« November 2006 | Main | January 2007 »
December 31, 2006
Jimmy Carter on Palestine
I have not read Jimmy Carter's Peace Not Apartheid. I mentioned it here in passing. I have not seen many reviews. Has it been mentioned, reviewed, commented upon in Australia, apart from Anthony Lowenstein? It should be reviewed as Carter is taking on the orthodoxies in his own culture.
Here are some quotes from the text, courtesy of Norman Finklestein's review at Counterpunch. They make intersting reading in the light of this debate.
The overriding problem is that, for more than a quarter century, the actions of some Israeli leaders have been in direct conflict with the official policies of the United States, the international community, and their own negotiated agreements. Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land. In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements. (pp. 207-9)
You can see why Carter's text is not very popular amongst those in Australia who defend Israel, but ignore the way that the Israeli state has colonized Palestinian land and it occupies the Palestinians in an draconian manner.
And this paragraph will upset the US friends of Israel:
The United States has used its U.N. Security Council veto more than forty times to block resolutions critical of Israel. Some of these vetoes have brought international discredit on the United States, and there is little doubt that the lack of a persistent effort to resolve the Palestinian issue is a major source of anti-American sentiment and terrorist activity throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. (pp. 209-10)
That states the issue plainly in terms of the US support for Israel. For the Israel Lobby the Jewish diaspora must stand with Israel and it insists that America do so too.
The neo-cons would see red over this quote:
The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honors its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories. (p. 216)
Carter is speaking frankly about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Of course, the Israel Lobby sees the strategic situation differently. It is the Israel lobby pushing for a war with Iran.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:58 AM | TrackBack
December 30, 2006
Middle East: the strategic map changes
If the situation in Baghdad is dire, then that involving Lebanon and Israel around what is often called the 'unfinished business' is troubling. This is more than Lebanon being deeply divided.
Fred Halliday argues that the third, and most important, outcome of the 2006 war is that the strategic map of the Middle East, the one with which Israel, the Arab states, the Palestinians and the outside world have all lived since 1967, has now in two ways significantly, perhaps even fundamentally, altered.
He says:
First, it is no longer just a matter of conflict between the Arabs and Israel, but of one between Israel and Iran, this latter power now developing a strategy, from Iraq to Gaza, designed to weaken the United States and its allies across the region. Second, the assumptions of that post-1967 epoch no longer hold, of territorial compromise, UN resolutions, the pursuit of mutual recognition, international guarantees. In Iran, and in its allies Hizbollah and Hamas, Israel now has an enemy more resolute, organised and uncompromising that any it has faced since it was established.
This is a new dynamic.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:49 AM | TrackBack
December 29, 2006
a strange thesis
Tanveer Ahmed in an op-ed in the Courier Mail warns against the Australian left aligning itself with the Islamist movement. He says that:
the French scholar on European Islam, Oliver Roy, notes: "Islam has replaced Marxism as the ideology of contestation. When the Left collapsed, the Islamists stepped in." This trend is being displayed politically most clearly in the Arab world, where a large number of old socialists are finding it easy to slide into Islamist parties.Veteran foreign correspondent Mary Ann Weaver writes in her book A Portrait of Egypt: "A number of my former professors from the American University of Cairo were Marxists 20 years ago; fairly adamant, fairly doctrinaire Marxists. They are now equally adamant, equally doctrinaire Islamists."
That refers to the Middle East and the European disapora, but not Australia. Still, let us accept that there is an odd alliance between sections of the Left and Islam, and that Islam is the ideology of contestation now that Marxism has faded away. Contestation against what though?
What Ahmed then says is that the growing overlap with Islamist interests should worry large sections of the Left because:
There is just too much of a gulf between Islamic groups and the Left in the areas of civil liberties to sustain any meaningful bond. Islam openly despises homosexuality and views the liberation of women suspiciously, believing it is the major cause of an apparent breakdown in the family. Many leftist groups also have a strong anti-religious flavour. Their potential for overlap and co-operation remain largely limited to foreign policy, where their ideological alliances are clearer.
Fine. Yet Ahmed undermines this by when he says that the leftist organisations and sympathisers urges for social protest is mirrored within Islamic groups, risks undermining their hard-won gains.
Is it the case that the Left see their urges for social protest mirrored in Islamic groups? Hardly. Defending a multicultural Australia from conservative attacks or deepening democracy, or fighting a corporate form of globalization does not imply identification with right wing Islamic groups. Far from it. Moreover, isn't there a tradition of hostility of Islamism to leftwing movements?As Fred Haliday argues Islamist programme, ideology and record are diametrically opposed to the left – that is, the left that has existed on the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:33 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
December 28, 2006
The Australian bashes the ABC again
I see that The Australian is having another 'lets trash the ABC.' This time it is Paul Gray, a columnist with the Herald Sun in Melbourne. The trashing is hard to take seriously as political commentar---it is incoherent and makes little sense--- but it does open a window onto the violence in the political unconscious of Australian conservatives.
In his op-ed Gray says that he has always contended that dealing with the ABC's bias problem at its roots requires nothing less than the complete philosophical re-education of those ABC staff members engaged in intellectual tasks. He adds that short of outright privatisation, this is the only way to arrest the endemic anti-Western bias which, at our ABC, expresses itself as partisan political passion, with the institutions and figureheads of Western liberal democracy as its principal targets.
Gray has his wires mixed up. The ABC works within liberalism not outside it. It works within the tradtion of western liberalism and is not anti-western. Gray's 're-education' call reads like something out of Mao's cultural revolution. Re-education into what?
Gray outlines his reasoning:
The ABC represents the Australian intellectual class in miniature. The journalists, writers and artists who make up that class suffer broadly from the confused values that have characterised Western intellectual elites since the late 19th century. There is political passion without historical knowledge. There is philosophical scepticism, without the well thought-out metaphysical beliefs to make that scepticism useful. There is a nihilistic tendency that goes beyond the call of reason, and summons those afflicted with it to a fundamentalist rejection of the society in which they live, and which on the whole treats them very well.
This reads like a conservative Christian rant, which ignores the existence of conservative intellectual elites and the role they have played in critiquing liberalism. Moreover, Australian intellectual class has been primarily educated into a utilitarian liberalism.
So what does this re-education involve, given that Gray holds the problem is less the creation of ABC culture as such and more a problem of the Australian tertiary-educated middle class? Gray says:
Perhaps those making the coffee at ABC staff cafeterias may be excused from the need to learn the basic outlines of Western metaphysical discourse: the tension between utopian political ideologies and the doctrine of original sin, for example. But any staffer who is paid to write, record, edit or in any other way contribute to the production of verbal output through the media of ABC TV and radio should be trained to recognise the key elements in historical Western intellectual discussion. Re-education, leading to a broadened view of the traditions of Western civilisation itself, is the only way to counter the deep-seated anti-Western hostility that characterises our intellectual elites in the modern era.
We need religion to counter secularism, because the secularism of the tertiary-educated middle class is nihilistic. That means being western is being religious in a conservative way. So how does privatisation and the market ensure a conservative religious re-reducation. Isn't it the market and its consumerism that is ungodly?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 27, 2006
goodbye Saddam
It looks as if Saddam Hussein's death from execution will come shortly. Few will shed any tears for this dictator, given the way he brutalized, tortured and killed the Iraqi people.
It is apparent from the Iraq Study Group report that Iraq isn't going to have a democracy in any meaningful time frame. Nor a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government. So why is the US,. UK and Australia fighting in Iraq? To install a Shi'ite state align with Iran? An American answer by Emily Miller in the Washington Post. It demands some accountibility from the nation's leaders.
The Post has a photo essay entitled Life at a Ramadi Outpost It shows how the US troops are in hostile territory, where a hearts and minds strategy no longer works. The Iraqi's do not want the US there.
Juan Cole has a post on the top ten myths about Iraq. It's good stuff and required reading. Deconstructing myths around the war on terror is necessay because the core resistance to the US Iraq is not al-Qaeda---it is an insurgency by Suuni Arabs acting as spoilers. Deconstructing myths is also necessary because Iraq has become a farce. We now have British troops attacking the police at the al-Jamiat police station that they established and with whom they had been theoretically working for nearly four years. As Roy Hattersley observes in The Guardian:
among their regular activities, they [the police at the al-Jamiat police station] crushed prisoners' hands and feet, electrocuted them and burned them with cigarettes. You will recall that one of the reasons given to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the obligation to save the people from that sort of atrocity. It now appears that, at least in al-Jamiat police station, the arrival of what is bravely described as democracy has not made much difference.
President Bush assures us that he is working on a plan for victory. As Condelezza Rice says about Iraq:
This is a country that is worth the investment because once it emerges as a country that is a stabilizing factor, you'll have a very different kind of Middle East. And I know that from the point of view of not just monetary costs, but the sacrifice of American lives, a lot has been sacrificed for Iraq, a lot has been invested in Iraq.
So what is the dividend?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:54 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
December 26, 2006
Water: poor old Adelaide
I've just got back from walking along the edge of the Murray River downstream of Goolwa and just before the river's mouth on the western side. We had planned to walk to the mouth of the river and stand on Barker's Knoll However, it was too hot and we ran out of time.
On the Goolwa side of the river people were mucking around in boats and jet skis and having lots of Xmas holidays fun. This part of the river was a playground for Adelaideans. It was a different story on the Murray Mouth side of the barrages. There was no flow over the last barrage and the level of water was downstream of the Goolwa barrage was very low. The river looked sick and smelt fetid.
I looked back up stream, imagined a map of the Murray-Darling Basin and recalled the water restrictions, the low water levels in the dams, the lack of rain in the catchment areas and thought ---welcome to the new world of global warming. This is what it is going to look like. Water restrictions (capping demand) is not the answer. It's lack of supply that's the problem.
My next thought was that Adelaide still depends on the River Murray for its drinking water. That means Adelaide is pretty much stuffed. It's future will depend on recycling and desalinisation plants. Yet the Rann state government, like the other State governments in capital cities, which have a water crisis, has continued to take the profits from its water utility, rather than reinvesting the money in new infrastructure. How shortsighted is the SA Treasury then?
Are they waiting for the rains to come, just like the Nationals? Maybe they---state Treasury officials and ministers in the Rann Government--- should go have a look at Perth and then start working on a long-term water strategy for Adeliade. After all, the Premier does go on about climate change being a big issue and the need for CoAG to address it. So where is the long-term water strategy for the capitol city?
Does any state government have one? Or is it still mostly spin? Surely the performance on the Living Murray Initiative is an example of inaction: at the end of 2006 not a drop has yet been returned to the Murray River. After two years of delay the commonwealth has determined it will restrict future purchase of water entitlements to water derived from efficiency savings. Yet it is the over-allocation of water for irrigation that is the primary source of the water crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin---not the drought as the Nationals keep saying.
If we come back to Adelaide we find that developers are not being encouraged to explore water saving,water reuse, energy conservation and production. The Hindmarsh Island marina development ----a big new pleasure play ground----is a wasted opportunity. None of the McMansions have water tanks or facitlities to recycle their grey water.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:36 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
December 25, 2006
Xmas cheer
Religion normally stays in the background even if many Christians at this time of the year have fantasies about Australia being a Christian nation and Christianity uniting the Australian people in one faith. It's the market that unites us these days, isn't it?
Scratch Media, Vension Air, 2006
After 9/11 there have been demands by conservatives that religion must have central place in public life. Of course they do not mean Islam. They mean just Christianity. That demand, which represents dissent from secular liberalism, discloses the way that Christianity is little more than a defensive subculture that denounces secularism whilst posing as a part of liberalism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:43 PM | TrackBack
December 24, 2006
Bush on Iraq
So Bush is now finally acknowledging a bit of reality--he grants that the war in Iraq is not going all that well. That means the "war on terror" isn't going well either.The shadow of Iraq hangs over Washington, London and Canberra. Even the last operation to clear Baghdad was a failure.
Remember Shock and Awe? Remember the "mission accomplished" scenario? Or the way the corporate media, by and large, was still recycling the White House press releases. Or the way the conservative movement ran the triumphalist message underpinned by the maintenance and projection of American military power?
Now Bush is looking at defeat. It's that simple. For the neo-cons it's going to be more troops in Iraq--the surge option. For the neo-cons there was nothing wrong with the idea of invading Iraq at all. The problem is that not enough resources has been put into the occupation. So more manpower is needed. It's the “one last push” argument, which says the White House cannot hope to slink away from Baghdad, leaving the Iraqis in charge, without first stabilising the capital. Bush can still leave Iraq a winner and even "transform" the entire Middle East.
Won't that 'secure Baghdad' strategy (the Keane-Kagan strategy) provoke more attacks by al-Qaeda and provide more targets for Sunni insurgents?
If Iraq has destroyed the Bush legacy, then it is likely that the US conservatives will blame the loss in Iraq on liberals no matter what happens; and in Australia the neo-conservatives will blame failure in Iraq on the ALP, the ABC and SBS and the left in general. The neo-conservatives assume that unswerving support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a necesary condition for being accepted as being serious about terrorism and national security.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:09 PM | TrackBack
December 23, 2006
Xmas spirit
The Australian outdoes itself in its hatred that borders on the pathological. In its Xmas editorial it gestures to friendship amongst the Australian people but the text is primarily concerned to deny friendship. The editorial starts thus:
Christ's birth, with its universal promise of redemption, also planted the seeds of enlightened values and their universal promise. Here we refer to the power of reason tempered by the ultimate dignity of the individual, as well as a scepticism in its thoughtful form that smartly seeks out knowledge and questions received dogma, rather than its debased post-modern version that either substitutes a cynical universal disbelief for genuine thought or, worse, imposes a moral arrogance that shuts down debate.
Well, I'm a postmodernist. And I reckon this is wrong:
Geoff Pryor
That ethical judgement closes down the debate with moral arrogance. I'm then condemned because I'm a '68er and an environmentalist. The former impulse, which aims 'to remake the world in the name of secular religions into new arenas', results in the following:
Both science and traditional religion became the enemies as New Age religions promised all the answers. Pharmaceutical companies are derided as exploiters rather than life-savers. Much of the environmental movement survives on the back of a human impulse that sees the apocalypse as always just around the corner. Here "sustainability", as it is called, has become a post-modern form of grace and the mantra by which all projects are judged. ....For the end results of all these movements is darkness, not for an hour, but eternity.The common thread to all of these post-modern beliefs is their low horizons, constrained worldview and consistent lack of confidence in humanity's ability to use science and reason to better our condition.Well, that gets rid of the ecological enlightenment or the 1968 impulse to expand and deepen democracy beyond its stunted liberal form.
The Australian editorial ends by wishing 'our fellow Australians a merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous 2007'. Well, that can't mean me, can it? According to them I'm unAustralian and an enemy. Just like David Hicks.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:54 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 22, 2006
Xmas political humour
A light moment as we enter into the Xmas period and begin to realize, yet again, how Australia's Christian traditions are fraying all around us.
Andrew Weldon
It would be nice to see a simliar cartoon done for the Nationals, Greens and Family First. Or one for how the corporate media still sees bloggers. The assumption seems to be that journalists rewriting government media releases should be taken seriously as a contribution to democracy, whilst commentary on political events, public policy or the the “disaster” of Australia's foreign policy in Iraq by bloggers should be treated as frivolous, a bit like popcorn at the movies.
No doubt we will hear yet more calls that Australia needs a recovery of faith to overcome the moral decay (postmodernism and relativism) that is eating away at the foundations of civilised society. Or that a study of Australia's Christian heritage should be mandated in in history classes. Will studying Nietzsche's critique of Christianity--God is dead and we killed him--- be mandated to nuture critical thinking to ensure a bit of balance and keep the Enlightenment in play? After all Nietzsche was all about the revaluation of values; not a simple affirmation of the old worn out religious ones.
Update: 23 Dec.
I see that conservative Christians are banging on about "aggressive secularism" and a need to put God back into our lives. God is back, they say, then they go all political. The God is back bit comes because we are supposedly tired of materialism and an unexplained universe, they are searching for some purpose and meaning that makes sense in the 21st-century environment, and religion has the enduring answers. God. But's he dead remember. We killed him off, as Nietzsche said.
I cannot forget that it is the Christian Right who push Islamophobia or Anti-Muslimism, which is becoming one of the more pressing social pathologies in Australia. They are helping it to become established and acceptable and so legitmating of virulent bigotry.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:14 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 21, 2006
poor buggar me aborigine
Chloe Hooper has an op-ed in The Australian on the way the law works in relation to indigenous people at Palm Island in the deep north of the state of Queensland. As we know Mulrunji Doomadgee died in 2004 within 45 minutes of his arrest, with a liver almost cleaved in two, four broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein, a haemorrhaging pancreas and a black eye. Queensland Director of Public Prosecutions Leanne Clare SC had stated that she had reviewed all the evidence regarding Mulrunji Doomadgee's 2004 death in a Palm Island police station, finding it the result of a "complicated fall".
'All' the evidence? If so, what does 'review' mean? What is the basis for judging the importance and significance of the evidence? How come we had "fall" not "assault"? Clare explicitly says that the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee was an accident, which is quite different from saying that that there is not sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction, in could be proven beyond reasonable doubt that the fatal blow was struck by Sergeant Hurley.
An editorial in The Australian puts the political context this way:
The extent of dysfunction [in Palm Island] was underlined by yesterday's visit by Queensland Premier Peter Beattie to explain how a local man in custody could die in a scuffle with a policeman, and nothing happen as a result. Two plane-loads of police were flown into Palm Island to safeguard Mr Beattie, while another police boat remained offshore.....Doomadgee was arrested for questioning police authority. He had done nothing wrong and had never been in trouble with the law. His death has highlighted uncomfortable facts about policing in Queensland and the treatment of the state's Aboriginal citizens. The facts of Palm Island and the Doomadgee case are scandalous and Mr Beattie should have more to offer than a brave face backed up by heavy police protection.
Questions arise because something is amiss in Clare's judgement. She came to a conclusion as to the cause of death which is not a prosecutory function, and she did not indicate what evidence proves that the death was an accident. As Chloe Hooper points out:
Clare says she has based her decision not to charge Hurley on "the evidence, not emotion". She can't mean the evidence given by the three forensic pathologists who appeared at the inquest. These doctors, including one commissioned by Hurley's lawyers, were in little doubt Doomadgee's injuries were caused by a good deal more than a fall on to a flat surface...This forensic evidence would all be admissible and compelling were Hurley to be charged.
If we turn to the report of the Queensland Deputy State Coroner Christine Clements we find this account of the medical evidence:
The consensus of expert medical opinion was that a simple fall through the doorway, even in an uncontrolled and accelerated fashion, was unlikely to have caused the particular injuries...[One of the pathologists claimed] This kind of injury is usually associated with an application of very severe force such as in a high-speed motor vehicle trauma.
In a 40-page report, Clements finds Hurley became angry and assaulted Doomadgee. She also claims the subsequent investigation, conducted by Hurley's friends in the police force, was "wilfully blind" and "reprehensible".
So why did Clare say "fall" not "assault"? Can we infer that the police are above the law, as Hooper suggests? It sure looks like there is one law for th epolice and one for indigenous people at this point in time. An independent review of Clare's decision is the minimum that is required. Disciplinary action against Sergeant Hurley is also necessary, as he both failed in his duty to a prisoner to take reasonable care for his or her safety and he compromised the investigation.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:13 AM | Comments (24) | TrackBack
December 20, 2006
Biomedicine, markets, biopolitics
Biomedicine is the big sign of postmodernity and the new knowledge economy in which knowledge is tied entrepreneurship, capital and the free market. Biomedicine is the future! Biotechnology is the next wave of the knowledge economy and biomedical biotechnology is seen as a key driver for the knowledge economy everywhere.
Nikolas Rose, writing in Kritokos, says that the discourse of biomedicine describes how many believe that we are on the threshold of an epochal change.
The sequencing of the human genome, it was claimed, would enable experts to read the book of life, decode the code of codes, remake Eden, usher in a brave---or terrifying---new world. Our genotypes would be read out, coded on a chip, and used to predict our fate, dignose our diseases and to personalise our medicines. New reproductive technologies would enable a world of designer babies and engineered people. Human stem cells would regenerate damaged human tissue, cure spinal injuries, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Smart drugs would enable us to engineer our moods, emotions, desires and intelligence at will. Some of the biomedical techniques cited insuch futurology are already familiar, but most are said to be 'just around the corner'. Each day seems to bring news of research that promises to increase our ability to modify, manipulate, transform our living bodily processes at will in pursuit of our secular desires.
Biomedicine is linked up with the market, as all the state governments in Australia just love biocapitalism because the biotech industry is a powerful engine of growth and change. It is a form of knowledge/power--a biopolitics.
Is biomedicine one more stage in the long history of medicalization in the sense that more and more everyday troubles are coming within the sphere of medicine, and technical fixes to misery and ill health are replacing addressing social causes of suffering. I'm not so sure. This looks to me to be something different--- more like a reshaping of our bodies to achieve perfection by improving on nature than biology is destiny; a bio-politics of life rather than an eugenics imposed by a state to improve the quality of the population; a steady reshaping of what it is to be human in postmodernity than a becoming posthuman.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:05 PM | TrackBack
New -look ALP
So the ALP is renewed, refreshed, eager to take the fight to the Liberals and wrest the levers of power from Howard's hands in the next federal election. They are talking in terms of Australia needing an immediate commitment to a national carbon trading scheme that offers a possible, long-term global trading scheme. This would involve ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, developing clean-coal technology, increasing use of gas, setting greenhouse gas reduction targets, investing in renewable energy, and penalising companies that breach set emission levels.
What then of the old growth native forests? Where does the Rudd-ALP stand in relation to the native forest logging industry?
Rod Clement
Isn't logging native forests a negative for climate change? Did not the Stern report find that stopping land clearing and native forest logging is the first thing that should be done on a global scale to stop the onset of human-forced climate change? Don't old-growth forests store and absorb huge amounts of carbon, making their preservation a high priority in carbon trading and other efforts to tackle global warming?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:55 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
December 19, 2006
economic forebodings
So what happens to highly indebted households when the economy slows? It will slow eventually. Wiill the slowdown be no worse than a "soft landing"? Or will it be the imbalances on the financial side that will do us in, as happened in the early 1990s?
Tanya Lake
In the Sydney Morning Herald Ross Gittens says:
Just think how vulnerable we'll be to a severe recession if our heavily indebted household sector is joined by a highly geared corporate sector. Anything that frightens the horses will have both consumers and businesses pulling in their horns.
Is this a possibility? Is it likely? I'm going to read the 2006 Boyer lectures, delivered by Ian Macfarlane entitled The Search For Stability, as these are about how we have struggled to find a means of ensuring a stable growth path for the economy. Macfarlane says that we had it, lost it disastrously, half-regained it, then we fully regained it. He asks: Is there a new set of challenges waiting to trap us?
So what does Gitten say? He gives a very dialectical answer:
When you fix one source of economic mismanagement and instability you encourage imbalances to emerge in other areas. Stabilise the real economy and you unwittingly invite problems in the financial economy because stability encourages people to risk gearing up in pursuit of higher profits.Every period of stability fosters the seeds of its own destruction.
Its the kind of answer I'm partial to.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:46 PM | TrackBack
the illusions of the war crowd
There is an unreal air around the Middle East and Iraq in Washington, London and Canberra in their attempts to build their model Middle Eastern state, and in their argument for continuing the occupation of Iraq for years ahead. It appears that the White House is leaning towards a broad rejection of the recommendations from the Iraq Study Group--- for a withdrawal of US combat forces by early 2008, and for the opening of talks with Tehran and Damascus. What's left of the "coalition of the willing" continue to say that they stand foursquare behind democracy in Iraq; and they insist that they have no intention of cutting and running from the country, even though the American people want the troops out of Iraq and want the US to extract itself from the quagmire.
Whilst the destruction of daily life - from mass kidnappings, bombings and shootings - in Iraq continues unabated, the Bush, Blair and Howard crowd continue to enwrap themselves in their illusions that they are courageously fighting the "terrorists fighting democracy" so as to defend democracy. There is a state of denial about the horrors of life for Iraqis--a living hell --- and the way that the chaos of sectarian civil war results from Iraq's continuing fragmentation; a state of denial that refuses to take responsibility for the chaos their invasion unleashed. Yet the sharp escalation of sectarian violence in Iraq threatens to saddle the United States with its greatest foreign-policy disaster since the Vietnam War.
What's the point of a heavier US footprint when Iraqi's are now politically mobilized and they want the US to leave. What does "victory" mean in this context? By defeating the Sunni insurgency and resistance and establishing a sustainable democracy in Iraq? Ensuring the US's imperial goals in the Middle East---creating a client regime, which is the key to establishing and maintaining the U.S. as the dominant power in the Middle East.
In Washington debates around Iraq there is a reluctance to advocate the withdrawal of American troops and the abandonment of the Bush administration's goal of pacifying Iraq. Such a withdrawl would mean the abandonment of over two decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East---Lebanon to Pakistan. I cannot see that abandonment happening under Bush, no matter how lameduck he is. Iraq is all about empire.
