Public Opinion

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December 31, 2010

The Australian's hammer

The Australian's editorial--- The politics of vacillation is holding back the nation --hammers out the standard News Corp message about a weak Labor government not knowing where its going or it standing for anything substantial by way of substantive reform.

This message or agenda is hammered because we get little by way of an argument. You get get impression that, since the Australian is basically talking to itself about itself, there is no need for an argument. It has well developed ideas about what Australia needs and it routinely hammers away at an insular leftish culture that is out of touch with the values of mainstream society which it supposedly represents. The editorial says:

It has been the year of indecision for Australia, cocooned from the economic problems of Europe and the US but complacent about the nation's future. Weak political leadership and a lack of vision was greeted with ambivalence by voters...A resources boom and strong economic growth cloaked a policy vacuum as our politicians enjoyed a reform holiday the nation could not afford. At year's end, the country's political class is all but deadlocked, with a minority Labor government in Canberra still trying to navigate its way around a Greens agenda obsessing on 10th-order issues rather than the substantive productivity, infrastructure and tax reforms so vital to our future.

What then are the substantive productivity, infrastructure and tax reforms necessary for the nation's future prosperity? Strangely, the editorial doesn't say.

What it says is this:

The government must start governing according to what the country needs, not what focus group studies claim it wants... While $31 million buys our elected representatives a lot of data, it cannot overcome a policy paralysis born of disconnection with the electorate and a lack of courage in implementing essential reforms.The second lesson of the year is that governments have limits, and we cannot continue subcontracting tasks to bureaucrats that they are incapable of performing...Governments play a crucial role in setting economic policies and broad directions for defence and for delivery of essential services, but we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that governments are omnipotent...a nation's achievements are built on the enterprise of its people and it is from their labours, not the work of governments, that growth and prosperity will flow.

There is no content at all about the substantive productivity, infrastructure and tax reforms so vital to our future that would facilitate the enterprise of the Australian people and their labours that build economic economic growth and prosperity?

it doesn't even bother to engage with the Gillard Government's spelling out that substantive productivity reforms will be achieved through investment in education and training to lift skill levels in the work force; its proposals to enhance infrastructure; CoAG's agenda for a "seamless" national economy etc etc. What we are offered is little more than office gossip in the form of commentary about its editorial line.

The Australian is talking to itself about itself.

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December 30, 2010

two types of media

In Murdoch's search for an answer to content theft in The Age Gordon Farrer, the technology editor of The Age, says that if Murdoch's model of restricting access to news content spreads to most (if not all) traditional media outlets, then journalism could split into two camps. This argument is initially plausible.

He says that in one camp there:

will be the content produced by professional journalists, backed by large organisations and traditional news-gathering structures that include several levels of editing and fact-checking, plus researching resources. This content will have to be paid for by consumers and — thanks to technological restrictions — it won’t be easily shared in social media or aggregated by search engines. It will become niche-focused news: in-depth and difficult to produce at one end; sensationalist and entertaining at the other.

In the other camp there:

will be citizen journalism: free of charge, easily searched, easily shared, more reliant on the individual writer's skills and news sense, probably shaped as much by popularity (sensationalism and entertainment value) as newsworthiness.

So we have two different types of journalism, each with their own pluses and minuses. It is a useful starting point. The most obvious flaw is that it ignores the public broadcasters who provide professional content free. And that causes problems for Murdoch and Fairfax.

Farrer then goes on to comment:

Because of the evolving restrictions to accessing ‘‘old media’’ news content — paywalls and apps that don’t allow searching, sharing or cutting and pasting of content — the citizen journalism camp will not be able to rely as much as it has on professional journalists’ content for inspiration. That is, the bloggers and tweeters and Facebook posters who riff/comment on/analyse traditional media journalism will have to go elsewhere for fodder.

Farrer's assumption that Murdoch and Fairfax provide quality assumption that bloggers then riff off is undercut by what passes for professional journalism in the mainstream media today. A lot is infortainment, much is recycled press releases, public relations junk and deception. Public opinion surveys on honesty and ethics reveal that journalists, advertising personnel, and public relations practitioners score at the bottom of those surveys.

Only some bits and pieces of professional journalism can be considered quality journalism, often from the same journalist. Newspapers are becoming more opinion and comment based, often with a political bias since it is the 24 hour television channels that deliver the news to us.

Secondly, some bloggers provide quality commentary and analysis that mainstream journalists riff/comment on--- the latter rarely analyse. Thirdly, Farrer has no idea of a dialogic public sphere in which the deliberation about issues gives rise to the ongoing conversation in the public sphere---such as the one about the changing nature of the media in a digital liberal democracy.

A deliberative democracy represents an attempt to counteract the deficits of representative democracy, particularly in terms of legitimacy.

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December 29, 2010

right wing economics

Tony Makin in Dutch disease no excuse for poor productivity in The Australian says that the Australian economy is exhibiting worsening symptoms of a phenomenon known internationally as the Dutch disease. Makin is referring to what is also known as the Gregory Thesis.

Makin says that by contributing to the high Australian dollar, the booming mining and resources sector here continues to squeeze profitability in non-mining sectors. The macro-economic gains from a sudden expansion of commodity production for export are partially offset by costs borne by traditional industries elsewhere in the economy.

Thus the appreciation makes imports cheaper and hurts the competitiveness of the import-competing sector (often manufacturing and services and farmers if they are 'price takers' on world markets). Therefore, the export boom in one sector, 'crowds out' the other sectors via the appreciation.

Makin, who is a professor of economics at Griffith University, states that:

Between 2000 to just before the GFC downturn in late 2008, when commodity prices surged, Australia's average annual GDP growth rate was 3.3 per cent.This was below the economy's 3.6 per cent average growth rate during the past half century, a long-run rate that mainly reflects growth surges in two intervals: the 60s and the economic reform era from the mid-80s through to the end of the 90s...In other words, economic growth this decade has actually been lower than the long-term average, at the same time as export commodity prices have been well above their long-term average.

The reason for this subnormal growth he says is has been the sharp productivity slowdown that has occurred since the turn of the century. The mining boom has not compensated for this poor productivity performance and is in no way an excuse for suspending economic reform efforts.

Makin says that genuine productivity-enhancing reform remains as important as ever for restoring economic growth to at least its long-term average rate. Now the main cause of increased productivity is working smarter, or being cleverer. It is crucial that effective measures be adopted to ensure that the revenues from the project are spent in ways that produce direct benefits for the Australian population as a whole, and not just those in the mining sector.

This refers to technological change, organisational change, industry restructuring and resource reallocation, as well as economies of scale and scope. Over time, other factors such as research and development and innovative effort, the development of human capital through education, and incentives from stronger competition promote the search for productivity improvements and the ability to achieve them.

What does Makin suggest? Surprisingly none of the above. He focuses on exchange rate over-evaluation ---what is hindering output in the non-mining sector is an overvalued currency. He says:

the most obvious macro-economic antidote for exchange rate overvaluation is a drastic cut in government spending that would take pressure off interest rates. A spending cut in next year's budget of the same order as the 2008-09 squander in response to the GFC might be a start ... Public spending cuts could be accompanied by measures that boost the intake of labour and capital from abroad ... Increased immigration would augment the labour force, and further liberalisation of foreign investment policy would facilitate faster capital accumulation

So the government intervention to counter the global financial crisis was a squander and the proper economic policy is the slash and burn of austerity economics. How does this IPA-style economic policy increase productivity? Makin makes no argument that it does.

Presumably, it is increased capital flows into Australia does, as well as cheaper labour from abroad.

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December 27, 2010

sex + censorship

This article in The Guardian confirms what I'd assumed with respect to the religious (Christian) Right's response to pornography and sexualization and children in Australia. The context is the Cameron Government's policy to block pornography online in the UK through an internet filter or blocking access to certain webservers.

James Gray says that many of the religiously inspired conservative lobby groups in the UK:

consciously co-opt feminist terminology and attract feminist support by speaking frankly about the "pornification" of popular culture and the effect this may have on the aspirations of young people, particularly girls. But the progressive language conceals a distinctly reactionary political agenda...Despite the broad range of religious traditions and denominations represented by these groups, their stance on the issue of sexualisation tends to be remarkably similar. For them, the term neatly encapsulates a narrative of moral degeneration that is so broad as to effectively include any representation or discussion of sex, sexuality and relationships, whatever the context. So pornography is harmful, but for some so are gay characters in soaps and adverts for condoms. Their bete noire is sex and relationships education (SRE) in schools – and they vigorously oppose any attempt to bring the subject within the English national curriculum.

It is similar in Australia. They ---the religiously inspired lobby groups--- even oppose teaching secular ethics in public schools in Australia. They see it as another example of the decline of moral/ethical standards in the community resulting from the decline of religious influence.

Secular ethics means a relativistic secular world view, which is a rejection of God given absolutes in the form of the Ten Commandments. For them--eg., the Australian Christian Lobby -- ethical and religious perspectives are not morally equivalent to each other. Religion has a monopoly over ethical practice.

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December 26, 2010

US politics: the shift to the right

Eliot Weinberger in his review of Decision Points by George W. Bush in the London Review of Books says that in the mere two years since he left Washington, Bush is beginning to seem like a reasonable man compared to the Republicans who have now been elected to higher office.

Unlike them, he was not a ‘family values’ Christian who liked to have prostitutes dress him in diapers; he did not have to pay a fine of $1.7 billion (yes, billion) for defrauding the government; he does not advocate burning the Quran; he does not believe that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim allied with terrorists who is building internment camps for dissidents; he does not believe that people of Hispanic origin should be randomly stopped and asked to prove their immigration status; he does not support a military invasion of Mexico or a constitutional amendment stating that the United States cannot be subject to Sharia law or an electric fence along the entire Canadian border or the death penalty for doctors who provide abortions; he does not believe that bicycle lanes in major cities are part of a plot by the United Nations to impose a single world government.

Weinberger adds that the Palinites and Tea Partiers are getting the publicity, but the old-fashioned neocons still hold the power, and they may well run the ever patient Jeb Bush – practically the only Republican left with both dull conservative respectability and national name recognition – for president in 2012.

This shows just how much the Republican Party has shifted to the Right in the context of the global financial crisis.

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December 25, 2010

Xmas

Merry Xmas everyone.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Christmas Lilies, 2010

Hope you all have a good break. We down at the weekender in Victor Harbor cleaning it up for friends to stay in for a couple of weeks.

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December 23, 2010

ALP: all at sea?

It is not just asylum seeker policy is it. The minority Gillard Government appears to be all at sea in a number of areas: the Murray-Darling Basin, climate change, health reform, urban renewal --nay reform in general. The exception is the national broadband network, where there has been vision, policy competence and leadership. Why so? Why does the federal Labor's primary vote continue to fall, and not just in the mining states of Queensland and WA?

Bernard Keane's interpretation in Crikey is in the form of an identity crisis:

It’s genuinely unclear, even to Labor MPs, what Labor now stands for, what it believes in its heart of hearts. The party’s turn away from reform under Kim Beazley and Simon Crean was, evidently, more than just petty politicking. But the bigger problem was it didn’t abandon economic liberalism in favour of something else -- say, old-fashioned big government and a regulated economy. No, it continued to talk the language of economic liberalism, but without the commitment to it of the previous generation. In such a party, unmoored from core principles, unsure what its philosophical foundations are, the hucksters of NSW Labor, with their relentless focus on announceables, and focus groups, and media management, could have a field day. And they have. There’s little evidence that Labor is finding a way to repair these deep tears in its soul.

His judgement is harsh but accurate. The political hucksters from NSW run a hollowed out party; one squeezed between the suburban mortgage belt parts of the capital cities and the inner-city areas. The Coalition keeps acting as if an election is just around the corner.

Does that identity crisis mean the social democratic left has to go back to its roots?

Update:
In the Australian Financial Review Geoff Kitney says:

Not since the early days when the two party system evolved has a prime minister faced the challenges Julia Gillard has faced. No modern political leaders have had their power so circumscribed as hers. No modern political leaders have had so little leverage on the system with which to build their leadership authority....Her task is huge. The critical question hanging over her---and which will probably determine the fate of her government --is this: is she up to the task. Does Gillard have the leadership qualities---the negotiating skills, the inspiration, the ideas, the drive, the team, the breadth of vision--- to inspire her government m her party and the people.

This is the great person view of politics--the great leader--when it is the cabinet that shapes the politics; a cabinet in a de facto coalition with the Greens over a normal parliamentary term; it is a collective approach because ministers do have responsibility for their portfolios.

It is the business world that demands strong leadership to push through economic reform to create a market society. A minority government, by definition, cannot be strong. So corporate Australia is sceptical about the Gillard Government.

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December 22, 2010

huh

In a post on the ABC's Unleashed entitled Life in the WikiLeaks twilight zone Russell Trood, the Liberal Senator from Queensland and Deputy Chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee, launches an attack on Wikileaks. He says:

perhaps what is most objectionable about the whole affair is the suggestion that Assange and WikiLeaks represent the triumph of pure democracy. At best the WikiLeaks philosophy is grounded in a naive conviction that complete transparency at every level will result in better government. At worst, it represents an anarchistic desire to hobble the institutions of liberal democracy. That it comes dressed up in the sort of sanctimonious anti-American, anti-capitalist rhetoric one might generally expect from first year arts students, washed up flower children and parliamentary members of the Australian Greens, merely adds insult to injury.

This is quite rich coming from a member of the political class in a liberal democracy whose background leaking to the media is standard operating procedure. It is also offensive, given the way that Australia, as a national security state after 9/11 is becoming a surveillance state in the context of the hysteria about Muslims (Islamophobia), the fixation on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in Australia and the frame of an apocalyptic clash of civilizations.

This is a state that endeavours to hide everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously spinning and lying to citizens about its activities (eg., the Iraq war) as well as putting in place a system of monitoring, invading and collecting files on ordinary citizens suspected of no wrongdoing. This is a state that sees terrorism everywhere.

Trood says:

Ironically, by attempting to impose transparency by force, WikiLeaks has probably set back the cause of open government by at least 10 years, and the cause of international diplomacy even further. Frank, fearless and candid diplomacy may be only an ideal, but it is one worth pursuing as a precondition for mutual understanding and respect between nations. It is also likely to be the first casualty of the inevitable crackdown on information sharing between governments.

So how does accountability of liberal democratic Australia government work given the above actions and deceptions of the national security state premised on the protection of secrecy in governments? Exactly how is the national security state in the process of becoming an open government?

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December 21, 2010

NBN: hostile responses

The business case (or corporate plan ) for the National Broadband Network (NBN) has been released by the Gillard Government. It will offer $24.00 wholesale and $53-58 retail per month for the basic 12 Mbps / 50GB NBN plan; have an internal rate of return on investment of just over 7 per cent; 70 per cent of businesses and homes expected to use the NBN eventually; and in the short term about half will stay with the most basic service of 12 megabits a second.

It wasn't just the Liberal Party, who basically said it wasn’t worth spending government money on a telecommunications upgrade which would primarily be used to fuel the nation’s passion for high-end video and gaming content. The NBN is essentially a video entertainment system for them.

The reaction in the mainstream media was hostile. The editorial Murdoch's naysaying Australian said that the business case is not a cost-benefit analysis; does not assess the opportunity costs of spending billions on this project rather than other services or infrastructure; does not negate the need for a comprehensive analysis by the Productivity Commission; and is not considered an important area of policy reform by business executives. Therefore, the NBN is not in the national interest and it is not the best value for our money.

Jennifer Hewitt in saying that the business case is more about political cover for a government nervous about increasing public doubts over whether the promise of the National Broadband Network offers value for money. Or Michael Stutchbury saying that if the NBN were such a smart-money bet, then private investors would be rushing in, which they're not. Therefore, the NBN is flawed.

The hostility is not limited to Murdoch's naysaying Australian. At Fairfax we have Adele Ferguson saying:

The federal government's much awaited business plan for its national broadband network is three parts puff, two parts smoke and mirrors with a pinch of fact thrown in. And while the government's twin messages that the network will be transformational and the billions of dollars in taxpayers money will be repaid with interest may sound impressive, dig deeper and it is based on a lot of assumptions and hyperbole.

There is no argument provided to justify the claim. It is Ferguson's piece that is puff and smoke and mirrors.

Katharine Murphy, in contrast, acknowledges that her qualified coming around to the NBN has been a slow process has largely been driven by the competition policy principles that rest beneath the whole idea. She refers to the market model (Telstra) failing to meet national needs:

Without the promise of a national broadband network, the government would not have been able to undo 20 years of terrible policy in telecommunications. John Howard's single greatest economic policy mistake was turning Telstra from a public monopoly to a private one with the capacity to strangle competition and innovation at the retail level, leaving us less well-off for communications services than other comparable nations. That mistake is now on the road to being rectified through the breaking up of Telstra, the concept the pointy heads call ''structural separation''.

But the positive note ends there. Murphy says:

The NBN project is full of risks. Some of the myriad assumptions in the business case are more than likely flawed. Costs have already blown out and could well again. (Remember when this idea cost $4.7 billion? Now it's $27.5 billion of taxpayers' money.) There may not be sufficient skilled labour to deliver the rollout on time and on budget....The attack lines Turnbull has been running (transparency, value for money, whether the technology will be future-proof) are all solid.

Assumptions may be flawed because they are assumptions. The difference between the cost $4.7 billion and the $27.5 billion is for two completely different projects--fibre-to-the-node and fibre-to-the-home; a difference Murphy fails to acknowledge. So we either have deception or ignorance. How does the fibre will be obsolescent argument go?

These kind of articles indicate that we have vested interests opposing the NBN. They want it to fail; to see it destroyed. So they spread misinformation to those people who do not understand the NBN making it seem “pointless” and not worthwhile.

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December 20, 2010

global economy: 'hot money'

The US Federal Reserve sees the international economy’s role as a deus ex machina to rescue the US economy. Foreign countries are to serve as markets for a resurgence of U.S. industrial exports and most of all as financial markets for U.S. banks and speculators to make money at the expense of foreign central banks trying to stabilize their currencies. The way to achieve this is to depreciate the dollar.

Martin Rowson

Michael Hudson in U.S. “quantitative easing” is fracturing the Global Economy in Real-World Economics Review (no. 55) says that the Federal Reserve low interest rate policy and pumping dollars into the global economy has two unfortunate side effects for Australia – but a free lunch for foreign speculators.

First of all, high interest rates raise the cost of borrowing across the board for doing business and for consumer finances. Second – even more important for the present discussion – high rates attract foreign “hot money” as speculators borrow at low interest in the United States (or Japan, for that matter) and buy high-yielding Australian government bonds.The effect is to increase the Australian dollar’s exchange rate, which recently has achieved parity with the U.S. dollar. This upward valuation makes its industrial sector less competitive, and also squeezes profits in its mining sector. So on top of Australia’s rising raw- materials exports, its policy to counter its real estate bubble is attracting foreign financial inflows, providing a free ride for international arbitrageurs.

This foreign-currency play is where most of the speculative action is today as speculators watching these purchases have turned the currencies and bonds of other raw- materials exporters into speculative vehicles.

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December 19, 2010

US: economic recovery?

Currently, in the US unemployment is rising, stores are closing and the economy is succumbing to debt deflation. The upshot of the Federal Reserve trying save the banks from negative equity through liquidity (ie., quantitative easing to help U.S. banks earn their way out of negative equity) is flooding the global economy with a glut of U.S. dollar credit, destabilizing the global financial system in the process.

In How Can the Economy Recover? in the New York Times Jeff Madrick says that optimism about the recovery of the US is not warranted:

What makes this recovery different is clear. Consumers have record levels of debt compared to income and some $12 trillion in losses on their houses and financial investments. They are not going to spend money as they usually do—perhaps not for a long time. A damaged financial system is also not lending significantly, partly because business clients aren’t seeking loans unless they directly generate more sales, and consumer demand is low. Business investment, propelled by piles of cash on the balance sheets, is nevertheless slowing after rising strongly from low levels for the past year.

He goes on to add that what is rarely recognized is that even if the US can emerge from a weak economy within a few years, the economic foundation that existed before the cataclysm of 2007 and 2008 may not be adequate to restore the widely shared prosperity the US needs.

Those on the right rely on the ingenuity of capitalism as an adaptive mechanism which rely on the arguments about the self-organizing dynamics of the capitalist economy.The politics of their laissez-faire economics holds that cutting social programs and limiting aid to workers are exactly what will revitalize the nation’s economy by demanding that people be responsible for themselves. In sum, markets should be as free of government interference as possible, and must become the efficient distributors of social goods.

The fiction is that bailing Wall Street banks out of their losses is a precondition for reviving employment and consumer spending – as if the giveaway to the financial sector will get the economy moving again.

Cutting taxes is the key to future jobs for those who seek to reduce government intervention and have faith in free markets are the Republican answers to rebuilding the nation. They assume that assume that the policy objective is to return to the stable economic growth that preceded the crisis of 2007 and 2008, even the austerity economics could well leave the nation with a lost decade of slow growth and high unemployment.

The policy of the Obama administration has been to bail out the banks by re-inflating U.S. real estate, stock and bond markets at least to their former Bubble Economy levels. The aim is to restore the flow of credit--a euphemism for keeping the historically high debt levels in place, and indeed adding yet more debt (“credit”) to enable home buyers, stock market investors and others to bid asset prices back up to rescue the banking system from the negative equity into which it has fallen.

The “recovery” that is envisioned is one of new debt creation. This would rescue the biggest and most risk-taking banks from their negative equity, by pulling homeowners out of theirs. Housing prices could begin to soar again.Unfortunately, instead of the banks lending more to U.S. homeowners, consumers and businesses, they have been tightening their loan standards; and are engaged in interest-rate arbitrage (the carry trade), currency speculation (forcing up targeted currencies) commodity speculation and buying into companies in Asia and raw materials exporters.

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December 18, 2010

Australia's refugee myths

In Boat tragedy: How Australians became complicit in the horror of Christmas Island in The Guardian Richard Flanagan says that though Australia doesn't have a refugee problem (last year just 5,500 people sought asylum – less than 2% of the migrant intake) it does have a public policy problem with refugees.

Steve Bell

The problem is with the genuine refugees seeking asylum from war torn countries, not the those overstaying their visas – such as 50,000 mostly British and US tourists. These are allowed to stay illegally. There is no public anxiety about these illegals. They are white are they not?

Flanagan says:

Australia does have a dismal public life largely bereft of courage or humanity, and it has created a national myth that now poisons all sides of politics. The myth is that of the boat people. It is the idea that hordes of refugees will overrun Australia unless harsh policies of dissuasion and internment are employed.How a nation in which one in four is a migrant embraced such a cruel and stupid idea is mysterious...But for more than a decade this myth, the issue of opportunism and electoral cynicism, has been a weeping sore at the heart of public life.

The myth has grown ever more powerful after 9/11 as refugees and terrorism were seen as the same problem by the conservative side of politics, with Labor's leadership capitulated to Howard's Fortress Australia vision and largely being in lock-step with his policies.

Referring to the Christmas Island tragedy in which a small wooden boat carrying about 70 refugees was smashed by a wild sea into a limestone cliff Flanagan says:

in the video footage of the tragedy it is possible to look down the cliffs of Christmas Island and in the spin-drift blown up from below to hear not only the screams of the women and children, to see not only the drowned and the drowning and a broken boat, but also to glimpse the promise of what Australia had once been. And with each wave that rolls in, it breaks apart a little more.

What Flanagan neglects to mention is the history of Fortress Australia being a racist one to keep out the non-whites.

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December 17, 2010

Labor's lament

Michael Thompson's No place in Labor for people like me in The Australian has a simple argument: the middle-class progressives are killing the party to which he once belonged. The rot set in with Gough Whitlam and has continued until today with the alliance with the Greens.

Thompson's "authentic" Labor Party is that of socially conservative working class. However the working class is awake to the betrayal of its values by the middle class progressives (he means lawyers, schoolteachers, public servants and academics) and will be looking about for a new political home. He says:

Several things post-election have led me to this realisation: Labor's alliance with the Greens; public pronouncements by party officials; the media and books on the ALP; terms of reference of the review launched in the wake of the election debacle; along with reflections on the paucity of working-class candidates preselected to stand for seats in low-socioeconomic electorates.

By socially conservative working class he means a blue collar working class who upholds the socially conservative values and aspirations of their working-class parents and grandparents. These values include aspirations for jobs for their children (not pie-in-the-sky green jobs) and a chance to improve their lot in life.

So where will the politically aware, disaffected socially conservative (industrial) working class go to find their political home? They are the 'Howard battlers' and Thompson adds:

Tony Abbott, with his instinct for saying what he thinks, has appeal for these same voters (when not making gaffes such as saying he was too jet-lagged to visit Australian troops in Afghanistan, or advocating an expansion in middle-class welfare that would add to the call on scarce public funds), and should he court them as part of a new, grand Coalition electoral strategy, not merely at election times, the chickens from Labor's alliance with the Greens would come home to roost.

Thompson fails to see that the ALP, like the Liberal Party, is a mass party that is a broad church. It has to be because its left of centre constituency is diverse and changing. It is diverse and changing because capitalism is changing and so is the class structure.

Update
Thompson says nothing about today's industrial working class being composed of far more than workers in traditional blue-collar factory jobs and their households. It necessarily includes many workers often theorized as post- industrial, information age, or service economy workers. Not only does he say little about the rise of service sector employment in recent years, or the emergence of neo-liberalism over the last three decades and its attack on the welfare state, he ignores that the working class was politically defeated, across the Western world in the final decades of the last century.

The experience of defeat is important because it colours the political landscape today. Capitalism has come to be seen as the natural order of things, whether we like it or not – something to be bemoaned, perhaps, but not transformed. An entire generation has now been brought up with dramatically limited political horizons, a fact reflected in widespread disengagement from politics. It is the environmental critique of capitalism that calls for the transformation of capitalism, not the socially conservative working class.

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December 16, 2010

the American media: in the service of power

In The media's authoritarianism and WikiLeaks at Salon.com Glenn Greenward critiques the American media over its response to WikiLeaks in accepting and repeating the false claim that WikiLeaks has indiscriminately dumped thousands of cables, whereas newspapers have only selectively published some.He says:

the broader point here is crucial: the media's willingness to repeat this lie over and over underscores its standard servile role in serving government interests and uncritically spreading government claims...That's why this cannot-be-killed lie about WikiLeaks' "indiscriminate" dumping of cables has so consumed me. It's not because it would change much if they had done or end up doing that -- it wouldn't -- but because it just so powerfully proves how mindlessly subservient the American establishment media is: willing to repeat over and over completely false claims as long as it pleases the right people -- the same people to whom they claim they are "adversarial watchdogs." It's when they engage in such clear-cut, deliberate propagandizing that their true function -- their real identity -- is thrown into such stark relief.

He adds that the immediate consensus in the American political and media class was that the cyber activists who launched denial of service attacks were engaged in pure, unmitigated destruction -- even evil -- and should be severely punished.

The Americana media is less a check on state power and more a reflection of what the government thinks. They are, as Jay Rosen puts it, on the wrong side of the secrecy of the national security state after 9/11.

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December 15, 2010

The Australian: our future is conservatism

In No time to rest on our laurels in The Australian Paul Kelly says that Australia needs more reform, if economic growth is to continue. This is yet another variation of Murdoch's message to Australia that the Gillard Government stands for nothing and it is weak. The general argument is put by Chris Berg at the ABC's Unleashed:

the era of reform is over. Our boldness has gone. No longer are we able to push through major economic changes. We have no appetite for challenge. Australian politicians are hesitant to take risks, intimidated by polls, and the Government is cripplingly scared of focus groups and opposition.

What Kelly adds to this is that the result is complacency and blandness.

Kelly states that rarely has the gulf between the power centres of the "insider" culture of the political-media class, which sees the need for more reform, and the "outsider" perspective, which is in a sullen mood, been greater. According to Kelly:

the Labor Party seems confused and divided about the fundamentals; that is, about the sort of society and nation it wants Australia to be. Such economic, social and educational challenges penetrate policy and values. What are Labor's core values? Julia Gillard talks the language of economic reform and educational standards, yet the gap between talk and delivery is vast.

What sort of reform are those in the power centres of the political-media class talking about then? A more sustainable Australia? Shifting to a low carbon economy by investing in renewable energy like China? No way. That is definitely not what is meant.

Reform is economic reform as understood by the Business Council of Australia. That reform is pro-market reform to ensure more labour mobility, less industry assistance, less red tape etc and increasing productivity. Nothing about the Murray-Darling basin or health reform.

Kelly's argument in support of this kind of pro-business reform is that:

The GFC has delivered a shattering intellectual and moral message to the world: while the US is wounded, the European model is crippled. Europe's system of government debt, entrenched welfare, extensive regulation and mushy "tolerance towards all" as its unifying value is broken. Does Labor not see the obvious?

Gee I thought that the global financial crisis dealt a death knell to a neo-liberal mode of governance structured around free market economics, not the crippling of social democracy and Green progressivism. Two years ago governments saved the necks of the world’s financial markets who were begging for help. Now the market is back to intimidating governments and there is a deep resentment against markets and financiers.

The obvious for Kelly is that a declining Europe and a rising Asia means that Australia should embrace the values of personal improvement, economic competition, educational excellence, national pride, strong family ties, cultural traditionalism and rising religious faith. The obvious is that the future lies with conservatism, not the Green progressive social democracy that shapes Labor thinking; a social democracy premised on reducing inequality.

Chris Berg sees little connection between emissions trading and the pro-market reforms of the 1980s:

The reform of the 1980s had one clear and unambiguous goal: to clear up a century of accumulated, unnecessary or entirely counterproductive regulatory burdens. These burdens were holding back Australia’s economic growth, limiting personal income, and entrenching private interests at the public expense.The goal of an emissions trading scheme is very different: to impose burdens on the Australian economy...the great reforms of the 1980s ... were designed to boost, not restrain, economic growth.

Well no. The goal of an emissions trading scheme is to use a market mechanism to facilitate a shift to renewable energies, and away from coal, so as to reduce greenhouse emissions produced by the coal-fired power stations.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:55 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

December 14, 2010

banking reform?

Swan's reforms to cut down the power of the banking cartel and increase competition in the finance industry was a fizzer. Pretty much in line with the standard talking up reform and not much action. Remember Swan's earlier promise that customers can "now vote with their feet"? Well, the market as it exists now doesn't work that way.

The reforms include a permanent deposit guarantee scheme, the scrapping of a ban on selling covered bonds commitments to outlaw mortgage exit fees, allowing mutuals to become banks more quickly, extending the deposit guarantee indefinitely, and making "price signalling" of interest rate hikes illegal.

Swan’s package isn’t radical. It is more tinkering on the edges than landscape altering and, indeed, probably does more for the major banks than it does for their competitors.The cartel still rules and they treat us consumers badly, but we accept that treatment because we feel that the banks offer us security.

The result, as Tim Colebatch says in The Age is that:

If you're paying too much for your mortgage, you'd better find your own solution: tightening your belt to pay down your debt, refinancing with a credit union, whatever. Best of luck.

Interest rates will rise next year because our mining investment boom will threaten to overheat the economy. So if you are already with a credit union then it is belt tightening, whilst the banks use their cartel power to increase their profit margins and make larger profits. It is more higher fees and charges for consumers.

Talking of the fifth pillar as competition is a misnomer. As Coelbatch observes the four too-big-to-fail banks now hold 80 per cent of all loans. The other banks have 17 per cent, and all credit unions and building societies, just 3 per cent. Sadly, the Rudd/Gillard Government and the competition watchdog allowed one of the big four to swallow up the next biggest bank: first, the State Bank of Victoria, then the Bank of Melbourne, then St George. The result is a cartel that, by and large, does not compete on price.

Hence the need to do something substantial about competition, since the Reserve Bank of Australia is interested in the stability of the financial system not competition.That means supporting the market power of the major banks. If it is the cost of funding that is the main barrier to more serious competition in banking, then little was done by Swan to ease funding pressures for smaller lenders. Little was done to create a fifth banking pillar that would be able to muscle up to Westpac, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ Bank and National Australia Bank.

If Swan wants to build a ‘fifth pillar’’ based on credit unions and building societies, then he has yet to explain how a sector with $76 billion of assets and without any significant improvement to their capacity to raise funds competitively is going to be able to discipline the four majors, with their $2 trillion-plus of domestic assets. They aren't.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 13, 2010

The Cancún negotiations

The failure of the Copenhagen climate summit last year (it proposed a system of voluntary pledges that were very low) dealt a blow to the idea that governments could control the output of greenhouse gases in their societies.

This failure by the UN disclosed that the Rudd Government was more or less naked on the issue, and that it lacked the political courage to push for the reforms required to shift the Australian economy to a low carbon one. The fossil fuel industry and its allies won that battle.

The Cancún negotiations were an attempt to try and patch up the process of multi-lateral talks and set new building blocks for a legally binding treaty. The result is a modest step on from the failure at Copenhagen As the editorial in The Observer states:

First, they outlined a mechanism that could play a critical role in helping to prevent the deforestation of developing nations, a major ecological issue. Second, the talks established a fund that will raise and disburse $100bn (£64bn) a year by 2020 to protect poor nations against climate impacts and assist them with low-carbon development. Third, they set up a mechanism to transfer low-carbon technologies to developing countries.

The final text has references to a long-term goal of holding temperatures to 2C and a future review of whether the target should be revised to 1.5C. Nations agreed once again that world average temperatures should be allowed to rise by no more than 2C, but once again they declined to commit collectively to real and binding targets for emissions cuts by which performance could be measured.

It is a modest step because the Cancún result pushes the dispute---the widening divide between rich and poor countries over the architecture of a global agreement--- to next year's talks. The current Kyoto commitments expire at the end of 2012, making the next UN conference the last practical opportunity to seal a new set of Kyoto commitments in the form of a global formal treaty through the UN process. The Kyoto protocol is the only existing legally binding treaty, but only demands cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from rich, industrialised nations. Kyoto excludes the big emerging economies of China, Brazil and India.

The US is going backwards on Obama's domestic green agenda. They will not be taking strong action to cut their emissions. They, and other developed nations such as Japan, use various tactics to wriggle out of taking strong action to cut their emissions.

The irony of the situation in Australia is that as temperatures become hotter--especially in the cities--air conditioning will become not a luxury but a life saver. Air conditioning runs on electricity, still provided largely by fossil fuel. The extremes of heat, and the consequent increase in urban air conditioning, are likely to make future heatwaves even more lethal.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 12, 2010

the press + democracy

In Let Us Pay at the London Review of Books John Lanchester addresses the problem faced by the newspaper industry as a result of the ongoing migration of readers and advertisers towards digital media.

He says that:

Its underlying problems are to do with the net: loss of circulation and ad revenue are both driven by the rise of new media. Its opportunities come from the net too: that huge new army of readers. The industry is no longer going off a cliff, but it is still on a downward slope, and unless something happens to stop it, costs per copy will continue to rise relative to sales, and eventually newspapers will either die or (more likely) be so hollowed out by cost-cutting that they exist as freesheets with a thin, non-functioning veneer of pretend journalism.

He acknowledges that the press has many flaws---eg., news is entertainment and entertainment is news; a pack mentality and the idea that only things which are being already covered in the media are worth covering; a general retreat from the principles of serious journalism, investigative journalism, and a horror of complicated ideas; amnesia; a default setting to knee-jerk populism.

However, we still need the press because the press is just about the only force which resists governments arrogating more power to themselves, and without the press our democracy would head the way that papers themselves risk heading, and become hollowed out, with the external apparatus of democratic machinery but without the informed electorate which the press helps create.

Lanchester adds that though the fact that newspapers are necessary does not mean that they will survive. He adds that, if a solution to this slow decline is going to be found, then it will be in the form of a market mechanism. No one has found it yet. The one on trial is the paywall mechanism, but few are willing to follow Murdoch down this route because the collapse in circulation and limited income stream.

He argues that their cost base will force them to junk their print editions and shift to digital only with a simple and easy method of payment so that readers can create an individualised newspaper.

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December 11, 2010

WikiLeaks + press freedom

We learn from WikiLeaks that the upbeat account of Rudd and Gillard about the Afghanistan war they constructed for the Australian public stands in stark contrast to their pessimistic private account of it going badly.

So we have a credibility gap that is deepened by the real reason for Australia's involvement in the war is to uphold the alliance with the US, and not to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven. The corporate media has gone along with the deceptions. They are a part of the political establishment that it is their duty to report.

It's a credibility gap based on spin about progress continually being made and Australia staying for ten years if need be to get the job done. Gillard, it seems, goes out of her way to assist the US. The Labor Right's modus operandi is to ingratiate itself with the Americans. Hence all the obedience training to ensure close fealty to those with geo-political power.

WikiLeaks is a challenge to the current power structure in liberal democracies. It is highlighting how this structure has been hollowed out through showing how networked power works.

This can be seen in their response to the WikiLeaks---impress the Americans by saying what they want to hear Gillard accusing Assange of acting illegally; McClelland asserting that obtaining classified information without authority is an offence under Australian law. No Australian laws have been broken, and the leaks come from an American database.

The inference is that the Gillard Government has little time for the freedom of the press--ie., those journalists who leak classified documents are criminals who should be jailed. The authoritarian undercurrent that runs through the ALP right surfaces; an undercurrent that situates the Gillard Government in opposition to its own left-wing constituency.

Andrew Wilkie, the Tasmanian Independent MP, nailed it when he said that Gillard has shown contempt for the rule of law, trashed the principle of free speech, and failed to stand up for Australian sovereignty by defaulting to the interests of the US ahead of those of an Australian citizen.

The name of the game is to please the Americans. Mark Latham had a phrase for this kind of behaviour: "a conga line of suckholes". The WikiLeaks cables remind us of the extraordinary demands that American officials now make of U.S. allies and those allies accommodate American demands out of self-interest,

Update
Glenn Beck from Fox News has his take on WikiLeaks:

The reality is that WikiLeaks is as only as effective as its media partners: they screen the cables, identify narrative threads, redact the names, and embarrass the parties involved.

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December 10, 2010

‘turn the boats back’

William Maley in 'Fear, Asylum, and Hansonism in Australian Politics' in Dialogue (vol, 29 No 2, 2010) says:

In the ranks of the general public, there may well be a sense that unauthorised arrivals by boat cause a policy problem because the people coming in are typically not refugees. Within the ranks of government, policy makers know that the opposite is the case. Unauthorised boat arrivals cause a policy problem because the people coming in are typically refugees...People smuggling is essentially a black market response to the attempts by states to prevent refugees from making asylum claims in the first place.

He adds that states are arenas of competing political interests and forces, and refugees may weigh far less heavily in leaders‘ minds than the voters who have the capacity to eject them from office.

Thus from April 2010, Afghan asylum applications were increasingly rejected not because the situation in Afghanistan had actually improved, but because it had been made crystal clear to primary decision makers that this was what their political masters wanted. Acceding to right wing populism has proved to be electorally rewarding--as we saw in the last federal election.

Maley adds that:

The abandonment of the 1951 Convention would not put an end to the problem of refugee flight. It would simply offer a pretext for shifting the burden still more onto poor countries, adjacent to regions of instability, that are already bearing the bulk of the global refugee burden as countries of first asylum. Rather than an assault on the Convention, what is required is leadership from key political figures; leadership directed at rebuilding fractured elite consensuses in favour of refugee protection

I see little hope of that. It is more likely that there will be further concessions to right wing populism, despite Australia being a nation of immigrants. Conservative politicians have become adept at fomenting and exploiting the popular (almost enculturated) fear of outsiders as an electoral weapon. Electorally, this strategy is very effective that Labor is running scared of an electorate energised by Opposition rhetoric.

It is fear of the Other (aliens) that has helped shape this nation since the 1850s blocked Chinese immigration at the height of the gold rushes. The desire to achieve uniform measures to control immigration (to exclude non-whites) was a central factor that drove the colonies to federate in 1901. Fear is the dark thread that weaves itself through the discourse around immigration and it manifests itself in the racist assaults on foreign (mostly Indian) students.

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December 9, 2010

WikiLeaks: secret diplomacy

Here are some good questions about the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable dump from Dan Gilmor, who is within the Berkman Center for Internet & Society community.

What is emerging strongly is the defence of diplomatic secrecy in international affairs in opposition to Assange's views about shifting US regime behaviour. Aaron Brady has a good analysis of Assange's view at zunguzungu. In contrast to this kind of nonsense in the Australian media, Brady starts from Assange's premise that authoritarian governments--among which he includes the U.S. and other major and semi-major world powers--are, at root, conspiracies. This allows Assange, ever the hacker, to put secrecy at the heart of his political philosophy.

This is a defence of diplomatic secrecy by a former US diplomat who was based in Indonesia during the Suharto regime. The heart of Scott Gilmour's argument is that what US diplomats do is work for human rights; that they use secret cables to do it; and that Wikileaks today is impeding the efforts of American diplomats to “make the world a little better.” It does so because it destroys the trust and reputations of many American diplomats who do good work.

A convincing rebuttal, which highlights why citizens need to know what their governments are doing in their name, is provided by Aaron Bady at zunguzungu.

The US did little to prevent the 24 years of institutionalized repression, torture, murder, and more torture and murder by the Suharto regime, reckoned that the Indonesian military could keep the peace in East Timor during the referendum for independence and opposed UN peacekeeping action in East Timor. The US military was behind Indonesia’s military which was behind the militia violence in Timor because Suharto was anti-communist.

So we need to treat the claims made by US diplomats about the significance of their information with skepticism. The inner nexus of power in Washington maintains an unbending commitment to the idea of the “new American century” and the status of the United States as the world's only military superpower. The diplomats work for an empire that kills innocent people to protect its global and geo-stratetgc interests. So they cover their tracks.

What we have learned from the WikiLeaks is that Australia's brutal realism about the US needing to contain China with force if necessary:

Calling himself "a brutal realist on China," Rudd argued for "multilateral engagement with bilateral vigor" -- integrating China effectively into the international community and allowing it to demonstrate greater responsibility, all while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.

This does not involve a realist analysis of what circumstances would that course of action be necessary, as opposed to helping to incorporate China into multilateral global institutions. As Hugh White points out Australia is not doing the hard geo-strategic thinking, even though it stands between China and the US.

Australia's foreign policy under Rudd appears to be accepting, working within, and endorsing the current American approach to China, which more or less guarantees contested and possibly hostile relations between Washington and Beijing in future because China will contest American hegemony in the Asia Pacific Region.

Yet power is shifting in this region towards China. As Clinton stated China is now the USA's banker. Australia's economic interests lie with China. That means Australia's national interests in the region are quite different to the global interests of the US.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:04 AM | Comments (24) | TrackBack

December 8, 2010

a divided and hierarchical system of schools

Julia Gillard has astutely sold the idea that improving educational outcomes improves productivity and is as essential to the national economic agenda as it is to the social agenda. Some of the steps in this improvement are a national curriculum, the My School website and the NAPLAN test.

The improvement is necessary because performance at the higher levels of achievement is static or declining and the persistent tail of low achievement, associated mostly with socio-economic disadvantage, is too long.

In Australia elite private schools boast gleaming new classrooms, libraries and sports facilities, while government schools are increasingly dilapidated. It's not that simple of course, because many independent (ie. private) schools actually receive the vast bulk of their funding from the taxpayer.In effect we have two public school systems: one with some hefty co-payments by parents, and an under-funded version run along traditional lines. What we call private schools are more accurately called government subsidised schools.

So much for the separation of church and state.

Behind this lies the very distinct and depressing social and academic gaps among schools, a product of geography and quasi-market ideology interspersed with official neglect. The effect is that Australia’s public schools are becoming “ safety net schools” only required to offer a “reasonable standard” of education. Australia has a funding system that sets up one system of schools to succeed and the other to struggle.

The growing social and academic division between our schools has been partly caused by the consistent (30 years) under-funding and undermining of our public schools. Instead of a divided and hierarchical system of schools, the local public schools especially should be funded so they become a real and active choice for all children.

Under a neo-liberal mode of governance we have an educational marketplace with its rhetoric of "parent choice" and "competition" were schools compete against each other by being seen as "better" than their competitors. In education markets the winners are those with the most resources; the losers are those with inadequate resources. So we have gated school compounds in some areas and ghettos in others. the neo-liberal rationale is that "sluggish" public schools in disadvantaged areas are forced to become innovative through direct competition with the private sector.

Instead of raising the education of all communities , especially in bringing up the bottom, public policy is creating inequality and division. Labor's commitment to social justice and equal opportunity is undercut by the failure to adequately support public schooling.

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December 7, 2010

WikiLeaks: pressure mounts

WikiLeaks continues the dump whilst the extra juridical attacks on Julian Assange and on WikiLeaks continue. The US, the defender of internet freedom and democratic governance, is doing all it can to stem the flow of this information. A compliant Australia, as a friend of the US, is doing everything it can to assist the US in its extra-judicial pursuit of WikiLeaks.

John Naughton in Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice in The Guardian say that this:

represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.....The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

The leaks expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates--especially over Afghanistan.

Though absolute transparency is not desirable or necessary, there has been too much secrecy and subterfuge in the name of diplomatic endeavour in the current system of governance with respect to Irq and Afghanistan. So a corrective towards transparency is a good idea.

Naughton adds that what WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out.

In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

The liberal democracies are opposed to the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere. When challenged they show their authoritarian side and the due process of the law be dammed. And yet, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Iran/Contra, the cruise missile attack on Sudan, Colin Powell's cooked-up testimony to the Security Council in 2002, how many of us are under that many illusions about the dark underbelly of U.S. foreign policy?

Update:
Glenn Greenward at Salon.com says:

Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them -- all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They've blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange's legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them "Terrorists" even though -- unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things -- neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.

For those politicians crying treason and death penalty on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange the term 'terrorist' simply means someone impedes or defies the will of the U.S. Government with any degree of efficacy. The mainstream US media rolls over, despite the US's standard practice of CIA black sites, rendition, the torture regime, denial of habeas corpus, drones, assassinations, private mercenary forces, etc in defending its imperial interests. The media outlets appear to be devoted to serving, protecting and venerating US government authorities, turn a blind eye to secret governance and appear to do little to challenge the 'eradicate Assange' calls.

It is beginning to look as if the United States cannot be both a republic and an empire. At the moment it is acting like a wounded bear confronted by its demise as the global superpower. This empire may well unravel with unholy speed.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:18 AM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

December 6, 2010

Swan: “banking competition”

Wayne Swan will soon make public his “banking competition” package to address the problem of the "too-big-to-fail" banking cartel in the context of the politics of "populist" bank basing", a Senate banking inquiry, and probability that they’re going to be exempted from the tougher capital rules that Basel III will impose on the 25 most ‘systematically important’ banks in the world.

Early leaks to the press suggest that Swan's “banking competition” package:

(1) will give assistance to the smaller banks, building societies and credit unions, most likely by extending a government guarantee to their borrowings and also by guaranteeing their deposits even after a government guarantee on all deposits expires late next year.

(2) ensure consumers get better information at the point of sale, with mortgage and credit card providers required to present accurate information as to the likely costs.

(3) give a greater role to the ACCC to oversee the banks, to ensure that their fees are justified by costs and to regulate ‘‘price signalling’’ by the banks.

The problem here is that better informed and empowered consumers does not lead to "shopping around" because the banking cartel is able to because put in place impediments to those who want to move their business elsewhere. So much for competition.

We still have the problems left over the global financial crisis-the banks are still not lending to small business and property development.

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December 5, 2010

Murdoch + iNewspaper

Emily Bell on Murdoch's iPad experiment in The Guardian refers to Murdoch's view that iPads are "game-changers" and his alliance with Steve Jobs of Apple to launch The Daily, a tablet-only paper with "tabloid sensibilities and newspaper intelligence" in the US. I interpret that shift to infotainment as a recognition of the threat that once advertising moves online then moving newsprint around can never make a profit.

Bell says that:

Murdoch like so many is caught between wanting revenues to reach the levels they have for packaged print products, and to retain some influence through publishing news products. The iPad is seen as being very appealing by the non-digital for a couple of reasons. The first is that you surrender control only to Steve Jobs, not the rest of the internet... The second is that you have a slightly more certain fix on revenues. But only slightly.

The question is do we want this? Is Murdoch's content information that we don't need? I don't think that this is the future. For instance I don't need Murdoch's copntent like I need the Lightroom processing software for my photography. I'll pay for the latter not the former.

As Bill Thompson points out at Open Democracy print is being replaced by digital distribution and network-based forms of expression are taking over its role as the main conduit for cultural development and the dissemination of ideas, offering to do more with less, turning the fixed text into an an active document and moving us from a one-way model of publishing to a world that can take full advantage of rich complexity of interaction and social media.

Thompson goes on to say that:

However protracted the decline [of newspapers and print media] it is happening, and it is clear that printed newspapers and magazines and broadcast television and radio have peaked as our primary tools for sharing news and opinion, that books are already being superseded when it comes to the heavy lifting of spreading and reinforcing ideas, and that interactive services based on easy online publishing, social media and the facilitation of physical propinquity are replacing pulp-based texts and linearly-scheduled programmes as the main ways in which we will acquire our knowledge of those things we collectively believe to be true about the world - the ‘news’.

We don't really need newspapers in their printed form---The Times has stopped being a newspaper when it went behind a paywall, because it is no longer generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community. As Clay Shirkey points out The Times is becoming the online newsletter of the UK’s conservative political party.

In the context of Murdoch's intense dislike of the open internet we need journalism as disclosure--as Wikileaks is currently doing-- and good and diverse interpretation of events. Murdoch's success in media leads to media dominance (his motivation is money and power: power and money) becomes a problem for democracy, and this is more important than Murdoch's bottom line.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:12 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 4, 2010

a republic of learning

In Lecture 2: A Lectern in a Dusty Room, the second lecture in his 2010 Boyer Lectures, Glynn Davis raises the question of the relevance of the traditional university. He does by quoting from William Clark in his Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University:

Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience. You're in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room ... lecturing to a roomful of teenagers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones; '... Suddenly, you find yourself wondering ... how you can possibly be doing this. Why, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year ... These activities seem both bizarre and disconnected, from one another and from modern life...'.

Davis' response is that there are reasons to get together on a campus, even to wear funny gowns. He says that we need the firsthand experience of working with greater teachers, of seeing how they approach knowledge, how 'learning as doing' informs their own scholarship.

Could that not be done through the group discussion in a tutorial format that is based on selected readings opposed to the lecture? Surely the lecture is dead in a digital age.

Davis evades the issue raised by Clarke to defend the bricks and mortar university as opposed to the virtual one.

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December 3, 2010

Cancún climate summit

There is not that much being said about the UN Cancún climate summit in the Australian mainstream media. So I have turned elsewhere to see what is going on.

Tim Yeo in Cancún climate summit: Let's look beyond carbon in The Guardian says that:

The perfect outcome would be a binding agreement to drastically reduce emissions – reflecting what the science tells us we need to do to avoid disaster – with all nations ending up with a fair share of rights to the atmosphere.The political reality post-Copenhagen, however, means this just isn't going to happen....It's unlikely that countries will sign up to binding limits on carbon dioxide unless growth can be decoupled from the use of fossil fuels.

The problem we face is simple. Once the planet warms to the point where environmental changes that further add to warming feed off each other, it becomes almost meaningless to specify just how much warmer the planet may get. You've toppled the first domino and it becomes virtually impossible to stop the following chain of events. So the idea is to stop the first domino falling---to avoid crossing the 2C threshold.

It ain't going to happen is it? Even though 2010 is on course to be the hottest year on record and the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1996.

We are on the pathway to a 4C temperature rise by 2060. As John Vidal says:

UN research shows that the pledges and promises made last year by 80 countries to reduce climate change emissions fall well short of what is needed to hold the global temperature rise to 2C and avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

So why not stop the present subsidies of fossil fuels and use the money to reduce emissions? Well, we have the powerful counter-movement, led by corporate-funded thinktanks, that has waged war on green policies. This states that technology can solve all political and economic problems--eg., nuclear power, GM crops and geoengineering.

So the issue is about power--corporate power that has captured the governments of nation states, such as the US and Australia.

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December 2, 2010

Health reform: states reneg?

National health reform has become more complex with the new Baillieu Government in Victoria threatening to back out of the COaG deal the Rudd/Gillard Government had signed with the states. This involved the states handing back one-third of their state’s GST revenue in return for increased funding and a guarantee that the Commonwealth will fund 60 per cent of hospital costs. Apparently the NSW Liberals threaten to follow the Baillieu Government.

I'm unsure of the reason for this, given the spiralling costs of running the public hospital system, or what the proposed alternative would be. I would have thought that the core strategy for the Liberal states (WA, Victoria, NSW) is to obtain real growth in federal funding for the public hospital systems over the next decade. This position assumes that the Liberal states want to maintain the Medicare policy of universal access to comprehensive public hospital services (that is their stated policy position).

Jeremy Sammut, a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, thinks otherwise in his Ridicule the prescription to induce health reform at the ABC's Unleashed. He radically questions the policy consensus on the long-term sustainability and bipartisan political desirability of Medicare.

He says that we need to:

go back to first principles and admit the original error which, of course, was the decision to establish a government-run health system in the first place....Hospital care needs to be treated like any other good the community desires. It needs to be purchased by or on behalf of patients from providers who compete to deliver these services at the efficient cost of production.The health fund an individual joins to insure themselves against the risk of serious illness should be responsible for doing the purchasing. Each fund should be free to purchase services from the public or privately-owned facility that is able to deliver the best quality care at the best price. Artificial restrictions on hospital bed numbers would not exist in such a system in which the supply of hospital care was demand-driven.

What is necessary is real structural health reform--the key is not health delivery but health insurance not health delivery. To achieve it, Sammut says, the myth of ‘free’ hospital care needs to be busted. We know there is not enough money in the economy for governments to pay for all the hospital care required each year. Hence the need to restrict or ration access to hospital care.

We therefore need to fund hospital treatment overtime by paying for insurance premiums. Medicare should be scrapped and the ‘right’ to taxpayer-funded health care replaced with a health voucher. Each Australian would use their taxpayer-funded voucher to purchase private health insurance.

Genuine health reform is dumping social democracy's Medicare, that is premised on health care as a core government service and responsibility, and embracing the neo-liberal's free market profit driven approach to privatised health care.

An alternative approach going back to first principles is to rethink the way that health care is reduced to hospital or emergency care. The costs of hospital care can be reduced by keeping people out of hospital by investing in preventative primary care, so that people do not need to end up in emergency departments of hospitals. That too is structural reform.

In arguing for his market-based approach Sammut neglects to mention that it is the market failure in health care that requires government intervention in the form of Medicare. Nor does Sammut mention the large public subsidy of the private health funds through the mechanism of the private health insurance rebate. This was introduced by the Howard Government to ensure a consumer shift to private health insurance to help the health insurance industry stay afloat.

The problem the Gillard Government faces is that Labor under the previous Rudd/Gillard government got sidetracked in its reform of the health system by placing the emphasis on the funding of hospitals; and away from strengthening the relationship between preventive care and hospital care. Sidetracked because from federal Labor's perspective it is the relative isolation of the general practitioners that they fund from the rest of the system needs to be addressed. Federal Labor had proposed to do this with a national network of primary health care organisations to be known as Medicare Locals.

Consequently, the current debate on national health reform has been reduced to one about hospital funding, not better health care through developing a more functional nexus between hospital and community health and primary care services.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:39 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

December 1, 2010

WikiLeaks: embassy cables dump

The full diplomatic archive of a quarter of a million documents known as the WikiLeaks embassy cablesfrom the Siprnet database will be released in dribs and drabs over the coming months. The Americans are none too happy about the diplomatic cable dump judging from their assertions that national security will be compromised, that lives will be lost and that the cause of human rights will be set back.

Then again after the last dump, the White House claimed that Julian Assange had blood on his hands.There was no evidence that was the case. Much of the "harm" is embarrassment and the highlighting of inconvenient truths. As Heather Brooke points out in The Guardian much of the outrage about WikiLeaks is not over the content of the leaks but from the audacity of breaching previously inviolable strongholds of authority.

This dump has resulted in Interpol issuing a wanted notice for Julian Assange. The Republicans want Assange hunted down and possibly killed (ie., executed while resisting arrest. Wikileaks itself must be destroyed as it is a terrorist organization. They're furiously waving the flag of treason.

Unfortunately, Assange, who is an Australian national not living in the U.S. The Republicans and the comedy show at Fox News (Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck) are using Wikileaks to attack the Obama administration.

The Australian Government, however, is doing its bit: they've placed Assange under investigation by the federal police; whilst the Wikileaks dump is now subject to a whole of government investigation. This suggests that the Gillard Government does not accept that transparency and accountability in government and international institutions are a good thing; or that there is a genuine public interest in knowing the things the cables mention.

What is interesting about the Wikileaks' dumps (the Afghanistan and Iraq war reports plus the diplomatic cable dump) is that the elite news organizations in the Internet age — in this case, The Guardian, NYT and Der Spiege etc ---are conduits of material originally obtained not by their own investigative journalists but by others, such as WikiLeaks. The big papers wouldn’t have the material without WikiLeaks.

What we have is collaboration by major media organizations across international borders both in agreeing to work together in publishing the material and in agreeing what material should be kept out. It is a new kind of global investigative journalism.

Jay Rosen observes:

In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.

Today, we find that the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors.

Update
We can infer from this shift in power that these leaks indicate that we should be politicians speak of a threat to "national security", as this can be a fig leaf to cover up dirty deeds. We haven't learnt much re the content so far. Saudi Arabia urges US to attack Iran to stop its nuclear programme; Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al-Qaida; China is willing to accept Korean reunification; Pakistan is under the American hammer; that US military forces are indeed secretly operating on Pakistan's territory.

We learn that Pakistan takes billions of dollars in American aid, most of it military, and it arms and supports the Taliban and other violently anti-American groups. So both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are American allies who actively support America's enemies.

Update 2
We learn on day 5 of the leaks that Afghanistan is a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm. Well, that confirms the common view that predatory corruption, fueled by a booming illicit narcotics industry, is rampant at every level of Afghan society. This corrupt government has made into a cornerstone of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan by the US. Australia goes along as usual in covering up the stench of the corruption.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:43 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack