John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Our ‘best friend’ in Asia is in trouble.

    Japan now faces its fourth recession since 2008. The Japanese economy has contracted in 13 of the last 27 quarters. In effect, there has been no growth for six years. The Japanese economy has been moribund for two decade.

    So far Abenomics is not delivering as Prime Minister Abe had hoped. His attempt at money-creation on a vast scale to monetise Japan’s enormous public debt is not working.

    Facing failure of his economic policies, Prime Minister Abe has done what many politicians do when they are not sure of their position. He has called an election for next month. He will probably win that election despite the drubbing he received in a bi election a few days ago in Okinawa over US military bases on the island. He will win the December election, not because of any policy success he has had but because of the abject failure of the major opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan.

    Abenomics had three arrows.

    The first was printing of money on an enormous scale by the Bank of Japan. It was designed to stimulate the economy, particularly consumption and promote inflation which would help monetise the debt and encourage consumers to spend now rather than wait for prices to fall. But the economy has stalled again and prices are not rising.

    The second arrow was budget reform to repair Japan’s enormous government debt. Japan’s gross government debt as a percentage of GDP stands at 238%, the highest in the world. By contrast the Australian figure is 27%, although when we listen to Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey we would think that we face an emergency.

    Prime Minister Abe attempted to address the government debt problem by increasing the GST from 5% to 8% in April, but it stopped consumption in its tracks. Prime Minister Abe has now said he will delay the next increase in the GST from 8% to 10% which was scheduled for October 2015. So budget reform has been put on the back burner. The second arrow has also missed its mark.

    The third arrow involved structural reform which necessarily takes longer to achieve. This third arrow had several features. It is not having much effect.

    • Boosting the role of women in the workforce, but there is no sign yet of any upward trend in participation by women in such a male dominated society.
    • Reform of industries including, importantly, agriculture. But farmers are solid supporters of Prime Minister Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and he is reluctant to upset them.
    • Immigration to address Japan’s pending democratic disaster. Japan’s population is currently about 127 million. It is projected to fall to about 100 million by 2050. By then the population will have aged dramatically. For decades Japan has talked about migration, but little is done because Japan is culturally apprehensive about foreigners, ‘gaijin’. There are over 500,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan, the descendants of people who were brought to Japan as workers when Korea was part of the Japanese empire (1910-1945). Those Koreans are still ‘outsiders’ in Japan and presently subject to a hate campaign by right-wing nationalists who are attracted to Prime Minister Abe’s policies in such areas as visits to Yasukuni Shrine, denial on comfort women and the Tianjin massacre. There have been a few Asian women who have migrated to Japan to marry farmers who have found it difficult to find a partner. With a culturally exclusive attitude to all foreigners and with Japanese women reticent about marriage and families, Japan is unlikely to break free of its population decline.

    Our ‘best friend in our region’ is in serious trouble.

    In July last year, we signed a much hyped Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan which Andrew Robb said would ‘turbo-charge’ our trade with Japan by reducing tariffs and other restrictions on our goods and services into Japan.

    But twelve months later it is clear that two factors will slow down the alleged benefits of the EPA. The first is clearly Japan’s sluggish economy which is again in recession.

    The second is the depreciation of the Japanese yen which is the direct and intended result of Japanese policy-makers. Since we signed the EPA with Japan in July, the Japanese yen has depreciated over 7% against the Australian dollar, making imports into Japan more expensive. This will reduce the benefits of the tariff reductions that we have negotiated. And Japanese policy-makers are determined to depreciate the Japanese yen even further. The Yen has depreciated 20% in recent months against the US dollar.

    By 2050 China will have a population of about 1.4 billion and Indian 1.6 billion compared with Japan of 100 million. A large population does not necessarily result in economic success and influence. But we are seeing amazing growth in China. Watch this space for India.

    China and India are likely to be increasingly important to Australia’s economic future. Tony Abbott should be more careful about the language he uses about ‘our best friend in Asia’. By 2050 we may have a very different view about who is most important to us in our region.

  • Lifters and leaners in tax.

    In the SMH today (27 November 2014), Michael West has a very interesting story about the leaners and lifters in the business community and the unfairness of tax avoidance by some companies. It clearly works to the disadvantage of many Australian companies who are paying fair rates of taxation. For the link to this story, see below.  John Menadue

     

    http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/leadership-needed-on-tax-fairness-in-australia-20141126-11ukw2.html

  • John Menadue. Move over Joe Hockey

    The Julie Bishop media blitz continues. But will it flame out like the media blitz of her namesake, Bronwyn Bishop who was also touted by the media as a possible Liberal leader over a decade ago. Like Julie Bishop now and Bronwyn Bishop then, they had amazing free runs in the media. But in the end substance and not style wins out.

    And on substantial issues as I have mentioned in my earlier blogs, there is little of real achievement… There have been record cuts in overseas development aid, Ebola delays, needlessly provoking China over its island dispute with Japan, failure to achieve real outcomes on MH17 and of course, most recently, playing party politics with the President of the US over climate change.

    Since Joe Hockey hit the hurdle with his first budget, Julie Bishop has obviously seen an opening. The media posturing is so obvious – a range of interviews from Harpers, Vanity Fair and Peter Hartcher in the SMH. There was a round of media interviews in New York which was ideal to project her role as Chair of the Security Council. And of course there was media interest in her jogging in Beijing and elsewhere. She has clearly been impressed by the media which John Howard attracted with his early morning walks and Tony Abbott’s bike riding. But there is not much substance in jogging. She probably decided that shirt-fronting the President of the US would bring her brownie points with her increasingly nervous colleagues and with the electorate.

    Her attack on Tanya Plibersek in yesterday’s SMH also reflects this media drive. It hard to understand how she thinks that flirting with Kevin Rudd adds to her foreign policy credentials. If anything she might consider retracting what she said about Kevin Rudd’s campaign for an Australian seat on the Security Council.  ‘There really has been no justification for the benefits that will accrue to Australia for pursuing a seat [on the Security Council] at this time.’ How ironic that she now projects herself as the Chair of the Security Council that she was so critical of a short time ago. How Julie Bishop also thinks that Tanya Plibersek would benefit by a briefing from her is hard to grasp. Most people would think that a briefing from foreign policy and intelligence specialists, which she received, would be much more useful.

    But what Julie Bishop will be most remembered for is her attack on President Obama to burnish her tough person image as the logical successor to Tony Abbott if opinion polls keep trending down against the Coalition.

    The Coalition was not expecting President Obama’s speech in Brisbane or the deal that President Obama made with President Xi. The Coalition clearly feels badly hurt by the position the US has taken.

    Our Foreign Minister and the government however should not have been surprised. The signs were everywhere that the Obama administration was tiring of the Australian Government’s position on climate change.

    Tony Abbott was due to meet President Obama for their first meeting at the APEC Summit in Bali only a month after Tony Abbott was elected. But President Obama could not attend and was represented by his Secretary of State, John Kerry. On good advice, I understand that John Kerry was not impressed with Tony Abbott on climate change. He asked officials ‘Where does Prime Minister Abbott get this stuff from on climate change?’

    In the AFR yesterday, John Kehoe, its correspondent in Washington spells out very clearly that the Australian Government had been warned about what was coming up in the lift on climate change. Kehoe referred to a speech that John Podesta, President Obama’s climate change policy architect had made. Podesta had been pivotal in President Obama’s landmark deal with China. Kehoe reported that in July this year in a speech ‘to senior Americans and Australians including Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, Podesta bemoaned Australia’s lack of climate policy. After the abolition of a carbon price, attendees say Podesta told the audience the Australian Government did not have a credible climate policy in place, adding he felt he should be honest with Australian friends.’

    According to Kehoe the issue was also spelled out plainly by Caroline Atkinson who was President Obama’s ‘G20 sherpa’ and national security adviser for international economics. Kehoe reported ‘Not once but twice in the lead up to the G20, Atkinson publicly told Washington audiences full of Australian government officials that the US expected to have a proper discussion on climate at the G20. She even suggested that other countries would team up against Abbott to make it happen. For those in Canberra blindsided by Obama damaging Abbott on climate change, they overlooked signals the White House had been sending for months.’

    There is clearly no excuse for Julie Bishop’s ignorance or surprise in what was in train. A minister who was on the ball would not be blindsided like this.

    In recent days we have had The Australian carrying stories designed to help the government in its predicament on climate change. Could we think of it doing anything else! The Australian suggested that Tony Abbott led the pack in standing up against President Obama on climate change in and around the G20. This is patently nonsense and special pleading. The reverse was the case with not only President Obama but Prime Ministers Cameron and Merkel, and President Hollande, and maybe others ringing the carbon change bell on our Prime Minister.

    The relentless media campaign by Julie Bishop tells us a lot about the problems unfolding in the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop’s personal aspirations and how the under resourced Australian media can be so easily manipulated and distracted by personality and celebrity at the expense of examination of policy.

    It is also becoming clear that the government has nowhere to go on climate change, except in reverse.

  • John Menadue. Capitalism, inequality and taxation.

    In his challenging series last week on ‘Is capitalism redeemable’ Ian McAuley drew attention to how growing inequality is the cause not only of serious social concerns, but it is also presenting us with some quite serious economic problems.

    There is not much doubt that in the US, the growing tax concessions for the wealthy and the obstacles placed in the path of low income and poor people to organise themselves through trade unions, has had serious economic as well as social consequences. With companies like Walmart paying poverty wages, low income people don’t have the money to buy goods and services that businesses would like to sell. And despite US companies and the wealthy being awash with money, particularly as reflected in the buoyant US stock market, business is not investing in new businesses and jobs for the chief reason that the demand is just not there. Inequality is a major economic problem.

    The IMF has highlighted the economic damage that inequality is doing. A staff policy paper 2014 found that ‘our work built on the tentative consensus in the literature that inequality can undermine progress in health and education, cause investment-reducing political and economic instability, and undercut the social consensus required to adjust in the face of shocks and that it tends to reduce the pace and durability of [economic] growth.’

    The managing director of the IMF has been even more explicit. She recently noted that the 85 richest people in the world control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population – 3.5 billion people. She commented ‘With facts like these, it is no wonder that rising inequality has risen to the top of the agenda – not only among groups normally focused on social justice but also increasingly among politicians, central bankers and business leaders. … It is therefore not surprising that IMF research – which looked at 173 countries over the past 50 years – found that more unequal countries tended to have lower and less durable economic growth.’

    The Governor of the Bank of England warned us only a few months ago that unless action was taken on inequality ‘capitalism would devour its children’.

    The OECD in its June 2014 report said that ‘OECD data shows that well into the recovery from the global economic crisis, the distribution of pre-tax and transfer income remains significantly more unequal than it was before.’ In particular the OECD expressed concern about ‘anchored poverty’ particularly amongst the young.

    Ian McAuley has pointed out that because of growing inequality and the unwillingness of corporations and individuals to fund new growth and new jobs, more and more people have to rely on government benefits to tide them over. That in turn results in increased budget problems. We all instinctively know that well-paid jobs in a strong economy are better for everyone than government benefits. We need to address this downward spiral by the poor who become increasingly dependent on welfare with severe personal and social consequences but also serious public finance problems.

    One feature of modern capitalism particularly by global companies is tax avoidance. We are reading about it almost every day. It is not only unfair but has serious economic consequences. As Ian McAuley put it ‘The economist Joseph Stiglitz points out that well-crafted taxes can actually improve a country’s economic performance. Tax regimes which give a leg up to new ventures, which encourage retraining, or which shape depreciation provisions to encourage the uptake of new technologies, can all help improve a country’s economic adaptability. A carbon tax is an example not only of the payment for harm done to others, (negative externalities in the language of economists) but also of an incentive for industries to adjust and modernise their productive methods.’

    But unfortunately Australia is going in the opposite direction with widespread tax avoidance. Companies such as Westfield paid an effective tax of only 8% over the last decade. News Corp tops the list with 146 subsidiaries in tax havens.

    Companies like this are the real ‘leaners’ and not the welfare bludgers that Alan Jones and the Daily Telegraph talk about. But not content to avoid company tax on an enormous scale they have their corporations fund their private travel, private entertainment, and their private boats

    In 2011-12 according to Peter Martin in the SMH on 13 May ’75 ultra-high earners had a taxable income of $1.10 each’.

    Almost every day we have more and more information about tax avoidance and tax havens. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the benefits to the rich are damaging both our society and our economy.  Our four major international tax advisory firms are facilitating this large scale tax avoidance. They call it ‘aggressive tax planning’ or the means to overcome ‘unfair tax competition’, presumably by other tax avoiders in Australia and elsewhere.

    The government is not making it easier to crack down on major tax avoidance by cutting back experienced and professional staff in the Australian Tax Office. The government and the ATO also need information on where profits are being made and taxes incurred by jurisdiction. The ATO needs new legislation to address profit shifting through transfer pricing, thin capitalisation and debt loadings. We hoped that the G20 in Brisbane would address this issue but it seems to have been overwhelmed by other matters.

    The most consistent critic of inequality and concern for the poor is Pope Francis. A year ago he seemed a voice in the wilderness.  But he is now being joined by such people as the managing director of the IMF, the Bank of England and senior politicians.

    We are finding that inequality breeds not only social problems but has serious economic consequences for the future of capitalism.

  • John Menadue. Murdoch and Abbott vs ABC.

    This is a repost of a blog which I initially posted on December 19 last year.

    Tony Abbott has a debt to repay to Rupert Murdoch for the extremely biased support he received in the last election.

    With the help of Senator Cory Bernadi, Tony Abbott is now following the Murdoch Media line in attacking the ABC. He is also following in the steps of the Howard Government that attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the ABC to heel. During the Howard Government, Minister Richard Alston and Senator Santo Santoro led a concerted campaign against the ABC to force political compliance.

    Last week Tony Abbott joined in the attack on the ABC in the Coalition party room. He particularly took a swipe at the ABC for revealing government spying around the world that has been brought to attention by Edward Snowden. But the ABC was in good company in carrying these stories. The Snowden revelations were carried by The Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel. Even if the ABC had declined to participate in the Snowden revelations it could not have avoided subsequent coverage of one of the major news stories of the year and possibly the decade. The ABC would have been forced into catch-up for weeks.

    The Chairman of the ABC has announced a ‘bias audit’ of the ABC to counter the campaign by the Coalition and the Murdoch media. I can understand this defensive reaction, but it is all so one-sided. Who is to audit the Murdoch media and the scurrilous campaign that it conducted during the last election? Murdoch even sent one of his New York heavies, Col Allan, to do a hatchet job on the Rudd Government. It was an appalling abuse of power.

    The Murdoch media is critical of the performance of the ABC but is silent on the performance of the Lachlan Murdoch – James Packer performance at Channel 10, to say nothing of the free ride it has given to James Packer for Sydney’s second casino for high rollers.

    The Murdoch media which consistently points the figure at others has been charged with phone hacking and bribery of police in the UK. Rupert Murdoch abandoned his Australian citizenship to take advantage of business opportunities in the US.

    The Murdoch campaign against public broadcasting is not new. James Murdoch, who has been pushed aside because of the hacking scandal that occurred under his watch in the UK, took every possible opportunity to attack the BBC. He alleged that the taxpayer-funded BBC was providing unfair competition to the Murdoch media.

    It is nonsense to suggest that it is only public broadcasters like the ABC that are publicly funded. Ian McAuley in New Matilda on 9 December this year put it this way

    “Commercial media are funded by what is to all intents and purposes, a sales tax. For example, if you buy a new car, around $500 of what you outlay is for advertising. Last year, $13.1 billion was spent on advertising, of which $4.9 billion was for commercial TV and radio, and $2.6 billion was for newspapers. To put these figures into a digestible form, we are paying about $1,500 per year per household for advertising, of which $500 is for commercial TV and radio, and $300 is for newspapers (not including the cover price). By contrast we are paying about $120 a year for the ABC. It is as asymmetric deal: those who use only the ABC pay $500 a year for commercial TV and radio, while those who use only commercial media pay $120 for the ABC. … Perhaps it’s part of our civic contract that those who pay for the commercial media they never use don’t complain, but the commercial media, particularly the Murdoch media when they attack ABC funding, don’t seem bound by such rules of decency.’

    But who does the public really trust in the media? The overwhelming evidence is that the ABC is the most trusted media in Australia and the Murdoch media is the least trusted.

    A recent poll on ABC funding in the Fairfax media drew over 21,000 respondents. 77% agreed that the ABC was an excellent and essential service that deserved more money. Another 12% said that the ABC did good work but the funding was about right.

    Essential Research has just reported about ‘trust in the media’. Once again, the ABC is at the top of the list. Rankings for “a “lot of, or some trust, in the media” were as follows:

    ABC TV news and current affairs                                70%

    ABC radio news and current affairs                           63%

    ABC talk-back programs                                              46%

    Commercial news and current affairs                       38%

    News and opinion in daily newspapers                     48%

    Commercial TV news and current affairs                 41%

    Commercial radio talk-back                                        31%

     

    For particular newspapers, respondents ranked the newspapers in which they had “a lot of or some trust”. The rankings were as follows:

     

    Melbourne Age (Victoria only)                                    68%

    The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW only)                   64%

    The Australian                                                                64%

    Courier Mail (Queensland only)                                  59%

    Herald Sun (Victoria only)                                            48%

    The Daily Telegraph (NSW only)                                 41%

    Trust in the Daily Telegraph has fallen dramatically over the last 12 months with its particularly biased campaign during the last election.

    The Australian Press Council has also noted the performance of some Murdoch publications. The APC publishes guidelines to aid journalists and editors an investigates complaints. One subject which I follow closely has been asylum seekers. The APC reported on a Daily Telegraph story of 26 November 2011 headed ‘Open the floodgates – exclusive: thousands of boat people to invade NSW’. The APC found that this story was ‘grossly inaccurate, unfair and offensive’. It upheld a complaint about a similar story in the Herald Sun on the same day. The APC also found against three articles by Greg Sheridan on ‘illegals’ that appeared in the Australian on 23 and 28 October 2010 and 5 March 2011.

    The ABC does not always get it right. It has had a very ordinary coverage of news on both TV and radio from Canberra for many years. Its Canberra correspondents show little interest or knowledge of policy. I wonder if they can spell the word! I am also amazed that the ABC continues to use ‘experts’ from so-called independent think-tanks like IPA, that refuse to disclose their funding sources. I suspect that those “think thanks” are often fronts for special interests. Cash for comment takes many forms.Unfortunately the ABC also still sees itself as a branch office of the BBC and CNN rather than an independent and involved media organisation in our own region.

    But for all of its shortcomings, what an awful and barren media landscape we would have without the ABC.

    The last people who should be lecturing the ABC about performance and bias are Tony Abbott and the Murdoch media.

  • Walter Hamilton. The ABC and its competitors

    When the British conducted atomic tests at Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s Australia’s newspaper proprietors tried to prevent the ABC bringing along its recording equipment to capture the event. They wanted the ABC locked out of the story because it would steal their thunder: how could a printed article about an atomic explosion compete with sound and vision? The national broadcaster appealed for help to Prime Minister Menzies who ruled that the ABC had the right to be there.

    There was a time, of course, in the 1930s, when the ABC news consisted of a radio presenter reading extracts from newspapers; an independent national news service was still a thing of the future. Observing today’s multifaceted and well-resourced ABC it’s easy to take the status quo for granted. We should, however, never underestimate the historical resentment felt by commercial media owners toward the ABC’s power to erode their market share.

    I should state up front that I do not believe the announced 4.6% cut in the ABC’s budget heralds its demise as an effective public broadcaster. A proportionally bigger cut by the Howard Government had to be absorbed in 1996-98, when the ABC’s revenues from government were around $575 million per annum compared with $1.04 billion today (after the latest cut). Since the budget low-point in 1998, revenues have risen by almost 30%, after taking inflation into account––though services have also expanded*. So, while the cut will hurt, if well managed it should not threaten core activities. The corporation has expanded into many new areas in recent years, during which time its budget has increased significantly. In the period ahead it will need to consolidate and re-examine priorities.

    Having said this, I have no doubt that, along with the stated fiscal imperative, ideological factors influenced the government’s decision. Over the past year, the Abbott Government has on several occasions publicly condemned the ABC for its coverage of asylum seekers and relations with Indonesia, for instance. There is a discreet way for a government, through the relevant minister, to make its views known on the corporation’s performance; by reaching for the bullhorn, the prime minister and others knew that while they were unlikely to change the ABC they would surely isolate it and damage its credibility. The decision by Foreign Affairs in June to drop its contract with the ABC’s Australia Network international television service followed years of lobbying by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, backed by relentless attacks from News Corp’s in-house commentators. If the present government had a firm ideological commitment to public broadcasting it would not have conducted itself in the way it has nor applied the cuts it has.

    At the heart of this debate, however, is not a broken election promise, as egregious as that is, or even the political colour of the parties in power. Heaven knows, past Labor Governments have not held back from savaging the ABC when it got under their skin. Since 1998, funding of public broadcasting in Australia (SBS and ABC) has fallen as a percentage of GDP from 0.162% to 0.102%, during a period in which conservative federal governments held office for 10 years and Labor for six. No, for me, at the heart of the debate is marketplace competition. It was the case in 1956, when the newspapers tried to stop the ABC covering a major news event; it remains the case today.

    The former media writer at the Australian newspaper, Amanda Meade, stated in the Guardian online two years ago: “Attacks from News Corp papers, in particular from the Australian, are now so frequent that there can be no pretence the paper is running anything but a campaign. Where anti-ABC material once might have been found on the comment pages, now it seems to be reported as news, despite some stories having little news value.” In my opinion, the same thing could have been said at least 10 years ago. Back then News Corp journalists would privately joke that it was permanent “open season” on the ABC; during editorial meetings it was always good for a bashing. This could only mean the reporters knew they would never be pulled up by the boss no matter how hard they put the boot into Auntie.

    Rupert Murdoch has made his views clear: why should commercial operators, who must raise their own funds and answer to shareholders, have to compete head-to-head with a publicly funded entity that does not need to turn a profit? It goes against his grain––and he is far from being alone in this within corporate and political circles. When the media market was reasonably stable, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, when newspaper sales were strong and before television and radio audiences began drifting off to the Internet, this represented mainly a philosophical objection. Now, as the entire media landscape is shifting, and the ABC has moved inexorably into the new digital markets where Murdoch and the other proprietors are scrambling to establish a presence, the commercial stakes are higher than ever before.

    When television was king, viewers did not have to pay to switch to a commercial network; the advertising revenues were enough. For their online news sites, however, Murdoch and the others need Internet users to pay up front. Will consumers do so in sufficient numbers when they can access the ABC’s (or BBC’s) site for free, and get all the other digital add-ons (podcasting, streaming, etc.) for free? You only have to commute by train in a big city to observe how many travellers are reading the free newspaper versus those reading one they paid for.

    As much as I want the ABC to survive and thrive, we need to concern ourselves too with the collapse of the business model for commercial news media organisations. If the ABC exists, in part, to preserve media diversity and provide services that others neglect, it follows that we should desire healthy and fair competition. Of course, one might ask, why should the ABC care if the competition is hurting? The answer I believe is, “always study your opponent”.

    The advent of new digital platforms has changed the competitive relationship between the ABC and its commercial rivals. Some foresee a battle to the death in which big players like Rupert Murdoch will use friendly governments to emasculate the competition. I am not among the pessimists. I know, from experience, how much politicians of all stripes like appearing on the ABC and how important the public broadcaster is to a lively cross-section of Australian voters. But something will have to give in the media fairground, where some of the attractions are apparently free and some are not. I say “apparently” because the ABC does come at a cost, even if the sums are generally buried away in the national accounts. It survives, in a sense, through a compulsory levy on the taxpayer.

    I wonder whether the time has come to reopen the debate about the funding method for maintaining the ABC and whether all its services, regardless of the cost, should be available without any “user-pays” restrictions. Whatever side of the fence one sits, it could only help to focus the arguments and nourish the public debate.

    *These and other figures were taken from ABC and SBS annual reports and Bureau of Statistics releases and used the Reserve Bank inflation calculator. By way of comparison, government revenues to the Defence Department rose by 45% above inflation between 1998-99 and 2013-14, according to the department’s annual reports. The defence budget represented 1.9% of GDP in 1998 compared with the current 1.8% (where it’s projected to remain through 2017).

    Walter Hamilton worked at the ABC for 33 years.

     

     

  •  John Menadue. Undiplomatic, politically partisan – and wrong!

    Julie Bishop has decided to take on the President of the United States over his comments to an audience at the University of Queensland on the state of the Great Barrier Reef.

    It shows immaturity to jump in so quickly to defend what I think is the indefensible by attacking others without any real basis.

    It is also an example of how the Liberal Party sees the alliance between us and the US, not as an alliance between our two countries, but as a special relationship between the Liberal Party of Australia and the Right Wing of the Republican Party in the US.  Such behaviour does great damage to Australia’s long term relationship with the US

    In attempting to rebut President Obama, Julia Bishop said ‘Of course the Great Barrier Reef will be conserved for generations to come. And we do not believe that it is in danger.’ Yet Australian experts on the subject tell us quite clearly that the reef is in real danger.

    • Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, the Director of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, said that President Obama was ‘right on the money. … He is stating the facts … the reef has already shrunk by half in 30 years, with climate change a factor in the retreat.’
    • Charlie Veron, the former Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, said ‘In the long term, that is the whole of this century, we are going to have the Great Barrier Reef slaughtered … if carbon dioxide emissions keep trending as they are.’
    • Dr Jon Brodie, the Chief Research Scientist at James Cook University said ‘Julie Bishop’s comments contradicted the government’s own report on the state of the reef. … The report found the reef to be in poor condition and the outlook is for continuing deterioration … it’s obviously in danger. … Under the government’s 2050 action plan, the reef will continue to decline.’

    The clear error by Julie Bishop on the Great Barrier Reef follows a pattern of climate change denial by Tony Abbott and the government.

    This undiplomatic response by our Foreign Minister and poor action on policy is becoming part of a pattern as I set out in my blog of 18 November ‘Julie Bishop-substance and style’.

    • In the last Coalition budget she was responsible for the largest reduction in overseas development aid by this country. It was the largest cut in the budget.
    • She unnecessarily sided with Japan against China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.
    • She sided with Israel against overwhelming world opinion over the continuing expansion of settlements by the Israeli Government.
    • Her megaphone diplomacy over MH17 achieved very little. It was the Malaysian Government that negotiated with the rebels in the Ukraine and secured access to the crash site, the return of most of the bodies and the recovery and return of the black boxes.
    • Despite the posturing in the Security Council on Ebola, we have been very slow,selfish and restrictive in our response.

    And now we are seeing the most diplomatic and gauche mistake of all with the attack on the President of the US.

    I would be confident that this extraordinary  attack  on President Obama would be against the advice of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It  very likely came directly from the private offices of Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop.  The PM would probably not want to do the job himself, so the media obsessed Foreign Minister  obliged.

    Despite misstep after misstep the media has given Julie Bishop a very free run. Perhaps the media is giving her this free run because it feels guilty about the unfair treatment that it dealt out to Julia Gillard!.

  • Geoff Hiscock. Cleaning up the coal energy pillar a central task for Modi and Abbott

    Narendra Modi and Tony Abbott explicitly defined energy as a “central pillar” of the India-Australia economic relationship in their joint statement this week.

    That’s a good sign, but if they want to make a truly significant contribution to the long-term economic and social benefit of India and Australia, then they need to deliver forcefully and quickly on the commitment they made to work together on clean coal technology.

    An emphasis on utility-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in India would be a good place to start. With 1.93 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions last year (5.5 per cent of the global total), India does not yet match China’s massive 9.52 billion tonnes (27.1 per cent), but it is headed in the same direction and by 2025 could be the world’s biggest coal importer.  Much of that coal will come from Australia.

    India has a large domestic coal industry, but it relies heavily on imported coal for its energy needs from Indonesia, Australia, South Africa and Kazakhstan. If the Modi-Abbott embrace holds true, then Australia is going to be an increasingly important energy supplier for India, both in thermal coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

    Modi told his Australian audience that he wanted all Indians to have access to electricity generated in a way that “does not cause our glaciers to melt.”  While the opponents of coal see that as the go sign for renewables, the reality is that coal is not going to disappear from India’s energy equation any time soon. It now generates 60 per cent of Indian electricity, and while that share may fall to 50 per cent between 2025 and 2030, the actual volume of coal consumed will not decline, because most of India suffers from a power supply shortage.  Modi’s home state of Gujarat is one of the few parts of India with a power surplus – a result of Modi’s pro-business policies and his encouragement of groups such as Adani and Tata to build large coal-fired power stations there. He has also given strong backing to the solar power industry

    But even with a substantial investment in domestic oil and gas, LNG imports, nuclear, hydro, solar and wind power, Modi knows that India will have to rely on coal-fired power stations for its electricity and industrial needs for years to come. It simply lacks the infrastructure, the smart technology, the time and the money to move too far from coal too soon.  To say that coal globally is in structural decline ignores the development aspirations of a multitude of nations.  India, for example, is still way behind China on the development path, and as many as 300 million of its 1.3 billion people lack access to the affordable, reliable power that coal can deliver.

    The world has known for decades that coal carries a heavy environmental price – Europe and the US in the 1950s, Japan in the 1970s and China in the 2010s all bear the scars of coal-fired air pollution. But just as suphur dioxide has been cleaned from smoke stack emissions, so too can carbon dioxide be removed if the political will exists and the price to pay is deemed palatable. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) typically reduces a power plant’s efficiency by 8 to 10 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency. For India, just as it is for China, the big challenge is to maximise the efficiency of new coal-fired power stations to offset the losses that go with CCS.  The latest ultra-supercritical power stations have efficiency ratings of 44 per cent or better. Unfortunately, too many of the power plants built in Asia in the last two decades have still been in the subcritical range, with efficiency ratings of 28-38 per cent. The factors that determine a plant’s efficiency (apart from the quality of the coal and water) are pressure and temperature, and the ability of components such as boilers and turbine blades to withstand higher pressures and temperatures,

    This is where Australian expertise in metallurgy, in power plant design, and in scrubbing carbon out of coal could be of great benefit to India, both economically and environmentally.  Increased washing of coal to improve efficiency, de-watering, steam-cleaning of flue gases and the use of a range of CCS options covering combustion, pulverisation and gas conversion are being tested around the world in demonstration plants and pilot projects. There is an urgent need to apply these carbon-cleaning measures to full-sized coal-fired power stations. That is starting to happen in North America through utility-scale CCS projects such as Boundary Dam in Canada and Petra Nova in the US, and will most probably happen in China from about 2016 onwards.

    Early last year, New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) published a scoping study on the potential for CCS to mitigate India’s greenhouse gas emissions.  It pointed to a number of Indian CCS research projects in energy, petrochemicals and metals, in cooperation with countries such as Norway and the United States.  It said the barriers to CCS in India included the lack of accurate geological storage site data, the extra cost involved in using CCS, the “demonstration stage” nature of the technology and a lack of knowledge and capability among policy makers and regulators.  Other factors were financial risk for investors, lack of skilled labour and infrastructure, legal issues over land use, water contamination, CO2 leakage, and the cost- efficiency trade-off in retrofitting power plants with CCS measures.

    It concluded that India’s top development priority was to provide electricity to all at affordable prices. Nonetheless, it said CCS work should continue with “sustained efforts … required towards capacity development of different stakeholders.”

    The TERI report identifies the sort of work that needs to be done in India before CCS gets moving. Modi and Abbott should ensure the momentum generated by this week’s energy embrace does not get wasted.

    Geoff Hiscock writes on international business and is the author of “Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources,” published by Wiley.

  • Walter Hamilton. Japan: when in doubt, call an election

    Japan, Australia’s second biggest export market, has fallen back into recession. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has reacted by calling a snap election for mid-December, a year ahead of schedule, claiming he needs a new mandate to tackle the nation’s economic problems. Trade deals or talk of trade deals between Australia and both China and India should not distract us from the fact that one of the region’s great powers is sick and we are not immune.

    Japan buys 16% of Australia’s exports: not as much as a few decades ago but still substantial.

    Since 2008, the Japanese economy has contracted in 13 out of 27 quarters. In net terms, this adds up to no growth for six years. In the most recent September quarter, gross domestic product fell by 1.6% in annualized terms, following a revised 7.3% contraction in the previous quarter. Two consecutive quarters of decline defines a recession.

    As I wrote in an earlier blog, Japanese domestic consumption remains extremely weak. The adverse effect of the lift in the nation’s consumption tax (GST) from a rate of 5% to 8% in April was greater than the government and most market analysts predicted. Ahead of the tax hike consumers front-loaded their purchasing so that after the rise spending collapsed and has remained depressed.

    The consumption tax rise was always seen as risky but necessary in order to start repairing the deficit-ridden national budget. While the legislation to gradually raise the tax passed during the previous administration, the strategy was endorsed by Abe and implemented by his Liberal Democratic Party-led government. Now the Prime Minister has decided to abandon the present course of budget reform.

    On Tuesday night he announced that the Diet would be dissolved on 21 November ahead of a Lower House election expected on 14 December and that he would go to the polls pledging to delay by 18 months the next consumption tax increase, from 8% to 10%, originally scheduled for October 2015.

    Abe quoted the rallying cry of the American Revolution ‘no taxation without representation’ to justify his decision to call an election on this policy issue, though it seemed an odd analogy since what he is proposing is a ‘no taxation’ platform. At the same time, Abe said the government’s commitment to balance the national budget by 2020 remained solid. His credibility on this point hangs in the balance, since many commentators were predicting Japan would miss the target even with the next scheduled consumption tax rise. Looking less confident than usual, Abe did not attempt to explain how the budget target could be achieved if the tax increase were delayed. ‘I hear voices saying Abenomics has failed,’ he told a nationally televised news conference, ‘but I have yet to see any alternative policy put forward.’ In other words, you’re stuck with me––sink or swim.

    In recent weeks, Japan’s central bank has reacted to the renewed weakness in the economy by greatly expanding its fiscal stimulus, the main plank of the administration’s revival strategy over the past 18 months. By printing money to buy government bonds, the bank has been pumping inflation into a chronically deflated economy, so far with little lasting effect. The most conspicuous consequence has been a fall of about 20% in the yen-to-US dollar exchange rate. This has helped exporters back into profits and fed through into modest wage rises for employees in big export-oriented firms. But the weaker yen has also pushed up import prices, discouraging consumers and increasing the raw materials costs of many businesses, large and small. It has all the appearances of a vicious cycle in which the cure seems just as likely as the disease to kill the patient.

    Abenomics, the catchy term coined two years ago to describe Shinzo Abe’s program of economic reform, is rapidly acquiring a hollow sound. The program consists of ‘three arrows’ (Abe’s words): fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reform. The first two arrows, fired as soon as he took office, have failed to hit the target. Abe insists there are signs of improvement––the best labour market conditions in 20 years; strong job recruitment of high school graduates––and asks for more time to bring off the fundamental improvement electors were promised. It could also be conceded that structural reform, the ‘third arrow’, necessarily takes more time to deliver, but in this policy area too his government’s performance has been stronger on rhetoric than performance. Abe’s much-touted campaign to boost the role of women in society and the economy fell flat when two of his female cabinet ministers had to quit their posts because of old-fashioned money scandal and election law violations.

    Japanese voters will soon have a chance to pass judgement on the past two years. The disorganized and ineffectual state of the nation’s political opposition makes it likely the LDP will be returned to office, despite the poor state of the economy. That, however, is an early assessment. Much can happen in unpredictable times, given an electorate worn-out from hearing unfulfilled promises and as cynical about their leaders as they have ever been since the war. Japan is in trouble, and trouble there means trouble for Australia.

     

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years.

     

  • John Menadue.   Julie Bishop – substance and style

    According to opinion polls, Julie Bishop’s standing has climbed. In Harper’s Bazaar she has been described as the Woman of the Year. It is suggested that she could be a leadership contender…

    But how much substance and how much achievement has there really been. How has Australia’s foreign policy interests been advanced?

    Before looking at the performance, it is worth recalling that no Australian Foreign Minister could be said to have failed in recent decades, from Gareth Evans to Bill Hayden to Alexander Downer, Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd and Bob Car. One advantage that Foreign Ministers have is that there is really no domestic constituency that they are likely to upset. At the same time there are numerous media and photo opportunities to do newsworthy things like running around Beijing. The media which is so often about politics and spin rarely looks beyond style and presentation.

    In passing I think there were more real achievements by Gareth Evans than any others.eg peace in Cambodia.

    In terms of the first twelve months of the Abbott Government and Julia Bishop’s performance in foreign policy, what can we deduce?

    The largest cut in the May 2014 Budget was in Julia Bishop’s portfolio. Overseas development aid was cut by 21%. What a failure!

    Julia Bishop unnecessarily involved us in the dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. She said “China doesn’t respect weakness” and that “Australia will stand up to China to defend peace, liberal values and the rule of law”. Perhaps that was just an inexperienced Foreign Minister but hopefully she now reflects that we should stay out of that dispute.

    Julie Bishop has announced a “signature initiative” to promote understanding of our region by supporting Australian undergraduates with internships in the region. She has called it a Colombo Plan in reverse. But there is a problem with this. What she has not explained is how those undergraduates will get jobs in Australia using their regional education and experience. We had a boom in Asian language training in Australia a couple of decades ago, but it fizzled because Australian companies would not employ Australians with Asian skills. As a result these young and Asian skilled Australians drifted away to take jobs in places like Hong Kong. Has Julie Bishop examined this serious problem of Australian companies and their unwillingness to employ people with Asian skills?

    There is no indication that Julie Bishop discouraged Scott Morrison in proceeding with his grotesque proposal to send refugees to Cambodia.

    The Rudd and Gillard Governments opposed the policy of the Israeli Government in expanding settlements in occupied Palestine. Last year Julie Bishop reversed that policy at the UN. 158 countries supported the UN’s call for an end to these settlements. Australia joined with eight other countries in abstaining from a vote.

    Julie Bishop made a name for herself in the recovery of bodies from MH17. She showed us her toughness although she didn’t quite use the rhetoric of “shirt-fronting”. But the real achievement in the recovery of bodies from MH17 was made by the Prime Minister of Malaysia whose government, without fanfare, negotiated directly with the Russian backed rebels in the Ukraine. As a result the rebels agreed to a train with refrigerated carriages carrying most of the bodies out of the crash area. The Malaysian Government also secured access to the crash site and the recovery of the black boxes. In the UN and elsewhere Julie Bishop, in association with the Dutch Foreign Minister, continued to attack the Russians but refused to deal with the rebels. It was good domestic politics in Australia but not helpful in assisting recovery from the crash site. The Malaysians really delivered when it mattered. Julie Bishop,despite the rhetoric,was really only a bit player.

    Julie Bishop and Tony Abbott were completely blind sided by the agreement on carbon pollution between the US and Chinese Presidents.. On this most critical issue,involving  the US, our most important ally and friend,we knew nothing. On such a matter of great substance Julie Bishop was asleep at the wheel. It tells us a lot!

    It is important to distinguish between style and substance.

  • Renewable energy investment.

    A key feature of the President Obama/President Xi communique is their commitment to substantially reduce carbon pollution. There was little mention of an emissions trading scheme or putting a price on carbon. The emphasis was on developing renewable energy as an alternative source of energy to fossil fuels.  Emphasis was given to development of solar, wind and nuclear power. But in Australia, our government in attacking the established renewable energy targets has caused great confusion and damage in investment plans. As a result, renewable energy investment in Australia dropped 70% in the past year.  See the link below to the  report from the Climate Council which was published in The Conversation on 10 November.  John Menadue.

    http://gu.com/p/436ym/sbl

  • Is capitalism redeemable? Part 6: Inequality – it ain’t fair

    We get a laugh out of the Monty Python sketch of four Yorkshiremen competing with one another to tell stories of the hardship they endured when they were children, 30 years earlier – “you think you had it tough …”.

    Without going into Pythonesque exaggeration, four older Australians could easily recount similar stories. If they grew up in a Brisbane middle-class suburb, their house probably had no indoor toilet: there would have been a bucket toilet in the backyard emptied by the “dunnyman” (the “sanitary collector” to use one common euphemism) . If they grew up any distance from a city they probably didn’t have electricity, and the idea of turning on a tap to get hot water was almost beyond imagination.

    Like the Python characters, who all claimed they “were ‘appier back then”, they wouldn’t consider they had led deprived childhoods, because those were the standards of the time.

    Those material standards now, however, would be considered deprivation. Even if our own material conditions don’t deteriorate, if everyone else’s conditions improve, we feel hard done by.

    We have a natural concern for fairness, a concern not to be confused with envy. In our concern for fairness we want to see our own and others’ conditions brought up: envy is about wanting to see others brought down.

    This may all seem to be no more than commonsense, but there is a strong economic philosophy captured in the slogan “a rising tide lifts all boats”, essentially saying that any outcome is a good outcome so long as no-one is made any worse off. Inequality doesn’t count in other words. This philosophy, based on the work of the Italian Fascist Vilfredo Pareto, made its way into schools of economics and into public policy in the latter part of last century and is a mainstream of economic thinking.

    It was influential not because academics and public servants had any attraction to fascism, but rather because it came in a neat “value free” mathematical package, absolving the academic or public servant from having to worry about fuzzy things necessitating moral judgements, such as equity.  And it provided an easy rationalisation for the economic philosophies of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the early 1980s, later to be taken up across the political spectrum.

    Since the 1980s Australia has become more prosperous, but the benefits of that prosperity have gone disproportionately to those who are already most privileged. Research by Andrew Leigh and others shows that over the twentieth century Australia’s income distribution became more equal up to around 1980, but then started diverging once more. By now those gains have been lost: our income distribution is now roughly similar to what it was in 1900. Thomas Picketty’s research, which also takes in wealth, has similar findings for other ‘developed’ countries.

    If that widening inequality were a result of choice it should not necessarily be a policy concern. There are people who choose to work hard and to take risks, while there are others who choose to join religious orders with vows of poverty or to seek low-paid but safe employment. Australians show no appetite for enforced social levelling.

    But when inequality results from entrenched privilege, inheritance, “old boy” networks, exercise of political influence, denial of access to quality education and corruption, we are properly indignant. As a general point, we are less concerned with inequality in itself, than with the fairness or otherwise of the processes that lead to inequality. An almost uncontested political value in a country like Australia, transcending traditional “left’/”right” divisions, is a belief in equality of opportunity – a “fair go” in the vernacular.

    While the fair go may be an aspiration, Australians don’t believe it holds in reality. In a recent survey by Essential Media respondents were asked “which has more to do with why a person is rich” – “because he or she has worked harder than others” or “because he or she had other advantages”. Hard work scored only 28 per cent while “other advantages” scored 56 per cent.

    The capitalist economic system works when there is a strong connection between contribution and reward. That’s the very theoretical and practical basis of market economics.  That connection will never be perfect: even in the fairest system there is an element of luck. But when the connection between contribution and reward is badly severed the economic system itself loses its legitimacy. When legitimacy is lost people are inclined to reject the whole capitalist model, turning to superficially attractive but destructive alternatives. The plutocrats who show off their riches so vulgarly and the politicians who dismiss our concern with fairness don’t seem to realize that they’re threatening the very viability of the system that has supported them.

    Even before reaching that self-destructive outcome, an economic system that results in inequality is one that is wasting many opportunities.  That’s the subject of the next article.

  • Today’s World – Democracy, capitalism and Islam.

    Mauricio García Villegas, El Espectador, Colombia, http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/elmundo-actual-columna-526496

    The anniversary of two events that have marked out the course of our world has just been commemorated.

    The first is the taking of the United States embassy in Teheran on 4 November 1979. Iran at the time was governed by the Shah, a monarch who wanted to turn the ancient Persian people into a Western nation, hell or high water. It set off a reaction from Islamic leaders, amongst them the Ayatollah Khomeini, who, from his exile in London, organized a revolution to overthrow the Shah, and to establish an Islamic theocracy. The taking of the embassy and the capture of 52 American hostages for 444 days is one of the culminating moments of that revolution.

    The second event is the fall of the Berlin Wall that occurred on 9 November 1989, which started the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and put an end to the Cold War. The fall of the Soviet Union changed history so much that Eric Hobsbawm, the great English historian, said that the 20th century was a very short one, lasting only 75 years between the First World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    These two events changed the course of the 20th century. The Iranian revolution was proof that despite all the colonial attempts to assimilate the Middle East culturally and economically, the old yearning for a theocratic government continued intact for many Muslims. The colonial sins of Europe and the United States in the Middle East (starting from events in Palestine) not only gave rise to the Islamic revolution in Iran, but also saw the birth of the increasingly furious forms of Islamic fundamentalism that we see today.

    On the other hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent defeat of the Communist model, gave way to a kind of bold and lazy capitalism that ceased to feel guilty about increasing social injustice. Not only that, the lack of a competing system divorced capitalism from its democratic ideal, which was the flag that Western nations hoisted in opposition to its great 20th century enemies, first the Nazi regime and then the Soviet model.

    Many academic studies published in the last decade have raised the alarm about the way capitalism has been devouring democracy. I only site two recent and influential examples. The first, Thomas Piketty’s book (Capital in the Twenty First Century) demonstrates that we live in a system of hereditary capitalism where the level of accumulation of capital increases faster than the economy, and this leads inevitably to an increase in inequality.

    The second text is an article by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens) which uses quantitative information never used before to show that the American political system is dominated by the most powerful economic elites, and that there is very little that ordinary citizens can do to prevent it. The authors demonstrate that the majority do not rule in the United States. The rich do.

    In short, the direction that the world of today has taken has been determined in good part by the fall of Communism and the political defeat of the West in the Middle East. We have inherited terrible evils from this: the increasing acceleration of economic inequality and the rebirth of the wars of religion; they are two evils that in the middle of the 20th century, appeared to be on the way to extinction.

    Mauricio is a lawyer, sociologist and currently professor of law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota, Colombia and also Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Tony Abbott and the G20

    In the media in the past few days we have been overwhelmed by stories and photo opportunities from the G20 in Brisbane. It will take some time to sort out fact from spin. I have set out below some comments and opinions from observers. It provides a useful but only partial account by observers of the G20. I have not included any comments from News Corp publications. News Corp’s support of the government is entirely predictable.

    (more…)

  • Steve FitzGerald on Gough Whitlam, Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou

    Of the many things I admired and loved about Gough, one of the most delicious, next to our shared liking for food, was that he was the best person I’ve ever been privileged to brief. It wasn’t just that he soaked it up like blotting paper and asked for more and never forgot. It was that each piece of information was absorbed into its appointed niche and found a place in his political and historical cosmology, and emerged as knowledge, fully fashioned, and in context. One imagined the Graeco-Roman or later Christian ‘art of memory’, but of course Whitlamesque in its Enlightenment commitment to science and reason and the art of enquiry.

    When I went with Gough to meet Chairman Mao in 1973, at one point the discussion got into history and Sino-Soviet relations, and Gough says, from his reading it seems the Soviet Union wasn’t always helpful to the Chinese and at times directed them to actions which proved disastrous, ‘like the Nanchang Uprising. I understand Premier Zhou (Zhou Enlai, who was also at the meeting), you were the leader of that uprising’. I looked at him in astonishment. This generally little known event in Chinese history took place in 1927, after the Chinese Nationalists broke a united front with the Communists and staged a bloody attempt to wipe them out. Two and a half years before, on that famous 1971 visit that laid the fear of China, I’d given Gough background reading on a huge range of things and somewhere in there was a small piece on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party. And now, this obscure detail comes out, in context, accurate, appropriate. And Premier Zhou Enlai caps the moment with a self-criticism about his responsibility for the failure of that uprising.

    But the one time when in my experience Gough’s memory failed him was also in that meeting. They were winding up, with some comments from Gough about the roles of Mao and Zhou in the Chinese revolution, and Mao decided to launch back into the discussion, and asked ‘Would your Party dare to make revolution’ and Gough said ‘we believe in evolution,’ and the meeting was re-ignited, and there was an exchange on the theories of Charles Darwin (which Mao said he accepted but they didn’t apply to historical changes in human society). Mao asked if the city of Darwin was named after Charles Darwin and did Darwin ever visit that city in the Beagle, and Gough had a rarest of moments when a detail escaped his prodigious memory. Zhou Enlai looked at his watch, and with some banter about Mao’s age and infirmities, we stood to leave.

    A few days after Gough’s departure from China, I received the following telegram. It was vintage Gough.

    ‘Apropos my conversation with Chairman Mao, you should know that in 1836 Charles Darwin visited Australia as official naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle, landed at Sydney on 12 January and visited Bathurst. On next voyage in 1839 Beagle without Darwin visited Darwin harbour which captain named after him.

    Please make full confession of error to Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai and say that with Chairman’s help I shall now follow correct line.’

    The ‘big ideas’ about which so much has been said and written in the last few weeks,  came from the big learning, the foundation of Gough’s weltanschauung. And the big target. Not for Gough the small target. No temporising, no pussy-footing politics or ducking and weaving to dodge negative opinion polls, no fudging principle to make oneself look more like one’s opponents. You could brief him. You could contribute ideas. But it was the courage and fortitude of the big target that turned the big ideas into the big public policy reform.

  • John Menadue.  We pass by on the other side.

    We are one of the richest and most privileged people in the world but our recent performance on Ebola, foreign aid and refugees tells the world a quite different story.

    On Ebola, our response has been grudging and slow. We tendered one excuse after another. We moved quickly however to commit our military to combat again in Iraq and Syria. Our Medical Assistance Teams which we have deployed in humanitarian disasters like the typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines were ready to go to West Africa. They had volunteered and had vaccinations. The AMA urged us to get cracking. After a very lengthy delay the government decided to outsource our assistance. Our tardiness was in stark contrast to the response of countries such as the UK and the US. All the advice from experts was that the best way to address the Ebola outbreak was at its source. We knew that the medical and health facilities and hospitals in Liberia and other countries in the region were closing because the qualified staff were contacting Ebola and dying. Several hospitals were bereft of any staff. Healthcare in West Africa was near collapse but we delayed. Liberia has an income per head of $US454 p.a.; ours is over $US68,000. It is hard to recall a situation where our response has been so miserable.

    The UNHCR told us a few days ago that there were 13.6 million refugees displaced by the wars in Syria and Iraq. That is more than the combined populations of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, our four largest cities. By our involvement in the war in Iraq we have contributed to this humanitarian disaster. But our refugee intake has remained unchanged at 13,750 p.a. Kevin Rudd had promised to increase it to 20,000 and Tony Abbott agreed before the last election. He then changed his mind and kept the quota at 13,750. If we adjusted our intake according to our population increase since the time of the Indochina refugee program, we would now be taking over 35,000 refugees p.a. which would still be quite small in relation to our migrant intake. Whilst the humanitarian tragedy in the Middle East escalates, we continue to turn our back.

    We are also ignoring our responsibilities as a wealthy country in overseas development assistance. In the last budget, the biggest cut in government spending was in overseas development assistance. We spend more on our cats and dogs than we do on ODA. At the same time that it cut funding for the poor of the world, the government kept in place a whole range of programs that advantaged the wealthy, such as superannuation concessions and subsidies to the mining industry.

    Surely we can do a lot better than this.

  • The G20 economies.

    The link to The Conversation below, provides a useful summary of the G20 and its member economies, e.g.

    The G20 economies represent 65% of the world’s population, 79% of world trade, 84% of the world economy and 77% of world carbon emissions.

    Australia rates number 3 in GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity.

    As a percentage of GDP, Australia has a relatively low level of debt compared to other G20 economies.

    Along with Canada,UK and Germany, we are the only G20 economies with a AAA credit rating.

    Australia and Canada have the lowest corruption rating amongst the G20 countries.

    John Menadue.

     

    http://theconversation.com/the-g20-economies-explained-in-12-charts-33887

  • John Menadue. Media failure.

    Yesterday I posted a story from ‘a former ABC correspondent’ concerning cutbacks in ABC bureaus, particularly in our region. The post was entitled: ‘The ABC:soft targets and collateral damage’.

    Cutbacks at the ABC are a very serious problem and will prejudice Australia’s future in our region. So much of Australian media reflects the pattern laid down more than a century ago and remains heavily dependent on the US and the UK for news and views. These latest developments at the ABC are likely to worsen this dependence on North Atlantic media organisations.  I wrote a blog on this subject on 17 April last year.  Extracts from it are posted below>

     

    Compare the media reports today about bombings in Boston and Baghdad.

    We have a deluge of coverage in all media about three tragic deaths in Boston. Australian correspondents in the US have gone into overdrive with stories and pictures of horror and courage.

    Today we also have reports of a tragedy in Iraq, a situation we contributed to with our support for the invasion and occupation of that country. Tucked away on page 14 of the Sydney Morning Herald is a report that “at least 37 people had been killed … in nearly 20 separate attacks, mostly bombings” in Baghdad and five other cities. In this year alone, there have been over 1,300 civilian deaths from violence in Iraq.

    This contrast in reportage illustrates how our media reflects the pattern laid down more than a century ago and remains heavily dependent on the US and the UK for news and views. An outside and independent observer would conclude that Australia is an island parked off New York/Boston or London

    Even the minimal coverage of Europe in Australia, usually reflects the jaundiced views of English media about Europe.

    This geographical bias is at the expense of important news and comment about our own region. Unfortunately even the meagre regional coverage is often about the unusual, the exotic or the unpleasant.

    Consider the geographic bias of media coverage of some recent events in the last year. These included the extensive, but almost irrelevant coverage of the US Republican primary elections, the saturation of the US presidential election and the suicide of a nurse in the UK as a result of a prank by the Australian media about the British royals. In contrast there was  minimal coverage of some major issues and events in our region – the Chinese National Peoples’ Congress in November last year and the very significant general elections in Japan and in the Republic of Korea in December last year  Blink your eyes and you would have missed the elections altogether.

    But the significance of these events was and is profound in shaping our economic and security future. Just consider the current crisis on the Korean peninsula and how critical it is for China, Japan, ROK and ourselves. .

     

  • Global Pulse Magazine

    You can now subscribe to Global Pulse Magazine.

    Global Pulse Magazine which you can view at www.globalpulsemagazine.com  was launched on September 29 and for the last month has been free to visit.

    We invite you to subscribe at and receive daily newsletter. Just go to the homepage of www.globalpulsemagazine.com and at the top right hand corner you can click the SUBSCRIBE button and follow the prompts.

    Global Pulse Magazine combines the resources of five leading Catholic publishers – Commonweal in New York, La Croix in Paris, UCAN based in Bangkok, Eureka Street in Australia and eRenlai from China though edited in Taiwan.

    Everyday, news, features and opinions of international interest and significance will appear on the site.

    As a special introductory offer, you can subscribe to Global Pulse Magazine for a modest US$22 that lasts for a year. A pay wall operates on the site.

  • The ABC: soft targets and collateral damage

    In 1963, the ABC’s then Controller of News reported to his superiors on the results of a wide-ranging visit to Asia. He recommended that the ABC undertake a major expansion of its overseas operations, driven by the belief that the journalists and camera operators of the national broadcaster were best equipped to keep Australians informed of the events, trends and decision-makers directly affecting them. This was seen as a core part of the ABC’s charter; few doubted it. Today, sadly, more and more of the ABC’s independent foreign newsgathering operations are being dismantled and the good work of decades squandered.

    Here’s what the News boss wrote after his swing through Indonesia, Singapore, Borneo, Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines: “I have been continually surprised in the past six weeks at the growth of the interest in and the consciousness of our country… Every thinking Australian knows that our destiny is linked with Asia. Now the Asians know it.”

    Before long, the ABC would base correspondents in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, New Delhi, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Hanoi and Beijing. It would, at various times, also staff bureaus in Port Moresby, New York, Washington, Brussels, London, Moscow, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Saigon and Wellington. The foreign correspondents were allowed to travel to seek out original stories, meet newsmakers in person, and live within the social and cultural milieu they were supposed to interpret for Australians; they were given time to reflect and make informed assessments of what was going on; and they were assisted by locally-engaged staff who provided language skills and research support.

    The correspondents and camera operators, in short, were able to be creative, well informed and abreast of events. The ABC competed alongside the BBC, NBC, CBS, Visnews and others: a necessary competition because each of these broadcasters––American, British, Australian, etc.––took a different perspective and served the interests of a particular audience/client.

    Today, to a terrifying extent, the thinning ranks of the ABC’s foreign correspondents are forced to become recyclers: desk-bound, “top of the head” commentators on a passing parade of events and issues they have little time or opportunity to inform themselves about, let alone reflect upon. The advent of so-called “instant” news (which is an oxymoron, since something does not become news until it is reported, and then everything depends on the quality of the reporting) has bled the purpose out of the foreign bureaus, laying them open to the slash-and-burn merchants who never really accepted the rationale for their existence in the first place.

    Yes, we’ve heard about the Federal Government’s cuts to the ABC budget and how this is the sole reason why the ABC has to reduce its foreign newsgathering. I don’t buy it, because I have seen and heard it all before. The ABC receives a large budget and in recent years has invested in many new “broadcast” platforms (online, digital television, etc). During this time it has failed to face up to the fact that its wages bill is grossly over-represented as a proportion of its total spend. In certain program areas, so much of the budget is committed to wages a ridiculously small amount is available for discretionary spending on new content. News and Current Affairs is especially vulnerable since it is impossible to predict when and where a major news event will occur and how much it will cost to mount the special coverage Australian audiences expect.

    ABC on-air personalities are not necessarily the highest paid in the industry, but the average salary and add-on costs of ABC journalists (to take one professional group as an example) are well above the industry average. The bell-curve of wage rates across the corporation swells above the median line. Now I’m talking like an accountant. Time, then, for a bit more history of the ABC’s international operations––because history, as well as budget expediency, lies behind the current push against the foreign bureaus.

    The ABC, a big organization, has its fair share of professional and personal jealousy. Some of it goes back to the old craft divides (journalist versus broadcaster, reporter versus camera operator, etc.) Some is related to inter-divisional rivalries. The expansion in the number of ABC divisions has only intensified the conflict over policy priorities and budget allocations. The ABC’s shift of emphasis away from the traditional media of radio and television has opened the way for new, ambitious empire-builders who have very different agendas from the old content providers.

    The ABC’s overseas bureaus were, to a large extent, established and maintained by the News division. I can say, from experience, that some senior executives of other divisions deeply resented this arrangement. What was in it for them? Calls for the disestablishment of the ABC’s overseas operation have arisen within the corporation on numerous occasions and certainly pre-date the current budget crisis. “Why not just take the news we want from the BBC or CNN?” I’ve heard asked. Better still get it free-of-charge from Al Jazeera. The supposedly swanky lifestyle of the privileged correspondent irritated those accountants and others who, as I say, never bought into the idea the ABC needed an independent newsgathering operation abroad. Their day has come.

    Assignment editors and news executives have become defensive: pulling a correspondent out of the Middle East just as the lid was about to blow off the place; shutting the Moscow bureau just as Vladimir Putin was about to reconstitute the USSR; cutting local staff from the Tokyo bureau, so the non-Japanese-speaking correspondent is left to pull together his reports from the Internet at Starbucks maybe.

    OK, the ABC can’t be everywhere and can’t spend recklessly. But that’s not the issue here. The simple fact is the foreign bureaus offer ABC management a soft target, a quick fix. The collateral damage will be the diminishing of the Australian public’s right to be informed by journalism that is relevant and trustworthy.

    Once a bureau is closed––local staff laid off, leases cancelled, contacts lost and trusted relationships foregone––often there is no way back. In a day the planning and work of a generation is forfeited. What will move in to fill the vacuum? Internet polls? Quizzes? Reader rants responding to blog sites? Interviews by remote control with untested and unchallenged “experts”? Agency coverage provided by any Johnny-come-lately? Or just silence? (Once upon a time the ABC had a bureau in Hanoi. How much news about Vietnam do Australians now receive, following its closure?)

    The ABC’s new foreign newsgathering model, according to reports, will rely on correspondents travelling out of a few selective hubs to report. This, of course, is not a new idea. The corporation once went through the expensive exercise of building up a large presence in Singapore, as a regional news hub. Now it has nothing in Singapore at all. Put all your eggs in one basket and you can find the basket is constantly in the wrong place and the costs of keeping it there––and moving reporters and camera operators in and out––grow way out of proportion to the alternatives.

    But the major argument against the “hubs” model is that correspondents become fly-in, fly-out “instant experts” who lose credibility with audiences. Before long, managers are thinking: “Why not keep them all at home in Australia, and only send them away to the fire once it has broken out?” Heard that one before too.

    Turning foreign correspondents into “firemen” (I use the term in the journalistic sense) can mean only one thing: they end up covering just “fires” (i.e. wars, riots and disasters). We all know, surely, that these are the exceptions, the tiniest part of the daily lives of most people in the world. Do we imagine we can really know what an Indonesian thinks or what a German believes––and therefore how they might vote, invest, travel, plot, reform or whatever––by concentrating on the exceptional moments in their lives, never knowing them, except as hapless victims or incomprehensible zealots?

    Fashions and technology change. Newsgathering is done very differently, in a technical sense, today compared with the 1960s: no more teleprinters and trunk-line calls, thank goodness. But news is not all, or even mostly, about the means of reporting; it is about the commitment to report accurately, fairly and responsibly. It’s about the calibre of the professionals charged with the responsibility, where they are deployed and how they are directed and supported. A former senior executive at the ABC, who thought deeply about these matters, once wrote:

    It is irrelevant in the philosophic sense how the truth is

    communicated. It is relevant only as to the practical but it

    does not mean and has never meant that smoke signals

    must take a particular form and ballad singers must only

    use a particular tune and that words to be printed on paper

    must never undergo change or even that the paper must

    always remain the same.

    What is important and what must be properly understood

    is that news demands good smoke signals and good ballads.

    It demands the smoke signals and the ballads that are

    appropriate to the time and are best understood by the people

    of that time because the communication of news is important

    in no esoteric sense. It is important primarily to make certain

    that truth is communicated and understood.

    In these times, when foreign news events seem more complex than ever and Australia’s direct stake in regional and international affairs is more diverse than ever (through military engagements, trade deals, emergency responses and security and diplomatic entanglements), the ABC needs to be focused on the quality of the smoke signals, and not sacrifice its foreign newsgathering tradition to the budget quick-fix. It should look harder at its structural budget problem and consider whether too much money, time and effort is going into propping up personal empires in Ultimo and elsewhere.

     

    The writer is a former ABC correspondent.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Peter Christoff. US-China climate deal: at last, a real game-changer.

    The new US-China climate deal is a game-changer.

    The United States, the world’s biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, has pledged to cut emissions by 26-28% by 2025 relative to 2005 levels, while China, the current biggest emitter, has promised to peak its emissions by no later than 2030.

    The agreement between the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters is part of preparations for the United Nations negotiations in Paris next year, where the rest of the world will attempt to hammer out a meaningful deal to limit emissions.

    It is a significant step forward. Back in 2009, the keenly anticipated UN climate conference in Copenhagen failed, largely because of a standoff between the two states.

    Their inability to collaborate and to reach a level of mutual recognition of each other’s capacities and limits before the conference was a major contributor to the meeting’s chaotic close and weak, non-binding outcome.

    The big turnaround

    This time, things seem different. Both states have recognised their responsibility to show leadership on the climate issue.

    China’s pledge to peak its emissions by 2030 indicates that it is now willing to assume a leadership role in international climate negotiations – a role commensurate with its global economic importance, with its status as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, and as a country that would be devastated by accelerating climate change.

    China’s proposed target – the first time it has agreed to stop growing its emissions in absolute terms – points to a willingness to shift towards a post-carbon economy.

    It is also a pragmatic response to the social and political challenges posed by dangerous levels of domestic air pollution, caused in part by dirty industrialisation and the use of fossil fuels, in its major cities.

    Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama’s pledge effectively throws down the gauntlet to the newly Republican-controlled Congress.

    The US Climate Action Plan has been Obama’s main policy for meeting the previous target of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, which he announced at Copenhagen.

    But Obama has been unable to legislate to establish a national emissions trading scheme in support of the existing US target or of tougher goals.

    Nevertheless, even in the absence of such a scheme, US emissions have dropped significantly because of the global financial crisis and its economic aftermath in the United States, the development and uptake of new gas sources, and the use of existing regulatory measures.

    In 2012, US emissions were 10% below 2005 levels and the United States seems likely to achieve its 2020 target, despite the recent upswing following several years of emissions decline.

    The new US target of 26-28% below 2005 by 2025 increases the pressure the country is putting on itself to perform and reform. The joint announcement also forces Congress to recognise that China believes that its economic competitiveness – and its challenge to the United States’ economic dominance – will not be harmed even by rapid decarbonisation.

    This knowledge should reinforce Obama’s push for better and more aggressive emissions-reduction measures, enshrined in domestic law, that will also help to modernise the American economy.

    But is it all enough?

    That’s the good news. Now for the not-so-good news.

    These commitments will frame the levels of ambition required of other states at Paris next year. Climate modellers will no doubt now be rushing to determine what these new commitments, if delivered successfully, will mean for combating global warming.

    The US and Chinese cuts, significant though they are, will not be enough to limit the total increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide unless other states engage in truly radical reductions.

    In other words, global emissions are likely to continue to grow, probably until 2030, which will make it impossible to hold global warming below the world’s agreed limit of 2C above pre-industrial levels.

    Australia snookered

    Nevertheless, this announcement means that laggard states like Australia can no longer hide behind the fiction that major developing economies like China are unprepared to make serious efforts to cut their emissions.

    It further embarrasses Australia in its attempt to keep climate change off the agenda at the meeting of the G20 next week.

    It increases the pressure on Australia to bring substantial target commitments to the table in Paris in 2015 – something the Abbott government is presently resisting vigorously.

    And it strongly suggests that the Abbott government’s longed-for coal export boom will, as many have predicted, turn out to be an illusion.

    Peter Christoff is the Associate Professor at University of Melbourne. This article first appeared in today’s The Conversation. 

  • William Grimm MM. Japan’s ‘inside-outside’ culture guarantees a bleak future.

    Society’s overwhelming suspicion of ‘foreigners’ will eventually lead to its decline.

    Japan is a dangerous place. The country is prone to volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis and typhoons. The earthquake and tsunami that three years ago took more than 18,000 lives brought that fact to the attention of the world. But, smaller quakes are a daily occurrence. In the week before my writing this, there were 32 earthquakes in Japan.

    Though dangerous in one sense, socially Japan is an extraordinarily safe country. Serious crime is rare, and generally enforced and obeyed safety regulations protect most residents from natural disasters and accidents.

    In the wake of the 2011 quake, tsunami and nuclear plant meltdown, observers outside the country remarked on the fact that the disaster was not followed by the looting and social disturbances that would be expected in most other countries. Japanese social cohesion is the pride of the nation.

    That cohesion, however, may ultimately prove more destructive than all the volcanoes, earthquakes and other natural risks.

    Ironically, though Japanese society is safe, research has shown that the Japanese as a whole are noteworthy for the degree to which they are untrusting and wary of others. That may be linked to a basic Japanese cultural trait: the division of society into “inside” (uchi) and “outside” (soto), or “us” and “them”.

    When combined with a tendency toward group cohesiveness, the result can be a strong sense of group identity vis-a-vis members of other groups. In fact, when Japanese introduce themselves outside their own group, they often do so by declaring their group identity: “I am Tanaka of such-and-such company (or other corporate entity).” This can give an adversarial cast to social relations.

    One who declares his or her “inside,” also declares others to be “outside.” So, when Tanaka-san declares that she is part of Company A, she is also declaring that she has no connection with Companies B-through-Z.

    That lack of connection is not absolute; it is contextual. If Tanaka of Company A and Satoh of Company B were to find themselves in the presence of someone from outside the realm of their rivalry, they would form a temporary new “inside”. So, if they were to encounter a widget maker from India, they would become “Japanese widget makers Tanaka and Satoh”.

    So, in a sense, it is the presence of an “outside” that defines oneself in a relationship in Japan.

    The most obvious “outsider,” reinforced by the very word used to describe them, is the foreigner. The Japanese word gaijin (foreigner) is written with the characters for “outside person”. To say, “I am Japanese,” means, “I am not a foreigner”.

    The ‘foreigners’ most encountered by Japanese are some 500,000 ethnic Koreans, the descendants of people who came or were brought to Japan as workers when Korea was part of the Japanese empire (1910-1945). They are still “outsiders” though they were born, raised and educated in Japan.

    Right-wing hyper-nationalists who are often supported by members of the ruling political party are especially outspoken against the “special treatment” Korean outsiders receive. There is no overcoming the “us” and “them” mind set.

    There are, of course, exceptions, but the general lack of involvement by Japanese in international organizations is one indicator of the boundaries that the uchi-soto mind set make almost un-crossable.

    Barring the arrival of aliens from another planet who would then be the cosmic equivalent of that Indian widget maker, it is unlikely that the average Japanese would be able to transcend nationalism to say, “We humans, we earthlings”.

    So, the “us” and “them” adversarial distinction toward foreigners is going to continue. And that will probably make inevitable the decline of Japan.

    The Japanese inability to treat as insiders ethnic Koreans who have been in Japan for four or more generations indicates that the country is not going to be able to open its borders to immigration, though such immigration is desperately needed.

    Japan’s population is already declining, and the latest projections predict that depopulation will lead to a decline in Japanese economic indicators in 25 years or so. Japan, which once reached the number two spot in the world economy and was touted as a possible number one will, in fact, become a small, politically and economically insignificant group of islands off the coast of the Asian mainland.

    An attempt to stave that off was made a couple of decades ago when special visas were granted to the descendants of Japanese who had emigrated to Brazil, Peru and Bolivia a century ago. It was thought that they would fit in as insiders and work in Japan’s factories, since they were somehow or other Japanese.

    However, they were not Japanese. They were Brazilians, Peruvians and Bolivians who had Japanese ancestors. Culturally, they could not be insiders, and so the government has not only cut back on the program, but is actively sending the “outsiders” back to whence they came.

    Japan continues to refuse to accept immigrants, and is unlikely to do so in the future because the exclusionary psychology of uchi and soto will not allow it. The social cohesiveness defined by uchiand soto will eventually lead to the end of Japan as a major nation.

    William Grimm has lived in Japan since the early 1970s, is a Catholic priest, writer and Publisher of UCA News, the Catholic news service for Asia.  This article first appeared in UCANEWS.com on November 7, 2014.

  • John Coleman. How things changed in 1972.

    As a journalist-bureaucrat 42 years ago, for me nothing illustrated more the bewildering speed of Gough Whitlam’s rollercoaster reforms than the removal of the last vestiges of the White Australia policy.

    I was publications editor for the Australian Information Service in Canberra, then Australia’s apolitical, overseas information agency. Part of my job was to produce the Australia Handbook which, with a print run of multiple thousands, was sent to our high commissions and embassies around the world for distribution.

    It was traditionally a dull, military-style manual, printed in black and white, updated each year by government departments and sought to give a comprehensive, factual account of Australia from its beginnings to its current economic, social and cultural achievements.

    Fresh from Fleet Street, I introduced full-colour, including a wraparound cover showing the yet-to- be opened Sydney Opera House, and revamped the layout and text.  Inevitably, there were delays, but with the election of the Whitlam government in December 1972, we were confident, with the book complete in those early weeks of 1973, there would be mostly minor changes for that year’s edition.

    But extensive changes were ordered. The revision was a nightmare; the book was on film and the amendments had to be laboriously stripped in.

    Poring over the revised text, I worried especially about the section on immigration which noted that following the 1966 policy review, it had been possible for non-Europeans ”to be considered for entry as migrants: Applications are considered individually on their merits, and approval is subject to their capacity to integrate…

    “Most approved applicants have been people eligible to practise in the professions in Australia. The application and approval rates have been increasing gradually though the numbers remain relatively limited. Non-Europeans are admitted as visitors, for business or as tourists…”

    Then – startlingly – Australia’s objective to maintaining a “homogeneous” society. I knew enough from Whitlam’s pronouncements that the White Australia policy was on the way out and took the text to a senior journalist colleague in the Immigration Department.

    The next few minutes, as he phoned a superior, were straight out of Yes, Minister, my colleague echoing, “Leave it in…take it out… leave it in…take it…” We took it out.

    We didn’t catch up in that edition with significant steps which, as the Immigration Department now notes in a fact sheet, the Whitlam government was to take later in 1973: legislating that all migrants of whatever origin be eligible for citizenship after three years’ permanent residence; issuing policy instructions to overseas posts to totally disregard race as a factor in the selection of migrants; and ratifying all international agreements relating to immigration and race.

    We did manage to squeeze in the announcement that from the 1974 academic year fees would be abolished at universities, college of advanced education and technical colleges, and that the government planned to discuss with the states assuming full responsibility for financing tertiary education.

    Medicare, still some time off, didn’t make the book, but we told how patients could insure themselves for hospital treatment through voluntary membership of non-profit health insurance organisations, contributions ranging from 70c to $1.90 a week for families.

    We reported the maximum weekly rate for unemployment benefits was $17 “with lesser rates for unmarried younger people,” but noted it was proposed to increase the rate for a married couple to $37.50 and single people to $21.50.

    We highlighted the mineral boom, pointing out the resources accounted for about a quarter of all our exports with manufacturing growing “spectacularly”, contributing  more than a quarter of GDP (that’s now halved). And we said the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, begun in 1949, was nearing completion.

    On the Arts, we quoted Prime Minister Whitlam that a new Australia Council for the Arts would be created with seven boards, ranging from Theatre to Aboriginal Arts. We pictured Professor A.D. Hope as one of the nation’s distinguished poets and told how movies like Wake in Fright were creating interest overseas.

    On international affairs, we complemented Australia’s increasing focus on participation in regional associations and relations with Asian and Pacific nations with a full-page picture of Indonesia’s President Sukarno. On Defence, we said Australia’s strike aircraft included Canberra bombers and Mirage fighters. Among sporting stars, we named Olympic gold medallist Shane Gould and tennis champions Evonne Goolagong and Margaret Court.

    The book had prolific statistics; among them, Australia’s population was estimated at 13 million, Aborigines at 140,000 and expected to double by the end of the 20th century.

    John Coleman is a freelance journalist and travel writer.

     

     

  • John Mant. Tribute to Gough Whitlam

    It is difficult to make this speech – so much to say about this great man and his times.

    I observed him from a number of angles:

    • Working with Tom Uren and Gough Whitlam on urban policy proposals before the elections.
    • Assisting my friends Peter Wilenski and James Spigelman in their work on the administrative orders for the new government.
    • As Uren’s principal advisor for the first year I attended that amazing two man Cabinet meeting when we made the first great installment on changing Australia.
    • During the first year of the government I was closely involved in a number of critical issues.
    • Finally I worked as the PM’s principal private secretary in the five months before the coup.

    And coup it was, make no mistake about that.

    A coup which was successful because of one of the PM’s most enduring qualities – an assumption that people would behave properly and constitutionally.  During the crisis, which was totally engineered by typical dishonourable acts and subterfuges by the Right, the PM’s central focus was to preserve Australian (and British) parliamentary tradition, namely that governments are made in the People’s house.  This belief mirrored his commitment to ‘one vote one value’.

    He assumed, wrongly, that his determined opponents, and especially the Governor General, would be similarly motivated. A person with a more cynical view of people may have been less trusting.  But then that person wouldn’t have been Gough Whitlam.

    His approach to policy reflected this.

    Gough Whitlam believed that governments can do good things for people. This was a view shared by others in the days which were before the Right launched its propaganda war to convince everyone that governments were the problem rather than the solution.

    Gough Whitlam’s approach to policy also reflected the realist tradition of Sydney University:  a thing is a fact only if it exists; any number particulars do not prove a general proposition.

    He therefore was a shining example of The Enlightenment.

    As such, he had difficulty in accepting those who would not face the facts – those whose views were driven by love of the past, superstitious dogma or cyclical political advantage.

    This, and his prodigious capacity for work and his legendary (and, for staffers, disquieting) memory for detail, drove The Program.  During the long years of Opposition he worked on it: rational, transforming, exciting.

    Assuming others would share his analysis, The Program was to be implemented. Unfortunately the quantity and quantity of his front bench too often meant some were not up to the tasks he set.  The Program was too rational for some, too rushed for others, not sufficiently flexible to respond to changing economic settings.

    But enough was achieved to make a real and beneficial difference to many lives.  Nobody else in Australia’s short history can claim to doing so much good.  For that we can be grateful for Gough Whitlam’s long and productive life.

     

    John Mant is currently a Councillor on the City of Sydney Council.

  • Walter Hamilton. Japan and China: agreeing to disagree

    In diplomacy, sometimes a nod is as good as a wink. You can argue later over the question of who nodded first (if at all). The leaders of Japan and China are maneuvering towards their first face-to-face meeting after two years of chilly and occasionally belligerent relations. To enable the meeting to happen officials on both sides have been engaged in a tortuous diplomacy of the nod/wink kind.

    The Japanese have a word, nemawashi, which loosely translates as ‘spade work’. They are masters at the patient, protracted negotiations––and accompanying softening up process––necessary to bring off a business deal, public works project or diplomatic coup. Their obvious equals in this are the Chinese.

    Two years ago, the centre-left government of Yoshihiko Noda, jammed in a wedge by right-wing agitators, took the fateful decision to nationalize several islands in the Senkaku group, close to Taiwan, which have been administered by Japan for most of the past 120 years. This, as far as China was concerned, changed the status quo in the two countries’ management of their territorial dispute over the islands.

    The Communist Party gave the green light for widespread protests in China, which sometimes turned violent: Japanese business premises were attacked, trade flows declined sharply and Chinese tourists stopped visiting Japan. When Chinese military vessels and aircraft started aggressively intruding into the sea and airspace around the islands, and Beijing unilaterally declared an exclusion zone in the East China Sea, it seemed possible that a military conflict might be triggered.

    The replacement of the Noda administration by the conservative LDP-led government of Shinzo Abe in December 2012 only sharpened the conflict. Abe adopted a hardline ‘no recognition’ policy towards China’s claim to the Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands and deployed additional military resources to defend Japan’s interests.

    Though the risk of an ‘accidental’ clash remained real, this writer never believed a military conflict was imminent, for several reasons. First, it was not in Japan’s interest to start one. Secondly, China knew that its naval power, at this stage, was not sufficient to be assured of victory. Thirdly, the Chinese economy is going through a delicate transition to a lower pattern of growth and would be vulnerable to any shocks flowing from a military clash with Japan. Finally, the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue is essentially about muscle flexing; the islands have little intrinsic value. In an exercise of muscle flexing, the idea is to display your biceps and triceps without actually lift the weights. This goes for both Abe and China’s President Xi Jinping.

    Diplomacy, rather than war, always held out the best solution for both sides: hence the months of backroom meetings aimed at achieving a result that allows both to maintain face. The APEC leaders forum, which kicks off in Beijing tomorrow (Monday), is the obvious occasion for a first tête-a-tête between Abe and Xi. It’s not a guaranteed success, but it seems likely that it will mark the start of a new modus operandi for managing the territorial dispute.

    The fact that the meeting will happen in China satisfies Beijing: ‘Japan came to us’. The formula to be adopted, according to reports, is that both sides will ‘agree to disagree’ over which has sovereignty over the islands. This would satisfy Tokyo by falling short of an open admission that China has a claim to the islands. The two leaders are also expected to endorse the work of officials, undertaken during the past year, to put in place a conflict-resolution protocol for de-escalating situations that could give rise to a military clash.

    The presence of a great number of coast guard and military vessels from the two nations, not to mention their competing fishing fleets, in the crowded East China Sea has been causing alarm in the neighbourhood and beyond. If Japan and China can agree on a better way to manage the consequences of their dispute, even if they cannot resolve it fundamentally, much will have been achieved.

    The other concession sought by China is that Abe should stop making visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a symbol of Japan’s wartime aggression, and do more to acknowledge the nation’s past mistakes.

    On these issues, the diplomats will have been throwing out their most delicate nods/winks. But remember, the horse is blind. Abe almost certainly will not publically abandon his prerogative to visit Yasukuni––but having stayed away during the recent autumn visiting ‘season’, he may already have sufficiently signaled his intention to tread carefully. (Other members of his Cabinet, however, have continued to visit the shrine where 14 convicted Class ‘A’ war criminals are commemorated among the 2.5 million war dead whose spirits are enshrined there.)

    Whether the two leaders can bring to their talks anything constructive on the vexed issue of historical accountability is very unlikely. The meeting, in fact, may prove little more than a handshake and a photo opportunity: the first step on a long and difficult road back to a saner future.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years.

     

     

     

     

  • Graham Freudenberg. Bjelke Petersen was an innocent.

     

    What is the real meaning of the G20 security farce in Brisbane? It is a massive exercise in political intimidation. It is a demonstration of the power of government to prevent or limit the most basic democratic rights of free speech, protest and assembly. Perhaps the worst thing about it is that, in the atmosphere of these times, this intimidatory assertion of authority is accepted without question as normal, routine and completely justified. There is a long term conditioning process of work here.

    The original target of the G20 security operation was demonstrations that might be organised by protest groups along the lines of Seattle or ‘Occupy Wall Street’. Why should such dissent require any more than ordinary measures of police supervision, backed, for this occasion, by enhanced intelligence work? Why should 900 heavily armed troops be involved in non-violent civilian protest, even if inconvenient to the authorities and unsightly for the visitors? One would have thought that a display of democratic protest would have been salutary to the likes of Putin and the rest.

    But the way this has been done – and spun in an extraordinary mixture of secrecy and selective publicity – has caused Brisbane citizens to believe that it is all about ISIS etc. In a single newscast on 3 November Channel 7 Brisbane had three juxtaposed items: an army rehearsal for a response to a random off-the-street kidnapping; an appeal by Premier Newman to citizens to come into the CBD during G20, lest Brisbane ‘look like a ghost town’; and the serving of a keep-way order on some poor ratbag officially designated as a ‘serial pest’ (shades of ‘The Skull‘ who used to haunt election meetings in Sydney in 1969 and 1972).

    Of course the most innocent explanation is that all this is not about protecting the people or the visiting Heads of Government but to protect the collective backsides of officialdom. But when we link the deification of the Australian soldier in connection with the First World War Centenary with this current involvement of the Australian Army in civilian control, it is not difficult to see the eventual outcome, intended or not: a pervasive and permanent acceptance of the use of the Australian military forces as a routine extension of the police power, against the exercise of the most fundamental democratic rights.

    As Goering said, ‘To control the people you only have to tell them they are being attacked. It works every time in every country.’

  • Patty Fawkner SGS. Betty has dementia.

    Grief is a constant companion when a loved one has dementia. And so, too, is grace, writes Good Samaritan Sister Patty Fawkner.

    Betty has dementia. Betty has had dementia for over eight years. Betty is my mother.

    “Mum will know when it’s time to go into care,” I would confidently say to my five siblings as Betty aged. I had utter faith in my ever-practical, no-frills, no self-pitying mother. I was wrong.

    A sober, unsentimental woman, Betty had met head-on all the challenges, joys and heartaches that come with rearing a large family with very modest means. I saw the height of her heroism and the depth of her love when Frank, the love of her life and my Dad, was diagnosed with cancer at age 57. Frank died 18 difficult months later.

    For 25 years she lived on her own and cared meticulously for the family home. But slowly, and then somewhat precipitously, Betty began to fail. She could no longer manage her money, her household, herself. She lost keys, money, her wedding and engagement rings. And she, herself, got lost.

    While her anxiety levels varied, those of her family were on constant red alert. Yes, we got the care packages and, yes, we attempted the in-house support, but Betty resisted because she “didn’t need help”. Lesson number one: Betty, as with all dementia sufferers, had lost the capacity to assess her own capacity. Logic, rational and evidenced-base arguments counted for nothing.

    I got the job of talking with her, to say it was time to go into care. For over an hour I cajoled, I reasoned, I wept. “I’m not going anywhere,” was her response. Forty minutes later, “Alright. I’ll go, but I want you all to know I’m not happy about this”. Thirty minutes later, “Alright. I’ll go and I’ll go graciously”.

    I could hardly wait to phone each of my siblings to share this impasse-breaking news.

    But two days later Betty had forgotten our heart-wrenching conversation. I began the conversation again the next week and again the next. Each time there was the same pattern of resistance, begrudging acceptance, followed by gracious acquiescence. Amazing.

    We were blessed in being able to find a place in a new state-of-the-art dementia unit in a suburb just around the corner from where Betty was born 85 years earlier.

    She was one of the first residents and was soon joined by 13 others in her wing. We sold the family home to pay for her accommodation. Overwhelming relief that Betty was safe and lovingly cared for trumped any other emotion we experienced over that time.

    Eight years on she is the only survivor from the original intake. Now 92, Betty’s dementia advances relentlessly. Physically she is frailer, though some days she looks as though she might live to 102!

    Grief is a constant companion when a loved one has dementia.

    There is grief for memories lost and for stories and secrets we can no longer share. As soon as I am out of sight Betty will not recall my visit. “It’s not that she really forgets,” a dementia specialist tells us; “it’s just that the experience is not ‘laid down’ in her brain, so there is no memory upon which to draw.”

    But even Betty’s former, pre-dementia life is no longer etched in her memory. She no longer remembers Frank or “the boys” – her five brothers – or her much loved sister. Her former life is now etched in her work-worn hands, and in her character and in her heart.

    In an inchoate way she ‘remembers’ her mother. Physical and emotional disorientation accompany the many urinary tract infections to which Betty is susceptible. At these times, she is inconsolable. “Where am I? I want to go home. Where is Mum? I want Mum.” Her yearning and distress is heart-breaking.

    Soon after Betty went into care, I was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery. I would have loved some comforting mothering. My mother was there, but the mother in whom I could confide was gone – another grief.

    Some weeks back Betty must have either fallen onto the floor or into a bedside table during the night. An alarm was activated as soon as she got out of bed, but some failure in the usually well-oiled system meant that no night staff came to her aid. She was found back in bed by the morning staff, hours later. Of course she had no memory of what had occurred.

    I was away and saw her a week later. Betty still had a huge lump on her forehead and half her face was bruised deeply, ugly. I cried when I saw her, more at the thought of my darling mother enduring this jarring, pain-inducing accident with no one to comfort her in the moment.

    Grief is one companion. And so, too, is grace.

    Betty was never an overly demonstrative woman, but now the dementia seems to have let the affection genie – both hers and mine – out of the bottle. I am just so grateful. I love cupping her ever-so-soft face in my hands, looking into her eyes, and saying, “I love you, my darling mother”. I joke with her that her response should be, “And I love you my darling daughter”. She used to be able to say that, but not now.

    One day I ask playfully, “Do you love me?” She responds seriously, yet with a twinkle in the eye, “I do”. I push my luck further. “How much?” “Millions,” she replies. I go away a happy woman.

    Betty seems to have rekindled a childlike delight in the simple things of life – looking at the clouds, being enchanted by a child, a flower, or a photo. Always one with a sweet tooth, we spoil her with chocolates. She savours each chocolate as though she’s stealthily partaking in some guilty, indulgent pleasure.

    There are as many laughs as there are tears. Earlier on when I could take her out for a walk, I expressed my concern that we shouldn’t walk too far. “You get tired, don’t forget,” I sensibly say. “Well you’ll just have to piggyback me back home,” she declares impishly.

    We see many signs of her playfulness and her familiar straight-shooting style. One of the residents fancies himself as a dancer and is often poised ready to do a twirl à la Fred Astaire. Betty looks at him, looks at me, rolls her eyes and says “Look at that silly old b—-r“.

    Betty was born Elizabeth Taylor, and like the movie star, appearances and grooming have always been important to her. When she sees an overweight person, she comments in a loud stage whisper, “Look at the size of that!” “Mum!” I quickly remonstrate. She smiles, hunches her shoulders and places a finger guiltily on her lips, pretending to be contrite.

    Just the other day I was sitting with Betty as my sister helped her with her lunch. She stopped eating, gazed at the woman opposite, looked conspiratorially at us and announced, “See that one, over there? She hasn’t got a clue”. “Really?” we say suppressing our laughter.

    Ronald Rolheiser reminds me that “Jesus gave his life to us through his activity; Jesus gave his death to us through his passivity”. And so with Betty.

    All her adult life she was in charge of a family and a household. She worked hard, cooking and cleaning, sewing and scrimping to make ends meet. In all this activity as wife, mother, nanna, sister and friend, Betty gave her life away. Now, she is unable to be in charge of anything – even of her most basic needs.

    Activity gives way to passivity. Staff and family perform the tasks that she once so competently mastered. In a society that equates worth and value with utility, work and activity, in a society which speaks vociferously about euthanasia, Betty’s life might be measured as having limited value.

    James Hillman in his book, The Force of Character and Lasting Life, asks the question: What is our value to others once our practical usefulness, and perhaps even our sanity, are gone? Character, he says – our own and others.

    “An old woman may be helpful simply as a figure valued for her character. Like a stone at the bottom of a riverbed, she may do nothing but stay still and hold her ground, but the river has to take her into account and alter its flow because of her.”

    Betty continues to give her life away in her diminishment and frailty. She gives to me now different gifts, at times deeper gifts, than she was able to give to me in her strength and activity.

    Betty has dementia. Betty is my mother and Betty is beautiful. She is priceless beyond all imagining.

    * Good Samaritan Sister, Patty Fawkner is an adult educator, writer and facilitator. Patty is interested in exploring what wisdom the Christian tradition has for contemporary issues. She has an abiding interest in questions of justice and spirituality. Her formal tertiary qualifications are in arts, education, theology and spirituality. This article was first published in the October edition of ‘The Good Oil’ the e-magazine of the Good Samaritan Sisters. See link below.

    http://www.goodsams.org.au/good-oil/betty-has-dementia/

  • ISIS and Vietnam.

    In an op ed column in the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman spoke of the parallels between the war in Vietnam and the conflict now in Iraq and Syria. He mentions how the executive of foreign journalists is designed to provoke Western intervention. See link below for Thomas Friedman’s article.  John Menadue

     

    http://nyti.ms/1vcTEK5

  • Antony Whitlam. Tribute to Gough Whitlam

    The Honourable (Edward) Gough Whitlam, AC QC

    State Memorial Service

    The Honourable Antony Whitlam QC

    Sydney Town Hall

    5 November 2014

     

    Auntie Millie Ingram gave a moving Welcome to Country. I also wish to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation on whose land this notable building stands. I pay respect to Gadigal elders – past and present – and to so many other indigenous Australians we are honoured to have join with us today, including members of Vincent Lingiari’s family.

    This is a celebration of the life of Edward Gough Whitlam. I shall try to remember that.

    Gough himself, when speaking on occasions like this, had a tendency to become so enthusiastic in his advocacy of projects associated with the departed person that the subject of the proceedings rated only a cursory mention.

    I am Gough’s eldest child. The only advantage primogeniture appears to have given me upon my father’s death, is this speaking slot.

    Gough, of course, would have loved to speak today, but the rules of the game necessarily disqualify him. That is just as well because I gather the Town Hall is booked tomorrow!

    There can be no complaint about Gough’s family cycle. True, his dear wife of nearly 70 years, our mother Margaret, predeceased him. But they both far exceeded all actuarial estimates for their generation.

    Gough’s only sister, Freda, survives him and we are delighted that she is here today.

    All Gough’s children are here today. There are four of us – and that is now the final count. I say this because, not so long ago, when Gough was growing older and more frail and, as Catherine says, more lovable, a visitor to his office politely asked how many children he had. Gough looked up and answered: “Four” and then with a cheeky smile and eyes glinting he added: “…….. so far”. Gough was also a much loved patriarch for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

    Today’s speeches remind us of Gough’s purpose in life. They were delivered with power and beauty that leave us all in awe.

    Cate is a woman of courage and conviction who refuses to be boxed in by her talent in theatre and in cinema. Noel is an iconoclast of great forensic skill, with a poet’s gift for language that he employs tirelessly in the interests of all Australians. Coming from a younger generation, their assessments of Gough’s impact are especially satisfying. Cate and Noel have added great lustre to this occasion.

    Graham and John are, of course, of the Labor Party. Graham was Gough’s collaborator from the time he became Leader. John was Gough’s closest friend and confidant in the last years of his life. They are both family, and they know how grateful we are to them for what they have had to say.

    Gough’s time in government was the pinnacle of his career. It is a particular pleasure, therefore, that Doug McClelland, Les Johnson, Kep Enderby and of course, Paul Keating, are here with us today. Unfortunately Bill Hayden and Tom Uren are unwell and cannot attend. Bill’s moving tribute to Gough is etched in our hearts and minds.

    For Gough, public service remained the most noble pursuit and there was no more important or honourable occupation than being a member of parliament. All his life he placed his faith in parliamentary government, responsible government and the two-party system.

    To the end of his days Gough was conscious that he owed everything that he had been able to achieve in government to the selfless efforts of members of the Australian Labor Party and to the confidence placed in him by so many of them.

    The media coverage of Gough’s death has been generous, and we have been greatly touched by the affection and respect from the public.

    There has, of course, been an information overload about the details of Gough’s life. However, I will flesh out two subjects.

    First, the matter of religion. Gough’s irreverent wit should not be misconstrued. It is true that Gough himself was not a religious person. However he grew up in a strongly religious household. His mother came from a prominent Baptist family in Melbourne. In Canberra Gough’s parents and his sister became Presbyterians. At the Canberra Grammar School, Gough repositioned himself as an Anglican. He married our mother Margaret in the Church of England, and he was astute to have each of us baptised and confirmed.

    Gough’s sister, Freda, was moderator of the Uniting Church in this state.

    Gough’s love of history informed a broad knowledge of religion. As children we were aware of this early. To keep us occupied on long car trips there were no video games or sing-alongs. Rather we were bombarded with the most exquisite detail of the doctrine and liturgy in different rites of the Christian Church. Gough did not claim to be a scholar, but he did have a lifelong fascination with religion.

    Gough employed religious imagery in his speech. Many of his attempts at self-parody about matters divine have been recalled with evident amusement during the past fortnight.  As I have said, Gough himself was not a religious person, but by his background and disposition he did not scoff at people who were religious and he was genuinely respectful of their beliefs and moral values. They included many of his closest friends.

    In every way, Gough was ever keen to inculcate in his children the virtues of religious tolerance. Plain courtesy and consideration for others was a big part of that. And of course, this was more than just religious tolerance. It was a quality that informed so much of what he aspired to do for our society as a whole.

    Now a little more biography and geography.

    In 1947 our family (comprising Gough, Margaret, me and Nick) moved to Cronulla. When Gough entered parliament in 1952, his seat of Werriwa included the whole of the Sutherland Shire and extended all the way down to Helensburgh and right across to Liverpool. My favourite boyhood memory of election campaigning with my father is of him trawling for votes, armed with a loud speaker, not being driven along streets in a flat-bed truck or a van, but motoring along the Woronora River in a “tinny”.

    In 1955 there was a redistribution, and the Shire and points south were cut out of Werriwa. The new seat extended along an axis north from Liverpool to the western edge of Parramatta at Wentworthville. So at the end of the school year in 1957 the family (now increased with the addition of Stephen and Catherine) moved to a new house at Cabramatta. That is where Gough and Margaret lived until he became Prime Minister. He never had a flat in town. During the whole of that time (for the last 13 years of which Gough was successively Deputy Leader and Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, with functions to attend all over the metropolis), if he was in Sydney, Gough slept at home in Cabramatta.

    Against that background, you can imagine my surprise, in the wash-up of Gough’s death, to read one of the more antic commentators thrillingly expose “the myth that Whitlam was a western suburbs kid made good”. I had never heard of such a myth. Has anyone? I did know that he had lived most of his adult life far from the centre of town in two houses built on unsewered blocks of land.

    I did know that for 20 years he had been an energetic local member in western Sydney where he had witnessed the problems of its rapid development, and where, with his vast knowledge of European culture, and the history of the Mediterranean people, he accorded unfeigned respect and dignity to all the area’s many immigrants.

    After parliament Gough remained vigorously engaged in our national public debate on many issues. Constitutional reform and equality of electoral enrolment spring to mind, but it is difficult to think of a significant topic on which he did not feel obliged to express a view.

    It was a brilliant decision of Bob Hawke’s government to send him to UNESCO. It got him out of the way and it allowed Gough to employ his great talents in the interests of world heritage and culture.

    Many talented and dedicated men and women have served on Gough’s personal staff. Until he became Deputy Leader in 1960 there was only his electorate secretary, the late Norma Thompson, whom we always knew as Miss Thompson. She operated from a corner in his office in the old Federal Members Rooms in the Commonwealth Bank’s “money box” building in Martin Place.

    Of the others engaged over the last half century, it would be invidious to single anybody out. They all endured his occasional changes in temperament, but at the same time they will all know how much he valued the contribution of each of them. It is truly gratifying that so many of them have taken the trouble to join us here today.

    Stamina is an essential ingredient in the make-up of any successful politician. Gough was lucky enough to have it in spades for most of his life.

    For the past few years, Gough has lived in an aged care facility at Lulworth where he was wonderfully looked after by everyone.

    Until the last couple of months Gough continued to go into his office four times a week. There were also increasingly frequent attendances upon all kinds of health professionals. Again I will not single anybody out. They know how grateful we are to each of them for their skill and care.

    The grace and serenity with which Gough accepted the decline in his health were quite striking. My brothers and I owe a particular debt to our sister, Catherine.

    The man whose appearance always brightened up his demeanour and to whom all his children are forever indebted for his devotion and love, is his driver, Michael Vlassopoulos.

    This is a State Memorial Service. Prime Minister, we are most grateful to you for authorising this occasion.

    We are also conscious of the great honour done us by the presence of HE the Governor-General, HE Lady Cosgrove and so many other distinguished persons and representatives of foreign governments who have gathered with Gough’s family, friends and supporters here today.

    It is a particular pleasure to welcome so many from Papua New Guinea, including Prime Minister O’Neill and Gough’s old friend, Grand Chief Michael Somare.

    At the start of today the genius of William Barton reminded us that we are here in Australia, a land where the indigenous peoples have lived for thousands of years. The road to reconciliation and recognition started with the Whitlam government, but it should be remembered that its land rights proposals were in substance implemented by Malcolm Fraser’s government.

    The attendance of representatives from the Gurindji people is a truly humbling testament to Gough’s legacy.

    Events at Wave Hill are the subject of the moving song written and performed today by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody. This song was written in the early 1990s around the time of Paul Keating’s great Redfern speech. Soon after, a brilliant young aboriginal lawyer called Noel Pearson came to public attention in the wake of the Native Title cases. The road ahead may be tortuous and difficult for all Australians but we need not be divided on partisan lines.

    The artistry of the orchestra and choirs today has been sublime and utterly spellbinding. Gough’s idiosyncratic predilections in the music for this occasion have been brilliantly vindicated.

    The next piece, Jerusalem, was the recessional hymn at Margaret’s memorial service. William Blake was, just like Gough, a radical. An Oxford theology professor has written that the words of this poem “stress the importance of people taking responsibility for change and building a better society”.

    In that spirit, it is a fitting piece to end the celebration of Gough’s life, and the symmetry provides a neat memory for us.

    Thank you all for coming.

  • Noel Pearson. Tribute to Gough Whitlam.

    The Honourable (Edward) Gough Whitlam, AC QC

    State Memorial Service

    Noel Pearson

    Sydney Town Hall

    5 November 2014

     

    Paul Keating said the reward for public life is public progress.

    For one born estranged from the nation’s citizenship, into a humble family of a marginal people striving in the teeth of poverty and discrimination, today it is assuredly no longer the case.

    This because of the equalities of opportunities afforded by the Whitlam program.

    Raised next to the wood heap of the nation’s democracy, bequeathed no allegiance to any political party, I speak to this old man’s legacy with no partisan brief.

    Rather, my signal honour today on behalf of more people than I could ever know, is to express our immense gratitude for the public service of this old man.

    I once took him on a tour to my village and we spoke about the history of the mission and my youth under the Government of his nemesis, Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

    My home was an Aboriginal reserve under a succession of Queensland laws commencing in 1897.

    These laws were notoriously discriminatory and the bureaucratic apparatus controlling the reserves maintained vigil over the smallest details concerning its charges.

    Superintendents held vast powers and a cold and capricious beauracracy presided over this system for too long in the 20th century.

    In June 1975, the Whitlam Government enacted the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Queensland Discrimatory Laws Act.

    The law put to purpose the power conferred upon the Commonwealth Parliament by the 1967 referendum, finally outlawing the discrimination my father and his father lived under since my grandfather was removed to the mission as a boy and to which I was subject the first 10 years of my life.

    Powers regulating residency on reserves without a permit, the power of reserve managers to enter private premises without the consent of the householder, legal representation and appeal from court decisions, the power of reserve managers to arbitrarily direct people to work, and the terms and conditions of employment, were now required to treat Aboriginal Queenslanders on the same footing as other Australians.

    We were at last free from those discriminations that humiliated and degraded our people.

    The companion to this enactment, which would form the architecture of indigenous human rights akin to the Civil Rights Act 1965 in the United States, was the Racial Discrimination Act.

    It was in Queensland under Bjelke-Petersen that its importance became clear.

    In 1976 a Wik man from Aurukun on the western Cape York Peninsula, John Koowarta, sought to purchase the Archer Bend pastoral lease from its white owner.

    The Queensland Government refused the sale. The High Court’s decision in Koowarta versus Bjelke-Petersen upheld the Racial Discrimination Act as a valid exercise of the external affairs powers of the Commonwealth.

    However, in an act of spite, the Queensland Government converted the lease into the Acher Bend National Park.

    Old man Koowarta died a broken man, the winner of a landmark High Court precedent but the victim of an appalling discrimination.

    The Racial Discrimination Act was again crucial in 1982 when a group of Murray Islanders led by Eddie Mabo claimed title under the common law to their traditional homelands in the Torres Strait.

    In 1985 Bjelke-Petersen sought to kill the Murray Islanders’ case by enacting a retrospective extinguishment of any such title.

    There was no political or media uproar against Bjelke-Petersen’s law. There was no public condemnation of the state’s manuover. There was no redress anywhere in the democratic forums or procedures of the state or the nation.

    If there were no Racial Discrimination Act that would have been the end of it. Land rights would have been dead, there would never have been a Mabo case in 1992, there would have been no Native Title Act under Prime Minister Keating in 1993.

    Without this old man the land and human rights of our people would never have seen the light of day.

    There would never have been Mabo and its importance to the history of Australia would have been lost without the Whitlam program.

    Only those who have known discrimination truly know its evil.

    Only those who have never experienced prejudice can discount the importance of the Racial Discrimination Act.

    This old man was one of those rare people who never suffered discrimination but understood the importance of protection from its malice.

    On this day we will recall the repossession of the Gurindji of Wave Hill, when the Prime Minister said, “Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof in Australian law that these lands belong to the Gurindji people and I put into your hands this piece of earth itself as a sign that we restore them to you and your children forever.”

    It was this old man’s initiative with the Woodward Royal Commission that led to Prime Minister Fraser’s enactment of the Aboriginal Land Rights Northern Territory Act, legislation that would see more than half of the territory restored to its traditional owners.

    Of course recalling the Whitlam Government’s legacy has been, for the past four decades since the dismissal, a fraught and partisan business.

    Assessments of those three highly charged years and their aftermath divide between the nostalgia and fierce pride of the faithful, and the equally vociferous opinion that the Whitlam years represented the nadir of national government in Australia. Let me venture a perspective.

    The Whitlam government is the textbook case of reform trumping management.

    In less than three years an astonishing reform agenda leapt off the policy platform and into legislation and the machinery and programs of government.

    The country would change forever. The modern cosmopolitan Australia finally emerged like a technicolour butterfly from its long dormant chrysalis.

    And 38 years later we are like John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin’s Jewish insurgents ranting against the despotic rule of Rome, defiantly demanding “and what did the Romans ever do for us anyway?”

    Apart from Medibank and the Trade Practices Act, cutting tariff protections and no-fault divorce in the Family Law Act, the Australia Council, the Federal Court, the Order of Australia, federal legal aid, the Racial Discrimination Act, needs-based schools funding, the recognition of China, the abolition of conscription, the law reform commission, student financial assistance, the Heritage Commission, non-discriminatory immigration rules, community health clinics, Aboriginal land rights, paid maternity leave for public servants, lowering the minimum voting age to 18 years and fair electoral boundaries and Senate representation for the territories.

    Apart from all of this, what did this Roman ever do for us?

    And the Prime Minister with that classical Roman mien, one who would have been as naturally garbed in a toga as a safari suit, stands imperiously with twinkling eyes and that slight self-mocking smile playing around his mouth, in turn infuriating his enemies and delighting his followers.

    There is no need for nostalgia and yearning for what might have been.

    The achievements of this old man are present in the institutions we today take for granted and played no small part in the progress of modern Australia.

    There is no need to regret three years was too short. Was any more time needed? The breadth and depth of the reforms secured in that short and tumultuous period were unprecedented, and will likely never again be repeated.

    The devil-may-care attitude to management as opposed to reform is unlikely to be seen again by governments whose priorities are to retain power rather than reform.

    The Whitlam program as laid out in the 1972 election platform consisted three objectives: to promote equality, to involve the people of Australia in the decision-making processes of our land, and to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people.

    This program is as fresh as it was when first conceived. It scarcely could be better articulated today.

    Who would not say the vitality of our democracy is a proper mission of government and should not be renewed and invigorated.

    Who can say that liberating the talents and uplifting the horizons of Australians is not a worthy charter for national leadership?

    It remains to mention the idea of promoting equality. My chances in this nation were a result of the Whitlam program. My grandparents and parents could never have imagined the doors that opened to me which were closed to them.

    I share this consciousness with millions of my fellow Australians whose experiences speak in some way or another to the great power of distributed opportunity.

    I don’t know why someone with this old man’s upper middle class background could carry such a burning conviction that the barriers of class and race of the Australia of his upbringing and maturation should be torn down and replaced with the unapologetic principle of equality.

    I can scarcely point to any white Australian political leader of his vintage and of generations following of whom it could be said without a shadow of doubt, he harboured not a bone of racial, ethnic or gender prejudice in his body.

    This was more than urbane liberalism disguising human equivocation and private failings; it was a modernity that was so before its time as to be utterly anachronistic.

    For people like me who had no chance if left to the means of our families we could not be more indebted to this old man’s foresight and moral vision for universal opportunity.

    Only those born bereft truly know the power of opportunity. Only those accustomed to its consolations can deprecate a public life dedicated to its furtherance and renewal. This old man never wanted opportunity himself but he possessed the keenest conviction in its importance.

    For it behoves the good society through its government to ensure everyone has chance and opportunity.

    This is where the policy convictions of Prime Minister Whitlam were so germane to the uplift of many millions of Australians.

    We salute this old man for his great love and dedication to his country and to the Australian people.

    When he breathed he truly was Australia’s greatest white elder and friend without peer of the original Australians.

    Noel Pearson is an Aboriginal Australian lawyer, land rights activist and founder of the Cape York Institute. This is the full text of the speech he gave at Gough Whitlam’s memorial