John Menadue

  • John Menadue. The death of Aylan Kurdi may not have been in vain.

    In the last week our media has been extensively covering the plight of Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing into Europe. Their reception has been mixed but the governments of Germany and Austria, and their people, have been extending help and kindness.

    I have posted three blogs in recent days on these issues: Mother Merkel and 800,000 refugees; Suffer the little children; Syrian and Iraqi refugees – a time for a bipartisan and community response (Arja Keski-Nummi and Josef Szwarc).

    In response we are seeing the generosity and concern of many Australians.

    Premier Baird in NSW said ‘We should do more and we should do it now.’ After seeing photos of the lifeless Aylan Kurdi, he said we must move beyond the debate about boats.

    The Tasmanian Premier, Will Hodgman, has offered to help refugees under a safe-haven scheme that was very helpful a decade and a half ago for refugees from Kosovo.

    The SA Premier, Jay Wetherall has said that ‘We will certainly be offering SA as an open and welcoming destination for those Syrians fleeing violence.’

    Barnaby Joyce has said that we need to do more. Many other MPs from all parties have expressed similar views. Trade Minister Andrew Robb has said that an initiative to help Syrians fleeing the war ‘was under review’. Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton will travel to Geneva to ask the UNHCR what more Australia can do to help refugees from war-torn Syria and Iraq.

    Tony Abbott is also responding by saying today that ‘We are proposing to take more people from the region as part of our very substantial commitment to the UNHCR. Mark Butler has said that at its last federal conference the ALP decided to increase the refugee intake from 13,750 to 27,000 pe annum. He said this gave substantial headroom to help Syrian refugees.

    The generosity of the countries bordering Iraq and Syria has been remarkable. Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have taken millions of refugees. But their generosity has been severely tested to breaking point. That is why we are now seeing the outflow of refugees into Europe.

    We were all appalled by the site of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach. His death and that of his sister and mother may not have been in vain. The human tragedy in a picture tugged at our hearts more than statistics ever could. But what a dreadful prices the Kurdi family has paid.

    Let’s hope that the Australian response both by governments and community groups will be generous enough to meet the tragedy which is now unfolding.

    Can we match Germany’s generosity, perhaps not in numbers but in spirit?

  • Brian McNair. News Corp and the future of public service media.

    I’ve been teaching students in Hong Kong about the relationship between politics and the media, and wanted to illustrate the sometimes problematic relationship between media and power. So I showed them Robert Peston’s BBC Panorama documentary about the “industrial-scale” criminality of Rupert Murdoch’s UK red-tops in the era of Andy Coulson and Rebekkah Brooks (* on Friday August 28 Rebekkah was named as CEO for News Corp in the UK).

    Like most people with even a passing interest in the part played by News Corporation in British politics, I remember exactly what I was doing when the scandal broke in 2011 and the sense of a seemingly indestructible media behemoth crumbling into chaos and ruin before our eyes. I had been researching and teaching about the News empire for more than two decades by then, frequently using it as a case study of how at least some privately owned media organisations abuse their power in pursuit of competitive success and political influence.

    While I always took care to acknowledge Murdoch’s positive contribution to sustaining the idea that journalism is important and must be invested in if it is to survive the digital age, the deeply unethical behaviour of The Sun in relation to such events as the Hillsborough stadium disaster and the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War were and remain classic examples of the excesses of British tabloid journalism.

    Murdoch’s use of his media to influence and shape the democratic political process in all the markets where he operates was illustrated by reference to Fox News, The Sun and other News Corp outlets which operate as what the late newspaper proprietor Robert Maxwell called a “megaphone” for the Murdochian world view and political agenda.

    So the phone hacking scandal of 2011 was a genuinely shocking thing to behold.

    Peston’s documentary was a reminder of that moment, which at the time was generally regarded as pivotal in British political history. Where senior politicians of both Labour and Conservative parties had for decades “queued up to kiss the shoes” of Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid editors (as investigative journalist Nick Davies put it to Peston), suddenly no–one wanted to be his friend anymore.

    The hitherto unspoken truth (unspoken among politicians who were its beneficiaries, that is) that the relationship between the Murdoch media and the political elite in Britain had become undemocratic and incestuous became the new common sense overnight.

    Among the many adverse impacts of the scandal on News Corporation was the collapse of its bid to buy the remaining 61% of the shares for BSkyB that it didn’t own – a deal that was by now attracting heat for both the Murdochs and a government that had seemed eager to wave the multi-billion deal through despite massive public opposition.

    There was talk of prosecutions in the US, where corporate criminality such as the bribery of public officials is taken very seriously. That never came to pass, but few doubted that the reputation of Rupert Murdoch and the corporate culture which he had presided over for more than 40 years had been seriously – perhaps terminally – wounded.

    Rupert resurgent

    That view has turned out to be well wide of the mark. Once again News Corporation is on the offensive against its old enemy, the BBC, lobbying a second-term Cameron government – armed now with a majority in the House of Commons and thus empowered to act with greater freedom than was possible in the five years of coalition – to shrink the corporation.

    Once again there are reports of Murdoch’s privileged access to the corridors of power, as in The Independent in July:

    George Osborne is under pressure to reveal if he held a private meeting with Rupert Murdoch days before the Treasury imposed a £650m budget cut on the BBC. Whitehall speculation about the alleged meeting – which would raise fresh questions about the closeness of the relationship between the Conservatives and the Murdoch empire – has prompted Labour to write to Mr Osborne demanding he release full details of his contact with the News Corp boss.

    It looks like business as usual, then, for a global media baron used to commanding the attention of political leaders and wielding his power to influence policymaking on the future of the BBC.

    Whose side are you on?

    In Australia, where I live and work – and where the phone-hacking scandal had little impact on News Corporation’s activities – a similar offensive is underway against the ABC.

    In Australia, as in the UK, News Corporation is allied to a right-of-centre government which regards the public sector in general, and public service media in particular, as hostile to its goals and ripe for “reform”.

    The Australian, News Corp’s flagship title down under (like The Times and Sunday Times in the UK), maintains a steady flow of anti-public service media reportage and commentary, criticising with boring predictability executive salaries, or the alleged bias of its news department, or indeed anything that can be made to appear excessive and un-Australian.

    After the Zaky Mallah affair, Prime Minister Tony Abbott asked of the ABC: “whose side are you on?” In a similar way, News Corporation likes to present the ABC as a cultural fifth column, its commentators regularly demanding that it be reduced to a “market failure” broadcaster – and in the process, coincidentally enough, allowing News the opportunity to become even more dominant in the Australian media landscape than it already is.

    On this issue, as on many others, Murdoch’s media act as cheerleaders for the Abbott government.

    I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the ferocity of the campaigns against public service media in Australia and the UK could easily be read as more than coincidence. In both countries News Corp press seek to undermine the funding models of public service media, and their right to produce popular entertainment programming such as The Voice. This has been a decades long campaign for News Corp in the UK, and after the Jimmy Savile scandal and other dents to its reputation, the BBC is more vulnerable than it has ever been.

    The ABC, one might argue, is in a stronger defensive position than the BBC. While the latter now faces five years of majority Conservative government, Abbott must go to the polls in September 2016 at the latest – and repeated opinion polls show a deep affection among Australians for the ABC.

    Tampering with Auntie would be politically risky. The real danger will come if the Coalition is re-elected with a comfortable majority, giving Abbott the freedom of manoeuvre now enjoyed by Cameron in the UK.

    In the meantime, the BBC and ABC must hold their nerve, and trust in the capacity of the publics they serve to continue recognising the importance of the role they play and the excellent value for money which they deliver. Both the BBC and ABC cost the individual license fee or taxpayer much less than a subscription to Foxtel or BSkyB. Even the purchase of one daily newspaper in either country for a year exceeds the cost per person of funding public service media and the wealth of content they deliver on TV, radio and online.

    Supporters of public service media are familiar with these arguments, but in both Australia and the UK they must be made and made again, forcefully and with confidence.

    To lose the BBC and the ABC, or to see them reduced to a pale shadow of public service media – think PBS and NPR in the United States – would be a cultural disaster from which there would be no recovery that was not directed by News Corporation and other private media interests.

    Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication at Queensland University of Technology. This article first appeared in The Conversation on August 29, 2015.

  • John Menadue. Don’t add to the disaster.

    The government is considering adding to the disaster in the Middle East by instructing the RAAF to bomb targets in Syria.

    Will we ever learn from our past mistakes?

    In supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Australia helped trigger the tragedy that is now unfolding. Perhaps a million lives have been lost and refugees are flooding in their millions into adjoining countries and Europe. Our involvement has triggered both ethnic and sectarian conflict. Does Tony Abbott ever stop and think about his role in the Howard Government that helped sow the seeds of this disaster?

    In considering the Middle East, Tony Abbott has two clear objectives that have nothing to do with our national interest. The first is to wedge the opposition and make it appear weak on security. He has instructed his private office to look for regular and if possible daily opportunities to highlight security threats. He wants to make the Canning bi-election a khaki election. Secondly he is determined to show that he is the most loyal ally of the US. He even asked the Americans to ask us to step up our role in the Middle East. He is quite unwilling to acknowledge that we are tying ourselves to a country that is perpetually at war. That is putting us at great risk.

    The West is not winning the war in the Middle East. The history of foreign intervention in the Middle East is one of loss and ignominy. Just ask the Russians.

    There is serious legal doubt about extending our role into Syria. The Saudis, Emirates and Qataris are not contributing to the campaign against IS. Many Saudis privately support and fund IS. Having suffered defeat as a result of the intervention by the US and its allies many Sunni in Iraq now support IS. None of our neighbours in South East Asia is involved.

    The commander of our joint operations in the Middle East Vice-Admiral David Johnson has told us that bombing Syria will not be a ‘game changer’

    Turkey, one of our ‘allies’ in the area, is playing a double game. Despite its alleged opposition to IS, Turkey has remained a major transit country for foreign fighters, including Australians, to join IS in Syria and Iraq. Turkey helps fund IS through large purchases of oil. Turkey is now conducting aerial strikes on IS in Iraq and Syria, but it is using these strikes against IS as a cover for much heavier aerial attacks on Kurdish positions. It is done to play to the domestic hostility to the Kurds living in Turkey. Yet the Kurds are the most effective military opposition on the ground to IS.

    We keep compounding the disaster we triggered in the first place. We cannot undo what we helped create, but we should not make it worse by allowing ourselves to be goaded by IS. Only a diplomatic and political resolution is possible. In any resolution Iran will be a key player.

    We would make a much greater contribution to wellbeing if we agreed to take 10,000 people displaced from Syria and provide refuge for them in Australia as we did for Kosovans in 1999.

    For an outline of the mess, see the link below to an article in the New York Times by Roger Cohen.  Middle East Zen

  • Suffer the little children

    the lifeless body of a child near the Turkish resort of Bodrum early Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2015
    The lifeless body of a child near the Turkish resort of Bodrum, early Wednesday 2/9/15 (Huffington Post)

  • Bob Kinnaird. China FTA and binding trade treaties are undemocratic.

    The China FTA and all international trade agreements are essentially undemocratic because they are ‘binding’ on all future Australian governments. They provide incumbent governments with the opportunity permanently to limit the options open to the Australian people and to tie the hands of their political opponents when they take office.

    Most Australians and probably some Australian Parliamentarians would be astonished to discover that treaty-status trade agreements permanently limit the ability of future governments to make laws, regardless of the wishes of the electors.

    If the treaty-status China FTA is ratified by the Australian Parliament with ALP support in the Senate and enters into force unchanged, the consequences will effectively be irreversible. The binding treaty obligation will permanently remove the ability of all future Australian governments and Parliaments (among other things) to apply ‘labour market testing or any economic needs test or other procedures of similar effect’ to all Chinese nationals in the standard 457 visa program and ‘installers and servicers’ in the shorter-term 400 visa program.

    This suits the Coalition government perfectly. The Coalition is publicly committed to the abolition of labour market testing in the standard 457 visa program. But it does not have the numbers in the Senate to pass the necessary amendments to domestic legislation – the Migration Act – to achieve this.

    So it is instead pursuing its aim via binding international treaties, first through the Korean and Japan FTAs which removed 457 labour market testing for nationals of those countries and now the China FTA.

    It is undoubtedly doing the same in its FTA negotiations with India and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries. Around 35 per cent of all 457 visas will be exempt from labour market testing by trade obligations, if the abolition of market testing is secured in the China and India FTAs.

    In practice, future Australian governments will not be able to reverse these exemptions to our migration laws embedded in treaty-status FTAs. By this point if not sooner, the pressure from all other countries for the same privileges in Australian temporary visa programs will be immense and probably irresistible.

    The Coalition government will therefore have achieved its aim of permanently removing the ability of all future Australian governments to reintroduce labour market testing in the 457 visa program as a whole.

    But it is doing this not by honest disclosure and arguing the case for changing domestic laws with the Australian people, on the China FTA or the broader plan. Instead, it is using binding international trade agreements to bypass the Australian community and reduce the sovereignty of Australian governments over its own immigration laws.

    True democrats and conservatives in the Coalition parties would oppose the government’s use of the China FTA and other treaties to do this.

    Bob Kinnaird is Research Associate with The Australian Population Research Institute and was National Research Director CFMEU National Office 2009-14.

  • Arja Keski-Nummi and Josef Szwarc. Syrian/Iraqi Refugees: Time for a Bi-partisan and Community Response

    Harrowing images and reports in our daily media give a human face to the grim words of the UN refugee agency: the number of men, women and children forcibly displaced by persecution, war and human rights violations is the largest on record. Nearly 60 million at the end of 2014 and greater since then.

    That Australia can and should significantly and as a matter of priority increase its contribution to the alleviation of the plight of so many people in urgent need is accepted by the major political parties and in many sectors of civil society.

    Last Wednesday the former Howard government immigration minister Philip Ruddock and Labor’s Chris Hayes called for Syrian refugees to be given safe haven visas to come temporarily to Australia, similar to the program adopted for refugees from Kosovo in 1999.

    This is the start of a conversation we must have at the political level that responds humanely and with compassion to the plight of people caught up in a bitter war and whose lives are being irrevocably changed.

    The fact is that in the past the Australian community and successive Australian governments have responded generously and with open hearts to people whose lives have been devastated by war. From the massive post war resettlement of people in the displaced persons camps of Europe, the substantial Indochinese resettlement programs of the 1980s and indeed our unbroken commitment since 1977 to have a planned refugee resettlement program. Our modern day society, the vibrancy of our cultural diversity and linguistic strengths are the rich by-products of these efforts.

    Now, again we are challenged to look at the assistance we provide and see what more we can do. There may be significant differences of view about the scale, timing and means of the contribution we should make but that does not mean we should not start doing more now.

    To begin with we should examine how we could provide immediate sanctuary through the safe haven visa arrangements for children and families affected by war as has been called for by Philip Ruddock and Chris Hayes. This could be done in coordination with the UNHCR, and community and faith based groups here in Australia. These groups could assist with both identification and hosting arrangements in Australia.

    We are mindful this is not a solution – but a temporary measure to get people out of danger. It is abundantly clear that the war in the Middle East will be long and drawn out – we should also be considering how, once people are in safety, we can assist with a transition into permanent resettlement when after a period of time, it is clear that return is not a safe or realistic option. Only in this way will people whose lives have been so severely disrupted by the war start the process of healing and building a new future for themselves.

    We believe the current Community Proposal Pilot whereby communities assist in hosting families and supporting them in their settlement pathway could be substantially expanded and adapted as both an on-shore as well as an offshore program. Frank Brennnan in his recent address to the University of Melbourne Law School has usggested a number of 7,000. This is a good start. Communities could for instance assist with visa application processes (on and off shore) including payment of visa application charges as well as settlement and community orientation processes. From the perspective of the government’s budget, the financial contributions of civil society would mean that it costs will be far less than the main resettlement program. Given this contribution we would strongly urge that such a program should not be counted as part of the established offshore humanitarian program that already responds to global refugee needs but as a unique response to an unfolding humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions. To do otherwise the government would be properly criticised as simply cutting public spending.

    Our understanding is that there is strong support for such community involvement with many more potential nominations than places available in the current program.

    Given the urgent situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, we are confident that Australians of all backgrounds would respond generously and enthusiastically as they have done on previous occasions when community involvement was sought.

    Reports from other countries suggest similar strong support from civil society groups such as church congregations to provide practical assistance and support for displaced people from that conflict.

    We know that we cannot be immune from global developments – action in this way will show we remain a generous and open hearted community willing to be there in tough times.

    Arja Keski-Nummi is active on refugee policy and operations. She was formerly First Assistant Secretary, International and Refugee Division in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

    Joseph Szwarc is Manager, Research and Policy, Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture.

     

    This proposal offers a practical and bi-partisan way to help the people who are displaced or who have fled Syria and Iraq. Could readers of this blog consider approaching Members of Parliament, community and faith groups to offer support and encouragement. Frank Brennan has suggested 7,000 places. Could we make it 10,000?

    Let’s do it.   John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Why are we so cruel? The problem starts at the top.

    The news out of Manus and particularly Nauru shows how callous we have become. It is not that we are always as cold-hearted as this. The response to the attacks on Adam Goodes and the murder of an AFL football coach shows our generous and humane side…our better angels.

    But we don’t seem to care about the cruelty being inflicted on children and women in Nauru. The Nauru government is corrupt. There is no rule of law worth the name. Magistrates are sacked by the government. In effect, we bribe the Nauru government to do our dirty work. Women and children in Nauru are crying and we turn away.

    There is poison in our public life but we don’t seem to care.

    I suggest there are three main reasons why we have become so callous.

    The first is the abdication of political and moral leadership. Asylum seekers have been demonized for years. It goes back to John Howard and his exploitation of fear of the outsider. He told us that asylum seekers were so inhuman that they would even throw their children overboard. For years Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison described asylum seekers as illegals and by inference, criminals. Scott Morrison told us that asylum seekers brought disease and wads of cash. He said that we should have a ‘behavioral protocol’ for asylum seekers living in the community. Senator Abetz told us that asylum seekers in the community should be publicly listed like pedophiles.

    If asylum seekers are as inhuman as Ministers have repeatedly told us, why should those with administrative responsibility take particular care?

    Leaders set the tone on how people behave in any organization. Put more bluntly is the old adage that the fish rots from the head down. People dealing with asylum seekers can read the signs from the top. These signs tell them that we don’t need to take particular care of asylum seekers and refugees. Surely the staff in the field for Transfield must be reading these signs. The signs tell them that if you rough up asylum seekers they probably deserve it.

    Every organization has a spectrum of people who are concerned about discipline and police-like roles. These organizations also have people that are generous and humanitarian in their outlook. When I was the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs I was aware of the tension in the department between enforcement and control people on the one hand, and humanitarian and generous people on the other. I was fortunate that I had as Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Immigration Minister Ian Macphee who made it clear where the balance should be. The staff in the department could read the intent of the Prime Minister and the Minister. That strongly influenced the culture of the department.

    I think I was able to shift the culture of the department at least temporarily because we knew what the Prime Minister and the Minister wanted. People in the department today would get a very different reading. It would explain, at least in part the fiasco in Melbourne last Friday.

    The second reason for our callous disregard of asylum seekers and refugees is that there is no effective supervision. Journalists are largely excluded from Manus and Nauru. The President of the Human Rights Commission was vilified for defending the rights of children in detention. There is no UNHCR to assess and report on what is occurring in our name in Nauru and Manus.

    The third problem is contracting out. The government seems to have contracted out both refugee policy and operations. In some respects contracting out makes sense but contractors, with pursuit of profit, have a different ethic to public servants who are directly responsible to the government for the public good. In these circumstances it is essential that departments retain the ability to effectively supervise contractors. But over the years competence in our public service has been stripped away in the name of getting rid of red tape and downsizing government. Our public service must maintain its competence and it cannot contract out its moral responsibility to private corporations. When working holiday makers are exploited as fruit pickers, it is not defensible for the employer to say that hiring of staff has been contracted out to a labor hire company.

    As the prime contractor how could Transfield not know what has been happening!

    If governments won’t listen, we should welcome action by superannuation funds like HESTA and UniSuper and others to withdraw support from companies such as Transfield. I welcome the growing disinvestment from companies who are acting unethically. It gained momentum with divestment in tobacco companies and then companies that did business with apartheid South Africa. It is growing rapidly in fossil fuels. The business elite and their supporting business commentators will tut tut but if governments won’t listen, it is important that civic groups take action when they believe that companies are acting unethically or improperly. Unethical investments, even if they are legal such as investments in tobacco companies are seldom good investments in the medium and long term.

    It is interesting that in 2015-16 the cost of the offshore management of less than 2,000 asylum seekers in Manus and Nauru is expected to be $811 million. Companies such as Transfield have been gorging themselves. Yet UNHCR in South East Asia has a budget of only $160 million to cover over 200,000 refugees, half a million internally displaced people and nearly 1.4 million stateless persons in the region. It says a great deal about our priorities and our morality.

    Our processing in Nauru and Manus is unsustainable. It is unethical. It is wasteful.

    We should not be surprised at what is unfolding in Manus and Nauru. There are prices to be paid when our leaders demonize and dehumanize human beings. Innocent and vulnerable people are paying a heavy price for failed moral leadership and the exploitation of fear in the community. Our problems start at the top and not just in one political party.

    Today is Migrant and Refugee Sunday. Pope Francis has chosen the theme ‘Church without Frontiers, Mother to All’ and asks us to build ‘a culture of acceptance and solidarity, in which no one is seen as useless, out of place or disposable…Suspicion and prejudice conflict with the biblical commandment of welcoming with respect and solidarity the stranger in need..’

  • Julianne Schultz. Why public broadcasting is worth saving.

    In an age of global media abundance, the notion that public broadcasting is a mechanism to address “market failure” is beguiling. It is also fundamentally wrong.

    Public broadcasters have a unique national responsibility to provide a public good to citizens, rather than the more narrowly defined and easily measured mission of commercial broadcasters, to engage consumers and maximise the return to shareholders.

    Public broadcasters provide a return that is more complex to measure, but with the increasing sophistication of “impact measurement”, not impossible. The exact nature of the outputs and outcomes varies from one country to another, but includes providing platforms for news, entertainment and education that foster a shared sense of national coherence.

    Public broadcasters including the BBC, ABC, SBS, CBC among others, do this by providing a non-partisan information base, which in turn creates opportunities for political, cultural and local engagement. By committing resources to producing news, drama and entertainment, they not only foster professional skills and output, but the scope and sustainability of the production industry. The BBC and ABC have also often been important sources of technological innovation in both platforms and content, and talent development, which over time benefits both the sector and enriches the lives of citizens.

    Commercial broadcasters also contribute to this mix, of course. In every country local content makes sense, and in most, licensing regulation requires it. But the primary responsibility is to profit, to make money by maximising audiences. Inevitably some content will overlap, for instance, both the public and commercial broadcasters have invested heavily in news and drama. Depending on the funding model that underpins the sector, some public broadcasters mirror the commercial industry more closely than others.

    Public good

    The fundamental “public good” rationale, which has implicitly defined public broadcasting for nearly a century, grew out of scarcity – of spectrum, capital and content. Domestic regulation addressed this with codes of practice, quotas and licence fees.

    This model has been thrown into sharp relief in a globalised media world characterised by abundance, audience fragmentation and life-threatening challenges to the business models of companies that grew rich in the era of mass media. The declining numbers of journalists and newspapers is comparable in countries with and without strong public broadcasters – the business model is not threatened by public broadcasting, but by its own dynamic.

    Rather than making public broadcasting irrelevant, this context makes it arguably more important than ever. Without the public broadcasters continuing to employ large numbers of journalists, local coverage would be even weaker. No other media organisation has a primary responsibility to citizens, as a nationally defined group.

    Addressing this need is not just a matter of compensating for any market failure, which will inevitably occur at a time of rapid technological and economic change, but goes further.

    IPSOS Mori

    Public broadcasting is not just “another business”. Indeed it must operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, with more transparency, and address the cultural and political needs of a society that expects world’s best entertainment and news services, because it is provided by public funds.

    As BBC strategist James Purnell said:

    You can squeeze a very ambitious version of the BBC into the argument that it is an organisation that exists to correct market failure. Arguably, it might be more persuasive. But it’s not true. This is clearly a life-enhancing service that meets public goals we have as a society.

    What is the market?

    Market failure is a technical economic term which, like many phrases from that lexicon, seems to have a commonsense meaning – that when a market fails to operate efficiently or deliver the expected goods and services, steps can be taken to address the shortcoming.

    This raises the question: what is the market? In the media industry, assessments of market inevitably revolve around advertising. Attempts to define markets for content, or national culture, are much more problematic and have done little to prevent monopolies.

    Commercial broadcasters engage with an audience of consumers, seeking to maximise their numbers and the profits that can be derived by successfully entertaining and informing them. Public broadcasters are required to provide a universal service to fulfil their responsibility to citizens.

    There are areas that do not make commercial sense – but this is a rapidly changing field. Once, for instance, it was public broadcasters who covered sport, until the money chased them out. Simply filling the gaps before they become profitable is not a firm institutional basis.

    As the cultural deficits become clear public broadcasters have evolved to address them – in Australia this included the creation of SBS as a multicultural broadcaster and National Indigenous TV to address the limited representation of the First Australians. Other areas of national cultural deficit are emerging in response to the globalisation.

    Public broadcasters therefore provide a service that is both universal and particular, according to the framing of national charters, but which also implicitly or explicitly also address other public purposes. As a result the standards of public accountability, are also higher and the contest over ideas is more robust. Independence and trust are essential – hard won and cherished.

    ABC Annual Report 2013

    Not surprisingly at a time when audiences are fragmenting as choice proliferates, there are commercial operators ready to argue that public broadcasters should retreat to the niches and specialist gaps and leave the mass to them, there are also emerging areas of cultural deficit as fragmentation and globalisation take their toll.

    Cultural bedrock

    Public broadcasters need to have a universal reach to provide a shared resource funded by all citizens and available to them all. This goes to the heart of the bedrock of a national culture – identity, meaning, shared experience – which requires investment in both platforms and content. In these times public broadcasters uniquely have both the capacity and authority to act as an institution when the commercial media is less able and willing to fulfil this role. As a result they retain a much higher level of public trust than the commercial media. In a fragmenting environment they are able to continue to exercise an institutional role that profitability alone cannot guarantee.

    The House of Lords inquiry into the BBC’s licence fee is focusing on the public purposes of the national broadcaster: its capacity to sustain citizenship and civil society, promote education and learning, stimulate creativity and cultural excellence, represent the full range of regions, bring the UK to the world and back and help deliver the benefit for emerging technologies. Defining these purposes is a useful adjunct to the charter – addressing outcomes as well as outputs – and help explain why public broadcasting continues to be more than a mechanism to address market failure.

    Charlotte Higgins has argued that the UK without the BBC would “no longer be Britain as we know it” – the same applies for the ABC in Australia. Public broadcasters continue to have a unique role of challenging, informing and entertaining a citizenry that is defined by national boundaries.

    Julianne Schultz is Founding Editor of the Griffith Review; Professor, Griffith Centre for Creative Arts Research at Griffith University. This article first appeared in The Conversation on August 24, 2015.

  • Bob Kinnaird. China FTA truth still elusive

    Two months after releasing the China FTA text the Coalition government has still not told the Australian people the truth about the labour mobility provisions in ChAFTA.

    The result is confusion even among usually well-informed commentators. Greg Sheridan Foreign Affairs Editor for The Australian says ‘the clause in the FTA that says there is no need for labour market testing applies only to projects over $150 million’ (‘Shorten hits rock bottom with China FTA stance’, The Australian, 27 August 2015).

    The fact is that FTA clause applies to all Chinese nationals on all non-concessional 457 visas and 400 visas regardless of where they are employed, that is, on projects over $150 million and elsewhere.

    An AFR opinion piece from Angus Taylor Liberal member for Hume is the latest example from the government side (‘Campaign against China FTA defies reason’, Australian Financial Review, 26 August 2015). The AFR says that Mr Taylor was formerly a partner at McKinsey & Co and a director of Port Jackson Partners. So he should be a reliable witness on ChAFTA, but he is not.

    Mr Taylor’s column criticises the union campaign against the foreign worker provisions in the ChAFTA package and claims that: ‘At the heart of the campaign is a false assertion that the China free trade agreement frees up Chinese workers to work on Australian projects. Nothing could be further from the truth. Treaties don’t override domestic laws in this country. If we were to free up the regime for offshore workers, we would need to change legislation, but this won’t happen. The 457 visa regime will remain unchanged, because nothing in the agreement requires workplace legislation changes.’

    It is Mr Taylor’s assertions that are false.

    The China FTA, and the associated MOU on an ‘Investment Facilitation Arrangement’ (IFA), do ‘free up’ Chinese workers to work on Australian projects and in Australian employment more generally.

    The FTA itself commits Australia not to apply ‘labour market testing, economic needs testing or other procedures of similar effect’ to all Chinese nationals in the non-concessional 457 visa program, and the shorter-term 400 visa program for Chinese ‘installers and servicers’ of machinery and equipment. This obligation also carries over to any other temporary visa through which Australia chooses to implement its international obligations under ChAFTA.

    In 2013 the Migration Act 1958 was amended to require labour market testing (LMT) by sponsors seeking non-concessional 457 visas for workers in specified occupations: Skill level 3 (mainly trade-level), engineering and nursing occupations.

    The ChAFTA obligation means that from the date ChAFTA enters into force, Australia will not be able to apply LMT as legislated in the Migration Act to all Chinese nationals nominated for non-concessional 457 visas in trade-level occupations, engineering and nursing.

    It also means that once ChAFTA enters into force, the Australian Immigration Minister will no longer have the discretionary power to require legislated LMT for sponsors nominating Chinese nationals for non-concessional 457 visas in all other 457 occupations. Before ChAFTA, the Minister could simply issue a new legislative instrument requiring LMT for these currently exempt occupations. After ChAFTA, the Minister can no longer do so, in respect of Chinese nationals.

    All this very real change comes about because, contrary to Mr Taylor’s assertion, international trade treaties do ‘override’ domestic laws in this country, in this case the Migration Act 1958.

    Mr Taylor appears unaware that the Migration Act specifically provides that LMT cannot be applied in the non-concessional 457 visa program where it is ‘inconsistent with Australia’s international trade obligations’, as determined by the Immigration Minister (s.140GBA of the Migration Act 1958).

    Assistant Immigration Minister Michaelia Cash has so far made three such ‘Determinations’ by legislative instrument under s.140GBA, including in relation to the two North Asian FTAs concluded by the Coalition government, the Korea-Australia FTA (KAFTA) and the Japan FTA.

    Mr Taylor should also know that these Ministerial determinations resulted in declarations that LMT would no longer be applied in the non-concessional 457 visa program to all Korean nationals and all Japanese nationals from the date these FTAS came into force; and that the relevant ChAFTA definitions of ‘natural persons’ of China covered by this obligation are the same as those in the Korea and Japan FTAs.

    It is true that no ‘legislation’ is required to implement this particular ChAFTA obligation (only a regulatory change). But this is only because Australian migration legislation already provides that international trade obligations take precedence over our domestic migration legislation on ‘labour market testing’ in the non-concessional 457 visa program.

    The MOU on an ‘Investment Facilitation Arrangement’ (IFA) also ‘frees up’ Chinese workers to work on Australian projects. This MOU is not part of the formal ChAFTA treaty but is listed on the DFAT website of ChAFTA Official Documents under the heading ‘Related documents’.

    This MOU gives employers on Chinese-funded projects of $150 million or more (including Chinese State-owned-enterprises) access to Chinese concessional 457 visa workers under so-called umbrella ‘project agreements’ and ‘labour agreements’ for direct employers on these projects. These are over and above the non-concessional Chinese 457 visa and 400 visa workers granted LMT-exempt entry under the FTA itself, described above.

    ‘Concessional’ 457 visa workers mean Chinese and other foreign workers in semi-skilled occupations, and those nominally in skilled occupations but who do not meet the standard minimum requirements for a 457 visa, such as minimum English language skills.

    Mr Taylor’s piece does not mention the MOU and it is not clear if Mr Taylor understands that the MOU on IFA is not part of the formal ChAFTA treaty.

    But in any case, the salient point is that like the momentous change expanding Chinese worker access to 457 and temporary work visas via the FTA itself, implementing the MOU on IFA for Chinese concessional 457 visa workers does not require legislative change under current arrangements. This is because such arrangements are currently governed not by legislation but simply Ministerial ‘policy’.

    That says more about how inadequate the current arrangements for regulation of concessional temporary work visas are, not that the changes involved in this MOU are trivial.

    The question to ask is if these ChAFTA labour mobility concessions by Australia are really so trivial, why are they are so important as to be a potential deal-breaker for both China and Australia? The answer is that for both China and Australia, these labour mobility concessions are far from trivial. They are significant and substantial.

    Bob Kinnaird is Research Associate with The Australian Population Research Institute and was National Research Director CFMEU National Office 2009-14.

     

     

     

  • Sydney’s Holroyd High School and asylum seeker children.

    Refugees and their children face many difficulties in settling in Australia. But the evidence shows that after this settling in period, refugees and their children outperform Australian-born people in many areas. We see the results for refugee children in university-entrance exams and in university performance.

    One remarkable example is the experience of refugee and asylum seeker children at Sydney’s Holroyd High School. The principal of Holroyd High School, Dorothy Hoddinott, was interviewed recently by Eleanor Hall on the ABC’s The World Today.  Read about the remarkable story of Holroyd High School and its students in the link below.

    http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2015/s4298964.htm

  • Stephen Harper. The closing of the Canadian mind.

    Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has no greater foreign admirer than Tony Abbott who gushed about him when he visited Ottawa a year ago.

    Like Tony Abbott, Stephen Harper has attacked science and the media. He has weakened citizenship laws and supports polluters. It sounds very familiar. For an article in the International New York Times by Stephen Marche, see link below. John Menadue.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/the-closing-of-the-canadian-mind.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad

  • Stuart Harris. Who are we backing in Syria?

    It would be a serious mistake for Australia to respond positively to the US request, that we presumably invited, to join in airstrikes on Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Such action would probably be against international law, and in any case be ineffective, while increasing IS recruitment and failing to resolve the undoubted problem.  Like US policies towards Syria, it also lacks clear strategic objectives.  IS, while certainly brutal is the armed opposition to the also brutal and corrupt Assad government, the overthrow of which ostensibly remains the prime target of US effort.
    More importantly for Australia, the civil war raging in Syria, with its multiple competing domestic and international interests, has increasingly developed into an intense Sunni versus Shia sectarian civil war.  Whose side are we backing?  Despite political concerns about Australia’s domestic security, nothing could be worse for our multicultural society and its  security than an action likely to stir a sectarian conflict among our Moslem citizens”.

    Stuart Harris was Secretary, Department of Foreign Affairs, 1987-88. He is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Department of International Relations, School of International, Political and Strategic Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU.

  • Sandra Jones. Don’t worry about the kids: Let’s just protect the alcohol industry

    A recent study from Monash University found that a quarter of all alcohol advertising on Australian TV was during televised sports. Importantly, 86% of alcohol advertising between 6.00am and 8.30pm (that is, when kids are most likely to be watching TV) was during sports programming.

    The broadcast of alcohol advertisements on commercial television in Australia is restricted in order to limit the exposure of young people to alcohol advertising. Alcohol advertising is only permitted during periods of M (mature classification), MA (mature audience classification) or AV (adult violence classification) programs (which are restricted to between 8:30pm and 5.00am).

    The one – completely counter-intuitive – exception to this is that the broadcast of alcohol advertisements is permitted during the live broadcast of sporting events on weekends and public holidays. It is not surprising that this ‘exception’ results in alcohol advertising being shown at the time that children and teenagers are most likely to see it and most likely to be influenced by it.

    Free TV, which represents the television networks, wants to bring forward unrestricted viewing hours from 8.30pm to 7.30pm. Conversely, Prof Kerry O’Brien and his team at Monash (like most of us in public health) wants the reverse – moving the kick-off time for alcohol advertising from 8.30 to 9.30pm..

    Even more than that, what we’d really like to see is the removal of the ‘exemption’ for live sport; an exemption that FreeTV defends but is unable to justify. An exemption that the rest of us recognize for what it is: a clear message that the money-makers are more interested in protecting alcohol advertisers than protecting kids.

    The World Health Organization’s European Charter on Alcohol 1995 asserts that:

    “All children and adolescents have the right to grow up in an environment protected from the negative consequences of alcohol consumption and, to the extent possible, from the promotion of alcoholic beverages (and) … no form of advertising is specifically addressed to young people, for instance, through the linking of alcohol to sports.”

    In relation to sport, the current iteration of the Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code (ABAC) states that a Marketing Communication must NOT show (visibly, audibly or by direct implication) the consumption or presence of an Alcohol Beverage as a cause of or contributing to the achievement of personal, business, social, sporting, sexual or other success.

    The previous version of the Code also used to say that alcohol advertisements must NOT “depict any direct association between the consumption of alcohol beverages, other than low alcohol beverages, and the operation of a motor vehicle, boat or aircraft or the engagement in any sport (including swimming and water sports) or potentially hazardous activity” but now it says “before or during any activity that, for safety reasons, requires a high degree of alertness or physical co-ordination, such as the control of a motor vehicle, boat or machinery or swimming”.

    Somehow, in its efforts to toughen up the Code and better protect kids from inappropriate messages about alcohol, the ABAC managed to drop the specific reference to sport. Does that make you wonder whose well-being they are protecting?

    What is particularly problematic about the ‘exemption’ for alcohol advertising during live sport broadcasts is that it opens up a mammoth marketing opportunity that goes far beyond the commercial breaks.

    In a study funded by the Cancer Council Victoria, we analysed the television coverage of the 2012 AFL and NRL finals matches on WIN and Prime (in the Illawarra NSW). The AFL finals averaged three minutes of alcohol commercials and an additional 17 minutes of alcohol marketing per game. The NRL finals averaged just over two minutes of alcohol commercials and an additional 28 minutes of alcohol marketing.

    A few years ago we conducted interviews with children aged 10 to 12 years about their engagement with sports. The children associated playing sport with positive life outcomes such as good health, success and maintaining a healthy weight. Watching sport on TV was a regular part of life, especially for boys. The children were also aware of the concept of sponsorship and were able to identify the sponsors of the sporting teams, including the alcohol sponsors. They also remembered and recognized alcohol ads, and expressed strong positive associations between alcohol brands and sport.

    Participant: that’s a very good one [VB] because most men drink. . . Especially like when they play sports, and yeah and when they’re tired from sports they might go and then have a drink and stuff.

    Public health advocates and organizations focused on the wellbeing of young people are united in their view that alcohol advertising and alcohol sponsorship are harmful to young people.

    While the industry would state that they are only targeting those over the age of 18, their messages are clearly being heard, and internalized, by even very young children. Surely it is time for our government to recognize that, even in a country that supports free trade, protecting our children must be a higher priority than protecting the alcohol industry.

    Professor Sandra Jones is an ARC Future Fellow and Director of the Centre for Health and Social Research (CHaSR) at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne).

  • Clive Hamilton. Damned Lies, Minister Hunt and Climate Models.

    If you believe what you read in the Daily Telegraph saving the planet must mean trashing the economy. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it, no matter what the evidence shows. If the numbers show the opposite, well, they have ways.

    And so last week the Murdoch tabloid took a bunch of numbers concocted in Environment Minister Greg Hunt’s office and turned them into the screaming headline “ALP’s $600B Carbon Bill”.

    One of the most egregious beat-ups you’ll ever read, the story was chock full of terrifying predictions about what will happen if Australia joins global efforts to limit global warming. The story was full of “shocking predictions”: “Economic growth shattered”, “Thousand of jobs lost”, and “a devastating blow to the economy, slashing thousands of jobs”.

    The story was purportedly based on modelling results commissioned by the Climate Change Authority from Treasury and the then Department of Climate Change. Yet the conclusions Minister Hunt and the Telegraphreached were the opposite of those drawn by Treasury (and endorsed by the Climate Change Authority in its 2014 report).

    Gazing at the same modelling printouts, Treasury wrote that the economic effects of all scenarios considered “are small compared with the ongoing growth in GDP and GNI per person over time” (p. 72).

    They present “only modestly different economic outlooks”, wrote the boffins. In fact, so modest are the economic effects of even strong climate action that when they are depicted on a chart it is quite difficult to pick out the difference between the “No carbon price” scenario and the “High price” scenario, the gap that the Telegraph, and Minister Hunt, claim would “shatter” the economy.

    I reproduce Chart 3.32 from the Treasury report above, which measures real GDP over 2010-2030, the same figures that the Telegraph found “shocking”. You might need a magnifying glass to see it but all of the fuss is over the gap between the mustard coloured top line and the green bottom line. It is this difference that will wreck the Australian economy, if you believe Minister Hunt and his friends at the Telegraph.

    To Do Nothing or Not To Do Nothing

    It turns out that the Minister’s office possesses a very large magnifying glass indeed. But before they used it they needed to decide what to look at, and here they engaged in several blatant deceptions.

    First they compared the “No carbon price” (do nothing) scenario with the “High price” scenario (limit warming to 2°C) and attributed the difference in economic trajectories to Labor’s planned policy. Apart from the fact that Labor has not adopted the latter policy (although in my view it should), this comparison is irrelevant.

    No government is going to pursue the do-nothing “No carbon price” trajectory, which would mean abolishing the Direct Action scheme, the Renewable Energy Target and everything else.

    The Abbott Government has itself just announced a target that is similar to the “Central policy” scenario (the blue line in the chart). Any policy to cut emissions will impose a cost, so the Government’s 26-28% by 2030 target will be a “hit” to real GDP that will account for a large chunk of the $600 billion.

    Secondly, Treasury’s horrifying “High price” scenario is the only one that would limit global warming to 2°C. The 2°C objective is the official policy of the present Government, so by concocting these figures Minister Hunt is undermining himself (unless he is deceiving us over his commitment to 2°C, which is possible).

    Thirdly, a substantial portion of the economic impact (previous modelling exercises indicate around one third) is due not to Australia’s carbon abatement policies but to the actions of other countries. In no sense can that part of it be attributed to the Labor Party’s “carbon bill”. Nor can the Coalition’s weak target change what other countries do.

    How to turn a mouse into an elephant

    Having chosen the comparison that will provide the loudest headlines in a Murdoch tabloid, Minister Hunt then pulled out his king-sized magnifying glass. How did he get this apparently huge number of $600 billion?

    Well, he looked at the real GDP figures (the figures accompanying Chart 3.32) and saw that the difference between the “No carbon price” and the “High price” scenarios in the year 2030 is only $64 billion. Hmmm, not big enough for a scare campaign.

    So he added up all of the differences in real GDP over 2013-2030, that is, what you would get by colouring in the gap between the mustard and green lines in the chart. But, hey, real GDP (that is, adjusted to exclude the effects of inflation) is always going to be less impressive than nominal GDP. So he picked an inflation rate of 2.5% (making the basic error of using the CPI instead of the GDP deflator) and, Hey Presto, out pops $633 billion.

    Now that’s a headline.

    Except it isn’t. At least, it would not be in any newspaper that subjected government claims to a modicum of scrutiny.

    $633 billion sounds big, but compared to what? Well, compared to cumulative nominal GDP over 2013-2030, which, using the Minister’s figuring, will amount to $46.1 trillion. So over the whole period the “devastating blow” amounts to a shortfall in nominal GDP of 1.37% in 2030.

    But there’s a better way to look at it.

    The Treasury modelling shows that, compared with doing nothing, if we join the rest of the world to limit warming to 2°C Australia’s real GDP will be $64 billion dollars lower in 2030. How much is that? Well, under the do-nothing scenario real GDP is projected to grow by almost two thirds between 2013 and 2030. In the last of those years, 2029-2030, it is expected to grow by $69 billion, a little more than the $64 billion decline in GDP due to strong climate policy.

    In other words, the “economic devastation” amounts to no more than one year’s delay before Australia’s real GDP expands by two thirds.

    Who is mean and tricky?

    So here is the question: Are Australians willing to delay the growth in real GDP by 12 months and in doing so play their part in global efforts to tackle climate change, or would they prefer to have the growth a year earlier and do nothing about climate change, sponge off the rest of the world and become an international pariah?

    Mr Hunt’s attacks on reasonable efforts to tackle climate change assume that Australians are a mean and nasty people who put tiny increases in future incomes above a safe climate for their children.

    I can’t finish without one last comment.

    One of the more dishonest deceptions in this saga is the Telegraph’s claim that it has uncovered “the report Shorten didn’t want you to see”. In fact Greg Hunt was the author of this deceit, claiming Labor “would never want these numbers to see the light of day.”

    But all of the modelling by Treasury and the Department of Climate Change (now the Department of Environment) was posted on the Authority’s website at the time of the release of its report. The secret “devastating” GDP data from Treasury’s Chart 3.32 were reproduced in its report to the Climate Change Authority plain as day in Table 3.3, and the modelling results were discussed extensively in the Authority’s report.

    No Minister, there is no conspiracy between Treasury, your department, the Climate Change Authority and the Labor Party.

    Mr Hunt’s confabulations and the Telegraph’s beat-up add to the sorry history of climate scare campaigns. The journalist who accepted uncritically this steaming pile of horse manure from Minister Hunt and spread it thickly over the pages of the Daily Telegraph was the tabloid’s national political editor Simon Benson.

    Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics, Centre for Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Charles Sturt University. This article first appeared in The Conversation on August 18, 2015.

  • Irfan Ahmad. As Morsi faces the gallows, where are the defenders of democracy?

    In mid-June, an Egyptian court upheld the death sentence against the country’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi, whom the military deposed in July 2013. Death sentences against Morsi and 105 others were confirmed after Egypt’s grand mufti gave his approval. Many Islamic scholars (ulema) in the past spoke truth to power, for which they were jailed or executed. The mufti and the general who ousted Morsi, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, are instead sending democracy, freedom, justice and truth to the gallows.

    Amnesty International described the trials as “grossly unfair” and “charades”. Emmad Shahin, an academic of international repute, was among 101 others sentenced to death in absentia. I contributed a chapter to a volume co-edited by John Esposito and Shahin.

    Why are the world’s democrats so quiet?

    We have long heard about Islam’s presumed inability to separate religion and politics. Do we hear those same voices ask now: why is the Egyptian government mixing religion and politics, sham judicial trails and sharia? Did anyone object to el-Sisi seeking sanction for a political legal ruling from a religious authority?

    Instead, this month, the US has openly embraced el-Sisi’s regime. We have yet to hear democratic leaders unite in saying: we oppose the death penalty for Morsi.

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott condemned the execution in Indonesia of two Australians, so will he denounce the death sentences imposed in Egypt? If not, is it unfair to conclude that the death penalty is wrong only when applied to “our” people?

    Can Egypt really be said to be “restoring democracy”? That is the phrase US Secretary of State John Kerry used to justify the 2013 coup, which was followed by a deadly military crackdown against peaceful protesters in Cairo. The then-Middle East “peace envoy”, Tony Blair, hoped for a “rapid return to democratic rule” as he lent his backing to the regime and became its adviser on “economic reforms”.

    What notion of peace condones – directly or otherwise – the killing of more than 800 peaceful protesters within a few hours at Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adaweya square on August 14, 2013? As Egypt’s then-defence minister, el-Sisi had “overall responsibility for the army’s role” in a slaughter comparable to China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

    Why are most of the world’s otherwise eloquent, even roaring, democrats largely mute about the death of Egyptian democracy and its symbol, Morsi? Why does the democratic conscience of the so-called globalised and connected world appear so disconnectedly unshaken by the brutal crackdown?

    The brutal business of killing politics

    According to media reports and the Brookings Centre for Middle East Policy, it is “unlikely” the death sentence will be implemented. Regardless, the purpose is clear: to frighten Egyptians into submission so they dare not ask again for democracy. Under a regime such as el-Sisi’s, there is barely a space for politics, and certainly not for democratic politics; the only permissible politics is acquiescence to the dictatorial regime.

    This killing of politics is evident in the sheer numbers of people the regime has arrested and imprisoned – around 40,000 by one estimate. Dissident media have been shut down and disobedient journalists fired and jailed. The imprisoned include not only members of Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party but anyone who defies el-Sisi’s dictatorship. In short, voices opposed to de-democratisation are treated as threatening.

    Imprisoning people and passing death sentences on a virtual assembly line sends a message to Egyptians: abandon politics altogether. The increasing use of torture, including sexual abuse, reinforces this message.

    Seen from the perspective of American philosopher-activist Henry Thoreau, the repeated branding of the imprisoned as terrorists, or terrorist sympathisers, or enemies of the nation-state – a line echoed in national, regional and global media – hides the reality that the regime is terrorising the people and is arguably their most lethal enemy. In his landmark essay Resistance to Civil Government, Thoreau observed:

    Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

    Faith and freedom defy state violence

    The banning of political parties and sentencing to death of Morsi and others are, we are told, necessary to fight terrorism and threats to Egypt’s security. For more than a decade, security threats and terrorism have been mediatised as synonymous and both as Islamic. Whatever acceptability el-Sisi has to local and international elites is on account of his role as a “secular” warrior against what his spokesman has called religious fascism and terrorism.

    This propaganda fits, as well as reproduces, the post-Cold War polarisation of international politics. The “evil” communist, according to anthropologist Joseba Zulaika, has been replaced with the new enemy baptised as terrorism (read Islamic).

    We must puncture and resist, as Thoreau did, such a violent staging of the “clash of civilisations” thesis in the form of terrorism versus democracy, Islam versus the West and so on. What is at stake in Egypt and elsewhere is the freedom and democracy routinely denied and suppressed by invoking the bogeymen of religion and terrorism.

    A different understanding of religion actually connects Christians in the West and Muslims, in fact people of all faiths across the world. This is not the religion of Egypt’s grand mufti, Shawki Allam, and his predecessor, Ali Gomaa, nor the likes of Florida pastor Terry Jones, nor the Buddhist monks inciting mass violence against their fellow Burmese. It an understanding shared by thinkers such as Thoreau, his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an Indian figure of monumental significance but unfortunately not well known.

    Khan’s philosophy of peace, dear to people of many faiths organised under the banner of Khudaai Khidmatgaar (God’s Servants), flourished in the same place where, ironically, the Pakistani Taliban come from. People such as Khan harnessed religion for peace, justice and equality and to fight slavery, colonialism and humiliation. Theirs was a vision that transcended sectarian divides.

    Ugly geopolitics and the beauty of sun-bright Mecca

    The bravery with which peaceful democracy protesters confronted death in Cairo resonates with Khan’s philosophy of peace. He challenged the brutality of the British Empire as well as the injustices – including patriarchal and feudal – within his own society as follows:

    I warn the English that we also have God who watches over us … I admit that they have got machine guns, army, guns and police, but we have got God. We [Indians] have also got patience [ṣabr].

    The resolve of Egypt’s political prisoners recalls the spirit of Khan, who spent decades in prisons, and Emerson. Unlike Samuel Huntington, who would separate the West and Islam, Emerson connected them to assert:

    I clap my hands in … joy and amazement, before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sun-bright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty.

    It is this beauty Emerson spoke of that is concealed by merchants of the clash of civilisations – much of the mainstream media, thinktanks, policymakers, politicians, profiteering business conglomerates, the military-industrial complex – so as to sell the ugly shape of their geopolitics. The el-Sisi regime aims to block the way to the future that Emerson saw through cowardly devices such as death sentences and torture.

    After the death sentence, Morsi declared:

    I am not afraid … I promise the revolutionaries that I will not be less courageous and steadfast than they are, and I will stick to my principles and stances in confronting the coup … The coup leaders seek to break the will of the revolution. I call on everyone to complete the revolution without fear.

    If Morsi is hanged, will there be a Thoreau to write about the “Martyrdom of Mohammed Morsi”? The verse Thoreau quotes in “Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown” remains completely apt.

    Tell men of high condition,

    That rule affairs of state,

    Their purpose is ambition,

    Their practice only hate;

    And if they once reply,

    Then given them all the lie.

    Irfan Ahmad is Associate Professor of Political Anthropology, Institute for Religion, Politics and Society at Australian Catholic University. This article first appeared in The Conversation on August 14, 2015.

  • Theresia Hiranabe. “My dreadful experience of war”: a Japanese perspective.

    FEATURE, The Good Oil, August 18, 2015

    For Japanese Good Samaritan Sister Theresia Hiranabe, the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II is a timely opportunity to share her “dreadful experience of war” and how it led her to the Good Samaritan Sisters. 

    BY Theresia Hiranabe SGS*

    The seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II is a good reason to tell my dreadful experience of war – and in the end – how it led me to the Good Samaritan Sisters.

    On December 8, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. This brought Japan into World War II. At that time I was eight years old and living in Manchuria. My family had moved to Manchuria from Tokyo in 1938 when I was six. There, we lived in Botanko, very close to the Russian border, and my father worked for the army.

    As the war progressed, we began to hear about the bombing of Tokyo, Osaka and other industrial cities in Japan. We also heard how people were suffering from shortages of food and other necessities of life. In Manchuria, however, we were a long way from the battles and did not suffer like that.

    But on August 8, 1945, life changed dramatically for my family. At 5:00am I was woken by a terrible noise. People were shouting that Russia had declared war on Japan in Manchuria. That same day, in the afternoon, Russian B-29s crossed the border and began dropping bombs. That evening, Russian tanks invaded Manchuria and a fierce battle was fought; the Japanese forces were defeated.

    Earlier in the day the evacuation of civilians had begun. As we were waiting for cars to take us to the train station, the bombers came over Botanko. At that moment we became refugees: my mother, my younger brother and me. My elder brother, who had just turned 18, had been called up for military duty along with all male students. It would be some years before we would meet him again. There was no time to say goodbye to friends or teachers; I have never met any of them since.

    When we got to the station there were thousands of terrified people crowding the platform and struggling to board the waiting train. We thought ourselves lucky to get onto the train, even though it was a roofless goods wagon. The train was packed but did not leave until the next morning. Just before our wagon left my father found us to say goodbye. He promised to come to us as soon as he could.

    It was August, mid-summer and very hot as we made our journey. Every day there were sudden showers. In our open wagon we got very wet, but dried out quickly in the hot sun. It took two weeks to reach Shinkyo (now Chosum), the capital city of Manchuria. The train was slow and stopped often. At these stops we were able to buy food from Chinese farmers. Since ours was the first train to leave Botanko we were spared the bombing by Russian planes. Later trains were bombed, killing many women and children.

    When we arrived in Shinkyo on the morning of August 15, 1945, we were told over a loud-speaker that at noon there was to be an important announcement. I felt uneasy and fearful that something might happen to us and it came over like a shadow on my heart. Then at noon, we heard the voice of the Emperor announcing that Japan had accepted the Potsdam Declaration and that the war had ended. Everyone knelt down on the ground and wept. We all asked ourselves, “what shall we do?” I still remember this terrible despair.

    We did not stay in Shinkyo. The train moved on that afternoon and, a week later, we arrived in Hoten. Everywhere we looked we saw Russian soldiers. We were so frightened. I still feel that fear when I think about it. Even now when I hear the sound of a big truck, I’m reminded of that fear.

    After we had been in Hoten awhile, we women and girls were each handed a pistol in case of an attack by Russian soldiers. That made us even more frightened, but fortunately we did not have to use it.

    The situation was very uncertain. Russian soldiers were everywhere but they did not have total control of the city. The Japanese army did what they could for us. At first we were given shelter in an army building. I remember feeling safe on the ninth floor. But every day the number of refugees increased, and two weeks later, we were all moved into a school. There were thousands of us.

    Although Hoten was a Japanese city, it was not safe for us. The Chinese, who had been invaded by the Japanese forces, took their revenge by looting and burning Japanese houses.

    Winter comes early in Manchuria. November 1945 was a freezing winter, with temperatures ranging from -10 to -30 degrees. Every day groups of settlers – women, children and old men – arrived from the north, having walked through the snow. They had lost everything as a result of the Russian invasion and Chinese rioting. Many died of hunger; babies died on their mother’s backs. One mother asked a man to bury her beside the mountain path. Then she killed her small child who was dying after which she herself died.

    Towards the end of the year my father came to find us. He found us a place in a Chinese hotel. He also got work with a Chinese employer and we began to have hope of getting back to Japan. But in early 1946, my father caught a cold, or so we thought. Sick with typhus, he died on January 12. My mother, who had nursed him, also caught typhus and died a few weeks later on March 4. My ten-year-old brother and I (now 13) were orphans.

    Before my mother’s death, the Chinese man my father worked for helped my mother with the cremation of my father’s body. I wanted to put his ashes somewhere holy so I went very secretly to the temple and when I thought no one was watching, I dug a little hole and left them there.

    There were many orphaned children like us. We were not left without help. Much of it came from a Zen Buddhist temple where people made sure we had food and shelter, and arrangements were made to get us to Japan. We went on the first ship to sail to Japan after the war. It took a week.

    We were looked after by the Japanese Welfare Authority. Most of the children were taken by their relations. Two months later my elder brother returned to our home town in Hokkaido. When he heard about our parents’ death and that my young brother and I had returned to Japan, he came to Hakata to take us to Hokkaido. This elder brother died two years later.

    While waiting for our relations to take us we went to school. One of the teachers there was a Catholic lady, Setsuko, who cared for us as well as taught us. She had been baptised by Father Flynn, an Australian priest in Hakata. He was one of the Australian priests who responded to the appeal of Bishop Yamaguchi of Nagasaki to help rebuild his diocese after the devastation of the 1945 atomic bomb.

    Father Flynn introduced Setsuko to the Good Samaritan Sisters who had also responded to Bishop Yamaguchi’s appeal. Setsuko worked with the Sisters in Nagasaki and later in Sasebo at their newly established kindergarten.

    I had been in Hokkaido for five years and was wondering what to do with my life. Setsuko invited me to Nagasaki and it was there that I met the Sisters. I still remember the strong impression they made on me. I was not Catholic, but felt something happened to me.

    I began learning about the Christian life. Two years later I went to Sasebo and worked with the Sisters. On Christmas Day 1952 I was baptised in front of the Sisters. I had a wish to join them. It kept growing, but many obstacles were in my way: my poor health, due to lack of nourishment because there was no good food in Japan; I had no money because I didn’t have parents; and my education had stopped because of the war.

    When I visited the Sisters again, they were busy with preparations for the opening of Seiwa High School and I was asked to help. I had no special reason to refuse, so accepted.

    After working with the Sisters for a year, I began my education at Sasebo which was followed by five years’ study at university. After my graduation I worked as a teacher at Sasebo and became a Good Samaritan aspirant. Three years later, in 1964, I became a Good Samaritan postulant. This was the beginning of my life as a Good Samaritan Sister.

    Whenever people sympathise with me for what I suffered in China, I answer in my mind: Japan did serious wrongs as a colonial ruler. When Japan invaded China and Korea, millions of people suffered terrible pain.

    I offer my sufferings in China, the death of my parents – the loss of everything, as compensation for what Japan did. It is my small sacrifice.

    * Good Samaritan Sister Theresia Hiranabe has a background in secondary school teaching, adult faith formation and pastoral work in Japan. Now retired, she lives in Nara and is involved in adult faith formation, catechetics and scripture studies.

    Source: http://www.goodsams.org.au/good-oil/my-dreadful-experience-of-war-a-japanese-perspective

  • John Menadue. The Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing.

    I have frequently raised my concerns about the ability of the Department of Health and Ageing to develop good health policy and manage health reform. A test of the new Minister is whether she can help facilitate the necessary reform. See below links to two earlier articles I wrote on this problem. The first is a capability review of the Department of Heath and Ageing by the Australian Public Service Commission. The second is a report by the Australian National Audit Office of DHA’s administration of the Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement.

    Both reports raise very serious issues.

    https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=3411

    https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=3453

  • Nicholas Reece. How Australia’s cartel-like political parties drag own democracy.

    In a modern democracy like Australia, political parties are the main delivery mechanism of change. But recent events suggest these vehicles for change have become incapable of changing themselves.
    For the ALP it is the rejection of internal democratic reform and the failure to modernise the relationship with the union movement. For the Liberal Party it is an entrenched and embarrassing under-representation of women in its senior ranks.
    Recent attempts at internal reform by the major parties have been miserable flops, as they cling to the economic and social structures of a bygone century. And the Greens are no better.
    As a result, Australia suffers from the lowest levels of political party membership in the advanced world. Yet the cartel-like structure of our party-based system means they continue as viable entities. The party is over but the music keeps playing, turning Australia into a democracy without the people.

    In July, Labor’s national conference achieved significant policy success on several fronts and provided a political boost for Bill Shorten. But on the issue of internal democratic reform, the party once again came up short.
    The conference adopted one significant change: ordinary members will now directly elect at least 150 delegates, the equivalent of one for every federal electorate, and a little more than one in three of all conference delegates.
    The same conference also overwhelmingly voted down a motion to give local members at least 50 per cent of votes for Senate preselections. Another motion, to increase the vote of ordinary members in preselections for House of Representatives candidates, was put up then withdrawn.
    With unions representing just 17 per cent of the workforce, Labor is trying to be the party of the future while shackled to the political economy of the 19th century.
    Shorten in his campaign to become Labor leader promised party reform and gave commitments about setting a new standard for selecting ALP senators and giving members more say in preselections. Yet he was not even present on the conference floor when the matter was debated. It was a far cry from Gough Whitlam’s courageous “the impotent are pure” speech to the 1967 Victorian ALP conference.
    Meanwhile the Liberal Party remains chained to 19th century social arrangements, with an outrageous under-representation of women in its senior ranks.
    When Sir Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1944 he created a political party that was arguably the most progressive in the world in the representation of women. Menzies established quotas, with women to take a certain number of elected organisational party positions, and these quotas exist to this day in some state branches such as Victoria.
    But with the exception of John Hewson, successive Liberal leaders have failed to give due attention to advancing women in their ranks through pre-selection and promotion. Now the Liberal Party finds itself with just 19 per cent of its federal parliamentary ranks filled by women and only two women in a federal cabinet of 19. That is half the number of women in the Cabinet of Afghanistan.
    Again, the answer for the Liberal Party is obvious. But the party’s rejection of quotas is a triumph of school-boy debating rhetoric over evidence-based policy making. Quotas will help get more Liberal women into parliament. Quotas will help the Liberals with policy making in their party room. Quotas will help the Liberals win more votes at elections and form government more often.
    But Tony Abbott is resisting calls for reform, is defiant on quotas, and will not admit to any institutional bias. In so doing he is proving to be part of the problem, not the solution. Menzies would be turning in his grave.
    Finally, if you think the Greens Party are the standard bearers for internal democracy and modernity, then think again. The Greens’ system for electing their party leader is steeped in more mystery than the selection of the Pope. And their party conferences are closed affairs, with the media banned from attending debates.
    In most democracies, about 5 per cent of voters are party members. In Australia, the figure has dropped sharply to less than 2 per cent.
    If the Australian political parties operated in a competitive market like other organisations or companies, there is no way they would survive. So how do they get away with it? The short answer is that our party political system operates a lot like a cartel. A general lack of competitive pressure means they do not feel the heat to reform. Australia’s pathetic party funding and donation disclosure arrangements are further evidence of this cartel-like arrangement.
    There is also an insularity to the Australian political system that means our parties often lag years behind developments in other parts of the world. In advanced democracies in Europe and North America there is a much higher awareness of what is happening in political parties in other jurisdictions, and this tends to drive reform towards best practice. The Australian political class seems unaware of Australia’s wooden-spoon status when it comes to party membership, or that most parties on both the left and right give their members a much bigger say in decision-making.

    The paradox of power makes change hard: those with power simply won’t agree to a change in arrangements that will diminish their power. And there is no equivalent of the ACCC to demand change to the structure of this system.
    The jungle drums for change are beating. But they will need to beat louder still – both internally among party members and externally with voters – if anything is going to change.
    Liberal Party strategists know one reason they underperform with women voters is the lack of women in their parliamentary ranks. And Labor Party leaders know they need to cauterise the damage from the trade unions royal commission by modernising the linkages across the labour movement.
    Just don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
    Nicholas Reece is a principal fellow at Melbourne University and a former Victorian secretary of the ALP and policy adviser to Julia Gillard, Steve Bracks and John Brumby. This article was first published in The Age on August 10, 2015

     

  • Naval shipbuilding in South Australia is a waste of money.

    In this blog on 19 August, I reposted an earlier blog from Jon Stanford on ‘The government’s new naval shipbuilding policy’.

    Hugh White,  a columnist at The Age and Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Study Centre, ANU, has written a recent article on the same subject. The article is consistent with the thrust of Jon Stanford’s earlier article.

    See link to Melbourne Age article below:

    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/naval-manoeuvres-a-costly-exercise-to-secure-votes-not-borders-20150816-gj0fjh.html

  • John Menadue. Saving lives at sea!

    To justify its harsh refugee policies, the government has been telling us that their policies are designed to save lives at sea. What hypocrisy!

    And only last week we saw at the ALP Federal Conference, former Labor ministers justifying their ‘turn-back’ policies as a means to reduce drownings at sea.

    Please spare us this charade.

    The objective of our inhuman refugee policies is overwhelmingly political, to be seen to be tough on boat arrivals and win electoral support as a result. The object of the present government has been to deride the Labor party for its alleged softness on refugees and to parade its own toughness on boat arrivals, and particularly towards Muslims. It has been overwhelmingly playing to our fears of the foreigner. It is not about stopping drownings at sea.

    John Howard led the breakdown of bipartisan policy on refugees and deliberately sought to divide the country by the promotion of fear. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison followed even more unscrupulously. This promotion of fear of the outsider and the person who is different has been exploited to the full and it has paid off politically, to our great shame.

    Boat people were no longer people in great need and distress. For political purposes they have been demonised. They were ‘illegal’ and akin to criminals. Scott Morrison told us that they brought diseases and wads of cash. We were told that they were so inhuman that they would even be prepared to throw their children overboard.

    To justify these disgraceful policies we are now told continually that their purpose was to stop the drownings at sea.

    If the objective was to stop the drownings, we would have been sending ships to rescue distressed people at sea. That is what the Italian navy has been doing. But we send out our ships to stop arrivals, return asylum seekers to Indonesia or detain them off shore almost indefinitely. It is not designed to save lives at sea.

    During the Indochina outflow in the late 1970s and early 1980s there were tens of thousands of refugees drowned at sea. We will never know the number. Thousands were thrown overboard, raped or robbed by pirates on the high seas. But we did not turn away from the plight of desperate people by suggesting that if we helped it would only encourage more risky voyages and more drownings.

    If we were seriously committed to a genuine policy of stopping drownings at sea, one would expect Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to be nominated for humanitarian awards – perhaps a Nobel Prize each. But when they are honest with themselves they will know that this argument about their policies being designed to stop drownings at sea is disgraceful and dishonest nonsense.

    And by what moral authority have we a right to say that we should stop desperate people taking risks for freedom. If a family is fleeing the Taliban or that death cult IS or fleeing persecution and facing death in Iraq or Syria have we a right to say that they should not risk their lives in flight either by land or sea. Surely it is for them to make the calculation that the risks in flight are less than the risks of staying in their homeland and facing persecution or worse. How can we honestly say that it is up to us to make the moral decision about whether other people should take risks for their own survival?

    The whole campaign against boat arrivals is to politically exploit our fear. It is not to stop drownings at sea.

    Let’s be honest with ourselves.

  • David Holmes. Australia’s climate politics on a high wire.

    (or – Murdoch and Abbott in climate dial duet)

    While the politicisation of climate change has transformed climate reporting into something of a circus, the Coalition’s announcement of a 26% emissions reduction target on 2005 levels for Australia by 2030 has surely placed its climate policy on a dangerous high wire.

    The high wire is not that the target has been set too high. It is that trying to balance this “defeatist” target is going to lead to the collapse of Direct Action, and will impair the ability of the Coalition-News Corp publicity machine to defend fossil fuels.

    Already, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is resorting to increasingly desperate and absurd arguments, such as his comments on the ABC’s AMon Wednesday morning about exporting coal to India and China:

    The great thing about the Australian coal industry is that it’s actually helping countries like China to reduce their emissions intensity, if not their overall emissions, because our coal is better quality coal than the Chinese and Indian coal.

    Never mind that the floor price for coal is set to continue diving worldwide. Here is an unfathomable argument that Australia’s increasingly worthless coal is better than everyone else’s unworthy coal, and is helping fight climate change.

    With coal, as with its new target announcement, the Coalition’s honesty about its climate policy in the past will be unveiled. The ruse of a long and sustained campaign of impression management is about to be exposed by the high wire act.

    In the context of every anti-renewable, pro-coal and denialist utterance from Coalition ministers over the past two years, the revised targets are a complete stunt that have little to do with decarbonisation.

    Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday, Peter Hartcherargued that the Coalition doesn’t make any of its:

    … big decisions based on science, economics, markets, or any value other than politics. So let’s set aside the pretence that this is really about climate change.

    The Coalition is continuing to play out a strategy that has worked for them in the past. This is to mount a defence against any charge that it is doing nothing about climate change, and then turn attention away from itself, by attacking Labor and the Greens as having scary policies that will hurt the economy, jobs and electricity prices.

    This is why the Abbott government was sure to mention that while 26% is guaranteed, it might think about 28% if it is not going to hurt the economy. Never mind that the only target 26% meets is to keep Australia at the bottom of the league of nations that can actually afford to do something about climate, while having a per capita carbon footprint four times the world average.

    The Australian revealed that while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Environment Minister Greg Hunt lobbied for a more ambitious target of 30% at the cabinet meeting prior to the announcement, it was Abbott who pushed for the lower target.

    So while this all-too-risky high wire act is wanting to draw attention to “the economy”, it does so only as a means of attacking policies that actually do address decarbonisation.

    Abbott is banking on a number of things here: that a “toxic carbon tax” scare campaign can be recycled for the next election, and that News Corp will do the heavy lifting for him by continuing to heavily editorialise against Labor.

    And, right on cue, the day before the government announced its 2030 emissions target, the Daily Telegraph produced another of its signature attacks on Labor’s climate policy. Its front page prepared the way for a “responsible”-looking policy from the Coalition, citing rising power bills, job losses and a collapsing economy.

    The News Corp tabloids are capable of ferociously nationalising their editorial stance toward a Labor emissions trading scheme and caricaturing it as a toxic carbon tax at a moment’s notice. But, such a stunt is looking rather worn-out. What both Abbott and the Daily Telegraph have ignored is that the electorate has noticed that power bills have spiked substantially under Direct Action, and that carbon emissions have dramatically increased.

    Curiously, however, while two of The Australian’s columnists professed their love for coal and the Adani mine in the Galilee Basin, reporters David Crowe and Sid Maher ran an article that floated the inadequacy of the announced targets.

    The Climate Council’s Tim Flannery, so often pilloried by The Australian, had the story lead with the quote:

    Over the next few days, there will be a lot of spin to try and confuse Australians into thinking that we are doing more than we actually are. But no amount of smoke and mirrors will cover up the fact that an emissions reduction target of 40 per cent on 2000 levels by 2030 is the bare minimum and this target is far below that.

    Crowe and Maher then go on to quote independent senator Nick Xenophon and Shadow Environment Minister Mark Butler’s dismissal of the target, before going on to conclude:

    The Australian target would be below Canada’s ambition of 30% by 2030 and would not keep up with the US target of 26-28% by 2025 or the EU promise of a 40% cut from 1990 levels by 2030.

    However, more significant is that the government is ignoring advice from its own Climate Change Authority, which has consistently recommended cuts of between 40 and 60% by 2030. With the Climate Change Authority providing a benchmark target, in a rational world you would think this would create a bidding war between the parties for the highest targets – especially given the level of public anxiety over global warming.

    Climate change is set to be the main battleground of the next election campaign. Labor has declared it so. And newspaper polls, think-tank polls and even the major parties’ own internal polling show climate change to be front and centre of voter concern.

    What is needed is a budget approach to framing policy that the Climate Change Authority itself uses. Globally, carbon emissions should not exceed 1700 billion tonnes between 2000 and 2050 if we are to give ourselves a reasonable chance of staying below two degrees warming. Australia’s share of this, adjusted for relativities with poorer nations and per capita carbon footprint, is calculated by the Climate Change Authority to be approximately ten billion tonnes of C02 between now and 2050.

    However, unless the major parties listen to the Climate Change Authority’s advice, what risks getting lost is the comparability of effective action. By being pre-occupied with abstract targets rather than carbon budgets, parties will continue to compare their policies to other nations, and other timeframes, which end up becoming meaningless – for climate policymakers, economists and the public at large.

    David Holmes is Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. This article was first published in The Conversation on August 12, 2015.

  • Walter Hamilton. It’s not the apology, stupid!

    We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.

    This comes from the statement issued during the week by Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific. It is perhaps unfair to highlight one sentence from a longish document, but, in my reading of it, this accurately summarizes its abiding sentiment.

    Abe wants to draw a line under the past. He wants to end the culture of contrition that, he believes, has crimped nationalist sentiment in his own country for a generation and prevented Japan acting to its full and sovereign potential.

    Personally, I do not believe anyone can ‘apologize’ for the mistakes of others. To apologize means to take responsibility before the public for one’s own error; it is expected that a correction or an act of restitution will follow. Real apologies exist in the present, when something can be done about the mistake, as opposed to retrospective compensation. The rest is an ex-post facto judgement: approval or regret, disgust or admiration. We may feel our forefathers, former governments, dead Popes or whomever have made mistakes we would not have committed, and wish they had not acted as they did. But we are not they; we are actors operating only within our particular circumstances, milieu and knowledge, not theirs. Apologizing on their behalf, therefore, is mere cant and nonsense.

    I say this because for too long Japan, its neighbouring countries, and others who suffered at the hands of the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s have been fixated on the quality of the apologies post-war leaders have been obliged to utter for the deeds of the past. Every statement, especially on the anniversary of the war’s end, is scrutinized for its ‘grief’, ‘remorse’, ‘regret’, ‘apology’ words, in a fruitless game of semantics, as if this changed anything.

    (In his own, much briefer, commemorative speech on the weekend, Emperor Akihito for the first time used the phrase ‘deep remorse’ to express his feelings––well and good, as far as it goes. This liberal-minded emperor is perceived by some to be a counterweight to the bellicose Abe. On such a formal occasion there was never much scope for him to articulate an alternative narrative, but the fact that he broke new ground––when Abe merely re-hoed old ground––is worth mentioning.)

    The past rules a line under itself. What matters, the only thing that matters, is the quality of our understanding of history and our ability to admit and learn from the mistakes of the past. On this score, Abe’s statement fails miserably. It provides an apologia for Japan’s actions rather than a nuanced and forthright account of the policies and actions that brought disaster upon Japan and inflicted suffering on millions of others.

    The statement was drafted by a committee of ‘experts’ whom Abe appointed, in characteristic manner, to shift from him the responsibility for its particular contents. And yet it is pure Abe in its thesis.

    Time and again, the Japanese Prime Minister recounts events leading up to the war in terms of Japan being forced into a corner: threatened with loss of sovereignty by the American/European imperial powers in the 1850s and threatened again with economic ruin by their trade protectionist policies in the 1930s. Japan always acted out of a sense of ‘crisis’, a need for survival. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole truth.

    What this thesis fails to acknowledge is the agency of Japan’s own leaders in planning and executing an imperialist policy from the very start of the nation’s modernization in the second half of the 19th century and the many steps taken to suppress democratic movements inside Japan in the first half of the 20th century. Japan’s ‘manifest destiny’ of imperial aggression in Asia (thence extended to the broader Pacific) was not something it had to invent because the nation was excluded from the benefits of international affairs and commerce––it was an exercise in hegemony intended to ‘perfect’ the colonial empire of the ‘White’ powers.

    Abe states: ‘The Japan-Russia War gave encouragement to many people under colonial rule from Asia to Africa.’ I have heard this sort of comment from all sorts of right-wingers in Japan. It is laughable, in the sense that one colonial power, Russia, was simply replaced by another, Japan. Abe cannot talk about the ‘encouragement’ of 1906 unless he is willing, in the same breath, to admit the disillusionment of 1910 (the year Japan annexed Korea) and beyond. The feelings of ‘profound grief’ and ‘eternal, sincere condolences’ expressed on several occasions are empty without an acceptable historical accounting for the events one is ‘grieving’ about.

    Abe is forthright when he chooses to be and evasive when it suits him. For instance, we have this about Japan’s sufferings: ‘The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the air raids on Tokyo and other cities, and the ground battles in Okinawa, among others, took a heavy toll among ordinary citizens without mercy.’ The ‘without mercy’ here, the only use of the phrase in the speech, is applied exclusively to the Allies. But when it comes to acknowledging the so-called comfort women, the many mainly Korean women organized into brothels to service the Japanese military, this is his oblique way of addressing the issue: ‘We must never forget that there were women behind the battlefields whose honour and dignity were severely injured.’ The ‘we’––and not ‘I’––of this statement is particularly greasy; Abe requires others to ‘never forget’ what he himself has previously denied ever happened.

    In describing the postwar setting in which Japan re-emerged as a great power, Abe makes no acknowledgement of the reforms undertaken during the Allied Occupation––he doesn’t even mention that there was an Occupation (just as he fails to mention Pearl Harbor). He talks about never again resorting to the threat or use of force to resolve conflicts, but omits to say that this principle only came into existence through the 1947 Constitution adopted by Japan under the watchful eye of the Americans. Since Abe considers this document does not represent the will and culture of the Japanese people, and wants it changed, he commits a double hypocrisy by paraphrasing its Article 9.

    Australia is referred to several times in the statement, generally in the context of the POW issue. There is acknowledgement of the POWs’ mistreatment, though the main reason they are mentioned is to stress how Japan has been so graciously forgiven by its former enemies. The whole second half of Abe’s statement is about receiving forgiveness and moving on from a position of apology. For every mistake, whether by Japan or its opponents, he offers ways in which Japan has learnt and will act differently in the future. Sounds fine, except, as itemized in this blog, promises built on a shoddy foundation of historical distortions and wishful thinking do not carry much weight.

    Forget the ‘apology’ trimmings, feel the cloth.

    Walter Hamilton reported on Japan for 11 years for the ABC.

     

     

  • Peter Day. “Sally’s worth it.”

    Harry Anslinger’s dream to rid the world of drugs was given legs in 1930 when he was appointed the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department‘s Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

    He was a brilliant bureaucrat with a grand vision underpinned by prohibition; a man who single-handedly turned a marginalised, underfunded Bureau into an uncompromising and powerful war machine.

    But, as Johann Hari reveals in his compelling book “Chasing the Scream – the first and last days of the war on drugs,” Anslinger was also a zealot and racist:

    “The most frightening aspect of marijuana, [Anslinger] warned, was on blacks. It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers – and unleashed their lust for white women.”

    Harry’s dream has become a global nightmare.

    A story:

    I’m not sure of the exact date, but I’ll never forget the encounter.

    I first met ‘Sally’ (not her real name) in late 1997 at St Canice’s parish, Kings Cross.

    She was homeless. She was an addict. She was paid for sex.

    Sally was exhausted – her life was exhausting.

    She needed some respite – just a couple of nights in a safe place, please.

    At that time, St Canice’s was providing temporary shelter for working girls just like Sally. The accommodation was very basic: a small room with a single bed and a sink overlooking the church’s carpark.

    For a brief period, it was my responsibility to help clean the room and welcome its guests. It was a simple process: strip the bed, put on clean sheets, wash the floor and sink, and empty the bedside bin which was a popular hang-out for used syringes.

    This is how I came to meet Sally. She arrived one afternoon set for a couple of night’s accommodation and we had a chat:

    Cuppa, Sally?

    Yeh, that’d be good, thanks. 

    How’d you sleep?

    Not bad; it’s nice to be safe, which ain’t too common given me lifestyle. 

    It must be awful feeling so unsettled …

    Yeh, not much fun; not much of a life, neither. 

    If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been using … and living on the streets?

    God, I’ve been usin’ since I was a teenager … almost 20 years now! 

    Sorry, excuse me; the kettle’s boiled; any sugars?

    Yeh, three, please … make it four. 

    Biscuit?

    Ta; that’d be nice. 

    There you go, hope it’s not too strong.

    Perfect, ta.

    Yeh, I had me first shot when I was fourteen. Mum used to entertain a lot, if you know what I mean; not nice blokes, neither. They used to rough me up quite a bit; had a pretty terrible childhood, really. Mum was a user too. That’s how I got into the gear … and prostitution. 

    Hope you don’t mind me asking; but do you think you’ll ever escape all this; the drugs, the …?

    Look, gettin’ off the gear’s the easy bit; but what for? What am I goin’ to do when I get off it? I’ve been a prostitute and user since I was fourteen; haven’t worked for nearly 20 years; not much of a CV. Not much of a story for a future employer, is it? The thing people don’t understand is that all me friends are users, too. This is my world. This is all I know. So, if I stop usin’, it means I’ve gotta give up me friends as well. I’d have to find another world. It’d be like startin’ all over. I’m not sure I can do that. I’m not sure I’d know where to start … it’s not just a physical thing, drug addiction …

    _________________

    When one listens to stories like Sally’s, two things become apparent: firstly, how traumatised and sick she is, and secondly, how much her drug induced chaos makes sense, as terrible as that may sound. After all, why wouldn’t she pursue relief from such unbearable psychological pain – ever had a knee replacement or a tooth pulled and refused pain-killers?

    As many addicts will tell you, addiction is really a disease of loneliness and self-worthlessness – much of it stemming from abuse.

    Indeed, “it’s not just a physical thing, drug addiction.”

    And here-in lies the problem with the war on drugs: it is a war that predominately targets the sick and the weak and the poor.

    It is a war against the Sallys of the world who, thanks to prohibition, are forced to hunt for their pain relief amidst wicked and brutal people in wicked and brutal places.

    One might even say we have criminalised pain relief.

    Yet still, after almost a century, most of the generals and policy boffins prosecuting this war continue to pursue Mr Anslinger’s ideology of prohibition and criminalisation: if you get rid of the chemicals and swat away the users and sellers, all will be well.

    But all is not well wherever this ideology abounds.

    Indeed, prohibition has inadvertently created another war: the war FOR drugs: a murderous, multi-billion dollar free-for-all overseen by transnational cartels, gangs, and assorted opportunists.

    The global misery and damage is incalculable.

    This tsunami of crime has also spawned a brutal and unjust judicial system; one which powerfully prosecutes the weak and weakly prosecutes the powerful. Look who is filling our gaols: in the U.S. and Australia it is those who are poor and black and addicted – Mr Anslinger would be pleased.

    The nature of this racist backdrop is encapsulated in the following exchange between decorated American police officer, Matthew Fogg, and one of his superiors. Once again, we turn to Hari’s “Chasing the Scream”:

    “Fogg was bewildered as to why his force only ever went to black neighbourhoods to chase drug users. He suggested to his boss they start raiding white neighbourhoods as well.

    “‘Fogg,’ his boss said, ‘you know you’re right they are using drugs there but you know what? If we go out and we start targeting those individuals, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians, they know all the big folks in government. If we start targeting them … you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to get a phone call and they’re going to shut us down … There goes your overtime. There goes the money that you’re making. So let’s just go after the weakest link. Let’s go after those who can’t afford the attorneys, those who we can lock up.’”

    The war on drugs has encouraged governments, police, the law, and us to look upon the Sallys of our world with a dismissive contempt. Thus, Sally and her ilk are swatted off to the streets and into humiliating prison settings which are far more adept at re-traumatising the traumatised than rehabilitation.

    When asked how Australia might most effectively respond to the drug problem, Dr Alex Wodak AM, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, had this to say:

    “We should be making primarily a health and social response. I say ‘primarily’ because there should always be some law enforcement; if there was a tanker full of heroin coming to our ports I like to think something would be done about that.

    “But this is also about gross inequalities in our communities. Australia is a much more unequal county compared to countries in Scandinavia, or Japan that have lower levels of drug use. Generally the more unequal the country the higher the levels of drug use.

    “From a social perspective, we should do everything we can to keep people who use illicit drugs integrated in the community, and if they fall out then we should help them reintegrate. One of the most helpful things we can do is encourage them to get a decent education and some training and help them gain meaningful employment that will maintain their self-respect. 

    “From a health perspective, let’s say it was your sister with the drug problem and she really wanted to stop. Every relative would want her to go to a counselor or health professional rather than be picked up by the police. The criminal justice system is stigmatizing, if your sister was to go to jail the stigma will always hang over her… when finding a boyfriend, getting a job, renting a place. Making sure people are not irretrievably damaged is very important.”

    Hear, hear. Sally’s worth it.

    Peter Day is a Catholic Priest in Canberra.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Mark Triffitt and Travers McLeod. Entitlements scandal is a sign of political rot.

    When does a political system become corrupt? When is the line crossed from garden variety rorting by a few members of parliament to institutionalised abuse of taxpayers’ money by the system?

    The latest scandal over politicians’ entitlements has been like lifting the proverbial rock to discover a deeply, ethically challenged netherworld. One flagrant folly scuttled out, only to be followed by a horde of others.

    Individual politicians have responded by pointing the finger at everyone and everything except themselves. This includes blaming their transgressions on a “system” of entitlements they created.

    The public has reacted with disgust. And rightly so. This is our money being used for gratuitous chopper rides and flying the family business class to outback resorts.

    It’s also compounded a growing view that our democratic system has become largely unaccountable and insensitive to citizens and, as a result, is reaching breaking point.

    In this hothouse environment of outraged public opinion, it can be easy to exaggerate current events into claims of a full-blown crisis. After all, politicians have been up to these sorts of shenanigans since forever.

    So how do we run a ruler over recent transgressions to see if they represent a superficial problem, or something more deeply embedded? Fortunately we have guidelines in the form of an article by American philosopher Amelie Rorty on how and why corruption begins and spreads.

    Rorty is concerned with “the gradual corruption of an individual”. But her observations have important implications for the institutions and systems that individuals inhabit.
    Her article, “How to Harden Your Heart: Six Easy Ways to Become Corrupt”, says the slippery slide to corruption is rarely obvious or defined by a single event. Instead, it happens by nuance and degrees.

    It usually starts as the result of small errors of judgment. Individuals might rationalise their behaviour as minor infractions and even admit wrongdoing. But no real steps are taken to stamp out these behaviours. As acceptance of small errors compounds, hardens and spreads, self-deception leads to denial. The occasional individual ethical lapse becomes habitual corruption.

    Applying Rorty’s thinking to our national political system provides a disturbing insight into where it is, and where it might be heading. The conclusion is unthinkable in a country that prides itself and its democratic system as being largely “clean”.

    Rorty points to six warning signs that indicate if an individual is moving into the danger zone. The cues are eerily similar to what many in the community now consider to be broader weaknesses of our political system.

    The first danger signal is what Rorty calls “attention to the present”. In the context of our political system it’s the overweening obsession with the short term and is potentially dangerous in fostering corruption because it allows wrongdoers to disconnect their present actions from future consequences. Obsessive reliance by MPs on fortnightly opinion polls is but one example of this corrosive impact.

    Another warning sign is what Rorty calls “groupie attraction” or “gravitating to the company of like-minded” – a succinct way of describing the Canberra political bubble.
    This is dangerous because the groupthink it creates provides both protection and support for wrongdoing (what is upheld as the “standard” in Canberra won’t often pass the pub test in Castlemaine).

    Another red flag, “imitating the leader”, is self-explanatory in a political world where parties and Parliaments are increasingly organised around the dictates of their leaders.
    “Captain’s calls” are increasingly the norm. The result is political subordinates who struggle to think for themselves. Rorty describes this warning sign as when “newcomers and initiates gravitate to powerful figures. Without realising it, novices emulate the behaviour of those who model ‘how things are done’.”

    One final sign is “papering over the cracks”, which Rorty highlights as an attempt to distance the problem from the cause. We have seen this in Canberra via claims the problem lies with the “system” and not the ethical lapses of individuals.

    In short, Rorty requires us to face up to the cause, not the symptom.

    The entitlements scandal is a sign of alarming and unprecedented corrosion of Australia’s political culture. It has emerged from a succession of suspect individual moral judgments contributing to what is becoming a debased political system. That’s why far-reaching measures are needed to stamp out the rot before more damaging behaviours take hold.
    Measures offered by politicians that are likely to tinker with the present expenses system will be insufficient. As Rorty warns, “when corruption is widespread, home-grown prevention can at best provide only some resistance”.

    Full, immediate and independent transparency on entitlement use is but the first step on the long road to democratic renewal.

    Dr Mark Triffitt is a lecturer in public policy at the University of Melbourne. Dr Travers McLeod is the chief executive officer of the Centre for Policy Development.
    This article first appeared in the Melbourne Age on August 13, 2015.

  • John Menadue. Liberal Party misuse of Royal Commissions.

    Dyson Heydon is in the news again. 

    Several weeks ago he appeared to question the credibility of Bill Shorten as a witness before the Trade Union Royal Commission. He also had unusual things to say about the credibility of Julia Gillard when she appeared before the Commission. 

    See below a repost of an article on the Liberal Party and royal commissions.

    John Menadue

     

    REPOST

    With the Abbott Government there is a pattern of using Royal Commissions to attack former and current ALP leaders. See the links below to two earlier posts on the subject.

    What we really need is a Royal Commission into billions of dollars of tax avoidance by major companies operating in Australia. They are avoiding proper scrutiny.

    John Menadue.

    The Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program – a ‘dog’s breakfast’.

    What a remarkable thing to say!

  • Trans Pacific Partnership and consumer rights.

    The consumer magazine Choice has recently carried articles by Sarah Agar about the TPP and what might be traded away in terms of cheaper medicines, public interest laws and food labelling. This report was updated on 29 July, about a fortnight before Trade Minister Andrew Robb decided that he would walk away from the TPP negotiations. This article in Choice is a useful background on many of the key issues that were at stake. Fortunately the government has decided that the TPP was balanced too much in favour of corporate interests and at the expense of consumer interests.  John Menadue.

    See link to article below.

    https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advice/your-rights/articles/where-are-consumer-interests-in-international-treaties-like-tpp

    https://www.choice.com.au

  • John Menadue. The Senate saves the day on the Trans Pacific Partnership.

    The Senate saves the day on the Trans Pacific Partnership.

    Often the Senate is seen as obstructive or worse. But it has performed a very useful purpose in helping to derail the Trans Pacific Partnership. Hopefully the TPP will not be put back on track.

    According to the New York Times, our Trade Minister Andrew Robb told the TPP negotiating ministers in Hawaii that the Australian Parliament – read Senate – would not accept the further restrictions on trade in pharmaceuticals which the US was proposing. He was apparently concerned that to accede to the US demands would result in substantial increases in Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and penalise Australian pharmaceutical users. As a result of this breakdown on pharmaceuticals, the Australian government ‘walked away from the negotiations’.

    Perhaps I missed it, but I was surprised that I read this report from the New York Times and not from the Australian media. With a few exceptions, the Australian media has consistently failed to report and analyse the minor benefits that we will obtain from successive ‘Free Trade Agreements’ that Andrew Robb has finalised with Japan, China and the Republic of Korea. The so-called benefits have been grossly exaggerated but the Australian media has largely accepted the government’s version of events. And so we saw little serious examination in the Australian media of the TPP.  https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=3226

    There are many reasons why the proposed TPP was not in our interest.

    The first of course was the US proposal to increase protection from five to eight years for US pharmaceutical companies and their biologic products. It would have added to the high costs of pharmaceuticals in Australia as a result of Big Pharma’s influence on Australian governments in the Australian market.

    Very frustrating was also the fact that it was only late in the day that we were able to have some understanding of what Big Pharma and other powerful US multinationals were attempting with the TPP. This secrecy made it difficult to access the real agenda of corporate America. But with the benefit of some hindsight it is clear now that the US corporate agenda was not to free up trade but to increase protection.

    From the beginning TPP should have been suspect in terms of our national interests. The TPP was designed deliberately to exclude China. The US has been trying to build a trade bulwark against China, our main trading partner. Surely our objective and that of the US should not be to confront and contain China, but to accommodate wherever possible its involvement in the world economy and in world politics. Furthermore TPP did not include Indonesia which by 2050 is projected to be the world’s fourth largest economy. 70% of Australia’s merchandise trade passes through Indonesian waters every year. Indonesia is our most important strategic partner.

    How could the TPP serve our interests by excluding both China and Indonesia that are so important for us? Only two years ago we released a White Paper ‘Australia and the Asian Century’. That White Paper which highlighted the importance of the Pacific region for our future, has been taken off the government website and was clearly ignored in the TPP negotiations.

    Another major concern over TPP was the provision for settlement disputes between investors and countries whereby investors could sue governments in compliant pro-business fora for losses incurred when governments legislate in the public interest. Why this presents such a problem can be seen by what has happened in Hong Kong. Having lost its case in the High Court over plain packaging of tobacco, Phillip Morris is now suing Australia in Hong Kong because of an earlier trade agreement that Australia signed with Hong Kong. What an awful abuse of corporate power in defiance of our national interests.

    There were also other problems. At the end it seems that the US was not prepared to provide reasonable access for dairy products and sugar. This was a re-run of the US attitude ten years ago in the negotiation of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. That agreement not only denied proper access for Australian sugar and dairy products it also turned out to be a real dud in helping to promote Australia-US trade. Shiro Armstrong of the ANU has reported that both Australia and the US are ‘worse off than they would have been without the agreement’.At the time John Howard told us what a wonderful outcome it was for Australia

    In retrospect it is clear that almost everything was wrong about TPP – both its objectives and its processes.

    The collapse of negotiations is a welcome outcome but our media hardly noticed. So often it is obsessed with adversarial politics and personalities and has little interest in policy. In the TPP negotiations we had major national issues at stake, but our mainstream media was asleep at the wheel – again.

  • John Menadue. Parliamentary reform and the new Speaker.

    In my post of 12 May this year ‘Democratic renewal and our loss of trust in institutions’, I wrote about our loss of trust in so many institutions including our parliament and political parties. If Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten want to improve public debate and restore some faith in our public institutions the election of new speaker Tony Smith provides an opportunity to change course.

    The most trusted of our institutions are all public institutions; the ABC, the High Court and the Reserve Bank. The least trusted are political parties and the expenses mess triggered by Bronwyn Bishop will add to that lack of trust.

    Trade Unions and business groups rank about equally in trust but they are well down the list of trusted institutions. The Federal Parliament is trusted about as much as our media and not surprisingly with News Corp the least trusted of all of our media.

    The abuse of public trust by Bronwyn Bishop and others must be addressed but there is an unfortunate and consistent clamour by the powerful to undermine parliament and governments. The powerful, the wealthy, large businesses and the media don’t want their powers checked. That is why they target the parliament and political parties for criticism. This is not really surprising as the parliament in particular and our general political processes are the best means to redress power in favour of the powerless.

    Consider the furore over Bronwyn Bishop and the minimal attention to other rorts. Last week the media reported that the privileged and poorly performing sons of Rupert Murdoch would each get $US 27 million a year for four years in remuneration. There is little comment about the widespread and enormous tax avoidance by the powerful.

    Politics is the means to rebalance power in favour of the poor and needy. That is why democratic renewal is so important.

    The main concern I have about Bronwyn Bishop is her abuse of power and using her powers in the parliament in the interests of Tony Abbott and his government. She also had the unpleasant knack of looking down on those that she considered of less merit than herself. Unfortunately neither Tony Abbott nor Bronwyn Bishop has shown any real appreciation of the parliament and its proper role. How galling it was to hear from her on her resignation that she had done it ‘because of my love and respect for the institution of parliament and the Australian people’.

    There are few signs that government leaders appreciate the damage that Bronwyn Bishop has done to the standing of the Parliament. Christopher Pyne said that Bronwyn Bishop ‘had been felled in the most unfair circumstances by politics today’. Tony Abbott added ‘Despite some admitted errors of judgement she has served this parliament, our country, her party, with dedication and distinction over 30 years. She has been a warrior for the causes she believed in.’ But clearly she was not a warrior in the interests and integrity of our parliament.

    Hopefully the new speaker will provide an opportunity for parliamentary and democratic renewal. He has said that he will not attend party meetings. That is important but he needs to go much further. He should consider the practice of the House of Commons in the UK that speakers in future must be nominated at least by a minimum number of members of the Opposition. This ensures a less partisan speaker.

    With the new speaker’s leadership, the parliament should take responsibility and in a quite transparent way for the control of members’ of parliament’s expenses and entitlements. These matters should be the responsibility of the Department of Parliament and not the Department of Finance.

    As I mentioned in my earlier post on democratic renewal, I outlined other important ways to reform and improve the parliament.

    To assist members of parliament to counter the power of the cabinet and the public service the last parliament established a Parliamentary Budget Office. It provides independent and nonpartisan analysis of the budget cycle. It was a good start. But its work is restricted to budgets. Similar offices should be established in such areas as health, defence and foreign affairs.

    The research resources of the Parliamentary Library should also be enhanced. In the development of Gough Whitlam’s policy program the Parliamentary Library was a critical enabler. 

    We need an improved parliamentary committee system where hopefully we can begin to see again the art of negation and compromise. The Senate has shown that improvements are possible. A good start in our next parliament would be an all-party committee to consider ways in which the performance of the parliament could be improved and the power of the executive contained. 

    We need a broad agenda for parliamentary reform. The major party that is credible on parliamentary reform will reap a large electoral dividend. The best way for Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten to prove their bona fides as parliamentarians is to demonstrate by actions how they value the Parliament and use it as their forum and not television grabs, and talk back radio. What a pleasure it would be to see the parliament as a lively forum for debating policy and asking genuine questions to elicit information rather than a means to score political\l points. If only our politicians would seriously endeavour to find common ground by starting on such issues as senate electoral reform, political donations and ending the abuse of power by lobbyists. Leadership by Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten in these areas is the best way to restore confidence in parliament and politics. Don’t talk about it. Do it.

    There is a lack of trust in most of our major institutions. With the help of Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten the new speaker does provide an opportunity for the reform of Parliament and the restoration of confidence in our political processes. Those processes are essential for good policy and governance in Australia and supporting the most vulnerable and powerless in our community.

  • Jane Tolman. Facing up to dementia.

    As I reflect on the ongoing complaints at federal and state level about our ailing health system, widespread community concerns and a medical culture which is still often hospital- and doctor- centric, I wonder how we will be able to sort it all out.

    In the 20th Century, when average life expectancies were in the 60s and 70s, we died from a range of illnesses, but often from vascular diseases (heart attacks and strokes) and cancers. With our increasing longevity, the 20th Century diseases are being replaced by the neurodegenerative diseases of the 21st Century. These include Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease, the dementias (Alzheimer’s being the most common one in Australia) and many more less well known. They involve physical and very often cognitive elements, marked by increasing frailty and dependence. Impairment of mobility, balance and all the senses (hearing, vision, taste, smell and touch) are common features.   They are all progressive.

    In what ways is this world of neurodegeneration different?

    Our hospitals are no longer full of acutely unwell younger people, as they were even during the period of my training. Many hospitalised patients now are older people who have had a fall, become delirious with a trivial infection, become confused after some “relatively” minor event, or are just not coping. The old rules simply no longer work.

    First, our patients very often lack adequate cognition to give us a good history so that an appropriate diagnosis might be made, or lose their cognition over time. This means that a collaboration with family or care-givers is required to provide satisfactory management.

    Second, the notion of confidentiality and privacy must be reconsidered. Those patients with failing cognition are vulnerable to their own lack of understanding, judgement and decision-making, abuse by others, bureaucracies, and a community health system which is still the poor cousin of hospital care. Families and care-givers frequently complain that doctors will not hear their concerns, and feel demeaned or angry when their stories are not heard or believed.

    Third, neurodegeneration is not “curable”. There might be exacerbations of ongoing problems, or superimposed illnesses (often due to falls or infections) which can be treated. But in the main, these conditions are palliative. That means that there should be an early diagnosis, a plan generated, and families and care-givers as well as health professionals all party to it. Care-givers must know what’s ahead. It is essential that there is recognition of the palliative focus, and that each of these conditions is relentlessly progressive. Just how much do we put a frail elderly person through so that the same thing can occur within days or weeks of hospital discharge? How often do we ask our patients (and their families or care-givers) what they want? It’s OK to die. We will all do it, and we have no control over that. But we do, or should, have control over the manner of our death.

    Fourth, admitting to hospital these frail elderly people is often bad medicine and it’s bad for the health system. The effect will be to “decondition” the patient so that an admission of a week with the presenting problem my well require a month or longer in rehabilitation in an effort to restore to function.

    Solutions to the myriad problems of our ailing health system are complex. But talk of more beds and more doctors in hospitals misses the point. We need to understand our patients, and their needs and preferences. We need to stop pouring our precious health dollars into the seemingly bottomless pit of our hospital system and concentrate on prevention of these precipitants of admission, and to re-direct the resources into the community. Dementia alone is threatening to cripple the health system. Carers are carrying a huge and increasing burden with little recognition or meaningful support. When things go wrong, the fall-back position seems to be to admit to hospital, a choice which just happens to be the worst for everyone. Having a proper, well-resourced and comprehensive system of community care for those with dementia, backed by well-informed health professionals, supporting families and carers, is essential.

    Reading Death Rules: how death shapes life on Earth and what it means to us by Queensland Palliative Care physician Dr Will Cairns (Vivid Publishing, 2015), and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014) by American writer and surgeon, Dr Atul Gawande should be mandatory for health bureaucrats and clinicians.

    As we learn to appreciate the impact of neurodegeneration, we should constantly reflect on this question: what are we really trying to achieve? It’s all about people, and about how to give each of us the best time possible. It is not now about prolonging life at all costs.

    Improving care for those with neurodegenerative conditions and supporting their carers, will also serendipitously aid the health care system. It might be more expensive in the short term. And certainly there will be considerable system reconfiguration, with substantial emphasis on education for both health professionals at all levels, and the community. The biggest challenge, though, might be the required culture change.

    Advertisement: a good start for education on dementia might be to enrol in our Understanding Dementia MOOC (Massive Open On-Line Course) which can be found at www.utas.au/wicking/wca/mooc

    Jane Tolman

    (Associate Professor in Aged Care at the Wicking Dementia Centre at the University of Tasmania, previously Director of Aged Care in the Tasmanian health system)

     

  • John Menadue. Don’t tamper with citizenship.

    The Australian Government has presented new legislation that would enable the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to revoke Australian citizenship for dual nationals who might have been involved in terrorism activities. There would be no judicial review.

    As a result of an apparent disagreement in Cabinet, the government has deferred a decision on how to deal with sole Australian nationals who might be linked to terrorism.

    This is a massive overreaction for largely party-political purposes – promoting fear of terrorism and feeding anti-Muslim sentiment in the community. Determined not to be wedged on the issue the ALP is yet again in ‘me too’ mode.

    There are good reasons why we should not tamper with citizenship. Citizenship is a critical and unifying national symbol and should not be used to address alleged short-term problems. Acts committed by Australians should be punished under criminal law and if the law is not effective for the job it should be strengthened.

    Some four million Australians are dual citizens. They are a national asset. We are a country built on migration and citizenship is the culmination of that migration process. Citizenship is a key part of nation building and should never be discounted or discouraged. It should basically only be revoked on the basis of false claims in the application for citizenship. We should not be diverted from the centrality of citizenship.

    A key principle of all citizenship is that people of many different backgrounds can become good and loyal Australian citizens. In the present situation that means that Muslims, like others, can become good Australian citizens. It is belief in that principle that holds this country together. If we debase that principle we should not be surprised that many people, particularly young people with origins in the Middle East might decide that they have no future in this country.

    Australians citizens commit many crimes – murder, drug trafficking and child abuse. Should we revoke their citizenship? Why only IS supporters? Each year our police forces are called to intervene in over 200,000 cases of domestic violence. Surely that is a much greater problem than IS. All offences including supporting IS must be addressed with rigour but we must ensure that citizenship is open to all people who have met our criteria.

    Some ministers have sought to strengthen their case for denial of citizenship to dual-citizen holders by pointing out the citizenship revocation legislation in the UK. But the UK is not a country built on migration. We are.

    The government estimates that revocation of the status of Australian citizens who have dual citizenship would affect less than half of those allegedly assisting IS. The numbers would be small but the consequence would be that the legislation would probably prevent these people returning from overseas. This would leave a few of our jihadists overseas to continue their damage. How perverse this would be. It would be much better if they return to Australia and we prosecute them under our laws.

    The government legislation proposes that the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection should have the power to revoke citizenship based primarily I would expect on information from ASIO or other security services. There would be no judicial review. The rule of law would be trashed. What a worry it would be relying on ASIO and Minister Dutton!

    In addition to strengthening our criminal law there are other ways that we can protect ourselves against terrorism or discourage possible recruits. We can withdraw passports to prohibit travel. We can also suspend legal entitlements such as Medicare and social security payments which attach to permanent residence, and not to citizenship.

    As Malcolm Turnbull has said, citizenship revocation should not be a ‘bravado’ issue and used to weaken our rule of law. Government bravado and promotion of fear is making us less safe. It is undermining citizenship.