As Michael Schwartz observes over at Tom Dispatch the Bush's administration's political agenda for the "arc of instability" predated Bush, going back to the moment in 1991 when the Soviet Union simply evaporated, leaving an impoverished Russia and a set of wobbly independent states in its place. He says:
While the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton did not embrace the use of the military as the primary instrument of foreign policy, they fully supported the goal of American preeminence in the Middle East and worked very hard to achieve it -- through the isolation of Iran, sanctions against Iraq, various unpublicized military actions against Saddam's forces, and a ratcheting upward of permanent basing policies throughout the Gulf region and Central Asia.
Bush and his neocon circle remain committed to the grand strategfy of maintaining the United States as the dominant power in the region.
If Iraq is the lynch pin of US hegemony in the Middle East then the insurgents’ strategy against foreign occupiers is a classical one--- “to make the occupation…so untenable and uneconomical that the [occupier] will have no option but to consider withdrawal.” As Jeffrey Record says in his review of Ahmed S. Hashim's Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq , (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006):
In the case of the Iraq War, which most Americans now regard as a mistake, the insurgency could politically coerce a U.S. withdrawal by raising the costs in American blood and treasure to unacceptable levels by inciting Iraq’s descent into a civil war that would render a continued U.S. military presence a costly irrelevance. Provocation of civil war has been al-Qaeda’s avowed aim in Iraq, and by the summer of 2006, sectarian violence had displaced insurgent attacks on U.S. forces as the primary threat to the U.S. objective of a unified, democratic and stable Iraq. As each month passes, Iraq looks more and more like a Middle Eastern former Yugoslavia than an Allied-liberated France.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 18, 2006
hot global money on the loose
I've got a deja vu feeling around the current private equity deals ---2006 feels like the 1980s. Boom times. Only this time around we are talking in terms of excess global financial capital, not the Australian banks tossing money around after the deregulation of the financial markets in the 1980s. There is lots of money in private equity consortiums floating around looking for a home, there is the loading up companies with heaps of debt, and the debt, which if all goes to plan, is to be paid out of future cash flows. Wiil there be a sell off of parts of Qantas (eg., catering, frequent fliers etc) to realize value as well as the standard cost cutting? Private equity looks like financial trickiness, leverage, engineering and speculation to me.
The private equity consortiums are out to make money from capital gain. So who suffers? Will there be job losses? Less attractive working conditions (eg., less pay)? Reduced services for consumers? The costs of running Qantas are going to be cut for sure, and changes will be forced on the workforce. Jetstar is the future. There is no doubt about that. Who, then is making the money from the deal---the fund managers or investors? Macquarie Bank is looking increasingly rapcious and arrogant these days.
Bruce Petty
I have lots of questions about Qantas because there is some crafty spin around this deal to lull us into its just 'business-as-usual.' Does the private equity deal of $11.1 billion-- a buyout to all intents and purposes --- add value to Qantas, Australia's national carrier, in the long term? It may well mean an end of government protection for Qantas in international air routes. That would trim earnings. And how does the vertical integration between Qantas and Sydney airport by Macquarie Bank foster competition? What happens to cash flow and debt repayment for Qantas if oil prices soar with high debt ratios? Or if there is a global recession and there is reduced demand for airtravel?
Why not see the private equity consortiums as private equity raiders, or leveraged buy-out firms-- looking to make money from companies that are underperforming, have low debt levels, or are underpriced by the market. The funds borrow a high proportion of the money needed to pay for the takeover and, once completed, this debt finds its way onto the books of the target company. So the company becomes a lot more highly "geared" and this debt needs to be serviced. The private equity players hope to make their killing by refloating the company for a lot more than they paid.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:14 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
December 17, 2006
new Arab media voices
In my posts on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict I have increasingly noted the anti-Palestinan bias of the Australian media and the way in which it is largely pro-Israel and pro-American. The other side of this bias is the lack of Arab voices --we just do not hear them. An Arab public sphere does not really exist in Australia; or if it does, it so marginalised in Australia that it has no voice. However, there is a global Arab voice--most notably the new Arab media such as al-Jazeera----but this is still difficult to access in Australia, even though al-Jazeera is the leading and most influential public platform for Arab critical voices across the Middle East and in the Diaspora.
In 'Voices of the New Arab Public' Marc Lynch (who blogs at Abu Aardvark) traces the emergence of the new Arab public sphere starting in the early 1990s until the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2004, analyzing the evolution of Arab debate on political developments related to the Iraqi crisis. He shows that this new Arab media has revolutionized Arab public discourse on Arab political issues, especially on Iraq and Palestine, which is challenging the contrived monolithic discourse, dominated by the “voice of the state”.
The argument is that Al-Jazeera's novel approach to Arab politics--freely aired open and unscripted public arguments and disputations on the most sensitive issues---is empowering individual Arabs to assert their independent opinions in the public arena, thus defining a new kind of Arab public and a new kind of Arab politics. This phenomenon is not mentioned by the Quadrant conservatives who argue that Islamic and Western cultures are incompatible in a single polity and say no more Muslims in Australia.
The academic reviews of Voices of the New Arab Public can be found here From these and Lynch's responses we can glean that the book makes a strong argument for the potentially positive effects of the new Arab media:
shattering state monopolies on information and opinion, challenging taboos and red lines which have shackled Arab political debate, consistently highlighting democratic elections and political reform, and empowering contentious politics from below. The book argues that building a culture of pluralism and public debate is a necessary condition for achieving real democratic reforms.. but not a sufficient one.
This is a very different voice to Stone's collapsing Muslims into Muslim fundamentalism and saying that the core of the Muslim problem (it stands opposed to everything Western civilization stands for) lies in the essence of Islam itself.
Mahmud A. Faksh, one of the reviewers of Voices of the New Arab Public, asks a good question: 'Is the new open Arab public sphere really paving the road to a liberal, pluralist politics, as the author seems to imply'?he says:
The answer is simply no. Indeed, as the study shows, the emerging Arab public discourse, open and free though it may be, remains cloistered in an Arab narrative anchored in Arab-Islamic identity and culture, spewing populism, anti-Westernism driven by past and present grievances (colonialism, the plight of the Palestinians under occupation, the suffering of the Iraqi people under the weight of the U.S.-imposed sanctions, the subsequent U.S. occupation, and perceived or real Western double standards), and obscurantist Islamism---all the antithesis of a civic liberal culture that promotes tolerance, trust, compromise, and reason in the marketplace of ideas.
Faksh says that the Middle East today is in the throes of an ongoing pervasive and intense struggle between moderate Islam and militant Islam that is shaping the Middle East's evolving cultural dynamics and its worldview and that modernist-secularist discourse in the Arab public arena is a marginal one. Lynch says that his book is explicitly ambivalent about the liberalizing effects of the new media, as opposed to its contributions to pluralism and contentious politics. It argues that the new Arab public can not alone produce democracy, is constantly tempted by populist mobilization, and will not necessarily advance liberalism.
He argues that even if the power of a new international public sphere is growing, it is not at all clear that it is a liberal public sphere as the politics of the new Arab public sphere tend towards populism, the politics of identity, of authenticity, and of resistance. He adds that whether the Arab public sphere develops in a liberal direction or in a populist direction, consumed by questions of identity and authenticity, is one of the most pivotal questions shaping the Arab future.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:15 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
December 16, 2006
Justice---Queensland style
It's strange. The stark differences between state Deputy Coroner Christine Clements' findings that Sergeant Hurley caused the death of a drunk Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island two years ago and Director of Public Prosecutions Leanne Clare's decision on Thursday not to lay any charges over the incident---not even a disciplinary issue. Queensland Deputy Coroner Christine Clements had found Hurley to be responsible for Doomadgee's death. It's a stark difference.
Whilst a prisoner Doomadgee had suffered four broken ribs and his liver was torn in two and there was a police coverup as the Queensland police community (the police union and Police Minister) looked after its own. The incident caused riots on Palm Island and the Queenland police responded with heavy handed tactics: including holding children at gunpoint in nighttime raids and conducting illegal interviews, including extracting confessions from unrepresented teenagers.
As Noel Pearson told ABC radio yesterday:
Aborigines were looking to this [legal process] as a sign that they could actually rely upon the legal system, that the legal system was capable of dealing with them. It just shows that there's a different value of a white life and a black life in the state of Queensland.
It is hard to disagree with Pearson on this. It is an example of the significant divide between indigenous and non-indigenous people.That divide is explored here in this essay by Chloe Hooper in the March 2006 issue of The Monthly.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:13 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
December 14, 2006
DLP+ ALP: history reborn
As we know the DLP was founded in the 1950s after an acrimonious split from the ALP, and helped keep Labor out of power at a federal and state level for more than two decades. It was in 1955 that a fiercely anti-communist, predominantly Catholic faction of the ALP, crossed the floor of the Victorian Parliament to destroy the Labor government of John Cain snr. So a proportion of Catholic Labor voters transferred their political allegiance to the DLP, and through it to the Liberal side of politics. A Tory working class was born and the DLP was the arch enemy.
John Spooner
Given this political history why would the apparatchiks in the Victorian ALP in the 2006 state election preference the DLP ahead of the Greens in some key upper house seats ? You can also ask: Why did the apparatchiks preference another right-wing party, Family First, to help it get elected to the Senate at the 2004 federal election? Was exhuming the DLP---it has not held a seat in a Victorian parliament since 1958, or in any Australian parliament for more than 30 years--- just another mistake by the oh-so-clever party machine men?
Of course, you would have to ask the ALP power-brokers in the party machine's powerful administrative committee these questions. Shouldn't they have to explain their decisions to the rank and file? We can, however, surmise that the deals to preference the DLP ahead of the Greens would have been given the okay by the inner Brack's circle. Senior ALP strategists confidently predicted that the Greens would grab the balance of power before the election. So we know the basic answer: the deals with the DLP were done to prevent the Greens from gaining control of the Legislative Council.
Are the Greens worse than the DAP or Family First? Obviously yes, for the socially conservative wing of the party, which is deeply opposed to the decriminalisation of abortion and gay civil unions. The Greens are the enemy. The DLP is a friend. Is this how the rank-and-file Labor members see things?
So what does that suggest about the ALP's commitment to social justice (eqality of opportunity +solidarityas a helping hand when times are tough?) sustainability and social reform? It's too lefty for the right wing machine men who detest the cosmopolitan, inner city professional class, have little time for social liberalism, and sideline the environment to keep the economy ticking over. This is the crowd that is content to be an echo of the Howard government and have little or no conception of market failure. Their "business as usual" means that emissions will take atmospheric carbon to a level likely to produce a final temperature increase by two degrees; to the point at which positive feedback mechanisms will start to trigger runaway climatic change.
So what does that say about the Bracks ALP? If the key feature of the 2006 Victorian election is that the Labor Party is the big winner and there was a shift to right-of-centre in the regions, then the ALP is socially conservative, and Steve Bracks is Victoria's first DLP Premier. Things will remain that way as long as the Liberals continued to be defined as free market, small government liberals.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:05 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
December 13, 2006
Pinochet---good riddance
At long last. Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew Chile's democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende in 1973 in a coup and then ruled Chile as a dictator during the 1970s and 1980s, has gone. That is cause for celebration, but not state funerals. Pinochet's regime was a one-party state, backed by the Nixon administration in a CIA-engineered military coup. If the regime was not a mini copy of European fascism 1930s style, then it sure was a brutal, authoritarian regime. The shadow cast by Pinochet's counter-revolution was a long one.
Pinochet reckoned that he had blasted away democracy to save Chile and that he had rescued Chile from a Soviet takeover. The country was at war against foreign aggression, and this justified the use of any and all military means. However, Allende's socialist government was an elected democracy, not a dictatorship. Pinochet was the brutal dictator who instituted a program of repression, political persecution, mass arrests, summary trials, systematic torture and "disappearances," secret executions and detention by death squads. During Pinochet’s 17-year rule, some 3,000 people were executed (after being brutally tortured) and some 30,000 brutally torture--most of these were left-wing workers, students and intellectuals.
It was Pinochet who used a military dictatorship to transform Chile from a third world democracy into a globalized free market economy with a traumatized population.This is not to argue that monetarism (or neo-liberalism) is inherently fascist because it can only be imposed by state repression. All that is being stated is that a dictatorship was used to introduce "economic liberty" and that this destroyed political liberty. It is not to argue that the denial of political liberty is both necessary and sufficient in order to create (and preserve) "free market" capitalism?
Others--business types--do argue that people need economic security first and only when they have that can they afford to focus on democracy and human rights. Others argue that Pinochet's regime was justified by Chile's economic miracle.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Australian, global warming & Thomas Kuhn
Alex Robson, an economist at ANU, has an op-ed in The Australian, where he argues for scepticism with respect to global warming. He warns us about the academic consensus of Leftist critics because they often get their predictions wrong. He gives a couple of instances of this, then asks: What lessons can we learn from these sad, embarrassing episodes? The most obvious one is that the predictions of left-wing economics professors have very little credibility. He makes his case:
Academics are like everyone else; we often get things wrong. Economic predictions do not suddenly become more accurate - and policies do not suddenly become more desirable - if more professors sign a letter saying so. Indeed, the evidence seems to suggest the opposite is true. Academics can make an important contribution through teaching and research, not by demeaning themselves and their chosen discipline by petitioning the government and trying to influence policies by the sheer weight of numbers.
It's a reasonable point. Politics is different from research. But that is not to deny that academics cannot act politically. Robson then goes on to say that there 'is an important lesson for climate change policy here:'
Geoff Pryor
Robson says that we are regularly bombarded with news that there is a scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming. Groups of scientists have circulated petitions (and opponents have circulated counter-petitions) in an attempt to sway politicians and public opinion. He then makes an arguement that pits science against mob rule:
But consensus (otherwise known as rule of the mob) is an irrelevant concept in the sciences, just as it is in economics and other disciplines. Scientific progress is - and should continue to be - a thoroughly undemocratic process. It is the quality and logic of arguments - and the soundness of the theory and empirical methods used to generate predictions - that matter.....A petition does not constitute scientific proof of anything.
That' s right --a petition does not constitute scientific proof. That is not the end of the matter, however. We still need to consider Robson's positivist understanding of science.
Robson's understanding of science is flawed. As Thomas Kuhn argued, consensus is part of the workings and paradigm of normal science. Robson presupposes a positivist philosophy of science in which scientific progress develops by the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, or the correction of past errors. Such progress might accelerate in the hands of a particularly great scientist, but progress itself is guaranteed by the scientific method. Kuhn contests this traditional view in that he argued that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. As the Stanford Encylclopedia of Philosophy states:
This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a 'disciplinary matrix'....although elsewhere he often uses the term 'paradigm'. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist....The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.
So consensus is not mob rule in politics. It is a part of normal puzzling solving science. And that is what we have with respect to the understanding of climate change by natural science: a consensus that it is partly caused by human actions and has negative consequences for Australia in terms of wilder weather, increased heat, less rain, and rising sea levels etc.
Robson's argument for scepticism on global warming is not persuasive.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:10 AM | TrackBack
December 12, 2006
Israel: contrasting views
Jimmy Carter, an ex-US President, has an article on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in the Guardian which uses the word apartheid to describe what is being created in the occupied territories. It is a contrast to the views of Ted Lapkin, director of policy analysis at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), whose latest op-ed in The Age takes issue with the proponents of conventional Middle East political wisdom...[who]...tell us that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute fuels global terrorism by exacerbating Islamic discontent. Lapkin states:
.... the Muslim extremists who wage a terrorist war against the West have no interest in a benign settlement to hostilities between Arabs and Jews. In the jihadi world view, Israel is a colonialist that has illicitly built on land granted through divine dispensation to the Islamic nation. In radical eyes, the only acceptable outcome must encompass the destruction of the Jewish state. Of course, national suicide is not a popular policy in Jerusalem.The Palestinian Government also maintains an attitude towards Israel of negation rather than negotiation. But even if Hamas were one day to miraculously see the diplomatic light, a Middle East peace treaty would do nothing to slake al-Qaeda's thirst for blood. Any such neighbourly arrangement that recognised the existence of a Jewish state would serve only to inflame jihadi passions.
What is not seriously considered by Lapkin, in his rhetorical defence of Israel, is that Israel may actually be acting as a colonial regional power in terms of its occupation of the Palestinian territories. What else is settler expansion in the occupied territories? It is colonial dispossession taking place through settler expansion.
Colin Rubenstein reinforces Lapkin's Zionist position when he writes that the key is Islamist terror which is 'based on a totalitarian Islamist ideology. Solving the Arab-Israel conflict, even if achievable, would do nothing to eliminate the economic and political deficiencies in the Arab states that make this ideology popular ' On this 'evil versus good' account the good Jewish people in Israel are the victims of the evil Islamist terrorists and the loyalty of the Jewish diaspora lies with supporting the good Jewish state and the actions of the good Israeli government of the day.
What both Lapkin and Rubenstein do is conflate Israel's fight against the Palestinian terror attacks and the Palestinan people with the West's war on terror. That is the (AIJAC) position. Carter, in contrast, undercuts the evil versus good duality when he draws attention to the responsibility Israel needs to bear for what has happened in the Middle East when he mentions the oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories.. [with].. its rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.' A colonial regime is probably better way to represent what is happening in the occupied territories than an apartheid regime, despite the similarities.
What Carter is doing is providing a way to introduced a Palestinian state, rights of Palestinians and the occupied territories into the public debate. These are rarely deemed to be legitimate. Yet to have a debate the rights, security needs and history of both Israelis and Palestinans need to acknowleged. As Anthony Lowenstein says in My Israel Question the Zionist lobby patrols the boundaries of public debate, aiming to silence anyone who occassionally strays from the accepted line (p.182).
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
energy compromises
First we had the nuclear energy taskforce. Now we have an the carbon emissions taskforce that is to look into a global system of trading, and how Australia might take part in such a scheme. Now, it is hard not to see this in the context of the standard Howard policy of short term tactics and political expediency. The Howard Government needs to be seen to be doing something in an election year on an issue in which public opinion is way ahead of either of the main political parties. Government responses so far have been superficial, as it is more concerned with the maintenance of resource interests as the main game with the environment as a secondary consideration.
Cathy Wilcox
The context is one excessive faith in the prospects of clean-coal technology and highly partisan stances on the nuclear option and carbon taxes. If the taskforce has no environmentalists on it, then it has the climate change skeptics on board. It has been given the task of finding a way in which Australia can reduce greenhouse gas emissions without losing its trading advantages in traditional energy areas such as fossil fuels. It is required to maintain the prosperity that our abundant fossil fuels have given us whilst at the same time exploring options for global climate change solutions.
The taskforce must also advise on the “nature and design of a workable global emissions trading system of the type that Australia would be able to participate”. Is it to be an Australian only one---a global system based on Australia’s needs only? Or is it to be more along the lines of implementing a domestic emissions trading system that is capable of participating in international carbon markets as they stand in the near future?
The problem is that global warming cannot be effectively addressed with what have increasingly become the customary political responses: a quick rhetorical fix, a few token handouts to green programs, or simplistic changes of policy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:58 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 11, 2006
the commentariat on ALP renewal
I've been caught up in Melbourne and Canberra these last few days. I was without access to broadband in the Radisson on Flagstaff, and so there were no weekend posts. I was working amidst the heat and the smoke from bushfires currently engulfing Victoria's north and east east, and then in the Snowy Mountains on Monday. Both cities were engulfed in blue hazy smoke. The smoke had even extended to South Australia on Saturday morning when I flew across to Melbourne, and it entered the plane's air conditioning system as we flew into Melbourne.
I noticed that the weekend papers were full of commentary about the new ALP leadership team of Rudd and Gillard and new front bench. Lots of judgements were made about the significance of the new ALP front bench in which the "factional daleks" still had a significant say in selection. What was acknowledged is that Labor could no longer rely exclusively on its union base to win the next federal election, given the Liberal attack of 'different style same substance' (ie., Labor is contolled by the unions). It's early days:
Looking back from now we can judge that Beazley was underperforming, and there was an assumption that he would lose with his single focus on industrial relations. So it was time for change. This is the honeymoon phrase with lots of positive media coverage for the ALP. The problem is keeping the momentum going. So how do the commentators see the significance of the changes?
Many focused on industry policy and Rudd's comittment to retaining a strong manufacturing base in Australia to try and avoid Australia becoming China's quarry and Japan's beach. They tried to to pin an increased tariffs and protection policy, and picking winners on Rudd, despite his advocacy of competition, innovation and free trade.
Brian Toohey, writing in the Australian Financial Review, was more adventurous. He noted that Rudd was trying to get the ALP to be taken seriously in the battle of political ideas and values debate, where they were now where to be seen as a different voice. Toohey described this in terms of Rudd trying to achieve this goal by pigeonholing John Howard as a market fundamentalist, highlighting the opposition between Howard's family values and workplace reforms, and spelling out the clash between Howard's liberal 'individualism' and his conservative 'social cohesion'. Alas, Toohey did not do much more than describe what Rudd was doing. What was missing was the analysis of what Rudd was doing.
Update:13 Dec
Jack Waterford's op-ed in the Canberra Times gives us some analysis by referring back to Mark Latham. He rightly highlights the role played by the campaign team:
Latham's chief weakness, the lack of a coherent economic policy and a coherent economic message, went against his instincts and was pushed on him by his advisers political geniuses and personal enemies such as Stephen Smith and Wayne Swan, who seem to have an incredible capacity to become indispensable during an election campaign. And Simon Crean, not a Latham enemy, but perhaps, with the best will in the world, in no great position to help.
It's the strategy of campaign team that isi the problem not the leader. Waterford adds that the:
The campaign professionals have the appearance of knowing all about campaigning, and can manage, fix and arrange things such as liaison with party central, keeping everyone else "on-message", remaining a "small target" and not being "distracted" by ruses and diversions by the other side. But their tactics do not seem to work, least of all on voters. In each campaign, moreover, they have begun the 12-month lead-up to an election with the polls pointing towards a Labor win, and squandered it by election's end.
Is the ALP going to repeat this kind of campaign?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:38 PM | TrackBack
Noel Pearson on the ALP's indigenous policy
Does anyone know where Labor stands on Aboriginal affairs? How will things change under Gillard and Rudd? What will be their concerns? How will their talk about good commonwealth-state cooperation bring about change? What does the federal and state governments working together to help fix indigenous issues in their state actually mean?
Noel Pearson, writing in The Weekend Australian, gives us an account. He says that:
The Government is showing that it is prepared to take on a hard debate about welfare, which is one of the most important policy areas for indigenous Australians. The question is, would a federal Labor government show the same determination in policy areas where opposition from well-organised welfare lobby groups is a certainty? Evans and McMullan have made statements that seem to be in favour of policies for welfare reform, control of supply of addictive substances, and restoration of personal and family responsibility and social norms. It will be a measure of Labor's policy maturation if it follows the lead that Evans has charted.
What of improving health care for indigenous people? Where does that fit? Healthcare is more than controlling the supply of addictive substances.
Pearson says that Labor's present policies have been developed in a series of speeches and essays by Senator Evans and Bob McMullan. He interprets Evans and McMullan to have taken a balanced approach to indigenous rights and responsibilities.
Pearson says that the important statements by Ecans and McMullan are about issues that indigenous organisations in Cape York Peninsula have been driving for many years. For instance, Pearson quotes McMullan saying that "if drug and alcohol abuse is not targeted directly, it will be impossible to resolve other problems"; and Evans saying that "Labor must engage more and adopt a less ideological stance ... in the welfare debate". In relation to indigenous rights Pearson says the Labor Party has consistently advocated indigenous representation at regional and national levels.
Pearson adopts a critical tone in reltaion to Evans' and McMullan's first attempts to develop Labor's stance on indigenous representation. This lacked substance. They spoke about the need for benchmarks and stressed the importance of accountability of governments to indigenous people. Labor, however, said nothing about any powers being vested in indigenous institutions or other means of compelling government agencies to perform better. Pearson says that it was an important development when Evans, in an under-reported speech at the National Press Club in Canberra, said that:
We need a national indigenous body (that) has the power to make governments - federal and state-territory - accountable. No government, Labor or Coalition, has ever made a serious attempt to give indigenous people the power to hold government to account. Labor is determined that (there) will be a strong and independent voice for indigenous people. And we are determined that the accountability mechanisms will differ radically from the ones in place now.
That's fine. The policy is developing. Will Jenny Macklin continue it? I hope so as I still have no clear idea where Labor stands on better healthcare for indigenous Australians.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:24 PM | TrackBack
December 8, 2006
media changes
It is well known that, for all the rhetoric of market solutions, the Australian media market is a protected cartel where existing players profits are buttressed through government regulation.
Allan Moir
Emma Dawson & Miriam Lyons argue in New Matilda that this protected cartel:
is a particularly pressing problem in the ‘new media age’, when traditional news sources, such as newspapers and television, are being supplanted by new media technologies. While, at present, the majority of the news and journalism we consume still comes from the daily paper or the nightly news, the future is digital, and the community is beginning to move decisively in that direction (despite government coddling of free to air TV). Australians are increasingly getting their news and information online or on-demand: the audience that turned the television on at the end of the working day and rarely touched the dial before bed time is largely gone.
The old ‘static’ audience of yesterday is rapidly being replaced by troops of highly mobile, technologically savvy consumers, whose loyalty is to themselves and their own tastes, rather than to any monolithic media ‘voice’. As such, they cannot be relied upon to provide the kind of mass audiences that have driven commercial media for more than 50 years.
So why protect the old media?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Canberra watch
The response by the Howard Government to the situation in Iraq, the mid-term Congressional elections and the Baker report is that nothing has changed apart from some minor adjustments to tactics. That was the line being presented throughout Question Time in the House of Representatives all this week to sharp questions being asked by a re-energised ALP. There were few doubts about Iraq, but many self-serving delusions about the Middle East on the Government side.
Leunig
Who do they--Howard and Downer--- think they are kidding with all the bluff and bluster about chaos descending, running up the flag of appeasement, and the Baker Report justifing their position of business as usual etc etc? That report amounted to a repudiation of the President's democracy project in the Middle East? Do they take us citizens to be fools? Do they think we don't read and make judgements? The ground of Howard's moral certainity is a wasteland of death and destruction, not power used for virtuous ends through clean hands. Howard and Downer remain enwrapped in illusions.
The Iraq Study Group's recommendations on Iraq are a substantive change of strategy and an implicit rejection of Bush's foreign policy. The recommendations involve troop withdrawals, negotiations with Iran and Syria, shuttle diplomacy to get a peace process going between Israel and the Palestinians, and no mention democracy for Iraq or any other country in the Middle East.
Of course, Howard and Downer's bluff and bluster hides the fact that they now talk about stability in Iraq. Democracy has been quietly dropped. It is no longer a goal. It has gone the way of WMD. The Howard Government is looking increasingly isolated now that the ambitious project to reshape the Middle East and the whole international order in terms of Pax America has collapsed in the sand of Iraq. Howard remains enwrapped in the dark shadows of Iraq.
What remains unquestioned in Australia is the false neocon notion that the royal road to Jerusalem lay through Baghdad.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:56 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
December 7, 2006
media plays
I see that Fairfax Media has launched a $2.9 billion friendly shares-and-cash takeover bid for Rural Press, thereby creating the largest newspaper company in Australia. The takeover is to be completed in April 2007 and it will probably act as a deterrent to predators ( Murdoch, Packer and Stokes) eyeing a full takeover of Fairfax in the new media landscape. So the Canberra Times and radio stations (in Queensland and South Australia) will added to the AFR, SMH and Age. Rural Press was previously owned by Fairfax, before the bustup in the late 1980s, when Warwick Fairfax lost the company from his ill-fated $2 billion-plus privatisation of the group. Fairfax then slid into receivership.
Pryor
Fairfax Media will emerge as a stronger, independent national media player following its effective takeover of Rural Press next year. It allows the combined group to step up its internet potential by using the content from the combined metropolitan, regional and rural newspaper group. However, the combined group has no interest in moving into free-to-air television.
Rural Press extracts a good margin out of its businesses as it runs them very lean and operates from a particularly low cost base. Local journalism meaning low rent journalism. Presumably, the tight control on costs by Rural Press will also be a key part of delivering earnings growth for the new Fairfax.
What does that mean for journalism at Fairfax Media? Yet more downsizing? Margaret Simons in the Sydney Morning Herald answers:
We can expect deep cost cutting, and it will be on the Fairfax side, not the Rural Press side, which is already so lean as to be skeletal. Brian McCarthy, the Rural Press chief executive, will now be in charge of running the broadsheets as well as regional and suburban newspapers. He is notorious as a tough, ruthless manager, cutting resources to the bone....the truth is that at Rural, John Fairfax has left McCarthy to run a lean, mean, accountant's company, and hasn't imposed his aspirations. So we can expect cost cutting at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. The truth is that this would have happened to some extent no matter who owned the mastheads.
Will the takover mean a much improved Canberra Times that has been so poorly resourced? A greater online local presence for the Canberra Times? How will community and localism work in the national capital?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:39 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 6, 2006
"the blame game"
A central issue in the urgently needed restructure of Australia's health care system is to establish models of care that prevent illness and provide early diagnosis and treatment of problems.
The health system is focused on chronic disease management and hospital care and is under greater stress due to a shortage of funding and workforce. The primary health care system is failing for a shortage of general practitioners.
Others argue that the central problem is the blame game between the states and the commonwealth, and the duplication between the two levels of government on health costing the community between $1.5billion and $4billion a year.
The rising costs of health care and a funding structure that can create incentives for state and commonwealth governments to shift costs to others and this compromises the ability of the increasingly interdependent public and private health care providers to offer the care that patients require. In the debates in the House of Representatives on health the Howard Government bashed the states for poor service delivery.
In contrast Kevin Rudd argued that the Government failed to deliver a national reform agenda in health and education, despite a $40 billion dividend from the economic boom.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 5, 2006
Rumsfeld's Iraq options
This is the full text of Donald Rumsfeld’s Memo of Options for Iraq War suggesting new options for Iraq that was sent to the White House just before the mid-term Congressional elections and his resignation. It recognized that Iraq was a bit of a problem in that some change was needed to the current strategy, since he states that what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.
The current Bush/Cheney position is flawed because of the weakness of the Nouri Al Maliki Iraqi government, its inability to be a unity government, and its lack of capacity and willingness to stem the rising violence in Iraq. Hence the White House is considering options. Those options do involve a questioning of the US as an empire and the rhetoric of the global war on terror. These are a given.
My eye went to the options Rumsfeld did not find particularly attractive, namely :
*Move a large fraction of all U.S. Forces into Baghdad to attempt to control it.
*Increase Brigade Combat Teams and U.S. forces in Iraq substantially.
*Set a firm withdrawal date to leave. Declare that with Saddam gone and Iraq a sovereign nation, the Iraqi people can govern themselves. Tell Iran and Syria to stay out.
*Assist in accelerating an aggressive federalism plan, moving towards three separate states — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd.
*Try a Dayton-like process.
The memo's bottom line is to make small changes to the current Bush/Cheney position of 'staying the course.'
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
'not just an echo' of old Labor?
Jack Waterford's op-ed in The Canberra Times is an interesting historical account of the role of factions in the ALP. He says that both Rudd and Gillard have never much benefited from factional patronage. They have won power by prising some politicians from their factions.
Renewed power for the factions will not help them. They do not want the first loyalty of caucus members to be to groups which aspire to bind people to majority views a process of caucuses within caucuses within caucuses which produces lowest-common-denominator ideas, not fresh ones.
Well that is different from Beazley. However, the swift Kim Beazley-Kevin Rudd battle was just a battle of numbers with the philosophical questions about neo-liberalism and globalization, and larger policy questions about climate change and health, playing no role. So what does the Rudd/Gillard ALP stand for in terms of new ideas and values? It looks like an Australian version of Blairite New Labour to me, for all the talk about Whitlamite free education and health care.
On the renewal theme advocated by the Rudd/Gillard ALP Waterford observes:
Above all a party which has suffered greatly by being seen to have lost passion and principle and to be hostile to new ideas, needs to establish processes for generating and testing policies, not repelling them according to where they have come from. The risk of Rudd is not the prospect of his taking the party down blind alleys the fear that people held of Mark Latham. It is that he will become paralysed by the difficulty of getting ideas through caucus, and that he will settle instead for repackaging, with mere slogans, old, tired, and not-very marketable goods.
The introduction of new policies into the political debate is desparately needed. Yet it is in the context of a domestic economy that has limited spare capacity (shortage of skilled labour) constraints on government spending that will encourage consumers to spend, and interest rate increases. It is in the context of an American economy going soft, aneconomy facing challenges from China and a falling dollar.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 4, 2006
ALP: renewal or not
I'm going to be in a CoAG meeting all day in Canberra so I will not be able to follow the news around lunctime about the renewal of federal ALP in an open ballot at a specially convened meeting. Nor will I be able to see the start of Question Time. And I've been too busy trying to deal with viruses, getting my site back up and pre CoAG meetings to follow those studying the tea leaves (polls, body language, rumours) for signs and portents of what might happen today.
Some say you have to watch the eyes not the lips to know what's going on. Others say the 30 uncommitted MP's on Friday are down to 10. Philip Coorey in an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald reckons the blood fight is really about hatred and frustration. That is cynical reason.
Anthony Weldon
John Button, writing in The Age, says that one thing is clear. If the Rudd-Gillard team wins by a handful of votes, it is a result. If Kim Beazley wins by a handful of votes, it solves nothing. Many of those who reckon they can read the eyes --- say it is still too close to call.
In contrast Peter Van Onselen, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, says that:
Labor's most important state at the next election won't be Queensland. It will be Western Australia, Beazley's home state. At the 2004 election Mark Latham lost two seats there (Hasluck and Stirling) and almost lost two more (Swan and Cowan). With Beazley at the helm and unhurt by a challenge, Labor could have reasonably expected to win back those two seats and possibly two more (Canning and Kalgoorlie).With a new leadership team and an embarrassed and ousted Beazley, Labor will be lucky not to lose Swan and Cowan. West Australians are a parochial bunch. So instead of needing 16 seats to form government, Labor may need to pick up 18 seats after WA losses. Beazley would have been looking at needing 16 seats with the real possibility four of them would be won in the west.
The Canberra Press say that it is breaking for Rudd and Gillard. Does that renewal mean a further breakdown in the factional system? Does that mean a shadow cabinet based on talent not factional representation? Will Gillard gain Treasury? Will it mean new policies? New directions?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:14 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
December 3, 2006
where's Israel
The current conflict between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian territories has been stirred by the US and Israel and their stubborn refusal to recognize a democratically elected Hamas and to starve the Palestinian government of funds.This calculated destruction of the Palestinian economy through the imposition of sanctions is designed to undermine the Hamas Government.
What is often ignored in Australia is the insight of ex -president Jimmy Carter-- the occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli settlers and military and a system of occupation that is designed to separate Israelis who live on Palestine territory and Palestinians who want to live on their own territory.
Saying the above in Australia challenges the view that Hamas is a terrorist organization by those who think in terms of the global war on terror. It's the Palestinians who continue to fire rockets into Israeli land. It's the Palestinians who have kidnapped Israeli soldiers. It's the Palestinians that continue to perpetuate terrorist acts against the Israelis.
Australia's Jewish community is politically conservative and it is frustrated with the inherently left-wing bias perceived in Australian universities. So it is no suprise that we have a local expression of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in terms of the Israeli lobby's attack on Middle Eastern studies in Australia's universities.As Anthony Lowenstein reports, it is claimed---by Jewish Labor MP Michael Danby and Ted Lapkin of the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council amongst others--- that students are being fed an increasingly biased and distorted anti-Israeli view of the region by "Arabist" academics. Danby's and Lapkin's criticisms are focused largely on the two best known Middle East study courses in the country: Andrew Vincent's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Macquarie and the Australian National University's Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, directed by Amin Saikal.
the word "fed' is suggestive. That implies there is no debate or critical ethos in the universities and no attempt to foster critical reasoning on this issue.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 2, 2006
Telstra is fair game
Telstra has little credibility. Sol Trujillo talks big about Australia needing to make the shift to high speed broadband to remain competitive, national prosperity, that the current speeds are holding Australia back, and the state of broadband services are a disgrace. They sure are. Even Rupert Murdoch and James Packer agree on the national interest requiring high speed broadband services.
Yet it is Telstra who has 44% of the broadband market, and it is it's competitors who have made the shift to ADSL2+ not Telstra. It is Telstra who refuses to turn on highspeed broadband in areas where it does not face competition. The technology for ADSL2+ has already been installed. So it is Telstra who is deliberately stifling broadband speeds.
What Telstra is doing is to using competition laws as a subterfuge to delay the roll-out of fast broadband services. Telstra is using this delay to pressure politicians to remove regulations poor service very high. Yet it is competition that will deliver faster broadband services.
The delay is resulting in the state Labor governments (eg., NSW, Queensland and Western Australia) proposing to roll out internet infrastructure by planning their own open access broadband networks.
Telstra bangs on and on about regulation --the ACCC is deemed to be a rogue regulator. Yet the ACCC uses the Trade Practices Act when Telstra acts to impede competition. Telstra cannot stand regulation in the public interest.
It would be best if the infrastructure is controlled by the federal government and the states creating their own infrastructure is contrary to creating national markets and infrastructure. But Telstra's intransigence has led to this. If Telstra refuses to 'flick the switch ', then the states should act as direct competitors to Telstra's national network.
What will Canberra do now that T3 is out of the way?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 1, 2006
Canberra watch
Is the federal ALP a party in search of a spine, as Laura Tingle argues in the Australian Financial Review? Well, I reckon that it has lacked political courage. Tingle says that:
These days, much of the federal parliamentary Labor party is beyond even being depressed about the lack of spine the party appears capable of showing collectively. And at the end of the day, its a lack of spine that is Labor's problem. The electorate has judged Kim Beazley and decided he's weak and people are not listening to what he has to say... But what the last two years have revealed is a more systematic weakness in Labor's ranks...The party seems unable to mobilise itself to successfully provoke a change--either with or without Beazley.
There have been murmurs all week about the need for change with the behind-the-scenes backgrounding and undermining---called a destablisation campaign by the press. Currently, the right wing ALP, ruled by an inner circle of mates headed by Swan, Smith and Conroy, has been going nowhere on the issues that count and which flow Labor's way:- interest rates, climate change, Iraq. These have been placed to one side in favour of industrial relations. So we have a one card trick. It's not enough to make the case for a change of government at next years election. The ALP has looked depressed and dispirited all week. It has lacked courage to tackle the issues that matter.
Bill Leak
Well, we will see about the spine bit won't we? The Rudd/Gillard team have issued a challenge to Beazley. There is to be a spill of all leadership and frontbench positions on Monday.The challengers are calling for a change in the leadership of the party and strategic direction. That's a welcome move. It's time for change. Beazley is yesterday's hero.
It would appear that the dominant NSW right wing faction, which once stood behind Beazley, has split into two. Will Rudd/Gillard deliver on the fresh ideas, fresh vision and a bucketload of energy that they promise? How will that happen given the diminished talent pool, and the Stasi trend described by Senator Ray:
A whole production line of soulless apparatchiks has emerged: highly proficient and professional, but with no Labor soul; control freaks with tunnel vision; ruthless leakers in their self-interest; individuals who would rather the party lose an election than that they lose their place in the pecking order
Presumably the strategy of relying on resentment over Coalition policies is coming to an end.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
talking sense on foreign policy
If the ALP is not going to engage in a debate on foreign policy beyond bringing the troops home from Iraq for fear of upseting the great and powerful Americans, then we need to turn elsewhere. Owen Harris has an interesting article in todays Australian It is a summary of a speech entitled After Iraq given to the Lowy Institute.
Harris begins by stating the hegemonic Australian foreign policy tradition:
If you consider the grand strategy of Australian foreign policy over the past century, what stands out is its essential simplicity and consistency. It has always consisted of allying our country closely with a great power that is committed to preserving the existing international order against those who want to change it radically. For the first 40 years of Australia's existence, that power was Britain. After 1941 it was for a period Britain and the US. For the past half-century it has been the US alone. Between them, those states strove to maintain the international status quo against those revisionist states - Nazi Germany, militaristic Japan, communist Russia - that sought to change it radically.
Howard has continued this tradition with its muted or limited independence for Australia when he gave his support to the US after 9/11. However, as Harris points out, a neoccon Washington was not concerned with maintaining the staus quo in international affairs. The US, to speak a different language, was the imperial power.
Harris states it this way:
The Bush doctrine, formally proclaimed in the presidential national security strategic document of September 2002, committed the US not only to combating terror but to actively promoting democracy and a market economy in "every corner of the world" - that is, to transform the whole international system to conform with American values. To that end it would, where necessary, use its vast military force, not only defensively to contain and deter its adversaries, but actively, assertively and pre-emptively.
That is what Howard signed up to, and continues to support in Iraq and Afghanistaan. It's time for a reassesment since we are now close to the end game in Iraq. By almost common consent, and even in the opinion of Tony Blair, America's Iraq venture is a disaster. So what now? Harris is cutting in a way that the little Americans in the ALP never are:.
There is plenty of scope for discussion as to what is the best course of action from here on, the order and tempo of events. But simply yelling "No Cut and Run" and having no apparent plan for ending participation in the business, beyond making our decision entirely dependent on the decision of an inept and demoralised Bush administration, is surely a pathetic sign of political and intellectual bankruptcy.
The danger is that because the relationship is inherently unequal the weaker party may well become so enmeshed in the affairs of the senior partner as to lose its autonomy. That is the case now. Iraq highlights how Australia has committed itself to marching in lock-step with a superpower that is committed to an incredibly ambitious program of global change. What is given in return? The US typically ignores Australia and take no notice of Canberra. There is no sense of reciprocity in the so called special relationship.
Does not the "special relationship" need to be rebalanced and rethought?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack