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June 28, 2013
live by the sword, die by the sword
History will be kind to Gillard once the partisan commentary fades. People will remember Gillard when they've forgotten about the others. Some will see her leadership as prime minister in terms of a political tragedy. Others will be more sympathetic.
It will become increasingly difficult to downplay Gillard's body of reform (the carbon price, the NDIS, the Murray-Darling agreement, aged care and the Gonski reforms) in the teeth of being constantly undermined and disparaged, publicly mocked and belittled by a conservative patriarchal culture that directed its attacks at her appearance and reduced her personhood to body parts. The theme was that “women are wrecking the joint" or that woman leaders are not legitimate.
Alan Moir
As Anne Summers observes:
most of the commentary about Julia Gillard, including from some of her parliamentary colleagues, gives the impression that she is a transitory and insignificant figure whose grasp on the levers of power is tenuous, who is incompetent at governing and whose very tenure is illegitimate.
Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, was a leader who got the above reforms through by toughing it out in the face of extraordinary political adversity, a concerted campaign against her by the Murdoch press and some shock jocks to deny her legitimacy, and a personal invective that deployed a pathological sexism as weapon.
What may well happen is that Julia Gillard's legislative legacy and great record of reform (few ever mention the Murray-Darling agreement by the way) will probably be deleted from the political memory of the Labor Party by the men now in control. Gillard had offered a hollowed-out ALP a political future beyond its deadening labourism.
It is not clear that a post-Gillard ALP --starting with Rudd---will have the political nous to grasp it and build on it in order to reinvent itself as a social democracy in a globalised economy. So far they only see themselves as just trying to protect Gillard's reform legacy.
Gillard's picture of the political future was about social justice not the renewal of democracy that would address the expressions of contemporary voter cynicism and its lack of political literacy in the broad electorate. So we are left with a shallow and sensationalist media which continues to purvey old shibboleths as folk wisdom, the underlying message being that all politics is inherently corrupt. Politics is a uniquely dirty pursuit largely confined to political parties run by ruthless scoundrels
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June 27, 2013
too little too late?
The Labor caucus has ended the civil war between Gillard and Rudd by dumping Gillard and going with Rudd in the hope that he can avert the electoral disaster the polls consistently forecast. It was the prospect of both losing more than 30 seats in the House of Representatives and of Abbott winning control of the Senate that pushed the Gillard loyalists to a reluctant embrace with a man they neither liked nor trusted.
The preconditions for Labor to avert electoral disaster requires re-uniting a fractured party, re-connecting with a hostile electorate and countering the powerful and relentless body blows from the LNP's scare campaign. Since it has to be done in a couple of months, it is probably too little too late. What we are seeing is the death throes of the Labor government. The bloodletting will take place after the election.
David Rowe
Maybe the ugly sexism that has been directed at Gillard will subside with all the Labor carnage and wreckage. Maybe Australians will begin to acknowledge that the 43rd Parliament has been a successful working Parliament.
Maybe there will also be some acknowledgement that the Rudd Gillard government successfully navigated the global financial crisis and that the Gillard Government, despite its neo-liberal mode of governance, has also been a reformist centre-left government (eg., broadband access, disability support education, carbon pricing and protecting the environment).
What has been made clear from these events is that the political reporting and commentary on the Gillard Government and the Rudd-Gillard leadership contest indicates that the role of the Canberra Media Gallery has been one of actively shaping events.
This is done by the mechanism of:
the various factional players align themselves with various pundits and journalists, feeding them strategic information to pursue private agendas. Indeed, the distinction between political players and political pundits is now thinner than ever before, as media insiders and political insiders work in very similar ways.
The Gallery, of course denies this, by saying that they are merely reporting on events.
The denial is not persuasive. This is because we see the priorities and practices of commercial media, the consistent manipulation of images and quotes to fit a predetermined narrative, the ability to manufacture drama out of the tiniest sliver of on-camera tension, their indifference to the policy debate, the concentration on polls, of personalities, and the horse race narrative of Julia versus Kevin, the complete and utter disregard for truth or accurate representation and the construction of the public as consumers not citizens.
If these political events highlight how the media has effectively abandoned its role as the fourth estate, then they also show that the ALP's labourist kind of social democratic party with its deeply conservative trade union bureaucracy has little left to offer. It is pretty close to exhausted: the trade union base has withered; the decline in membership is dramatic; and it has lost a large chunk of its electoral Left flank to the Greens and its right flank to the Coalition. It increasingly has to rely ever more on preferences.
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June 26, 2013
looking back on the 43rd Parliament
The face of Australian politics is starting to change. A new turn is dawning, given that Labor is currently expected to retain between 30 and 40 lower house seats after the 2013 election.
People are starting to look back and to judge the last decade. In his Along with voters, Labor lost the moral high ground at The Drum Greg Jericho says:
When we look back on the 43rd Parliament - if, as the polls suggest, the ALP is flogged at the election - it will mostly be regarded as a failure.
Why so? Because many will find fault with the Government of this Parliament by looking to Newstart and the single parent allowance and to asylum seekers.
Jericho grants the positives: putting a price on carbon; the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and a new funding model for schools. But, in his judgement, these don't outweigh the the consequences of the negative policies--we could add that the position of many indigenous communities remains massively disadvantaged and public education became increasingly residual---which have resulted in the ALP losing any moral high ground it may have once had.
One point of difference with Jericho is that though I see the ALP through rose tinted glasses. The ALP is a labourist version of a social democrat party whose ethos is to civilize capitalism-- today this civilizing ethos combines a globalised economy with a well-developed structure of social protection.
I do not consider it as having any high moral ground. The Greens do, not the ALP. It's wishful thinking to think otherwise given that the ALP's organizational structure is that of a political machine that is constructed from disparate and antagonistic factions banding together for mutual profit and conditional support to defend their power base. The ALP may be part of a social democrat tradition, but it is not a democratic party. Nor is it a mass membership party.
Another point of difference with Jericho is with his claim that Labor is solely responsible for the mess around the asylum seekers. This is more the failure of the parliament, in 2012 to reach a consensus to enact some kind of measures to stop refugee drownings at sea – something for which all politicians should be responsible. Some kind of consensus is a precondition for a regional solution, which is the only way to address this complex issue of global movement of peoples.
Another point of difference is that I accept that the ALP has embraced a neo-liberal mode of governance with its governance of the self in the new market order.
Update
It's also now a looking back on the Gillard Government, given that the ALP caucus voted 57-45 to install Kevin Rudd as leader of the Labor Party.
There is great turmoil in ALP ranks. Craig Emerson, Joe Ludwig Stephen Conroy, the Communications Minister and the government’s senate leader, Greg Combet and Peter Garrett have quit the cabinet. Wayne Swan has resigned as deputy prime minister and quite the cabinet whilst Anthony Albanese becomes the new deputy prime minister.
The immediate question is whether Abbott move for a vote of no confidence in the Rudd Government in the House of Representatives tomorrow? Does Rudd have the numbers with the cross benchers to defeat it? If he does , then Rudd would be able to determine the date of the election and would not necessarily have to run to the polls. Rudd will be a lame duck, caretaker prime minister whose job will be to save as many Labor seats as he can. Rudd will not save Labor from defeat.
Can Rudd lead Labor to a narrow loss even though you can’t expect people to vote for you to run the country if you can’t run yourself?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:05 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
June 24, 2013
the energy transitions under way
Big mining doesn't agree that something--- housing investment and bigger export volumes?---will have to replace mining investment as an economic driver as the boom winds back. Big Mining holds that the mining industry saved Australia from the global financial crisis, that mining is Australia's destiny and Northeren Australia is the new frontier.
The Abbott-led Coalition agrees. The reason is that the international demand for rocks and coal is inexhaustible as the growing middle classes of emerging superpowers such as India and China require more electricity to power their new gadgets and appliances.
David Pope
The problem with the above mining scenario is that energy efficiency and renewable energy are the key drivers to address the challenge of climate change and the goal of reducing emissions; and secondly, India and China are turning to renewables because it is cheaper than electricity from the predominantly coal-fired grid.
This reduced demand from India and China reduces the price of coal and, this in turn, raises the issue of the economic viability of the giant coal projects proposed for Queensland’s Galilee Basin--ie., the prices of coal would fall below that required to obtain a satisfactory return on investment in the mega mines. Carbon emissions from coal consumption are becoming a major constraint on its future.
This kind of energy transition undercuts the claims of the Australian Coal Association and the Minerals Council that there are no viable energy alternatives to coal. What the old order will do is to continue to dedicate vast resources to successfully preventing the introduction of sensible climate change policy in Australia. The Coalition will be captured.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 22, 2013
the surveillance state
The ongoing disclosures about the secret surveillance programs on the citizens of western democracies indicate that the surveillance programs are far more extensive than was first realized. The Australian government has been building a state-of-the art, secret data storage facility just outside Canberra to enable intelligence agencies to deal with a ''data deluge'' siphoned from the internet and global telecommunications networks.
Steve Bell
We now learn, courtesy of the documents shown to The Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the spy agencies of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information.
The plan is codenamed MTI, or Mastering the Internet – and it aims to collect a significant amount of the world's communications.
This access to the internet is codenamed Tempora, and it is different from Prism in which the spy agencies secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet. Henry Porter points out that:
It is an alarming fact that over the last two weeks, as details of Prism and the covert acquisition of phone records have been laid bare, politician after politician, on both sides of the Atlantic and from both sides of the left-right divide, has argued that the loss of a little liberty is a small sacrifice to make for security. Most appreciate that no such transaction exists in the real world, for the very reason that those making the argument stand to gain so much from public acquiescence. This is about the unscrutinised power of a deep state and its burgeoning influence on society.
The fear created around the national security state's terrorism agenda has been used to elaborate a huge system of espionage and domestic surveillance. The justification is that citizens can afford to lose a little liberty to make the world safer.
The other line is that the innocent have nothing to fear from disclosure, Cory Doctorow, in response , says that we should care about privacy because:
if the data says you've done something wrong, then the person reading the data will interpret everything else you do through that light....Once a computer ascribes suspiciousness to someone, everything else in that person's life becomes sinister and inexplicable.
What we are witnessing is the the metamorphosis of our democracies into national security states in which the prerogatives of security authorities trump every other consideration and in which critical or sceptical appraisal of them is ruled out of court.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:12 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
June 20, 2013
the politics of the welfare state
In the second part of his interview on The Conversation Ken Henry raises the issue of the Intergenerational Reports in the context of raising the GST.
The Grattan Institute's Budget Pressures on Australian Governments confirms what Henry says about the federal government and the states and territories could face a combined annual deficit. So we have the imperative of making fiscal responsibility at the heart of public policy.
Henry says:
Every one of those intergenerational reports pointed to the impact on budget, well it was the commonwealth budget but the state budgets are effected as well, the impact of population aging. And what those reports identified was an emerging funding gap over a 40-year period of close to more than five percentage points of gross domestic product. At the moment I think we’ve got a revenue to GDP share at the commonwealth level in Australia, I think it’s 22.5%, something of that order.
Just in order to address the budgetary impacts of an aging population, unless we can find some other way of supporting the aging population, for example, a way of growing the economy faster so we don’t have to increase tax rates in order to get more revenue, we’ve just got a bigger tax base because the economy is growing faster due to productivity reforms and through reforms to participation.
Henry adds:
If we can do that, great, but if we can’t do that then we know and these Intergenerational reports have been saying it for more than 10 years now, we’re going to have to find another five percentage points of GDP in the form of government revenue. We’re going to have to lift average tax rates by five percentage points, now which tax bases would you be targeting if that was your job?
Another scenario not canvassed in the interview is to change the welfare state. This is surprising given the Coalition's approach to short-term austerity to ensure deficit reduction.
Peter Whiteford points out that:
Overall, the Australian welfare state performs two main functions – redistribution between rich and poor (the Robin Hood function) and insurance and consumption smoothing (the “piggy‐bank” function). In Australia we tend to focus on the idea that the welfare state should mainly be about redistribution to the poor, which is why we focus so much on concerns about middle-class welfare.
The standard way of reigning in the costs of the welfare state in Australia is increased mean testing to tighten up the eligibility for benefits thereby doing away with universalism.
Another way is to a step back towards a “contributory principle”—the notion that the benefits you get are at least partly related to what you pay whilst protecting the people who are really in need—not least those who may never be able to “contribute.” This way involves a welfare system where contribution played at least a slightly larger part than it does now.
This introduces for a centre-left government with a tight fiscal mandate the dilemma between bolstering the contributory principle of the welfare state and the role of the welfare state as a vehicle of redistribution.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:47 PM | TrackBack
June 19, 2013
Ken Henry on Australia's economic future
There's an interview with Ken Henry, the former Treasury Secretary, at The Conversation about Australia's economic future. In part I of the interview Henry says that the emergence of China as a major economic power has to be recognised as the most spectacular economic shock ever, to hit the world and that Australia needs to secure its place in the Asian Century.
There are two prongs to Henry's argument with respect to Australia's economic future after the mining boom. The first is selling quality products to the Asian middle class:
Today, there are something like 60 million people in China that could be regarded as middle-class people....In 15 years time, Asia will have 3.2 billion middle class consumers. The Australian market... will be less than 1% of the Asian middle class consumer market. Those business that are likely, those Australian business that are likely to be successful in the Asian century are those that have already figured this out and are already repositioning their businesses in order to market product, whether it’s goods or services, to that 3.2 billion middle class consumers in the Asian region.....How do you get a tiny percentage of that market? What’s the best ingredient for success? It’s quality. Quite simply, it’s quality.
The Chinese middle class want to buy very high-grade stuff Henry adds, And they actually see Australia as a supplier of high-grade stuff. It’s not just wine but also design and architectural services. They see Australia as being a supplier of high-grade stuff.
In part 2 of the interview Henry says that the second prong is to become part of the global supply chain:
The trick for business success, and I’ve seen this with Australian businesses operating in Asia....What they are doing is, they are developing strategies that will see them become integral parts of regional, and in some cases, global supply chains.They’re identifying niche market opportunities in which Australian expertise is acknowledged and Australian expertise is highly valued.
The level of the currency is a consideration, but you know in the list of things that really matter in executing that strategy, the level of the dollar might be number five, it’s certainly not number one.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 18, 2013
The Australian: more nonsense
An editorial in The Australian--entitled Leadership panic ignores Labor's policy challenges--- says that Labor's only hope is to rediscover the mainstream of Australian politics. It must provide sound, stable and responsible government, just as it did, for the most part, during the Hawke-Keating government.
David Pope
What then is sound, stable and responsible government? The editorialist is only too happy to say. What voters will want from Rudd, should he return, is a detailed plan of action to to fix Labor's many policy failures and to set a new policy course for a third term. What then is the plan? Well Rudd:
must show how he could stop the boats in order to save lives and to address concerns in the community. He should consider the policy of turning or towing back boats to ports of origin and reinstating temporary protection visas. He should abolish the carbon tax and move to a floating price mechanism that will better align Australia with carbon price mechanisms abroad. He will need to rebuild relations with business. He should revisit the Gonski school education reforms. There is no merit in rushing to implement a flawed plan from which less than half the nation's school students will benefit. Gonski should be more than a financial wedge against the opposition. It could become a significant reform agenda but it needs national support. It must focus more on curriculum, lifting teaching standards and giving schools greater autonomy.
These are Liberal Party policies. So sound, stable and responsible government is a Government that has a Liberal Party plan of action.
Why? Because mainstream Australia is not Labor. It is Liberal. Labor should be Liberal ,if it wants to provide sound, stable and responsible government, is the argument. It's not much of an argument is it.
The scenario is underpinning this is even more fantasy like---it is Kevin Rudd emerging like a butterfly from the chrysalis of his former disgrace and humiliation to take us all back to the paradise The Australian has planned for Australia.
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June 17, 2013
its the dead hand of NSW Labor
Sadly for the ALP, the current leadership tension, which is fuelled by a hostile media's beatup for click bait and has led to the current disunity within the ALP, is about personalities, not policies. It's about a different face not different policies. Period.
David Rowe
Most of the noise and heat is coming from the toxic, right wing NSW branch of the Labor Party. This is the branch that fostered a hardy and virulent form of political corruption, pioneered the revolving leadership syndrome, and nurtured politicians like Eddie Obeid and Ian MacDonald.
The sad truth is that a majority of the Australian electorate reject the reformist policies of the Rudd/Gillard Government and desire a return to the happy Howard days promised by the conservative restoration.
The majority will vote for the roll back of the reforms, the politics of austerity, and the killing off of renewable energy in September. Unemployment will rise and Australia will not become a leading digital economy by 2020 because it will remain the Australia mining and agriculture.
This is an Australia that turns its back on securing a place in the global high tech economy. High-tech industries along with the research, development and innovation, is what other countries do. For this Australia economic growth will be driven by a large expansion of coal and gas resource development.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:20 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
June 15, 2013
The Canberra Press Gallery
This is a reasonable interpretation of the Canberra Press Gallery at work:
Alan Moir
It's what they do best, other than recycling media release or the relaying the political whisperings when acting in their self-appointed roles as political players. They are, by and large large, hostile to all that policy stuff. It is fear and loathing that sells newspapers these days.
It has taken the Gallery a long time to acknowledge the misogyny and public sexism that is being used by the conservative movement to attack Gillard the person. They've known about it from the beginning but they have deemed it to be unworthy of political consideration. Few have taken a stand against it or even called it for what it is-- a deliberate strategy by the conservatives to use sexism to undermine the legitimacy of Gillard as Prime Minister.
Their default position has been to deny that the misogyny and public sexism is relevant to Australia's political life other than a desperate Gillard playing the gender card.
This is also the position of News Ltd and the AFR. Its weekend editorial, Distracted by the sexism sideshow, says that Gillard's blue ties speech was a desperate diversion born out of the Prime Minister's fire political outlook. It acknowledges the sexismin the body politic --not the misogyny though --and then says:
Labor's problems is its economic and jobs a narrative is now being exposed by its mismanagement of the mining boom. Rather than spreading the benefits of the boom, there is nothing left in its budget to pay for Ms Gillard's grand spending programs for schools and disability services. She and Mr Swan have no rhetoric to deal with Australia's high cost base which is forcing job shedding through Labor's traditional heartland and which must be an urgent policy priority for an Abbott Government. This vacuum has prompter Ms Gillard's wild diversions into issues such as abortion and misogyny and encouraged the distast6eful depths of gender culture to s rise to the surface of political debate.
The high cost is code for the high Australian dollar which is the result of the play of market forces which the AFR supports, along with the free flow of capital. If you accept the role of the deregultaed market as the AFR does, then you accept floating exchange rates.
The high Australian dollar, which has been causing grief to the manufacturing industry, was the consequence of the mining boom and Australia's strong economic position vis-a-vis the US and Europe.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:39 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
June 14, 2013
Syria: it's getting complicated
It seems that what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule of the Assad Regime in Syria in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region.
This undercuts the conventional view in the West that Bashar al-Assad’s government would fall any day and that the end was just round the corner, given that Assad’s regime was on its last legs.
Martin Rowson
Patrick Cockburn in a column in the London Review of Books says that:
Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China v. the West.
Syria is being torn apart by the conflict as the sectarian tensions are tearing the region apart.
For the US the policy is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible. For the low price of aiding and arming the rebels, the U.S. preoccupies all of its adversaries in the Middle East.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 13, 2013
where to now?
Tom Conley in his column Revisiting the banana republic and other familiar destinations at The Conversation highlights how Keating's argument against the resources as saviour view of long-term Australian prosperity was overpowered by the resources boom caused by China's economic development.
Australia has been lucky to be in a position to take advantage of China’s industrialisation and recent Asian economic exceptionalism in the face of a slow American recovery and continuing European crisis. Conley says:
China changed everything. Its voracious appetite for resources pumped up the prices Australia received for its exports – particularly coal and iron ore. Australians promptly forgot the warnings of the past, as resource wealth became the new reality masquerading as a permanent change...This boom has now peaked and Australia must now find new sources of growth.
He adds that with increased global supply and lower prices, it is likely that Australians will start worrying about Australia's dependence on resources once again. Any downturn in China and other Asian economies will now negatively affect Australia.
Where to now then? How can Australia wean itself off its reliance on resources? Conley doesn't say. All he say is that:
Australia’s historical vulnerability to declines in international resources demand is about to re-emerge, which will make economic management a difficult task after the September election.Things have been tough for the Rudd and Gillard governments, but they will be even tougher for an Abbott government constrained by their rhetoric of the dangers of public debt. Labor was helped by the investment revitalisation of the Chinese economy, but should they win the election, the Coalition will come into office at a time of Chinese economic consolidation and rebalancing.
He makes reference to the 1980s commentary about the end of the industrial revolution and touting the beginning of the information age, but says nothing about whether this would help Australia wean itself off its reliance on resources .
The great dream of Australian economic policy-makers is that the eventual rebalancing of the Chinese economy away from investment and exports towards consumption will boost Australian exports of services, agricultural products and advanced manufacturing. Fingers crossed then because China has a very difficult adjustment ahead of it.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 12, 2013
broken dreams
One of the significant benefits of the Gillard Government's Gonski reforms is that it is a step that begins to address the future of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Young Australians, especially those not from middle-class backgrounds, are having a pretty hard time. The labour market prospects for young people without skills and qualifications is likely to remain bleak, especially with the slowing of economic growth and the decline of manufacturing.
If you’re poor, young and white with low educational qualifications then a future of unemployment and living on welfare beckons. This is especially the case if you happen to live in an area marked by economic decline, poor schools and employers uninterested in developing the skills of young people in low-paid jobs.
Improving school education by making the funding more equitable to improve the skills and qualifications is a better policy approach than that of the those of the “flag, faith and family” social conservatism who point the finger at immigration as the cause of the Australian turning sour for the unskilled, white working class.
They tend to argue that low-skilled immigrants have taken jobs from unskilled natives, leaving them languishing on benefits; and that high-skilled immigration reduces both the incentives and opportunities for ambitious and talented natives (suburban aspirationals) to move up the mobility ladder.
The possibility of a long-term exclusion of Labor from government means that the Coalition is evolving into a Little Australianer grouping that favours Fortress Australia with its distorted version of what it is to be Australian; a version that will favour the funding of private schools at the expense of poor public ones and the wind back the commonwealth's spending on health and education
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 11, 2013
surveillance in a digital world
We now live in a world where electronic networking has penetrated into part of people's lives to the extent that we now talk in terms of the physical and virtual worlds. We are just as concerned about our personal identity and privacy in a networked world as we are about the corporate power of the global internet giants.
LJS photography/Alamy
John Naughton in his column, To the internet giants, you're not a customer. You're just another user in The Guardian, spells out the adage that if the service is free, then its users are its product. He says that when the history of our time comes to be written, people will marvel at the way that billions of people were seduced into the kind of one-sided agreements they have struck with outfits such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple.
In the case of Facebook, the historical analogy that comes immediately to mind is sharecropping – the agricultural system in which a landowner allowed tenants to use his land in return for a share of the crops produced on it and which was once a staple of the southern states of the US. Its virtual equivalent is the Facebook system: a billion people till Master Zuckerberg's land, creating all the content that is then harvested by him and his advertiser buddies. The only difference is that on Facebook the sharecroppers don't get any share of the proceeds. They're just croppers.
He adds that the really weird bit is that the croppers are absurdly pleased with their lot.
They get to post photographs of themselves drunk, sober, recumbent and upside-down. They get to "Like" their friends' jokes and status updates and to organise parties and social events without having to use obsolete media such as email. And in the process they "pay" for this entertainment with their privacy and their personal data, apparently without batting an eyelid. We users have signed agreements that require us to accept all kinds of conditions imposed by us, whilst explicitly exempting the internet giants from any obligations whatsoever.
The internet giants are not alone in the surveillance of citizens. In our networked world the rapid technological change now permits clandestine surveillance (electronic snooping ) on a massive and Orwellian scale, whilst the legal safeguards and political oversight is lagging behind. The security state is now saying that a government can legitimately spy on its own people on the grounds that it is trying to protect them from threats of terrorism. As Clay Shirky points out with respect to the Obama Administration the result is that:
the distinction between gathering information on particular targets of investigation and members of the general public has collapsed, while the loophole for gathering "incidental" information has expanded so broadly as to allow for wholesale acquisition and storage of electronic communications of any person anywhere, forever.
The security apparatus run by the US government in the world has broken almost completely free of the checks and balances needed in a democracy.
It is not, however, just limited to the US. The National Security Agency (NSA) has collected pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide. It has obtained direct access to the digital systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. The Internet surveillance program called Prism collects data from online providers including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and log-ins.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:36 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 8, 2013
Not again
It's becoming a circus.
It being Rudd's push to become leader of the ALP yet again. And the Canberra Press Gallery go along with the endless undermining of Gillard by Rudd supporters; an undermining that takes the form of public comments and actions directed against Gillard. Rudd's track record is increasingly looking to be that of a white-anter or saboteur.
Alan Moir
The ALP ought to realize that the tactic of revolving door of leadership is not a solution to the the party's problems. These are structural not personality based.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:08 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 6, 2013
Garnaut on after the mining boom
In his Ending the Great Australian Complacency in the early 21st Century speech Ross Garnaut addresses the fateful choice that Australians will need to make in the months and years ahead about how to respond to hard times after more than two decades of extraordinary prosperity. It's not the choice at the forthcoming federal election.
The hard times choice is at a time of international financial uncertainty that is still dragged down by the overhang from the global financial crisis and where the causes of the crisis mostly remaining at large. It comes at a time of ideological uncertainty, with doubts growing about whether the political and economic systems of the developed world of which Australia is part still have the capacity to deliver prosperity to most of their citizens.
Alan Moir
Garnaut, now at the University of Melbourne, says that we face three big challenges if we're to avoid the end of the long boom leaving us with much to regret:
(1) The first is that our real exchange rate now needs to fall a long way to be consistent with full employment.
(2) The second challenge, he says, is to change entrenched expectations that living standards will rise inexorably over time; that household and business incomes and public services will rise and taxes will fall, as they have done for a generation.
(3) The third challenge we face is that our political culture has to changed. It has changed since the reform era 1983-2000, in ways that make it much more difficult to pursue policy reform in the broad public interest. If we are to succeed, the political culture has to change again.
Basically Australia’s external position is weak with the approaching end of the China resources boom and this will result in the fall of the foreign exchange value of the Australian dollar and it will result in reduced living standards—the amount of goods and services that Australian incomes and expenditure support—unless there are corresponding increases in the productivity with which Australian resources are used.
The key depends on how successful we are in restoring growth in our trade-exposed industries outside the resources sector and a strong revival of investment and exports in services, manufacturing and agriculture as well as some moderation of the decline in resources investment.
He says that the economic choice is that after the decades of prosperity, Australians now must choose between two radically different approaches to our problems.
Do we accept persistent large increases in unemployment and large declines in living standards under Business as Usual--[ie.,conduct our public life as if the approaches that were good enough in the days of easy prosperity can deliver acceptable outcomes in harder times].? Or do we accept a Public Interest approach: think hard about how to achieve a large reduction in the real exchange rate and how to lift productivity and to share across the Australian community a moderate reduction in living standards? The moderate reduction in living standards will be smaller and of shorter duration the more it is accompanied by restoration of strong productivity growth.
Garnaut is pessimistic given that the political culture is now one in which policy change in the public interest has become more difficult over time as interest groups have become increasingly active and sophisticated in bringing financial weight to account in influencing policy decisions.
A new ethos has developed in which there can be no losers from reform. Business has asserted a property right to continuing benefits of regulatory mistakes. It demands compensation for corrections to errors in policy. Households have been led to expect that no policy changes will cause any of them to be worse off.
The limits of intrusion of private interests of many kinds into setting the rules for a market economy have been eased. An example is the Business Council dream of ''reforms'' that advance their private interests (industry welfare,) at the expense of the rest of us.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:20 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
June 5, 2013
Adelaide: urban renewal
The city of Adelaide is changing post the Global Financial Crisis. It's not just the laneway revitalization projects in the CBD -i--t's also the high rise development.
The billboards go up. Regeneration is occurring. The billboard or signage says don't worry, this development will respect local charm, traditions, the unique "vibe" of the area and revitalize the precinct to make it more vibrant and connected. The development's regeneration builds on the great "brand" of tradition, history and character of a particular area of the city.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, New Mayfield, 2013
The vehicle for the top-down branding is façadeism: taking a series of old buildings, keeping the frontage and building massive units in the back of it. This way, huge shops can be introduced by stealth. This façade of sensitivity (to community, locality, and history) is a fig-leaf to conceal an development agenda that is purely commercial. This figleaf of façadeism is what allows developers to deny that they are taking a top-down approach.
The conflict around local identity and development is traditionally represented as one between ‘resistant residents vs innovative developers’ especially when the development involves constructing 10--14 storey buildings in hitherto defiantly low-rise areas of the city. That resistance to high rise development int he CBD by conserving local ‘character’ at all costs risks the museumification of urban living in the name of heritage that overlooks the area’s long and complex history.
This traditional kind of framing ignores that there are all sorts of local initiatives that seek to highlight the positives in a particular area local attempts by local people to create or cement a concept of community – both within the locality and in the eyes of others. An artist run gallery here, a small bar there ; or a gym or design studios or history walking tour.
This suggests the existence of heterogeneity, the different of voices that characterise a community, that is denied by the imposition of a singular vision by both of the traditional sides of the debate. They ignore the fine grain of Adelaide city’s revitalisation. The fine grain is premised on diversity in that the more diverse the uses, the greater the attraction. As the Six Degrees Adelaide Fine Grain report states:
Much of the city square mile is still dominated by low to medium density residential, which contributes to the character of Adelaide. These areas... [need] the introduction of some local neighbourhood mixed uses – cafes, small scale retail, art galleries, community facilities and so on – because essentially they are more like an inner suburb.
There is a need to re-shape the way Adelaideans think of the City Centre into distinct precincts, with a City Core at the centre of Adelaide and to develop the precincts to create a series of unique places and destinations.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:21 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 3, 2013
the coal industry speaks
The fossil fuel industry currently has its back to the wall with declining demand for its coal exports and the electricity produced by coal-fired power stations. The decline in electricity demand is due to the high penetration of solar power wind energy, the success of energy efficiency scheme and the popularity of energy efficient appliances.
The coal based electricity network owners are in a situation where they have overspent on their network infrastructure (they've spent around $40 billion) and they now face difficulties in recouping their investment (plus the regulated return on their investment that is decided by market regulators) due to the declining consumer demand for their coal fired electricity.
Since people are using the inefficient network less (its a system that uses less than 10 per cent of the original energy burned at its end point), the revenue needed to match the regulated returns have to be gained from elsewhere. So electricity prices rise and, as a consequence, consumers use the network less. So we have bigger networks with more spare capacity most of the time. As more people reduce demand, or even leave the grid, this leaves network owners with an increasingly redundant system.
So how does the Australian Coal Association address this issue? Primarily in terms of its pro-development ideology rather than the market's supply and demand. In her May speech to the Sydney Institute Dr Nikki Williams, the Chief Executive of the Australian Coal Association, poses the question: 'Is Australia on an unwitting slippery slope towards the strangulation of the coal industry and all its related rail, road and port infrastructure and diverse supporting services - with all that implies for jobs, investment and prosperity?"
Yes, is her response. Her reason for the industry’s woes was that it is almost entirely due to “environmental extremists”, not falling coal prices due to declining Chinese demand for Australia's thermal coal exports or coal mines losing money.
Her speech is structured along the lines of virtuous miners versus nasty environmentalists. On the one hand there are supporters of the resources industry and a robust economy, and on the other hand, there are environmental guerrillas in thrall to a green religion opposed to economic growth.
Williams says that:
The war against coal and fossil fuels, in the name of climate, should be exposed for what it really is: an attempt to snooker development by stealth. It is often an affront to democratic values whilst posing as legitimate ‘people power’. Anti-development activists are attempting to bludgeon society with a singular value-set that has the capacity to transform our world in ways that most of us would not endorse. This is a more fundamental debate than climate versus coal – it speaks to the burning issue of energy poverty and the way our society deals with volatility and tension; with accommodations that breed expectations of further accommodation; with paradoxes; with a quantum of information that can obscure as much as enlighten; with the growth in the number of constituencies which makes it harder to achieve consensus.
She states that the core of the debate is fundamentally about development: how much or little, how fast or slow, if or when human needs take precedence over those of other living things, and whether the developing world has a right to aspire to, and eventually obtain, the quality of life enjoyed in the developed world or not.
The consequences of the anti-development activist's agenda, according to Williams is far reaching for all citizens: constricting consumption patterns, limiting population, depressing prosperity and redefining what people should and can aspire to. The activists want to close down Australia’s $60 billion coal industry which steered our economy through the GFC, and with the support Greens Party, seek to tax the industry to death in order to redistribute those funds to needy social and environmental causes.
Williams goes on to say:
Many anti-coal activists are deluding the public about their real agenda. For them, development is the problem: environmental impacts simply manifest the problem. They are really saying that energy consumption must be radically cut. But, that means accepting unfed mouths, uncured poverty and subsistence existence. People in the developing world do not aspire to this. Neither do most Australians....We need an informed debate about the full dimension of the challenges and solutions to the energy /climate change conundrum. Religious-like wars on the subject must be rebutted. Distortion, mistruths and single issue evangelism are diversions from developing realistic solutions to the energy / climate change challenge.
Williams' reference to the issue of climate change is to dismiss global warming alarmism. She says that "the last time I flew to Europe (which was last week) it was pretty apparent that the Arctic was still there and I think the majority believe that ‘give and take’ and ‘compromise’ is how consensus is constructed."
William's understanding ‘ of give and take’ and ‘compromise’ to achieve consensus is to demonize her opponents.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:23 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack