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January 31, 2007
gambling + happiness
Gambling damages families and disrupt their communities yet it is accepted even fostered by governments. Gambling ranges from bingo to betting on horses and dogs, scratchcards, raffles, lotteries, poker clubs and casinos aplenty. The internet is afloat with roulette, blackjack and poker sites. Britain has embraced Internet gambling and gets a substantial amount of tax revenue from the $12 billion U.S. consumers spend gambling online each year, much of it with U.K.-incorporated gaming sites.
Being for more gambling yet against "problem gaming" is seen as the pathway to happiness. It is odd isn't it. Governments support and patronise the alcohol and gambling lobbies and yet repress other indulgences and addictions, notably street drugs. They accept city centres with drunks and gamblers yet fill prisons with drug users.
Libertarians say that citizens in a free society should be able to spend their money on whatever peaceful pursuits they fancy.Why is spending money in a casino any different from spending money in a tavern or a sports arena or at a political fund-raiser? And why should those who gamble "responsibly" be punished simply because some choose to gamble "irresponsibly"? Excessive gambling is an ethical problem that should be dealt with by individual choice, not government coercion.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:18 PM | TrackBack
SBS goes commercial
I watched a bit of SBS tonight. What's happened? The 9.30pm news looks like that of the ABC with a break in the middle that is filled with adverts. I watched a program on the necons entitled The Power of Nightmares and it was broken throughout with blocks of adverts. I was watching commercial television. SBS is no longer a public broadcaster. It's now just another commercial free to fair station chasing the advertising dollar.
When did this happen? Sometime last year I presume. I understand that the network is still limited to five minutes of advertising per hour and the advertisements must appear in what the guidelines refer to as "natural breaks". I saw no natural breaks on The Power of Nightmares; in fact the flow of the programme---a feature documentary--- was interrupted by the ad breaks.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:36 PM | TrackBack
January 30, 2007
water politics: more subsidies
Andrew Macintosh, a deputy director of the Australia Institute, has a succinct account of the environmental strategy of the Howard Government, that puts its big water plan into a political perspective. This is a plan which, as John Quiggin points out, places the emphasis on enginneering solutions--the lining and piping of the open irrigation channels from the river to the farmer's property. What played second fiddle was the market purchases of water entitlements. Full-cost water pricing was never mentioned.
Macintosh says that:
The Government's solution to water problems has largely involved providing public money for water infrastructure, much of which has appeared in the form of subsidies to the agricultural sector. Thursday's announcement of the $10 billion water package signalled that this policy is unlikely to change. The Government's plan states that the bulk of the money will be directed to farmers to improve water efficiency and irrigation infrastructure. The lion's share of the money is intended to provide further subsidies to what is already probably the most subsidised industry in Australia.
What is firmly rejected is the neo-liberal or free market approach that involves a buy back of water licences for the environment, apply full-cost water pricing, establish tradeable water rights, reduce agricultural subsidies and then allow the market to do its thing subject to appropriate environmental restrictions.
All you hear on the radio these days is subsidies for the agricultural sector, which undercuts its public image of being the least subsidized agricultural sector in the develped world. Macintosh d goes on to say that because of the Government's ties with irrigators:
it has (for the most part) refused to buy back water for the environment, does not support full-cost water pricing, opposes environmental regulations and has provided an unprecedented level of subsidies to the agricultural sector. Under the new plan, it appears these subsidies will continue to flow and buy backs will remain a last resort. The same approach has been adopted to greenhouse policy. Enormous subsidies have been provided to the fossil fuel sector in the name of growth. Then to solve the problems caused by burning fossil fuels, the Government has provided more subsidies.
He says that it is unlikely that Turnbull will be given the scope by the Prime Minister to radically alter the direction of environment policy: he will be given his running orders from Howard and he will be expected to follow them. Hence it is unlikely that Turnbull will push the argument that free markets are the best means of determining the allocation of scarce resources, and that government's role should be confined to supporting rather than directing market forces.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:28 AM | TrackBack
January 29, 2007
Adelaide's water future
It is now accepted in policy circles that the shift in rainfall in Australia has been substantial during the past 50 years. Southern Australia is receiving ever less rain--- 250 millimetres---than they did back then. Larger and larger amounts of rain--- 250 millimetres--is falling over parts of the north-west are receiving.
Bruce Petty
Scientific evidence is indicating that rising temperatures are being caused by an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. It is argued that these gases are also thought to be causing at least part of the rainfall decline across southern Australia, though land clearance and natural variability of rainfall may also be having an impact.
Where to for Adelaide now? The CSIRO estimates that by 2020, average annual flows to the Murray-Darling catchment may reduce by 15 per cent due to climate change and other factorsI
SAhas to guarantee Adelaide's water supply by taking pressure off the River Murray, which means that SA state must find new sources of fresh water instead of relying on the Murray, with SA needing to move to non-climate dependent sources of water. The Liberal opposition in SA has trealized this and taken the first steps by proposing that the desalination of seawater is the long-term answer to the state's water crisis; greater use of greywater on lawns and gardens from domestic washing machines and capturing the recycled wastewater discharged to the sea;
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 28, 2007
Jimmy Carter in Australia.
Jimmy Carter, a former US president, was on ABC Radio National Breakfast programme last Thursday about talking the Israel/Palestine issue. He was interviewed by Paul Barry, whose persona is that of a tough interviewer.Yet Barry skirted most of the hot issues, in a most professional manner of course. (Listen here.)
Reference was made by Barry to Carter's recent appearance at Brandeis University. What was not seriously explored was Carter's claim of the regime of apartheid imposed by Israel on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Was the title of former President Jimmy Carter's new book fully justified--"Palestine--Peace not Apartheid"? Was Israel practising apartheid in the Palestinan territories, as Carter claimed? Was that too hot to handle?
Did the ABC lacked the courage to tackle the key issue?
There are plenty of hot issues to explore: Carter’s suggestion that Israel has committed human rights abuses against Palestinians, that the American Press is extremely pro-Israel, and that Israel lobbyists stifle debate. Why not mention these things in relation to Australia?
Barry also missed the opportunity to explore the Israeli assumption that it would be enough to apply heavy economic pressure and arrest members of the Palestinian parliament and government ministers to overturn the election results in Palestine that bought Hamas to power. So it was an interview marked by what was not said about the core argument of the book: that Israeli policy toward the Palestinian population in the West Bank is akin to South African policy toward the non-White majority during the apartheid era.
The ultra-nationalism that animates so much of the Carter-bashing was given a free pass. We have a situation in Australia where support for the State of Israel operates to the point of denying that it can do wrong or be responsible for the displacement and oppression of the Palestinians. The hardline Israeli narrative in Australia holds that the Palestinians exist only in terms of being a threat to Israel. There is an inability to regard Palestinians as full human beings with equivalent human rights.
Carter challenges this Zionist discourse because of his commitment to human rights. The over the top responses to Carter indicate that Zionism cannot distinguish between authentic criticism of the concrete reality of Israel and an anti-Semitism that regards the Jew abstractly and in a demonic form. Zionism works by making instrumental use of anti-Semitism, as a rubbish bin into which all opposition to the practices of the Israeli Government can be quickly thrown. Zionism works on activating fearfulness around which to rally Jews.
The Carter controversy seems to be growing and becoming uglier. Consider this op-ed by Deborah Lipstadt in the Washington Post entitled Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem. She says:
Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes in defense.One cannot ignore the Holocaust's impact on Jewish identity and the history of the Middle East conflict....by almost ignoring the Holocaust, Carter gives inadvertent comfort to those who deny its importance or even its historical reality, in part because it helps them deny Israel's right to exist. This from the president who signed the legislation creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Lipstadt concludes by saying that though Carter is a 'man who has done much good and who wants to bring peace has not only failed to move the process forward but has given refuge to scoundrels. '
Carter could have given the Jewish narrative more prominence, but it does appear as if the Holocaust is being used as a weapon against Carter. However, the Palestinians had no part in the crime against the Jews of Europe in the 20th century. Carter is arguing that no good reason justifying the current Palestinians suffering.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:41 PM | TrackBack
January 27, 2007
Greenwash?
As Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year, pointed out, the Howard Government has been dragging the chain with respect to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and introducing a carbon price as a way of forcing industries and businesses to lower their greenhouse emissions. But an election looms:
Alan Moir
While there is a scientific consensus that rising average temperatures are due to climate change, conservatives think that those of us who argue that we need to take urgent and significant action to reduce our output of carbon dioxide are the new religious movement. Environmentalism has replaced Marxism is their constant talking point.
Howard's shift challenges the commonly accepted view that progressives are so yesterday and that conservatism is where the power lies now. This is big government conservatism mugged by greenhouse reality.
Howard, once a sceptic, now declares himself to be a climate change realist. He accepts that there does appear to have been a contraction to the south in the weather systems, which traditionally brought southern Australia its winter and spring rains. Of course, for many in rural Australia, that reduction in rainfall is known as a drought. History works in cycles for them. Some of them are now saying that with the recent rains the drought has broken.
In the meantime Howard, the big government conservative, continues to provide enormous subsidies to the fossil fuel sector in the name of economic growth. How then do we address the problems of global warming caused by burning fossil fuels? Why the Government provides even more subsidies for new technology.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:29 PM | TrackBack
January 26, 2007
Mulrunji Doomadgee: reverberations
This is very good news on Australia Day. Queensland Attorney-General Kerry Shine has said he would pursue charges against Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley over Mulrunji Doomadgee's death in the island's watchhouse in November 2004.This judgement is based on a report by former NSW chief justice Sir Laurence Street found there was enough evidence to charge the officer with manslaughter - and to warrant a conviction. Sir Laurence was asked to consider whether sufficient admissible evidence existed to support the criminal proceedings against any person with respect to the death of Mulrunji; and whether there was a reasonable prospect of a conviction before a jury if prosecution was brought against any person.
I'd always thought that the earlier ruling by Queensland's Director of Public Prosecutions Leanne Clare last year, that there was not enough evidence to warrant any charges, was suspect; an indication of the legal system in Queensland stumbling badly. Something was wrong when there were no charges over an indigenous death in police custody.
There should now be an investigation into the initial police probe into Mulrunji's death, which the coroner found had lacked objectivity and independence.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:49 PM | TrackBack
January 25, 2007
Canberra Watch: water
I see that the Howard Government has started shaping up for a federal election with a cabinet rehuffle that makes Malcolm Turnbull Czar of water and environment, or a water supremo. The next step was a Big Plan to seize control of the water debate and take the governance of water from the states. This centralisation of power is a strategy designed to sideline Rudd's earlier ALP initiatives for a water summit, drawing together all State and Territory leaders to have a summit.
Water is now definitely on the political and political agenda, and Howard's action plan indicates that climate change is now centre stage politically speaking. Howard and Co did need to claw back lost ground and reconnect with the shift in public opinion on climate change. Does that mean the Nationals will be sidelined on water?
They have resisted water reform, put a stop to the commonwealth government buying back overallocated water licences, and limited water reform in the form of claw back from efficiency gains. The viability of the irrigation districts is what is paramount for the Coalition. That leaves room for the ALP to move in the cities. What will the state premiers do now in their capital cities? How will they move beyond water restrictions?
Irrigated agriculture, such as cotton and rice, does need to start making the shift out of the southern Murray-Darling Basin to northern Australia. Though this is being considered by the Howard Government, its Big Plan involves $1.5 billion is going to promote more efficient water use on farms, the nation's biggest consumers of water. Around $6 billion is being used to modernise irrigation infrastructure to improve structures like pipes and channels in a project aimed at saving 3000 gigalitres of water a year.
What happens to that saved water? How much of that goes back to irrigators? How much goes to environmental flows? The proposal is to spend $6 billion on efficiency improvements aims t:o
achieve efficiency gains of around 25 per cent of total irrigation water use. This programme will generate water savings of over 3,000 GL per year, with over 2,500 GL per year saved in the MDB. Water savings will be shared 50 per cent with irrigators to help meet the challenge of declining water availability, and 50 per cent to address over-allocation and sustain river health.
So the implied return of water to the Murray-Darling Basin is around 1250 GL, which is close to the 1500 GL recommended by the Living Murray program as the minimum needed for sustainability. What is the time frame for this ambitious project?
What is less noticed, but of crucial importance, is that $3 billion is explicitly being used to help ease farmers off the land and to buy back water licences as farms are sold. So we have broken with the state's evasion of restoring environmental flows to the Murray-Darling Basin's rivers by buying back the over-allocation of water licences. Howard's $10 billion plan depends upon the governance arrangements for the basin are put on a proper national footing-- ie., all relevant state and territory leaders will have refer to the Commonwealth their powers of water management within the Murray-Darling Basin.
How will the ALP states approach federalism now. The federal ALP has always been deeply centralist. Will the ALP states give Canberra their control over water, only to see water policy continue to be along the lines of the Nationals---protecting irrigated agriculture and keeping the Murray-Darling Basin's rivers as irrigation channels? Isn't that the current practice of the states? If the Coalition is politically beholden to the cotton industry and the rice industry and the upstream irrigators are in control of water, then what will SA do?
Should the federal ALP respond by placing the emphasis on water reform in the capital cities, couple it to an increase in environmental flows by buying back water licences from the cotton and the rice industry, and encouraged the cotton and the rice industry to shift to northern Australia?
Then again, Howard could well be very serious in addressing the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin and more than willing to sideline the Nationals. Maybe.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:19 AM | TrackBack
January 24, 2007
State of the Union: digging a hole
I would have thought that Shiite and Sunni insurgent dominance in Baghdad is such that it will be extremely difficult for Bush's "surge" in troops to restore law and order and stablize the daily bombings and killings from sectarian warfare. It will be easy enough for the Shiite guerrillas to pull back, stockpile weapons, lay low or even leave Baghdad for a period.
Now why would the Shiite Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, move against the Shia militias that support him? More American troops fighting in Baghdad's red zone is going to increase the widespread humiliation and anger amongst Iraqi's. With the US bottled up in the Green Zone, with a lack of access to the population, and almost nonexistent language skills on the part of both CIA and military intelligence personnel, Bush's plan is akin to finding oneself in a hole, and then digging deeper.
Via The Politico. The time warped Republican rhetoric that retreat isn't an option, which will be used to justifiy digging the hole ever deeper. Liz Cheney's op-ed looks crude judging by these talking points, as Bush's State of Union Speech currently being delivered in the House to a Democrat-controlled Congress was also concerned with health care, energy security and immigration. But the crudity around Iraq is placed in the context of the war on terror and regional hegemony.
I only managed to catch the last 5-10 minutes of the State of the Union speech. It was a more humble Bush, who spoke in a subdued, noncombative style. Bush is politically weak and iraq is the cause. The country is now aligned against him, since, Bush in effect, has been rejected by the electorate. We have entered the end game of the Republican era.
The speech contained no suprises on Iraq. Bush says that if America is:
to win the war on terror, we must take the fight to the enemy...Al Qaida and its followers are Sunni extremists, possessed by hatred and commanded by a harsh and narrow ideology. Take almost any principle of civilization, and their goal is the opposite. They preach with threats, instruct with bullets and bombs, and promise paradise for the murder of the innocent....In recent times, it has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shia extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East...Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah, a group second only to Al Qaida in the American lives it has taken.
Bush is going to take everybody---Al Qaida, Shiites and Sunnis--- only the Kurds are left out:
The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat. But whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent, they have the same wicked purposes: They want to kill Americans, kill democracy in the Middle East and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale ....
It's the usual freedom v totalitarianism rhetoric. Bush adds that ' we advance our own security interests by helping moderates, reformers and brave voices for democracy.' Who are these moderates in Iraq? Is it the Shi'ite Iraqi Government residing in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and relying on the Shiite militia to fight the Sunni insurgency? But they want a speedy and total US withdrawal from Iraq! They want a sovereign Iraq not a client state.
This is the transcript of the Democrat response by Senator Jim Webb to Bush. It's a bit of straight talking on Iraq.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:06 AM | TrackBack
ALP: education matters
Kevin Rudd's education speech at Melbourne University needs to be read in the context of the discussion paper. This explores the critical link between long term prosperity, productivity growth and human capital investment, and frames education as an economic reform issue. Andrew Norton makes some comments on universities, whilst Andrew Leigh has some comments on schools.
Education has been a simmering burn under the Howard Government, due to the consequences of neo-liberal mode of goverance: low investment in skills and training, laying waste to the humanities in public universities, reduced public funding of public universities and high priced degrees. Education has been seen in term of a private rather than a public good.
The Beazley-led ALP failed to cut through on education and it was not able to build on the rhetoric about knowledge nation to put the Howard Government on the ropes. The opportunities were there with the Howard/Costello reliance on Quarry Australia to ensure prosperity and address the balance of payments of deficit. The ALP had consistently argued that Australia can do better on education, and that education is crucial to improving Australia’s productivity performance and to ensure its international competitiveness. One strand of the argument was about Australia's growing productivity gap, namely:
The economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, and more intense use of technological innovations gave a onceoff boost to the size of the economy, but now further productivity drivers are required if Australia is to recover its productivity momentum...A significant constraint on Australia’s productivity growth in recent years has been under-investment in education.
This argument never really cut through because it was not part of a larger economic narrative that persuaded us that reform was necessary, or indicated what kind of reform was need to boost education.
The New Directions Paper states the issue clearly enough:
The challenge that Australia now faces is that the platform for economic prosperity in recent years has changed from high productivity growth, to the short term, boom-time prices for minerals and energy. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Australia is likely to face moderating conditions in global resources markets. In the absence of the resources boom, Australia’s economic fortunes will be determined by our underlying performance – i.e. productivity growth rates, which have been weak in recent years, and growing challenges to workforce participation arising from long term demographic change... It is important for Australia to reconsider the long term foundations of economic prosperity... economic research indicates that the most important enduring determinant of living standards is a nation’s productivity. Understanding the nature and foundations of productivity is central to the challenge of sustaining prosperity into the future.
The paper's argument is clear. Lifting productivity further in the next decade of twenty first century is the key challenge facing economic policy makers. It says that there is a broad consensus in the official and academic literature that two important determinants of long term productivity growth and prosperity are the degree of openness of the economy (that is, to both internal and external competition) and the level and quality of human capital investment.With repect to the latter it says that:
The more educated economies are wealthier economies. Countries that invest in education do better in achieving their potential economic growth rate.Beyond economic goals, educational analysts also highlight that education creates other social benefits. It helps build social capital – societies with a strong commitment to education can also enjoy higher levels of civic participation in community and religious groups, greater social cohesion and integration, lower levels of crime and social disadvantage, and a more trusting, equitable and just society.
The basic policy argument is that Australia’s current investment in human capital is inefficiently low, and
in the long run Australia’s productivity growth will fall behind those of other countries that are making greater
investments. Australia must lift its productivity growth to sustain its economic prosperity and this is best achieved
by improving our economic resources through investments in human capital.
So education needs more money. The human capital argument is that whereas in most OCED countries increasing private spending on tertiary education tends to complement, rather than replace, public investment, this is not so in. Australia. Here the shift towards private expenditure at tertiary level has been accompanied both by a fall in the level of public expenditure in real terms and by a significant decrease of public subsidies provided to tertiary students.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 23, 2007
Water crisis in SE Queensland
Brisbane is now a very large and thirsty city built on a very small river catchment. It is argued that the heat generated by the city combined with the cooling effects of the Wivenhoe dam has caused the storms to change track8, leaving Brisbane’s major dams in a rain shadow. According to this story in the Courier-Mail, the water crisis in South East Queensland is deepening:
Although the southeast has received about 40mm of rain since Christmas, none of the rain created significant inflows into the Wivenhoe, North Pine and Somerset dams, which are at 23 per cent of capacity and falling about 1 per cent every three weeks. By June, it is possible the dams will be down to 17 per cent of capacity.
Brisbane is running out of water, and with insufficient rainfall, Brisbane and environs will be without sufficient water in 2 to 3 years. If current conditions continue, Brisbane will run out of water by early 2008. As Ian Mackay argues it's lack of rain, not just population pressure, that's the primary cause of the water crisis. As he says the problem for SE Queensland is that the water crisis comes from an almost total reliance on dams for water supply. More and bigger “dams equals more water” is the ethos. Yet without good run-off rain, a dam is just an expensive wall. Though the proposed water grid takes steps towards integration of the water cycle, it has minimal water recycling and rainwater harvesting. Recycled water is inevitable for south-east Queensland.
I notice that the Beattie Government is still pushing ahead with the controversial dam at Traveston Crossing near Gympie, west of the Sunshine Coast. I understand that the Traveston project will cost of about $1.7 billion, and that this represents almost a quarter of the Beattie Government's $8 billion water plan. It is a huge financial and political investment. I discern a bit of a noose around the neck of state Labor on this. Virtually no one outside Queensland supports the proposed dam, with many inside the state also opposed.
Water does need to be treated as a commodity and pricing policies should replace water restrictions over the long-term as a rational and efficient way of addressing the issue of water scarcity. Currently there is a market for water irrigation, whilst urban water is controlled through restrictions. That means households, which account for 8-10% of total annual water consumption, comply with water restrictions,whilst industry is not being held to account in the same way.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:13 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
January 22, 2007
The Australian's irrationality
The Australian continues to talk its nonsense on climate change due to its odd conception of environmentalism as a religion. This time it downloads an op-ed from the UK based Financial Times written by John Kay, that is entitled 'Green lore now treated as gospel.' It's more of the same old stuff that is endlessly repeated by the defenders of the free market who misinterpret Adam Smith.
The standpoint of Kay's text is that of an enlightened economic rationality. Suprisingly,for someone who wants to link economics to the natural sciences, he views environmentalism not in ecological terms terms but as an Apocalypse myth. Hence envirornmentalism belongs to literature, not history or science, so it is fiction and has nothing to do with truth. Presumably a (romantic) environmentalism as a religion is a part of the counter-enlightenment. Kay spells out his thesis of environmental evangelism thus:
Environmentalism at first lacked a persuasive Apocalypse myth. The litany of environmental degradation had to confront the manifest fact that many aspects of the environment were steadily improving, with cleaner air, rivers and seashores. The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon. That is why environmentalists attach so much importance to the assertion not just that the world is warming up, which is plainly true, but that this warming is our fault, which is less plainly true. The connection between rising carbon concentrations and the growth of modern industrial society provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future.
This is not very persuasive. 'Cleaner' rivers does not make sense of the lack of flows in the Murray-Darling Basin's rivers. I presume that Kay is referring to a cleaned up Thames. Yet The Australian is saying that this kind of widely acclaimed English commentary is relevant to policy and public debates in Australia.
Secondly, Kay's phrase 'sins of the past' uses the language of Christianity to link climate change to religion. However, environmentalists do not use the sin language to explain the lack of flows in the rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin, as they say it is caused by the over-allocation of water licences by state governments. Nor do environmentalists use the sin language of religion to talk about the effects of climate change in terms of global warming, changing rainfall patterns and water shortages. Their's is a secular language of greenhouse emissions being caused by the way energy is currently produced by coal fired power stations.
Kay, who produces a weekly column in the Financial Times, is way off target, as is The Australian in terms of the tacit linking of romanticism to religion and evangelism (fundamentalism). Environmentalists in Australia say that the current drought is overlaid by the effects of global warming. The account given of effects is based on the natural sciences and climatology, as it cites a clear downward trend in regional rainfall over the past 30 years as evidence of climatic change. It is acknowledged that, whilst the magnitude and nature of the change are far from certain, there is a need to be prepared for the eventuality that our dams may yield less water than has been the case in the past; and that this is coinciding with the prediction that climate change will bring higher temperatures and evaporation, increasing the demand for water.
Kay just loses the plot at this point, which is where economic rationality as a defence of the liberal free market Enlightenment, becomes so distorted and twisted that it transforms into its opposite--irrationality. He says:
Environmental evangelists are therefore not interested in pragmatic solutions to climate change or technological fixes for it. They are even less interested in evidence that if we were really serious about reducing carbon emissions we could do so by large amounts without significantly affecting our economies or our lives. Windmills on roofs and cycling to work are insignificant in practical consequence, but that is to miss their point. Every ideology needs rituals of observance which demonstrate the commitment of adherents.
See what I mean--its a rant not an argument? Kay's claim, that environmental evangelism's ritual, gesture and rhetoric takes the place of substance, simply does not connect with the policy proposals in Australia. These are firmly based on policy substance, as environmentalists address water shortage in the policy terms of the recycling of storm and grey water. It is the state governments that refuse to invest in water infrastructure. Moreover, environmentalists say that Australia needs to invest in wind power to feed into the electricity grid, and invest in renewable energy industry to meet peak electricity demand from airconditioners during the summer; and that the best way to facilitate this is for the energy intensive industries to become part of an emissions trading scheme. It is the Federal Government that refuses to do this because it is hell bent on protecting the coal industry.
This kind of op-ed is yet another example of the poor quality of the commentary pages in the corporate media in Australia. Junk is being downloaded that has no relevance to the policy debate about energy and water in Australia. This the " expert professionalism " of a political hack with an axe to grind, which is defended by journalists in the corporate media when they dismiss bloggers for producing meaningless drivel. Such junky commentary under the guise of "expert" is the reason why the credibility of journalists is now on the line.
What is being paraded for all to see is ignorance, columnists saying the same thing year after year, ill-informed rants, and vacuous, staged polemics. What it produces is a low grade public culture where little by way of fresh intellectual content or new ideas is produced, and you can go a little time and encounter nothing but received wisdoms.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:18 AM | TrackBack
January 21, 2007
the importance of literacy
Noel Pearson, in an op-ed in The Australian draws attention to a literacy crisis in remote Aboriginal communities. He says that the three most important aspects of the literacy crisis in his home region of Cape York Peninsula, are: Indigenous children are behind from the beginning of their schooling; they fall further behind while at school; they end up two to four years behind by the end of Year 7.
He says that this two to four-year gap makes it impossible for most students to go on to secondary school, further training and education and, ultimately, to a job and economic independence. He then adds:
The core problem in Cape York Peninsula, that indigenous children start from behind and then stay there or drop further behind, is caused by complex social problems in the communities and by shortcomings in government school policy. State and federal government agencies are working in partnership with Cape York Peninsula organisations to address these issues, but resolution of these structural problems will not arrive quickly. The long-term strategic policies that aim to improve community life and reform the regular delivery of education by the state education departments will not help the students who are enrolled in Cape York Peninsula schools this year.
He argues that we must respond quickly and efficiently to the emergency: that a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of indigenous children attending primary school in Cape York Peninsula are destined to be excluded from mainstream society and labour markets because they will be illiterate or semi-literate.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:08 AM | TrackBack
January 20, 2007
water is everywhere
It's not often that I agree with the Business Council of Australia. In a study last September, the Business Council called water shortage "one of Australia's greatest myths". State governments are currently saying that urban water scarcity is inevitable, and that we must learn to use less water to survive, that we need to accept another summer of water restrictions, and that our future is increasing water restrictions until the rains return.
The Business Council says:
"The perceived shortages are due to artificial limits on supply to our cities and an inability to allocate water to its highest value use in rural areas. If we allocated water for environmental purposes for example, to restore river health and allowed market pricing and the laws of demand and supply to operate as they do in every other market, there would be no talk of shortages or the need to curb economic growth."
The impediments to new urban water supplies should be removed. All the competing options (recycling, desalinisation) to increase water supplies need to be seriously considered.
Well, the rains have returned. It's been raining in Adelaide these last two days--quite heavily today. So what has happened to all that storm water? Why, its all been flowing out to sea. Yet the state government is saying that we have no water so we need to be on tougher and tougher water restrictions!
The reality of course is that the Rann Government, like the other state governments, has not been investing in water infrastructure. It's public profile on the national stage is that climate change is a reality and we must address it. But it does nothing about finding alternative supplies of water for Adelaide, even though it knows that it cannot rely on the River Murray for its water supply, due to decreased flows. And it continues to insist that that its state water businesses pay dividends to state governments rather than fund increased levels of capital expenditure.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 19, 2007
work + family
Julia Gillard, the deputy leader of the ALP, stated recently that it was much harder for women with children to rise to the top in politics. She ius reported as saying in the Bulletin that:
‘If Peter Costello genuinely thought about it, could he be the mother of three children, be Treasurer for more than a decade and be next in line to be Prime Minister? Could John Howard have been a mother to his children as opposed to a father and be in the position he is in today? The frank answer is, no’.
A truism I would have thought, despite conservative raving on about Gillard being anti-male, or causing businesses to go bankrupt. Gillard is asking John Howard and Peter Costello to reflect to themselves: to ask could they be where they today and have been born a woman; to reflect on how there are still more challenges for women and particularly women who are trying to balance work and family and work and family in stressful jobs that require a lot of travel.
Bill Leak
Most, though not all, of those woman who have succeeded in politics have done so after their children have grown up. So if women are to participate in the workforce then we need a substantive child care policy:
Gillard went on to say that in terms of making work and family fit together better that:
...the reality is that politics, like a lot of our workplaces, at the moment is pretty unforgiving when it comes to helping people balance work and family life. What we have got to do at all levels of our society and in all of our workplaces, including the political workplace, be looking for creative ways to help women and men, mums and dads balance up work and family responsibilities.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:37 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 18, 2007
Baghdad revisited
Tony Karon over at Rootless Cosmopolitan has a good post the plan of the severely weakened US administration of President Bush to stablize Baghdad plan. He says:
So, essentially we’re now being asked to believe that the Iraqi government, dominated by Iran-friendly Shiite religious parties, is going to act in concert with Bush’s plan — and even Bush admitted that their support is the critical factor — giving U.S. forces the green light to take control of Sadr City from the Sadrists and so on, even as Washington moves its assets into position for a military strike on Iran....Even within the narrow Iraqi context, no matter what Maliki has told Bush, I wouldn’t bet on him coming through for the U.S. when the battle for Sadr City starts in earnest, and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, appalled by the violence, begins demanding that the U.S. go home.
The signals from Washington are increasingly about the need to curb Iranian influence in Iraq and the wider region and the object of Bush's latest escalation is Iran. The interests and objectives of Iran's strategic rivals the United States and Israel threeaten to bring closer the prospect of pre-emptive assaults on Iran's nuclear installations.
Iran is seen by Israel as a potentially powerful regional player who could become a threat. And according to Israel’s military doctrine, potential threats are to be treated as existing threats. The US-Israeli strategy iis one of building a new middle east order based on Iran’s exclusion and isolation. Karon adds that:
Equally important, though, the new Bush moves give Iran no incentive to cooperate, and plenty of incentive to tie the US up in an increasingly messy situation in Iraq. And my suspicion is that Tehran has hardly begun to exercise its ability to cause chaos in Iraq.
The US aims to justify its aggressive rhetoric against Tehran and it is suggesting that Iran bears much of the blame for sectarian violence in Baghdad. Iran has Iraq, Afghanistan, and the oil card to counter its exclusion and isolation. Iran wants to be the "indispensable regional power" – in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and much of central Asia.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:36 AM | TrackBack
January 17, 2007
knowledge + economic innovation
So another textile and footware industry moves offshore to take advantage of low wages in Asia, as de-industrialization gathers pace. This time it is the Hobart-based Blundstone, which recently announced that it was shifting manufacture of its boots to Thailand and India. Manufacturing in Australia is being downsized, as it gravitate to low-wage countries in a global world.
The solution is to go high tech, embrace a knowledge economy, and put resources into economic innovation. The neo-liberals are right on this---the universities become the incubator of new technologies, which are then commercially developed and distributed by start-up companies. This is the future in a global world. Protection, or a closed economy, as is advocated by some manufacturing unions, is not the answer.
In an op-ed in The Australian Glyn Davis and Joshua Frydenberg argue that Australia should emulate California, which is the home of this kind of innovation. They say:
The Californian strategy is clear and it is working: produce the engineers, scientists, researchers and MBA graduates who will invent new industries. The approach created Silicon Valley is flourishing in bio-medicine and looks set to boom in bio-fuels, energy alternatives and new fields such as robotics. Each begins in university research facilities but moves quickly to start-up companies and markets. The process once took years. Now the cycle is getting shorter, with knowledge transfer a core business for American universities.
This is what Australia should emulate they say. Their argument is that Australia shares share much in common with California: a welcoming climate, natural resources, an immigrant culture and an economy in which services rather than manufacturing provide most employment. Like California, Australia too is seeing and seizing the economic opportunities in Asia, particularly in China.
Davis and Joshua Frydenberg state that:
.. if Australia is going to take the next step and become a hub for innovation and new markets, it is our universities that must become the fulcrum for this change. Building closer relationships between educators and business, encouraging a greater culture of philanthropy, increasing our appetite for venture-capital-type risks, and a more active program for recruiting and nurturing the best talent are just some of the techniques Australia needs to more effectively employ. Australia has the people, the resources and the capacity to replicate California's success. Let us start now.
What they do not mention is that the state in California puts in billions of dollars to help fund new initiatives in renewable energy and stem cell medical research, whilst the Australian government cuts back on investing in renewable technology. Australia was once a leader in this kind of renewable energy research. Most of it has gone offshore from lack of support. That lack of support was not even from neglect and ignorance. It was a deliberate running down.
Despite the Backing Australia’s Ability (BAA) program---an ‘innovation action plan for the future’--- the Australia state under Howard and Costello is into pork barrel and protection: they are protecting unsustainable agriculture and the polluting fossil fuel lobby. Their industry policy and agenda is not the neo-liberal one of fostering university knowledge and technological innovation. Their image of Australia is the old fashioned one--Quarry Australia not an knowledge economy. As Evan Jones observes:
Any concern for potential de-industrialisation has been offset by a longstanding ‘cargo cultism’, a naïve optimism in a rosy future for the Australian economy. The massive trade deficit in value-added manufactures is seen as temporary, or as a step on the path to more efficient future production. Resources exports will be our perennial salvation; even greater scale is achievable by better infrastructure. Tourism revenue will bring up the rear. The science and technology sector, should anything of substance eventuate, will be icing on the cake.
In contrast to California there is little by way of opening new horizons for business.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:12 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 16, 2007
conservatism, multiculturalism, democracy
Senator Brett Mason, a Liberal senator from Queensland, has an op-ed in The Australian on multiculturalism entitled, 'Nation must get precedence over ethnicity'. In it he outlines his conservative understanding of multiculturalism:
It looked really good on paper. Immigrants would be encouraged to retain their distinct cultural identities on condition that they subscribed to the tenets of Westminster democracy...The Australian brand of multiculturalism intended to maintain a fine balance between sectarian rights and mainstream responsibilities. Minority groups would be free to follow their creeds as long as they did not contravene the values of democracy. And in the event of such a conflict, the tenets of Australian multiculturalism mandated that individual rights, gender equality and religious freedom would always reign supreme.
The phrase that 'minority groups would be free to follow their creeds as long as they did not contravene the values of democracy' suggests that you cannot question the 'values' of democracy or have different values. Critique of liberal democracy is off limits.
What Mason ought to have said instead of 'values' is the rule of 'law '--thus ''minority groups would be free to follow their creeds as long as they did not break the law of the nation state. ---In replacing the rule of law with values Mason covers up that strand of conservatism that is anti-democratic and authoritarian.
Mason then repeats the standard conservative critique of multiculturalism that claims conceptual shortcomings mar the core of Australian multiculturalism and have have spawned hesitancy and confusion in its application.
At its core, the word multiculturalism implicitly elevates ethnic tribalism over national commonality. The term makes express reference to factionalism without specific mention of the unifying factors that are supposed to be the pride of this policy. It sends the message that diversity is an end in itself, rather than merely a means to the end of a better Australia.
That duality position ignores a middle position in which you can affirm your ethnic community and Australian democratic values. 'Ethnic tribalism' is like religion in a liberal democracy---it's a personal matter premised on the public private distinction. So Australian Muslims are more than happy to comply with the secular rules of Australia because these are the best guarantee for religious freedom.
Mason of course rejects the liberal account. He sees Sharia Law in opposition to the rule of law in Australia:
In several European nations, Muslim leaders have begun to press for the application of sharia law to their communities. And because sharia constitutes a distinct legal code, there is nothing in the strict definition of Australian multiculturalism that would preclude such a demand in Brunswick or Lakemba. In fact, that is precisely what the radical Muslim Hizb ut-Tahrir movement is doing when it calls for a Taliban-style Islamic caliphate in Australia.
This ignores the conflicts in interpretation over Sharia law within Islam. It ignores that several of the countries with the largest Muslim populations, including Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, have largely secular constitutions and laws, with only a few Islamic provisions in family law, or that Most countries of the Middle East and North Africa maintain a dual system of secular courts and religious courts, in which the religious courts mainly regulate marriage and inheritance.
How is the latter different from the way that Christianity works in Australia? Isn't Mason denying religious freedon to Muslims or the existence of Islamic reformation in Australia?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:20 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 15, 2007
rationalising irrigated agriculture
An Age editorial addresses one implication of the water crisis that many say is caused by the drought whilst other says it is drought plus climate change. The implication is the rationalisation of agriculture in a world of glbal warming. The editorial states:
In the past six years, more than $1 billion in drought assistance has been doled out. No one disputes the need to keep in production those farms that are viable in all but extreme years. Not enough thought has been given, however, to which farming areas and practices may no longer be viable most of the time — particularly if water pricing more closely reflects its real scarcity and value. For some marginal farmland, drought aid simply extends the farmers' agony and compounds the damage to land that can no longer sustain them. The environment, in effect, pays a hidden subsidy for agricultural food and fibre production, at the expense of future productivity.
The editorial acknowledges that many agricultural producers are at the cutting edge of sustainable farming technology and practices that maximise efficient use of water, but rationalisation of agriculture has been a politically sensitive issue and thus all too slow. It goes on to say that we need to address what is marginal agriculture:
Four years ago the Victorian Catchment Management Council predicted that current agricultural practices would render 40 per cent of farmland useless by mid-century. Land and water resources continue to be exploited and degraded: salinification and soil denudation and loss has spread, while groundwater use doubled in the last decade despite concerns about replenishment and contamination.
The drought means that the focus is now falling on irrigation, which is far and away the biggest user of water. So what needs to be done in terms of the rationalisation of irrigated agriculture given this scenario?
The Age says:
It is time to end the waste of open channels, flood irrigation (instead of precisely monitored sub-surface irrigation) and crops that offer a low return on huge water use. For instance, returns on water to orchards can be up to 40 times those for rice. There may be a case for planting rice and cotton in wet years but an automatic massive entitlement to water cannot be justified when other uses are more justifiable. The same goes for non-essential industries predicated on abundant, ludicrously cheap water.
I've often heard that neo-liberals say that all that matters is water efficiency--- what is produced does not matter. However, sustainable agriculture is more than the efficient use of scarce resources. What the editorial does not mention is the buying back of water licences as the farmers sell their property and leave the industry.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:09 AM | TrackBack
January 14, 2007
US's 'interests' in the Middle East
In a response to the Iraq Study Group Report by Baker and Hamilton Larry Everest comments:
Baker and Hamilton’s introductory letter spells out two of the report’s central and overarching themes: the U.S. has legitimate “interests” in Iraq and the Middle East, and bipartisan consensus and domestic unity are essential to advancing them. In most all discussions of the ISG report, these two statements are treated uncritically, as self-evident truths and worthy goals.Yet if anything needs discussion, dissection, and debate, it’s these two foundational, generally unquestioned, assumptions. What are “U.S. interests” in Iraq and the Middle East? Why should the population support their pursuit?
My concern is with the former theme--- that the U.S. has legitimate “interests” in Iraq and the Middle East. The assumption that the US has legitimate interests in the Middle East does need to be unpacked. I generally decoded 'interests' in terms of empire and hegemony.
Everest concurs. He says that the Baker/Hamilton report tells us that “Iraq is vital to regional and even global stability, and is critical to U.S. interests” and he comments thus:
In this instance and mainstream discourse, “interests” is a euphemism for U.S. hegemony in the Middle East – hegemony aimed at controlling global energy sources and markets (the lifeblood of modern empire), preventing others from doing so, and dominating this geopolitical nexus between Europe, Asia and Africa. This predominance has been a pillar of U.S. strategy for 60 years under Republicans and Democrats alike, key to ensuring the smooth functioning of U.S. global capitalism in the interests of its imperial elite.Pursuing these objectives has meant turning Israel into a regional gendarme and supporting the dispossession of the Palestinians, maintaining ruthless tyrannies while overthrowing popular governments, and intervening covertly and overtly on many fronts, over decades.
He adds that the Bush administration, saw conquering Iraq as a way to dramatically assert U.S. power and begin restructuring (“democratizing”) the region’s brittle tyrannies, undercutting Islamists, and facilitating U.S.-led globalization.
Control of Iraq would place U.S. forces in the heart of the Middle East/Central Asian region – home to 80% of world energy sources – and give it enormous military and economic leverage over potential global rivals. It was conceived as phase two (after Afghanistan) in an ongoing war for unchallenged and unchallengeable empire, theorized by the neocons and codified in the U.S. National Security Strategy (of 2002 and 2006).
I more or less acept this account and I' dont see it as viewing US intervention in the region solely through the prism of traditional, Cold War dogma as James Baker claims in his response. Everest is reductionist in that he reduces empire to 'the smooth functioning of U.S. global capitalism in the interests of its imperial elite'
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:23 PM | TrackBack
January 13, 2007
water crisis
It's been the Murray-Darling river's driest year on record: just 1317 billion litres of water flowed naturally into the Murray system — compared with the previous minimum of 1740 billion litres in 1902. The Murray River would have stopped flowing altogether in 2006 and been "reduced to a series of pools at bends in the river", if it had not been artificially boosted.
So what is Premier Beattie doing to keep the Murray Darling River system flowing? He's going to auction an additional eight billion litres of water a year from the Murray-Darling's parched upper reaches for irrigators. The Warrego, where Queensland is planning to extract the eight billion litres, is at the headwaters of the Murray-Darling river system. Queensland is full of doublespeak about water. It talks sustainability but is determined to push ahead with continued development of the upper reaches, after refusing to join a national effort to cap the water-take 10 years ago.
Bill Leak
This is is significant because the ephemeral flooding upper reaches of the Murray-Darling System helps to flush the entire system. Queensland has trapped the floodwaters in Queensland has turned the Condamine-Balonne catchment, which hosts the Cubbie Cotton farm, from one of the areas least affected by water harvesting to one of the most.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:21 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
January 12, 2007
whither social democracy
One aspect of the Howard Government's strategy to preserve power (other than welfare for the middle class) is to build a conservative base that would turn out in elections. So its ministers have courted the Christian right, they have opposed stem-cell research using human embryos; banning gay marriage; put conservative judges on the High Court; and framed issues from gay marriage to fighting terrorism in a way that has continually put the ALP on the defensive. For instance, on the latter issue, Howard has succeeded in painting the opposition ALP party as weak on protecting the security of the country.
Has this embrace of Christian conservatives helped push the Liberal Party far to the right, leaving more centrist and independent voters up for grabs?
If so, does this open up an opportumity for Rudd and his moral/political discourse to seduce the political centre? After all, the right wing in Australia likes to think that the nation was, at its inception, highly religious, and specifically Christian. That leaves those whose morality is secular based in limbo.
Where does it leave those aspirationals who have benefited from Howard's IR reforms.
Still it is the ALP that has to make the case for change. It needs to say more than the Howard Government is tired, and has run out of ideas, since social democracy’s position is substantially weakened. That markets are good for generating growth but need to be checked and channeled when they threaten broader societal goals—lay behind the postwar settlement and the welfare state. However, the concept of a politico-economic order built around the legitimacy and frequency of state intervention to protect society’s interests from market operations does need some kind of defence.
A 'fair-go' sounds thin. So does 'equality of opportunity'. We need a 'third wave of economic reform' doesn't really enthuse. What does a social democracy stand for in the global world of the 21st century? Do not Work Choices and IR Reform appeal to our fears, not our hopes? Are circumstances now more favourable for social democracy’s than they were in the 1990s? Can the ALP convince us that they want to create a world where markets would exist but be tamed, one in which society’s collective needs would take precedence over individuals’ and markets’ needs? Is this what the ALP stands for?
We now have a continuous stream of media commentary that says social democratic Europe is bad (no growth) and free enterprise America is good (lots of growth). What has to go is Europe's social welfare. It cannot be afforded.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:08 PM | TrackBack
January 11, 2007
markets, morality, politics
David Burchill has an op-ed in the Australian Financial Review that picks up on Kevin Rudd's recent talk about the market fundamentalism of the Howard Government. Rudd, to his credit, has made an effort to articulate his fundamental ethical commitments that we deploy to explain and justify to ourselves and to others what we value, and we we do so. Rudd recognizes the extent to which politics is ethically informed and the way the ALP has been struggling for over the "moral values thing. It's version of social democracy has an ethical deficit.
Burchill acknowledges that Rudd's charge of market fundamentalism is misplaced as the Howard Government has been economically pragmatic rather market fundamentalist. He then adds that Rudd's claim has less to do with economic policy than political imagination. Burchill says that Rudd's:
...key claim is not that the government is too market minded, but rather that its market-minded vision involves it in refusing to accept the reality of other political signals such as conscience and morality. ...This is a pregnant political theme. It speaks to the anxieties of many parents in recent years, that the traditional space of morals and values has been evacuated in the rush to personal success of recent decades.
Maybe. Isn't the Howard government strong on morals as well? Defending heterosexual families, pushing welfare to work reform for single mothers and self-responsibility is being strong on morals. This appeals to the individualist values of the protestant moral middle class, does it not?
Burchill's argument is the ALP needs to talk the morality talk in order to win over the electorate. He goes on to say that:
Rudd is calling for a loose pragmatic coalition of post-1960s radicals and old style conservatives, against what both commonly view as the amoral economic liberalism of of the contemporary right...Rudd is still feeling his way...He's clearly searching for positions that will allow Labor to build a winning social coalition, by prising elements of the conservatives successful coalition away from them.
That is what returning to the centre means. So who is Rudd going to prise off the coalition's base with his religious based moral discourse of compassion? Why none other than 'Labor's blue-collar supporters?' Supporters? Aren't these the Tory working class that went over to Howard because of their social conservatism? Why would they return to the ALP?
What is forgotten by Burchill is the way that the ALP has trouble articulating with clarity and conviction the vision of economic justice that underlies its social and economic policies; and second, even a strong argument for economic or social justice does not, by itself, constitute a governing moral/political vision. What he doesn't seem to recognize is that liberalism has become an enfeebled public philosophy that's lost its capacity to inspire. The ALP's straining to connect with questions of moral values hasn't carried conviction up to now.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:52 PM | TrackBack
January 10, 2007
political cross dressing
Mark Davis has an interesting paragraph in his op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald about understanding how our political parties are seen by voters. He says:
One theory, proffered by the commentator Don Arthur, is that the left-right divisions of Australian politics have been replaced. Instead, voters see Labor as the caring and nurturing party, better suited to state issues such as health and education, while the Liberals are seen as the strict father, best put in charge of the nation’s finances and defence and border protection. If such a political climate change has occurred it will tilt the odds of federal success against Labor.
The Dad and Mum thesis, whose genealogy in Australia is traced by Andrew Norton, does have plausibility at the level of political rhetoric. But it ignores both the ALP's history as an economic reform party under Hawke and Keating, and the way that the Howard Government retains the welfare state, is a friend of Medicare redistributes taxes to middle class families---what Don Arthur calls political cross-dressing.
The Dad and Mum thesis also ignores the shift in social democracy away from the statist conception as founded in a paternal welfare state to a more libertarian and less statist social democracy which involves debates about the market is to be managed. 'Managed' means the need to moderate and control market forces.
A core idea of social democracy accepts that markets should be expanded and that markets should be managed; and a debate within this liberal tradtion is about how best to balance the two political goals. The concern is to prevent society and community from being gutted by the free market. The historic 20th century answer to civilizing capitalism was welfare capitalism, and it is this model that has been under attack by classical liberals libertarians and laissez-faire economists since the 1980s.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:22 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 9, 2007
stablizing Baghdad
I see that Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stated that the Democrats would not give President Bush a "blank check" to continue the war in Iraq. Bush is now required to justify the spending on sending extra troops to Iraq. Congress should assert the principle of accountability and oversight. It has the authority to do so.
Bill Leak
The news reports say the surge option (extra troop numbers of 20,000 to 30,000).The assumption is that a central reason for US failure to control Iraq was a lack of troops.It ignores the view that the Iraqis, like anyone else, do not like being occupied. So more US troops means more resistance.
The extra troops will open up a new front in Baghdad against the Shiite militia associated with the Iraqi Government headed by Nouri al-Maliki. The Iraqi Government is expected to help take on Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in an attempt to clamp down on the sectarian war in Baghdad. It is a strategy to split the Shiites and isolate Moqtada al-Sadr to create a more moderate government. Presumably, the short-term surge to stablize Bagdhad could create a temporary window for the Shi'ite Iraqi forces to develop and take over and normalize the city. What if the Shiite Sadrists lie low while the US mops up the Sunni Arab guerrillas.
What does the new effort to stabilize Baghdad involve? Traditional, large-scale U.S. operations as well as nighttime raids by smaller, more mobile forces? The last time Moqtada al-Sadr's men fought the US, on two occasions in 2004, they lost a lot of militiamen but gained greatly in credibility in the eyes of Iraqis. Won't the new strategy likely result in an intra-Shia civil war in addition to Sunni-Shia war and the Sunni-US war.
So the US is now going to fight both the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militia (ie., the Shiite Mahdi Army). Well, that strategy, which rejects the advice of the Baker-Hamilton review for a gradual withdrawal, should cause deep unease both in military and Congressional circles. What if the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militia form a tactical alliance against the American occupation? I guess that's one way to reconcile the Sunni-led insurgents and their archenemies, the Shiite militias.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:15 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 8, 2007
higher education at the crossroads
A good higher education in Australia now costs students a lot of money. The days of a fully public funded higher education have long gone, replaced by tension between government funding and user-pays. Students leave university with a hugh debt: $50,000---$200,000 depending on the course. It's a heavy burden. How is HECS debt is affecting graduates' career choices, life and family choices? Is higher education becoming more middle-class?
So how much public investment should there be in universities and how much should students contribute, now that the national HECS debt is set to hit $13 billion? The ALP is not pushing this debate. We can, however, turn to Fred Hilmer, who has an op-ed on higher education in the Sydney Morning Herald. He says that though Australian universities are in a good position was built up over half a century of government funding and support, supplemented by student fees, they are not grasping the opportunities created by an increasingly globalised market for education. The warns that Australia is running the risk of a slide into mediocrity, with an underfunded and overregulated higher education sector. Hilmer says:
The Government is at a crossroads in terms of higher education policy. The choice is not between a fully regulated, fully government-funded system and an entirely deregulated, privately funded system. Neither is feasible. But what we have now is the worst of both worlds: increasing government regulation and declining funding.
Hence the key issue: how much public investment should there be in universities and how much should students contribute? Hilmer says that income from local undergraduate students is the largest single source of revenue for universities, and this comes partly from government payments for students - a fee subsidy - and partly from the students, via the Higher Education Contribution Scheme and the 25 per cent premium on HECS universities are permitted by regulation to charge.
Hilmer goes on to say that:
The government portion has been declining in real terms, as it is indexed at below inflation. The amount students can be charged is similarly regulated.The result is declining real income for universities from their biggest source of revenue. Philanthropy, while vital, cannot close the gap. ..... Nor can international students be expected to cross-subsidise an underfunded system. What is needed is a fundamental reappraisal of the funding model, not more regulation and more complex reallocation of inadequate funds. How much will government be prepared to pay, on what basis, and over what period? How much should students be prepared to contribute and how?
Hilmer does say that shifting more of the burden onto students is not the preferred option. In a real market with price competition, a university would be cutting its throat to overcharge for its product. The more likely scenario would be moderate increases with a percentage of students receiving fee waivers or scholarships on the basis of need or ability.
Notice how increased public funding is not even mentioned as a possibility by Hilmer. It is going to be steady increases in the price to be paid for the desired degree. Universities universities will push to make HECS higher because they argue that they are not funded sufficiently by government through indexed grants. That means the universities will push to shift more of the cost burden on to students.
Presumably, more and more struggling students in our capital cities will need to turn to welfare agencies such as the Salvation Army, now that the campus-run interest-free loan scheme, textbook and food subsidies were scrapped or reduced in response to the imposition of voluntary student unionism.
A good opportunity for the Rudd-ALP to come up with some interesting policy ideas now that it is committed to fighting market fundamentalism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:41 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
January 7, 2007
Iraq: what next?
Despite the shift in power in Washington, it looks as if President Bush will go with the neo-con's surge option to stablise Baghdad. Iraq is now immersed in bloodshed from sectarian violence. Now some neocon's have jumped ship saying that George Bush was a hopeless President surrounded by incompetent advisers, that Iraq is lost and that the consequences for America and the world will be dire.
However, victory is still possible says Frederick W. Kagan at the American Economic Institute:
Victory in Iraq is vital to America’s security. Defeat will likely lead to regional conflict, humanitarian catastrophe, and increased global terrorism.Iraq has reached a critical point. The strategy of relying on a political process to eliminate the insurgency has failed. Rising sectarian violence threatens to break America’s will to fight. This violence will destroy the Iraqi government, armed forces, and people if it is not rapidly controlled.Victory in Iraq is still possible at an acceptable level of effort. We must adopt a new approach to the war and implement it quickly and decisively.
What is the game plan, when Irag is control led by Shi’ite Islamists in unstable coalition with Kurdish separatists with Iraq heading towards ethinic regional autonomy, and around 150,000 US troops in Iraq have been thwarted by a small insurgency drawn from Iraq's minority population of Sunnis?
Will the extra troops in Baghdad spend their time defending surviving Sunni enclaves from Shi’ite ethnic cleansing now pushing west across Baghdad? Does that mean the US will attack the Shi'ite militias while fighting a Sunni insurgency? It begins to look like it.
Simon Jenkins in The Times says that:
Iraq’s next chapter must be written by Iraqis alone. Outsiders have made this country a byword for arrogant and incompetent interventionism. The West’s 2003 assault on Iraq was unprovoked and justified by no overriding threat to western interests. It was a ghastly, gigantic whim, one to which the British government fully subscribed.
Maybe it was less a whim and more a case of the US military aiming to subdue Arabs to create space for Israel to expand? Was not the neocons' original plan to give Israel hegemony in the Middle East by using the US military to overthrow Iraq, Iran, and Syria? Has not the failure of US forces to subdue Iraq led to a new neocon plan to give Israel hegemony in the region by spreading sectarian conflict among Muslims throughout the region?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:52 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 6, 2007
politics + cricket
Parliamentary political life is in recess for the next month or so. Of course, the politicians were at the cricket and making sure the television cameras depicted them as being there.
Bill Leak
It's clever isn't it, the way cricket and politics are interwoven. Many of the commentators in the Canberra Press Gallery have been offering advice to Rudd about what to do to stay in the game. They see politics as a game in which the politicians and journalists are the players. We citizens watch the game on our television sets.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:58 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 5, 2007
on Bush's Iraq strategy
Immanuel Wallerstein has an op-ed in The Canberra Times on President Bush's search for a "new strategy" for "victory" in Iraq. He says:
Given all the hints and leaks, there are few people waiting breathlessly for the presidential speech in which he will reveal his decisions. The new strategy promises to be the old strategy, with perhaps an additional small number of US troops in Baghdad.....Bush will push through the plan for more US troops. This will make no military difference. If the US sent in 300,000 troops, it might quash both the insurgency and the civil war. But sending in even 30,000 troops will be an incredible strain on the viability and morale of the US military. By June 2007, at the latest, it will be clear to even the most stubbornly blind, like Bush and the surviving neo-cons, that the US is in a dead end and bleeding badly.
Wallerstein asks:
Why doesn't Bush cut his losses? He can't. His entire presidency revolves around the Iraq war. If he tries to cut his losses, he admits that he is responsible for a national disaster. So he has no choice but to try to bluff his way into 2009 and turn over the disaster to someone else. That is, he has no choice acceptable to him.
That captures the neo-con stubborness of 'staying the course.' Wallerstein does not mention the imperatives of empire as the reason for having to stay the course.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 4, 2007
conservative follies
I see that Janet Albrechtson, in her latest column in The Austalian, laments the lack of conservative cartoonists in Australia. She rightly observes that all the pot shots come from the left side of politics and all the targets are on conservative side. As Tim Dunlop observes this is what you'd expect when the Liberals have been in power in Canberra for a decade.
Matt Golding
Now it's not that there aren't issues for conservatives to lampoon. Do not conservatives defend Australian values --including the rule of law? So they could highlight the erosions of liberties in Australia--eg., the way the rule of law has been breached through dumping habeas corpus for a political sacrifice (eg., David Hicks who is deemed to be a traitor)--- could they not? Are there not ALP governments in all states in Australia? Doesn't that provide plenty of opportunities for conservatives to lampoon the left side of politics?
Albrechtson has an explanation for the dearth of good conservative cartoonists. She says:
The explanation lies not in some cartoonists' conspiracy, but in the cartoonist's cast of mind. There is a natural leftist habitat for the cartooning kind. So I'll leave you with a larger but somewhat cheeky hypothesis. Left-wing politics is essentially an emotional, instinctive utopian kind of world peopled by romantics and dreamers. Conservatism is, on the other hand, more rational, analytical and pragmatic. That is why creative types tend to come from the Left. Right-wingers, by contrast, have real jobs.Huh? How does 'natural leftist habitat for the cartooning kind' square with the work of good conservative cartoonists in the US? And Max's dialectic of concepts in Capital vol. 1 was emotional and instinctive? The conservative denial of global warming, and the need to shift to renewable energy, is rational, analytical and pragmatic?
The Howard Government's recent media reforms, which are carefully designed to protect the profits of its media mates and deny the public the benefits of digital television, is deemed to be rational, analytic and pragmatic even though this policy turns its back on the principles of competition and consumer choice that the government professes to uphold? And conservatives denying market failure in terms of greenhouse externalities is rational? Gee I learnt about that kind of market failure in economics 101.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 3, 2007
religion and public life
In a liberal democratic society religion and morality have been privatised to ensure social stablity and political unity in a pluralistic world of competing conceptions of the good. So we have the principles of toleration and the state being neutral between individual moral and religious beliefs. On Rawls' account, this allows reasonable people with differing ethical, moral and religious beliefs to accept the constraints of public reason.
This form of liberalism is under attack from conservatives who want to reintroduce religion into politics, to ensure that there is one on form of religion (Christianity) to another, and for the state to intervene to ensure a Christian approach to ethical issues. What is sought here is a bigger role for religion in public life.
A recent example is Tony Abbott, the federal Minister for Health, awarding a $15.5 million contract for a pro-life Catholic church (ie., Centracare its welfare agency) but not a secular pro-choice family planning agency, such as Family Planning Australia. There is commentary over at Larvatus Prodeo and Blogocracy
What we have here is a deliberate attempt at polarization decade that pit “the religious right against the secularist left, and acts to ensure that conflict becomes ever sharper. What we have now is a fundamental disagreement over the place of religion in politics. Polarization undermines the the basic principles shared by all the parties to discussion, irrespective of cultural and other differences. In the absence of such a common ground in Australia's divided political culture, politics becomes just a kind of war.
That is the conservative agenda adopted from the Rovian Republicans in the US. The constraints of public reason are rejected as it is held that God requires us to live in a particular way.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:38 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
January 2, 2007
bloggers, tutored feelings, gatekeepers
Many cynical Australian journalists continue to see blogging as an "act of narcissism", mere self-indulgence and self-promotion, rather than blogging---and other "user-generated" sites---as contributing to the growth of the internet. Blogs are witnesses to the erosion of the mass media. This erosion is more figures of stagnant sales, the declining readership of newspapers, or in the shift away away from free-to-air-television. What is in decline is the trust in the media ---we no longer accept its ideology of truth, objectivity, and watchdog for democracy.
I see that Time magazine has challenged the view of "pajama journalists" making noise by making web users "Person of the Year". I haven't been able to read the article, as it is now offline. According to Marcel Berlin's at The Guardian Richard Stengel,Time's editor, commented:
"You, not us, are transforming the information age." [the reason is] "For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game ..."
I hazard a guess that Time recognizes that the internet's information explosion has fostered the "ordinary" person being as important to the dissemination of knowledge, information and opinion as the expert or the professional.This other side of those working for nothing [ie., bloggers]--- "beating the pros at their own game"; is that the quality of some of the work produced by the pros is pretty poor and often not worth reading.
Berlin himself takes exception to Time's argument:
The philosophy I object to, which the internet's information explosion has fostered, is that the "ordinary" person is as - no, even more - important to the dissemination of knowledge, information and opinion as the expert or the professional...Time's assertion that those working for nothing are "beating the pros at their own game" is nonsense. They are providing a different service, an opinion based not on expertise and experience, but on their less tutored feelings.
So my work is based on my personal feelings not on knowledge and experience; and my feelings (emotions) are less tutored than those of the tabloids, cheque book journalism and backbench politicians who work on gut instinct and prejudice. Give me a break. Moreover, you can hardly call the Canberra Press Gallery the experts providing informed comment when they avoid public policy like the plague. The reality is that the printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is now presented and consumed as a commodity with entertainment value.
Leslie Cannold in The Age says that there is an audience wanting to consume informed opinion and analysis. She asks:
Can personal blogs (web diaries or logs) posted free-of-charge on the web meet this demand? Are they doing so already, increasingly cannibalising audiences that currently consume — and pay for, either by subscription or by viewing ads — opinion and analysis moderated by editors on radio, TV, newspapers and news magazines distributed both in hard copy and online (enabling links and interactive reader comments)? With one important caveat, my judgement on both questions is "no".
Those blogs, which interpret the news and current affairs, lack the editorial oversight that prevents the publication of well-packaged pseudo-knowledge that offer deception. We need gatekeepers to ensure informed opinion and enlightening analysis.
Do we? What about the tabloids? Aren't the tabloids more about well-packaged pseudo-knowledge in the form of infotainment? Do their editors ensure enlightened opinion and informed analysis? Do we actually get informed opinion and enlightening analysis from the corporate media in these days of infotainment as Cannold presumes? Isn't this what is being eroded? Isn't there a growing distrust of the output of large commercial news organizations--similar to the distrust of the spin that politicians and their advisers produce. Hence we have questioning the message in spite of the editor's quality filter in the broadsheet press.
Secondly, isn't blogging more about carrying on an ongoing conversation on particular issues than private individuals consuming informed opinion and analysis? Cannold's important caveat is that:
What contemporary blogophiles advance as the benefit of their preferred medium is the weakness of opinion moderated by a handful of mostly pale, male and stale editors. Blogs empower those marginalised or excluded by traditional editorial gatekeeping processes.These include the young, the female, the queer, the non-white and those from non-Christian backgrounds: groups comprising growing minorities — and in some cases outright majorities — in Australian society. In the past, justice was the justificatory principle behind demands by such groups for greater representation in the creative engine room of Australian culture, including among those who interpret the news. In the era of blogs, it may be proprietorial self-interest that finally results in things changing.
So what then happens to the need for editors as gatekeepers to ensure informed opinion and enlightening analysis from the diverse views of the excluded minorities? Do we make an exception of the need for traditional editorial gatekeeping processes?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:39 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
January 1, 2007
Remember David Hicks
It's a cynical take on our federal politicians isn't, highlighting the gap between rhetoric and reality as we move into 2007 and a federal election. The more things change the more they remain the same. Still, 16 seats is all that it takes for the ALP to win the election.
Allan Moir
What is i missing grom the cartoon is the ruthlessness of the politically successful. An example ist the continued detention of David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba erodes the very rights and freedoms that the Australian government says it is defending in the war on terrorism.
The accusations against Hicks are based on association, and for this he has been incarcerated for 5 years. Doesn't this undermine a bedrock of our system of justice? --that the evidence against Hicks be presented in a public hearing in a recognized court so that the claims against him can be tested, so that a jury can convict or acquit.
As things currently stand, Hicks has no prospect of being tried in a proper court.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:43 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack