Public Opinion

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June 30, 2009

urban water planning

Peter Cullen, who was thinker in residence in Adelaide in 2004, said in his Flinders Research Centre for Coastal and Catchment Environments Schultz Oration in late 2007 about water and climate change. I thought that I might revisit this in the light of the focus of the forthcoming Adelaide Festival of Ideas on limits.

Cullen draws attention to what is becoming increasingly obvious. He says that:

Much of Sth Eastern Australia is drying out and is now in serious water deficit. It is no longer prudent to believe this is a drought that is about to break. There is every likelihood that we are seeing real climate change and this must be a driver to let is start managing our water resources as thought they were a scarce and valuable resource upon which we all depend.

He adds that the consequences of southern Australia drying out is that:

The demands on our dwindling water resources are escalating. Everyone believes their use of water should be the priority. The environment has been largely sacrificed with the Coorong rapidly becoming like the Dead Sea. We are facing a crisis. There will be a horrible shakeout in rural Australia and our cities are going to have to lift their games in water planning.

Adelaide, he argues, is faced with reduction in water availability from both the Hills catchments and from the Murray River. To its credit, Adelaide has moved beyond hoping for rain to meet the 245 GL it needs per annum with its projected population increases. What, then are the best options to plan for water security into the future?

Adelaide has the following options for augmenting its water supply are to purchase water from upstream irrigators, desalination, recycling and groundwater. The first is unrealistic in the long term whilst groundwater is not an option because the groundwater in the Adelaide Plains is over allocated. That leaves recycling and desalinisation.

Desalinisation has been the primary strategy with water recycling a very distant second. Although South Australia has been a leader in using recycled water for irrigation it has not supplemented this strategy to use reclaimed water to relieve the pressure on the city’s drinking water supply. There is no recycling of grey water into Adelaide's drinking supply, and there is a minimal use of recycling storm water. There is about 160GL every year of storm water going out to sea and the best expert advice is somewhere between 90 and 110GL could be captured from that.

However, only 5 per cent of the capital program for SA Water is going into stormwater recovery. Existing harvesting schemes only yield 6GL a year, with projects already committed expected to generate an extra 12GL a year. The Water for Good plan states that greater Adelaide's stormwater use for non-potable needs, such as gardens and toilets, is planned to be 20GL of stormwater a year by 2014, 35GL a year by 2025 and 60GL a year by 2050. Moreover, only households in new suburbs will be supplied with the stormwater because of the expense of fitting new pipes.

That is a very slow response.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:03 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 29, 2009

changes in migration policy

Temporary worker schemes are a fact of life. They exist around the world including Australia with its 457 visa system and they indicate a shift in international migration from settlement migration to temporary migration. Globally, the flows of temporary labour have been increasing.

Peter Mares in an article entitled The Permanent-shift-to-temporary-migration over at Inside Story says that there has been a transformational shift in Australian migration policy.

What was initially intended as a way of plugging temporary skills gaps has become a permanent feature of the Australian labour market. Last financial year, for the first time, the number of visas issued to temporary foreign workers under the 457 scheme outstripped the number of visas granted to permanent skilled migrants. There is every possibility that this will happen again: although the permanent skilled intake is capped, the employer-driven 457 visa scheme is not.

The market for 457 visas was expected to rise and fall in line with economic needs, and indeed there has been a sharp fall in new applications since the onset of the global recession. But when growth returns to the economy numbers will rapidly go up again. Employers are likely to bring in temporary workers far more swiftly than the government lifts its annual quota for permanent migrants.The fundamental shift from permanent to temporary migration is a shift away from the migration pattern in the the twentieth century when migrants came by sea and stayed for good.

Mare points out that Australia is moving towards a “two step” migration program, in which permanent settlement is preceded by a period of temporary residence as either a migrant worker or an international student. This is a “try before you buy” system of migration. Are 457 visas are being abused as source of cheap labor, rather than as a means to overcome skills shortages? Mares says:

The concern swirling around the 457 visa program is not about Irish nurses or English doctors pushing down wages and taking jobs in Australian hospitals; the focus is on workers from “developing countries” like China, India and the Philippines. Their “temporary” status is used to raise questions about the legitimacy of their presence in the Australian workforce...at one level the union concerns are accurate: the 457 scheme does risk undermining hard won conditions in Australian workplaces because temporary workers, particularly blue collar workers from non-English speaking backgrounds, are unable or unwilling to stand up for their rights.

He asks: how do we respond to this problem? Should we end the scheme or change its operation? Mares explores the latter option.

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June 28, 2009

why not close some streets to cars?

Max Fisher in The Atlantic has a good idea, given the low profile that urban policy has in Australia---Inside Story does not even a category for cities, though Australian Policy Online does have an urban planning category.

Fisher says why not have a segregated set of roads and paths for bikes only. If we separate fast-moving highways from slow-moving local roads -- why not create a separate road system for even slower bikes as well?

 City planners should take overcrowded city streets, which barely move anyway and are unsafe for cyclists, and close them to cars. His argument is this:

Citing a need to alleviate motor traffic, reduce air pollution, and increase general health, cities are carving out more bike lanes. But bike lanes simply don't work. Maybe something about America's competitive cowboy culture means drivers just can't bring themselves to share the road, frequently parking in bike lanes, turning across bike lanes without warning, and colliding with bikes....The solution isn't more bike lanes, many of which are so poorly designed that they make biking even more dangerous.

If bike-only roads grow and traditional roads shrink, auto commuters who live close enough to work to bike will be far more inclined to do so, thus ultimately reducing traffic for those who must drive. This is one step to a sustainable city.

The policy reality is that even though urban public transport has accounted for much of the growth in travel from 2004 to 2008 in Australia a car travel continues to dominate travel in our cities. Though bikes are making a return in terms of cycling as exercise and for bike pools for getting around the city, little is being done in urban mobility plans to rollback the car's domination, despite the car being a major producer of greenhouse gases and toxic pollution in our cities. Since many roads were not designed to accommodate bicycles in Australian cities bikes compete with cars for space, and cyclists, along with pedestrians, belong to the most endangered road users.

Urban transport policy is still dominated by the neo-liberal prescription of privatizing public transport and price hikes for public transport in the name of market efficiency, as opposed to sustainable cities (cites that have less cars, renewable energy powered, and full of water recycling features) and a green economy. There is little attempt or desire to reduce car use further given the importance attached to subsidising car companies to produce more cars.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:37 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 27, 2009

Canberra gaze

Well, there you have it. Whilst the Australian Senate evades the issue the US House of Representatives has passed historic legislation to limit pollution blamed for global warming by aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 (note the baseline is 2005, not 1990 levels) by 2020, and 83 per cent by 2050. 212 representatives voted no, with all but handful of these no votes rejecting the bill because they rejected the notion that America has to do something about greenhouse gases.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act is a cap-and-trade system that sets a limit on overall emissions of heat-trapping gases while allowing utilities, manufacturers and other emitters to trade pollution permits, or allowances, among themselves. The cap would grow tighter over the years, pushing up the price of emissions and presumably driving industry to find cleaner ways of making energy.

It was hard work to pass the legislation it is riddled with many loopholes and concessions) and the bill must still clear the Senate (where it faces even more daunting odds) before it can be signed into law.

Meanwhile in Australia:

Moir

In Australia the political play is to have the legislation rejected by both the Liberals and the greens whilst the economic play is to protect the mining sectors and unions, which are part of the base of the present government.

What George Monibot has written about the US applies equally to Australia:

Thanks to the lobbying work of the coal and oil companies, and the vast army of thinktanks, PR consultants and astroturfers they have sponsored, thanks too to the domination of the airwaves by loony right shock jocks, the debate over issues like this has become so mad that any progress at all is little short of a miracle. .....A combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media keeps America in the dark ages. This bill is the best we're going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed.

Sad isn't it: --we have this form of corruption of liberal democracy under the guise of lobbying as the representation of interests and the free market think tanks go on about 'Leviathan is back', limited government and individual freedom.

For the Greenhouse mafia the effective operation of a democratic political system requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. For them a crisis of democracy can occur when the populace becomes too well-informed about the true goals and motivations of its politicians, government and corporations. Participatory democracy and active citizenship are to be resisted because limits need to be placed on popular sovereignty in order to remove people from decision-making.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:52 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 26, 2009

Murray-Darling Basin: water theft

Miles Kemp in the The Advertiser reports that the state governments of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland are turning a blind eye to water theft and manipulation of irrigation rules to protect their irrigators in the Murray-Darling Basin. That is what the water politics is about----protecting irrigators at all costs.

Kemp outlines how the various ways by which water is being stolen by irrigators across the Murray-Darling Basin; ways that indicate the indifference of the irrigators to the health of the River Murray. These include:

Tampering with water meters to stop them recording water use.

Frequent breaching of water use caps without prosecution.

Inadequate policing of water theft.

Earthworks which divert floodwaters, bypassing water metering.

Recapturing downstream of water destined for environmental flows.

Poor control of groundwater use.

The most significant regulatory issue was that legislation needed to be reviewed and updated to control water harvesting from flood plains and multiple channels. Flood-plain "harvesting" and its diversion to storages in Queensland and parts of northern NSW was extensive, and once the water gets out on the flood plain state governments have no idea how much there is or what is being taken. Nor do they care, it seems.

Adelaide has a water problem, and it desperately needs to cut its reliance on River Murray water for its critical human needs. Hence the belated turn to a desalination plant, near the now disused Port Stanvac refinery. The refinery will be dismantled by Mobil.

That still leaves the slow drying out of both Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert because no water is coming down the River Murray. The pumping of water from Alexandrina to Albert, which has kept the latter going as a lake, will soon stop. The effect is that the Lake Albert will dry out during the summer. Lake Alexandrina will follow.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:45 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 25, 2009

Iran: more repression

It is increasingly obvious that the Islamic regime in Iran is transforming into a dictatorship as it increasingly turns to repression to deal with civil disobedience, and clamps down on the opposition. The attempted silencing of dissent is now Iran’s everyday currency. As Juan Cole states:

By stealing the election for Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has effectively made a coup on behalf of the clerical sphere in alliance with lay hard liners, which threatens to virtually abolish the sphere of popular sovereignty. That is what Mousavi and Karroubi and their followers are objecting to so vehemently. The reformers are saying that the regime has just moved toward really being a totalitarian state and is now removing any space for dissent.

Though this is the largest popular uprising that country has seen since 1979, it does not herald the imminent collapse of the current theocratic regime.

Martin Rowson

The neocons are arguing that the protesting Iranians we see on our TV screens and computer monitors have gone far beyond demonstrating about a stolen election. They want to dump the current regime, turn their backs on radical Islam and install a Bush-era Middle East secular democracy. Bush redeemed. 'Something Must be Done' they say.

These calls for a more proactive U.S. stance by the Right ignore that the memories of the U.S. role (CIA) in the Mossadegh coup--ie helped the UK to overthrow the elected government of Iran in 1953 over oil nationalization----fresh in the national consciousness of almost all Iranians still. The neocon account implies that Obama should proclaim that Moussavi was America’s candidate, and that the US is firmly pitching its tent alongside his.

What would that do for the protesters on the ground, and the larger reform movement in Iran? In nationalist Iran today, if someone is successfully tagged as an agent of foreign interests, it is the political kiss of death.Moreover, as Juan Cole points out:

Obama will likely be as helpless before a crackdown by the Iranian regime as Eisenhower was re: Hungary in 1956, Johnson was re: Prague in 1968, and Bush senior was re: Tiananmen Square in 1989.George W. Bush, it should be remembered, did nothing about Tehran's crackdown on student protesters in 2003 or about the crackdown on reformist candidates, which excluded them from running in the 2004 Iranian parliamentary elections, or about the probably fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad in 2005.

What is unclear is whether the clerical regime of Ayatollah Khamenei as a totalitarian state can generate change from within. The rhetoric at this stage is that the "enemies" of the Islamic republic are threatening its existence; that "resistance" to these is essential; and that President Ahmadinejad and his allies represent the strongest force to defend the regime.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:17 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 24, 2009

NBN + digital economy

The national broadband network (NBN) discourse has been dominated by discussion over its cost and whether to go ahead with a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) architecture. Instead of seeing basic connectivity as just another marketplace we look at it as we do roads, which means a state-funded organisation with one mission: universal gigabit access as a public service.

Yet the action is not the network per se, as it is going to be in the applications you run over the network. The development of applications in healthcare, education, social networking and general business as primary areas where innovation would occur and opportunities arise.

In other words we are talking about a digital economy. Since the NBN would be a white elephant without the digital economy, it is better seen more as a national infrastructure, with that infrastructure carrying all information services with broadband Internet being just one of them. IPTV will almost certainly be another, voice services, government-related services, creative businesses and financial services.

The digital economy is the key to the nation’s economic future, and how it will drive future industrial capability and competitiveness. Australia's communications infrastructure and increased digital participation are key to building a 21st century knowledge economy.

But it comes with the fundamental seachange in rights and responsibilities conferred by the biggest upset in intellectual affairs since literacy because NBN becomes another form of distribution for music, media and visual content to the shop or cinema of the analogue era of distribution and control. We need to consider a general fair-use provision to allow sharing for private purposes — not a debate about who should be the one to tell-off file-sharers or forcing internet companies to disconnect persistent users of illicit P2P file-sharing.

Such a fair-use provision, that would acknowledge copyright, but permit limited usage for non-commercial purposes, is a middle-ground between making content owners choose between putting something fully into the public domain or controlling it tightly through copyright.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:16 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

dodgy documents in SA

There is a parallel to the Goodwin Grech fake mail saga currently consuming Canberra, and the event happened in SA several weeks ago. Just like Turnbull + Co, the SA Liberals were hoodwinked by a political hoax. Odd isn't it--the lust for a "silver bullet" solution by those desperate to get back into power at any price. It means that they see Labor rorts and cronyism (behind which stands a looming Labor corporate state) everywhere and so they go for the smear strategy.

The dodgy documents event in SA is a good example. It refers to the false emails, which appeared to have come from Labor Party headquarters. They suggested that Mike Rann, the Premier of SA, had links to a company connected with the Church of Scientology. They were anonymously dropped off to the Liberals and Martin Hamilton-Smith, the Liberal leader, then spruiked them inside and outside Parliament, without bothering to check them out, even though he said that he had.

Hamilton-Smith then accused Rann and others of serious criminal misconduct, and he released the documents that he claimed supported his allegations. He accused Mike Rann of being involved in plans to give a company associated with the Church of Scientology favourable treatment in return for $20,000 in donations organised by Labor fundraiser Nick Bolkus. Rann's Government was corrupt.

Now documents in brown envelops turn up to oppositions all the time. Oppositions rely on these leaks to get a foothold in criticising the government of the day and making them accountable. Rann gives many genuine examples from his time as Opposition leader. But the Church of Scientology? That should have been a red flag, surely, despite the Rann Government being very socially conservative.

The fallout from the dodgy documents saga is that Hamilton-Smith has had to apologize, and is currently facing legal action for defamation from both the ALP State Secretary Michael Brown and Nick Bolkus. The Liberals in SA are desperate in their desire to return to power, but they are divided, are in a bad way in electoral terms, and they appear as a rag tag party rather than as the alternative government. They need to win 10 seats to govern and have around 9 months to get their act together.

The affair has significantly damaged the Liberal Party's standing in the electorate and that of the Opposition Leader, who it is charged, doesn't have the right character (ie., trust and reliability) to be Premier. The SA Liberals have become consumed by leadership speculation, and there have been calls for Hamilton-Smith to throw in the towel. As they say, he is one bad poll away from being dumped as leader. He fights on, but he is badly damaged--a "lame duck" leader.

It is still unclear who was behind the dodgy documents hoax. No one seems to care. All the interest is focused on the rag tag Liberals who face a state election next year, and they have made little headway in making the Rann Government accountable. Instead of standing on their principles and showing why state intervention into the market economy is a bad thing--- (their core economic philosophy), they aim to show that Labor, as always, is the party of mates, rorts, special deals, cronyism and patronage.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:15 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 23, 2009

walkable urban environments

Ryan Avent has an interesting argument in American Prospect about the causes of the global economic recession. Behind the fallout from the global financial crisis --ie., the decline in wealth due to housing and market crashes---there is the effect of the rising cost of oil on consumers:

it seems clear that the sudden and sharp increase in the price of a commodity so integral to all aspects of American life was very much responsible for putting us all in the uncomfortable situation in which we now find ourselves.

Rising petrol prices directly impacted consumer spending in that every additional dollar spent at the pump was one that could not be used for other purchases. The effect on households was most intense where commutes were longest, in the suburbs. So they switched to smaller cars and GM and Chrysler go down the tube into bankruptcy, turned to public transport and drove less.

Avent goes on to say that return to global growth in the future will mean a continued rise in oil prices. They are starting to rise now, and that rise will mean cuts to consumer spending and problems for indebted households. They are going to restrain their spending on other purchases.

And that represents a serious constraint on recovery. Unfortunately, this is not a problem that can be resolved quickly. America's geography and automotive fleet took decades to assemble, during which time transit and walkable environments were neglected and woefully underfunded. It is simply impossible to move any significant percentage of American households to within reach of transit or into a highly efficient new automobile in a matter of months or a few years. This is the work of decades.

Public transport and walkable environments were neglected in Australian cities as well, despite the increasing shift to the inner city living. If there are some moves are being made towards investing in public transport as part of nation building---I guess that the automobile-oriented nature of our current transportation network means that there are more shovel-ready highway projects available than public transport projects----little is being done to roll back the car to construct walkable environments in our cities.

Avent argues that capital spending on highways can be accepted if such spending advanced our long-term goals, but this balance of funding clearly does not. However, spending to repair existing road infrastructure should be balanced with investments in greener transit, rail, and bus systems if we're to effectively reduce fossil-fuel consumption and carbon emissions.

That is the sort of debate that should be happening on the Senate --not the current debates about what to debate. A debate that acknowledges that there is no money left with which to fund a green new deal and that government will only be able to pay off these debts only by resuming economic growth. The implication is that greenhouse gases grow because the economy grows; an economy still dependent on fossil fuel.

It is estimated that $50 billion of investment in energy infrastructure is needed to ensure the transition to a low-emissions generation. How then is the shift to a low carbon economy going to be funded? Through an emissions trading scheme-- the GPRS, for that is all that on the table. Can we hope that the CPRS prevents new coal fired stations being built and encourages alternative forms of energy. Or will the coal-fired power stations be closed down prior to the expiration of their normal life-cycle and the coal assets stranded.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

after the smoke clears

So the political crisis that the Liberals promised to engineer in the OzCar affair has fizzled to little more than the standard Parliamentary squabbling and bile. Can Turnbull use his finely tuned barrister skills to turn things around, reignite the blowtorch, and turn it on The Treasurer? How wounded will Turnbull become from the Labor counterattack on his big character?

For the moment people will just switch off now as the fizz has gone and there is no blood flowing as the arrows have missed their target. Some will see the ongoing political spectacle as the politicians throwing the switch to avaudeville understanding of a blood sport. Should we sit back and have a good laugh at the clown's doing their resignation act? Will this act be pushed aside by another act about spooks or moles?

What has been lost sight of with the switch to vaudeville is the politically significant "debate" in the Senate about whether Australia should take a legislated position on carbon reduction to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen next December. Or whether, like the US, Australia should decide its emissions trading policy after Copenhagen. Australian policy on carbon reduction really matters because it has a direct impact on both jobs and exports and on the necessary shift to a low carbon economy.

How is the big "debate" going? On the one hand, there is a Coalition filibuster on in the Senate to avoid having a debate on cap and trade or the ETS scheme. Delay, delay, delay is their tactic. On the other hand, the Rudd Government has ended the funding for stand alone renewable energy in remote locations of Australia whilst saying that Australia needs infrastructure funding to help soften the recession. Yet another renewable energy programme bites the dust because it is too popular.

What is going on here with Labor? They have even linked the 20% target for renewable energy to the ETS scheme, which is dead in the water in its current form. All the talk from Wong is about pressuring Turnbull to pass the GPRS legislation, when it is clear that Turnbull will delay as long as he can. Putting pressure on Turnbull has been Wong's standard rhetoric for ages.

Neither side of politics seems to have much to fear from voters on this issue, despite the popularity about households making the shift to renewable energy through putting solar panels on their roofs. Consequently, the politicians can afford play their parliamentary games in the legislative tussle with each blaming the other for no action. Maybe our legislators prefer to do nothing at all---so they promise environmentalists they could promise really tough emissions trading reform while also reassuring business (Big Carbon) that no such law is going pass.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:44 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 22, 2009

political heat and bluster

As we know the global recession had forced financiers to tighten lending, leaving many car dealers in danger of losing crucial financial support. Hence the yet-to-be-established OzCar finance facility. One fallout from the Rudd Government efforts to establish alternative financing for car dealers when two major financiers threatened to pull out of Australia at the height of the global credit crisis is the so-called OzCar affair or ute-gate.

Ute-gate refers to the Coalition's allegations of a favour for a mate (namely, Ipswich car dealer John Grant, a friend and political donor who lent a 1996 Mazda ute to the PM's electoral office for use as an electoral vehicle) by both the PM and Treasurer. Both are alleged to have helped to arrange finance from Treasury and to have misled Parliament about this, by understating their contact with, and support of, John Grant's attempts to find substitute financing for his business.

Little evidence has been presented to justify the allegations. Firstly, the Coalition does not have the alleged email from from Rudd's economic adviser Andrew Charlton to Treasurer Wayne Swan's office and to Treasury official Godwin Grech. Said email does not appear to exist at this stage, despite the clams of News Ltd journalists. Secondly, the case against Swan is circumstantial, in that the public emails show Grech reporting back to Swan and his office in regular detail about Grant's case, but Grant did not receive any finance for his dealership.

Not withstanding this, the Coalition is calling for the resignation of both Rudd and Swan for having mislead Parliament. At this stage it's still heat and bluster. On the basis of an email Turnbull says he doesn't have he has demanded the resignation of Kevin Rudd. The federal police and Auditor-General have been called in to ascertain the status of the missing email. So it's all sound and fury at this point by both the Coalition and News Corp newspapers.

That leaves the patronage and special treatment case against Swan in the spotlight. The case is thin. Godwin Grech in Treasury said he devoted considerable time and effort because he knew that Grant wasn’t any "normal constituent". Did Swan intervene on behalf of the Prime Minister's friend? Did Swan intervene on behalf of the Prime Minister's friend? If so, was Swan just acting like any MP and directing a constituent to the relevant agency as he claims? Did he lobby for taxpayer funds to be given to a car dealership in difficulty?

So we have the question of whether it is about process or outcomes. Did John Grant get preferential treatment is the question. There are emails showing two other car dealers got handled the same way. So was this preferential treatment just standard political procedure in a liberal democracy?

Once again, it is still mostly heat and bluster. However, heat and political bluster often results in burns and wounds. People get hurt and there blood on the floor. It is still unclear, at this stage, who will get hurt-----Rudd, Swan or Turnbull. Things will start sorting themselves out as information comes to light from the investigations by the Australian Federal Police and the National Audit Office.

Calling this a 'political crisis'--as do some News Ltd journalists--- is playing fast and lose with language. It's only a political crisis in the feverish imaginations of the media arm of the Liberal Party.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:03 AM | Comments (28) | TrackBack

June 21, 2009

US health care: reform

As Ezra Klein points out in American Prospect Obama's health-care reform is health-care-system-spending reform The purpose of health reform is to pay for health care -- not to improve the health of the population. If health insurance does not equal health, health insurance is important because, as Kein says:

for too many, a trip to the emergency room ends in bankruptcy, or a child's fall results in massive credit-card debt. And those who can't afford regular care often suffer terribly from chronic pain and preventable illness. Fixing the health-care system is imperative from both a moral and an economic perspective.

There are around 47 million individuals in the US currently uninsured and unable to afford care. Obama's public option if it materializes, will be just that — an option Americans can choose, thereby giving Americans an alternative if private insurers fall down on the job.

Kal

In the US Big Pharma and Insurance are planning to degut the public options in Obama's health care legislation that is before Congress--a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. So it represents competition.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:20 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Detroit: an empire of ruins

Over at Open Democracy Ross Perin says that Detroit is dying. With the erosion of traditional manufacturing Detroit is a shrinking city.

As the US auto industry sinks---the manufacturing isn't coming back--the industrial city in Michigan becomes a site of ruins. Ross Perin observes:

The city's thousands of homeless wander the few parks; thousands more squat in vacant buildings. A little farther out, the authorities have lavished less attention; whole districts of the city molder half-empty, and condemned towers of public housing await demolition. This may be the ultimate stage of inner city blight: grassy, silent lots and the peaceful ruins of stately homes. No gun-toting criminals, no noxious industry, no overcrowded housing projects--in fact, no one in sight at all.

Like the decline in mass media newspapers Detroit 's decline signifies the end of the model of economic security and widening prosperity for structured around the industrialization and manufacturing dependent on cheap fuel. It indicates that those nations with the highest percentages of their working populations able to do symbolic-analytic tasks will have the highest standard of living and be the most competitive internationally in a warmed up world.

But there is also an ecological fallout from the old industrial age. The self-regulating mechanism of the earth system means that the myriad feedback mechanisms and processes are coming together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities such as transport and industry through huge emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Inaction---Kyoto was 11 years ago and virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings---- has meant that it is now a question of surviving what is an inevitable hotter climate than it is today. This is working to secure energy and food supplies in the global hothouse, and build defences against the expected rise in sea levels.

This is relevant to Australia because it already has extensive arid and semi-arid areas, relatively high rainfall variability from year to year, and existing pressures on water supply in many areas. Rising temperatures will mean agriculture may become nonviable in certain areas, water supplies may fail for some cities; rising sea levels will destroy low-lying coastal areas whilst modern urban infrastructure will face risks from powerful extreme weather events.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:04 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 20, 2009

too much spin?

George Megalogenis makes two key points in Let reality do the talking in relation to the second part of the Labor government’s economic stimulus package. Megalogenis rightly acknowledges that the structure of Labor’s stimulus package --the money flowing through the real economy--- is one in which the school building program aims to take over from the so-called cash splashes.

The first point made is that the second strand of the stimulus package is working:

Construction, the sector that usually leads the nation into a jobs recession, happens to be hiring again, according to this week’s official statistics. That makes it two ticks so far for the stimulus. Phase one, the $20.1billion in cash handouts, propped up consumer spending. Now phase two, the $14.7bn school-building extravaganza, is keeping the blue-collar tradie off the dole queue.... The construction sector had shed 15,000 jobs between last August and February. But 10,000 jobs were added in the three months to May - that is, after the second stimulus package was announced in February. Over the year to May, construction employment is up 8500, or 0.9 per cent. To put that result in context, construction had lost 50,500, or 4.3per cent, of its workforce at the equivalent period of the last recession in the early 1990s.

So the stimulus is doing the job it was designed to do--- a quick hit to the GDP in a context where many constructions are being finished slowly, some developments have gone bust, and there are few new big developments being started. Presumably, this hit holds things---helps prevent a deeper recession--- together until the big infrastructure projects come on line.

Megalogenis' second point is that a question mark should be placed over the second stimulus package in terms of whether the money is being spent wisely. There are examples of this not being the case. He says:

Kevin Rudd confuses the worthy exercise of sandbagging the most volatile part of the labour market with nation-building...Labor couldn’t have it both ways - spending promptly and investing wisely - so it sacrificed efficiency and equity for haste. ...Rudd lumps the mass school maintenance, announced in February, with the budget’s infrastructure agenda. This is where he invites confusion because he is selling a gymnasium and a road or a port as the same thing. Plainly they are not. If the economy wasn’t on the edge of recession, the gym may not have attracted the taxpayer chequebook. But the road or port would have been built, preferably by the private sector or in a public-private partnership in keeping with Labor policy.

Megalogenis is right on this: calling the money for school maintenance and buildings nation building is spin, since the word 'nation building' has historically meant really big infrastructure projects.

What is unclear is why Labor needs to spin in this way when the stimulus is working. It doesn't cover up the obvious flaw that nation building is more business-as-usual and has very little to do with making the shift to renewable energy. Is it the consequence of the obsession with media management? Is it a bad response to the Coalition's attack on Labor's Keynesian policies?

The question mark has the effect of increasingly interpreting Labor's reform policies as more about spin than action. My judgement is that the reform current of Rudd Labor is weak--the light on the hill flickers in the darkness. Most of the reform rhetoric looks increasingly like spin to cover up inaction.

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June 19, 2009

Canberra gaze

Does Costello's bowing out of politics give Malcolm Turnbull some clear air and room to move on climate change and emissions trading, beyond the current Liberal strategy of just saying no, no, no? Or, on other interpretations, just putting off passing the legislation until next year.

Will the Liberals take this opportunity to accept that action is required to ensure that greenhouse gas emissions need to peak within the next six years for the world to give a chance of limiting global warming above pre-industrial levels to about two degrees? Will they go beyond their rhetoric of massive jobs lost and the need for ever more subsidies to Big Carbon.

Costello's presence meant that Turnbull was, or allowed himself, to be trapped by the conservative wing of the Liberal party, which is ideologically opposed to an emissions trading scheme and desires to fight to the death on the issue. Surely the few climate change denialists can be disciplined by the Liberal whips, and The Nationals left to wander off in the wilderness to confront their outrage in the regional mirror. Not even Big Business (including the resource companies behind the green mafia) say they want the Liberal's to reject the legislation twice and so give the Rudd Government the double dissolution trigger.

According to the Climate change: Global risks, challenges & decisions report, recently released at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, Based on the latest scientific evidence presented to a preliminary conference to the main event at Copenhagen it says that recent observations are near the worst-case predictions of the 2007 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the case of sea-level rise, the report says that this is happening at an even greater rate than projected - largely due to rising ocean temperatures causing thermal expansion of seawater.

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a symposium on the economic crisis

The Crisis and How to Deal with It is a symposium hosted by the New York Review of Books on the global recession. The context of this debate is the ongoing conflict within the economic profession over what to do, given that the financial system as we know it actually collapsed, really ceased to function and had to be put on artificial life support. That collapse then caused a recession in the global economy.

The traditional classical economic position is that free markets are automatically self-adjusting to full employment. They were either continually at full employment or, if disturbed by an outside shock, rapidly returned to it. The only thing capable of wrecking the workings of the market’s invisible hand was the visible hand of government interference. The Great Depression of 1929-32 clearly showed that markets had no automatic tendency to full employment. This failing of the invisible hand justified government intervention to boost demand so as to maintain full employment.

In the 1960s the Chicago School lead by Milton Friedman reinstated classical theory using mathematics to argue that markets are instantaneously, or nearly instantaneously, self-adjusting to full employment. The message of the neo-classical economists was simple: markets were good, governments bad. Policymaker signed up in droves, persuaded that economics, unlike sociology, was a natural science that had discovered the truth about the real nature of things as expressed in mathematical theorems.

Then along came the global financial crisis recession and it showed that markets were not self-adjusting. The bubble-prone financial system had collapsed of its own weight, not from external shocks. Governments did so by running budget deficits and going into debt.

The counter attack by the neoclassical economists, such as John Taylor, concentrated on the level of debt of the US government. The argument was that the debt could do more damage to the economy than the recent financial crisis, with government now the most serious source of systemic risk. Neil Ferguson outlined the risk in terms of upward pressure on interest rates and rising inflation from too much money sloshing around because governments printed money to fund the deficit.

In the symposium Ferguson, defending the neo-classical position, stated that:

we're using two quite contradictory courses of therapy. One is the prescription of Dr. Friedman—Milton Friedman, that is —which is being administered by the Federal Reserve: massive injections of liquidity to avert the kind of banking crisis that caused the Great Depression of the early 1930s. I'm fine with that. That's the right thing to do. But there is another course of therapy that is simultaneously being administered, which is the therapy prescribed by Dr. Keynes—John Maynard Keynes—and that therapy involves the running of massive fiscal deficits in excess of 12 percent of gross domestic product this year, and the issuance therefore of vast quantities of freshly minted bonds.

His argument is that there is a clear contradiction between these two policies, and we're trying to have it both ways. You can't be a monetarist and a Keynesian simultaneously—at least I can't see how you can, because if the aim of the monetarist policy is to keep interest rates down, to keep liquidity high, the effect of the Keynesian policy must be to drive interest rates up.

Nouriel Roubini's response to this is the right one on counter-cyclical monetary and fiscal policy-- the stimulus in the short run and then to restore medium-term fiscal sustainability. He says:

on the question of policy responses, there is no inconsistency between monetary easing and fiscal easing. Both of them should be stimulating demand, and the monetary easing should be leading also to restoration of credit. Of course, in a situation in which the economy is suffering not just from a lack of liquidity but also problems of solvency and a lack of credit, traditional monetary policy doesn't work as well. You also have to take unconventional monetary actions, and you have to fix the banks. And we need a fiscal stimulus because every component of our economy is sharply falling: consumption, residential investment, nonresidential construction, capital spending, inventories, exports. The only thing that can go up and sustain the economy for the time being is the fiscal spending of the government.

The argument about the risk of government debt ignores that the policy response has been to socialize the bad debts of the financial institutions and to put them on the balance sheet of the government.

Ferguson's response is that this implies a massive expansion of the state to substitute for the private sector and re-regulating the market. He says:

The lesson of economic history is very clear. Economic growth does not come from state-led infrastructure investment. It comes from technological innovation, and gains in productivity, and these things come from the private sector, not from the state.

In the long term yes. In the short term governments need to kick start the economy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:09 AM | TrackBack

June 18, 2009

Iran: civil disobedience

In Iran the street protests over the disputed elections continue as does the repression of dissent on the street by the clerical regime and the crackdown to prevent the foreign media and internet providers from carrying further coverage of the demonstrations. The rift between factions of the Islamist ruling class have become more open as the street protests transform into a civil disobedience movement.

Moreland

Will this self-directed movement be satisfied with a limited recount of the election, given Hussein Mousavi's demand for a fresh election? Is the recount a delaying tactic by the authorities who are hoping things will calm down. Will the reform movement in Iran be subsequently thwarted and crushed? Will there be a savage, bloody crackdown by the Khomeinists?

There does appear to be a crisis of authority for the clerical regime as the theocratic state is metamorphosing into a military dictatorship. However, we have little idea how these protests are going to end or what they are will produce by way of reform.

What is unclear is the significance of the regime deep divisions in what is now a highly polarised society or what these divisions represent beyond being hardline (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) and reform (Hashemi Rafsanjani and former president Khatami) has called for market reforms and privatisation, more personal freedom and better relations with the west). We know that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been caught up in the eight-year tug-of-war with the reformist movement, that he interprets the discontent on the streets as a potential threat to the very notion of an Islamic Republic, and the survival of the theocratic regime come first.

At the moment it looks as if the existing regime will survive the current turmoil and remains in power and that Ahmadinejad will wind up serving as president for another term. So an increasingly sclerotic clerical regime continues on for a while with ever more power given to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

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June 17, 2009

a national energy policy?

The sentiments in the cartoon are understandable. The horizon of politics in liberal democracy is short term not long term. For instance, how often do we hear Canberra discussing the energy implications of peak oil (resource depletion) and the trend toward higher prices for Australia?

There is a culture of institutionalised denial in both government and the energy industry on this, in spite of the discourse of shifting to a low carbon economy around the emissions trading scheme. Peak oil is still ritually dismissed as being only a “theory” and not as something happening now. The assumption is that there is enough oil for the long term. Canberra believes in fairy tales.

Leunig

If peak oil means that there is still enough oil for a few decades but not for everybody, then Australia needs to start to develop a national energy policy and to review it regularly. It has not done so. Why are we not surprised? Nor has it taken immediate steps for instituting national programs of research and development into liquid fuels to replace petroleum, and energy sources other than fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Nor has it instituted a national program of energy conservation.

Instead we have a business-as-usual scenario in which oil production continues to grown to meet increases in demand, and infrastructure funding is committed to expensive road expansion projects when the prospects for road transport are looking particularly bleak with the projected increase in fuel prices as oil demand and prices skyrockets.

When oil becomes ever more expensive that means our farming techniques will need to adjust to the increasing price of mineral fertilizers as well as the production and transportation costs of food. Does that mean a transition to smaller scale more organic agriculture?

From what I can make out Australia's de facto national energy policy is being written by the producers of fossil fuel, in and their strategy is to torpedo the vigorous search for alternatives.The commonwealth government goes along as their desire is to avoid having to take decisive measures or to confess to dramatic policy errors around energy.

In this energy policy renewable technologies are not a “normal” part of thinking when dealing with the future energy supply, nor are they accepted as the known sustainable solution to Australia's energy-supply problems.

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June 16, 2009

Peak oil

Peak oil happens where supply can no longer met demand. The implication of this theory is that the era of cheap and plentiful oil is drawing to a close. If peak oil is one of those of these fuzzy events that you only know clearly when you see it through a rear view mirror, then the emergence of China and India, and their big demand for energy, means that, global oil demand will eventually outpace supply, driving up prices again.

Oil prices are now going to be structurally higher than they have been, given the geological limits. No doubt about it. The issue is not one of "running out" so much---there is still a lot of oil left-- as it is more of not having enough to keep our industrial economy running. The problem is that we are running out of cheap oil. There will be a gap between supply and demand, since there will be less to go around just as more and more countries want more and more.

The Energy Watch Group's 2008 Oil Report says that:

To increase the supply of oil will become more and more difficult, the growth rate will slow down and costs will increase until the point is reached where the industry is not anymore able to bring into production a sufficient number of new fields quick enough. At that point, production will stagnate temporarily and then eventually start to decline.

Peak oil is now, even though institutions close to the energy industry are engaging in a campaign trying to “debunk” the “peak oil theory”.

In the short term the rate of decline after peak is estimated to be about 2% per year. That doesn’t sound that drastic since we can make up the shortfall by taking measures to increase energy efficiency and avoid waste. We have created a society that depends very largely on a particular kind of energy. We are dependent on oil because of its versatility, liquidity -which makes it easy to move around- and also because we can make so many things out of it, including plastics and asphalt for our roads.

If the widespread use of fossil fuels has been one of the most important stimuli of economic growth and prosperity since the industrial revolution, then peak oil or a global decline in oil production means big changes in how we currently do things. Industrial civilization was based on the consumption of energy resources that have finite limits in quantity--oil, natural gas and coal.

Hence the need to reduce energy use, have a long term strategy of shifting to renewable energy resources and realize that we wont be powering the fleets of international air transport on wind power and we wont be repairing roads with solar power.

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June 15, 2009

costello will go

The Libs are about to lose their Cossie.

Malcolm will be devastated.

Will Abbott follow? Minchin?

Will Turnbull be able to get some kind of coherent opposing done without Costello and his camp breathing down his neck? Or will Barnaby continue to ensure that disunity and death continue?

Who will replace Costello? Will it be John Roskam, chief of the IPA, the Ponds Institute of climate change sceptics? Whoever it is will end up in parliament. Higgins doesn't do variety.

Costello's not actually leaving until the next election. Will he manage to keep quiet, or are in we for a grand finale series of explosions?

Posted by Lyn Calcutt at 5:23 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Iran: Ahmadinejad clings to power

It does appear as if something akin to a coup d'état---or rather a palace coup--- against the reform movement has taken place in Iran. The use of force is to ensure that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the conservative clerical bloc can cling to power:

More can be seen on two Flickr streams: one here and another here. This violence punctures the dream of freedom of the Iranian green reform movement. Will the turn to force erode the legitimacy of the cleric controlled Islamic Republic?

A BBC video:

The reconstruction of the steps of the strike against the reform movement indicate it was organized. Local and international phone calls were locked, as were SMS messaging, Facebook and other networking sites used by the opposition activists. Newspapers were ordered by the intelligence ministry not to report trouble. Websites were blocked.

According to Juan Cole, the green movement's political desire is to expand personal liberties, women's rights, and widen the field of legitimate expression for culture in opposition to the extreme puritanism of the hardline clerics who had managed to roll back all the reforms since 1997 and defeat the reform camp. However, political perspectives have social and economic roots that makes them sensitive to the internal dynamics of the society. dsalehi at Tryanny of Numbers says:

It would appear that there are two fault lines that run deep in the Iranian society–the rural vs. urban and the poor vs. the middle class–both of which seem to be reflected in the political divisions that have come to the fore in this election. Crude personal observations (backed by TV images!) suggest that the supporters of the two leading candidates are socially diverse: the poor (and the rural?) are more likely to vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad and the middles class in either location is for Mr. Moussavi.

Can the authoritarian regime clamp down on the reform movement? Will the right wing regime's turn to violence become a turn to terror? Is there a revolt against the theocracy? Does the theocracy see a wave of resistance that would sweep them out of power?

The riot police are retreating from civilian demonstrators:

Is the regime coming apart at the seams and turning on itself? Is Iran headed for civil war? How does the regime--now the coup d'état government----consolidate its hold on the country?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:06 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 14, 2009

Obama, Israeli settlements, Netanyahu

Mathew Yglesias at American Prospect makes a good point with respect to American policy towards Israel's settlement expansion in Palestinian territory:

Every American president for decades has officially said that the United States is opposed to the construction of Israeli "settlements" in occupied Palestinian land. But such opposition has almost always come with wink-and-nod approval of continued settlement activity. Thus, even at the height of the Oslo Accords and the peace process and even under the governance of center-left Labor prime ministers, settlements continued to expand with little public criticism from the United States.

Obama has made the settlements an issue. He wants them to stop whilst hawks want them to keep plugging along. Gershom Gorenberg observed in an earlier issue of American Prospect that:

Settlements were established as part of a deliberate and controversial gambit, an attempt to lock Israel into keeping the occupied territories......Netanyahu and his partners don't want any of this to stop. They want settlements to keep growing, in order to block an Israeli withdrawal and a two-state solution.

The Israeli right (including the pro-Israel lobby in the US) stands for the continual expansion of settlements and no surrender of territory. An expansive Zionism calls on Jews to “redeem” the Biblical Land of Israel by settling on West Bank land. The settlements existence undercuts prospects for a two-state solution because the physical space they occupy makes a mockery of the physical integrity of any Palestinian state.

The Israeli Right have no intention of dismantling Israel's infrastructure of occupation and ceasing its control over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlement construction, with the Israeli government has encouraged growth through planning, state-initiated projects, and subsidies, is political because construction is aimed at preempting the negotiations.

Making the settlements an issue undercuts the way that Palestinians have usually entered the Australian conversation on the conflict through the prism of the Israeli narrative that represents them as a threat to Israel, thereby and opening up a space for the marginalized Palestinian narrative.

Update
In his speech at Bar-Ilan University Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attempted to narrow a rift between Israel and its closest ally. Until now he has been adamant that a settlement freeze is unfeasible and that he would concentrate on strengthening the Palestinian economy, rather than agreeing to their statehood. He says that Israel can agree to support for the concept of a Palestinian state but without defining its borders; the demand for Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; demilitarization to will prevent rockets raining down on Tel Aviv and nearby Ben-Gurion Airport; and a positive, if not overly passionate, attitude toward the settlements and their residents. He also said that Jerusalem must remain the unified capital of Israel.

He added that Israel would not build any new settlements and would refrain from expanding existing Israeli communities in the West Bank. Still, Netanyahu said the government must be allowed to accommodate natural growth in these settlements. On the other hand, his demand from the Palestinian Authority to annihilate Hamas in Gaza; his insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state; and the stipulation that all Palestinian refugees be given asylum outside Israel's borders.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:08 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 13, 2009

the road to Copenhagen

David Adam in an movement towards a global agreement on reducing greenhouse emissions at Copenagen. The new climate treaty will be replace the Kyoto Protocol which was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005.

Adam says the climate change has always been more about the politics than the science, and whilst the message from the scientists has hardened over the last decade, the politics has remained largely the same.

In one corner sit the rich countries: made wealthy by development fuelled by the burning of coal, oil and gas. And in the other corner sit the poorer nations, many of them eager to follow the same track. Kyoto crudely divided the fight against climate change along similar lines, with only the rich nations handed binding targets to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution. That was fair, the reasoning went, because rich countries were largely responsible for the problem, and had the resources to develop cleaner technology. Poorer nations would be allowed to carry on as they wished, with a tacit understanding that the burden would be shared more widely in future.

Fast-forward a decade, and the neat division of Kyoto has blurred. Large developing nations such as China and India sit at or near the top of the emission charts. The cuts in carbon that scientists say are needed to avert catastrophic damage cannot be achieved by the developed world alone.To make a meaningful difference, a new treaty must address the soaring emissions from the developing world. Therein lay the politics.

It is hoped that the agreement at Copenhagen conference will close with agreements on four political essentials, namely:

1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?

2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?

3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?

4. How is that money going to be managed?

That goes to the heart of the politics of climate change.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:55 AM | TrackBack

June 12, 2009

beyond neo-liberalism

Robert Wade in Financial Regime Change in New Left Review makes an interesting point about the global financial crisis. He says:

The shocks of the past year—another thirty years on from the last major shift—support the conjecture that we are witnessing a third regime change, propelled by a wholesale loss of confidence in the Anglo-American model of transactions-oriented capitalism and the neoliberal economics that legitimized it (and by the US’s loss of moral authority, now at rock bottom in much of the world). Governmental responses to the crisis further suggest that we have entered the second leg of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, the recurrent pattern in capitalism whereby (to oversimplify) a regime of free markets and increasing commodification generates such suffering and displacement as to prompt attempts to impose closer regulation of markets and de-commodification (hence ‘embedded liberalism’). ... The first leg of the current double movement was the long reign of neoliberalism and its globalization consensus. The second as yet has no name, and may turn out to be a period marked more by a lack of agreement than any new consensus.

Polanyi argued in the Great Transformation that under capitalism the economy becomes disembedded and dominant, thereby creating grave dangers for humanity and the environment. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.

In the face of this danger, society develops defence mechanisms that, in turn, can hinder the pursuit of profit. This is the famous 'double movement' which, Polanyi strove to show, emerged spontaneously in market societies--a sort of dialectical relationship between destruction and protection.

Polanyi's work holds explanatory potential in the current period of neoliberal globalisation. Some have even suggested that a new 'double movement' can currently be witnessed: the destructive impact of neoliberal globalisation and attempts, by different groups within society, to regulate it. Wade begins to spell this out when he says that the double movement means that the globalization model itself needs to be rethought. It over-emphasized capital accumulation or the supply side of the economy, to the detriment of the demand side (since the stress on export-led growth implied that demand was unlimited).

The failure of catch-up growth,, stems in part from neoliberalism’s lack of attention to domestic demand, reflecting the dominance of neoclassical economics and the marginalization of Keynesian approaches. Developing domestic and regional demand would involve greater efforts towards achieving equality in the distribution of income—and hence a larger role for labour standards, trade unions, the minimum wage and systems of social protection. It would also necessitate strategic management of trade, so as to curb the race-to-the-bottom effects of export-led growth, and foster domestic industry and services that would provide better livelihoods and incomes for the middle and working classes. Controls on cross-border flows of capital, so as to curb speculative surges, would be another key instrument of a demand-led development process, since they would give governments greater autonomy with regard to the exchange rate and in setting interest rates.

If the second leg of the present ‘double movement’ turns out to be a period from which consensus is largely absent, it may also provide space for a wider array of standards and institutions—economic and financial alternatives to the system-wide prescriptions of neoliberalism. This may give the new regime that emerges from the current upheavals greater stability than its predecessor.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:01 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack

June 11, 2009

China makes moves on renewables

China is still the world's biggest user of coal and the largest emitter of carbon. Neither of those two things look likely to change, Moreover Beijing has yet to accept any target for reducing carbon emissions and overall greenhouse emissions in China probably won't fall until at least 2020-30.

However, and this in marked contrast to Australia, China plans to ramp up wind and solar power, so that they meet 20% of its energy needs by 2020. There are reports that Beijing will spend up to $600bn on clean power over the next decade - or the equivalent of its entire military budget every year for each of the next 10 years.It is doing so for energy security reasons --to cut its dependence on dependence on foreign fuel supplies.

Despite the infusion of cash and government support for renewable sources of energy, China is expected to remain dependent on coal for about 70% of its energy needs for at least the next two decades, meaning it will remain the world's biggest emitter of CO2, a major greenhouse gas.So carbon capture better work, because China is not going to stop using coal.

Admittedly, this attempt by China to make the shift to a low carbon economy will cut little ice for the deniers in Australia. As Gavin Schmidt points out on RealClimate the denier's current mode of reasoning has indicated a tendency for the same nonsense, the same logical fallacies and the same confusions to be endlessly repeated; along with the recycling of talking points long thought to have been dead.

This video explores what underpins the denier's mode of reasoning:

It is a clear video description of the now-classic Dunning and Kruger papers on how the people who are most wrong are the least able to perceive it.

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June 10, 2009

stall, stall stall

The Ingram Pinn cartoon below, entitled Political climate change refers to the change in the political climate in the UK caused by the MP expenses scandal that has placed the corrupt UK political system on the nose with voters.

However, there is also a change in the political culture in Australia due to the effects of the global financial and economic crisis. The rhetoric is one of protection and jobs, and the political discourse has narrowed to being about the economy, with the environment and global warming being pushed into the background.

The political horizons are shortening as well as narrowing in that you can sense the preparations being put in place for an election. Consequently, the shift to a low carbon economy is pushed into a never never land. The union's rhetoric is focused on jobs lost from emissions trading not on the jobs gained from the shift to renewable energy and the new industries.

The politics is one of stall, stall stall. Hold back the change. Deny the future of a warmed up world. We cannot afford early action on emissions trading, as there are jobs in the coal industry to protect. We cannot afford to reduce our reliance on cheap energy and our exports of coal to China. Say no no no to emissions trading, even though it has been deferred by Rudd Labor.

It's a depressing discourse---not the new script of recession and austerity-- but the failure to use the crisis to plan for the low carbon future that is coming. Instead of a debate about whether the content of the publicly funded stimulus (designed to ease the decline in economic activity) facilitates the shift to a low carbon economy, we just have an emphasis on the backlog of actions--roads and ports and schools.

Meanwhile money to facilitate the shift to using solar power instead of coal fired electricity continues to be cut. The austerity script during the crisis is applied to renewable energy, whilst the largess and excess of of public finding is given to the fossil fuel industry with a nod and a wink of more to come.

Update
I am depressed by all of this and depression is emerging into a left melancholia. Unlike Freud, who made a clearcut distinction between mourning and melancholia---ie., a normal versus a pathological reaction to loss---Walter Benjamin does not view melancholy as an illness to be overcome or cured, but rather as a mood or disposition towards the world characterized by loss of a loved, desired object.

In this case it is loss of a progressive conception of social democracy and its commitment to an ecological enlightenment. The postmodern bears the disillusion and disenchantment with the promises of modernity without seeking to restore a lost integral harmony.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:17 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 9, 2009

Obama's Cairo speech

I referred to Obama's Cairo speech in this earlier post which I'd only quickly scanned. I've read it more slowly since then, and parts of it---- eg, on Israelis and Palestinians--- are very powerful within the context of US policy in the Middle East. Obama says:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Remember, this is a president of the USA talking. Obama deals openly and directly with the suffering and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians. He then goes on to point to a way that could address the suffering and aspiration:

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

He goes on to say that "violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."

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Senator Fielding: a climate change denialist

Senator Fielding, the Family First Senator, attended the Global Warming: Was it ever really a Crisis conference hosted by the Heartland Institute. The institute, which stands for free market environmentalism (ie., is opposed to governmental regulation proscribing polluting activities), is not a natural science research institute. It's position is that public health campaigns against smoking are based on "junk science".

Penny Bradfield

In his 'open mind' op-ed in The Australian Fielding says that his concerns arising from his fact finding tour are scientific ones, rather than policy ones about how to best address market externalities. He says:

I heard views that challenged the Rudd government's set of "facts". Views that could not be dismissed as mere conspiracy theories, but that were derived using proper scientific analysis. The idea that climate change is a result of the variation in solar activity and not related to the increase of CO2 into the atmosphere is not something I can remember ever being discussed in the media. The question of whether global warming is a new phenomenon or something that is just part of the naturally occurring 1500-year climate cycle was never raised in any of the discussions I have had with the Rudd government. Has the government considered these questions, or has it just accepted the one scientific explanation for climate change at face value?

Fielding's argument is that these are the sorts of questions about the science of climate change need to be answered before any emissions trading scheme (environmental legislation to deal with market externalities of greeenhouse gas emissions) can be properly considered.

What Fielding has embraced is the claim that carbon emissions are not driving global temperatures, on the grounds that during the past decade carbon emissions have been increasing rapidly but according to some scientists global temperatures have not been rising; that through the past 100 years, global temperatures have not changed in proportion to the changes in carbon emissions; and that solar radiation is both highly correlated to global temperature changes, and is a plausible alternative explanation for global warming.

Fielding's position is actually a denialist one, ie that global warming is not caused by human actions. It is solar activity that is the cause. We can also infer that he assumes that the market is able to correct the negative externalities of industrial production, because market mechanisms left to their own devices contain built-in incentives for environmental degradation. Fielding, consequently, is opposed to governmental regulation proscribing polluting activities. Thirdly, his open mindedness is limited as he views his environmental opponents in the public debate as being caught up in "alarmist rhetoric and extreme ideology."

If this is not his position, and if he were as open minded as he claims he is in the op-ed, then he would have also visited genuine primary research bodies, such as NASA’s GISS at Columbia, or NOAA’s Climate Diagnostic Centre at Boulder on his US fact finding tour. He didn't. It would appear that Fielding has also not bothered to arrange briefings on the scientific questions ----eg., whether solar radiation is a plausible alternative explanation for global warming----through the CSIRO or the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra. That he hasn't done this means that he not making a genuine attempt to enter the debate and that the criticisms from global warming scientists about his solar flare explanation is warranted.

We can infer that Fielding's position is a political one---he is acting to prolong the transition away from coal and other fossil fuels. Fielding frames his political opposition to an emissions trading scheme in scientific language so as to lend credibility to his blocking of environmental reform. His politics is to exempt coal-fired power stations from an ETS, or to provide them with free permits. In acting as the political representative for the Victorian coal industry Fielding has placed himself on the margins of the debate on the right kind of political action.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:30 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

June 8, 2009

Middle East: two state solution?

In Obama and the Middle East in the New Review of Books Hussein Agha, Robert Malley argue that Obama's rapprochement---eg.,the dazzling performance of Obama's Cairo speech--- with Islam and diplomatic engagement with the Middle East is focused:

at the outset .... on improving conditions on the ground, including the West Bank economy, curbing if not halting Israeli settlement construction, pursuing reform of Palestinian security forces, and improving relations between Israel and Arab countries....Judging by what the new president and his colleagues have suggested, attending to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a matter of US national interest. The administration seems prepared to devote considerable diplomatic, economic, and, perhaps, political capital to that end. And the goal, once the ground has been settled, will be to achieve a comprehensive, two-state solution.

The Israeli settler movement has spiralled out of control and Obama's unequivocal demand for settlement expansion to come to a grinding halt is certainly a break with previous US policy, which under Bush amounted to blind support for Israeli expansionism and intransigence. It means Netanyahu must either confront the settlers -- since that is what Obama is, in effect, asking him to do -- or give in to them, and risk losing American support.

This is a stark choice. Netanyahu must preserve, at all costs, Israel's strategic relationship with Washington; yet on the other hand, he has right-wing coalition partners who are obsessed with the status of the outposts. Something is bound to break, and when it does, the Netanyahu coalition government collapses.

The land grabbing settlers and the right wing parties in Netanyahu's coalition are opposed to Obama's path of reconciliation. Theirs is a apocalyptic Jewish nationalism, with its sense of sense of eternal victimhood, the evoking of a constant fear of recurrent Holocausts, the branding of every new adversary, be it Arafat or Ahmadinejad, as a new Hitler, and its construction of Iran as dedicated to the nuclear annihilation of Israel. This is a survival-in-the-face-of-annihilation narrative which holds that the Iranian regime exists in order to destroy the Jews.

On the other hand, if the leaders of Fatah and Hamas want a Palestinian state, then they need to close ranks. Agha and Malley say that Pesident Mahmoud Abbas cannot continue to talk peace with Israel when Israel is at war with Palestinians and that Palestinians cannot make peace with Israel when they are at war with themselves.

They go to say that though the idea of Palestinian statehood is alive, this is so mainly outside of Palestine:

Establishing a state has become a matter of utmost priority for Europeans, who see it as crucial to stabilizing the region and curbing the growth of extremism; for Americans, who hail it as a centerpiece in efforts to contain Iran as well as radical Islamists and to forge a coalition between so-called moderate Arab states and Israel; and even for a large number of Israelis who have come to believe it is the sole effective answer to the threat to Israel's existence posed by Arab demographics.

The more the two-state solution--two states living side by side--- looks like an American or Western, not to mention Israeli, interest, the less it appeals to Palestinians. The political reality is that there is overwhelming popular opposition to the intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many countries in the Middle East.

If we turn back to US policy it is a reasonable to interpret Obama's Cairo speech as a repudiation of the Bush Republican policy towards the Middle East. Robert Dreyfuss reminds us of the core elements of that policy:

Bush's War on Terror, which in a moment of candor he called a Crusade, was widely viewed by Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others as an assault on Islam itself, a conclusion that was reinforced by right-wing US Christian denunciations of Islam as a religion of violence and by neoconservative and pro-Israeli efforts to exaggerate the importance of Al Qaeda in the broader Muslim world. The Bush administration's policy of regime change -- applied in its ugliest form in Iraq -- was originally intended to include Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan, as well, creating the image of the United States as a born-again imperial power in a region still recovering from the British, French, Italian, and other colonial powers that exited the region only recently. And Bush and Co. lumped together all of the region's anti-Western political forces, rolling Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iran's Shiite clergy, Saddam Hussein, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia's Wahhabis, and the Syrian Baath party into one big "Islamofascist" ball of wax.

So Obama is saying no to the Bush legacy: --I'm not Bush. He had to, given the devastation left behind by eight years of Bush and his neoconservatives as a result of choosing military over diplomatic means.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:56 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

June 7, 2009

Canberra gaze: Rudd reshuffle

In the first significant revamp of Kevin Rudd's front bench line-up Rudd said that his reshuffle was "a minor reshaping of the executive" to bring Mark Arbib, Chris Bowen, Jason Clare and Greg Combet and that he called the shots not the factions in the Labor Party. That may be the case, but Rudd also used that reshuffle to shore up his NSW Right power base.

So what does the shuffle say in terms of its political meaning? My interpretation is that places an emphasis on jobs in an economic and political landscape recast by the global financial/economic crisis. Labor's response to this crisis has been to make jobs the priority at the price of debt and deficit, not to use the crises to begin the long term shift to a low carbon economy.

So we will experience more strategically planned leaks, ever smiling snaps, and lots of happy headlines of ministers in hard hats and red vests controlled by the Prime Minister's office so that the Rudd Government looks in nightly news as if it frenetically trying to help people through the global economic crisis. Media management within the relentless 24-hour cycle is everywhere.

The cracks in wall to wall media management imagery, slogans, spin and publicity can be seen around climate change, and what has been disclosed is the political reality of the Rudd Government just caving into the big polluters and saying nothing substantive about addressing climate change.

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June 5, 2009

SA Budget 2009

Labor Governments in South Australia operate with the overhang of the 1980s when the then Bannon Government came close to bankrupting the state. Rann Labor has always presented itself as the party of probity, even parsimony, and they make a big deal of the state's triple-A credit rating from agencies such as Standard & Poor. They are economic conservatives, rather than Whitlamites.

This budget is no different--- the Government is cancelling new prisons (a new men's and women's prisons at Murray Bridge and a new youth detention centre), capping public sector pay rises at 2.5 per cent per annum for four years, and plans to cut $750million in government outlays. Public transport fares will increase and government charges will rise by an average 4.2 per cent. And there is no new tax relief. The state's revenue has fallen, and there would be a Budget deficit of $265 million in 2008/09, a deficit of $304 million in 2009/10, with the Budget returning to surplus in 2010/11. Unemployment will continue to rise. The State retains triple-A credit rating.

So we need to look on the margins of the budge to discern any difference or new becomings. First, the state would spend around $2.1 billion over four years on water security, including the desalination plant, wastewater recycling and stormwater harvesting and reuse.However, no water had been allocated for new environmental flows for the Murray River whilst storm water initiatives continue to receive marginal finding.

What we also find is that SA is claiming that it can carve out a new industry for South Australia so the state could become the renewable energy hub for Australia. South Australia, according to the Rann Government, had 56per cent of the nation's wind power, 90 per cent of its geothermal investment and 30 per cent of solar power. It will reach the 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2013 rather than 2020. SA's 2020 target is 33 per cent.

A region with abundant renewable energy potential should be actively moving to make use of it. How realistic is the state's 33% renewable energy target of the state’s electricity generation sourced, and by what energy sources will this be achieved? Is the Rann government implying that SA can become self sufficient in electrical generation? Does it look good because the other states are doing next to nothing?

But let us accept that SA is making the right moves re green jobs and businesses and ask what investment is there is a knowledge economy based around the shift to a more sustainable mode of living? Well there is a new $20 million renewable energy fund over two years to support the research, development and commercialisation of renewable energy technologies with the first project to be a $1.6 million geothermal research centre at the University of Adelaide. These are small steps, but at least they are not giving truckloads of money to coal or sucking up to the big polluters.

Barry Brooke at BraveNewClimate.com makes some good points about SA and renewable energy. He says:

SA has a relatively small electricity demand compared to the national total, an already well developed renewable energy infrastructure, and some of the best resources in the world to tap into. The other states are way behind in build out, as some of the figures in the press release indicate. But most importantly, SA can reach a 33% level with no requirement for large-scale energy storage, and potentially no further fossil fuel backup. The state is connected to the large east coast grid, powered predominantly by coal, and can draw on this abundant supply via the Murraylink interconnector when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.... We can also sell to the east coast grid when delivery is near peak.

Like WA SA has excellent wind resources especially along the west coast of Eyre Peninsula. Will SA do with solar what it has done with wind? Or is geothermal going to provide the base load power?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 4, 2009

UK Labor: the living dead?

The Brown Labor Government in the UK is in a deaththroes. The smell of corruption around expense claims and allowances of dishonest MP's is overpowering, Labor's polling figures are dismal, there is a concerted backbench revolt to unseat Gordon Brown, there have been four ministerial resignations, and the party is fracturing as it hesitates on constitutional reform.

Steve Bell

It is expected that Labor will do badly in the county council elections and the European elections this week, which will further destabilise the Brown Government. A national election is due around June 2010. David Cameron and the Conservatives are looking pretty good compared to the wreckage that is Labour. Brown and Labor appear doomed, as there is nothing in the tank. Labor's implosion will make a Conservative landslide inevitable, possibly on the scale of the Conservative defeat of 1997. Labour's fate could be to become the third party.

The Guardian says that Gordon Brown must go:

The truth is that there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support. The public see it. His party sees it. The cabinet must see it too, although they are not yet bold enough to say so....Great causes win the day when people fight for them. A year of lingering emptiness beckons instead..The blunt reality is that, even if he set out a grand programme of reform now, his association with it would doom its prospects. Proportional representation would transform parliament, but if Mr Brown put a referendum on the ballot, it would be defeated because he backed it ....Labour has a year left before an election; its current leader would waste it. It is time to cut him loose.

Brown and co increasingly look like the living dead and faces the prospect of many years in the political wilderness.

Morten Moreland, The Times

At a deeper level there is a widespread sense that the machinery of representative democracy, legislature and the executive is dysfunctional and the conventions of Westminster politics bankrupted. There is a need for reform. Proposals include super select committees that would counterbalance the unchecked power of the executive and especially of the prime minister; a written constitution; limits on parliamentary sovereignty by electoral reform (proportional representation), devolving more power to more city mayors; greater use of citizen forums with real power to recommend changes direct to parliament. The call is for a citizenship democracy rather than a consumer democracy. Neil Lawson says:

First past the post (FPTP) is the electoral system of the bygone age of Fordism, the age of mass production, of two social classes and therefore just two old political parties. It is the bureaucratic and clunking system of two tribes that go to war; tribes that are controlled and ordered by the party machines. There is no public debate, we just take it or leave it. It is yah boo and adversarial. It feeds the tyranny of middle England whereby a handful of voters in a handful of seats determine every election outcome. It gives all power to the fickle and the people who lead them; Rupert Murdoch of the Sun and Paul Dacre of the Mail. In the process core supporters are taken for granted and ignored.

He says that without proportional representation other democratic reforms are just a technical fix. Will New Labour reform the political system as its last act?

It is unlikely. Though New Labour will have lasted 13 years they have precious little to show for it. Martin Jacques says

So what then of New Labour’s political legacy? From the outset, it was founded on a deep pessimism, the belief that there was no alternative other than to acquiesce in the Thatcherite settlement. The meaning of the “new” in New Labour was that Labour should abandon any claim to a distinctive project, and that at most it could only provide a variant of Thatcherism...Looking back at 1997, one is struck by the sheer failure of intellectual and political courage that informed New Labour. Of course, it was full of fine words – about its radicalism and its project – but these were no more than a smokescreen, designed to conceal the fact that, from the beginning, it did not actually have a project worth the name, and certainly no reforming ambition.

1997 represented a step back into history: a rejection of social democracy and the abandonment of a commitment to and belief in the idea that Labour could be distinctive and original, that its purpose was not simply to offer a variant of Conservatism.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:27 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

June 3, 2009

honour

This is doing the rounds today, raising chuckles as it goes.

THE editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, has won the JN Pierce Award for Media Excellence for leading the newspaper's coverage of climate change policy. The award is presented each year by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.

For the first time, the judging panel presented the award to an editor rather than a reporter or columnist. APPEA chief executive Belinda Robinson said that over the past 12 months The Australian's "in-depth coverage of a range of public policy issues affecting Australia's upstream oil and gas industry has been of a consistently high standard".

An honour richly deserved.

Posted by Lyn Calcutt at 12:46 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

the final showdown

In Australia and the US the final showdown over climate change has shifted to the policy area with the cap and trade legislation going through Parliament and Congress. Those deniers who see climate change as a relic from the past---- "Global warming: was it ever really a crisis? --have lost the battle. They are not sceptics, as they are more akin to "flat-earthers", since they have a fixed position, ignore evidence that does not fit their case and cherry-pick shreds of data that do appear to back them up.

Now the conflict is more naked and out in the open: the old energy companies just opposing reform defending their interests. They see in the economic recession new potential to re-open - and possibly win - the battle on global warming---its all about jobs jobs jobs jobs. The Liberal Party, those sturdy defenders of free market capitalism who distrust government interference, is speaking on their behalf. Many of them have a deep distrust of the key messengers on climate change: the liberal media, lefty politicians and green campaign groups. Their denial of climate change--and that of the libertarian right's various think tanks in the denialosphere-- has been deliberately constructed as a tactic of an business elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism.

In Australia the Rudd Government is just going through the motions of defending its legislation in the face of the entrenched opposition to the idea of reducing carbon emissions in the energy industry that sees the emissions trading scheme as effectively a tax on energy. They reject what they claim are knee-jerk government policies in response to activist campaigning that will have far-reaching economic implications while achieving no environmental benefit.

The best interpretation that can be given of the Rudd Government is that they want to get the cap andtrade scheme started and so shouldn't be too aggressive on the early targets and on the early timescales as that would draw considerable opposition and would delay the process for several years. So softly softly is the strategy adopted, even that means more money for the coal fired power stations that oppose any change, allowing state governments to build more coal-fired power stations and pushing solar power to one side because it is still far too expensive to compete with conventional power plants.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 2, 2009

riesling threat

Inside Story is looking to increase (free) subscriber numbers to its newsletter.

You can actually learn things from Inside Story essays. Like this one from Charles Gent, which I personally found quite alarming. More alarming than swine flu or terrorism or Steve Fielding.

Goyder's Line is something of a relic from South Australia's early surveys, drawing an 1865 line between arable and non-arable land bang on the edge of a precious vineyard collection. It's been moving south at an unfair pace and is threatening to take some of the best riesling country with it.

Maggie from The Cook and the Chef must be beside herself.

Posted by Lyn Calcutt at 5:39 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

comment on the punch

Verdicts on News Ltd's new adventure, The Punch, are rolling in. As could reasonably be expected, belonging to News Ltd is a problem straight off the bat.

Apparently it's supposed to be a showcase for journalism, but as Jason Whittaker points out, there's not a lot of journalism in it. Not of the news breaking, investigative, revered kind anyway.

The Pure Poison guys are stuck into it already, one go at Tory Maguire and one at Mike Rann.

Tim Burrowes thinks it will find an audience and notes the remarkable resemblance to the revamped Crikey site. Mark Bahnisch noticed the same thing, and also makes an On Line Opinion comparison. In that vein, consider also Unleashed and New Matilda. How much opinion can the Australian market accommodate?

I get what the design is trying to do, and like others, suspect that it's partly an attempt to take on Crikey more than

other similar sites, or blogs, but Crikey could well turn out to be the least of its problems.

Selected comments are published right there, on the front page. They're moderated, but as Bolt, Blair and Ackerman know well, there's moderation and there's moderation. Thinking you can establish a reputation on the basis of contribution quality alone (especially when you're not paying contributors) is misguided. The Punch's commenters will contribute at least half of what it turns out to be. So where will these commenters be coming from and what will they bring with them?

Some will probably migrate from similar sites and blogs, but the majority will most likely end up there via the News Ltd funnel. Instant problem. Eyeball grabbing screaming headlines plus the established News Ltd audience. Nothing new there.

The biggest comment draw so far is a story on the 'race row' over attacks on Indian students. Comments here. If it's considered analysis or top shelf informed debate you're after, you'll have to look elsewhere, but Bolt's crew either haven't arrived yet or are being moderated. Mostly.

It's too early yet to see where it's headed, but indications so far suggest that The Punch is already defined by its origins in Rupert News.

Posted by Lyn Calcutt at 3:54 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

digital town squares

The mainstream media in Australia are less known for their innovation and entrepreneurship and more for their dogged protection of the status quo. The quality of the content of the newspapers is declining, the free-to-air television stations are low on good content and they are only tentatively making the shift to digital television; digital radio is barely out of the blocks, whilst the regional press is about cost-cutting their existing businesses, putting profit before journalism and squeezing every cent they can from their markets.

The regional press is particularly bad. As Mark Day observes in The Australian the websites of the regional press (eg., APN News & Media and the Fairfax/Rural Press group) are:

weak extensions of their newspapers -- flimsy on news and largely devoid of any local inspiration that could be described as coming close to the ABC's video/citizen journalism plans. If the regional operators have run the numbers on what it would take to build viable and profitable sites in key regional markets, they've backed away from serious investment because they haven't been able to make a commercial case for it.

Given this unwillingness to develop a digital media presences the ABC's idea of town squares in regional areas is innovative and very attractive. The ABC plans to hire "specialist video content makers" in each of its local radio stations across 50 communities in Australia. ABC managing director Mark Scott fleshed out the idea of a web hub to a Senate's estimate committee by saying that local video content makers:

will be filming, editing and uploading original local content for that market, for that community, so content from that region and for that region will be distributed through our ABC local website.This allows the community to create its own content, to develop its own stories and to share those with the broader community. We will be establishing community websites and genre portals which allow Australians with common interests to talk with each other and to share experiences.This is the creation of a virtual town square, a place where Australians can come together to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to speak and to be heard.

The development of the hubs is made possible by the rollout of the proposed $43 billion high-speed National Broadband Network, as this means that people in regional areas would be able to access video.

Though it will take a while for a critical mass of video content makers or citizen journalists to emerge from the ABC's incubator, it does open up a platform for regional communities to explore issues such as the decline of the River Murray. In the Fleurieu Peninsula the issues associated with the River Murray--eg., proposals to address the drying out of the lower lakes, and the slow death of the Coorong--- have a limited media presence. The Victor Harbor Times has no opinion or commentary.

So the ABC's Townhall idea provides a digital platform for local content producers. We can develop our own stories about the issues that are important to us

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:16 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 1, 2009

GM, bankruptcy, renewal

General Motors is expected to declare itself bankrupt seeking legal protection from its creditors after running up losses of $81bn (£50bn) over four years.This will result in job losses and closed factories, with health care plans and retirement savings at risk for thousands of workers and their families.

The hope is that Chapter 11 bankruptcy will provide the means for a swift reorganisation of the company that would allow a slimmed-down version of the Detroit manufacturer to emerge from bankruptcy within 60 to 90 days.Under a proposed carve-up to be put before a bankruptcy judge, the US government is likely to get a stake of 70% in the company in return for further state aid of up to $30bn. The United Auto Workers union will initially get 17.5%, accepting shares in lieu of cash owed by GM to fund retired employees' healthcare cover. A majority of GM's bondholders have accepted an offer to swap their $27bn in debt for an initial stake of 10%, plus warrants allowing them to increase their ownership of the company to 25%.

Mike Thompson

Industry-wide vehicle sales in the US have fallen from 16m annually to fewer than 10m, the worst slump since the second world war. In the first quarter of the year, GM's revenue dropped catastrophically from $42.4bn to $22.4bn. The company's US market share, which reached 51% in 1962, has dwindled to 17.9% as nimble Asian rivals chipped away at Detroit's market dominance.

It was only last week the auto industry bowed to the inevitable, accepted new higher fuel economy standards, the political realities of climate change, expensive petrol and the technological reality that the internal combustion engine is giving way to another technology (electric motors or other alternatives). Prior to that, GM's standard response to falling sales and profitability had been deep cost-cutting fighting congressional efforts to boost fuel economy not innovative new product. GM's history is one of building their large gas guzzling SUV's, and, from the 1970s onwards, it ceded the small vehicles market segment ceded to German and Japanese automakers years ago. The US auto executives treated small, efficient cars as a low-margin afterthought.

Higher fuel economy standards is a step in the right direction, but it represents only a fraction of what the auto industry could do to build a greener car, which is what they have resisted for a couple of decades. GM has a history of scoffing at more energy efficient and environmentally responsible cars It was only four years ago that GM nixed the idea of building an electric car. For decades the US auto companies never moved new technologies past the concept stage, even though GM and General Motors cars were seen as dated and inferior.

Unless sales pick up, it will be hard for GM and Chrysler to make it, even with billions in bail-outs, in an overcrowded industry with a crumbling economy. To avoid the scenario of weakened companies dying or getting gobbled up by stronger competitors, they will have to deliver new product. Will they be able to sell enough cars to both pay down debt, which could still be $10 billion to $20 billion, and fund new vehicle development, in time?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:06 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack