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January 31, 2010
Tony Blair performs Blair at Chilcot
British political news has been caught up for the last several weeks by a formal inquiry into the illegality and deceptions behind Tony Blair's decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not possess. Blair as war leader used secrecy and slick subterfuge to attain his ends. That war is the defining choice of Blair's premiership.
Martin Rowson
The Dutch have found that that the war, which was supported by the Dutch government following intelligence from Britain and the US, had not been justified in law. Blair regrets nothing and his performance exhibited his question-dodging skill.
As mentioned in an earlier post this stands in stark to Australia, which pointedly refuses to "look back" or concern itself with whether it waged an illegal (and horribly destructive) war. It is not even possible to imagine John Howard and Alexander Downer being bought before an investigative body and forced, under oath, to testify publicly about what they did as a means of determining the legality or illegality of that war; their knowledge of Fallujah massacres,or their complicity in Abu Ghraib and the CIA renditions.
We know that the invasion was launched on a misleading prospectus constructed from intelligence which was flaky when it was not simply fake. Yet we refuse to come to terms with the true scope of our wrongdoing when it comes to the aggressive war in Iraq. One begins to think that our politicians have ashtray hearts.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 30, 2010
the population debate
The 7.30 Report on the ABC has been running a series on the population population debate last week. This series steps beyond the political rhetoric of a greater Australia to:
take a look at how an increased population is likely to reshape Australia, where it will be accommodated, how government will cope with the pressures on all those fundamentals like jobs, transport, housing, food, energy and water, health and education, and how we're going to maintain social cohesion through the next wave of immigration.
Living in Adelaide, which is slowly becoming hotter and drier, makes me very aware that water is a key issue. Water isn't getting any more plentiful. It's not just our lakes, rivers and wetlands that will be effected. Australia's cheap coal-fired power generators, for instance, will be hard-hit by water shortages as they driven by steam and cooled by water. 20 per cent of our water supply goes to cool coal-fired power plants to produce electricity. So if you want to save water, make the shift to renewable energy.
Secondly, a region's population and economic growth is limited by water-- a strong possibility for the south-east corner of Queensland and Canberra. So how do you ensure our cities are running sustainably? Water recycling from the shower, the bath and the laundry for households; storm water retention and recycling for cities; recycling treated sewerage for businesses and landscapes.
Water is a symptom of the sustainability issue. Sustainability means sustainable cities since, as Brendan Gleeson pointed out, Australia is a nation of cities and suburbs. Tim Flannery, in the same forum, observes:
Every time I fly into Melbourne, I see those suburbs just expanding out into the countryside. And they've all got lovely green lawns, those houses, all of their swimming pools are full. You look over the other side to the farmland, the grass is dead, the farm damns are empty and you can see what's happening, that this unsustainable model is just growing and growing and growing in the cities and we're not doing the job that we need to do in terms of constraining it.
Gleeson says that we haven't been very good at recognising that our cities are a central feature of our national life.
But I think it's important that we put cities and their health or otherwise at the centre of this discussion, because the large majority of the population growth is gonna occur in our cities, so how well are they faring? How well are they suited to providing the base for another surge in population growth?
His answer is that if you look at our cities in terms of water, energy, transport, we've reached some really critical thresholds in our cities where we've got some serious dysfunction. He adds:
I think the biggest problem that we have is a governance deficit for cities. .... And for a variety of reasons, the state governments have not proved to be adept managers of our metropolitan areas. And we can go into a whole lot of incidences where they have mismanaged, in my view, our cities. The record of that management of the cities has been a very episodic and in many ways amateurish one.
Bernard Salt points out that our cities work at the moment where you can commute from the city edge to the city centre, where petrol is $1.25 a litre. At some point over the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years that might be $5 a litre and the entire CBD-suburban industrial model breaks down.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:19 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
January 29, 2010
Obama's 2010 State of Union speech
If Obama gives good speeches then it is the follow-through that is generally problematic. In his 2010 State of Union speech he said that everything begins with the economy and then said that the most urgent task was to shore up the same insolvent banks that helped cause this crisis. So it is Wall Street not employment on Main Street that needs shoring up, even if the US is a consumer-based economy.
How then does Obama jump start the engine of job creation, given an unsound financial system calling the shots, a 10 percent unemployment rate and little sign of a vigorous economic recovery?
Steve Bell
Obama's 'jobs and economy' section of the speech acknowledges that the aftermath of a severe financial crisis has led to mass job destruction and that the only thing that’s keeping things from getting worse is deficit spending.
Obama says that:
...the devastation remains. One in ten Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined. Small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard. For those who had already known poverty, life has become that much harder. This recession has also compounded the burdens that America’s families have been dealing with for decades – the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college.
Obama plans to jump-start job creation through tax cuts for businesses and to provide needed relief for families through tax cuts for middle-class households. The strategy is one of growing the economy in order to reduce the budget deficit over the long term. This is then tied to American innovation and investments in clean energy and education.
What if the current recession has has more to do with problems deep in the structure of the American economy than with the ups and downs of the business cycle? What if America's unemployment tends to be structural rather than cyclical in the sense that that the job and industry just go? Doesn't that mean searching harder to find a job that meets a current skill set, or the need to get new skills for new industries?
There was an appeal to export-led growth creating jobs but the U.S. manufacturing sector is on the skids. If (net) exports don't lead the way, then consumption or investment must fill the void. If the private sector fails to act then that means that the government either hires people and puts them to work or induces businesses to hire more people. Congress is not keen on any major new job-creation efforts.
So how does Obama plan to achieve export-led growth?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 28, 2010
the internet's technological shift
Nicholas Carr, the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, argues that we're in the midst of a transition in computing, moving from our own private hard drives to the computer as access portal to programming to data storage run by companies with big hard drives in out-of-the-way places.
The implications of this technological shift from an older client-server model to a web-based or utility based model is explored on his Rough Type blog. In this post on Google he says:
Google's overriding business goal is to encourage us to devote more of our time and entrust more of our personal information to the Internet, particularly to the online computing cloud that is displacing the PC hard drive as the center of personal computing. The more that we use the Net, the more Google learns about us, the more frequently it shows us its ads, and the more money it makes. In order to continue to expand the time people spend online, Google and other Internet companies have to make the Net feel like a safe, well-protected space.
So Google has to convince the public that the Net is safe if we are in the process of shifting from mainly used our computers to run software programs installed on our hard drives to using them mainly to connect to the vast databases of the Internet.
In this post on Apple's newly released iPad he argues that the iPad is the clearest indication that we’ve entered a new era of computing, in which media and software have merged in the Internet cloud.
... as the Internet has absorbed the traditional products of media - songs, TV shows, movies, games, the printed word - we’ve begun to look to our computers to act as multifunctional media players. They have to do all the work that was once done by specialized technologies - TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, books - as well as run a myriad of software apps. The computer business and the media business are now the same business. The transformation in the nature of computing has turned the old-style PC into a dinosaur. A bulky screen attached to a bulky keyboard no longer fits with the kinds of things we want to do with our computers. The obsolescence of the PC has spurred demand for a new kind of device - portable, flexible, always connected - that takes computing into the cloud era.
With the iPad, Apple is hoping to deliver the key device for the cloud era, a machine that will define computing’s new age in the way that the Windows PC defined the old age. The computing in the web based model is all about the programming - the words and sounds and pictures and conversations that pour out of the Internet’s cloud and onto our screens.
I agree with Carr's argument that the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. Moreover, it not only supplies the stuff of thought, but also shapes the process of thought as I quickly scan short passages of text from many sources online. This is different kind of reading to the deep linear style reading of books and behind it lies a different kind of thinking --a nonlinear network thinking?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:49 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
January 27, 2010
going to the gym
There hasn't been much commentary about Rudd's series of recent speeches about Treasury's forthcoming Intergenerational Report entitled Australia to 2050: Future Challenges. Is it just the holiday season, or another sign of the decllne of the mainstream press?
Ross Gittins is an exception. He critically tackles Rudd's rhetoric. Gittins says that one of the effects of ageing is slower growth in our material standard of living due to to slower growth in the size of the workforce:
But, by my calculation... rather than rising by about 110 per cent over the next 40 years, our real incomes are projected to grow by a paltry 80 per cent..Rudd apparently views this gap with great concern and automatically assumes all of us do, too. He vows to take the steps necessary to prevent this slowdown in the rate of growth in the economy's production of goods and services..How? Mainly by increasing the rate of improvement in the productivity of our labour - the average amount of goods and services produced by an hour of work...If we could increase this rate of improvement to average 2 per cent a year, Rudd tells us, we wouldn't miss out on each being that last $16,000 a year better off by 2050.
Gittins comment is just think of all the extra stuff you could buy with an extra $16,000 per family member. It's hardly worth the effort. My response is how about extra free time from work? That is my choice--to forgo the $16,000 and give more time and energy to my photography.
Gittn's says that Rudd's second point is that the ageing of the population threatens the sustainability of government budgets, as it will result in higher costs for health, aged care and the age pension, with the key spending pressure being healthcare.
Rudd says the looming pressure on government budgets leaves us with three options: first, ''cut health spending, reduce aged care and reduce payments for people entering retirement''. No dice. Second, permit ''long-term unsustainable budget deficits''. No dice.But third: boost government tax revenue by increasing participation in the workforce and ''most critically, by boosting the productivity of the workforce''.
Gittins comment is that he is not buying this analysis. There is the fourth option for covering the expected higher spending on healthcare is higher taxation, only Rudd doesn't have the courage to mention it.
Rudd, as Peter Costello did, is trying to ''pathologise'' the expected growth in health spending: make something good (our greater ability to prolong our lives and make them healthier) sound like it's bad (the elderly will be putting an intolerable burden on taxpayers).According to the Government's projections, our real incomes are likely to grow about 80 per cent over the period. There's no good reason we shouldn't choose - as we assuredly will - to spend a higher proportion of that on improving our health and longevity.
That increased spending is not just higher taxation for hospital care by the welfare state that libertarians call the nanny state.
What Gittins misses is that we are devoting a greater proportion of our income on preventative healthcare so that we don't end up obese or in hospital after a heart attack. We also eat better (clean and fresh food) and we exercise more to get fit. We go to the gym --ride our bikes-- so that we are able to live longer, healthier lives.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:54 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
January 26, 2010
the idea of a mutualised news organisation
In his 2010 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief, makes some points about paywalls and the new digital journalism that make a lot of sense. You don't hear these kind of media insights and arguments from the Australian media --Fairfax or News Ltd.
He begins by looking at one business model of journalism --the one that says we must charge for all content online. It's the argument that says the age of free is over: we must now extract direct monetary return from the content we create in all digital forms. He says that this this leads onto two further questions.
The first is about 'open versus closed'. This is partly, but only partly, the same issue. If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost. That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms. It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.
The second issue the business model raises is the one of 'authority' versus 'involvement'. Or, more crudely, 'Us versus Them':
Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn't. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority.
He adds that last year the Guardian earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business. However, his commercial colleagues believe they would earn a fraction of that from any known pay wall model. The amounts earned don't justify choking off the growth in audience numbers through a walled garden.
The Guardian's growth strategy is to embrace digital, reinvent journalism, grow the digital audience and increase digital advertising. Rusbridger's take on this is about reinventing journalism in a digital world with its computer and phone screens that the digital revolution has bought into being. He accepts the argument that digital technology has helped to:
develop a generation of fierce independence; of emotional and intellectual openness; of inclusion; biased towards free expression and strong views; interested in innovation, used to immediacy; sensitive to/ suspicious of corporate interest; preoccupied with issues of authentication and trust – which includes having access to sources; interested in personalisation or customisation rather than one-size fits all; not dazzled by technology, but more concerned with functionality.
Rusbridger says that the Guardian is edging towards a model in which a mainstream news organisation can harness something of the web's power. It is not about replacing the skills and knowledge of journalists with user generated content. It is about experimenting with the balance of what we know, what we can do, with what they know, what they can do.
We are edging away from the binary sterility of the debate between mainstream media and new forms which were supposed to replace us. We feel as if we are edging towards a new world in which we bring important things to the table – editing; reporting; areas of expertise; access; a title, or brand, that people trust; ethical professional standards and an extremely large community of readers.
They are reaching towards the idea of a mutualised news organisation.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:30 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 25, 2010
taking on financial capital
After the global financial crisis there’s every incentive for the big bankers on Wall Street to engage in a repeat performance. Since they were bailed out by the state with few strings attached it’s now clear to them that they’re living in a heads-they-win, tails-taxpayers-lose world. After the global financial crisis, global financial capital hates any reform that restricts its casino like activities, which they equate with doing God's work.
There is an emerging conflict between the state and financial capital in the US. after Obama's stated intent to take on Wall Street by announcing plans for stringent rules on the banking sector to prevent commercial banks from making risky trades ups the stakes.This is not before time.
Obama is giving his support to two measures to make sure that Wall Street doesn’t crash into another financial crisis: (1) separating the functions of investment banking from commercial banking (basically, resurrecting the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act) so investment banks can’t gamble with insured commerial deposits, and (2) giving regulatory authorities power to limit the size of big banks so they don’t become “too big to fail,” as antitrust laws do with every other capitalist entity.
However, Congress is not really that interested in the state-based approach to limiting the size and risk of big banks, given that the major source of campaign funding is finance capital. On the other hand, the deep and continuing economic stresses in the US means that voters are petrified of losing their jobs, their homes, and what’s left of their savings and don't have much time for the excess of the big banks--bank profits are up and bonuses as generous as at the height of the boom.
There is a populist backlash building in the US against Wall Street and a bad economy, and President Obama’s kid-gloves treatment of the bankers has put Democrats on the wrong side of this rage.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:04 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
January 24, 2010
Chinese stories
We don't really know much about China if we read the mainstream press in Australia. Their discourse is usually one of China's rapid rise to economic supremacy and aren't we oh so lucky that the Chinese need our minerals for their superfast economic growth. Shanghai is the showcase of Chinese ‘hyper-modernity’. If in the 19th century, Australia, like Europe, looked to America as the future, then In the 21st century, the West looks towards China in something of the same way.
Buried within this celebratory discourse, which is spun by the mining companies and the Australian state, is a subcurrent of fear that a distinctively Chinese modernity, rooted in the Confucian values of devotion to the family and respect for the state, will end the dominance of the West.This usually surfaces when state owned Chinese companies what to buy into the mining companies.
We don't get much of an account of the models of developed that have enable this economic growth. What strategies have been employed by the Chinese state to ensure this economic development and high-speed growth? It cannot just be the dynamism of capitalism since free markets in China remain half-strangled and deformed by a corrupt and self-aggrandising state, which denies its people liberty to manage their own economic affairs.
This book review by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books helps to fill in some of the gaps. It reminds us that the great state-owned enterprises of the north-east were scrapped or sold off, leaving their workers jobless and often near-penniless while officials and profiteers lined their pockets. So we have the rustbelt of Manchuria. It also highlights that the state in the 1990s poured loan capital into large, rebuilt state-owned enterprises and urban infrastructures and granting massive advantages to foreign capital drawn to the big cities.
Anderson says that the sunbelt of Guangdong:
has seen the emergence of a new working class of young migrant labourers from the countryside, about half of them women, without collective identity or political memory, in the coastal export zones of the south-east. They have low-wage jobs, but no security, toiling up to 70 or 80 hours a week in often atrocious working conditions, with widespread exposure to abuse and injury. Dereliction in the rustbelt, super-exploitation in the sunbelt: the treatment of labour is pitiless in either zone.
The social consequences of this change has been massive inequality between and city-dwellers within the urban population itself.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 23, 2010
funny that
Funny how Australia has gone very quiet on the Iraq war whilst the British are conducting an inquiry into it. The Chilcot inquiry embraces the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and the aftermath and is providing further evidence that Tony Blair misled the British public in the run up to the war in Iraq in 2003.
Steve Bell
Narry a word in Australia. The curtain has been pulled down. The silence is deafening.
Nothing is being said even though the Howard Government simply followed Washington and London on the need for regime change, on being committed from an early stage to a military invasion, and in deceiving the Australian public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There was no threat to Australia from Iraq even ttough and Howard, like Blair, had claimed that intelligence had "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had WMD.
The Chilcot Inquiry shows that claim is unsustainable on the basis of intelligence assessments.The lack of evidence when inspectors went in did not change the policy of military intervention because people in government were convinced that there were weapons.
Isn't it the role of the media to ask journalism is about asking awkward questions? So where are the questions? It seems as if everyone in the Australian polity wants to forget the skeletons from the shameful past.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 22, 2010
America in decline?
If Barack Obama was elected to regenerate America --a politics of rebirth that has a strong Protestant salvation theme in it---then does the Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts signify the end of that attempt to arrest the decline of the US amongst Americans? If the United States is still a superpower, then it is a superpower that faces tough competition from outside and difficulties within.
Is the U.S. an empire in decline? There is a pervasive sense of decline in the US. The case for America's decline is put by the economists J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen, both of Berkeley, write in their book, The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money.
They argue that:
After almost a century, the United States no longer has the money. It is gone, and it is not likely to return in the foreseeable future … The American standard of living will decline relative to the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world … The United States will lose power and influence.
America is now massively in debt to foreigners and will be more in debt with each passing year as far into the future, whilst the modern or contemporary is no longer American.
DeLong and Stephen Cohen add that:
When you have the money--and "you" are a big, economically and culturally vital nation--you get more than just a higher standard of living for your citizens. You get power and influence, and a much-enhanced ability to act out. When the money drains out, you can maintain the edge in living standards of your citizens for a considerable time (as long as others are willing to hold your growing debts and pile interest payments on top). But you lose power, especially the power to ignore others, quite quickly--though, hopefully, in quiet, nonconfrontational ways. And you lose influence--the ability to have your wishes, ideas, and folkways willingly accepted, eagerly copied, and absorbed into daily life by others.
The end is inevitable: the US must recognize that it has become like a normal country. For America, this will be a shock: American has not been a normal country for a long, long time.
The opposite case is put by James Fallows in How America Can Rise Again in The Atlantic. The argument is that:
What I’ve seen as I’ve looked at the rest of the world has generally made me more confident of America’s future, rather than the reverse. What is obvious from outside the country is how exceptional it is in its powers of renewal: America is always in decline, and is always about to bounce back.
The United States says Fallows, has the power to correct its problems with respect to jobs, deficits, military strength and independence. America still has the means to address nearly any of its structural weaknesses.
According to Fallows, America's governing/political system is not is equal to the tasks. It's caught up in paralysis. Its government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. So America the society is in fine shape whilst America the polity most certainly is not.
Now there is a great deal of truth in that. However, it does not deal with the decline of the US as a superpower and the emergence of a multipolar world of nation; a similar decline to that of the British empire. As a center of power, the US is still more powerful than others, but for some years now that energy has been flowing in the opposite direction.The world's greatest exporter became its greatest importer whilst the most important creditor has became the most important debtor.
Every important national economy in the world now exports products to the United States without purchasing an equivalent amount of US goods in return. The US trade deficit with China was about $200 billion dollars in 2005; it was a solid $80 billion with Japan; and more than $120 billion with Europe. The United States can't even achieve a surplus in its trade with less developed national economies like those of Ukraine and Russia. Everyday, container-laden ships arrive in the United States – and after they unload their wares at American ports, many return home empty.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 21, 2010
community cabinet in Adelaide: water
Federal Cabinet was in Adelaide last night at the Norwood Morialta High School in the marginal, Liberal-held seat of Sturt. This is the third community cabinet held in South Australia. The local Labor marginals, Kingston to the south and Wakefield in the north, have already hosted community cabinets of their own.
This is a rustbelt state facing a crisis in manufacturing as the local car industry winds back production and exports due to GM crash into bankruptcy last year. As Hendrik Gout points out at Crikey, the Holden Commodore is no longer exported to the US, and production at Holden's Elizabeth plant is now well under capacity with shifts shortened or cancelled.
Exports were seen to be a key part of Holden's strategy to continue building large cars in South Australia in response to Australian sales of large sedans having dropped for the past 15 years. The outlook here is grim. is SA moving from the Rust Belt to the Green Belt.Is it a technology state focused on the future of green manufacturing?
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Milang, Lake Alexandrina, 2008
As would be expected, the main issue to surface at the Sturt community cabinet was the lack of water flowing into the Lower Lakes of the Murray-Darling Basin, despite the recent deal that had been reached between NSW and SA that guarantees 148 gigalitres of floodwaters from NSW will flow into the Lower Lakes region, with a Federal Government injection of 20 gigalitres on top of that.
The unexpected environmental flows may buy a year or two for the lower lakes and Corrong. The concern expressed at the community cabinet was about the decline of the local communities, due to the lack of water in the lower lakes. This kind of protest will happen more and more across the Murray-Darling Basin due to the effects of climate change. Victoria's solution, to impose a cap on water trading and so retain the water for itself, is an example of the dysfunctional governance.
My position is that, given the incapacity of CoAG to deal with the water crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin, the only long term and sustainable solution to the problems of the Lower Lakes and Coorong is to return the Lower Lakes to a saline estuary. This can be accomplished by the following:
• Allow seawater to flush out damaging acidity and prevent further deterioration.
• Modify the barrage gates to be operated remotely and quickly to take advantage of tidal cycles and wind induced heads of water.
• Remove accumulated sediments inside the Murray Mouth.
• Build a weir or lock between the Lakes and the River.
This would create a biologically diverse Ramsar wetland rather than wind swept dusty paddocks of acid sulphate soils. Of course, that still leaves other regional communities along the river facing their decline.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:38 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
January 20, 2010
is the old political order in decay?
The Piping Shriek argues in The Failure Of Factionalism at New Matilda that the old political order in Australia is in decay. He offers two examples to make his case: the decay of the NSW Right and its business/union partnership model that defined Modern Labor Mark I into bankruptcy and Tony Abbott's ascension, which exposed the bankruptcy represented by the old guard of the federal Liberals.
He says that in late 2009 both dumped a leader that they called “experiments”, but were actually products of their respective loss of control. But in doing so, the dumped leaders blew the gaffe on their parties that signalled that while status quo may look as though it has been restored, to all intents and purposes, the game was up and that the last vestiges of the 20th century political order were coming to an end.
His argument is that given the decline of the old political factional in the ALP order and the rise of climate change politics at a global level it is a bad strategy to try to maintain its old ways. Consequently, the Rudd Government needs:
to replace an exhausted domestic program with an international agenda. We saw in 2009 that a central problem for the Government, the uncertainty and lack of direction in the international order, became more apparent. It was not just in the inconclusive results of international summits like Copenhagen, or the earlier economic one in London. On the regional stage, incidents like China's arrest of Stern Hu, Indonesia's wrangling over the Oceanic Viking, or the Indian Government's escalation of the stabbing of an Indian student in Melbourne, only served to highlight that Australia has become an increasingly soft target as the authority of the old political order declines.
Climate change remains the defining factor that is re-shaping the political landscape because ultimately it impacts directly on the main question facing both sides of the political class – legitimacy.The Liberal old guard has tried to make a stand around climate change their contortions on the issue are all too apparent.
I accept this 'decay of the old political order' argument. I would reinforce it by saying that the old political order represents the defence of the fossil fuel industries on the grounds that Australia is among the most dependent on fossil fuels for its wealth creation and urges a wait-and-see policy to climate change. That defence includes large chunks of the Labor Party as well as the conservative dominated Liberal Party.
Update
So where to now for those in the political class who are determined to move way from the old political order? Is there a new political order in formation? If one is emerging, then what does it look like? Is it the presidential-style of government?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 19, 2010
Intergenerational Report: Australia to 2050: Future Challenges
So there is to be a third Intergenerational Report, entitled Australia to 2050: Future Challenges, which analyses the key long-term challenges facing Australia for the first half of this new century. This is to be released in the next few weeks, but we have heard this account before from Peter Costello, when he was Treasurer in the Howard Government. Kevin Rudd adds little that is new. More problematically he says nothing about addressing the effects of climate change on the economy.
According to Rudd's Australia Day speech the ageing of our population is the key challenge. Rudd says that to understand its implications, we need to ask three basic questions:
First, how much are we ageing by?
Second, how will this impact on family living standards and the economy?
Third, what can we do about it?
No mention of ageing and wellness at all. For Rudd its all about the negative impact of ageing economic growth and prosperity. Rudd says that:
On the first question, the Intergenerational Report projects that our population will grow from 22 million today to 36 million by 2050... On the second question public finances will be burdened with the increased costs of looking after the needs of older Australians - in health, aged care and age pensions - but with a smaller proportion of Australians in the workforce, tax revenues won't keep pace with those rising costs.
Consequently, we will either generate large, unsustainable budget deficits into the second quarter of the century, or else we'll need to reduce government services - including health services - as the needs of an ageing population become greater. This is the same message as Costello. For the old political order an ageing population is not an active population.
The third question is what can be done to strengthen economic growth in the face of the fundamental challenge from the ageing of the population.Rudd says:
In the long-term, there are three sources of economic growth - the three Ps of population, workforce participation and productivity growth.With lower fertility rates and stable migration ratios, population policy will on current trends at best make a marginal contribution to the challenge of an ageing population.The truth is that the strong policy levers lie with policy measures to lift participation and productivity growth...the most important of the three Ps [is] productivity growth. It is productivity growth that must play the central role in building Australia's future economic growth.
Again this is same message as Costello. It's Treasury's message. Rudd's twist is that productivity growth had fallen under the Howard Government:
During the 1990s, productivity growth hit the two per cent mark following the reforms of the Hawke-Keating Governments, but it fell to just 1.4 per cent in the first decade of this century. If we let this trend of lower productivity growth continue, Australia will struggle to meet the major challenges facing our economy in the decades ahead....The Australia to 2050 report shows that without a concerted effort to increase productivity, average annual productivity growth will be just 1.6 per cent over the next 40 years, leading to average annual economic growth rate falling to 2.7 per cent, compared to the historical average of 3.3 per cent over the last 40 years.
And Labor's plans to grow Australia's productive capacity over the long-term? Well, there is nothing new there either.
It is increased investment in long-term nation-building economic infrastructure including in roads, rail and ports; an education revolution, in the form of doubling the investment in Australian schools over the next five years; helping businesses use technology to work smarter and faster through the high-speed National Broadband Network, and implementing microeconomic reforms to cut red tape for business and build a seamless national economy.
Nothing about greening Australia to make it more sustainable or making the shift to a low carbon economy. Not a mention, even though this is actually a key long-term challenge for Australia.The inference is that Rudd Labor is not serious about making the shift to a low carbon economy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:41 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
January 18, 2010
media conventions
I read somewhere that the ABC is planning to run a 24 hours news channel, bringing it into competition with Sky News. Fair enough, as it is where things are going, as the newsstand model of newspapers no longer meets consumers’ needs. But this is more the flow of ordinary news to the public than watchdog journalism.
Radio Nationals' Breakfast needs to do more than just accept that the broadsheet newspapers set the stories for the day, and then just follow their interpretation with little critical comment of its own. This is a convention of “good” journalism done on autopilot that wears the heroic mantle of truth-telling:
What is needed is not only a redefinition of journalism, but also of what it means to be a journalist in the world of Web 2.0, a fragmenting public, audience loyalty to news sites is minimal, many viewers have abandoned the news for entertainment, and the diminished public for journalism is becoming more partisan.
Most of the orthodox newspaper reporting by the Canberra Press Gallery is recycling the media releases by politicians and publicity/media companies. What is different from this journalism in the commercial media is the shift to partisan commentary---eg. the Murdoch Press--- and this is likely to shift further in that direction.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:22 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 17, 2010
a study in contrasts
There is a clash of ideas between an angry public on Main Street angry over the fallout from the global financial crisis and the unrepentant bankers on Wall Street who have returned to business-as-usual with their runaway profits and bonuses that the bankers are achieving thanks to the support of a debt-laden taxpayer.
The contrasts deepen when the disaster and suffering in Haiti is bought into the picture:
Martin Rowson
But hey, this is capitalism and financial capital is very powerful. Stuff happens, according to the bankers. Capitalism has its booms and busts every six to seven years.The destruction is a way to clean out the weak. Its a way that the world works. The global financial crisis was like a hurricane that nobody could have predicted.
So there is no need for greater regulation of financial capital because the global financial crisis in order to prevent the pileup of up ever more debt, both by pushing loans on the public and by taking on ever-higher leverage within the financial industry.
As Paul Krugman says in The Guardian we need to remind ourselves what has happened so far:
the US economy is still grappling with the consequences of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; trillions of dollars of potential income have been lost; the lives of millions have been damaged, in some cases irreparably, by mass unemployment; millions more have seen their savings wiped out; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, will lose essential healthcare because of the combination of job losses and draconian cutbacks by cash-strapped state governments....And this disaster was entirely self-inflicted...This time we're in trouble entirely thanks to the dysfunctional nature of our own financial system. Everyone understands this; everyone, it seems, except the financiers themselves.
That is an effective refutation of finance capital's understanding of how the global financial system works.
Do the top executives actually believe their rhetoric about a global financial crisis being akin to a hurricane? Or are they just trying it on in front of Congress?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:52 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 16, 2010
going postmodern?
John Kerin in the Weekend Financial Review outlines 6 policy issues that the Rudd Government fix. These are asylum seekers, the budget deficit, health, ETS, tax and water. No mention is made of urban expansion in the capital cities even though Rudd is a big population man.
John Spooner, 2050
Of course, we could interpret Spooner's cartoon as a dig on iconic tourism in a global economy. What is offered in Melbourne's Docklands is a replica of Uluru in the Kata Tjuta National Park, without indigenous ownership. This has been built to attract tourists and people to this urban wasteland, given that Melbourne cannot attract the name global architects to build iconic or self-aggrandising buildings.
Seriously though, cities represent a challenge and an opportunity for climate change policy. As the hubs of economic activity, cities generate the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions and are thus important to mitigation strategies. We do need to think in terms of sustainable cities given our problems with water .
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 15, 2010
university futures
A possible future neo-liberal scenario for universities in Australia as a result of needing to reduce government debt. That means deep cuts somewhere. Why not higher education? It is not protected by the ballot box in the same way that health is.
A possible future is one of increases in university tuition fees, reduced government funding, most universities delivering cut-price vocational training to all but those students at elite universities who overwhelmingly come from the most privileged social backgrounds; concentrating all research funding in a handful of elite institutions; denying academics at other institutions the opportunity to engage in direct research; research funding across all disciplines will in future be tied to measurable economic ‘impact’.
Realistic? It would have been under the Howard Government.This part of the political class did not want to have well-educated, independently-minded generations of young people asking awkward questions.
Their education policy meant the transformation of large numbers of ‘students’ into a ready source of casual labour; the attempted transformation of higher education into uncritical training for employment, and the explicit orientation of research towards the demands of business. This policy was symptomatic of a situation in which ‘business interests’, narrowly conceived, were allowed to organise the shape and direction of our educational culture.
And under Rudd? We will have to wait and see. The current university expansion agenda appears to mean that what is under the guise of ‘university education’ is a new form of tertiary vocational training for the service, retail and media industries. The market talk enframes us as competitive consumers, as opposed to the old (1970s) social democratic ideal of equality of access to an excellent university education.
For all its talk of the knowledge economy Rudd Labor operates with the social democratic shell and the neo-liberal content favoured by the business lobby; one in which graduates are to be educated to take up junior management and marketing positions and any other form of education (eg., in the humanities) involving autonomy in thinking, researching and writing is deemed to be a dangerous diversion.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 14, 2010
Google and China
As we know Google had allowed Chinese censorship on its search engine in order to gain access to the world's largest market. Google’s systems had succumbed to direct attack by China’s cyberwarriors that exposed the two different types of data which had led both to the theft of some of the company’s own intellectual property as well as details of two Gmail accounts.
The key paragraph in Google's statement about China's state sanctioned hacking is this:
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
So it is negotiations and compromise. What will that compromise be given Google's threat to pull out of China? The Chinese government would be likely to block Google.com at least partially in retaliation. Will Google then develop ways to circumvent government filtering?
Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information--often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion--that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. The current repressive regime in Iran is an example. In How China polices the internet Kathrin Hille spells out China's approach to Internet censorship and surveillance:
Ever since China linked up to the web in 1994, its rulers have sought to know, control and limit what their citizens read and write online. In the early years, the censorship system they built became known as the “Great Firewall of China”, because it focused on using router technology to block unwanted information from outside at the point where it might enter.But as internet use has grown... so too has the number of censors. And as China’s presence on the web has developed, with a greater focus on user-generated content, so have the censors’ strategies evolved.
China's current internet surveillance system to deal with Web 2.O is modelled on the lines of a “panopticon”. This refers to the 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who thought up a prison design which would allow monitoring of all prisoners at all times without allowing the prisoners to know whether they were being watched or not. The Chinese version is a participatory panopticon as internet users are involved in anonymously watching each other.
There will be fallout from the Chinese hack of Google's security because Google is the advocate of the view that we have definitively moved into the era where the network – not the PC – is the computer. The idea is that most people can now get all the computing services they need – web browsing, email, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheets, blogging, telephony, etc – via the net, so they no longer need to have a machine capable of running a bloated, clunky operating system. All we need now is an internet-ready device that can get its operating system from the network "cloud" and then get on with the real work of the day.
This is a world in which people's access to the internet is via tethered devices controlled by a powerful companies that makes money from surveillance. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” contradict the idea of the free or open generative internet --the idea of the Internet as a forum of free expression and access to information that supports an open public domain of knowledge.
A lockdown on PCs and a corresponding rise of tethered appliances suggests that what today we take for granted--- a world where mainstream technology can be influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field---will become marginalized. The other side of the open internet is the shadowy ‘‘uncivil’’ dark net of armed social movements, transnational criminal networks, and the multitude of private social networks that exist among migrant and diaspora communities.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:15 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 13, 2010
Liberal circles
In politics the end is political power, to get it and keep it. For the Liberal Party, it is the religious and corporate constituency who are the people who help them do that, that is their base. A lot of money is raised from industry and a lot of votes come from the religious conservatives. So in that sense the modern conservative movement has a lot of electoral and political tendencies that put it at odds with science.
One of the disturbing aspects of the Liberal Party is the way that it has imported many of the policy stances and strategies of the US Republican Party. Disturbing because this intellectual dependency has involved the unquestioning acceptance of the war on science that was such a characteristic of the Bush Administration in the US. It's a strategy to give the conservative base what it wants.
True, unlike the US Republicans, the Liberal Party has not come out against evolution and embraced creationism, despite its ever growing embrace of the conservatism of Christian fundamentalism. Nope, the Liberal Party's war on science surfaces, and finds its expression within, its scepticism about climate change, even though its antagonism to climate change is also based on right-wing populists associate of climate change with the Left: --with socialism, communism, state planning and anti-individualism.
This kind of political opposition to government policies from Big business and religious fundamentalism around an emissions trading scheme, abortion, stem cell research suggests that the scientific consensus threaten their religious beliefs, their economic power or their social influence.
Though this makes climate change a political, not a scientific issue, underneath this politics of science lies the current that the Left (the party of equality) is the Party of science. The political Right do tacitly hold that the IPCC's science of climate change is akin to junk science. The attack on science is not direct--- because science is seen as good within the Australian polity--- but rather in a belief that uncertainty in findings indicates fatally flawed research.
Because most cutting-edge science--including most research into currently controversial topics--is uncertain, it is dismissed as junk. The inference is that science is an enemy, just like the Left. However, instead of saying that business interests or moral values trump the scientific consensus the conservative Right's strategy is to argue that the IPCC's scientific consensus itself is flawed. Then they encourage a debate between the consensus scientists and the fringe naysayers, giving the two apparently equal weight.
This then plays into the way the media seeks entertaining "balance" by portraying both sides as evenly matched, equally vehement. Though this appeals to viewers' sense of fair play, sometimes even cheering underdogs vs. snooty, scientific authority figures, such "balance" can also empower fringe groups to stay in the fray forever, magnifying uncertainty indefinitely, preventing any conclusion from being reached.
The associated rhetorical strategy is to assert that those making the “war on science” argument, are just plain confused, that the facts of science aren’t under attack from the right, it’s just that disagreements have occurred over ethics and energy policies.
This is happening in the cultural context of postmodernism, which destabilises all claims to truth and creates a widespread mood of doubt and scepticism, and so creates a cultural vacuum in which every form of extremism and identity politics can flourish.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:54 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
January 12, 2010
media: shifting the debate
We live amidst a digital revolution and, as we adapt to its ever deepening effects, we realize that this revolution is continuing. As an editorial in The Australian says:
Fifteen years ago, mainstream access to the internet through the then-revolutionary Netscape browser banished the orthodoxies around the collection and distribution of information. Analysts argued that the net was as transformative as steam engines and rail transport had been in the industrial age. It looked like a big call back then, but in hindsight such predictions undervalued the impact the internet would have beyond the world of business and the extent to which it would alter perceptions of time, distance and knowledge. A decade ago, few appreciated the way the net would destroy traditional business models yet at the same time spawn a suite of new products and applications.
The implications of the digital revolution are increasingly beginning to sink in--the format of journalism and potentially other media is moving away from the page-centric world we all grew up reading and writing and to a reinventing of text-based journalism for digital platforms.
We are also experiencing a far-reaching convergence of technologies: eg., newspapers are both print and digital; art galleries are starting to make films and the digital, and the erosion of distinct media policy regimes about print media, television and the internet. Newspapers are becoming multimedia operation whilst internet companies are becoming content providers.
The media debates are increasingly marketed by a conflict between between public broadcasting and commercial media (Murdoch's attacks on the ABC), the shift in regulation as pay TV becomes more prominent and a national broadband network is built, and the consumer resistance to control of the public discourse on media by media corporations.
How can we citizens contribute to the debate dominated by the centres of media power and the ‘recipe knowledge’ of the mainstream media with the emergence of the knowledge economy. Philip Schlesinger in The Politics of Media and Cultural Policy in Media LSE indicates one way that policy wonks have done this. He says that:
Influencing the terms of debate is difficult because the shaping of policy has become both more competitive and more complex. The multiplication of cultural and communication management consultancies, the expansion of special advisers in government, the growth of in-house research teams inside communications regulators, the development of specialist media and communications business journalism - all of these have recast the space available to the academy to make its views known and be taken seriously. They have reshaped the public sphere and the intellectual fields within it.
Schlesinger argues that the policy field is dominated by idea of the creative industries, creative economy and making creativity profitable.This discourse holds that cultural and communications industries designated ‘creative’ (ie., dynamism, growth, talent formation and national renewal) are the driving force of a new economy and a rival in importance to the financial sector.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:52 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 11, 2010
homeless in Australia
There are around 100,000 people defined as homeless, given an increasing population and high levels of family breakdown, substance abuse and mental illness, and Australia's dire shortage of cheap rental.
Homelesness is particularly noticeable in the capital cities and many inner-city Australians have become habituated to the homeless, even though we know that the category homelessness goes beyond beyond rough sleepers and just a lack of housing.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, homeless in Adelaide, South Australia, 2009
Historically people have thought about homelessness as being an issue for single men - the stereotypical view is a man with an alcohol or addiction problem. The reality is that there is a whole other group of homeless people emerging that include families and teenagers.
The rate of homelessness in the inner city areas of capital cities is generally higher than in their middle and outer suburbs in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and Canberra with the most common cause being family breakdown. Difficult economic conditions as a result of the global financial crisis and a tight housing market have made circumstances particularly hard for some families, with more turning to support services for assistance (Supported Accommodation Assistance Program or SAAP). They have been evicted for rent arrears, defaulted on mortgage payments or lost a job.
So it is not just about people sleeping on a park bench. It also includes people living in homelessness services, staying temporarily with family or friends, or living in unsafe situations (such as women and children experiencing domestic violence).
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:13 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
January 9, 2010
Adelaide: drifting into a genteel poverty?
Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. That industrial epoch of capitalism had its own distinct geography, a post 1945 spatial fix of suburbanization based on mass production, cars and consumer credit.
Today, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries--what some call the knowledge economy. The decline in manufacturing is the result of long-term trends—increasing foreign competition and the relentless replacement of people with machines. This transformation will also have its spatial fix.
Adelaide is one of the older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past, and it has continued to struggle long after the mega-regional hubs and creative cities have put the crisis of the early 1990s behind them. As a rust belt city it stands for a region in decline as the manufacturing industry has shrunk, whilst the local high-end services—finance, law, consulting—that it once supported have also diminished. This region is no field of dreams.
The policy question is: How does a city such as Adelaide prevent its stagnation and decline? Will it make the transition from a resentful, post-manufacturing tawdry inward- looking city to a cosmopolitan friendly, hip city open to the global economy? Or will the city and its regions continue to decline and become a relic of the industrial age? Can Adelaide reinvent itself?
Richard Florida in his The Rise of the Creative Class. argues that innovation., economic growth, and prosperity occur in those places that attract a critical mass of top creative talent. The key drivers of such a transition are the "three T's" of technology, talent, and tolerance. If cities could make themselves appealing to the Web designers, architects, biomedical researchers, and other innovators who are now the drivers of economic growth, then they would also attract the businesses that want these footloose pioneers to work for them.
Florida's urban renewal theory is that the creative class fosters an open, dynamic, personal and professional environment. This environment of bohemian lifestyles and creativity in turn, attracts more creative people, as well as businesses and capital. It is a “creative capital” view of human capital generating growth.
I've thought that the “creative capital” view of human capital generating growth is on the right track. First, about the importance of knowledge-creation and creativity becoming a more important part of the economy Secondly, as cities turn on creative people, they need to attract creative people. Thirdly, bohemian types like funky, socially free areas with cool downtowns and lots of density, as in Melbourne. This is funky, creative chic, innercity area is what Adelaide lacks, even if it has the odd bohemian coffee shops with free wireless. So we have the idea of the new economy that stands in contrast to the old economy with its older-style industries and more traditional values-----a smoke-stack economic development.
The problem for Adelaide is that the well-established tendency for most types of economic activity to cluster in relatively few places rather than dispersing widely--Michael Porter's theory of industry clusters. A second problem is is another well-established characteristic of economic activity: in addition to being clustered geographically, the various activities are also tiered functionally. It is tiered functionally because ventures of one sort systematically demand services of other particular sorts. Consequently, people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings. The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital-- varies immensely.
Adelaide's prospects as a creative magnet are too daunting, and it has limited possibilities to become a magnet for talent clustering to be come a postindustrial phoenix. It really needs economic development and the city has to grow skills and talent from within. So Adelaide needs to present itself as being in the top category—of something---in order to grow its skills and talent and prevent people from leaving, getting by on tourism and retirees subsisting on the pension.
What is this top something for Adelaide in a global economy? Rann Labor has little time for the creative industries. Their drivers are uranium mining and defence industries based around building submarines, and these are seen as the key drivers of technological innovation, economic growth, and improved living standards. This version of high tech and laptop professionals is a long way from Florida's idea of cities with its thriving arts, cultural climates and openness to diversity of all sorts and also enjoying higher rates of innovation and high-wage economic growth.
Will these drivers result in a new economy based on generating ideas, with a higher density of of talented and creative people? A creative, postindustrial economy? I cannot see uranium mining and submarines coupled with low-density urban sprawl creating new software and alternative energy industries. I cannot see that encouraging and shaping economic growth through mining and defence will position Adelaide so that it is becomes best positioned to compete in the coming decades. These are not enough to attract young professionals and creative types or to ensure the emergence of high-growth services and industries.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:05 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
January 8, 2010
the medical gaze
Though the concept of Medicalization needs to be revised to one over-medicalization, we still have the pharmaceutical industry busily engaged in shunting everyday problems into the domain of professional biomedicine.
This medicalization of the social is happening at a time of the erosion of medical authority; health policy shifting from access to cost control; managed care becoming central; the emergence of corporatised medicine; genetics becoming the cutting edge of medical knowledge and moving to the centre of medical and public discourse about illness and health; and the development of medical markets (cosmetic surgery).
Many socially unacceptable behaviors have been medicalized and assigned disease terms in the 20th century and we have the medicalization of depression in which the natural emotions of sadness are medicalized as a depressive disorder.
These are examples of the way that medicine as a dominant institution has expanded its gaze in the past half century or more and become central to the subjectivities of people's lives. The mechanisms here are both the transformation of the normal (sadness) into the pathological (a depressive disorder) and the way that medical ideologies, interventions and therapies have reset and controlled the borders of acceptable behaviour (social deviance), bodies (overweightness ) and states of being (social anxiety).
Over medicalization is now a common part of our professional, consumer and market culture in a post Prozac world--eg., medicalizing aging bodies (both female and male) in an attempt to control old age. This medical market is about pharmaceutical companies constructing and marketing diseases (anxiety) and then selling drugs (Paxil) to treat those diseases.
Another example is testosterone therapy for the treatment of male menopause (running on empty) to restore or enhance masculinity that plays withe body-as-machine metaphor. Men can fill up the tank with drugs to regain their sex drive, energy and optimism to become the sleek, powerful machine they desire to be.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 7, 2010
Murray- Darling Basin: waiting for the new basin-wide plan
Once again we see the effects of the slow action by the Rudd Government in addressing the dysfunctional federal governance of the Murray-Darling and the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin.The new Murray-Darling Basin plan to set sustainable water-extraction limits and provide increased environmental flows is still some time away from becoming operational. Some time means 2019, due to resistance by the states. So Rudd doesn't deserves much credit on water policy.
We are still left with a "governance" based on the conflicting attitudes and self-interests of the basin states. While individual State Governments continue to manage the water of the Murray-Darling Basin they will serve their own interests it is highly unlikely that the rivers will receive genuine increases in environmental flows of the magnitude required for their revival. The result is an ecologically debilitated Murray-Darling river system, which is what we have now.
The water from Christmas rains that produced floods in the Namoi, Barwon, Castlereagh, Paroo, Culgoa, Bokhara, Macquarie and Bogan rivers in the Darling system will run down the Darling River into Menindee Lakes, in western NSW.
A preliminary estimate is that 300GL would reach Menindee Lakes, but it would not fill the lakes, which had a capacity of 1680GL. Floodwaters are being dammed and diverted upstream, keeping them in New South Wales. More floods are required for water to flow into South Australia and the lower lakes.
The governance model is that NSW has powers over inflows into the Menindee Lakes and other storages. The trigger point where management of the Menindee lakes reverts to joint control under the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement is 640 gigalitres. At this point the Murray-Darling Basin Authority assumes responsibility.
NSW has said that it will honour the national Murray-Darling Basin Agreement, which ensures each state gets their share. Of course they will, since there is not enough water coming into the Menindee lakes to trigger water to be released into South Australia. Secondly, the existing regulations allowed NSW to fill dams and flood wetlands before water reached Menindee. Thirdly, water extracted for farm use in NSW was typically pumped straight out of the system or diverted through channels into dams. Fourthly, SA is not guaranteed to receive additional flows even if the trigger point for takeover was reached.
Ian Douglas points out at Unleashed that under the current mode of governance:
it is highly questionable whether there is any incentive for the NSW government to reduce the capacity of private dams and to remove the massive, frequently illegal, surface water impoundments constructed upstream from the Menindee Lakes by agribusinesses seeking to persist with broad-acre irrigation of high-water demand crops in what is predominantly a semi-arid environment.
He adds that cynically these agribusinesses:
made no mention of the fact that they are able to actively prevent vast volumes of surface water, potentially over 6,000 billion litres per year, from entering creeks and rivers in the Basin, as a result of the construction of what are euphemistically referred to as "ring tanks": huge impoundments comprising thousands of kilometres of levees bulldozed across ephemeral floodplains. These earthworks obstruct the natural flow of surface water, preventing it from entering the river system.
This highlights how South Australia, as the downstream state, has had to cop the brunt of the majority of the ecological losses in the system as a consequence of the long and prolonged drought. Clearly, with climate change, the Menindee lakes threshold needs to be overhauled to allow the restoration of environmental flows. These governance arrangements were forged in the 1960s, in the Menzies area, and had little to do with ecological health.The environment gets what water is left over after irrigation and towns take their share.
Fair water sharing today would see the recent rainfall in northern Australia offer the environmental allocation the Lower Lakes need.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:46 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
January 6, 2010
the ever shifting web
In his review of the just released Google phone--the Nexus One---Tim O'Reilly questions the common view that the Nexus One is at its core just another Android smartphone.
He makes the following argument:
What we see then is a collision of paradigms, perhaps as profound as the transition between the character-based era of computing and the GUI based era of the Mac and Windows. We're moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services.
Unlike Apple's iPhone Google's Nexus One is a web-native device. Despite its rudimentary connecting features, it is still a more fundamentally connected device than any previous phone. Apple has done a fairly poor job on its cloud integration so far. Its MobileMe is yet to be backed by big data and powerful algorithms running on a cloud platform.
The competition between phones platforms is one front in what Reilly has called a war of the web, with its references back to the Microsoft/Apple war around the personal computer in the 1980s that was one by Microsoft.
Reilly's thesis refers to the conflict between two models of operating system, which he characterizes as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet:
The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.
Apple has the proprietary position relative to Google's open position and Reilly's argument is that we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill in the web economy.
Reilly also argues that database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies and the race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespace. The failure to own an application's core data (eg., maps) will eventually undercut the applications competitive position. The key is to effectively turn certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the "internet operating system".
Google is moving in this direction. It, for instance, has taken the role of data source for maps away from Navteq and TeleAtlas and inserted themselves as a favored intermediary. They are giving away the main product for future advertising revenue alone. Google's strategy is to use open source software to commoditise – and make cheaper for consumers – any technology that brings more people to its advertisement-serving algorithms, whether via a computer or a mobile phone. It wants to make mobile devices and software more accessible to raise demand for advertising, the segment it dominates. And it makes products that don't suck.
Update
I'm not sure that the dynamics of the internet are about open systems vs. closed systems and about Google vs. Apple. It seems to be more about the mobile web and mobile computing, which in general appears to be growing leaps and bounds, and will continue to do so over the next few years. Is there something special about the mobile internet that compels people to pay for things they wouldn’t pay for on the desktop internet?
Though Microsoft is still dominant in PC operating systems it is a bit player in the world of online music downloads and digital media devices, and is increasingly becoming a has-been in smartphones. This is significant because it appears that people will carry their TV (and print entertainment? ) around with them instead of being glued to a TV as we are now.
Thus Apple tablet customers---ie., Apple scales up the mobile screen size from 3.5 inches to 10 inches---will watch their favorite movies and TV shows anywhere they go, and without commercial interruptions. Apple will make money with the iTunes model for the content and it is advert free viewing for the customer. Content is the key.
The implication is that broadcast television is past its peak. We can see that in the steady drop in the quality of the content, due to the fragmentation of the TV audience and the decline in revenue from mass advertising.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:32 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
January 5, 2010
a renewables national electricity grid
The Rudd Government has been around long enough for us to know that it says that it wants to promote renewables (the 2020 target, which requires Australia to generate 20% of its energy from clean sources?) whilst it goes for other policies to protect the coal-fired energy companies behind the scenes.
photovoltaic solar power station, Granadilla, Spain
First, the Rudd Government has no intention whatsoever of kicking dirty energy sources like coal off the national electricity grid. Secondly, a lack of connections to the national grid, which were not designed to channel power from the scattered and remote locations that suit renewables, has stalled the uptake of alternative energy. Thirdly, there is no real policy to transform the national grid to a renewable one, or even to remove the barriers that currently prevent renewable generators connecting to the national grid.
There is no vision in Australia for a continent-wide renewables supergrid so that electricity can be supplied across the continent from wherever the wind is blowing, the sun is shining the rocks are hot, or the waves are crashing.
photovoltaic solar power station + wind farm, Granadilla, Spain
There is no such action from the Rudd Government. Their action--and those of the states--- is about protecting the coal fired power stations vis-a-vis the national electricity grid, whilst doing little to solve one of the biggest criticisms faced by renewable power – that unpredictable weather means it is unreliable.
Update
What we have in energy policy terms are little bits of investment in renewables here and there rather than a concentrated investment to create a low-carbon economy. Penny Wong's talk about creating a low-carbon economy is just rhetoric that covers up the continued use of coal fired power stations. There is no attempt to increase the size of the renewable energy target, no moves to start building gas-fired power stations on the sites of the existing brown-coal power stations, nor any requirements that mining companies source power from off grid solar/thermal power stations .
In an op.ed in The Australian Richard Denniss says that:
The CPRS legislation proposes that we begin with a fixed pollution permit price of $10 a tonne. Wong has said while her scheme isn't perfect, something is better than nothing. She should take her own advice and introduce a carbon price; $10 isn't enough but it's better than nothing.The advantage of a $10 starting price is it would raise revenue to invest in efficient technologies and send a signal to new investors that the old days are over, while not being so high that it would have a significant effect on our so called emission-intensive trade-exposed industries.
Investing in efficient renewable technologies is the key. However, the Rudd Government is more focused on defending its flawed emission trading schemes--its such a poor example of an emissions trading scheme---- from those who would question it. All we get is the standard talking points repeated over and over again. Block block block.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:23 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
January 4, 2010
Krugman on US economic woes
Paul Krugman strikes a discordant note about US recovery in his Nobel lecture, on currency crises. He argues that the US is not likely to see a phoenix-like recovery from the current slump caused by the global financial crisis, that in turn, caused the world economy to substantially contract.
This currency crisis has left the bubble economies, such as the US and the UK, in a vulnerable position in a world where China's heavily managed exchange rate regime---its mercantilism---is a legitimate concern of its trading partners.
Since US households are broken on the wheel of debt it is unlikely that there will be a spending surge based on buy-now-save-never habits of yore. A housing boom is unlikely given the vacant houses and apartments left behind by the previous boom and massive unemployment.
At the end of his lecture Krugman asks: 'how long should the recovery in the US be expected to take?' His answer:
Well, there aren’t many useful historical models. But the example that comes closest to the situation facing the United States today is that of Japan after its late-80s bubble burst, leaving serious debt problems behind. And a maximum-likelihood estimate of how long it will take to recover, based on the Japanese example, is … forever. OK, strictly speaking it’s 18 years, since that’s how long it has been since the Japanese bubble burst, and Japan has never really escaped from its deflationary trap.
He adds that despite the praise being handed out to those who helped the US avoid the worst, the US is not handling the crisis well: fiscal stimulus has been inadequate, financial support has contained the damage but not restored a healthy banking system. All the indications are that the US is going to have seriously depressed output for years to come.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 3, 2010
politics + the good life
Alison Caddick in her Democracy evacuated editorial in Arena (Magazine or Journal?) addresses our relation as citizens to the democratic political process, to the market's reduction of development to economic growth and to a neo-liberal mode of governance. She makes an obvious point:
While we voted Labor because Mr Rudd promised real action on the looming emergency of climate change, we are locked into a crippled political process. Rather than a policy that makes a real contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions, we have the cruel joke of the ETS, which promises to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, while providing discounts and loopholes to industries of the worst carbon-emitting kind. We want action, but in some way unbeknown to us as ordinary voters, government is radically beholden to interests beyond our democratic control.
That is very true. Caddick adds that whilst we inhabit a (liberal) democracy and that part of our (historical) pre-consciousness still takes democracy for granted, we also know that neo-liberalism (as a mode of governance?) has changed things. It has dispensed with the venerable ethic of public service as such; the executive has become highly ‘politicised’; lobby groups now wield tremendous power; governments act to produce ‘results’; leadership is dead; and that management is the name of the game.
Neo-liberalism, she argues, is the Right's response to the ossification of the social democratic model, which had come to depend on a soulless machinery for carving up the ‘social product’; a political system dedicated merely to ‘redistribution’, the sine qua non of politics and government. It produces democratic ‘leadership’ is reduced to muscular action on the one hand and the tightest technocratic management on the other.
Arena Journal concerns itself with the possibilities for a renewed critical practice in an era of rapid transformation, and Caddick argues that issues such as global warming disclose a politics as politics should be — about the ‘good life’: about how we wanted to live; an ethic of the common good. Caddick's assumption is that we cannot tackle climate change within the parameters of neo-liberal globalisation--that neo-liberal globalisation is not capable of sufficient adjustment to turn climate change around. Questions can be asked.
Is climate change the tipping point around which to question the new-liberal recommitment to ‘let the market rule’ and to economic growth (measured as GDP) as the sole end of pubic policy. Is it the point to begin to question and rethink our deep-rooted assumptions about our mode of life and relations to the natural world? Or is climate change only the first among a series of crises likely to emerge if we cannot bring ourselves to change our present way of taking hold? Does it stir recognition of the way the uninhibited growth of the market can reach a point where it ceases to contribute to public well-being?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:23 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
January 2, 2010
Google Books
Google Books ( previously known as Google Book Research or GBS) will make it possible for consumers to purchase access to millions of copyrighted books currently in print, and to read them on hand-held devices or computer screens, with payment going to authors and publishers as well as Google. Do we have the emergence of a digital public library in the age of the search engine. Will this replace the public library of the card catalog?
Robert Darnton says about Google Books that:
Many millions more—books covered by copyright but out of print, at least seven million in all, including untold millions of "orphans" whose rightsholders have not been identified—will be available through subscriptions paid for by institutions such as universities. The database, along with books in the public domain that Google has already digitized, will constitute a gigantic digital library, and it will grow over time so that someday it could be larger than the Library of Congress (which now contains over 21 million catalogued books). By paying a moderate subscription fee, libraries, colleges, and educational institutions of all kinds could have instant access to a whole world of learning and literature.
He adds that Google has by now digitized some ten million books along with the missing pages, botched images, faulty editions, omitted artwork, censoring, and misconceived cataloging. Though 2006 Google signed agreements in 2006 with five great research libraries—the New York Public, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and Oxford's Bodleian—to digitize their book, books in copyright posed a problem, which soon was compounded by lawsuits from publishers and authors.
Darnton asks: On what terms will Google make those texts available to readers? It is a good question given that Google Books is a monopoly--- Google's digital database is not a public library-- and so there is the danger of monopolies tending to charge monopoly prices.
The governments of France and Germany have urged the court to reject the settlement "in its entirety" or at least insofar as it applied to their own citizens. Far from seeing any potential public good in it, they condemned it for creating an "unchecked, concentrated power" over the digitization of a vast amount of literature and the "uncontrolled, autocratic concentration of power in a single corporate entity," which threatened the "free exchange of ideas through literature."
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack