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July 26, 2013
the politics of border protection
So the Coalition's Operation Sovereign Borders has made explicit was implicit in its response to asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat. Australia is being invaded; the boat arrivals have created a national emergence; the military is required to defend Australia's borders; and the military is to be turned on the invaders in leaky boats lurking over the border.
David Rowe
Harsh policies deter people from getting on leaky boats organized by the people smugglers is the assumption. As more boats arrive the rhetoric of deterrence becomes ever more inflamed; the system of prisons built on the archipelago on various islands to our north is extended; and the system of detention and punishment becomes harsher.
It is a focus group policy for the Fortress Australia group who are scared, fearful and insecure and and who want to see asylum seekers arriving on the boats demonised and suffer. They don't belong here. So the punitive treatment of boat-borne asylum seekers is justified. The xenophobes are indifferent to Australia's involvement in conflict and persecution that force people to leave their homes and seek protection. Only Australia's policies determine the flow of asylum seekers. All that matters is the national interest and being toughest on asylum seekers.
Hence the acceptance of the unilateral Howard mantra: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come here” which now means “Stop the Boats!” with its implication of turning them back. It doesn't matter that Indonesia says that it won't accept any attempt to return them to Indonesia and that the only solution to the asylum seeker crisis lay in regional co-operation.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:13 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
July 22, 2013
why not in Australia?
Australian needs smart capital to transform its energy sector and build a clean energy future. Australia has the sunshine and space for investment in compelling solar energy technology that provides reliable clean energy, with the potential to significantly reduce costs on future projects.
An example: the Ivanpah solar power tower in the Mojave desert in the US. It is owned and operated by NRG Energy with technology designed and developed by BrightSource Energy:
Power towers are based on a relatively simple idea. The technology works by using a field of mirrors, called heliostats, to concentrate the sun’s rays onto a solar receiver on top of a tower. The solar receiver generates steam, which then spins a traditional turbine and generator to make electricity. Power towers are very efficient because all those mirrors focus a tremendous amount of solar energy onto a small area to produce steam at high pressure and temperature (up to 1000 degrees F)
Ivanpah is not the only large scale solar tower being built in this part of the US. So why not in Australia? Because the business-as-usual crowd say that Australia lives on the back of LNG, coal and iron ore. Hence their junk science campaign against wind farms to defend a fossil-fuel economy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:56 PM | TrackBack
July 21, 2013
So they say
More Canberra Press Gallery speculation about leadership tensions.
Only this time its the Liberal Party---Abbott v Turnbull. When the Canberra Press Gallery is not writing publicity for their favourite politician, they are speculating about leadership tensions within the political parties. Some political sense.
Alan Moir
It's horse race journalism---doing campaign coverage in which the journalists focus on who's going to win rather than what the country needs to settle by electing a prime minister. This perspective appeals to political reporters because it puts them on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the political operatives do. They so want to be political insiders.
It is true that Turnbull as a Liberal leader would be more likely to win an election, but it is also true that in doing so he would take the country far further to the right.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 20, 2013
goodbye to all that?
Jeremy Gilbert in Postmodernity and the crisis of democracy at Open Democracy argues that we have now entered an epoch of ‘post-democracy', within which the established institutions of democratic representation simply do not function to represent or to enact effectively the collective will of the citizenry. Gilbert says that:
One of the best-known and most widely understood explanations for this situation is that it is the key political consequence of economic globalisation. Put very simply: where governments no longer have the degree of control that they once did over flows of capital, labour, ideas, or people, then the capacity of individual national legislatures to determine what happens within their own borders is severely curtailed. Everything from wage levels and rates of inward investment to media content and the cultural makeup of local populations could once be regulated by the state, and now cannot.
So we have a situation characterized by the inability of institutions which were born in the industrial revolution and came to maturity in the era of cinema, railways and mass democracy to get to grips with the mercurial fluidity and speed of postmodern cybernetic capitalism.
This involves a shift from the era of representative democracy to a consultative democracy premised on the focus group, which is an acknowledgement of the end of the party-political model of the mid-twentieth century.
Gilbert suggests that what has emerged is government by an enlightened technocratic elite who accept implicitly the neoliberal premise that politics as such is over, and that all we really need is to be administered and managed by competent and trustworthy individuals. The political elite:
would use techniques such as focus groups and market research to find out what would make people happy, would try to give them more-or-less what they wanted, but would always keep in mind that maintaining the profitability of [Australian] companies and investors must be regarded as the first priority of governance.
He adds that this technocratic, neo-liberal model works very well during an economic boom but it comes when the boom ends. During a boom, it is not necessary for the governing elite to make choices about how to distribute a limited set of resources. The corporate elite can carry on reaping most of the rewards, as long as there is just enough cheap credit and extra tax revenue to keep consumers feeling comfortable and public services afloat.
As soon as the boom ends, however, an ugly reality makes itself felt again---the clearly identifiable conflicts of interest between sections of the nation state come to the fore. Some sectional interests will win and some will lose because the winners can only win at the expense of others.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 19, 2013
bloody hell
Federal Labor, in its desperation to stem its electoral loses in the 2013 election, has made a hard turn to the right, on asylum seekers arriving by boat. All unauthorised arrivals will be sent to Papua New Guinea for assessment and if successful, they will be resettled in PNG.
Arriving in Australia by boat will no longer mean settlement in Australia.
David Rowe
Under the new agreement between Australia and PNG, asylum seekers who arrive from Friday will have health checks and immunisations on Christmas Island and then, within weeks, will be transferred to Manus Island and “other centres” in PNG as yet unspecified.
UNHCR recently found that, while improving, the conditions on the remote Manus Island were still below required international standards. The conditions of the detention facility are harsh and inhumane.
Presumably, this hard turn to the right is designed to achieve what the Howard government’s Pacific Solution could not: that is, to ensure that no refugees are in fact resettled in Australia. The success of Rudd Labor’s plan relies on the ability of PNG to resettle large numbers of refugees. How can PNG deal with this problem?
A resurgent, Rudd-led, Labor party has embraced Fortress Australia in a global world, instead of supporting UNHCR and regional governments to swiftly process refugees and provide them with real solutions. So its off to the polls we go.
Rudd is in charge of things. He's taken back control. The Rudd government has shown that it has the power and capacity to act in postmodernity. Postmodernity means that we have:
now entered an era when none of the ‘modern' institutions of government seem capable of really exercising any control over the material, socialand cultural changes which capitalism continues to unleash upon us. At the same time, none of the large-scale, coherent systems of thought which have been handed down to us from earlier moments seem capable of grasping the full pluralism and complexity of a world of such dense, wild, unregulated capitalism as we see all around us today.
We are in a situation where there is an inability of institutions which were born in the industrial revolution and came to maturity in the era of cinema, railways and mass democracy to get to grips with the mercurial fluidity and speed of postmodern cybernetic capitalism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:12 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
July 16, 2013
shifting politics
The Coalition's slogans, stop the boats, end the waste, repay the debt, abolish the carbon tax-- a pledge in blood--were negative slogans, but they were devastating cut-through lines. The vacuum left by no, no, no. was filled and underpinned by a fear-mongering about future high carbon prices that was a political game, playing on people’s ignorance of how carbon trading works.
Alan Moir
The Rudd Government's proposed shift from a fixed carbon price to a floating one in an emissions trading scheme is flushing out the Coalition's position on climate change--its remedial policy is half-hearted, driven mainly by the search for votes, and under pressure from the climate deniers in the Liberal Party. It is also drive the Coalition further to the right. Hence Abbott's recent remark:
what an emission trading scheme is all about, it's a market, a so-called market, in the non-delivery of an invisible substance, to no one.
It implies a right to emit carbon – and then to limit the availability of this right in order to create scarcity and therefore a market for it. Carbon trading is the buying and selling of permits to emit carbon dioxide.
The shift to an emissions trading scheme linked internationally means a lower carbon price-- between $6 and $10 per tonne hence the politics. But will this lead to the generous concessions to business being reduced? Or an increasing focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy? Or reforms to the national electricity market?
It is unlikely, as the shift by the Rudd government is about politics not policy--a return to the Rudd tactic of wedging the Coalition--- with its spin about reducing the ‘carbon price cost of living pressures. It is spin because one of the reasons for the hike in electricity prices is the current system of national electricity regulation which has allowed excessive rates of return for publicly-owned transmission and distribution utilities which have become cash cows for various state and territory governments.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:42 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
July 7, 2013
King Coal's troubled future
The fossil fuel industry has a troubled future. It is constrained by political decisions to limit emissions, declining demand and by the lack of, or the high cost, of finance.
In a carbon constrained world-, where the commonwealth has acted to reduce the emissions from the power stations through carbon pricing, state governments in Australia (Queensland, WA and NSW ) are finding it increasingly uneconomic to protect their existing fossil fuel assets, such as their coal-fired power stations through various kinds of subsidies to the coal-based generators.
For instance, in NSW the coal-fired power stations were unable to compete with other power sources unless their coal was supplied at around one quarter of the cost of export coal. So the state Labor government started to build a new coal mine--- the Cobbora coal mine near Dubbo ----and ship the subsidised commodity to the state’s black coal generators so they could have cheap black coal. The new Liberal NSW government has decided to cut its losses and dump Cobbora.
WA invested $250 million into a failed attempt to upgrade the ageing and dirty Muja power station, and the plan is now abandoned and the money lost. Successive Victorian governments entered into controversial deals to extend and protect the life of the ageing brown coal generators in the Latrobe Valley.
The economic reality facing the fossil fuel industry is that electricity from unsubsidised renewable energy will soon be cheaper than electricity from new-build coal and gas-fired power stations in Australia.The assumption that fossil fuels are cheap and renewables are expensive is looking to be out of date. The energy future is that the Australian economy is likely to be increasingly powered by renewable energy and that investment in new fossil-fuel power generation may be limited because they will be too expensive.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 5, 2013
NSA: the authoritarian strain in US political life
Glenn Greenward highlights the political significance of the NSA revelations in the US emerging from the leaks by Edward Snowden.
First, national security agencies in intentionally deceiving Congress destroy the pretense of oversight. Members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security officials. That means the system of checks and balances is in the US is broken.
Steve Bell
Secondly, what is what's truly objectionable to many media and political elites is is when powerless individuals such as Edward Snowden blow the whistle on deceitful national security state officials on the fact that top US officials have been deceitfully concealing a massive, worldwide spying apparatus being constructed with virtually no accountability or oversight. The only political crimes come from exposing and aggressively challenging the most powerful political officials in the US.
So much for the rule of law and the right to individual freedom in the US. As Danial Ellsberg points out the bill of rights has been effectively revoked. The fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:39 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack