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July 31, 2007
Victoria, reform, federalism
I've left writing about the change of personnel in the Labor Government in Victoria with the retirement of Steve Bracks until now since more is involved than a change in Premier and deputy Premier. This quiet moment in the very busy Qantas Lounge at Canberra Airport before I fly back to Adelaide gives me the chance to make a comment against the backdrop of a two day AHCRA conference on health reform.
The Bracks' Government adopted a commonsense, inclusive approach that laid the ghosts of Labor maladministration to rest and kept the state on a steady course. In the absence of a national Bill of Rights Bracks enacted the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. After winning control of the upper house at last, Bracks gave that control away by reforming the council to have it elected by proportional representation. This is such a contrast to the Rann Government in SA, which dislikes the power of the Legislative Council and seeks to constrain it.
More significantly, Victoria was the policy workhorse of the nation with its National Reform Agenda, which was eventually taken up by CoAG. Hence we have an example of co-operative federalism, though little progress has been made on health care and education reform. That means Victoria has had a good state government. The Brumby Government's agenda does not include climate change.
Will Victoria continue to drive the unfinished reform business of CoAG under a Brumby Government? Will they use this leverage to reform state federal relations so as to give the states more autonomy in the use of federal funding? Will they use the co-operative federalism leverage to sort out some of the dual state and commonwealth responsibilities in health care and so break with the blame game that is such a common feature of federal political life? These are important questions as AHCRA has identified the inefficient allocation of resources caused by the current State/ Commonwealth funding structure as a core problem that needs to be addressed to ensure in health care.
The Howard Government's standard mantra is that the state governments are incompetent in providing basic services, and it talks in terms of conflict and war, the national Government solving problems and the takeover of state responsibilities. In contrast, Rudd is proposing to overhaul commonwealth-state relations, to do an audit of crossover areas and to eliminate duplication between the two tiers of government by giving states complete control of some areas and the commonwealth complete control over others.
So if Rudd is in lockstep with the Federal Government on national security, the logging of Tasmania's old-growth forests and the need for intervention on indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, then he is different on federal-state relations. As an editorial in the Canberra Times points out:
As Prime Minister John Howard embarks on his coercive push for the Commonwealth to assume responsibilities for the Murray-Darling Basin and to implement a national schools-based curriculum, Rudd has revealed details of a Labor proposal to implement a more cooperative brand of federalism, one that seeks an end to the perpetual squabbling between governments over the division of administrative functions and the flow of taxpayer funding. Rudd has pledged that a Labor Government would conduct an audit of administrative functions where there is a federal/state crossover, with the aim of cutting the number of shared functions. In line with giving the states and territories complete control for the provision of certain services, Labor will reduce the number and amount of Commonwealth specific purpose payments, which amount to around $30 billion annually, in favour of untied grants.
Labor argues that these reforms will put a stop to the "blame game" and end the cost-shifting that has increasingly characterised the delivery of government services, especially health care. Rudd argues that that Labor's model of cooperative federalism can reduce the waste and duplication and economic distortions inherent in the system and boost national productivity by enhancing common markets and removing the barriers to people and business operating across state borders.
Will Rudd's proposal end the "blame game" between the two levels of government, particularly in health and education? It depends on the division of roles and responsibilities. Bob McMullan, Labor's shadow minister for federal-state relations, says the Commonwealth would retain primary responsibility for economic management, the capacity to deal with international obligations and the responsibility to "redistribute resources to meet socio-economic and spatial inequalities within and between the states", but that other functions would be decided according to a mix of negotiated goals. Flexibility would be the benchmark in their implementation, and parties would need to agree on mechanisms of accountability.
Sounds enticing doesn't it, especially in relation to health care. Will it happen if and when the ALP regains the commonwealth levers of power?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
liberal interventionism
George (ooops Gordon) Brown, the British PM, goes to America and talks to the child-President about their rspecial relationship. Does that mean the UK will no longer be the poodle of the Republican administration that has only 18 months to run?
What about liberal interventionism and Iraq? Isn't Iraq a key factor in global oil supplies? Isn't Britain in the process of withdrawing from Iraq? What is the US going to do?
Does the conflict shaping up around Iraq--civil war and ethnic cleansing -- indicate that the US no longer has the ability to mould events in the region? John Gray, the British political philosopher, argues aginst liberal interventionism in The Guardian. He says that:
The era of liberal interventionism in international affairs is over. Invading Iraq was always in part an oil grab. A strategic objective of the Bush administration was control of Iraqi oil, which forms a key portion of the Gulf reserves that are the lifeblood of global capitalism. Yet success in this exercise in geopolitics depended on stability after Saddam was gone, and here American thinking was befogged by illusions. Both the neoconservatives who launched the war and the many liberals who endorsed it in the US and Britain took it for granted that Iraq would remain intact.
Gray adds that as could be foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, things have not turned out that way. The dissolution of Iraq is an unalterable fact, all too clear to those who have to cope on the ground, that is denied only in the White House and the fantasy world of the Green Zone.
What then of liberal internventionism? He says that whilst neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. He adds:
Many will caution against throwing out the baby of humanitarian military intervention together with the neocon bathwater. No doubt the idea that western states can project their values by force of arms gives a sense of importance to those who believe it. It tells them they are still the chief actors on the world stage, the vanguard of human progress that embodies the meaning of history. But this liberal creed is a dangerous conceit if applied to today's intractable conflicts, where resource wars are entwined with wars of religion and western power is in retreat
He says that the liberal interventionism that took root in the aftermath of the cold war was never much more than a combination of post-imperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics. It was an absurd and repugnant mixture, and one whose passing there is no reason to regret. What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility.
Gray seems to have spoken too quickly as we have liberal interventionism in Darfur. Or is this a case of the US and the UK's case for foreign intervention in Darfur being based on the fighting Arabs in the war on terrorism?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:09 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
July 30, 2007
ALP: why not some health policies
The formation of opinion amongst the Canberra Press Gallery is that the Howard Government's troubles are growing and that it is in electoral trouble. So it's time for the ALP to take the initiative and stop agreeing with Howard and putting forward its own policies that show it is a different brand from the Coalition.
Isn't the ALP marketing itself to us citizens as the party of fresh ideas and innovative policies? Or is it too early in the campaign for this?
Bill Leak
Why not some positive policies on health? Some fresh ideas? An indication about how the ALP will facilitate health reform? After all, the Coalition is not in favour of health reform (reformers damage people says Tony Abbott). So a new policy front can be opened up that would work to the advantage of the AL.
Their Fresh Ideas Future Economy policy document does favour a strategic emphasis on primary care and prevention:
The current health system is very good at providing acute and episodic care when people are sick, but it is not well equipped to meet the future challenge of the growing chronic disease burden....Federal Labor believes the best way to equip our health system to deal with the challenges of the future is to end the blame game and re-invigorate the role of the primary care system – the front line of the health system which provides health care to local communities.
However, the Fresh Ideas Future Economy document does not suggest how they plan to meet increased demand for health care services given both the limitations around dollars and resources, and the equity issues rising from those not being able to afford to pay for health services.
Update: 31 July
I've been attending the AHCRA health reform conference in Old Parliament House in fogged bound Canberra Monday and Tuesday of this week. The Coalition did not present at the conference. So they are not seen to be in favour of health reform. There is no need for it in their view, despite Abbott saying that the health system is a dogs breakfast.
Nicola Roxon presented yesterday afternoon, and her set speech was based on Rudd's fresh ideas for health. Roxon says that they have lots of policies under wraps she said. There were no sneak previews apart from Roxon saying that a Labor Government would ban the use of licensed characters such as Shrek as well as toys and giveaways, in promotions on television, mobile phone networks, the internet and in-store promotions to market food and drinks to children as part of a plan to tackle childhood obesity.
This policy opens up a clear difference between Labor and the Coalition — which has previously rejected policy advice to restrict junk food advertising to children.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:27 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
July 29, 2007
AMA: money talks
This is the speech given by AMA President, Dr Rosanna Capolingua, to the National Press Club, last week. I was interested in it as I had visited the GP last week and experienced a bad time.Though the GP was a referral mechanism my need for yearly checks ups for skin and prostrate cancer was questioned. I was sucking their Medicare dry.
I fought the GP who had not read my file for the followup referrals, and it cost me over $50. This was charged to my credit card and I would need to wait for several weeks for the refund to be posted. The GP was being paid to be the gatekeeper to the health system. There was little to no interest in preventative care.
I was also interested to read what the AMA considers the health issues to be in the federal election, as little--nothing---is being said about health by either side. A number of issues are canvassed by Capolingua in the speech: Indigenous Health, overseas trained doctors, public hospitals, aged care, rural health, national registration, Medicare easy claim and it is acknowledged that health health policy is the ‘sleeper’ in this election.
So things looked promising.
I was curious about Medicare Easypay It sounded good as the idea is that the patient will be able to get their Medicare rebate at the point of service when they pay the practice account. Just like the private health funds do when I see the chiropractor for preventative care.So where does the AMA stand?
Opposed, even though Capolingua starts the speech by saying that for the AMA patient care is the primary driver always has as its primary driver and in the forefront of doctors minds. Here's the relevant bit of the speech:
Patients will have to wait while the doctors’ receptionists need to spend more time processing each patient. I can see mums with one sick kid on the hip and a toddler running away, trying to pull out three cards – credit card, Medicare card and debit card - at the front counter to have the account processed. if it takes only one extra minute per patient, this could be an extra three hours work per day in a busy four-doctor practice. So far, some practices have got it down to four minutes a patient! That makes 12 hours a day! There will be additional keying in, and processing failures of up to 20 per cent as now occurs, and the system will take a long, long time and more staff and more EFTPOS terminals to reach efficiency. Remember the Medicare queue? I do not want my patients to suffer that in my surgery.
What? That reads as if the AMA want to be paid by Medicare to process the transactions far more than a concern for patient care.
This interpretation is supported by Jason Koutsoukis who was present at the speech in the National Press Club. He says:
It took a while, but eventually Capolingua let the cat out of the bag.The real reason the AMA doesn't like Easyclaim is because they want some extra cash in their pockets every time they process a payment — about $1 per transaction which, if you add up how many patients the average GP sees each year, could turn into quite a nice little earner funded by taxpayers. It turns out that pharmacists get a 40-cent transaction fee every time they process a pharmaceutical benefits scheme claim and the doctors want to be compensated, too.
So there you have it. Medical politics. It's about power not patient care.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
tough guys
Cheney, the all-around tough guy, rules Bush and is the one behind the talk about Saddam's mushroom clouds and the Evil Labs of Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax.
The tough guy doesn't doesn't negotiate with the bad guys. He stiffs them, as the Americans would say. However, as Peter Galbraith points out in the New York Review of Books:
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning—a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes—but by the consequences of defeat. ...Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat.
Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today—a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:49 AM | TrackBack
July 28, 2007
Rudd: beyond me tooism
Dennis Shanahan has an interesting op-ed in The Australian about Rudd's battle plan to become prime minister of Australia. It takes us beyond my me-tooism interpretation or Rod Cameron's avoiding the wedge. It is a plausible interpretation of the Rudd strategy.
Bill Leak
If half the battle is to get people to vote against the Government, then Rudd addressed this by turning the economic strength for the Coalition into a cost-of-living debate for Labor. Shanahan says that:
This was Rudd's first battle plan: convince voters not only that the Government was old and tired but also that it was not answering individual needs on expectations of material benefits, wasn't helping young people buy a house and didn't care about rising prices.
This is the mood for change strategy that creates doubts in voter's minds about the Howard government .
The other half of the battle is to tell people what the ALP stands for and to get them to vote for an ALP with fresh ideas. As Shanahan says:
Creating a negative atmosphere is crucial. It is necessary to cause doubt in voters' minds but it is more important to convince them to switch their vote from a known Government to an unknown Opposition. It is also even more difficult, having pursued people with unfulfilled expectations and ambitions, to then meet those expectations.
Rudd needs positive policies and fresh ideas about what to do about those unfulfilled expectations. That's the real challenge in the second half of Rudd's battle plan.
This implies that what Rudd stands for is not John Howard light.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:36 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
July 27, 2007
ministerial staffing
Anne Tiernan's thesis in Power without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian Governments from Whitlam to Howard is that "in constitutional and managerial terms, the ministerial staffing system is out of control". Staffers are now more numerous and more ruthlessly partisan than ever. Some, she argues, are "de facto assistant ministers", more influential than many senior public servants and elected parliamentarians. Yet as staffers' power has increased, both they and their ministerial masters have become less accountable.
She says:
The contemporary ministerial staffing system is large, active and partisan - far larger and further evolved than any Westminster equivalent. Ministers' demands for help to cope with the pressures of an increasingly competitive and professionalised political environment have been key drivers of the staffing system's development. But there has not been commensurate growth in arrangements to support and control it. The operating framework for ministerial staff is fragmented and ad hoc.
She says that though things are improving, ministerial staff receive little induction or professional development. Mostly they learn on the job. There are no 'how to' manuals, no briefings from former office-holders, no television shows or films.
An extract from the book at Australian Policy Online. In it she says that:
while institutions and actors have adapted to their presence, ministerial staff remain controversial; an important but somewhat awkward third partner in the traditional dance of executive advisory arrangements. To many they remain completely unaccountable. Their involvement in a series of controversies has raised questions about how effectively Australia’s Westminsterstyle political system accommodates their presence. These cases have exposed limitations and deficiencies in the minimalist framework developed to regulate the rapidly evolving roles of ministerial staff. Governance arrangements have not kept pace with ministers’ demands for more staff, and more active roles for them. Political practice has outstripped constitutional theory, creating uncertainty and confusion for public servants, for ministerial staff and ministers themselves.
They are “statutory orphans” and there is a lack of clear and shared understandings about the boundaries and parameters of their roles. What is needed is “a comprehensive set of standards for political staff… supported by appropriate mechanisms for reporting, oversight and sanction.”
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Canberra watch: economic reality
The Howard Government's economic credentials are looking shaky with the surprise rise in headline and underlying inflation and the increased possibility that interest rates will be increased by the Reserve Bank of Australia. The weight of evidence is that underlying inflation is now close to the top of the Bank's 2-3 per cent target range.
Bill Leak
Labor has made successful inroads into the Costello economic management in recent months by raising the issue of housing affordability and household budgets and saying that the Government is out of touch. The inflation rate opens up a space to point the finger at the big election spending --buying the voters with lots of Xmas gifts.
So, though we have boom times and low unemployment, the Howard Government looks shaky, even if the the polls are overestimating the Labor's vote. If Howard and Costello are in denial about battlers doing it hard in struggle street or the need for an interest rate rise, then Labor says that it is a safe pair of economic hands. If Kevin Rudd doesn't play ---there are no differences apart from IR--then the states have to set up (wall-to-wall Labor governments) and then bashed (incompetent). Howard is trying to create conflict and antagonism to get some poll traction. Tim Dunlop has more on this strategy
So will the Howard Government bite the bullet and recognize economic reality and the need for tightening monetary policy? An increase in interest rates will be unpopular among the Howard battlers and cash strapped households. What then?
Peter Brent from Mumble.com argues in The Australian that this increase could work in favour of Howard and Costello. He asks: 'So what might happen if interest rates move up before the election?' His answer:
For one thing, it will turn people's minds to, well, interest rates. Australians are in hock as never before and the thought of further rises can be stressful. Perhaps - you never know - John Howard and Peter Costello will take the opportunity to cite Labor's 17 per cent from the late 1980s. Fear can be paralysing, and people who are scared don't like to take chances. If rising interest rates induce stomach-churning about the prospect of further hikes, then the status quo option - the Government - will look more attractive. In this way a rise in interest rates may help the Government.
Maybe. A lot of people are drawing down on the equity in their houses to buy things they need. There is a large group of people who aren't interested in economic issues as they've never experienced a recession.
So the Howard government needs to undermine Rudd's economic conservative credentials and that he stands for a safe pair of hands. Can they do so?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:07 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
July 26, 2007
Haneef case + legal reason
Tony Morris, QC, sums up where things stand in the Haneef case:
“Australians can no longer have implicit faith in the integrity of federal police investigations, in the fairness of federal prosecutions, or in the responsible exercise of federal executive powers. If the AFP were doing their honest best, they must be monumentally stupid. The only alternative is they manufactured a false case.”
And that's about all we can safely say on the evidence that is public. The inference is that the legal system has got a problem. It is a difficult case and this means that judges decide decide hard cases such as this by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions.
So it is an important step that the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions Damian Bugg, QC will personally reviewing all the materials of this which has been plagued with mistakes and leaks. So legal reason intervenes to ensure the judicial systems operates in accord with its norms or ethos of justice.
The legal system has long abandoned Austin's utilitarian view that law is "commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from a sovereign, to whom people have a habit of obedience. It has also largely abandoned the classic positivist position that there is "no necessary connection" between law and morality.
What we have in play is an expression of law as a moral issue. As Dworkin argues in Law's Empire law is an 'interpretive' concept, that requires judges to find the best fitting and most just solution to a legal dispute, given their constitutional traditions. According to him, law is not entirely based on social facts, but includes the morally best justification for the institutional facts and practices that we intuitively regard as legal.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:06 AM | Comments (26) | TrackBack
July 25, 2007
water woes: to the High Court?
I see that John Howard will use constitutional powers over corporations, external affairs and interstate trade and commerce powers to enforce commonwealth government control over water in the Murray-Darling Basin to solve its problems.
I must admit to being surprised by what has happened with the management of the Murray-Darling Basin. Good bye co-operative federalism, hello Canberra takeover. Is this a case of electoral politics overriding good policy? Is Steve Bracks just defending the water licences of the Victorian irrigators? Just what are the key areas of concern between the Commonwealth and Victoria?
Bill Leak
I'm also ambivalent. It is a national issue and so Canberra should be centrally involved and call the shots, as the states have made a mess of things with their overallocation of water to foster regional development and refused to address the issue. But the states also have control of water, as stated in the Constitution, and so they should also be involved, as Victoria insists.
The constitution does not grant express power to the Commonwealth over rivers or systems such as the Murray-Darling. This is one reason the Howard Government has spent months trying to entice the states to cede their powers in return for a $10 billion investment.
So why do the states need to refer all their powers to Canberra? As we know from Kevin Henry, the Treasury Secretary, that Howard's $10 billion Murray-Darling rescue plan was poorly designed and done on the back of an envelop.
Howard is blaming the states as usual (election politics) when the real obstacle up to water is the Nationals who oppose any reduction in the over-allocated water licences and refuse to acknowledge the effects of climate change on the Basin---reduced basin stream flows by 20 and 40 per cent by 2030. Yet the indications are that in some of the southern catchments in the Murray-Darling Basin we are getting close to the predictions for 2030 under climate change. That spells the end of the expansion of irrigated agriculture.
The new commonwealth plan centralises water management, includes the setting or overall caps on water use, funding to buy back over-allocated water ad funding to increase the efficiency of irrigation. It will develop salinity plans and accredit individual water plans in catchments. The Commonwealth will not be able to get involved in in individual water river operations or seasonal allocations of water.
Are we now headed for the High Court? Section 100 of the constitution says:
"The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a state or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation."
This applies only to the trade and commerce power, and it just protects "reasonable" use of the waters. That leaves the corporations power. So what will the big irrigators do?
Update: 26 the July
I see that centralists are arguing that the real problem is our federal system of governance.Thus George Williams in the Age says:
The underlying problem is Australia's dysfunctional federal system of government. Our 1901 constitution fails to set out clear responsibility for the Murray-Darling and other waterways. While the management of a river system that crosses state borders should be a matter for federal government, the constitution fails to say this.
This ignores the resistance politics of the irrigation industry supported by the Nationals. The National Party attack good science as it opposes a mass compulsory buy-back of irrigators' licences that could devastate farming towns. Climate change may well achieve that.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
educational woes
As public universities begin to operate more like educational businesses in the market place the logic of the market bites ever deeper. It favours the sandstone universities but impacts negatively on those in a weak position, which are the suburban gum tree universities founded in the 1960s. An example. The Age reports that a new discussion paper:
paints a picture of a university in steady decline: fewer people wanting a La Trobe degree, falling entrance marks, below-par scores on student satisfaction surveys and a dwindling proportion of national research funding.The five-year slide led to La Trobe posting a $7 million deficit last year, making it the only Victorian university operating in the red....the university had become staid and conservative and could not continue on its current course...La Trobe had drifted from its origins as a radical and innovative university
The solution is to cut undergraduate teaching loads by at least 25 per cent by 2010 to free up time for research and the creation of lucrative postgraduate courses. Class sizes would grow as courses were axed. Academics who do not publish regularly would take on a heavier teaching load to allow others more time for research.
Will La Trobe be able to increase its income from research and so avoid becoming a teaching only university? It is not in a strong position. But it has little choice.
The university woes go deeper than this. They are no longer attracting the best graduates.They go into business as there is less financial support for what is essential to research and teaching--libraries---in a degraded tertiary sector.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:20 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
July 24, 2007
housing affordibility
My judgment is that many people who live in a capital city and, are on a good income, are suffering from housing stress. Financial stress from big mortgages is no longer exclusively a low-income problem. and though Sydney has become the world's sixth most expensive city, mortgage stress is no longer just a Sydney problem.
In the mid-1980s the median Australian house price was four times average annual earnings. Today, it's seven times. That's the fundamental reason housing has become so hard to afford.
Sharpe
It is generally held in Canberra policy circles that low interest rates, demand outstripping supply, limited land-release processes and the cost of building are the causes of rising house prices. Peter Martin, in this op-ed in the Canberra Times, argues that it is more complex.
He refers to Macquarie Bank's housing specialist Rory Robertson, who talks in terms of "the elephant in the living room" ---the big trigger for the post-1999 surge in housing prices. In that year the Government halved the headline rate of capital gains tax. From then on any profit earned as a result of selling an investment, such as a house, was taxed at only half the rate as money made from employment, interest or dividends.
That means investors are still piling into housing, keeping prices high, thereby making it difficult for new home buyers to leave the rental market by buying their own home. Houses are becoming increasingly unaffordable for most of the Australians who don't already own them.
II'm not persuaded that this is the big trigger. What about our desire for better hiomes that are better located? Isn't that a central trigger? Sure halving of capital gains tax by the Howard Government in 1999 did prompt a lot of of negatively geared investment in rental properties which added to prices. But aren't markets basically about demand and supply? Isn't it a case of the consumer desire and demand for better located and better homes increasing prices, because demand is pushing against supply? Demand is greater than supply.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:02 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
The forest wars
How do you save the trees when working class jobs are at risk? Dr Judith Ajani , who has just written a book entitled The Forest Wars, recently had an op ed in The Australian where she wrote:
The union-dominated factional preselection system means that if, or when, Labor returns to office, its approach to forests is unlikely to be driven by an interest in building a healthy wood-processing industry generating jobs and caring for the environment. Raw power will prevent it.
Well, we have seen the implications in Rudd's me tooism forest policy when in Tasmania. The bare bones are a $20 million support package for the forestry industry, including a $9 million national fund to increase forestry exports and no more protection for Tasmanian old-growth forests outside the existing Regional Forests Agreement and Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement, if Labor won the next election.
This firmly severs any links to the Latham forest policy. In order to win back the two seats of Bass and Baddon in Tasmania the technocratic Rudd Labor Party has sacrificed conservation for the sake of propping up a woodchipping industry that Australia no longer needs; one poised to double the volume of native forest woodchip exports. Rudd's policy, like the Coalition's, is all about jobs. Is there any difference?
Rudd's policy was welcomed by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's forestry division, a key part of the ALP's Tasmanian power base. These redneck Luddites led by Michael O'Connor, the national secretary, have traditionally understood the issue in cartoon terms of trees versus jobs. They have traditionally spoken with the same voice as Gunns and Forestry Tasmania. So the forestry debate is simply framed as militant green protestors chained to trees on one side, angry loggers with chainsaws on the other.
Does jobs versus trees mean that the Florentine, the Weld and the Blue Tiers - will be open to logging? The Tasmanian old-growth forestry today is mostly about wood-chipping for export, not high-value timber.
What this jobs versus trees framing misses is that there is a real choice now between logging native forests and fully utilising Australia's considerable stands of plantation timber. We are now faced with the possibility that Australia's existing tree plantations can meet the nation's wood needs for paper and timber without having to log native forests.
That's Anji's argument. She argues that there is no irreconcilable conflict between development and environment when it comes to forests and that policy inaction is the result of silenced plantation interests, failing bureaucracies, destructive union behaviour and government-created super profits from native forest woodchipping.
Where is the voice of Peter Garrett? He's notable for his silence on Rudd's announcement of the Coalition's forest policy. Did the former Labor leader Mark Latham really lose two Tasmanian seats at the last federal election because of a conservationist forest policy? Or is that a myth created by the ALP in Tasmania and their union backers to ensure subsidies for a minority of people in a few marginal seats in order to win the next election?
As Anji points out they--especially O'Conner-- peddle the line that the environment movement's campaign against native forest chip exports for what it really is - a campaign to cripple the forest and forest products industry by denying it access to native forests and so jeopardise the survival of 60,000 workers and their families. O'Connor obscures that "this one industry" comprised two competing sectors, with plantations being the biggest, the fastest growing, the largest investing and highest employing.
Since 80 per cent of Australia's timber industry manufacturing depends on plantations the environmentalists' demands to stop logging old growth native forests would not "cripple the forest and forest products industry" or jeopardise the survival of 60,000 workers and their families.
Another core issue is that forestry is a battleground in Tasmania, between corporate & government interests intent on cleaving the land, and changing legistation to suit their purposes, and the local citizens whose livelihood and lifestyles are directly affected - fisherman, farmers, enviromentalists, local people whose water catchments are at stake.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:46 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
July 23, 2007
the war on terror broadens
The war on terror is not looking good for the US. The Bush administration's contention that Iraq constitutes the "central front in the 'war on terrorism' is undercut by the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This has been made possible primarily by the "safe haven" it has enjoyed in the tribal areas of western Pakistan, and also by its association with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Pakistan is now a key military and political hub in the war on terrorism.
The Bush administration has long pressured President General Pervez Musharraf's government in Pakistan to attack suspected al-Qaeda bases in the tribal areas that border Afghanistan. The Pakistani army's recent military departure from this region after the peace agreement left the region in the control of the Pakistani Taliban, who have provided al-Qaeda the kind of safe haven it needed not only to rebuild its capabilities, but also to begin to exert its influence aggressively over neighboring territories and even into Islamabad.
The Bush administration is exerting more pressure on Musharraf in the effort to encourage him to send his troops into the border districts and attempt to take control at a time when Musharraf has domestic problems. Will he suspend the constitution and declare an emergency in the country?
Is Musharraf in a position to please Washington to carry out a full-fledged crackdown on Islamic militants?
The radical armed insurgency is dedicated to an Islamic revolution with the aim to establish a firm base in Pakistan from where it can fuel the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan and ultimately announce a regional caliphate. Can Pakistan prevent this, given the attacks by radical Islamists on Pakistani army and government facilities in districts bordering Afghanistan districts after the siege of the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad? The Washington Post reports that the fighting intensifies between the Pakistani army and insurgents in a volatile tribal area near the Afghan border.
Washington is becoming ever more involved in western Pakistan as the Pakistan security forces find the going tough. The Americans are intervening by building a large US base on a mountaintop at Ghakhi Pass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan (Bajaur) border. As Paul Rogers at Open Democracy highlights, the US is also intervening in the form of automated warfare based on an armed pilotless drone.
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where's the ALP?
The ALP has gone missing in the public debate over national security, individual liberty and the rule of law. It has laid low on the Dr. Haneef case, despite the government leaks, the police beatup/verballing, the secrecy culture, the media campaign, and the suspension of the law by the executive.
Laying low is deemed to be smart strategic politics--avoiding the wedge of terror being used for political purposes to win votes. They continue to lay low, despite the acknowledged weakness of the supportive evidence that is the foundation of the case against Haneef.
Pryor
Only Premier Beattie has the political courage to call it for what the Haneef case is---Keystone Cops in action-- and to question the extent of the police and government leaking about the strength of the prosecution case. If federal Labor is unwilling to defend the rule of law for fear of damaging its re-election charges, then where are the state Attorney Generals? Why are they not defending the rule of law?
What federal Labor is doing is to aping and emulating the Howard Government to get his hands on the levers of government. The danger in this crafting of the politics of mimicry is that it tacitly buys into dog whistle politics and so embraces the mantle of Howardism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:39 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
July 22, 2007
draconian legislation
As mentioned in this article in The Sunday Age most of Australia's anti-terrorism provisions are enshrined in four major pieces of legislation — the ASIO legislation, the Commonwealth Crimes Act, the Commonwealth Criminal Code and the National Security Information Act. Anti-terror amendments have also injected "national security" secrecy provisions into a raft of other statutes, including the innocuous-sounding Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act — often used in cases involving cancelled passports.
The implications: a scene reminiscent of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay's orange prison suits. It signifies the internment camp.
Eddie Safarik, Mohamed Haneef being taken from the Brisbane police watchhouse last week.
Welcome to the world of Guantanamo Bay in Australia.
The public, the federal ALP and all state Labor governments have supported the above legislation and dismissed the issue of human rights — especially in relation to non-Australian citizens---as a luxury that cannot be afforded in the "war on terrorism." The state Labor governments actually fell over one another in who the most hairy chested, with the Premiers outdoing one another modeling themselves on Rambo.
It was okay for the traditional order of the criminal justice system to be turned on its head and a suspect held in custody without being charged while police worked out a case against him. It is okay that even though the case against Haneef the heavy-handed imprisonment is warranted and Haneef should be treated as if he were a major criminal. This was, and is, justified on utilitarian grounds.
So is the suspension of the independence of the judiciary, the suspension of separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary, and the suspension of the rule of law.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:11 AM | Comments (27) | TrackBack
July 21, 2007
Canberra watch: 'shit happens'
It's hard not to avoid the judgment that Howard's time has come. Twilight is falling, if not fallen. The public is waiting for Howard to move on, and whilst they do, the Coalition is starting to unravel. Or is 'starting to bleed' from the political wounds more appropriate?
As Tony Abbott says "shit happens". It is happening this time, for sure. The "shit happening" signifies a political end game for Howard's version of conservatism. Newspoll indicates that the Howard Government has suffered a dramatic slump in support among young Australians (up to age 34).The Coalition has just 30 per cent of these votes, a drop of 10 percentage points. And Work Choices is continuing to bite against Howard.
Spooner
As Keating once said the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. Though Howard has pushed the one nation xenophobe button hard, the caravan moves on. The Coalition dogs bark about "working families in Australia have never been better off" and the caravan moves on. So we have Tony Abbott positing the existence of "parallel universes", whilst others postulate voter disinterest. The caravan has moved on.
Well, there must be a bit of anger and frustration amongst Howard colleagues at the latest self-inflicted wound from Costello's remarks. The smiles of unity and confidence--'we are getting on with governing the nation'--are political masks. Behind the masks the emotional crazies must be forming in the unconscious of some of the Liberals, given the reality of the persistently bad polls.
They are being mugged by reality in the twilight zone. That is the time the dogs come come out to hunt is it not? So who is hunting who?
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July 20, 2007
Iraq: Out of the shadows
An interesting interview in The Guardian. The major source of attacks on U.S. troops is still the guerrilla war waged by Sunni insurgent groups, not suicide attacks by al-Qaeda in Iraq. These insurgent groups have long stayed underground, communicating mainly through internet postings, but now, motivated by a belief that U.S. troops are going to begin withdrawal within the next year, they're starting to go public.
Marc Lynch comments on what this means:
These moves by the major insurgency factions over the last several months don't fit well within the preferred American narrative. Their actions are not motivated by the 'surge', but rather by the belief that the US will soon leave. Their hostility to the Islamic State of Iraq/al-Qaeda does not translate into support for the United States or the current Iraqi government. They vow to continue armed struggle until the US forces leave, and to stop the violence when they do. And they have clear demands for changes to the Iraqi political system on behalf of Sunni interests - demands which may be unacceptable to other Iraqis in their current form but at least offer a starting point for real political talks.
He adds that these factions have been articulating these positions very clearly and consistently for several months now. But they repeatedly seem to be marginalized or discounted because they don't fit the American narrative, in which al-Qaeda is the primary enemy and most Sunnis and insurgency groups are switching to the American side.
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July 19, 2007
disturbing views
I thought that I was pretty battled hardened with the views of conservatives. But these views on a Republican ship of fools pulled me up short. Johann Hari is reporting on the annual cruise of the National Review'. Try this:
I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, " Of course, we need to execute some of these people," I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change."
Gas chambers for American citizens. Wow. This is American decency?
There's more:
A bell rings somewhere, and we are all beckoned to dinner. We have been assigned random seats, which will change each night. We will, the publicity pack promises, each dine with at least one National Review speaker during our trip. o my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. "You must live near the UN building," the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. "They should suicide-bomb that place," he says. They all chuckle gently. How did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds?
Suicide bomb the UN? The Muslims are taking over Europe and then the worl. The US should bomb Iran. The US has not been t sufficiently "ruthless" in its wars in the e Muslim world.
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Haneef case: anonymous leaking
An earlier comment on public opinion with respect to Dr. Mohamed Haneef can be found here. It has got worse with the anonymous leaking of damaging and loaded material to News Ltd newspapers by, presumably, the police or Howard Government.So the Haneef's defense team retaliates. Barrister Stephen Keim, QC, indicated the defence leak was a response to "an aggressive campaign of leaking, selectively and misleadingly" by police.
However, it gets worse:
Pryor
Haneef has been moved to a high-security prison where he will be held indefinitely, treated as a terrorist and subjected to special conditions including solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
Update: 20 July
It now appears that there are three serious discrepancies in the police case and, as they are all to Dr Haneef's detriment, they stack the evidence against the 27-year-old medical practitioner.
# Contrary to the documentation produced by the police and put before a Brisbane magistrate, Dr Haneef did not say that he lived with the two terror suspects in Liverpool, Britain.
# Contrary to the claims of the police, Dr Haneef did offer detailed and plausible explanations about the circumstances of his one-way ticket to India, and his planned return to Gold Coast Hospital.
# Contrary to what the magistrate was told by commonwealth prosecutor Clive Porritt, Dr Haneef's old SIM card was not found in the burning Jeep Cherokee that was used in a terror attack on Glasgow airport on June30. The SIM card was found more than 300km away in the possession of Sabeel Ahmed, brother of the Jeep's driver and the second cousin to whom Dr Haneef had handed it.
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Costello's blues
I'm in Hobart at an Allied Health conference, and I'm finding it extremely cold at night. The sun shines during the day but the wind is bitter. There is snow on Mt Wellington, which provides the backdrop to Hobart CBD.
I have had difficulty finding the time to access the internet. The internet option in my hotel room is not working, and I'm working from the public access computer in a side room with no heating. I'm freezing, and I cannot post images nor make comments on the computer. I will add them latter when they solve the technical glitch.
I haven't been following the newspapers or the news. because of the conference. I did see that the underground tensions within the Liberal party are sufacing with Costello saying that Howard was a poor treasurer, is an overspending PM, doesn't tell the truth and will stab you in the back. Apparently that's a rough summary of Costello's view. He speaks as frustrated dudded man in Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen book, John Winston Howard: The Biography. It's not going to go down well in the Liberal Party is it?
Can we continue to talk in terms of Howard and Peter Costello's prudent management meaning that they are better equipped team to put Australia on the right path than Labor? Will the Canberra Press Gallery now become more critical of the Howard Government, given the ongoing exposed divisions and dislike?
Update: 20 July
Michell Grattan in the Age says:
But it's now clear that if the Howard Government were re-elected, it would be near impossible for that relationship to remain productive (unless there was, heaven forbid, a "deal" for the transition). The first part of the new term would be spent seeing off Howard. So why, Labor will argue, elect a government where the PM will initially be a lame duck, and then gone? It's a fair point, nearly impossible for Howard to answer.
She says that Howard faces an unenviable dilemma. He has always said he would stay as long as his party wanted him and it was for the party's good. Is Howard in the position of Kim Beazley last year, when it became clear the public was no longer listening to him? Howard no longer stands for the future.
Presumably, the Liberal Party will close ranks around Howard and vent its spleen against The Age for publishing such damaging extracts from the Errington and van Onselen book.
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July 17, 2007
Murdoch's voice
A graphic image of the Murdoch media as a conservative noise machine that is a globe-spanning media empire with affiliated digital and broadcast platforms designed to soothe conservatives' delicate sensibilities:
Sharpe
The machine is about setting agendas as a counterbalance to what he sees as a liberal print press (Fairfax in Australia). Setting the agenda means neoliberal economic views, neo-conservative enthusiasm for war-making, a dislike of multiculturalism, assimilation etc. There are no walls of separation between the opinion pages and the news sections in the conservative noise machine.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:48 PM | TrackBack
Pearson's Cape York reforms
Last night I watched The Cape Experiment, a look at Noel Person's welfare reform approach to the rivers of grog and welfare dependency, on the ABC's Four Corners. program. The program graphically showed the effects of these problems in Cape York and then explored Pearson's approach.
Pearson argues that his governance approach provides a pathway to aboriginal futures:
the fundamental structural and behavioural reforms we propose to implement in Cape York Peninsula will turn around the situation in our communities in a matter of years. Our remote communities can be transformed into strong home bases for Cape York people, safe and peaceful places where children receive a primary education that does not disadvantage them, and large numbers of adults learn to re-engage with the real economy instead of depending on passive welfare.
Pearson holds that welfare payments – sit-down money - have encouraged irresponsibility, facilitated a hand out mentality in indigenous communities and produced a passive people. His proposed reform is mutual responsibility and if people don’t take responsibility then his organization is able to step in. So indigenous people can lose their freedom if they don’t abide by the conditions of mutual responsibility.
Pearson's the pilot program--Cape York Partnerships-- involved teams working in the towns of Aurukun, Coen, Mossman Gorge and Hopevale to engage them on welfare reform by building trust over time, and to gently shape the conduct of the people in these towns so they would articulating the welfare reform principles as though they were their own. According to Philip White, who was a member of the team in Arukun, this would involve:
asking people living with 20 family members in one broken-down house about the provision of housing, asking people who had never had a real job about what sort of training services might help, asking parents with illiterate 12-year-old children about schooling - while reminding them of the role sit-down money played in producing such mealy outcomes.Similar research was undertaken in the towns of Coen, Mossman Gorge and Hopevale. The plan was to eventually build this feedback into policy before sending it to Brough. We were told this process would take at least a year and more likely two. But this real research conducted with real people is barely cited in the From Hand Out to Hand Up report.
The 4 Corners showed indifference and resistance to the Pearson/Brough plan amongst councillors in Hopevale, strong support amongst councillers in Mossman Creek. The teams were rejected twice in Aurukun. Why this happened was never explored. No indigenous criticism of Pearson's plan were aired, and there were no alternative indigenous voices.
Pearson's welfare programme has becomethe blueprint for the federal Government's intervention into the Northern territory.
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July 16, 2007
spinning the spin
Alastair Campbell was privy to intimate conversations with cabinet ministers and world leaders; but surreptitiously he was taking a note of what they thought were private conversations. He was the transmission mechanism, in charge of "message discipline", and therefore in charge of both the message and the discipline. As one of Blair's key advisers, he stepped beyond matters of presentation and explanation to be a strategist and tactician.
Apparently, the diaries are a bit of a yawn as the politically meaty bits are missing from the Blair years. Does his account from the heart of the spin machine contain insights into the management of political spin? After all Alastair Campbell is responsible for an era of squalid, sleazy spin. He made headlines around the world because of his central role in preparing the dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and the now infamous claim that Saddam Hussein could launch those weapons in 45 minutes.The weapons have yet to be found, and Campbell is basically defending his role as spim master.
Though Campbell chats away on his Diary of the Dairy I haven't found much there on the spinning of politics--what he calls modern communications. We know that Campbell, as Blair Government chief "spin doctor", has admitted that Labour's attempts to control the media has been partly to blame for public antipathy towards politics.
Those attempts to influence the news agenda involved self-serving leaks to the newspapers that whetted the appetite of reporters so that broadcasters tripped over themselves in their rush to gain exclusive interviews. It was Campbell who was feeding the "feral beasts" though a steady diet of good lines, clever evasions, half-truths and cues.
In doing so Campbell damaged the Parliamentary process because of the way he was allowed to rewrite the rules for government information officers so that they could trail announcements in the news media before being announced to Parliament. Campbell, as a special advisor, had the power to instruct civil servants or get involved in the publication of intelligence information, and he fought attempts by senior public servants to claw back a degree of control for the civil service.
Jack Waterford at the Canberra Times makes the point that:
Spin doctors are not new, any more than minders are. Only the terms are new. But the role of modern media in the political process and the 24-hour news cycle makes their role more significant. It has, to a degree, created a new profession somewhere between the politician himself or herself and the old notion of the cunning adviser, Svengali, Richelieu or Machiavelli himself.
They are masters of being ahead of the game. The danger is that the more one's talents as a Machiavelli are recognised, the more one gets to be distrusted, the more people feel they are being manipulated, the more the audience feels they are being played upon. Campbell was found out in the end.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:19 AM | TrackBack
July 15, 2007
Bush's surge + the ALP
Why doesn't the Australian government do something useful on Iraq and call for the US to rethink its foreign policy, and recognise the virtues of so-called "soft power" and acting through international institutions including the United Nations? Both the Australian public and the Iraqi public want us to leave Iraq. However, both the Australia government and the Iraqi government want us to stay. So we're staying. So much for democracy.
Howard and Co could put pressure on Bush, who is a corner being forced to defend his policy in Iraq, after a report on the effectiveness of the "surge" strategy concluded that the military situation had improved but political and economic targets had not been met.The trajectory of horror in Iraq his clear-- the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm. But Bush is staying the course. He's locked himself in. As commander-in-chief, Bush calls the shots, and he's not giving an inch to the critics, because he is convinced that Iraq is the central front of the war on terror.
Oh I know that Howard and Downer will never do this as they are neo-cons through and through.They accept America's sense of manifest destiny, and they see the Iraq war as one of liberation rather than conquest--a naked smash-and-grab raid on a sovereign state to allow the foreign power safe and unimpeded access to whatever pickings the plundered nation has to offer.
Presumably, the Canberra neo-cons are in denial. They do not accept that judged even by the lights of Bush's own "war on terror" standards, Iraq has been a spectacular failure. It took a country that had been free of jihadist militants and turned it into their most fecund breeding ground; it also took a country that posed no threat to the United States and made it into a place where thousands of Americans, not to mention many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis, have been killed. If Al Qaeda began as a fringe sect, then it has become, thanks in no small measure to the Bush administration, a global movement able to draw on deep wells of support.
The ALP could speak out, given its tradition of multilateralism. I presume that they support the US's empire of bases" the 700 or more military bases, giant to micro, that the Pentagon has listed as part of the Pentagon's global basing structure. This "footprint" is a way of getting at the nature of imperial power for a country that largely avoided colonies, but nonetheless managed to garrison the globe. Rudd starts from the premise the assumption that the United States should be the dominant force in international relations, accepts that the US is the empire of our age, and he sees the US's post–September 11 imperial mission in a benign light---export of democracy and saving the souls of the subject peoples.
However, doesn't the ALP share the new consensus which holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Thisi does not take any political courage as paid-up members of the US's foreign policy establishment, rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:29 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 14, 2007
double talk
After listening to the different indigenous voices at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas I have to agree with Tandberg:
Tandberg
Pat Dodson agrees. He says:
The intervention, and the accompanying headline-grabbing phrase "rivers of grog", was used as the political trigger for an unprecedented use of the military and police to occupy indigenous communities. Their role was to support a regime of coercive paternalism in which grog and pornography were to be banned, medical examinations imposed on children, and welfare payments managed and linked with school attendance.
There is no argument that the urgent immediate priority is to protect children. The welfare of our children and our families remains the key to our lives and future.
He adds that this priority is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda; and the Government has not made a case in linking the removal of land from Aboriginal ownership and getting rid of the permit system with protecting children from those who abuse them.
I concur with Dodson when he says that:
What is becoming increasingly clear is that the Howard Government has used the emotive issue of child abuse to justify this intervention in the only Australian jurisdiction in which it can implement its radical indigenous policy agenda. Reforming indigenous land title is central to the Howard Government's national indigenous policy program: an agenda that has been swept along by an alliance of established conservatives forces that have long opposed Aboriginal self-determination and land rights...There should be no doubt about what is at stake here. The Government's agenda is to transform indigenous larger settlements into mainstream towns and extinguish by attrition the capacity of indigenous people to maintain small homeland communities.
He says that though assimilation was comprehensively rejected by mainstream Australian society as racist, it is now back in vogue as this Government's indigenous public policy direction.This reflects the paucity of intellectual and philosophical discussion about the position of indigenous people in Australian nation building.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:54 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
July 13, 2007
talkback radio+conservatism
In the past decade talkback radio has become a powerful conservative political force in Australia with Stan Zemanek, Alan Jones and John Laws in Sydney and Bob Francis in Adelaide spearheading the one nation conservative movement. By giving voice to conservative instincts reacting to the effects of globalization talkback radio has helped to polarize, and deeply divide Australia.
John Ruddick argues that Zemanek's success was largely due to Paul Keating and the conservative hostility he attracted.It was the Labor Party heartland of western Sydney that tuned in in droves. Ruddick says:
By the mid-1990s, many blue-collar, socially conservative Australians who had voted Labor all their life were being turned off by the ALP. After having overwhelmingly supported Bob Hawke in the four elections from 1983 to 1990, they had serious doubts about his successor. Keating's agenda of multiculturalism, reconciliation, the politicians' republic, family reunion schemes and unfair dismissal laws appealed to the intellectual establishment. But rusted-on Labor voters were becoming unstuck .... when they heard someone spell out loudly and clearly why Keating was wrong on Mabo, or an apology to rampant welfarism, or his Asia-first foreign policy, they loved it. And so they went to the ballot box in 1996 and voted Liberal for the first time.
Zemanek could be heard in other parts of Australia, and he was especially popular in Brisbane and rural Queensland. When Howard won in 1996, it was western Sydney and Queensland that delivered a substantial proportion of his majority.
Ruddick says that where Limbaugh helped convert the Reagan Democrats into lifelong Republicans, Zemanek played matchmaker for Howard and his battlers. By helping to convert masses of Labor voters into Liberal voters, he played a pivotal role in Howard's success.
Ruddick also acknowledges that Zemanek was also instrumental in the nation's cultural realignment:
It is now possible to debunk many myths central to our view of society, once popular among enlightened Australians: that is to say, people who accept the assumptions of The Sydney Morning Herald and ABC world view. These include the following long-held beliefs: that welfarism and the perpetuation of tribal beliefs are the best way of achieving Aboriginal dignity; that separation and divorce do not harm children; that there is no downside to an excess of multiculturalism; and that there was secret women's business on Hindmarsh Island. During the Keating era, disagreeing with any of these shibboleths led to vicious criticism in certain circles. This is no longer the case.
Ruddick concludes by saying that Zemanek may have been crude and perhaps even rude at times, but he nonetheless helped to dramatically change the public culture of the country for the better.
Better? Why so? More freedom of speech? More freedom of speech in the form of dogwhistle politics? Greater expression of one nation conservatism that lead to the culture wars conducted by the Murdoch Press? A more polarized Australia? Is this better? How does that make things better?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:03 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Canberra watch
It is beginning to look as if the Coalition is in trouble, doesn't it? Deep trouble. The atmosphere is changing. Small mistakes that mean nothing in themselves (forgetting names, smug lines on housing affordability and food prices delivered with a sneer) become symbolic, and an indication of the formation a new more critical way of judging. The Liberal talking points no longer resonate:
Clement
A political shift is beginning to take place--the anti-Keating political constellation or political bloc that was put in place in 1996 is now unravelling. The ALP is now setting the agenda and the Liberals are responding, whilst the Liberal attacks on Rudd are water off a ducks back.
Laura Tingle in the Australian Financial Review says:
There has inevitably been a lot of discussion in Canberra about the government seems to be making so many unenforced errors of late, from last weeks' oil debacle, to whether a travel warning to Indonesia was upgraded or reissued to forgetting the name of the candidate for Franklin. Many believe it is just a reflection of how rattled the government is: that ministers just never believed that Rudd would be able to get and maintain the traction he has, and that they had got out of the habit of anticipating an effective opposition.
Maybe. Tingle also canvasses the effects of staff changes in the Prime Ministers' office. Maybe again. She mentions the attack on the Labor state's economic credibility has been ineffective in attacking federal Labor's economic credibility.
But it is not just a question of political tactics and strategy is it? These are not biting in the electorate like they used to because of the melting of the 1996 political alignment or bloc. The fault lines are shifting, as can be seen from the graphs interpreting Newspoll at Possum's Pollytics. There are large movements in the primary vote toward the ALP with women deserting the Coalition.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:00 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
July 12, 2007
The Australian versus the blogs
It's finally happened. The war between the blogs and Murdoch's Australian has opened. The issue is the interpretation of Newspoll and the blogs challenging The Australian's upbeat that Rudd's days are numbered as Howard fights back. What the polls say that the Howard government is in a desperate electoral position, and the Australian is doing its best to dig up glimmers of gold amidst the coal dust.
The Australian's opening salvo in the 'Newspoll wars' is an editorial subtitled Online prejudice no substitute for real work. The position is simple--the online commentariat are prejudiced whilst The Australian does the real political analysis. The salvo opens thus:
The measure of good journalism is objectivity and a fearless regard for truth. Bias, nonetheless, is in the eye of the beholder and some people will always see conspiracy when the facts don't suit their view of the world. This is the affliction that has gripped, to a large measure, Australia's online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people's work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society's pool of knowledge.
Now we must pinch ourselves to remind us that this is coming from The Australian, which is widely noted for its partisan commentary, bias and dumping of objectivity in the culture wars and the war on terror. Though two critics are mentioned--- Mumble's Peter Brent and Crikey--the salvo is much broader. The 'online news commentariat' are positioned as 'our woolly-headed critics' and 'as the one-eyed anti-Howard cheer squad now masquerading as serious online political commentary,'who, apart from a few notable exceptions, 'has all but exhausted its claim to be taken seriously.'
The following sentence 'Smug, self assured, delusional swagger is no substitute for getting it right' would apply to The Australian: to the low grade work of Dennis Shanahan that mocks the truth telling ethos of journalism, and as well as many of the other journalists in The Australian's stable whose work relies on the regular drip feed from the always unnamed "senior sources" in the Howard Ministry. This culture of hiding the sources for government stories corrupts journalistic culture.
Then we have this paragraph:
If there is a common theme to the criticisms levelled against The Australian's political coverage by the self appointed online commentariat it is that our critics only howl when the heat is being applied to Labor.... The self appointed experts online come ...from the extreme Left, populated as many sites are by sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper. We fully expect that if anything goes wrong for Mr Rudd in the campaign this year we will be blamed for Labor's misfortune.
There's a touch a persecutory complex here with the suggestion of feelings of paranoia that the critics are plotting against them, or out to harm them.
It is highly probable that the online commentators do not want a job on a real newspaper like the Australian and be obliged to spin for the Coalition to retain their jobs. They do not want to be caught up in self-deception that they are practicing real journalism. What hey have done is break the monopoly of the mainstream media and political elites, on interpreting the news to the electorate.
The Australian adopts a defensive position in its attacks on its online critics in wards that project its own practices onto its critics.
It reflects how out of touch with ordinary views so many on-line commentators are. They claim to understand the mainstream but in reality represent a clique that believes what it considers to be the evils of the Howard Government position on Iraq, climate change, and Work Choices to be self-evident truths....Such commentators clearly have a market because there are a lot of people who want to have their own prejudices endlessly confirmed. But they should not kid themselves they are engaged in proper journalism and real reporting.
Dennis Shanahan engaged in proper journalism and real reporting? How's that for self-deception. What does that 'real reporting ' mean in the context of the partisan commentary practised by The Australian's journalists? If a delusion is an unshakable belief in something untrue, then the statement that The Australian's commentators are engaged in proper journalism and real reporting is an example of an irrational belief that defies normal reasoning, as it is one that remains firm even when overwhelming proof is presented to dispute them.
The reality is that online commentators (Crikey and the political bloggers) are engaged in holding The Australian to account, and they are using the skills of journalism to make it's journalists more accountable to citizens in a liberal democracy.The Australian really doesn't like this online surveillance of its activities and commentary, judging by this shrill paragraph:
On almost every issue it is difficult not to conclude that most of the electronic offerings that feed off the work of The Australian to create their own content are a waste of time. They contribute only defamatory comments and politically coloured analysis. Not properly understanding how polls work gives our critics licence to project their own bias onto analysis of our reporting. The Australian is not beholden to any one side of politics and recent election outcomes vindicate our treatment of our polls. So let's not mince words. [W]e just don't think many of our critics have any real clue about polling and very little practical experience of politics.
Only The Australian understands politics. This appeal to authority to bolster a defensive position has an grandiose complex as The Australian assumes its the only newspaper in town. It has an over-inflated sense of self-worth, as only they engage in professional political analysis.
This self-delusion:----The Australian understands itself as 'not beholden to any one side of politics' when it functions as the publicity machine for the Coalition in our political discourse--is severe. What we have is a delusion accompanied by hallucinations, which are acting to strengthen confidence in the delusion that The Australian's partisan commentators are engaged in proper journalism and real reporting.
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Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: China +pollution
One of the themes runing through the regional sessions of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas was a coming to grips with increased power of China, its economic growth and its environmental pollution. Whilst some speakers (eg., Joseph Cheng) were optimistic others (eg.,Collen Ryan) were more pessimistic. And for good reason.
As Stephen Wyatt says in the Australian Financial Review (11 July, 1 2007) almost two thirds of China's rivers are poisoned , a third of the country suffers from acid rain, and thick smog covers the mainland. The Tai Lake symbolizes the problem. It is surrounded by textile, chemical, paper-making and other industries that pump out ammonia and nitrogen, filling the lake with nutrients that cause algae outbreaks.
China's environmental problems now threaten the sustainability of China’s economic expansion, whilst China's rapid economic growth is producing a surge in emissions of greenhouse gases that threatens international efforts to curb global warming, as Chinese power plants burn ever more coal and car sales soar.
The reasons for Ryan's pessimism is that, despite claims by China's central government that it is striving for more environmentally sustainable development, the regional authorities continue to push for growth at all costs. Christina Larson highlights the problem in The Washington Monthly:
The dilemma is enforcement. The central government’s decision to open up the country’s economy has simultaneously undermined its ability to impose its will on far-flung provinces. Since 1980, China’s economic strategy has been one of decentralization. State-owned enterprises have been partially privatized; provincial governments have been given more authority; entire sectors of the economy have been deregulated.
And:
In economic terms, this strategy has been wildly successful. But it has also diminished the central government’s reach. Gone are the days when Beijing could easily disseminate party dicta—or orders such as not dumping trash into the river—to every citizen through clearly delineated work units. Perhaps more significant, the central government has a dwindling ability to make regional and local government officials follow its lead. Although laws are promulgated in the capital, provincial authorities are responsible for implementing them. But provincial governments depend on tax revenue from local industries, so shutting down polluters often runs counter to their interests. Local officials are no longer beholden to the party patronage machine as they once were. They can make good money by selling land to developers, or taking bribes to protect a private factory. A promotion from Beijing is no longer the only route to upward mobility.
The central government no longer maintains a permanent presence in the provincial capitals, so there is no energetic national oversight of what happens in the provinces. Consequently, the breakdown in governance is so pronounced that, in defiance of Beijing’s ambitious targets, the country’s environment is getting worse, not better.What's more, China has shown little interest in controlling its green house gas emissions.
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the great Australian dream
I see that housing (mortgage and rent) stress, which is defined as spending more than 30% of household income on housing costs households pay. The service burden is increasing despite lower interest rates, rising household incomes and a strong economy.
It is especially difficult for first home buyers in the entry level houses on the urban fringe. Less regulation by state governments and far more land release is the solution say the the "supply-siders", such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Housing Industry Association, who are conducting a campaign for greater deregulation of land use.
But we also have the high price of established houses in the inner suburbs, which are increasing in demand. An increase in supply in outer areas is likely to have only a relatively small effect on prices for housing in preferred or desirable locations.
Julian Disney, who chairs a coalition on affordable housing from the housing industry, the ACTU and community groups, estimates there are more than 750,000 households paying more than 30 per cent of their income in mortgage payments and at least as many again who are “hidden victims”, forced to live in sub-standard housing often a long way from work and community facilities. Then there are those who don’t earn enough to break into the inflated market in the first place.
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July 11, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: a counter discourse
In her insightful comments in Pavlov's Cat on Paul Chadwick's remarks at the 'Digital Ink: the future of journalism', session of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas Kerryn Goldsworthy highlighted this remark made by Chadwick:
while people these days expect to be lied to by the newspapers, the emergence of blogging has enabled if not ensured the rapid investigation, exposure and exhaustive analysis of most such lies. Bloggers, he said, can and do quickly raise questions about conflicts of interest (both personal and business) in the MSM, 'and if you think Media Watch is tough ...!' There is, he said, 'a new transparency now abroad in old media, imposed upon it by new media.'
I've reworked this point about transparency into the idea of a critical discourse that is counter to that of the mass media.
A good example of this came from the talk on Sunday by Tracey Bunda entitled 'A way of understanding indigenous issues today'. She argued that new spaces need to be created to allow different indigenous voices to that of Noel Pearson and News Corp. This would contest News Corp's positioning of alternative critical views as the voices of "mad lefties" and "wild untamed blacks."
Some of these wild, untamed voices were those of strong Aboriginal women, and Bunda identified one as those Pat O'Shane. O'Shane's open letter to Kevin Rudd, was read by Bunda., and in it O'Shane addressing Kevin Rudd by saying that if Rudd wanted to distinguish himself as a true alternative Leader of the people of Australia ( including Indigenous Australians) then he needed to clarify issues for action. O'Shane identified the issues:
*Differentiating between Howard's land grab of Indigenous communities and the issue of child abuse;
*Making a distinction between Howard's political & economic agenda, and the real crisis of child abuse in communities;
*Removal of permits and the Commonwealth's control of the territory would enable Howard to place control of the mineral resources on Aboriginal lands into private hands;
*That solutions to the crisis of child abuse have been highlighted in a raft of domestic and international texts which do not promote deployment of police and the military as the front-line response: it requires a health, education, human services and housing response;
*That the Commonwealth has had the ability for decades to address this issue and has not had the political will. Let us be clear that Howard and Brough (not to mention Noel Pearson and Sue Gordon) are not the "Great White Hopes" for Aboriginal Communities.
O'Shane and the other voices of strong Aboriginal woman argued that the Howard Government's attack on self-determination was connected to future uranium mining and the increased mining exploration on lands occupied by indigenous people. Many of the Indigenous people opposed uranium mining and using indigenous land as a nuclear waste disposal site.
In response to a question from Wilma Mankiller about what would be the single most important indigenous policy change Bunda said that Aboriginal education is adequately resourced and then to ask what white practices need to occur for this to happen. What was needed from white friends and allies is a critical thinking that interrogates white values and beliefs associated with an ongoing colonial discourse. An indigenous future would be the children growing up in a world without racism.
Another example of a counter discourse is food politics as can be seen from these earlier posts here and here on public opinion and the excellent one by Kerryn Goldsworthy on Marion Nestles' What to Eat: Personal Responsibility vs Social Responsibility talk at Pavlov's Cat.
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cut 'n run
So the retreat from Iraq has begun. We have reached the beginning of the end game of a war that was sold as a war of liberation to free an oppressed people from a murderous and dangerous despot, but which descended quickly into a civil war. So endth the neo-con crusade led by Cheney and Bush:
Geoff Pryor
The Prime Minister John Howard defiantly says he is standing firm in his commitment to the Iraq war despite growing pressure on US President George W. Bush from members of his own Republican party for a change in strategy.Sounds like Custer's Last Stand to me.
This means continuing with a highly pugnacious, nationalist, fear-based, and unilateral foreign policy that keeps our country on the offense in the Terrorists' War on Us.It's a Rovian tagline, but an appropriate one for Howard. The Coalition may claim that Iraq won't be an issue in the 2008 election, but that's just spin and they know it.
The language of the “global war on terror”, which is what America calls its response to the September 11th attacks, needs to be dropped. The Economist argues that the idea of a “global war on terror” is an over-simplificiation:
Shortened to the acronym GWOT, it conflated the military campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan in 2001 with the war two years later to overthrow Saddam Hussein, an old foe who almost certainly had nothing to do with September 11th. That Iraq is a magnet for al-Qaeda is the result of the invasion of Iraq, not its cause. GWOT also implies, wrongly, that there exists a military solution to a problem that for a few countries (eg, Afghanistan) requires a co-ordinated nation-building effort but for most demands patient police and intelligence work. “War” should be the exception, not the focus of the effort against terrorists
The Washington neocons are holding firm. In the Weekly Standard William Kristol says:
The best strategy for the president is to hold firm. There is every reason to believe that he can survive the current calamity-Janes of the Republican party (does anyone really imagine that a veto-proof majority will form in the Senate this week or next?). This nonsense will pass, Congress will go on recess, and Petraeus will have a chance to continue to produce results--and the president and his allies will have a chance to gain political ground here at home. Why on earth pull the plug now? Why give in to an insane, irrational panic that will destroy the Bush administration and most likely sweep the Republican party to ruin? The president still has a chance to emerge from this as a visionary who could see what the left could not--but not if he gives in to them. There is no safety in the position some in the Bush administration are running towards.
This kind of resistance is definitely in the tradition of Custer's Last Stand. So is The Australian's editorial about of the “Iraq” part of the Newspoll, saying that “staying the course” was the most popular option from respondents.
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July 10, 2007
detention without charge
I've been watching the news for the way that counter-terrorism officials are being given extension after extension to investigate the Gold Coast doctor Mohamed Haneef and his alleged connections to members of a British terrorist cell. This detention without charge is now into its second week.
Clement
Its a closed world isn't it. Haneef has effectively lost his personal and civil liberties. Does this mean sacrificing the freedoms of a democracy on the altar of national security? Conservatives in a utilitarian society have little time for human rights, and they have even given up talkign about states rights. Their old state rights discourse, which they used to dismiss human rights, has been replaced by order and political authority. The authoity of the state stands supreme and it is concerned with security and the open society is a luxury we cannot afford.
The case made by former High Court chief justice Gerard Brennan is that Australia's anti-terror laws have gone too far and by implication the terror threat has been exaggerated by both the Government and security agencies. stereotyping of particular groups.
John Stanhope makes a general point when evaluating the says in the Canberra Times on the Federal Government's package of measures for Northern Territory indigenous communities:
We are certainly not encouraged to ask about the human-rights implications of particular decisions, or highlight the potentially discriminatory nature of particular policies. We are not encouraged to ask whether initiatives are evidence-based. Dare to ask if the rule of law the very bedrock of our legal system is being adhered to, and you run the risk of being accused of giving succour to terrorists, paedophiles, prisoners whatever unsavoury sub-set of society the state seeks to crack down on.
So who do we begin to counter this. Why not start with reducing the power of the Prime Minister to declare war; dissolve Parliament; recall Parliament; ratify treaties; and to make high-level appointments without scrutiny, including judges. These executive functions should be surrended to Parliament as Gordon Brown, the new British Prime Minister, plans to do.
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July 9, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007:-diversity
I've done some posts on the Festival's Saturday sessions at junk for code here and here; on Hilary Charlesworth's Dame Roma Mitchell Oration at philosophy.com and on social trauma (traumascapes) at philosophical conversations. It was difficult to attend every session on Saturday (overload given domestic obligations), and then to write about it late at night or very early in the morning.
Stu has some very good comments at Le Rayon Vet; Kim raises interesting comments on blogging the Festival at Larvatus Prodeo whilst Mark, at the same blog, discusses urbanism and ideas and blogging. He says:
One of the ironies, I think, of city based Festivals of Ideas is that they don’t provide an actual space, very often, or often enough, for civic discussion about the shape and feel and lived experience of urbanism. I think that’s something we could do with much more of, and perhaps something that with its power to create virtual commons, the blogosphere might be able to contribute to. Intensely personal experiences of urban life, and histories, can transcend the self-referential, because, after all, the greatness of cities lies in the weaving together of narratives with common reference points
Urbanism surfaced around water issues and the need to make the shift to sustainable cities as a response to climate change. But this was limited to water (desalinisation plants and recycling) with energy on the frringes.
Climate Change was everywhere in the Festival and a warmed-up Australia was widely acknowledged to be our future. Urbanism in a warm world was not really tackled, despite the Festival's theme of which way to the future. It falls upon a Festival of Ideas to do think this---- to introduce themes once discussed by the disbanded Commission of the Future. Since the media are obsesssed with the mining boom, Australia needing to be on its meetle if it is to remain globally competitive, wealth creation, not meddling in the self-organizing market and protecting our prosperty from the evil Other who hates us, public spaces need to be created to think critically and strategically about our future in a global world.
For instance, the Australian Financial Review, reputed to be the best of the quality media in Australia, is mostly concerned with economic growth and infrastructure bottlenecks disconnected from a warming Australia. So is most economic public policy. Thus the CEDA Report entitled Competing from Australia, which addresses global challenges facing Australia does not even consider climate change. Yet the Report says that it takes the first truly 21st-century look at Australia's trade and investment capacity in the globalising world economy! Since climate change is an example of market failure at its most starkest and confronting, we can infer that both the AFR and CEDA are in denial mode.
So it falls upon a Festival of Ideas to create the much needed public space--a space to foster a counter discourse to the traditional economic discourse of the AFR and the economic think tanks that presuppose that the be all and end all of economic policy is rolling back regulation to allow the market to sizzle and burn.
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Australia on the world stage
The defence of Australia doctrine been put to rest. This doctrine revolved around structuring the Australian Defence Force to protect the continent and Australia's northern air and sea approaches, maintaining a strong navy and air force to deter enemies in Australia's sea-gap before they gained a foothold on the continent. Australia is no longer threatened by Indonesia or Russia.
So how do we understand the new defence strategy? One suggestion:
The main preoccupation of an Australian defence policy is fighting Islamist terrorism as part of fighting the war on terrorism. In this war the alliance with the US is primary, whilst Japan is deemed to be Australia's closest ally in the Pacific region.
National security was once in the iron grip of Howard. He owned the issue. But, suprisingly, it is becoming a policy background, especially around Iraq.
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July 8, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: Indigenous Futures #2
The best session at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas that I attended on Saturday was the Indigenous Futures one chaired by Philip Adams in the form of a conversation. I discussed here in a pre-Festival blog on self-determination. John Howard's intervention into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory formed the backdrop to the discussions. As Adams said something strange and unpleasant is going on and we need to put our finger on it. Eliot Johnston, to whom the festival is dedicated, had a good go at the opening.
What was contested in the conversation was the claim that realistically, there is no alternative to assimilation, as land rights and self-determination haven't worked. So Howard's intervention can't do any worse. The wrongness of this claim was shown from a number of perspectives that argued self-determination was crucial to a better future for indigenous people.
Wilma Mankiller highlighted how the story of oppression and intervention (stolen generation) is the same between Indian and aboriginal peoples. Indian people in the US have their own self-government run their own show and have control over education and health services. Kerin O'Dea then argued that master and control have physical impacts on health as the lack of control over one's life (self-determination) caused chronic stress, depression, increased blood pressure, appetite for sweet foods and so increases the risk of heart disease and obesity.
So Howard's intervention, because it disempowers indigenous communities, increases the ill health amongst the members of those communities. Aboriginal people needed control over their own lives.
The issue is the one mentioned by Paul Keating in 1993:
I am not sure whether indigenous leaders can ever psychologically make the change to decide to come into a process, be part of it and take the burden of responsibility which goes with it. That is, whether they believe they can ever summon the authority of their own community to negotiate for and on their behalf.
Does the non-conservative indigenous and non-indigenous peoples’ failure to take sufficient political and practical responsibility for social functionality in indigenous communities made the recent intervention by conservative leaders inevitable?
Tracey Bunda contested Noel Pearson's positioning of being the indigenous voice who provided justification for Howard's intervention. There are different indigenous voices --eg., those of the strong indigenous women---and Pearson does not speak for all aboriginal people.
Bunda also contested Pearson's argument: that though he would prefer there to be no need to prioritise land rights over social order, if political circumstances became such that he was forced to prioritise, then he would place social order ahead of land rights. Bunda contested Pearson's position that social order should be addressed in punitive language saying that Indigenous people want to be consulted, that they would never give up their land or sovereignty and that Howard's plan won't work unless he consults and gives power to indigenous people.
Jay Griffiths, who worked in terms of the indigenous culture being dominated by the white culture, argued that what the dominate culture could do for an indigenous culture is to leave them alone and for indigenous people to listen to the tribal elders. I'm not persuaded by the first point. Aboriginal people need political help --they cannot do it on their own. What progressive whites can do is to critique those tendencies in white culture that legitimate the conservatives refusing to consult, respect, and work with indigenous people.
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Sunday morning humour
There has been lots of discussion of terrorism in the many discussions happening at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, so I thought that this cartoon appropriate:
Terrorism casts a long shadow across national discourse with most of it based around fear and hatred. They have declared war on us. So we have to fight back. Liberal freedoms are a luxury we can no longer afford.
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July 7, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: Digital Ink
This session of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas on the future of journalism took place in the Bonython Hall. Kerryn Goldsworthy attended the same session. I previously explored some of the ideas in the Media Moves post, which was from a blogger's relationship to the corporate media.
The session was chaired by Sarah Warhaft, the editor of The Monthly, which was launched at the last Festival of Ideas. Warhaft, to my surprise, is definitely old school print journalism, as are Ryan and Wheen. All loved newspapers dearly, and though they mentioned reading blogs and finding them useful, they did not critically think about their significance in terms of the development of the media or journalism in relation to democracy. What was clear from the talk was the identity crisis being experienced by journalism and their retreat into old style journalism.
Journalism was defined as print journalism (there were no TV journalists on the panel), which was then tacitly interpreted as high quality investigative journalism in the mainstream broadsheet media. This gold standard was the criterion to evaluate the changes in the media landscape. No mention was made of the bad journalists in the Canberra Press Gallery who do not read books, have no knowledge of public policy (nor are they remotely interested), never venture beyond writing about the surface party political conflicts and are indifferent, if not hostile to the world of ideas, and rely on the drip feed and planted leaks.
The gold standard as the normal meant that a narrative of decline was presented as a result of the internet and the digital age by people who lamented the passing of good old days of journalism and professionalism.
Collen Ryan argued that the business case of the narrative---the old economic model that underpinned mass circulation newspapers has been destroyed by the shift of the classified advertising to the web, and the minimal cash flow from online advertising no matter how many clicks. Newspapers are in decline and that means they cannot afford to support the expensive investigative journalism.
Ryan said that one solution is the New York Times option charge a realistic price of the product (subscription) and increase the quality of the product with opinion, good writing and good information. The Australian Financial Review is attempting this though unsuccessfully. The other option is Murdoch's global strategy across all platforms by leveraging off the journalist and owning the cannibalizer (Youtube).
Francis Wheen distinguished between newspapers (dying as the younger generation turns away) and journalism. He argued that the decline of investigative journalism predated the digital age, as it is the shift to entertainment that downgrades reportage and investigation which are seen as too expensive and unable to life circulation. The implication was that good journalism could survive in other mediums.
Thankfully, Paul Chadwick was the dissenting voice on the panel and he, more than the others, linked the media to democracy. He agreed with Ryan that the old economic model had been shaken and new one had ye to develop. He then gave the internet substance in terms of a new transparency that is imposed on the old media by the new media and bloggers.
He did so by taking a historical approach. He sketched the history of print and pointed to the similarities in the stages with the new digital media. Newspapers started out as rough pamphleteers (blogs); struggled for legal acceptance (Salon.com) ; developed a market model (Google are working through that) ; depended on mass literacy (visual or ipod literacy); technology (telegraph, printing presses, trucks) drove development ( portable computers wierless, ipods); collaborated with public relations and spin (Drudge) ; developed watchdog truth to power with the Pentagon papers (???) and distrust between journalists and audience (that is expressed by blogs).
What we can infer from this, Chadwick argued, is that the Internet places the tools of disclosure in the hands of everybody. The bloggers have digital skills that sift and order information that is dumped on the net by government to overwhelm the public on an issue and to evade accountability. What bloggers do is a textual analysis and deconstruct public documents (and op-eds in the mainstream media). So we have the formation of a critical discourse--- a counter discourse to the Murdoch style cross media ownership which closes things down.
Chadwick argued that bloggers use the skill of journalism to dissect journalism (their secret sources said in the spin and publicity column) and the journalists have lost their monopoly on selecting the key themes from a complex flow of information and then publishing it.
Journalists and the old print magazines are now running interference (denial, confusing the issue; bullying bloggers who tell the truth etc).
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Good news: Rising house prices
Rising house prices cause us to feel good --unless we have to take out a mortgage:
I'm not sure that the increase in the minimal wage announced by the Fair Pay Commission really makes that much of a difference. Of course, many neo-liberal economics would argue that the commonwealth government should do all it can to erode the minimum wage. Australia's minimum wages are too high by international standards--the second highest after France in the OECD countries.
And we all know that France is a basket case, don't we. Washington has said so. So it must be right.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Blogging the Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: water
One of yesterday's mid morning sessions that I attended at the 2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas was Peter Cullen's talk on water and climate change was entitled Drought Proofing Australia: Heroic Fantasies and Sobering Realities, It was in the gorgeous Bonython Hall situated on the gounds of the University of Adelaide, and it was standing room only. Water is a hot button issue in Adelaide.
As Cullen says: What if the Murray goes ---in the sense of the water being too salty or there being no flows due to lack of rain? What then for Adelaide? It's reality --not science fiction, as there is 40% less runoff and river flow into the Murray-Darling Basin. Adelaide only has enough storage for 35 or so days, Adelaide people use more water than people in other capital cities, and the groundwater on the Adelaide plains is being pumped as if there is no tomorrow. Adelaide has a big problem with water, or rather the lack of water.
So do the other capital cities for that matter, and climate change is going to make the situation worse. Though the "National Water Initiative is in place and we know what to do nothing much happens. Why is that?
Cullen argued that special interest groups across the basin act to block and delay reform for as long as possible. Their strategy for doing is follows a particular template. This says we lack knowledge even though we know enough to devise water accounts for the different catchments in the basin; deny the problem by denying the cause (over-extraction); confuse the issue; then threaten scientists who tell the truth so as to stop them speaking; then blame others in a different state.
In tricky times people tend to adopt heroic fantasies and simplistic solutions. They suggest we pinch some one else's water) (eg., the northern rivers), transport water long distances (eg., the proposed canal from Kimberley's to Perth). We tend to assume that we live in a wetter world than we do (drought is always an exception) and so build permanent irrigation (eg., irrigation on the ephemeral Darling at Bourke) in a land of variability. Politicians now turn to focus groups for wisdom and they have run down water policy planning in the agencies that were once based on good science.
By sobering realities Cullen meant that visionary politicians relying on focus groups were no substitute for serious water planning that involved technical, economic and environmental considerations. As it is not possible to drought- proof the Murray-Darling Basin there is a need to accept climate variability, live within our means (eg., accept the Goyder Line) rather than rely on hope, and realize that water is going to become expensive and that a carbon tax will make water even more expensive.
So we need to become smart. We know the way forward, the politicians want to do something and there is money floating around. Being smart is to make sure that water policy drives development and not the other way around.
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An Iraq joke
Loyalty to an ally is the main reason for staying in Iraq apparently. That's the official talking point for the neo-cons in Canberra, anyhow. Things appear to be otherwise though:
Bill Leak
Sad to see people not being able to get their act together. One almost feels sorry for them--almost. The feeling is more one of pity rather than compassion
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July 6, 2007
Blogging the Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007
I walked into the 2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas for the mid morning session in the delightful Bonython Hall on food entitled Before You Eat. It was hosted by Norman Swan, who runs the Health Report on your ABC. The session was introduced by Swan as a conversation amongst the participants on the politics of food. with the audience able to ask questions at any point. The session rambled over many topics as conversations do.
Marion Nestle kicked it off by introducing the industrial system of food or agri business that externalizes the cost of production (polluted rivers), has huge waste problems and produces poor quality food The reaction to this in the form of the sustainable family farm or organic farming. So we are faced with choices about the food we eat.
Kerin O'Dea argued that if change what we eat then we have to change the food supply. Instead of sending market signals to farmers to produce lean met we pay by the weight and so we have fatty meat. The food supply is not connected to public health.
Peter Clifton deepened this insight by arguing that as water is the crucial issue for Australians so there needs to be a trade of between the water used and the calories produced. So we weigh up white rice and an animal source of protein that also contains vitamins and minerals as a balancing act.
Clifton argued that as food production is efficient in Australia, food is cheap, Australians eat too much and so they become obese. I would have thought that junk food makes us fat and that there is a class divide around food: the middle class eat good quality food whilst the working class eats fatty food. That's what promotes obesity. The politics of food is a class issue. Even though we are surrounded, seduced and tempted by junk food, eating good food does matter in terms of our health or wellbeing.
A number of interesting questions were raised by audience about antibiotics in industrial produced chickens, the effects of gene technology on farmers, the greater inequality in diets, what our diets would be in 2040 given the effects of climate change---shortage of water and increased cost of energy.
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yet another rationale for Iraq
So now Iraq is all about energy security for Australia. Sure access to oil remains a vital national interest to Australia, our friends and trading partners, to our wellbeing and to that of the world.
However, Iraqi civilians must be sacrificed to ensure Australia's energy security? That is the implication of the PM's remarks in an address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, where John Howard said the Middle East was crucial to Australia's strategic and economic future because "our major ally and our most important economic partners have crucial interests there".
Clement
Except that the members of the Howard Government cannot agree on the new justification.Or is it a rational? Why would a country with substantial energy reserves need to go to war over oil?
The Age reports that the Howard Government has descended into disarray over the Iraq war, with the Prime Minister and two of his most senior ministers providing conflicting statements on whether oil played a part in the decision to invade the country or to stay there.
Tim Dunlop has more
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Adelaide Festival of Ideas: Elephants & Dragons
The first event of the 2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas took place last night at Elder Hall. It was entitled The Elephant and the Dragon. Kerryn Goldsworthy's insightful comments are here. It was an interesting and broad ranging opening session with a lot of different threads woven together. Radio Adelaide has podcasts The Australian makes no reference to the Festival---an indication of its unease with ideas?
The session was about the global economy, the interdependency of Australia with India and China, the formation of a multipolar world, and national security implications for an Australia aligned with the US in containing China but reliant on trading with China for its prosperity. Peter Mares from the ABC's National Interest gave the session its theme with a succinct question: what role do China and India play in shaping our destiny.
Joseph Cheng took the affirmative. There will be a multipolar world by 2050 with China going capital intensive and India taking the manufacturing route.This kind of development means more raw materials sourced from Quarry Australia. China will play a large role in the global economy through its foreign exchange reserves and overseas investment and will place pressure on the US to address its twin budget deficits.
Ramachandra Guha approached the question from a historical perspective of the British colonial discourse holding that India would never be a democracy as it would collapse into anarchy and dictatorship from internal tensions and conflicts. today the discourse has changed to India being a superpower, which has more appeal to the Indian political class, who envision India as an imperial power. Guha argues that the Indian political class does not have the capacity to be an imperial class and that it will just muddle along. Muddle because the effect of globalization is contradictory---a high tech Bangalore booms whilst the Indian poor in the regions are disempowered.
Robin Jeffrey argued that India can show the way for the world state system in a complex and diverse world. His argument was by analogy India is a complex and diverse nation state, that accommodates huge language and religious differences. The federal system is the key to this success with a strong centre underpinned by a public philosophy of Ghandism. The multi polar world, with its different langauges and religions, needs a strong centre and this will probably come from the US, China, Russia India as a concert of power holding differences together.
Jeffrey confirmed Guha's thesis that India will just muddle along in terms of handling its diversity and the tensions between economic growth and environmental protection.
Colin Ryan was the most pessimistic or sceptical. She questioned the myth of the transfer of power from the West to the East since despite the new factories China doesn't have the necessary infrastructure to be a economic superpower. It has no global companies, it is much poorer than the US, investment banks are underdeveloped, hedge funds nonexistent, and there is no rule of law.
In geo-strategic terms of the tensions associated with a balance of power in the world of nations the US will not allow the China to become a superpower, China will be forced to deal with the way its economic effects global warming. India, Japan and Russia will not kowtow to China. What is happening is the containment of China by India, Japan, Australia and the US.
Philippe Legrain also adopted a sceptical tone as argued that we have no idea what will happen by 2050. It observed that the modernization of China was similar to that of Britain in the 19th century in that there was a massive movement from agriculture to manufacturing ad huge transfer of the population from the countryside to the cities. With India there is a global movement of people to Silicon Valley in the US and then back to India to set by businesses in Bangalore. Suprisingly, Marx's name was never mentioned. Why so?
One of the implications from these "briefings" to us citizens that was drawn out in the subsequent conversation was amongst the speakers that the populations of China and India will not attain western standards of living. They are already having to confront the environmental consequences of rapid economic growth, especially China; as this growth, with its global competition for natural resources, is killing people and laying waste to the environment Though the Chinese Communist Party at the central level are beginning to address, it is not happening in the provinces where the corruption is deeply embedded. It was held that corruption is the greatest obstacle to ensuring a better environment.
And inequality? Doesn't that drive economic growth at the expense of the environment? It was stated that Australia is currently bedazzled by China and neglects India. Maybe Australia, as a middle ranking power, can persuade China to improve its human rights and climate change record. However, we in SA are planning to sell lots of uranium to China and India to ensure our prosperity. Yet no one mentioned nuclear proliferation even though Australia is becoming a part of the US's defensive shield against China.
Update
The Adelaide Review has a background article that allows Robin Jeffrey and Paul Monk to voice their views.
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Adelaide Festival of Ideas: Opening
I attended the opening of the 2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas last night at the State Library of SA. The wine was great, the finger food tasty, the atmosphere convivial. the people chatty. As one would expect from a city with strong regionally based food culture and a noble social democratic tradition. As always Kerryn Goldsworthy has some interesting comments and insights.
The Premier's speech, with its mixed metaphors and jokes about being haunted by the spectre of Mark Latham, highlighted how the thinkers in residence programme had grown out of an earlier festival, and the positive effect this was having on shaping public policy in SA. Mike Rann came bearing gifts--a doubling in the funding for the festival. But he gave no indication as to how he envisioned the Festival could grow.
Mark Cully, the Chair of the Festival, spoke of the haunting horrors of 9/11 and the way that people going about their everyday attending the 2001 festival affirmed his hope in the future. Both Rann and Cully highlighted the depth and breadth of the themes in this a carbon neutral festival, and how it had continued to grow. Cully, however, gave no indication of how the Festival would grown in the future. Where does it go from here?
My suggestion is that we grow the Festival so that it becomes an event in the nation by going online and just not contained within the borders of SA. Adelaide is small and the economic and environmental constraints on SA mean that we have to be smart. Adelaide can become the place of ideas--an ideas laboratory for the nation if you like. Sustainability-- or to use a word gone out of fashion, ecologically sustainable development--is obvious choice. Where's the ideas/policy think tank?
But not just ideas. Adelaide has a chance to be different. The Festival is a success because it is so accessible --its all walkable. Connect that up with the ideas about food politics and wellness and we have a city that is able to develop solutions to overweightness and illhealth. It can become a people friendly city and develop ways so that people can walk the city.
After the affirmation of indigenous culture in the moving welcoming ceremony that painted a future of indigenous culture and a sharing of the fire with the audience. A frail Elliot Johnston was introduced by Peter Mares of National Interest and he opened proceedings by picking up on the politics alluded to in the welcoming ceremony. Frail he may be but Johnston gave a tight and sharp critique of John Howard's recent military style intervention into indigenous affairs.
Whatever reservations we nay have of the following five aspects of the intervention (Johnston had many) they do support the Howard/Brough claim that they are addressing grog and sexual abuse of children in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. These aspects are banning alcohol, quarantining welfare, enforcing school attendance, health checks for children and an increased police presence.
Johnston, speaking as a citizen, argued that the other aspects of the Howard/Brough plan have little to do with sexual abuse of children : 5 year leases, scrapping the permit system , improving housing through market rates and leases, managers to be appointed. These strike at self-determination of indigenous people and should be resolutely opposed.
He's dead right. This is an enlightening critical thinking as a public reason at its best. It is insightful and, as a form of rhetoric that unifies reason and emotion, pushes prejudice and bigotry to one side. The message was cystal clear: some strands of the Coalition in Canberra may have embraced the counter Enlightenment with open arms to retain power, but Adelaide stands resolutely firm in its defence of an enlightening public reason. It will not be seduced by 'shock and awe' political prophets bearing false gifts and offering snake oil.
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an order of clemency?
Libby was accused of obstructing an FBI inquiry into the outing by the Bush administration of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, ending her career. The administration may have been taking revenge for outspoken criticism of the Iraq war by her husband, the former US ambassador Joe Wilson.
Sidney Blumenthal at Salon.com argues that Bush is entirely within his narrow right to use the pardon power in the Libby case.
But it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law governing that power because it is a consummate gesture of self-exoneration, at least if the vice president is an "entity within the executive branch." Bush rewards Libby's cover-up, thwarting the investigation into Cheney's and perhaps his culpability. Bush's commutation is the successful culmination of the obstruction of justice.
Bush will probably issue a full pardon just before leaving office in January 2009.
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July 5, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: eat well be well
Suprisingly, given the low profile of health issues in the federal election, the 2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas has a strong theme of health running the different sessions with a strong emphasis on good nutrition. Eat well be well is an argument running through the 'Before You Eat' session on Friday. Kerryn Goldsworthy at Pavlov's Cat has some interesting comments on this.
It is most explicit in Marion Nestle's ' 'What to Eat' talk on Saturday which takes us into food and health policy. Fox News, that Republican cheer squad, is not impressed by this kind of approach, which it sees as another example of junk science.
This approach works within the health policy reform agenda of prevention and primary care. This health reform argument persuasively expressed by the Centre of Policy Development is a simple one:
Governments are always talking about taking the pressure off public hospitals and reducing spiraling costs. The current Howard Government says it can do it by subsidising the Private Health Insurance industry, which hasn't worked. The states argue that they could cut hospital waiting lists if only the feds gave them more money. Both arguments miss the point. The best way to take the pressure off hospitals is to ensure that most people don't need to go there in the first place.
Australia faces spiraling rates of chronic illness, including many that could be prevented, mitigated or cured through early intervention. Without change, we will keep spending more and more to achieve less and less. Too many people have to fight their way through a complex maze of services and funding systems to deal with common illnesses that could easily be addressed at their local health centre or family medical and non-medical practice.
What is missing is the willingness of state and federal governments to take on the challenge of real health reform despite obesity being a real problem. The establishment of 'one stop shop' primary health care centres staffed with all the expertise needed to manage the overall health of the local population. These centres would form the backbone of a high-quality universal health system, benefiting Australians of all backgrounds and incomes, rather than a limited ‘safety net’ service designed to catch the fallout from a two-tier system.
Robert Phiddian's notes for the 'Before You Eat' session say that though food is at the centre of our lives constantly, a social as well as a physical staple, we in the developed world are further from the production of food than we have ever been before. The chain from farm to plate is now fantastically long and increasingly invisible to individual consumers, many of whom even do precious little cooking these days.
He says that his main point is that the food chain is attenuated, and we consumers don’t know much about what we are putting in our mouths. In particular, we could afford to know more about any or all of:
the risks to health (real as opposed to imagined) from chemical inputs in the food chain; the costs and benefits to individual health of highly processed foods; the costs (nutritional as well as environmental) of having everything in season all the time; the further dietary implications of affluence that mean most people in the developed world can eat what would once have been luxury foodstuffs most of the time; the alleged ‘obesity epidemic’ and what we can do about it.
We are right in the core of food and health policy. Nestle's talk, based on her 'What to Eat' book, directly tackles junk food and food politics from a health perspective. As she observes when it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics—not science, not ethics, and certainly not health.
A consumer driven society we have lost sight of wellbeing as a flourishing life understood as healthy functioning. We are reaping the consequences with obesity and ill health.
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rethinking the war on terror
Maybe, just maybe, there will now be a shift in reporting the war on terror in Australia. A shift that would develop the theme of linkage between the radicalising effect of events in Iraq and Afghanistan (in particular) and jihadist's operations against Britain, the US and Australia.
This linkage used to be called 'blowback':
Clement
'Blowback' interpreted the linkage in terms of definite connections between Australian security policy's close affinity with the George W Bush administration and the kind of threats to life and security made evident in the bombings in Indonesia and the UK.
Maybe the alleged linkage of the Indian Brisbane doctor Mohamed Haneef to the UK bombings provides a good opportunity to open up the debate about Australia's involvement in the war on terror. That debate is sorely needed in the media. After all, this perception of linkages is widely shared among citizens, even though it is continually denied by the governments of the three countries.
We need to start becoming smarter in how we understand Australia's place in the world of nations. After all, our state health departments are plugged into the global economy through the recruiting hundreds of young overseas-trained doctors a year, without quality testing of their knowledge or clinical expertise, so as to plug service gaps in our hospitals and medical services.
We cannot work on the assumption that Indian doctors are suspect terrorists--part of what conservatives are wont to call ideological sleeper cells. That places them all under the category of Islamic "targets"that are under suspicion and surveillance.
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July 4, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: Media moves
The 2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas has a couple of sessions on the media entitled Digital Ink: the Future of Journalism on Friday and Media Malaise on Sunday.
The link between the two sessions is liberal democracy. It depends on the media performing a watchdog function and keeping citizens informed of what is happening in the polity. The Murdoch Press, for instance has tossed this tradition aside on the issues such as the war on terror and climate change. It is openly partisan and frames its commentary within the culture wars that treats social liberalism as the enemy within.
Robert Phiddian's program notes for Digital Ink address a key issue in the current changes in the media landscape due to the medium media players (eg., Rural Press, Southern Cross Broadcasting) being taken over by the larger ones (Fairfax, Macquarie Media, News Corp) pursuing new media opportunities with their sizzling cross-media deals. Phiddian rightly says:
The dead tree version of newspapers is not going to go away any time soon ... However, it has long lost its primacy as a source of information on the world and is no longer even the dominant forum for the digestion of the information into opinion. As the economics of newspapers (and of TV broadcasting in due course) weaken, the way ‘good journalism’ has been funded in the past comes under pressure. Does digital technology provide alternative ways of performing this function that are as good as or even better than traditional print journalism? Or has something that has been socially and politically useful for at least the last century withering?
I presume that ''good traditional print journalism" here means the truth telling investigative journalism of the media acting as watchdogs for democracy.
Well, that is fast disappearing with the rise of infotainment (video entertainment as the key to online businesses). Hence the turn to digital media. This looks promising as some political blogs do perform a critical function on some public issues. So how will they grow?
Phiddian acknowledges that some parts of the blogosphere permit deeper, more expert, and less ‘spun’ analysis than often occurs in the traditional media. But, he add, two concerns nag:
*Some digital commentary is good but a very great deal is ratty and ‘interested’. The conventions for locating the authoritative material if you are relatively uniformed on a particular topic are not at all clear.
*What is the business model for maintaining good deliberative analysis on the web for when newspapers and media organizations have laid off all their journalists and replaced them with ‘bots’ crawling automatically
through digitally available media releases?
In other words, is there a future for journalism in something like the form we have known it?
What we have at the moment is a hostile relationship between the blogs and the establishment media:---the establishment media's hostility towards bloggers is quite marked, and the former's endless reliance on caricature to belittle and demonize blogs. The scorn is obvious: you cannot trust bloggers ; they are not objective, they are merely uninformed opinions, they are a bunch of reckless amateurs etc. etc.
This "critique", which purports to be motivated by a genuine concern over journalistic ethics and responsibility, is made by those who steadfastly ignore their own breaches of said ethics and professional responsibility. The overwhelming sentiment towards the work of bloggers from the partisan media figures is to ignore them, in order to relegate the political blogs to the "unserious" fringes of the media.
My judgement is that much of the establishment media's hostility towards blogs is grounded in the role blogs play in scrutinizing their conduct and offering an alternative to replace the opinion-making monopoly the mainstream media held previously. The anti-blogger hostility comes from bloggers shining a light on the corruption (eg., the drip feed) in the journalistic profession which previously remained in the dark, and by the blogs increasingly rendering what the opinion forming journalists do as less important. The blogger's critique of the establishment media is grounded in a desire for less spin and drop feed and more independent journalism and commentary.
Despite the constraints of a small market blogs are now able to stand on their own two feet in the media world and they are developing and debating different ideas, narratives, and viewpoints from the increasingly corrupted public discourse of a partisan corporate media.
Jack Waterford in the Canberra Times addresses Phiddian's second point in a more realistic way than the use of bots:
The ultimate nightmare of the reporter in this technological age is of the day when she is sent to cover a matter of public importance to discover that she is expected to file something immediate for her newspaper's website, then do some breathy radio for the company's radio station, a stand-up, from a laptop, for the company's television network, a series of updates through the afternoon for all of the above, then a thoughtful and considered piece of analysis for the company newspaper that evening. Probably with some digital photos of the action.
Is it a nightmare?
Update
Phiddian's blurb for Media Malaise or Agitators at work is based around the saying attributed to Voltaire that though 'I disapprove of what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it’, and he points out that the proverb:
is a crucial principle of liberal institutions. It is a principle under pressure in the command and control world of modern government and corporations. Tell us how and why to resist the pressures.Nevertheless, you may also wish to consider the human cost of agitation, both to the agitators and to those who sincerely support the status quo being undermined (none of us cares about the cost to those who corruptly benefit from controlling dissent, I presume). It is easy wax sanctimonious about the ills and idiocies of the world, but harder to be clear-minded and charitable in seeking to address them.
Agitators need independent media (eg., Tasmanian Times, and National Indigenous Times) for their voice to be heard given the increasing concentration of the media in the capital cities.
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Republican Justice
So President Bush has used executive clemency ( the president's exclusive power under the Constitution) to commute the prison term of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, who was convicted by a jury for perjury.
It shows the extent of the corruption of the political culture in the US. The powerful political elite are literally beyond the reach of the law.Their overriding priority is that they remain in power and as immune from the constraints of the law as possible.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo gets it right:
From day one this story has been about official lies -- corrupt power buttressed by fraud. Along the way it became a story about the president's hireling commentators who lost their honor by becoming part of the fraud. What Wilson said was true. His attackers are all parties to the same lie. Don't forget that.
It's about protecting the backs of the powerful for all of the lies that the Republican White House told and continue to tell the American public. Bush is covering his own tracks and obstructing justice.
Glenn Greenwood over at Salon.com says that the US has been a nation which allows our highest political officials to reside beyond the reach of law.
And over the last six years, that "principle" has been extended to its most extreme though logical conclusions. This administration expressly adopted theories -- right out in the open -- which, as it its central premise, states that the President is greater than the law, that his "obligation" to protect the nation means that nothing and nobody can limit what he does, including -- especially -- the laws enacted by our Congress, no matter how radical and extreme that conduct is.
Greenwood adds that over the last six years the Washington political press has directed their hostility only towards those who investigate or attempt to hold accountable the most powerful members of our political system.
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July 3, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: Indigenous futures
The 2007 Adelaide Festival of Ideas is dedicated to Elliot Johnson QC. He is known for his commitment to justice for all under the law, and achieving equality for all before the law coupled to his commitment to improving the treatment of Australia's indigenous people, as exemplified in particular by his work as Royal Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
This provides an excellent backdrop to the Indigenous Futures session on Saturday morning.
A Dyson
If you recall the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report highlighted the disproportionate rate at which Aboriginal people are arrested and imprisoned in Australia as the principal and immediate explanation for the deaths in custody. It addressed the alcohol issue without mentioning the need for protection for those women and children being battered and neglected on a daily basis.
What way forward? The Festival's program notes are written by Robert Phiddian of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas Committee. The notes for the Indigenous Futures session state ask a number of questions about the future of indigenous communities in a global world:
Indigenous peoples have suffered a lot during the imperial spread of European cultures in recent centuries, but they have defied the doom-sayers and are still here. Sure there are problems, but in many ways indigenous people are flourishing despite the discrimination. What is the shape of that flourishing likely to be in the coming decades? And what do you think the (presently) dominant global culture has to learn from the most ancient living cultures? .... Indigenous policy in Australia ... is a sorry history of the dominant culture projecting inappropriate solutions onto indigenous people. We don’t know better than the people actually involved, so we should take the opportunity just to listen.
This is not happening with the Howard Government's law and order intervention in the Northern Territory to stopping the flow of grog, jailing the sexual abusers and getting rid of pornography. It is a solution imposed from above rather than consultations with and ownership by the communities of those solutions.
It appears that this suggestion from the Little Children are Sacred report is dismissed as a delay tactic. Is it? It is the case that Canberra has better ideas for indigenous people than they do themselves? Some queries:
*what happens when a sexual offender returns to the community after doing time for sexual abuse? Pick up their old ways of alcohol and sexual abuse?
* the army/police/medical intervention assumes that indigenous people have no resources to deal with their social dysfunction caused by colonialism. It appears that their shaming courts are effective in the rehabilitation of offenders and indigenous concepts of mediation and restorative justice;
*the police, army and doctors are seagulls who blow in when what is also needed is building up trust with members of the community to help them revitalize a whole community themselves
*the social dysfunction in indigenous communities is related to community development and the lack of housing, inadequate provision of education and lack of employment in a hybrid economy.
You can see indigenous people as as victims or as survivors. The latter is the perspective of the communal ownership/ self-help approach to economic renewal and community development, or the need for indigenous communities to end their dependence on commonwealth support. It is different to the conservative approach described at philosophy.com that drives to assimilate indigenous people into the mainstream culture in which wealth determines the value of a human being, and there is a great deal of emphasis on physical appearance.
It is the communal self-help approach that is favoured by Wilma Mankiller, who is to give a talk on 'What does it mean to be an indigenous person in the 21st century' on Sunday afternoon. Mankiller taught her Cherokee people to believe in themselves again, trust their own thinking, and take charge of their lives. She emphasizes the strong sense of interdependence---people helping one another and feeling a responsibility for one another.
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Housing: an elusive dream
Though there seems to be little relief for housing affordability in sight, it is not a pressing election issue. House prices are increasing faster than the dual household incomes. That means greater mortgages and increased housing stress.This ought to be one of the crucial issues in the election campaign.
Michael McNamara, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, says:
Many Australian families are living on a knife's edge. Justifiably, we are far more fearful of our acute exposure to rising interest rates than ever. We will see more distressed sales. After all, if either partner loses their job or can't work for whatever reason, it will be game over. In mortgage belts, distressed sales are what sustain local real estate agents these days, and with more rises in interest rates predicted, this trend is expected to continue.
Australian households now spend twice as much on mortgage interest payments as they did in 1991.The consequences of 16 years of growth has seen soaring house prices have pushed home ownership out of reach.
Housing affordability, as measured by the Commonwealth Bank and the Housing Industry Association, has plunged 40 per cent since 1996. In this long boom of wealth and plenty, for the first time the average Australian household can no longer afford to buy the average Australian home.That has become an elusive dream.
The ALP's has released a discussion paper New Directions Paper on Housing Affordability whilst the states are calling for a big overhaul in housing policy.
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July 2, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007: Guy Pearse
The Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007, which I mentioned in an earlier post, draws ever closer. It starts this week on Thursday at 8pm, and I'm starting to work my way through the program to see which events I will attend and blog on. I see that Kerryn Goldsworthy is doing something similar.
I will definitely attend Friday morning's session in the Art Gallery Auditorium by Guy Pearse, the author of High and Dry. Pearse was a key figure in the ABC's Four Corner's expose of the Greenhouse Mafia in February 2006, which I'd commented on in this post.
I've read an extract of Pearse's High and Dry online as I was interested in how the Liberal Party discussed and argued about climate change and its projected effects on Australia. Pearse tells us straight, and it's a depressing story in terms of the formation of public opinion that helps to make Australia a more sustainable place.
Pearse says:
The party room is especially mute on the issue of climate change. I am reliably told by still serving Howard government ministers and backbenchers that even as recently as late 2006, climate change had not been raised in the party room – not this century, and quite possibly not for the whole period of the Howard government. Not one person stood up and sought to query, question or challenge the Howard government's policy in these meetings. There have been some tangential references to water and biofuel policies, usually from Nationals focussed on looking after farmers rather than out of concern for climate change. The only voices heard in the parliamentary party have been echoes of Howard's own
Pearse comments that climate change as an issue has been ceded by the party room to the relevant cabinet ministers. And as I detail elsewhere in the book, these ministers have ultimately handed over control of this issue to the Prime Minister. The party hasn't decided the government's greenhouse policy. John Howard has decided it himself. As Pearse observes 'anyone who deals with the Howard government knows that John Howard makes its greenhouse policy. The environment minister, the industry minister, the foreign minister and the treasurer are merely on the mailing list.'
Howard's scepticism about the environmental imperative hasn't changed. When he says he is suspicious of the more 'gloomy scenarios' and 'doomsday predictions', he is talking directly to his neoliberal constituency whom he knows believes climate change is 'junk science'.
It gets more depressing through. Pearson says that Howard frames the climate change issue thus:
The greenhouse policy advice John Howard has taken seriously depends on the idea that the minerals, metals and energy sectors are the basis of Australia's economic future. All his statements implicitly or explicitly show that he believes the competitive advantage of the entire Australian economy is cheap energy derived from fossil fuels, and that Australia's future is as an 'energy superpower'. It has been an article of faith across his government since 1996.This quarry vision is shared by many of the country's decision-makers and opinion-formers – from state premiers to media commentators to company directors. It has spread throughout much of the political establishment.
It's even more black and white than I'd thought, as I'd assumed that there'd be some questioning of Australia selling itself as one great big quarry within the Liberal Party.
I'm worried by the long term implications of Quarry Australia. There are alternatives but Howard's engagement with global warming is driven by a political imperative rather than an environmental one. Pearse is spot on about how John Howard's response to climate change is steering his country to a future of high emissions in the name of neo-liberal economic politics.
You can see why I'm going to attend this session of the Festival of Ideas.
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a threat-free Australia?
I heard on World Today the beginnings of a playing politics with the terrorist threat in Australia in the light of the events in Britain--- ie., an al-Qaida linked terrorist cell is suspected of attempting to commit mass murder using car bombs in London and Glasgow. A Howard government-funded research report reveals that 3,000 young Muslims in Sydney alone could be at risk of radicalisation by extremist elements both here and abroad, which could push them to commit terrorist attacks. 3,000 huh. That's pretty precise isn't it?
Note the revelations are about "could be" and "could push" not what is.
The report referred to a Mr Kara-Ali who was given a $200,000 grant by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in June last year to investigate the radicalisation of young Muslims in Sydney's southwest. Kara-Ali says:
We're finding out that per capita we've got a huge number of young Muslims (vulnerable to radicalisation) compared to other countries where there's a bigger community but yet relatively the same number of extremist youth.I believe in Sydney alone there's about 2000 and 3000 young Muslims vulnerable to being radicalised. There are ideological sleeper cells waiting to be completely radicalised. Because radicalisation ... is to act upon your extremist teachings."
Note the "vulnerable" to and "waiting to be" in addition to the "could be" and "could push." It's all about possibilities and what might be's. There is no evidence that this "might be" is actually happening. " Extremist " in this case refers to the Wahabi movement whilst "young Muslims" refers to Sunnis.
The impression given by the media report was that Australia has become a "prime country" for hardliners pushing extremist Islamic ideologies. I notice that the PM was quick off the mark---what is happening in Great Britain is a reminder to all of us about the threat of terrorism and that we must remain vigilant. No suprises there, but note the slipped in equation: ---pushing ideology equals car bombing terrorists. Pretty swift.The supporting argument for the equation of pushing ideology and car bombing terrorists is lacking.
Of course, this has nothing to do Iraq does it? Things are going according to plan in Iraq. These home-grown Islamic extremists just hate us and our values don't they?
Now it's only a matter of time before some Coalition politician stirs the fear pot by remarking that Australia is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream Australian society forcefully confronts the Islamist threat and the loopy civil liberty and multicultural appeasers are pushed into the background. Why so? Well at its core, Islamist fundamentalism---nay Islam--- is irreconcilable with western values and our Christian Judaic heritage. Islam must be confronted.
As usual Murdoch's Australian leads the way to a threat free Australia:
Islamists in Sydney and London, Glasgow and Gaza, Baghdad, Beirut and Bali are not all working together, but they are all driven by one goal -- to destroy the West and impose a global Islamist government. Australia cannot afford to be complacent about the threat it faces.....the war against terror is not a territorial battle. It is a battle against an anger-ridden ideology, a threat not only to Islam and Muslims but to the entire world.... vigilance alone will not defeat the threat we face. Governments, Muslim leaders and the wider community each have a part to play in breaking the link between religion and extremist ideology. Radical sheiks who have hijacked a noble faith and turned it into a violent rallying cry must be silenced. There is no place for their teachings in this country.
Free speech is a luxury that cannot afforded in a liberal democracy. Does that mean censorship is the linchpin of any fully functioning democracy?
Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy has some interesting comments
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July 1, 2007
Weekend question: about healthcare
Why is health on the backburner in this federal election. Is it because Australian's have a really good healthcare system? Is it because of bipartisan consensus on health? Is it because Tony Abbott has effectively neutralized health as a political issue? Is it because the ALP has little to say because it has run out of ideas after Medicare Gold was relegated to the historical bin? Is the concern about a two tiered health system lessening?
There is a consensus that the federal government should provide support to all Australians through Medicare and the pharmaceutical benefits scheme; that taxpayers should subsidize private health insurance and that the management of public hospitals should be left to the states.
Health has fallen off the political agenda, even as prevention becomes the new buzz word in health policy. Little is said about doctors being wined and dined by drug companies under "educational" events, and the way GP's are corrupted by these practices.
Does the ALP have a health policy? Not really. Medicare Gold has been pushed to one side. There have been vague commitments about improving relations with the states, reintroducing the commonwealth dental scheme and addressing the prevention of chronic illness. Labor has lost its leader in the Australian health policy debate by default.
Last week Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd did release Labor's health policy entitled "Fresh ideas and future economy", it focused on preventive health care. Rudd Labor is aware that the cost of providing health care and the cost of rising demand for health care is expected to spiral--- the commonwealth Government spending on health care will increase from 3.8 per cent of GDP in 2006-07 to 7.3 per cent in 2046-47 and that poor health adversely affects work performance and productivity.
Rudd Labor argues that the best way to equip our health system to deal with the challenges of the future is to end the blame game and re-invigorate the role of the primary care system – the front line of the health system which provides health care to local communities. So it will:
Develop a National Preventative Health Strategy to provide a blueprint for tackling the burden of chronic disease currently caused by obesity, tobacco, and excessive consumption of alcohol. The Strategy will be supported by an expert Taskforce.
Shift the focus from so-called “six minute medicine” in general practice by beginning a reform process to provide incentives for GPs to practice quality preventative health care;
Broaden the focus of the major health care agreement between the Commonwealth and the States and Territories beyond hospital funding by developing a National Preventative Health Care Partnership; and
In its first term, commission the Treasury to produce a series of definitive reports on the impact of chronic disease on the Australian economy, and the economic benefits of a greater focus on prevention in health care.
This sounds good but there is not enough detail to pass judgement.
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