaide. Many of the disapora are relatively young, well-educated, highly skilled and prosperous.

I presume that most expatriate Australians still embrace Australia as their home. Do Australians embrace our expatriate community as part of the Australian nation, and recognise that our expatriates are an important part of Australian society? How do we see the entitlement of Australia's overseas citizens to be engaged in the electoral process?

What does that skilled immigration do for those conservatives deeply concerned with social cohesion and a united society? Presumably, not much at the moment because it is only temporary skilled workers coming in. They are not staying. They are not citizens. Now what if they want to stay and become citizens?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 27, 2006

loving Australia

I missed this op.ed. by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post about why he loves Australia. Why would a neocon, who despises weak-kneed, Islamofascist-coddling countries, love Australia? Because it is not a weak-kneed, Islamofascist-coddling country that's why.

After a section that loves the conservative dismissal of multiculturalism and sharia law to help settle divorce disputes amongst Muslims, Krauthammer lays out his case thusly:

For Americans, Australia engenders nostalgia for our own past, which we gauzily remember as infused with John Wayne plain-spokenness and vigor. Australia evokes an echo of our own frontier, which is why Australia is the only place you can unironically still shoot a Western.

Australia is a place where men are still men and women are still women. White men and women are the good guys that is. And Christian to boot. The blacks are the other and must be dealt with accordingly. So must non-Christians. They are the bad guys. Xenophobic hate and contempt come to my mind when I think of the White Australia policy. The love here is a cowboy love of a good old shootout.

Krauthammer then connects this view of the Other to the world stage. He builds the case. Australia he says:

...is surely the only place where you hear officials speaking plainly in defense of action. What other foreign minister but Australia's would see through "multilateralism," the fetish of every sniveling foreign policy grub from the Quai d'Orsay to Foggy Bottom, calling it correctly "a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator"?

I thought that most of the world, apart from the oddly named Coalition of the Willing, the Israeli Lobby and Israeli hardliners favoured multilateralism. That means the Coaltion can stick it up those snivelling grubs who use international law to put constraints on imperial occupation of independent countries. Power is what matters. Power makes right.

Krauthammer loves Australia because it knows its place in the natural order of things of Pax Americana:

Australia has no illusions about the "international community" and its feckless institutions. An island of tranquility in a roiling region, Australia understands that peace and prosperity do not come with the air we breathe but are maintained by power -- once the power of the British Empire, now the power of the United States.

In case you missed the implication of imperial power about fighting the good fight for today, it is laid out:

Australia joined the faraway wars of early-20th-century Europe not out of imperial nostalgia but out of a deep understanding that its fate and the fate of liberty were intimately bound with that of the British Empire as principal underwriter of the international system. Today the underwriter is America, and Australia understands that an American retreat or defeat -- a chastening consummation devoutly, if secretly, wished by many a Western ally -- would be catastrophic for Australia and for the world.

What is good for America is not just good Australia it is good for the world. Hence there can be no "cut and run". You can sense the logic of paranoia: if we "cut and run,then that would provide a launching pad for the terrorists to strike the United States and the West.

Krauthammer ends saying that Australia understands America's role and is sympathetic to its predicament as reluctant hegemon. That understanding has led it to share foxholes with Americans from Korea to KabulThe Bush Administration as the reluctant hegemon? I guess it's a neocon attempt at a joke.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:32 PM | Comments (29) | TrackBack

June 26, 2006

the decline of the west

I've puzzled over this cartoon. Is it the left selling out? Is it the left giving up its liberal democratic values in the war on terrorism? Has the condition of the left got so bad that it has been reduced to having a garage sale of its values?

John Spooner

Then I read Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian on the war on Western values being waged within the West. This is the conservative meme of the West being a terrorist target because of who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values. Values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law. The the collapse of Western values meme is linked to decline of national identity and rebuilding building national identity in opposition to the multicultural rot.

Albrechtsen says:

For too long, the multicultural mind-set has acted like a two-pronged censor. It forbids talk that applauds the majority culture. And it's an even more potent censor when it comes to criticising minorities. Both are out of bounds according to these Two Commandments of Multiculturalism.

She talks about multiculturalism in terms of a faith, as a religion---the 'secular faith of multiculturalism' and the dismal and dangerous failure of the Left's preference for multicultural moral relativism.That points to a monoculture doesn't it?

On this conservative account liberal multiculturalism allows, or even nurtures, homegrown Islamic terrorism. Since Muslims place religion before nationality they create a divided society and can't be trusted to be loyal to Australia. Multiculturalism turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to a local network of radical Islamists who preach hatred and plot jihad. So conservatives have to fight to secure the nation's own absolute values.

Is that a plausible interpretation of the Spooner cartoon.?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 25, 2006

media changes

There is a good article on the current relationship between the mass media and blogs by Jonah Goldberg over at the LA Times. He puts the shrillness of boisterous and partisan blogs into a media context. He says:

For various reasons, the post-World War II generation was unusually trusting of big institutions and elites. It grew up with the first real national media outlets. Following on the heels of radio, TV further united the nation... A handful of media outlets... dictated the terms of the national conversation. This was the era of the "vital center," when the establishment was marked by an astounding level of consensus

.
He say that this kind of consensus was a historical one. Today we see this consensus breaking down on free-to air television. It is conceivable that within five years free-to-air TV's share will have dropped to 50 per cent of the total market, due to technological change but the long held, deep-seated resentment felt by many viewers about poor programming.

Things were also otherwise before 1945. Goldberg says that if you go back to the nineteenth century we find partisan conflict. Refeering to the US Goldberg says:

In the 19th century, newspapers played a different role from the one we think they're "supposed" to play. Newspapers contributed a sense of community to the boisterous new cities and towns popping up across the country. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the young American democracy thrived on competing "associations" between like-minded citizens. But because these people could never all physically meet, newspapers were essential to American democracy because "newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers."

And the next step:

American newspapers were never as unapologetically and uniformly partisan as European ones were (and still are), but they were still mostly creatures of specific political biases. There were Republican and Democratic newspapers, populist and communist newspapers, union and anti-union newspapers. These publications served as vehicles for partisan education and crusading personalities, in much the same way leading blogs do today.

Goldberg's argument is that blogs currently express this partisan conflict on the edges of the mass media consensus:

Take another look at the most flagrantly partisan websites today: the liberal Daily Kos and its conservative doppelganger, Red State. What you see are media outlets trying to serve the same function as newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A work in progress, they often screw up...There will always be a need for serious, professional news-gathering organizations. But there will also always be a need for the politically committed to form their own communities.

It's probably a good thing that blogs are shrill, boistrous in their partisanship.

However I'm not convinced by Goldberg's argument. Are not newspapers and TV increasingly crusading and partisan? Are there not blogs that provide serious op eds?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:00 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

movement in telecomunications

Finally we are getting somewhere with telecommunications as some sense is being shown by Telstra at long last. It's only taken them a decade.

Telstra has finally given ground by offering its competitors equal access to the planned $4 billion fibre optic broadband network on commercial terms. The fibre optic cable will cover regional cities and it wil be laid from telephone exchanges to nodes on suburban streets. The old copper wires will be used from node to home. Since this means that Telstra's competitors can send their own services over the network, competition will now be focused on the applications, services and content offered over the network, rather than Telstra selling the infrastructure itself. As it should be. We do not need a replay of the Telstra Optus cable fiasco with two fibre optic cable networks being built.

It will take 3-5 years to build the new network. Can Telstra deliver? Will Telstra earn enough delivering services on on the new fibre-to node (FTTN) network tto make it commercially viable?

This is a better place to be than a year ago, when Telstra was saying that no access to the new FTTN network would be granted to its competitors.

The downside is that those telcos who have built DSL networks using Telstra's copper phone lines to give consumers a better service will be disadvantaged, as the old lines will be switched off without compensation. That existing equipment is going to be stranded. They will be obliged to move to the upgraded infrastructure.

But I would be no better off. I use ADSL-2 and the speeds are comparable to the speeds Telstra is promising for the new network--24 megabits per second. The reason it is so slow--Singapore Korea and Japan are moving to networks with speeds of 100 megabits per second--- is that the fibre cable istops at the suburban node and it uses the existing copper wires to the home. Extending the fibre all the way to the home is the best telecommunications strategy. It shows that upgrading existing DSL over copper wires is is a short term or stop gap strategy, given the inherent technical limitations of copper.

Telstra is not proposing to extend the fibre all the way to the home. It will take 10-15 years for Australia to get fully fledged fibre to the home. So Telstra's proposal is another stop gap strategy, one designed to scare people from investing in ADSL2, and to ensure lighter regulation of Telstra by the federal government.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2006

Canberra watch

I would have thought that the AWA's has given federal ALP an issue to cut through on and to force the Howard Government onto its own turf--industrial relations. Isn't that cutting through, or as Geoff Pryor suggests getting the message out?

I appreciate that Big Business has gone in hard, with its key message that the ALP is taking Australia in the wrong direction --back to the past, whereas the future is towards a deregulated workforce and direct relationships between employee and employer.

But the ALP now has a toehold in the national economic debate--it can talk about the skills crisis and productivity, can it not? This is a doorway to address the issue of the enterprise culture based on the furthering of competitveness, creativity and innovation.

That is no small achievement for the Beazley ALP, which used to be roundly condemned for providing a small target---for pissing on the opponent and then pissing off.

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June 23, 2006

water politics

Although there is a lot of political talk about the importance of water in Australia and water restrictions in capital cities, the National Water Initiative, just like the Living Murray Initiative, has stalled. Water politics has become bogged down in squabbling amongst the states and the commonwealth over money, whilst the politicians address the need for water recycling in terms of the poo factor--true blue Aussies just won't drink shit!

Sure, there is a need to address the underpricing of water use given the low levels of the dams in Queensland.
But (purified) water recycling in a warming world offers the possibilities of long-term sustainable water use.

Yet state governments in NSW and Queensland duck and weave on this, even though parts of their states will run out of water in the near future.

A good example is drought-stricken Goulburne in NSW and south-east Queensland (some areas excepted), which will run out of water if the next two rainy seasons fail to drop rain on the catchment sites. With Brisbane's three dams already falling below a combined 30%, the Queensland capital was in as severe a water predicament as Toowoomba and searching for answers – that will be found in recycling.

Isn't it time to question the deeply held assumption that there will be an endless supply of water for agricultural, industrial and domestic use. Wouldn't that be taking the effect of climate change ---a warmed up world---seriously? That we need to to live with less water.

Since water conservation is now an everyday reality in our capital and regional cities we need to get smart in the way we use it. That is something the Queensland and NSW state governments have yet to do. The Beattie Government in Queensland still thinks that the water crisis of South East Queensland is best addressed by building two very expensive and unreliable dams; and it reckons that this is better than recycling fully treated water back into our water supplies and catchments. Unreliable because the water crisis in southeast Queensland is substantially caused by the reduction of rainfall in Brisbane, Toowoomba and Gold Coast catchments, which then affected inflows into the reservoirs of southeast Queensland.

Meanwhile the number of trees and shrubs that have died from lack of water will continue to rise.

Update: 25 June
And in the Murray-Darling Basin the irrigators who rely on the Murray and Goulburn irrigation schemes are being forced by their banks to sell their water rights or face foreclosure and financial ruin.These dried fruit, wine grape and citrus growers are succumbing to pressure to permanently or temporarily sell their water, even though this will make family farms unviable and practically unsaleable.The report in The Age Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 22, 2006

nobbling the Senate

Senate Clerk Harry Evans gives a good account of how things are in the new Senate:

It's pretty clear legislation won't get amended unless the Government amends it. Committees won't be allowed to inquire into anything embarrassing. Committees are given less time to look at bills. Some bills are not allowed to be looked at (by committees). Estimate hearings have been shortened. There has been a contraction of accountability opportunities, but not major nobbling — yet.

Will there be a major nobbling? Probably not. The referendums in 1967, 1974, 1977, 1984 and 1988, which were all designed to reduce the independence and role of the Senate, were defeated by the people.

Leahy

What there will be is a series of steps to hand more power to the prime minister to control upper-house scrutiny of government affairs. How then does parliament keep a watch on what Government's doing by pointing out the mistakes and misdeeds as they occur?

The judgement is that the Coalition will continue to retain control of the Senate at the next election

As the Canberra Times editorial observes:

The Senate's oversight and review functions are a pivotal part of parliamentary democracy, even if they haven't always been appreciated by executives whose legislative programs or ambitions have been thwarted or amended extensively by demanding senators. And the committee system, with its ability to debate and examine policy issues in detail, is an equally important role of the Senate - and crucial to the proper functioning of Australian democracy.

The editorial infers that this reduction of parliamentary scrutiny of ithe Howard Government's actions reveals a growing intolerance for criticism and scrutiny.

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June 21, 2006

Iraq: after Zarqawi

The killing of Zarqawi was recently celebrated as a big event by Washington. It is the US's one big counter-insurgency success in Iraq:

But the killing of Zarqawi has had little or no discernible effect whatsoever on the prosecution of the guerilla war in Iraq, has it? Does this failure undercut the US geo-political strategy in Iraq? On the geo-political interpretation the war in Iraq was a deliberately calculated exercise of US power with a specific end in mind ---namely, control of Iraq and establishing US hegemony in the Persian Gulf region.

Robert Dreyfuss outlines this stragegy:

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of US hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the US; create a new political class willing to be subservient to US interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.

I agree that the endgame is a permanent US military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for US business and oil interests. The geo-political interpretation of the Iraq war makes sense.

The question is: will the Al Qaeda militants---ie., Zarqawi-style jihadis--- be able to ensure that the civil war between Sunni and Shiites makes Iraq so unstable that the Americans will have to leave? Or conversely, will the US be able to wage a brutal war of attrition against the resistance by the Sunni insurgents in Iraq for years to come?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:31 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

from whence we have come

Ross Gittens, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, has a useful account of what social democracy once stood for in Australia. It endeavoured to correct the underlying structural (class) inequalities of education, health, employment, housing and location to achieve a fairer society by actively by pursuing six policy goals:

* Full-time employment for anyone who wanted it;

* A legislated set of minimum wages and conditions sufficient to sustain a decent standard of living, rising in line with national prosperity;

* A balance of bargaining power in the workplace;

* A means-tested but dignified safety net of welfare payments to cover short-term contingencies;

* A strongly progressive tax system; and

* Equality of access, across socio-economic groups and geographic regions, to public services such as good education and health care, housing and public transport.

Gittens, commenting on a paper by Fred Argy for the Australia Institute says that Governments didn't always attain those objectives, of course, but they did accept their legitimacy and they did strive for them.

No more. That was yesterday. Today, a neo-liberal mode of governance equates social justice (a fairer Australia) with a job. As Kevin Andrews, the Minister of Industrial Relations, says on Lateline 'fairness starts with the chance of a job.'

Is that all there is to justice as fairness? How does the Andrew's conception of fairness temper the effects of markets on income and wealth inequality?

The most dramatic reversal in social democracy's policy goals has been the undermining of both the minimum wages and conditions sufficient to sustain a decent standard of living and the balance of bargaining power in the workplace. As Argy points out, as the spending on middle-class concessions increases the the share of government spending going to the poorest 20 per cent has tended to decline appreciably, especially in the spending on health and school education.

Gittens comments that as:

spending on maintaining general public services struggles to keep up with demand, we're developing a two-class system in education (public versus private), health (public v private), housing (owners v renters), public transport (inner v outer suburbs) and location (city v country).

Welcome to the new neo-liberal world and the aspirational middle class. Will they accept Howard in a world of increasing interest rates coupled with the effects of the IR legislation and an effective scare campaign being run by the unions?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:13 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 20, 2006

the nuclear debate

I'm on the road in Brisbane and I might not be able to post today because of meetings. This Moir cartoon captures the debate on nuclear power in Australia:

Alan Moir

Though it is true that other countries can no longer get by without nuclear energy, Australia could. It has vast eastern coal seams, large and still to be discovered north-western gas, the wet southern brown coal, wind, sun, substantial geothermal sources. Australia's energy choices are wide and reasonable, and this natural advantage indicates that nuclear energy may never get a cost edge in energy-exceptional Australia.

But what we continue to hear about is Australia having 40 per cent of the world's uranium, emerging technologies that could substantially alter costs and choice, lower fuel costs, more easily recycled waste, the rebirth of Australian nuclear industry and bringing new skills and jobs.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:37 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 19, 2006

media matters

I notice that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp has come out against the Howard Government's proposed media reforms, thereby undercutting industry consensus (of the cosy club that runs the media in Australia), which was seen as a way to dismantle existing ownership rules. Murdock sees the deregulatory reforms as highly discriminatory and lacking in competition for free-to-air television.nes Ltd argue that the proposed reforms refuse to allow a fourth network; do not give big cuts to the list of sports events that must be offered fitrst to free-to-air networks before they can be shown on pay TV (Foxtel) and unfairly favours TV companies over print owners.

News Corp is a newspaper industry in Australia as it only has a 25% stake in Foxtel. Newspapers are a sunset industry with resources being pulled, journalists downsized, hack journalism, advertising shifting to the internet and returns to shareholders falling. The steady decline in the Canberra Times to a rural town newspaper with a poor online presence illustrates this.

Opening up the free to air market to a fourth network is what the Howard Government has consistently rejected. Howard has also said that he would not waste political capital on media reform unless the changes were supported across the industry. This leaves Helen Coonan, the Communications MInister, with the problem of which media moguls to side with (Packer and Stokes, or Murdoch), if she hopes to get her reforms through Parliament this year.

But isn't news Ltd part of the sheltered media workshop protected from the cold winds of market competition?

I presume that the real issue is is the new datacasting licences and how all the unused spectrum might be used and concessions from the media moguls on data casting is not going to be easily forthcoming. I also presume that datacasting licences, are not going to go to just the established television networks. Hence we have the difference between datacasting and fully fledged television, with the former defined to prevent them from competing with traditional free to air television. So the Howard government is trying to free up the restrictions sufficiently to make datacasting attractive, while also protecting the established cosy position of the free-to-air television networks.

Presumably, freeing up restrictions would allow the delivery of news, entertainment news and information to mobile phones. That would be a considerable threat to News Ltd's core tabloid newspaper business. Why buy a tabloid newspaper? And News Ltd currently has a weak presence in the online world.

All is not well in free-to-air television either is it? It is under significant threat from new media and it will have to find new revenue streams as TV audiences and advertising revenues continue to drop.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2006

The Israel lobby revisited

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's Israeli Lobby argued that "the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction". In a commentary on this text Kathy and Bill Christison describe the criticisms of the Israeli lobby thesis by those on the Left:

These critics on the left argue from an assumption that U.S. foreign policy has been monolithic since World War II, a coherent progression of decision-making directed unerringly at the advancement of U.S. imperial interests. All U.S. actions, these critics contend, are part of a clearly laid-out strategy that has rarely deviated no matter what the party in power. They believe that Israel has served throughout as a loyal agent of the U.S., carrying out the U.S. design faithfully and serving as a base from which the U.S. projects its power around the Middle East....These critics do not dispute the existence of a lobby, but they minimize its importance, claiming that rather than leading the U.S. into policies and foreign adventures that stand against true U.S. national interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt assert, the U.S. is actually the controlling power in the relationship with Israel and carries out a consistent policy, using Israel as its agent where possible.

Well, that is how I've come to understand the situation in terms of the advancement of the US imperial interest. The American left see Israel as a base from which U.S. power is projected throughout the Middle East.

However, I don't accept that Israel does the U.S.'s bidding in the Middle East in pursuit of its imperial objectives, which Washington would pursue even without Israel.It isar more complex than this --as the Christisons argue.

The Christison's question the presumption of US policy coherence in the Middle East, highlight the ad hoc nature of virtually every administration's policy planning process, and give instances where Israel was the senior partner in this particular policy initiative.They say:

The fact of a strong government-corporate alliance does not in any way preclude situations ­ even in the Middle East, where oil is obviously a vital corporate resource ­ in which the U.S. acts primarily to benefit Israel rather than serve any corporate or economic purpose. Because it has a deep emotional aspect and involves political, economic, and military ties unlike those with any other nation, the U.S. relationship with Israel is unique, and there is nothing in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nothing in the government's entanglement with the military-industrial complex, to prevent the lobby from exerting heavy influence on policy.

It cannot be said that the U.S. is Israel's master, or that Israel always does the U.S. bidding, or that the lobby has no significant power. It's in the nature of a symbiosis that both sides benefit, and the lobby has clearly played a huge role in maintaining the interdependence.

The Christisons say that it is the power of the lobby to continue shaping the public mindset, to mold thinking and, perhaps most important, to instill fear of deviation that brings this intellectual political class together in an unswerving determination to work for Israel. The ask: does not the massive effort by AIPAC, the Washington Institute, and myriad other similar organizations to spoon-feed policymakers and congressmen selective information and analysis written only from Israel's perspective have a huge impact on policy?

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June 17, 2006

the new world of work

Most of the public debate around work and individual contracts these days is centred on 'labour market flexibility' and the labour laws required for the globalized world of the 21st century. A few,however are talking in terms of AWA's having different kinds of flexibility: eg., upward mobility for those with good skills in a booming mining industry, and downward mobility for those with few skills in the cleaning industry.

Bill Leak

But what of the single parents, people with a disability and the older unemployed under the new welfare-to-work reform? These people face significant barriers to enter employment, and they are in need of intensive and sustained forms of assistance to overcome them. They may acquire a casual job under an AWA but they could well lose teh job without ongoing adequate support.

It is anticipated that around 18,000 people will lose their Newstart allowance (for eight weeks) as a penalty for breaching their participation requirements. Only 5000 will be case managed though a period of no income by those welfare organizations who have been contracted by the government to ensure the bills are paid and there is food on the table for the kids. The other 13,000 will have to rely on charities or the kindness of family, friends or strangers to get them through the eight weeks of no income.

This is the world of compassionate conservatism. It is more about punishing people who don't deserve welfare, rather than helping people who need extra help to get casualk work with low wages and poor conditions.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 16, 2006

geopolitics & Iran

A quote from the Defense Planning Guidance for 1994-99," which was written by then Undersecretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz around 1992. This laid out the strategy recommended by the Pentagon to ensure the U.S. held the position of the singular superpower in a post-Cold War world:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.

This Pentagon document articulates a clear rejection of collective internationalism. It held that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era was to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.

This remains the principal aim of U.S. strategy today, but it has now been joined by another key objective: to ensure that the United States -- and no one else -- controls the energy supplies of the Persian Gulf and adjacent areas of Asia.To assert U.S. influence in this region, once part of the Soviet Union, the White House has been setting up military bases, supplying arms, and conducting a sub-rosa war of influence with both Moscow and Beijing.

So argues Michael T. Klare in an article entitled The Tripolar Chessboard: Putting Iran in Great Power Context. He says that It is in this context that:

... the current struggle over Iran must be viewed. Iran occupies a pivotal position on the tripolar chessboard. Geographically, it is the only nation that abuts both the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, positioning Tehran to play a significant role in the two areas of greatest energy concern to the United States, Russia, and China.

The article is worth reading because of its emphasis on the geopolitics as a grand game of chess makes a welcome change from the spin of US news feeds that are recycled by our media as news.

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June 15, 2006

but is it appeasement

It's the Jakarta lobby in action again isn't it.

The decision to grant temporary protection visas to 42 asylum-seekers of the 43 from the Indonesian province of West Papua who landed at Cape York. That decision infuriated the Indonesian Government, which promptly recalled its ambassador and launched a diplomatic broadside, charging that the decision represented de facto Australian recognition of West Papuan secessionists, and undermined Indonesian sovereignty.

Prime Minister John Howard publicly declaring his support for Indonesia's territorial integrity and dispatched diplomats to give the same assurances to Indonesian government officials. The Indonesians, however, have not been mollified, have kept up a steady pressure on Australia to rescind the granting of the visas, or, failing that, to ensure there is no repeat of the episode, and stated that Australia still had to prove its commitment to respect Indonesia's sovereignty.

Doesn't the new immigration law do this? It prevents any further asylum-seekers from seeking refuge in Australia. The Bill recreate supplements the so-called Pacific Solution, whereby potential unauthorised asylum-seekers (including women and children) are moved to offshore processing centres without recourse to legal avenues available on the mainland.

So, is it just business-as-usual for the Jakarta lobby? Or does appeasement apply? And that in doing so, as the senate Committee noted the Bill breaches Australia's obligations under international law and that it "represents deficient foreign policy, in terms of a perceived attempt to appease Indonesia over the situation in West Papua".

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June 14, 2006

the market mood darkens

The Australian stock market has plunged almost 10 per cent in the past month, wiping out almost all of the gains of the past year. As they say in the financial press, the market mood is darkening, due to global inflation fears and the possibility of the Federal Reserve Bank lifting US interests. A downturn beckons. Doesn' that place speed limits on Australia's economic growth.

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Rodrigo de Rato, said in Canberra yesterday that Australia has positioned itself well for a potential economic downturn by paying off its debt, and for utilising the current account deficit for investment rather than consumption, as is the case in the US:

Australia's external deficit reflects high investment, rather than inadequate domestic saving, and investment is especially strong in the resources sector--which boosts propects for future exports which boosts prospects for future exports.

Not suprisingly, de Rato reckons that Australia deficit does not need any government policy response but would look after itself as the surge in business investment levelled. The market will self-correct.

That's good to be reminded of neo-liberal doctrine. It's good to see the faith being reaffirmed.

However, won't the trick of getting ever-increasing export finances to finance Australian's ravenous demand for imports no longer work in the near future? Either export volumes have to increase dramatically, or overall growth will have to slow. Doesn't that require a policy response from the government?

The IMF--isn't this institution struggling to be relevant in the 21st century, where private capital flows dwarf offical lending. Isn't it failing to ensure an orderly unwinding of imbalances in the world economy? Dosen't the IMF face an identity crisis, given that the IMF was created to promote a sound trading system, aid countries with severe balance-of-payments deficits and assist those in economic distress? The IMF is no longer at the center of today’s international monetary and international financial system at a time when the system itself was becoming economically more unstable and technically more volatile.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:09 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

flawed labour market policies

The assumption of the Howard Government's WorkChoices legislation is that deregulating labour markets is the way to reduce unemployment. If you cheapen the cost of labour --by reducing the protective work conditions and lowering the wage rate-- then there is more opportunites for business hiring unskilled labour in a growing economy. This implies that a unionised workforce causes unemployment.

But it is not necessarily so. You also need other policies in tandem with making the labor market more flexible so that people can choose the work arrangements that suit them. What is also required are active welfare to work policies designed to encourage claimants to seek and take work; and active labour market policies that skill those seeking to work.

It is the latter that is missing in Australia. The finger can be pointed at both the Howard Government for not addressing the skill shortage and the ALP state government for running down TAFE and making their courses too expensive.

There is no reason why strong trade unions and employment protection laws cannot go hand-in-hand with low levels of unemployment.That is not the nature of the politics being played is it?

The politics is to create the conditions that turn employees into independent contractors that require no holiday pay, no sick leave, and none of a range of other benefits that the union movement has fought for and won over the last hundred years.This is what is meant by the rise of self-employed worker ----the "enterprise worker" or self reliant society as understand by the neo-liberal Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies.

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June 13, 2006

ALP toughens up

Well it was foreshadowed wasn't it. Despite the wavering Kim Beazley and the ALP will abolish John Howard’s Australian Workplace Agreements--'the poison tip of John Howard's industrial relations arrow.' Federal Labor has also made industrial relations a centrepiece of the fight with John Howard's Coalition. It has given the ALP what it needed: a strong support base with voters, a clear differentiation from John Howard's Coalition and a potent weapon-- AWA's dismantling work conditions and lowering wages --- that resonates in the community.

So we have the political as a conflict between political enemies.

Bill Leak

But the unions only form 20-25% of the workforce and AWA's only cover about 2-3% of the workforce. It is unclear whether the ALP is revisiting the past on industrial relations, or looking to the future.

There were promises to pay TAFE fees for training the traditional trades, to encourage kids to investigate those trades through a "Trade Taster Program", and to pay TAFE fees for trainee child carers. This addresses the workplace crisis facing Australia - the shortage of skilled workers. That Australia is so short of skilled workers is a failure of government policy and pushing this issues is good policy. .

Yet this is lost in the rhetorical turn to 'jobs for Aussies' instead of importing workers, skilled or unskilled, to ensure the human resources are there to enable the West Australian mining boom. This turn to economic nationalism with tis roots in the socailly conservative blue collar base backs away from Australia as an open economy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:37 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 12, 2006

an apocalyptic vision

This is indeed strange.The Australian reports that Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the development, concepts and doctrine centre at Britain's Ministry of Defence, informed a conference that future migrations would be comparable to the Goths and Vandals, that North African pirates could be attacking yachts and beaches in the Mediterranean within 10 years whilst Europe could be undermined by growing immigrant communities with little allegiance to host countries -- a "reverse colonisation" .

Perry says:

Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned ... (the process) acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet."

Perry pinpointed 2012 to 2018 as the time when the power structure of the world, much of which dates from World War II, was likely to crumble. Rising nations such as China, India, Brazil and Iran would start to challenge the US as the only superpower. This would come as "irregular activity" such as terrorism, organised crime and "white companies" of mercenaries burgeons in lawless areas at the expense of conventional forces. The effects would be magnified as borders become more porous and some of the most vulnerable areas sink beyond effective government control. Criminals and guerillas may then spread the danger beyond these areas.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:41 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

June 11, 2006

citizenship---things are changing, differently

Some good questions for those with a bit of time for weekend reflections are raised in this passage in an article entitled, 'Experiments with Freedom: Milieus of the Human', by Aihwa Ong. She says:

The explosive growth and destruction of global markets is associated with various kinds of freedoms: freedom from old traditions, old obligations, spatial confinements, and political arrangements. Experimentations with freedoms---at the political, social, and individual levels---have historically accompanied capitalist expansion.The rise of nation-states in a global order has paralleled the growth of a world economy. These parallel developments have greatly complicated the meaning of freedom and obscured our understanding of the various forms it can take. What is citizenship if not the institutionalization of human rights as political membership in a nation-state? What are human rights if not the freedom from basic human want promised by a global community? Indeed, citizenship concepts that appear to us as enduring global norms of human existence are in constant flux, mirroring the constant upheavals of society and the eternal restlessness of capitalism.

Citizenship is a state of mutation is the argument ---The flows of contemporary globalization open up questions about the nature of human freedom and claims in environments of uncertainties and risks linked to mass displacements, economic downturns, and market exclusions highlight the protective limits of citizenship and human rights.These limits are being transgressed through a process of deterritorializing of citizenship, and, as a result, citizenship is being remade. Do the new logics of market-driven individualism subvert the freedoms enshrined in citizenship by stripping away the old guarantees of citizenship protections?

Ong warns that:

Experiments with individual freedom do not always result in the realization of Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism or the expansion of human rights. One can say that the ease of crossing borders is associated not primarily with goals of realizing the common global good but with specific individual goals or with political agendas that seek non-democratic visions.

Under neo-liberal modes of governance things may turn out to be quite other to the cosmopolitian conception of border crossings in which they can see a glimmer of a cosmopolitan future eg., Australian working in the US and so forming a diasporia.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 10, 2006

here's the nuclear wedge

I notice that the federal ALP is resolutely opposed to building nuclear power stations in Australia. For once they (the federal and state ALP) look united and strong as they run their fear campaign about the possible location of nuclear reactors in Australia. Not in my backyard is the public response across the nation. The ALP' s street smart tacticians reckon Howard's wedge, introduced with the nuclear review to start a national discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear power, will turn around and bite Howard hard.

Things are humming for the ALP. Hope rises. Pandora's box is being opened. Joy oh joy. Victory beckons. Theer is a spring in the ALPs' step. They can see the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel of opposition.

But Moir is right---all is not as it appears in Pandora's box:

Alan Moir

The real wedge is directed at SA, which is the weak link in the united front of resolute opposition. Why?

Michael Duffy spots the weak link. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald he says:

Last week I talked to a senior Labor politician in Adelaide and was struck by just how important uranium is going to be for the economic future of South Australia, which appears to have 40 per cent of the world's known uranium reserves (although the miners haven't yet found the limits to the Roxby Downs ore body). I was told cheerfully that if the demand for uranium keeps growing, South Australia will become "the Saudi Arabia" of nuclear power. (Now there's an interesting change from Don Dunstan's "Athens of the south".) It's going to be tough when they lose more manufacturing, but thanks to uranium the state's economy looks assured for the next 75 years.They're not going to let the rest of the ALP get in the way...

Duffy reckons it is really about uranium mining. Nope. That's only one aspect. The other aspect is an uranium enrichment planted---sited at Roxby Downs. That kind of value-adding would be an important boost to the SA economy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

whatever it takes

Andrew Bacevich has an interesting article in the London Review of Books entitled Why read Clausewitz when Shock and Awe can make a clean sweep of things?The article is a review of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor.

Bacevich confirms the position of this weblog that toppling Saddam (for Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) was the first phase of what was expected to be a long campaign to restore US pre-eminence, and that Iraq could serve as a secure operating base or jumping-off point for subsequent US efforts to extend the Pax Americana across the broader Middle East, a project expected to last decades.This would begin to redraw the political map of the region.

The strategy was that ‘The president would preside, the vice-president would guide, and the defense secretary would implement’ --- with Wolfowitz and a handful of others lending the enterprise some semblance of intellectual coherence.

Bacevich goes on to say that this project of unleashing American might abroad involved a radical reconfiguration of power relationships at home.This involved reducing the power of the Congress and the Supreme Court to circumscribe presidential freedom of action and waging a bureaucratic battle royal to marginalise the State Department, to wrest control of intelligence analysis away from the CIA and reform the Pentagon.

Bacevich says that Cheney and Rumsfeld have some wins:

Congress at present hardly amounts to more than a nuisance. Its chief function is simply to appropriate the ever more spectacular sums of money that the war on terror requires and to rubber stamp increases in the national debt.

The CIA has been weakened, the State Department is aligned with Cheney and Rumsfeld under Rice, and the US military has been transformed. What of the Supreme Court? Bacevich says:

The Supreme Court historically has shown little inclination to encroach on presidential turf in time of war. Any prospect of the court confronting this president was seemingly nipped in the bud by the fortuitous retirement of one justice followed by the death of another. In appointing John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush elevated to the court two jurists with track records of giving the executive branch a wide berth on matters relating to national security.

It is Iraq that has proved to be the stumbling block.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:16 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

a simple question

Can the federal ALP do a Clinton?

Clinton was able to link opportunity to responsibility--by demanding work in welfare reform, but then insisting that government had an obligation to "make work pay".

Would that provide the ALP with a politically sustainable model for broadening the benefits of prosperity? Would that kind of strategy enable the ALP to deliver for families struggling on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder without alienating those in the middle class above them?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2006

the impoverished state of politics

Some interesting comments in this article from the London Review of Books about British politics that apply to Australian politics. Ross McKibbin asks: 'Does it matter whether Brown is prime minister rather than Blair, or Cameron rather than Brown? Does it matter, indeed, whether there is a Conservative or a Labour government? At the moment, not much.' Can we say the same in Australia? Is politics that impoverished here?

Unlike many, McKibbin gives some reasons for his claim:

The first is that the country’s political elite is now largely divorced from the country; probably to a greater degree than at any time since the 19th century. This elite is drawn from an increasingly narrow social range: primarily from the law, the media, political and economic consultancy and ‘research’..... Whatever their formal political allegiances, they are all the same kind of people who think the same way and know the same things.

And secondly:

In a less mealy-mouthed age both the Labour and Conservative Parties would be thought on balance right wing, with the Labour Party more ambiguously right wing than the opposition. We have now a right-wing government and a right-wing opposition, while a centre-minded electorate has to choose which of the two is more palatable – that is, least right wing.

This is so in Australia? Or is it. Does labour market deregulation mark a significant difference between the Coalition and the ALP in Australia?

McKibbin says that another major reason why it doesn't make much difference whether there is a Conservative or a Labour government is what Australians would call the Lib-Lab argument, ie., the two major parties fundamentally share the same ideology:

Despite assurances that the political elite is interested only in what works, this is the most intensely ideological period of government we have known in more than a hundred years. The model of market-managerialism has largely destroyed all alternatives, traditional and untraditional. Its most powerful weapon has been its vocabulary. We are familiar with the way this language has carried all before it. We must sit on the cusp, hope to be in a centre of excellence, dislike producer-dominated industries, wish for a multiplicity of providers, grovel to our line managers, even more to the senior management team, deliver outcomes downstream, provide choice. Our students are now clients, our patients and passengers customers. It is a language which was first devised in business schools, then broke into government and now infests all institutions.

What used to be the centre has moved to the right of the centre.

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June 8, 2006

kissing the American liberal republic goodbye

An article in the New York Review of Books entitled 'Power Grab' by Elizabeth Drew is concerned with executive dominance in the US. It opens with the following statement:

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the White House has made an unprecedented reach for power. It has systematically attempted to defy, control, or threaten the institutions that could challenge it: Congress, the courts, and the press. It has attempted to upset the balance of power among the three branches of government provided for in the Constitution; but its most aggressive and consistent assaults have been against the legislative branch: Bush has time and again said that he feels free to carry out a law as he sees fit, not as Congress wrote it. Through secrecy and contemptuous treatment of Congress, the Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history. And because of the complaisance of Congress, it has largely succeeded in its efforts.

Bush has been issuing a series of signing statements which amount to a systematic attempt to take power from the legislative branch. To highlight the danger Drew quotes James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 47:

The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Congress is reluctant to make a move against the President's grab for power. Few people in Congress are protective of their institution or capable of looking beyond their parochial concerns to object and resist Bush's encroachments on the legislative branch.

This represents a shift to authority--to conservatism--and away from the liberal conception of ensuring that power is kept within bounds. This is a shift away from the liberal concern to use power to preserve liberty as conservatives do not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as used for the right purposes---national security and imperial power.

You can see the same shift to executive dominance happening in Australia. Inch by inch the constraints on the employment of executive power are demolished. The Howard Government stands for big government in Canberra, Howard has gnawed away at undermining federalism to amass further power for the commonwealth (water, industrial relations, energy etc) , and to increase the power of the executive vis-a vis Parliament by truncating the Senate.

This represents a shift away from liberalism to conservatism.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

the rise and fall of the middle class

The paragraphs below are from an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich over at TomDispatch.com.They two points that are of sigfnificance. One is about what is happening to the middle class in the US; the other is about the changing functions of the state in the ownership society where you take care of yourself.

On the first point Ehrenreich says:

In Fear of Falling, I was concerned with the distance between the professional managerial class and the traditional working class. I thought I saw a new class developing. The strict Marxist idea is: You've got the bourgeoisie. Everybody else is a wage earner and they're not that different, whether they're accountants or laborers. And I was saying, no, there's a real difference here. The white-collar worker who sits at a desk is telling other people what to do in one way or another. Such workers are in positions of authority when compared to blue and pink-collar people.

I remember reading that text drawing our attention to the professional-managerial class. That was then--the 1980s. Capitalism has changed since then. Ehrenreich goes on to highlight what has happened to this middle class since.

Ehrenreich says

Back then, I was emphasizing the differences. Today, in Bait and Switch, what I'm emphasizing is the lack of difference, that the security the professional-managerial class thought it had is gone. The safest part of that class, when I was writing in the eighties, seemed to be the professionals and managers with corporate positions. Then something happened in the nineties. Companies began to look at even those people as expenses to be eliminated rather than assets to be nurtured. What I was seeing in the late eighties was this pretty tight middle class where, really, the only problem was to get your kids into it, too.

So we have the squeeze on the middle class, which leads to downsizing, the slide into working clas jobs (taxis and call centres) and middle class unemployment.

The other point Ehrenreich makes is the one about the changing functions of the liberal state: the shift of government, at the end of the Clinton years away from the helping functions and toward the military, penitentiaries, law enforcement. Her thesis of a liberal state, with vastly expanded military and surveillance functions and sadly atrophied helping functions, is illustrated with the fobbing off of the civil parts of government onto religious and charitable groups, often politicized:

It's partly that the evangelical churches have reached for these things, and then there's the faith-based approach coming from the Bush administration where the dream was: Let's turn all social welfare functions over to churches. A lot of the megachurches now function as giant social welfare bureaucracies. I wouldn't have found this out if I hadn't been researching Bait and Switch and gone into some of them, because that's where you go when you want to connect with people to find a job. That's also where you find after-school care, child care, support groups for battered women, support groups for people with different illnesses. As government helping functions dwindle, the role of the churches grows. What's sinister is that so many of these churches also support political candidates who are anti-choice, anti-gay, and -- not coincidentally -- opposed to any kind of expansion of secular social services.

It's what is happening in Australia isn't it? The welfare functions of the liberal state is slowly being outsourced to the church. The state becomes less a social democratic one and more a neo-liberal one.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:17 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 7, 2006

undermining the family?

So the Howard Government is out impress the religious right with its push to quash gay civil unions in the ACT on the grounds that the ACT laws undermine the Marriage Act. This Act defines and protects marriage as a union of a man and a woman. Apparantly, the Federal Government has the power to overturn civil union legislation in the ACT and Northern Territory.

Gay marriage is one of the key culture-war issues for the religious right. They see this as all important, because it relates back to the family and the household. The Bible says that homosexuality is "naturally" wrong and the "evil" threat posed by sexual preference is a core part of religious right's biopolitical agenda.

Australia begins to look more and more like America every day with this kind of biopolitics, which appeals to its base of social conservatives who increasingly form the foot soldiers for the Coalition. The ACT Government is seen to be undermining the family at its foundational level. Saving the family is saving civilization itself for the religious right.

I thought that the ACT government has the power to legislate on civil unions and to legislate for relationships other than marriage. Isn't federalism meant to be about diversity, local rule and democracy close to people?

Update: 8 June
Rodney Croome, writing in todays Canberra Times, makes a good comment on the politics:

The real issue is appearance not substance, something Attorney-General Philip Ruddock concedes when he says that it's the "striking similarity" between the laws which matters.Overriding civil unions is about corralling, ahead of next year's federal election, those socially conservative and fundamentalist voters Labor shook from the Coalition's tree over IR reform.It's about heading off the potentially embarrassing situation where these voters are incensed by TV images of gay couples marrying on the shores of Lake Burley-Griffin and blame Howard for not stopping it. It's the same hate-dynamic that played itself out when Howard banned same-sex marriage in federal law ahead of the 2004 election, and to which overseas conservative governments frequently resort.

What we haven't heard in Australia is the conservative attack on rights on this issue. You know the argument along the lines of a special interest group's 'desires and preferences are deemed to be "rights" that can overturn thousands of years of universally recognized morality, tradition and practice. The community has suffered deeply from the weakening of the institution of marriage at the hands of 68er's ideology of the sexual revolution. This liberal cultural elite seeks to overthrow traditional and Biblical principles of sexual restraint and responsibility, and to foster moral erosion and historical decline.

Maybe we will expect to hear such an argument being run from the pages of the Murdoch press in the near future.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:42 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

It's strange isn't it

Well we know that nuclear power is not commercially viable in Australia without substantial government subsidy. (the Government's own Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation showed that the taxpayer would need to subsidise 21 per cent of the cost of a nuclear power station for the first 12 years to make it viable).

And we know this much about the location of nuclear power in Australia from previous government reports:

And we also know that the ALP states have refused to host a nuclear reactor in their territory--for good reason. So why the big nuclear push by the Howard Government?

And we know that it was only a month or so ago that the Howard Government Howard was resolutely defending Australia's vast fossil fuels industry in the Kyoto debate. And it's energy white paper was centred around advocating technologies that will improve the cleanliness and viability of fossil fuels. Hasn't the Howard Government also consistently ruled out a carbon tax on coal because it would impact negatively on the economy?

Why bother with an inquiry just into nuclear power? What is the point of such an inquiry? It likes an economic inquiry about wealth creation, not one addressing the problem of climate change.

Update
I see that the nuclear crowd are saying that the debate on nuclear power and national energy policy is essential to the prosperity of the nation and that it's disappointing to hear Kim Beazley say the ALP will fight the next election on an anti-nuclear platform. Really? But we never had a good debate on national energy policy.That policy has been run by the fossil fuel industry.

Guy Webber, in an op. ed. in The Australian argues for a rational assessment of energy options. He usefully weighs up the case for and against nuclear power. The case against adopting nuclear power is that:

we have large reserves of good quality coal and gas, and access to wind, geothermal, hydro, solar and tidal alternatives. The establishment and decommissioning costs of reactors are high. And there is the ever-present issue of security, waste handling and storage. The development of nuclear power may act to defer or discourage expansion of alternative and renewable technologies or, at least, skew the economics against their establishment.

Webber says the case in favour of nuclear power:

when mining and carbon emission impacts are assessed, the costs are potentially less expensive and less environmentally harmful than other energy sources. A nuclear program would require an increase in the technical and scientific capacity of the nation. This would be critical, particularly given that we have problems fielding enough skilled workers with our present industrial and technical mix. There is strong argument to suggest the real benefit of a nuclear power program would be the concomitant boost to education, research and technical expertise, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and manufacturing) fields.

Note the way energy has been reduced to nuclear. He's not really interested in energy policy --only the nuclear industry. The arguments in favour also apply to renewable energy--wind and solar.

Webber goes onto say that:

The debate on the merits or otherwise of nuclear power needs to be a rational, objective assessment based on hard science, economics and fact. It must be open and public so that the issues, supported by reference material that is peer-reviewed and unbiased, can be appraised. As with any other public policy development, it cannot and should not be subjected to the harm of political expediency or the agenda of interest groups.

Webber's op ed is not a contribution to such a debate. He main arguemt is that we have no choice. We have to go nuclear. But why nuclear and not renewable? Renewables are not even mentioned.

We can only infer that Webber is pushing the agenda of an interest group---the uranium industry.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:05 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

June 6, 2006

Iran: regime change

The fundamental contradiction in the US stance towards Iran is this: why is it that Iran cannot have what the other NPT allies of the US such as Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil and Argentina can have---the right to develop the peaceful use of nuclear energy? Isn't this Iran's legitimate right under the National Proliferation Treaty? That right is a key reason why the Chinese and the Russians will not in the end support serious collective action against Iran in the form of sanctions or a pre-emptive strike.

Not so for Israel. It describes the Iranian government as an existential threat. At a joint press conference on the White House lawn on May 23 with President George W. Bush, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a hard-hitting statement about Iran:

"The Iranian regime, which calls for Israel's destruction, openly denies the Holocaust and views the United States as its enemy, makes every effort to implement its fundamentalist religious ideology and blatantly disregards the demands of the international community. The Iranian threat is not only a threat to Israel; it is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the entire world. And it could mark the beginning of a dangerous and irresponsible arms race in the Middle East."

The question to ask: does Israel still drive US policy and strategy in the Middle East?

Isn't the primary reason for the American push against Iran’s nuclear program and for “regime change” about maintaining American hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf Region? What do things look like from the perspective of maintaining U.S. hegemony?

It does look as if Washington, and the neo-cons in particular, will accept nothing short of the complete removal of the clerical regime, and to reduce Iran to the status of an American protectorate alongside other oil-producing states (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) of the Persian Gulf Region.

Tom O’Donnell, in an article entitled, The political economy of the U.S.-Iran crisis: Oil hegemony, not nukes, is the real issue traces the history of the strategy to maintain American hegemony since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 by constraining Iranian oil production. This has caused a chronic economic crisis in Iran, while its Gulf neighbors are all enjoying economic boom times at the present time O’Donnell says:

The U.S. has invested considerable effort and political capital in preventing Iran under the mullahs from attaining the Iranian nation’s natural position of influence in the Persian Gulf Region and in the larger oil order. Moreover, the U.S. has not only undercut Iran’s ability to challeng American regional hegemony, the U.S. has waged economic warfare against Iran, systematically breaking down Iran’s ability to support its rapidly growing population and causing a chronic internal economic crisis, one which is shaking the regime. In all this, the U.S. has been so far successful.

The Iranian regime has its back to the wall with few options. On O’Donnell's account the equation is simple: if Washington doesn’t want to allow the mullahs to develop Iran’s oil, then they have to remove the mullahs. He adds:

It is crucial to recognize that this is ....the objective political-economic realities of the oil order today which are impelling the U.S. to take the offensive, and soon, if the oil order is not to be undermined by a demand crisis. Such a crisis could, in turn, spell disaster for global capitalism generally as transportation is universally dependant on oil – oil is the basis for well over 90% of all transportation.

If supply needs to stay well ahead of rising demand, then that means opening up the Iranian oil fields to global capital.

This account undermines the imperial overreach thesis, doesn't it.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

spruiking nuclear power #2

This is what Julia Bishop, the Minister for Education, Science and Training, said in her op.ed. in The Australian yesterday:

The cost competitiveness of new nuclear power technologies has also been demonstrated in studies conducted in Finland, the US, Japan and Britain. Recent studies conducted on behalf of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation have shown that in Australia nuclear power could be cost competitive with coal generation, even without considering the cost of carbon emissions.

I choked on that, as I understood that that nuclear power was 3 times as expensive in Australia and would not get off the ground without massive public funding. There would be no private investment unless the public picked up the tab.

I guess the 'could be' is the key word, as it could be cost competitive with massive public subsidy. Then so would solar or wind for that matter. Doesn't this kind of spruiking undercut Julie Bishop's stated objectives to have a public debate, an objective dispassionate discussion about nuclear power as an alternative source of energy?

Bill Leak

The ANSTO Report Introducing Nuclear Power in Australia: An Economic Comparision takes a financial perspective and it does mention public subsidies. Surely financing would need to highlight the huge initial costs of establishing a nuclear power industry and the Government being willing to meet the costs of cleaning up nuclear waste and to guarantee against accidents to lessen the risk.

You can be sure the private energy companies are not going to carry the financial risk.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:54 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 5, 2006

liberalism, water, interstate conflicts

The Canberra Times has a good editorial on water reform in the Murray-Darling Basin and the powers of the Commonwealth to intervene. It highlights the central problem of liberalism----the harmonization of interests.

The editorial rightfully points out that:

...the pace of reform has been slow and disappointing, and to the particular detriment of the environment. While most players are agreed that the best solutions will come from market-based solutions which effectively price water to reflect its value and its costs, there is too little progress in devising completely new irrigation licensing schemes, and even less progress in using pricing as a way of forcing irrigators both to better conserve the water they get, and to clean it before it goes back into river systems.

There has been very little progress in returning water to the rivers in the Basin to increase environmental flows, we can add. It is not clear that market based solutions will deliver the needed environmental flows.

The editorial points out why reform needs to be addressed. Using the example of Queensland the editorial says:

What is involved is effective trapping of water by irrigation interests in south-western Queensland so that water no longer flows into NSW. The Balonne River system in Queensland ultimately collapses into a broad watercourse from which, eventually, five or six rivers and creeks form, most to join the Darling River upstream of Bourke. In average seasons, even before a major dam was built by cotton farmers near St George, in Queensland, little of this water would reach the Darling. Every few years or so, however, a major flood would come down the Balonne and spread out over up to 40,000 sq km of NSW, soaking the soil and proceeding slowly into the Darling system, from which, ultimately, it joins the Murray and travels into South Australia. Since the cotton farmers built the dams, the largest on Cubbie Station, floodwater, on which the grazing potential of the NSW land north of the Darling is very dependent, has been significantly reduced.

The consequence of this self-interest by Cubbie Station is harm caused to others. Though:

The irrigation in Queensland has been quite remunerative... the prosperity has been very much at the cost of farmers and graziers downstream, as it happens in a different state. But not only rival farming claims to river and floodwater are involved; the trapping of most of the water in Queensland has a significant capacity to embarrass attempts by the Commonwealth and the states to restore the health of Australia's major riverine system.

Utilitarian liberalism would say the federal government should intervene. John Stuart Mill, who was most concerned to establish a limit to the legitimate interference of government to protect with individual liberty in On Liberty says that 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others'.(pp.21-22). Mill clearly argues for freedom of individual action where externalities are absent.

Where externalities do exist, however, the situation is altered. Mill says:

Whenever … there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law” ( p. 147).

If we look at this principle from the perspective of the individual’s obligation, then the liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people” ( p. 101). In those instances where the individual does not exercise sufficient forbearance to accomplish this, a potential role for the state arises. Mill is not asserting this as a hypothesis to be examined and tested; rather, he says, is an indispensable principle. ( p. 134)

How come there is no intervention by the federal state in the name of the unreasonable use of water?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 4, 2006

about American culture

From Joel Achenbach's feature in the Washington Post's weekly magazine on the global warming skeptics. These are the crowd who hold that 'global warming isn't really happening -- or, if it is happening, isn't happening because of human beings. Or, if it is happening because of human beings, isn't going to be a big problem. And, even if it is a big problem, we can't realistically do anything about it other than adapt.' Behind this crowd stands the fossil fuel energy industry, which has a financial stake in opposing policies and actions that seek to combat climate change.

Rather than evaluate any of the claims of global warming skeptics. Achenbach interviews the sceptics, lets them speak for themselves, and lets the readers draw their own conclusion. The sceptics come across poorly.

In the process of allowing the sceptics to hang themselves Achenbach makes the following comment:

Let us be honest about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything. Everything is a war now. This is the age of lethal verbal combat, where even scientific issues involving measurements and molecules are somehow supernaturally polarizing. The controversy about global warming resides all too perfectly at the collision point of environmentalism and free market capitalism. It's bound to be not only politicized but twisted, mangled and beaten senseless in the process. The divisive nature of global warming isn't helped by the fact that the most powerful global-warming skeptic (at least by reputation) is President Bush, and the loudest warnings come from Al Gore.

Strikes me as pretty accurate account from the bits of American politics that I dip into.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:57 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 3, 2006

water politics: cut and run

The story from the Lemma Government in NSW was that Snowy Hydro Ltd needed the money for expansion--this was the basis for the public float, and that it would use its share of the proceeds to fund health and education services. So why not continue with the float after the Howard Government flipped flopped and pulled the plug on its share, and then proceeded to blame NSW Government for the whole nasty mess?

Why did the NSW Government cut and run after being ambushed by Howard? Does not Snowy Hydro still need the capital? True, NSW does not want to put the money into the large investment needed to update the Snowy infrastructure, but couldn't the federal government hold a minority share in a privatised Snowy?

Alan Moir

By the way did you notice the way the Federal ALP Opposition has been more or less silent on the merits of the sale for fear of undermining their NSW colleagues' attempts to repair the state's rundown public infrastructure?Beazley supported the hydro sale. In the House of Representatives, fewer than five members opposed the legislation, and only two - independents Tony Windsor and Peter Andren - recorded their opposition to the sale. Most reckoned that the issue was about the sale of electricity --not water flows or the conditions of water flows. What was not had then was a national debate on who runs our water, who owns it, who has to pay for it and how secure it is.

The Australian Financial Review is not impressed by the economic nationalism of Bill Heffernan and others, which held that local and government shareholders were more likely to safeguard the interests of stakeholders in the Snowy scheme than would foreign shareholders.

The editorial says:

This [is] nonsense. The waters had been overallocated in the past by governments, resulting in serious land degradation along the Murray-Darling river system. Private, or foreign, shareholders could hardly do worse even if they controlled the waters, but they wouldn't have, because the NSW government retained ownership subject to a term-term licence to Snowy Hydro.

They have a point, don't they? The past record of water development has been pretty awful in terms of the overallocation of water, the salinisation of the landscape and the reduction of biodiversity.

So what is the argument for a private power company controlling the flow of water? The AFR adds:

There is nothing especially virtuous in public or Australian ownership; and social conditions can be just as effectively achieved by licence conditions imposed on private owners---even foreigners---than by the lumbering processes of government. This principle has underwritten public policy for more than a decade, though it is true it has been honoured in the breach when it comes to sensitive assets.

Woodside comes to mind, doesn't it? Why isn't Snowy Hydro seen as akin to Woodside -- in terms of national economic security. Isn't the Snowy scheme too valuable an asset to risk? Doesn't the national interest operate here? How can the licence conditions be guranted in the face fr profit earned from electricity?

The public's fear was that a privatised Snowy Hydro might compromise the irrigation and environmental side of the business in favour of the power side - concerns never effectively dealt with by John Howard or Senator Minchin. Doesn't the nature of the commercial operation of Snowy Hydro mean that power generation would take precedence over water flows in the Snowy, the Murray and the Murrumbidgee rivers.

Was the Howard Government cutting and running before people power? Or because it had failed to get the necessary legislative approval for selling its share of Snowy Hydro last year, and the new legisation to ensure legality may not have got through the Senate because Senators Barnaby Joyce and Steve Fielding would have voted against it?

What hasn't changed in all of this is the importance of water issues, given that Australia going to face a drier, hotter future, the National Water Initiative's recognition of the need for environmental flows, and the refusal of the Nationals to divert any water away from irrigators or productive use. The strategy has been to use public money to improve the infrastructure and for the Commonwealth to purchase the water saved from efficiency gains.

The problem here is that won't be enough for the environmental flows that are need to ensure healthy working Murray river because the overallocation of the water has been so excessive. Therein lies the key problem. However, the AFR is not much concerned about that issue.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 2, 2006

Spotlight on

Spotlight was a classic moment in the IR conflict. What was highlighted in federal Parliament by the ALP was that employees at Spotlight, a Melbourne-based chain of 100 fabrics and homewares stores, have lost a lot under the new AWA agreement. One of the staff in Spotlight's Coffs Harbour shop, Annette Harris, has become a cause celebre of the WorkChoices resistance movement. The company offered her a new contract which removed her shift penalties and other benefits worth $90 a week, in return for a new rate of pay which lifted her income by 2 cents an hour.

Spotlight employees had lost the following: all penalty rates including for public holidays; all overtime; rest breaks; shift allowances; sick leave allowances; rostered days off; uniform allowances; meal allowances; and first aid allowances. Furthermore, there will be no restrictions on the number of consecutive days employees can be required to work without a break, and no minimum break between shifts. For this, the employee receives a pay increase of 2c to $14.30 an hour.

The effective reduction in wages was legal and not an an isolated incident.

The Federal Government's Employment Advocate, Peter McIlwain, told a Senate committee on Monday that his office had analysed 250 of the 6263 AWAs lodged in the first month of the new system.

Of this sample of new workplace deals, 40 per cent stripped workers' entitlement to public holidays; 52 per cent reduced their shift loading payments; 63 per cent cut penalty rates; and 64 per cent removed leave loading payments. Were these workers offered higher levels of base pay in return for losing these entitlements? It was not possible to say, based on the information available, said McIlwain.

But it was clear that 22 per cent of the sampled agreements allowed for no pay rises in the life of the agreement, he said, implying that, after adjusting for inflation, these workers would face falling real wages.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:58 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 1, 2006

water politics+political marriages

So the political marriage between the Nationals and Liberals is off before they even got to the Church. The feds were not interested in the shotgun Queensland marriage to save the Queensland Nationals from a steady decline.

Geoff Pryor

What suprises me in all of this is the inattention to the privatisation of the Snowy Hydro-electricity Scheme---or more acccurately Snowy Hydro Ltd. The politics of water consumption is a e key issue and is a tailormade issue for their rural populism and conservative values. Yet the Nationals are nowhere to be heard.

Jack Waterford in The Canberra Times says that:

On an issue like the Snowy Mountains Hydro sale, Bill Heffernan is playing the role that a smart National Party, keen for signature points of difference with the Liberals - ought to have played.

The Snowy scheme is a national icon - as important and symbolic in the minds of urban Australians as much as rural ones - but it has a particular significance to the rural sector, not least those who live in the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Darling Basin - that part of the continent within which three quarters of the population, and almost all of the National Party constituency lives.

He's right on that. One consequence of the sale of Snowy Hydro Ltd, says Waterford, is this:

The sale of the hydro scheme does not mean the new operators will be able to fundamentally change river flows. These are, to a degree at least, fixed by intergovernmental agreements which will continue. But the new operators will have considerably more latitude and incentive to operate the scheme for the prime benefit and purpose of maximising their energy return rather than meeting the needs of water consumers downstream.

The latitude is spelt out by Graeme Davidson in The Age as follows:

The first is the seasonal timing of environmental and irrigation flows when they might clash with the privatised company's duty to its shareholders to maximise its returns from the sale of peak electricity or holding water in its upper storages to use as insurance for electricity retailers against price spikes that can drive electricity prices up to the $10,000 MWh cap.

Secondly,

...the three governments are committed to increasing the environmental flows from the present dribble to 21 per cent by 2012 and 28 per cent at some unspecified time in the future. This is water that will not available to Snowy Hydro for electricity generation. The additional flow is supposed to be made available from improved irrigation efficiency. The uncertainty surrounding the likelihood of achieving the extra environmental flows is likely to be increased with privatisation.

Yet the Nationals are not saying boo. Shouldn't they be jumping up and down in the bush? Or have they gone too far down the free market road to care?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:19 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

a biased Speaker

It's not a case of bad Parliamentary language and boorish schoolboy behaviour during Guestion Time, as Leunig reckons:

Leunig

David Hawker, the Speaker in the Federal Parliament, is well known for his double standards, biased rulings and favouritism towards the Howard Government. The ALP has protested long and hard about this to no avail.

Here is a classic example of the double standards. Labor's Julia Gillard is suspended for using exactly the same words as Tony Abbott, who was not suspended.

The veneer of neutrality has been exposed, and the Speaker stand exposed as being more concerned to protect the Howard Government than to uphold the authority and traditions of Parliament.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:03 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack