John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Who triggered the disaster in Iraq?

    George Bush and his neocons must bear the principal responsibility for the disaster which is continuing to unfold in Iraq. In Australian terms, the most guilty partners are without doubt the Howard Government and News Corporation.

    The Howard Government’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq in 2002 was loudly supported by Tony Abbott. He said the invasion ‘was to liberate other people, to advance everyone’s interest and to uphold universal values that the coalition of the willing went to war in Iraq. If it’s possible to engage in an altruistic war, this was it.’

    The consequences of the war for Iraq have been almost unimaginable. Hundreds and thousands of Iraqis have died and been driven out of their homes. Genocide and ethnic cleansing is now widespread.

    We spent over $2 b on the Iraq war which the head of the AFP said made us less safe.

    We knew little and cared little about the history of Iraq and its people. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but he kept the clash between Shia and Sunni under some control. Christians and other minorities were tolerated. Islamic extremists did not get a foothold in Iraq. After Saddam was deposed and killed, Al-Queda grew in strength, which has now morphed into the murderous IS.  It is as if the heavens have really fallen in. Christians, minorities and moderate Sunni are being murdered.

    It is time John Howard and Tony Abbott really confessed that they made a terrible mistake in joining the coalition of the willing. They relied on dodgy intelligence information that was manipulated to support a previously determined political decision to invade Iraq. Our intelligence agencies, particularly the Defence Intelligence Organisation, were highly sceptical about alleged biological and chemical weapons.

    The best service we could have given to our US allies was to warn them against the course that they had determined to pursue.

    And there was News Corporation raucously calling for support for the war and doubting the patriotism of the war’s critics. The campaign by News Corporation in support of the Iraq war was as unscrupulous and dishonest as its campaign now in support of sceptics on climate change.

    In 2003, Rupert Murdoch said ‘We can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam … I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly … The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy … would be $US20 a barrel for oil.’ The next year, Rupert Murdoch told ABC Radio ‘There is tremendous progress in Iraq. All the kids are back at school, 10% more than when Saddam Hussein was there. There is 100% more fresh water … Most of Iraq is doing extremely well.’

    The Australian in an editorial mocked the critics of the war whom it described as ‘the coalition of the whining’. Greg Sheridan, the Foreign Editor of the Australian described George Bush as ‘a really modern Winston Churchill’. Three months after the invasion of Iraq, Sheridan still thought ‘weapons of mass destruction doubts are ludicrous’.

    Tony Abbott is now telling us of the appalling humanitarian plight of so many in Iraq. Yet he with John Howard and Rupert Murdoch, must bear a heavy responsibility for what has transpired.

  • Jennifer Chesters. Private schools, fees and longer term payoffs.

    In a recent article published by TheConversation, Barbara Preston examined the link between type of school attended and progress at university. Barbara concluded that after controlling for tertiary entrance score, university students from government schools outperformed students from private schools. This finding suggests that paying for an expensive private school education may not be the best preparation for university study. If this is the case, perhaps parents paying private school fees are looking for longer term pay-offs for their investment.

    In this paper, I analyse data from the 12th wave of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) project to examine the longer term outcomes of attending private schools. For the analysis, I select one respondent aged between 25 and 34 years per household. The majority of young people have completed their education by the age of 25 years and are settled in their careers by the age of 34 years. The actual analyses that produced the findings discussed here is available (insert hyperlink to appendix here).

    Preliminary analysis shows that individuals who attended Catholic or independent schools were more likely to have completed Year 12 and to have graduated from university, after controlling for the effects of parents’ education, age and sex.

    But are there differences in labour market outcomes? Here the type of private school is important. Although those who attended a Catholic school were, on average, 1.3 times more likely to be employed on a full-time basis compared to those who attended a government school, former independent school students were no more likely to be employed on a full-time basis compared to those who attended a government school after controlling for the effects of level of education, sex and age.

    This result seems to suggest that paying private school fees is no guarantee of securing full-time employment. Given that women in this age cohort are in their prime child-bearing years, I also looked at the effect of interactions between sex and type of school attended; sex and age; and sex and level of education to determine whether there are differences between men and women. As expected, women were less likely than men to be employed on a full-time basis.

    Next, I examined the earnings of those employed on a full-time basis according to type of school attended controlling for the effects of sex, age and level of education. When it comes to weekly earnings, having attended a private school rather than a government school has no effect. So there would seem to be no return on the parents’ investment in terms of the earnings of their offspring.

    Perhaps parents were seeking to ensure that their offspring secured jobs with high levels of prestige in order to maintain their social status. After taking into account the effects of level of education, sex and age, having attended a Catholic school is associated with higher, on average, levels of occupational prestige than having attended a government school.  On average, attendance of an independent school is not associated with higher levels of occupational prestige.

    So why are parents choosing to send their children to independent schools?

    A closer examination of university graduates may shed some light on this paradox. Of the individuals who had completed a university-level qualification, those who had attended an independent school were more likely to have graduated from a Group of Eight (Go8) university compared to those who attended a government school. However, individuals who had attended a Catholic school were no more likely to have graduated from a Go8 university. Perhaps parents expect that graduation from an elite university would provide a pathway into a higher paying career.

    For university graduates employed on a full-time basis, graduation from a Go8 university had no effect on occupational prestige after taking into consideration the effects of sex, age and type of school attended. However, it is interesting to note that attendance of a Catholic school had a positive effect on occupational prestige. There was no pay off for graduation from a Go8 university in the form of increased earnings, nor did type of school attended have any effect, after controlling for the effects of age, sex and field of study.

     

    Summing up, these results call into question the wisdom of paying private school fees, particularly for independent schools. The massive growth in the number of private schools since the 1990s may be having the effect of diluting the advantages perceived to be attached to private schooling. If, as these results suggest, there is no long term advantage to be gained from paying to attend an independent school, why do parents stretch their family budgets to pay private school fees?

    Dr Jennifer Chesters is a Research Fellow at the University of Canberra. This article was first published in The Conversation on 13 August 2014. I also posted an article by Barbara Preston ‘State school kids do better at uni’ on August 13. This article was also first published in the The Conversation.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Saree Makdisi. The catastrophe inflicted on Gaza – and the costs to Israel’s standing.

    The Israeli public relations is almost as powerful as the Israeli military machine. An alternative view is expressed below by Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, and the author of ‘Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation’. This article was published in ‘Mondoweiss’ which describes itself as ‘a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective’.  John Menadue

    http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/catastrophe-inflicted-standing.html

  • John Menadue. Is there light at the end of the dark tunnel?

    In my blog of April 17 I outlined ways in which we might find a way out of the refugee quagmire. It is reposted below. 

    There is speculation that the government may announce an increase in the refugee intake to help the Christians and other minorities suffering dreadful persecution in Iraq and Syria. I hope this turns out to be the case and the beginning of a return to a more humane refugee policy.

    I could almost write Tony Abbott’s announcement. ‘Now that we have stopped the boats and put the people smugglers out of business, we can assist refugees in Iraq and Syria who are facing appalling persecution. By stopping the boats, we can increase our humanitarian intake in cooperation with UNHCR. This will be an orderly and regular program rather than allowing people smugglers to determine who comes to this country.’

    In my blog that I referred to, I suggested that the government should increase ‘regular arrivals from 13,750 to 20,000 per annum. This would be a useful start’.

    After the Howard Government’s pacific solution took effect, the refugee intake was increased from 7,642 in 2000-01, to 12,247 in 2006-07. In those same years, the settler/migrant intake was increased from 107,366 to 140,148.

    In that blog  of  April 17 I suggested  other actions that we could take which would be consistent with an ‘orderly’ refugee program – orderly departure arrangements with Afghanistan and Sri Lanka; alternate migration pathways and allowing asylum seekers on bridging visas in Australia to work.

    If Tony Abbott makes the announcement that I hope he will, it might be an opportunity to start rebuilding a bipartisan approach to refugee policy. 

    Even with the issue of boats off the political agenda, there are a lot of things that we can usefully do to protect the vulnerable and to restore our international reputation. John Menadue.

    Repost from April 17

    Is there a way we can turn this dross into gold, or if not gold, then a valuable metal? Is there a way through the present impasse that is both humane and practicable? I suggest there are some areas where we could have a broader discussion and decide what might be acceptable to the Coalition and the ALP. Surely some area of bipartisanship can be found. I suggest there are six areas which we should focus on.

    1. Action in the latter days of the Rudd Government followed by Operation Sovereign Borders has largely stopped boat arrivals. With so few ‘irregular’ arrivals, I suggest we should focus our attention on “regular arrivals” and increase the humanitarian program from 13,750 to 20,000 pa. This would be a useful start. It would demonstrate that the government is prepared to respond to asylum seekers and refugees in need provided they come through ‘regular channels’. (If today we took the same number of refugees that we took during the peak of the Indochina program and adjusted for population increase, our humanitarian/refugee intake would be about 35,000 p.a.)
      After the Howard Government’s Pacific Solution took effect, the refugee intake was increased from 7,642 in 2000/01 to 12,247 in 2006/07, the last year of the Howard Government. In those same years the settler/migrant intake was increased from 107,366 to 140,148.
      It is clear that having ‘stopped the boats’ as the Howard Government told us, they then considerably increased both the humanitarian and migrant intake. We should do the same again.
    2. Many Australians are concerned about the recent deaths and injuries on Manus and earlier on Nauru. It seems that asylum seekers where attacked by thugs within the Detention Centre on Manus. That is extraordinary and reflects on every Australian. A man has been killed in our name. We have a moral responsibility for any asylum seeker who comes to Australia and then is transferred to another country. To clarify the situation, I suggest that our moral responsibility should be strengthened by establishing a clear legal responsibility as well. We could do this by amending the Migration Act to ensure that there is ‘effective protection’ which is enforceable under Australian statute for any person that we transfer to another country. It would provide a discipline which is clearly lacking at the moment.‘Effective protection’ enforceable in Australian courts would need to be spelled out in the Migration Act to include such issues as non-refoulment, legal status when in another country, humane treatment consistent with the dignity and safety of the individual, and swift and efficient processing of claims. Surely the Coalition and the ALP could agree on ‘effective protection’ when asylum seekers are transferred to another country. The UNHCR should be asked to monitor ‘effective protection’.
    3. We need to address persecution and discrimination in source countries by negotiating Orderly Departure Arrangements with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Many asylum seekers coming to Australia come from these countries. We negotiated an ODA with Vietnam in 1983 whereby 100,000 Vietnamese came to Australia over many years instead of taking dangerous and irregular travel by land and sea. The Hazaras in Afghanistan and Pakistan desperately need our help through an ODA.
    4. We should consider other migration pathways that would reduce pressure on people to flee their countries. The largest number of asylum seekers coming by boat before the clamp down were Iranians.  I suggest that we should look at 457 visas or other migration pathways for young people from Iran. They would be great settlers.
    5. We need to address the issue of 30,000 asylum seekers in our detention centres and in the community whose refugee status has not yet been assessed. Immigration Detention Centres are very expensive and damaging to the individual. More asylum seekers should be carefully released into the community under bridging visas whilst their claims are being assessed. Most countries do this. In 2005 the Howard Government introduced the Community Care Pilot Scheme to assist asylum seekers in the community. Its focus was on case management. This pilot scheme became the Community Assistance Support (CAS) program and has worked well for asylum seekers in the community. Unfortunately a hostile political climate has made governments wary of developing the scheme. CAS should now be expanded.
      Further, as asylum seekers are released into the community, they should have the right to work. It is important both for their dignity as well as being in the interest of the Australian taxpayer. Surely the major political parties could agree on this. We have seen how country businesses like meatworks and fruit picking have welcomed asylum seekers.
    6. The only viable long term solution to desperate people taking risks in coming to Australia is through regional processing in transit countries and particularly in Indonesia with the cooperation of the UNHCR. We must bend our backs to do that. Julie Bishop would have an interest in this as it would help generate good will in our relations with Indonesia. We also need to build better relations with UNHCR.

    Surely we can find some bipartisan common ground in these six areas. Maybe we could find ways of turning dross into gold, or at least silver.

     

  • John Menadue. Who owns Medibank Private?

     The government has announced that it hopes to raise $4 billion from the sale of Medibank Private. But like many of its budget ‘savings’ it might find that it has to rely in this case  on the High Court rather than the Senate to decide if the $4 billion ‘saving’ can be realised.

    The case has been made by many people that the government is not the owner and certainly not the sole owner of Medibank Private. A view is strongly held that Medibank Private is owned by members/policy holders of Medibank Private. There are 3.8 million members. There is not much doubt that Medibank Private’s equity including accumulated reserves has come overwhelmingly from members’ contributions. At 30 June 2013 issued capital was $85m. Retained earnings were $1.3b. The market value of Medibank Private is estimated to be $4b by the government’s financial advisers.         .

    Medibank Private was first launched in 1976 with operations placed in the hands of the Health Insurance Commission (HIC).

    An examination of Medibank Private’s accounts by The New Daily (George Lekakis) reveals that before 1997

    • In 1988 the Chairman of Medibank Private, Fred Miller, wrote to Health Minister Neal Blewett that ‘Medibank Private is a non-profit organisation based solely on its contributors’ funds. The government has no financial interest in Medibank Private’s assets and reserves. Medibank Private’s assets and resources are the property of its contributors.’ This view by the Chairman was spelt out many times in statements and financial disclosures.
    • Members were officially recognised as ‘equity holders’ in the business from 1993 to 1996.
    • The balance sheets of Medibank Private before 1997 clearly show that the members owned the net assets of the company and not the government.

    The accounting treatment of Medibank Private was changed in 1997 by the Howard Government. This established government control and ownership of the fund.

    • In 1997 the term ‘members’ equity’ was removed from the balance sheet and replaced with a new concept of ‘fund equity’.
    • The Howard Government then directed the Health Insurance Commission to transfer equity of the fund to a new government-owned company known as Medibank Private.

    It would seem that the actions of the Howard Government and later the Rudd Government were designed to extinguish the rights of the members/contributors.

    The Australian Government can acquire the private assets of citizens under Section 51 of the Constitution but the acquisition must be on ‘just terms’. It is arguable that extinguishing completely the rights of contributors – the early ‘equity holders’ – can hardly be said to be on ‘just terms’.

    I must confess that I have a personal interest.  I have been a contributor/’equity-holder’ since 1976. I have contributed tens of thousands of dollars in premiums. Most of it has been a waste of money, but I suppose it gave me something called ‘peace of mind’ but not much more.

    Who owns Medibank Private? The High Court may be called upon to tell us.

     

    In my blog of March 26, 2014 ‘Privatising Medibank Private, who cares’ I argued the all health insurance, whether public or private is parasitical. Warren Buffett described PHI as the tapeworm that is destroying the US health system.

  • Peter Sivey. Health budget: GP care isn’t the problem, costly specialist care is.

    The opening of eight new medical schools in Australia in the past decade has seen a massive increase in the number of new doctors entering the workforce. The number of new junior doctors graduating in Australia doubled between 2004 and 2011. But while fears of an overall shortage of doctors seem assuaged, we don’t have the right mix of doctors.

    A recent trend is the increasing specialisation of the medical workforce. In 1999, 45% of Australian doctors were general practitioners (GPs) but this proportion had fallen to 38% by 2009. Similar trends can be observed in the United States and United Kingdom.

    This trend is concerning because primary care, provided by general practitioners, is the most efficient and equitable type of health care, particularly preventive care and the management of chronic disease. These components of GP-provided care have the potential to improve health outcomes, lower costs and reduce the need for future more costly interventions.

    In contrast, specialists tend to be reactive and expensive, seeing patients only when a health condition has taken a turn for the worse, when surgery, expensive pharmaceuticals, or other intensive treatments are required.

    Of course, a modern health-care system needs a high-quality specialist sector; specialists are the doctors patients rely on when they’re sickest. But workforce planners should strike the right balance between primary care and specialist physicians.

    So what is causing the growing imbalance towards specialism in medical career decision making?

    Our recent study asked junior doctors in Australia about their job preferences. We did this using a discrete-choice experiment, where respondents made hypothetical but realistic choices about their future career. By analysing their responses statistically, we could tell what factors drove their choices.

    Our results show a range of factors affect choice of speciality. Opportunity to practice procedural work and academic opportunities are some of the factors that drive junior doctors to specialise rather than choose general practice. But the elephant in the room is money.

    Specialists in Australia earn almost twice as much as GPs. Survey data shows average earnings in 2012 of $194,000 for GPs and $360,000 for specialists. Even when adjusted for the longer hours that they work, specialists’ hourly wages are still 60% higher than GPs.

    We found expected earnings have a large effect on choice of speciality. But lowering the income gap could redress the situation. Our modelling shows that increasing GPs’ earnings by A$50,000 per year (a 28% increase from 2008 levels) would increase the number of junior doctors choosing general practice by 11%, or 247 more trainee GPs per year.

    So, how can policymakers increase GPs earnings relative to specialists?

    The main policy tool available is Medicare. Medicare influences GPs’ earnings via rebates for the consultations they provide. Increasing Medicare rebates for GP services would therefore be a simple way of increasing their earnings. Of course, this is entirely the opposite of current government policies to introduce co-payments for bulk-billed consultations and reduce rebates.

    Innovative payment mechanisms may provide a more cost-effective way of increasing GPs’ relative earnings. Introducing additional funding sources using capitation (where doctors are paid for looking after enrolled patients for a whole year, not just per consultation) and pay-for-performance would allow earnings increases to be linked to higher quality of care, rather than just the number of consultations provided.

    Increased earnings for GPs needn’t blow a hole in the budget either. Offsetting savings could come from targeted reductions to Medicare rebates for specialist services, which would reduce the earning power of specialists, especially those working in private hospitals on privately-insured patients.

    In 2012/13, the government spent $3.9bn subsidising private specialist consultations. A proportion of these Medicare subsidies could be redirected to GP consultations.

    Together, these measures could reduce the relative earnings advantages of specialists over GPs, encouraging more junior doctors into general practice.

    Peter Sivey is Senior Lecturer, School of Economics at La Trobe University. This article was first published in The Conversation on 7 August 2014.

     

  • John Menadue. Missing in action when Kerry and Hagel come calling?

    I can understand Tony Abbott’s wish to direct attention away from the budget by going off to The Hague and London. But are Australia’s national and policy interests being served by his absence when John Kerry and Chuck Hegel visit us.

    In my blog of July 31 ‘Overplaying one’s hand’ I quoted Tony Abbott’s comments on MH370 in PNG. He said ‘Satellite footage shows what could be debris from the missing airline’s flight MH370’. But he was wrong.

    In Shanghai about two weeks later Tony Abbott said ‘We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorders to within some kilometres … we are very confident the signals we are detecting are from the black boxes on MH370’. On the same day Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who was in charge of the search, said ‘On the information that I have available … there has been no major breakthrough in the search for MH370’. What Angus Houston told us still stands. Apparently we are now to contract out the search for MH370 to a foreign company.

    Then Tony Abbott adopted what Paul McGeough in the SMH called ‘megaphone diplomacy’ on MH17. It has now become clear that it was the Malaysian Prime Minister who quietly contacted the rebels in Donetsk and secured the release of the refrigerated train with 200 bodies or more on board. The Malaysian Prime Minister also secured from the rebels the two black boxes of MH17. The role of the Malaysian Prime Minister clearly doesn’t suit Tony Abbott’s agenda. I have yet to hear him make any mention or thank the Malaysian Government for its role in what really mattered after the crash of MH17. Help from the Dutch and others has been helpful, but their contribution did not compare with what the Malaysian Prime Minister achieved. So Tony Abbott went to The Hague to thank the Dutch but there is still no sign of him dropping in to Kuala Lumpur to thank the Malaysian Government. Operation bring them home has become more like wait and see.

    Now Tony Abbott is on a side trip to London at the same time that the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and the Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel, are in Australia. This is quite remarkable. After President Obama, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are without doubt the two most important foreign visitors that could come to our shores at this time. But Tony Abbott was not here to discuss with them what more we might be doing in Iraq and Syria. Just imagine what News Corporation and other media might be saying if Prime Ministers Gillard and Rudd were absent at a time like this.

    Our national interest would be much better served with less grandstanding and less megaphone diplomacy.

     

  • Barbara Preston. State school kids do better at uni.

    State school graduates do better at university than private school graduates with the same end-of-school tertiary entrance score. That’s the clear finding in a number of Australian studies since the 1980s  and in England since the 1990s .

    The Australian research compared academic results at the end of first year at particular universities for cohorts whose entry was based on tertiary entrance scores (now ATAR) for the previous year in the same state. The most recent English research tracked all students who completed the end-of-school A-levels and went directly on to complete a full-time four-year degree course.

    The differences between graduates of state and private schools were substantial (though less pronounced among those who did very well at university). The Australian research found that, on average, graduates of state schools received the same marks at the end of first-year university as graduates of private schools who had tertiary entrance scores around three to six points higher.

    The English research found that at each A-level standard, on average around 7 percentage points more graduates of state schools than graduates of private schools received first or second-class, first division (upper second) honours.

    English results for graduates of independent schools and all categories of state schools, showing percentages that received an upper second or better degree by A-level achievement at the end of school.

    Research in both Australia and England also found that with the same tertiary entrance scores:

    • graduates of co-educational schools tend to do better than graduates of single-sex schools
    • graduates of lower-fee private schools (in Australia, Catholic schools) tend to do better than graduates of higher-fee private schools (in Australia, independent schools)
    • graduates of schools with lower average tertiary entrance scores tend to do better than graduates of schools with higher average tertiary entrance scores
    • graduates of (English) state comprehensive schools do better (to a small extent) than graduates of state selective schools.

    The general finding is that graduates of non-elite and co-educational schools do better at university than graduates of socially and academically elite and single-sex schools who achieved the same tertiary entrance score.

    Independent private schools have similar shares of enrolments in the final school year in Australia and the UK, but the state sector has a smaller share in Australia due to the large private Catholic sector (which at the secondary level has a socio-economic profile closer to the independent sector according to ABS Census data)

    So what can explain this difference?

    There are no definitive explanations for these findings, though there is some attempt in the literature, some indicative data, and much informed speculation. And there is, of course, great variation among individual students – and among schools, universities and university courses.

    Explanations tend to focus on aspects of secondary schooling and on students’ effort levels at university (associated with their cultures and aspirations), and any may be involved in particular cases:

    • Preparation for the end-of-school assessments in private schools, relative to state schools, boosts tertiary entrance results above “underlying ability”, and graduates regress to “underlying ability” level at university.
    • Preparation for life and learning beyond school in private schools (and single-sex schools) relative to state schools (and co-educational schools) is poor, resulting in university performance below “underlying ability”.
    • Graduates of private schools make less effort at university because of perceived long-term advantages of their secondary schooling and other socio-cultural reasons.

    It appears a reasonable assumption that tertiary entrance scores are boosted by a better quality of education at high fee private schools. Fee-based resources several times greater than those of state schools can fund smaller classes and other ways to enhance learning. In addition, selection and exclusion practices can ensure an academic atmosphere not disturbed by disruptive, difficult-to-teach students, or even students without high academic aspirations.

    However, there appears to be contrary evidence: state school students tend to do better in NAPLAN tests than private school students at schools of similar socio-economic status (especially at higher socio-economic levels), according to data on the My School website analysed by researchers Bernie Shepherd and Chris Bonnor for a forthcoming publication.

    Thus other explanations are likely. One involves a narrow focus on tertiary entrance results at many elite schools. Tertiary entrance results are a central aspect of the status and marketing of high-fee private schools – supported by high-visibility league tables and human interest stories in the media. High pressure, close supervision and narrowly defined learning leave little room for independent, self-motivated learning, and developing the personal and social skills required for success at university.

    Single-sex school cultures and practices may not prepare students well for university life. This is hinted at in the literature, but was “obvious” for a recent university graduate I spoke to who attended both single-sex and co-educational secondary schools and said many single-sex school graduates “do not learn to socialise at school, and when they get to uni they just party”.

    Other possible explanations relate to cultural class assumptions around success and entitlement. Some private school graduates may have an explicit belief (whether reasonable or not) that just having attended such an elite school will lead to employment advantages after university. Thus the incentive to work hard at university is diminished.

    Some may have a less conscious belief that they have innate superior intelligence that will get them though university without much additional effort. This sense is not properly tested in the “hothouse” atmosphere of closely supervised elite schooling, but is found wanting in the more open society of university.

    There may also be a lack of motivation for university among those from elite private schools where university is the norm. Those from state schools, where many different destinations are common, make a more deliberate choice for university.

    What are the implications?

    The government has set its sights on a highly differentiated fee and scholarship regime for higher education. Graduates of many universities are likely to have debts of over $100,000 for popular and socially important courses such as science, and debts of over $250,000 for longer courses such as veterinary science.

    Universities with high-demand courses and high fees will need fairer criteria for access to all courses and for the awarding of all scholarships based on entry-level academic merit. This is not just a matter of justice for individuals, but also for our future as a well-educated, productive and fair society.

    English education commentator Nick Morrison suggested that the disparity between state and private school graduates’ success at university ‘should provoke fee-paying schools to question whether they are doing all they can to equip students for university’.

    The Australian Financial Review recently urged people to “do the sums on the true cost of private schools”. It’s apparent that high private school fees may not be buying effective education. In the context of university debts upwards of $100,000, families should “do the sums” on comparable expenditure on schooling.

    Barbara Preston is an independent researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Canberra.

    This article was originally published in The Conversation on 17 July 2014 https://theconversation.com/state-school-kids-do-better-at-uni-29155. Full references are available in the original article.

     

  • David Zyngier. Senate committee backs Gonski.

    Gonski’s report on school funding has been backed by a senate committee even though the federal government isn’t backing it.

    (more…)

  • John Menadue. Will the new Colombo Plan work?

    Julie Bishop has announced a ‘signature initiative’ of the Australian government which aims to lift knowledge of the Indo-Pacific in Australia by supporting Australian undergraduates with internships in the region.

    This initiative is commendable but I hope it avoids the problem of earlier attempts to lift Australian understanding and skills for our region. The main problem before was that young Australians who committed themselves to skills about our region couldn’t get jobs in Australia. So they drifted away. Will we make the same mistake again?

    Let me give some background.

    The early Colombo Plan which was introduced by the Menzies Government in the 1950s brought thousands of young people from our region to study in Australia. At Adelaide University where I was educated there were hundreds of such Colombo Plan students. This earlier Colombo Plan built up not only the skills of these young people but it broadened and developed relationships between Australia and regional countries. Today there would be hundreds and perhaps thousands of former Colombo Plan students who now occupy senior government and diplomatic positions in the region.

    Now the government is proposing the reverse – providing scholarships for study by Australians for up to one year in the region with internships and mentoring backup. It is designed to deepen Australia’s relationship with the region, both at the individual level and through expanded links between universities and business. The Abbott Government has committed $100 million over five years for the new Colombo Plan.

    In the 1970s and 1980s there was a major upsurge in Asian language training in Australia. It followed the quite dramatic increase in trade in our region, particularly with Japan and later with Korea. But this upsurge in foreign language learning in Australia did not last. Our schools, colleges and universities gradually lost interest in equipping Australians with skills for the region. Our education system didn’t have resources or a long-term view to really embed Asian language training in our educational system.

    But it wasn’t just the fault of our education system. It turned out to be very difficult for Australian graduates with language skills to get employment with Australian companies. I spoke to hundreds of young graduates either individually or in groups over many years about the problem. I felt a bit responsible, along with Steve FitzGerald and others for encouraging young people to acquire Asian language skills. But it turned out to be a dead end as far as employment was concerned. These young graduates invariably told me that they had put five or more years into acquiring regional cultural or language skills but couldn’t find employers who were interested. Some obtained employment with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Austrade, but many drifted overseas to work with foreign companies in, for example, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo.

    Some of these young graduates may have had unreasonable expectations that a language skill would inevitably lead to employment. But I have no doubt that the lack of interest by corporate employers was a major problem.

    The lack of interest then by Australian companies continues today as far as I can tell. I have yet to learn of a single CEO or Director of our top 100 companies who can fluently speak any of our regional languages. They just don’t get it. The culture of most of their organisations is very parochial.

    It is also the experience that young Australian business people sent overseas to work in the region often resign on return to Australia because of an unsympathetic and sometimes hostile attitude to people who have worked in the region. I set this out in a blog of August 26 last year ‘Returning home can be the hard part’.

    At Qantas in the late 1980s we recruited a number of people with Asian skills. Some were given internships. But it didn’t last and within a few years most of them had left Qantas or worked in areas of Qantas where their Asian skills were not relevant. We recruited cabin crew with Japanese language skills, but it was a major problem overcoming the seniority rules for cabin crew which reserved the best routes, including the Sydney-Tokyo route for more senior cabin crew who didn’t have language skills.

    Because of the failure of previous attempts to educate young people for our region the government has now adopted a new approach in the new Colombo Plan. The government has come to the understandable view that galvanising our education system to respond to our region is very hard and that it might make more sense to send young Australians into the region to live and learn in that environment.

    My experience tells me that the experience of these young Australians in the region will be quite dramatic. It will be life-changing for many of them. But a key to the success will be the reception they get when they return to Australia. Will the business community respond in a better way than it did twenty years ago when it failed to employ so many young Australians who had acquired Asian skills in our universities?

    I hope we don’t make the same mistakes again because the new Colombo Plan is a very commendable initiative.

  • John Menadue. Diplomatic lessons for Canberra.

    In my blog of July 31 ‘Overplaying one’s hand’ I said that there were clear lessons to be learned from the disasters of MH370 and MH17. The lessons are – don’t overplay your hand or overstate your case for domestic political reasons.

    Today in the SMH, Paul McGeough, see link below, refers to the failure of megaphone diplomacy over the loss of MH17. He says ‘While Abbott and Bishop opted for megaphone diplomacy against the rebels’ sponsors in Moscow, Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, quietly made phone calls to the rebel leadership in Donetsk, in which he achieved essential outcomes – the release of the refrigerated train on which the rebels had stored the 200 or more bodies and the handling over to Malaysian officials of the Boeing 777’s black boxes, which are essential for crash investigators.’

    Now Tony Abbott is off to the Netherlands to thank the Dutch Prime Minister and  the AFP and other officials. But surely the priority call should be in Kuala Lumpur. It was the Malaysian Prime Minister who helped most of all on what really mattered. Why won’t Tony Abbott accept that? Perhaps he could make amends by dropping in to KL on his way home.

    In the same paper on the same day Peter Hartcher said that Abbott’s conduct over MH17 ‘has been impeccable’.Where has he been!

     http://www.smh.com.au/world/mh17-search-in-ukraine-turns-into-mission-impossible-20140808-101wxf.html

  • John Menadue. . Come by air – no problem!

    Many newspapers this morning are full of stories about fraud and bureaucratic negligence over air arrivals. The integrity of the visa system is being called into question.

    One June 20, last year, I posted an article ‘Come by air – no problem!’ It is reposted below. This blog highlighted the widespread preoccupation with boat arrivals.

    Other major issues have been overlooked,including the 50,000 plus in our community, who having overstayed their visa have ‘disappeared’

     

    Repost: Come by air – no problem!

    There is an easy way to solve the boat people “problem”. It is simply to get as many asylum seekers as possible to come by air. It would be a win/win for everyone. There are many reasons for proposing this.

    • The politicians and the media show no interest whatsoever in the asylum seekers who come by air. (In the last 10 years, over 78% of asylum seekers have come by air, although in the last two to three years, the proportions have changed in favour of boat arrivals.) But the fact remains, we are not concerned at all about air arrivals.
    •  This would solve the political problem We could also ignore the media misinformation
    • We don’t put many air arrivals into detention as we do boat people. So this could potentially save us up to $2 billion in detention costs.
    • Asylum seekers who come by air live freely in the community, and  are allowed to work. Boat people are not. So allowing more air arrivals to work saves the taxpayer and there is no need for asylum seekers to break the law and work in the grey economy.

    There are also good business opportunities here  for Qantas and other airlines. They need to set up joint ventures or appoint good agents to help as many asylum seekers to get visas to enter Australia  by air with Qantas or others. How can this be done?

    • Most asylum seekers who come by air promise that they are coming to Australia as a visitor, student or working holiday maker. Having got into Australia they then apply for refugee status and live happily in the community until their status is resolved.
    • So entrepreneurial agents can perform a personal and national service in helping asylum seekers come by air. We know there are some very efficient “agents” in southern China. China always tops the list for the number of asylum seekers who come by air. What a boon for both airlines and agents!
    • Clive Palmer has proposed that asylum seekers should fly to Australia. He said recently ‘All that needs to happen is that the government needs to stop telling airlines and other people not to give [asylum seekers] safe transport. If they come down here by air and if they are refugees that’s one thing. If they haven’t got a legitimate claim they can go right back on the plane the next day.’

    Clive Palmer clearly sees it as a win/win for everyone. As would other people.

    • Tony Abbott would surely applaud as it is an even better solution than his Pacific Solution to control our borders.  People smugglers would be put out of business
    • The media would obviously think it was good policy because it has shown very clearly that it is only concerned about boat people. Air arrivals are quite un-newsworthy.
    • Taxpayer money would be saved and airlines could make more money.

    But to disappoint Tony Abbott and the media, I must admit that some of the above is nonsense. You probably detected my tongue in cheek a few paragraphs ago!

    • Agents would need to encourage visa applicants to make false declarations about the reason for them coming to Australia.
    • It would be unfair to persons who genuinely faced persecution and who would have no way of getting a visa.
    • Asylum seekers who come by air, although many are quite deserving, have a success rate in refugee determination of just over 40%. For boat arrivals it is over 90%.

    Put simply, our preoccupation with boat people is a dishonest and misleading ploy. It is done deliberately to incite fear. For some reason boat people are a special threat. And Tony Abbott and the media play it for all it is worth. As reported by the SMH on 10 December 2010 “a key Liberal Party strategist told the US Embassy in 2009 that the more boats that come the better”

    The important issue is the total number of asylum seekers who come to Australia and not their mode of arrival. As an island continent we should not be surprised that really desperate people try to come by sea without a visa.

    The Coalition and the media have performed dishonestly over boat people. Following in John Howard’s footsteps, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison are deliberately inciting fear about boat people, yet show no interest at all in air arrivals. Where is the consistency in this?  For the media it is partly political partisanship, as with The Australian, but for most others it is laziness.  Pictures of unkempt bearded men on boats are so much more newsworthy. It is much harder to get pictures and stories of asylum seekers dressed in suits who come by air every day and all day through our airports. And no group exhibits more laziness  on this issue than the ABC, particularly its Canberra correspondents.

    Why do we continue to beat ourselves up only about asylum seekers who come by boat but ignore those who come by air and treat the latter much more generously particularly as the have a much lower success rate in refugee determination?

    John Menadue

     

     

     

     

  • Kerry Murphy. The persecutions.

    In March 2001, the Taliban dynamited the ancient Buddha statues of Bamian because the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, claimed they were ‘idolatrous’ and idolatry is banned in Islam.  In July 2014, ISIL destroyed the ancient tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul for the same reason.[1]  This site was considered a sacred site for Jews, Christians and Muslims for centuries.  Tragically it is not just ancient cultural monuments that are being destroyed by ISIL.  Other accounts refer to smashing of statues in churches and the looting of churches.  What is especially worrying and amazing is their willingness to publicise their war crimes and not merely claim them for themselves, but boast about it.

    There have been Christian communities in the Nineveh plain of northern Iraq for possibly 1700-1800 years.  Some of the Christian communities in Syria and northern Iraq can trace their origins to the early spread of Christianity throughout the Middle East and then Roman Empire.  For nearly two millennia they have survived but ISIL is possibly the most dramatic threat they have faced.[2]

    Initially Christians in Mosul hoped they might be spared the sectarian attacks on Shia by ISIL.  Then on July 14, they noticed the Arabic letter ‘nuun’ ( ن ) for Nasriya (Christian) was daubed outside their properties.  Then ISIL gave the estimated 35,000 Christians an ultimatum to 19 July – convert, pay the jizya tax, or be killed.

    The jizya is a tax levied on non-Muslims in Sharia law.  In ISIL’s case, the jizya was clearly protection money mafia style, and its onerous level was beyond the capacity of many.  This left the Christians with no real option but to flee their homes and abandon their goods.  Some claim they were robbed by militants as they fled, an added indignity.

    ISIL also daubed the Arabic R ( ر ) for rafidah or ‘rejectors’ on the homes of Shia and minorities such as Shabaks and Yazdis and Turkman Shia.  This is a Sunni term used to denigrate those who do not follow their particular religious interpretation.

    More reports are coming out of stoning for adultery, beheading of Shia prisoners (often from the Iraqi or Syrian militaries) and even the execution of the Sunni imams in the main mosque in Mosul, who were seen to be not teaching ‘correct Islam’ and so had to be killed.  One ISIL posting bragged about the execution of ‘rafideh’ for Eid – with horrific pictures of the terrified men in trucks, then kneeling before open pits to be executed.[3]

    It was these type of extremist actions that alienated the Sunni tribes from Al Qaeda in 2007 and lead to the ‘Awakening’ movement whereby Sunni tribal leaders supported the US against Al Qaeda.  It is a disaster for Iraqis that the Iraqi Prime Minister al Maliki has become so sectarian in his policies and actions that the Sunnis feel they are better protected by supporting the Salafist extremists in ISIL than their own Government.  Some Sunnis see Maliki as an ‘Iranian’ and others refer to the ‘good old days under Saddam’.

    The willingness of ISIL to publicise their war crimes – beheading prisoners, shooting prisoners kneeling before ditches and smashing religious icons and statues – is extremely worrying.  They obviously are not afraid of facing war crimes trials for their actions and probably they assumed they are immune from such prosecution may well be sadly right.

    Sadly for the Christians and other minorities of Iraq and Syria, they will not be able to return to their homes for some time, if at all.  The fact that many Palestinians still have their house keys from their homes in Israel which they fled in what they call the ‘Naqba’(catastrophe) of 1948 gives no hope to yet another group of refugees from the Middle East.

    Iraqis tell me that this focus on religion and sect is new in Iraq.  Baghdadi Christians and Muslims would celebrate each other’s religious holidays and exchange greetings and presents for Christmas and Eid.  Intermarriage between Sunni and Shia families was not uncommon, especially in Baghdad.  Now the situation has changed dramatically and sectarianism dominates.  Militias are forcing out such Sunni/Shia couples from their homes, others are being forced to separate just because their spouse is a different sect.[4]

    The labelling of communities with letters designating their status will immediately create fears in our post holocaust world.  We have seen this before.  In an inversion of this, Iraqis in Baghdad and Irbil protested in the streets holding up signs saying things like ‘I am Iraqi and I am a Nasriyan’ or others said ‘We are all Nasriyans’.  There were also protests in London and Paris with people wearing T-Shirts with just the Arabic letter on them, just as it has been seen in the graffiti daubed on homes in Mosul. On Lebanese TV a well-known TV personality wore a T-Shirt with the letter ‘nuun’ ( ن ) and said ‘We are all Nuun’. Others are putting the symbol and letter on Facebook in solidarity with the persecuted. [5]

    Hopefully such intercommunal and intercultural/religious stands will become possible again in Iraq and Syria, though I fear it will take a long time before there is much progress and the extremists are isolated and disempowered.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who practices in immigration and refugee law.

  • ‘The real danger to Israel comes from within’ interview with Eva Illouz and De Spiegal.

    This interview in De Spiegal is of interest and merit on the Gaza crisis. See link below.  John Menadue.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-sociologist-eva-illouz-about-gaza-and-israeli-society-a-984536.html

  • Lisa Petheram. Listening to young people’s voices on Refugee and Asylum Seeker Policy

    “They are playing with our lives…every year I get older
    …I want to start a family but I can’t    ”.

    What are young people in Australia thinking about refugee and asylum seeker policy?
    Two youth roundtables recently held by Australia21 have given some insight into the ways that young Australians think about these issues, and their visions for the future. The youth roundtables were held as part of a broader project Australia21 has been undertaking in collaboration with other groups – Asylum Seeker Policy: A fair, just and effective approach. As part of this project, a collection of short essays and a discussion paper on the options have been compiled. Also, on the 11th of July, Australia21 co-hosted an expert roundtable on this topic at Parliament House, with the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Law (UNSW) and the Centre for Policy Development.

    The first youth roundtable was held in Canberra with support from the Crawford School at ANU, with 38 young people aged 18-30 from the public. The second youth roundtable was held with Settlement Services International (SSI) in Sydney with 35 young people of the same age group, specifically of refugee and asylum seeker background. In both workshops a rich picture diagramming approach was used—to understand participants preferred futures around refugee and asylum seeker policy. Discussions from both roundtables were remarkably wide- ranging and insightful and had much overlap in content and opinion, despite participants being from very different experiential and cultural backgrounds. Conversations reflected a strong desire for change in policy and practice in Australia, and a sense of disillusionment and disappointment about public perceptions and treatment of refugee and asylum seekers.

    At the Sydney roundtable, the overarching message was that the refugee journey is long and difficult. “I thought when I got to Australia the hard part was over, but now I have to start again from nothing. It is hard in a different way. I can’t seem to get a start anywhere and it is hard to have hope until I can.” After arriving in the settlement country most people need a range of personally targeted supports to settle successfully, particularly in communities where refugee status carries stigma. Some of the current policy settings seem designed to frustrate that journey rather than support it, and to waste human potential. People appeared to be resilient and energetic but sorely tried.

    Participants commonly expressed strong frustration at the inhumane ways refugee and asylum seekers are treated through restrictive policies, as well as the way they are often stigmatized in the media and by the general public. “We are not animals, we are human”. There was a strong yearning to be treated and to live like others. It was suggested there needs to be strong, empathetic leadership and programs to address stigma and encourage community engagement. “I want to live in an Australia where the Prime Minister has been a detainee and knows what it’s like”. Another participant used a picture of birds being fed, to communicate her hope that if Tony Abbott fed the birds he may develop empathy. One said he would say to the Government “Please make decisions like you are deciding about someone from your own family

    There was much disappointment about new policies that create more uncertainty and fear.  Many were frustrated by being unable to plan or make any goals and being in “limbo land”, especially around study, work and family. “I don’t have anything good to tell myself in in the mirror in the morning. I want to build my life in Australia, but I can’t…How can I ever ask anyone for their daughter’s hand in marriage?”. In particular the inability to work while being processed is excruciating for many of the participants. They talked of having much passion, experience and qualifications and wanting to contribute in Australia by working, but losing resilience and hope. There was also frustration by those that were allowed to work, where time and energy put into gaining qualifications and experience were not recognized “I want to share my skills with Australia”

    At the Canberra roundtable sadness and anger was expressed about the treatment of refugee and asylum seekers. There was much concern particularly around mental health of people in detention and in communities. It was emphasised that policy makers and public should be strongly encouraged to reframe their current ways of thinking about refugee and asylum seekers, and be more open, sincere and unprejudiced in their discourse on the topic. Calls were also made for ‘grown up’ and progressive leadership, and for Australia as a nation to be more cognizant of equality under the law, and our moral and international obligations.

    It was argued that refugee and asylum seekers are often dehumanised in these debates; they are generally not seen by the general public and policy makers as ‘real people’, but as statistics, or criminals who should be behind bars. It was suggested that greater attention needs to be placed on more appropriate and creative solutions to domestic processing, especially in terms of the location and speed of processing. In an ideal future, Christmas Island and Nauru would be closed, and the money saved could be directed towards supporting communities to be involved in the processing and resettlement of refugee and asylum seekers. There were also strong calls for policy modification to ensure that people can have opportunities to contribute more fully to society (e.g. allowing people working rights while being processed).

    Young people have been engaged by Australia21 as part of this project as it is believed they can offer fresh thinking and innovative solutions that are valuable contributions to the policy making process. The outcome from the youth roundtables was reported on at the expert roundtable by a youth representative and will also be incorporated into a full report that will be released later in 2014.

    For more information about Australia21’s project on refugee and asylum seekers and youth engagement, please see www.australia21.org.au

  • Mike Steketee. Mandatory detention punishes but it does not deter.

    “It has not been easy for organised world opinion in the United Nations or elsewhere to act directly in respect of some of the dreadful events which have driven so many people from their own homes and their own fatherland but at least we can in the most practical fashion show our sympathy for those less fortunate than ourselves who have been the innocent victims of conflicts and upheavals of which in our own land we have been happy enough to know nothing” – Robert Menzies, Prime Minister, broadcast for the opening of World Refugee Year, September, 1959.

    Even some of the strongest supporters of the Liberal party and its policy of turning back the boats   cannot feel comfortable about many of the actions being taken in the name of securing our sovereign borders.

    They do not fit easily with the small “l” liberal philosophy that was an important part of the big “l” Liberal party that Menzies founded – beliefs that have been muted but not eradicated under successive conservative Liberal prime ministers in John Howard and Tony Abbott.

    In waging war against people smugglers, we are punishing their clients, who have turned to us for help – help that we have offered through our membership of the Refugee Convention. The armoury directed at deterring asylum seekers from coming by boat, implemented by Labor and Liberal governments, is astonishing in its extent and ferocity.

    Most of it achieves nothing other than degrading and in some cases ultimately destroying people’s lives. It is all the more pointless now that the one deterrent that has been effective – turning around the boats – has been implemented. As explored further later, a group of Australian experts on refugee policy believe there is a better way, even working within the present political constraints.

    We should do all we can to discourage people from taking dangerous sea journeys but we should also ensure there are alternatives for genuine refugees. The gold standard was achieved under the Fraser government.

    Deaths at sea have always been a feature of refugee flows. A document prepared for the Australian Cabinet in 1979 estimated that between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of those fleeing in the wake of the Vietnam War drowned.

    Then, as now, people driven by sheer desperation continued to get on boats. Then, as now, government action stopped the boats. Then, unlike now, people were given an alternative: Australia joined the US, China and Canada to reach an agreement under which each country took substantial numbers of Vietnamese and Vietnam agreed to stop pushing people out of the country. Australian officials, together with those from other countries, processed people in camps in Malaysia and other South-east Asian countries and flew the successful applicants to Australia.

    Without the same sense of crisis and with refugees fleeing from many different countries, it has been impossible to replicate such an arrangement. Instead, successive Australian governments have chosen other options, all  specifically rejected by the Fraser cabinet, like turning back boats – which then Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock told Cabinet, prophetically as it turned out, “would be courting international pariah status” – offshore processing, Australian detention centres and temporary protection visas.

    Turning back boats is the one policy that has unambiguously achieved its objective of stemming the flow of boat people. But it comes with costs. For some, the danger at sea has been replaced by the risk of forced return to the country from which they fled – like the 41 asylum seekers Australia sent back to Sri Lanka, a country which, assurances of a peaceful nation to the contrary, continues to persecute Tamils, including through torture and sexual violence, according to the US State Department, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Amnesty International, among others. There is the farcical saga of the 157 asylum seekers kept on a floating Australian prison on the high seas to ensure there is no blemish on Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s record of stopping the boats. There is the damage to the relationship with Indonesia, including the likely long-term consequences for co-operation on refugee issues.

    Stopping the boats may solve a political problem in Australia but it does so by dumping the issue into other country’s laps. People smugglers will look for other countries to which to send their clients. Genuine refugees who are deterred from fleeing by Australia’s tough policy run the risk of persecution and worse.

    The other policies of deterrence in Australia have not worked. The two big flows of boat people – between 1999 and 2001 and between 2009 and 2012 – occurred after the introduction of mandatory detention as a blanket policy in 1994.

    Not only has it failed to stop asylum seekers coming by boat but it has inflicted untold damage on their lives. The evidence is consistent and unambiguous, most recently from the Human Rights Commission’s visit to Christmas Island – that people left in limbo, with no guarantee of an end point,   despair over their future and can bear the mental health scars for the rest of their lives. The effects on children, 983 who remained in detention centres at the end of May, are particularly rapid and severe.

    At least most of the people who made it to Australia by boat before the gates slammed shut are now either living in the community on bridging visas or in community detention. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison wants to implement a form of temporary protection visas for those found to be refugees.  With no commitment that the visas will be renewed or that they will not be sent back, it is another form of enforced limbo, leading to the same spiral of despair and mental illness. Most of them have been denied the right to work, creating yet another source of despair. Jane McAdam, professor in international refugee law at the University of NSW, describes it to The Drum as “creating a broken future citizenry”.

    Legislation introduced last month by Immigration Minister Scott Morrison sets up yet more hurdles for asylum seekers. One measure lifts the threshold for people at risk of torture applying for so called complementary protection (an alternative to refugee status) to 50 per cent. “In reality it means that if even an asylum seeker has a 49 per cent chance of being tortured, Australia will still send them home,” says McAdam.

    She was one of 35 experts from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, together with federal MPs who met a fortnight ago to look at future policy. The details of their discussions are confidential until a report is released later this year but a discussion paper http://cpd.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Final-Policy-Paper-Beyond-Operation-Sovereign-Borders-03.06.14.pdf that was fed into the process points to a better way forward.

    It suggests detention should be kept to an absolute minimum, given the harm it causes. Asylum seekers should be given firm timelines for processing their claims, even though it might take three years to make decisions, given the large numbers involved. In the meantime, they should have work rights and health and welfare safety nets. If those found to be refugees are granted only temporary protection initially, there should be a defined process leading to permanent residence. Those not found to be refugees should receive reintegration help when returned to their countries.

    Because of the harsh condition in Nauru and ManusIsland, claims there should be processed within a year. As well, asylum seekers should be allowed some freedom of movement outside the detention centres. Better co-operation with other countries in the region should include more funding to help other governments support asylum seekers.

    These and other proposals would be steps towards restoring our standing as a nation to which many Australians, including Liberals, aspire – one that was among the first under the Menzies government to adopt the Refugee Convention and that Menzies described in the same broadcast in 1959: “It is a good thing that Australia should have earned a reputation for a sensitive understanding of the problems of people in other lands; that we should not come to be regarded as people who are detached from the miseries of the world.”

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Suffer the little children to come unto me…

    Well, not so if they are Palestinian children or asylum seeker children in our detention centres.

    At last counting there were 1,230 Palestinians killed in Gaza as a result of 3,000 or more air and artillery strikes. 56 Israelis have died. Close to 1,000 of those Palestinians killed were civilians, including children. Only three Israeli civilians died. Just imagine the outcry of the Israeli lobby if those figures were reversed and 1000 Israelis had been killed… Clearly the Israel lobby and many others don’t regard Palestinian civilians and children of equal value to their own.

    In her article ‘Grief grips Gaza’ in the SMH on August 2, Ruth Pollard tells the searing story of the carnage in Gaza. For link to story, see below.

    http://www.smh.com.au/world/grief-grips-gaza-20140801-3czlw.html

    The Israelis and their apologists around the world, including President Obama and Prime Minister Abbott, say that Israel has a right to defend itself. That is true, but it is only a very small part of the truth. They refuse to honestly admit that the core of the problem in Palestine is that land was stolen by Israel from the Palestinians in 1967. There will be no peace without justice. There will be no justice until Israel withdraws from the land it has stolen from the Palestinian people.

    But whilst this political impasse continues with the support of the Israeli lobby, the people of Palestine are suffering an appalling fate.

    Closer to home we have also had a searing account of the treatment of children in our detention centres. The Human Rights President, Professor Gillian Triggs has told us of the misery and trauma of children in our detention centres. She has been vividly supported by Elizabeth Elliott who is Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health, University of Sydney and Consultant Paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney. She accompanied Professor Triggs to Christmas Island. Professor Elliott has described the mental and physical symptoms of disease of children in detention where they are beyond health and hope. She has spoken of escalating rates of mental ill health. The distress was expressed as overwhelming sadness and hopelessness and manifest most dramatically by the high prevalence of self-harm in young mothers and psychological symptoms in their children.

    Professor Elliott described how the children expressed their mood through drawings. These drawings were bleak and about guns, barbed wire and tears.

    By way of contrast, my wife and I visited the Archibald Prize exhibition last week which featured the ‘Young Archies’ – portraits by 5 to 15 year olds. These beautiful portraits were in such contrast to what Professor Elliott has shown us by children on Christmas Island. The Young Archies of the same age as the asylum seekers drew beautiful portraits of people they loved and who loved them – mainly family. The contrast between the two lots of drawings highlighted very graphically the trauma we are inflicting on children in our care. And to think that Scott Morrison is the legal guardian of these children in detention!

    There is not just institutional violence against children in the Catholic Church and other institutions. It is happening now in our detention centres, this very day.

    For God’s sake, for the children’s sake and for our own sake, stop this inhumanity both in Gaza and in our own detention centres. The tears of the children will not wash away our guilt. At the very least we should stop wringing our hands and do something about it.

  • John Menadue. Overplaying one’s hand.

    With the benefits that governments get with incumbency, presidents and prime ministers need to be careful not to overstate their case or overplay their hands. The temptation is great, particularly when there are national outpourings of grief and when a global stage awaits.

    Tony Abbott was certainly on the world stage over MH370. On 21 March in PNG he announced that “satellite footage showed what could be debris from the missing airline’s flight MH370”. Then he added, ‘now it could just be a container that fell off a ship … we just don’t know … we owe it to [families and friends] to give them information as soon as it is to hand’.

    His speculation about the wreckage was not correct.

    On April 11 in Shanghai, Tony Abbott said ‘We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorders to within some kilometres … we are very confident the signals we are detecting are from the black boxes on MH370.’ On the same day, after Tony Abbott’s press conference, Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who was in charge of the search said ‘On the information that I have available to me, there has been no major breakthrough in the search for MH370’. The media reported in the SMH of that day ‘[Angus Houston] gave no indication that the black boxes were any closer to being found’.

    Tony Abbott was too early and overstated in his comments.

    On MH17, Tony Abbott and July Bishop have been playing on a much bigger stage in the United Nations. (Interestingly their platform was the Security Council seat that they inherited from the previous government despite the fact that the Coalition criticised the waste of money and that time should not be wasted in talking to Africans.)

    The unanimous decision of the Security Council drew world attention to the shooting down of MH17 with 37Australians and Australian residents on board. We had a direct and legitimate interest. But that Security Council Resolution 2168 on MH17 had no enforcement mechanism for the recovery of the bodies and the necessary investigations. The lack of any enforcement mechanism is now the reason why our AFP and others, particularly the Dutch and Malaysians, have been unable to access the crash site for days. And it seems that the reason for that denial of access is not because of Russian supported separatists, but because the Ukrainian government has seized the opportunity to escalate its military actions against the separatists. This action by the Ukrainian government seems to be a clear defiance of the Security Council Resolution.

    There are clear lessons to be learnt from the disasters of MH370 and MH17. The lessons are don’t overplay your hand or overstate your case for domestic political reasons.

    Tabloid headlines from the Murdoch media are not a good guide as to how we should conduct our foreign policy.

  • Walter Hamilton. One Man’s War.

    Japan both treasures and abhors its status as the only nation to have suffered a nuclear attack. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perceived, because of their unique and extraordinary destructiveness, as moral markers: warnings to the world and proofs that Japan paid in full for its part in the war.

    The A-bomb attacks are also portrayed in some Japanese narratives as events outside history, in the sense that they cannot be compared to anything else, acts that should never have happened and should not happen again. Rather than being the historical full stop in a sentence that begins with Nanjing or Pearl Harbor or Singapore, the atomic wastelands shame to silence attempts at arguing the logic of cause and effect.

    August 9th will be the 69th anniversary of the A-bombing of Nagasaki, which followed by three days the destruction of Hiroshima. In those two cities more than 200,000 people were killed outright or died within six months from wounds or radiation sickness. Even if one accepts the argument that the first bomb was necessary to shock Japan’s leaders into surrendering, the use of the second so soon afterwards seems wantonly cruel. For a Japanese person, therefore, any thought that he or she had a hand in delivering Nagasaki to its fate would be the stuff of nightmares. Which is exactly what 85-year-old Satoru Miyashiro says he has been struggling with these many years.

    To explain Satoru’s story is to open up the Hiroshima-Nagasaki narrative to a more subtle interpretation of responsibility, adding new ironies to the decisions that produced the mushroom clouds.

    Satoru Miyashiro was just 16 when employed at the famous Yahata Steel Works near the city of Kokura in northern Kyushu. Whenever the air raid sirens sounded it was his job to help light drums of coal tar placed near the steel works to create a smoke screen to prevent the B-29 pilots gaining a clear sight of their target. This counter-measure had been devised as early as 1936 because of Yahata’s importance as an industrial asset; by 1945, the local air defenses were so depleted little else stood in the way of Bomber Command.

    The Americans identified Yahata early on as a prime target, but initial bombing raids proved ineffectual. Everyone in the city of 250,000 knew they were living on borrowed time.

    The list of Japanese cities targeted for incendiary attacks was a long one: the sort of hit parade nobody would want to be on. A much shorter list of cities was drawn up in April-May 1945 for the atomic bombs. The American military-civilian committee given this task included the old capital, Kyoto, among them. The cultural treasure-trove was assessed as a major industrial centre.

    The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, however, was familiar with Kyoto from having visited there some years before and vetoed the decision. In its place Nagasaki was added to the list.

    Young Satoru, of course, knew nothing of these high deliberations in Washington. He was fully occupied at Yahata fighting fire with smoke. Then came news of a terrible new kind of weapon unleashed on Hiroshima the morning of August 6th; like many in Yahata, which was still largely unscathed, Satoru feared what was coming next. Sure enough, two days later, the B-29s arrived overhead. But it was a conventional, not a nuclear attack (though 20 per cent of the urban area was destroyed by incendiaries the Americans rated the results only ‘fair’).

    The next day Bomber Command set off from the Pacific island of Tinian with the second nuclear weapon. Their principal target was Kokura, site of a large arsenal, less than 10-kilometres from Yahata (both cities are now incorporated into Kitakyushu). Official war histories state that when the B-29 carrying the A-bomb reached Kokura the weather had closed in, forcing the pilot to divert to his secondary target, Nagasaki. Visibility was bad there also until the clouds opened up just long enough for the bomb to be detonated, as it turned out, right above the main Christian neighbourhood in that port-city.

    But is it true that Kokura was spared, and Nagasaki laid waste, because of the vagaries of the weather? Ever since that day Satoru Miyashiro has believed otherwise. On the 9th, an hour before the A-bomb flight approached Kokura, the air raid sirens sounded again, sending Satoru and his colleagues running to light the coal-tar drums. Black smoke soon filled the sky and floated on the wind across to Kokura. The weather in the area that day, according to meteorological records, was fair­­––not cloudy as the history books say––although a mixture of smoke and mist hung in the air. Rainsqualls had doused the worst of the fires from the incendiary attack on Yahata the day before, and it was probably vapour plumes mixed with coal-tar smoke that blocked the nuclear flash––and sent it on to Nagasaki: the hand of man, rather than nature, determined events.

    ‘I’ve been hearing this story ever since I was a child,’ says Satoru’s daughter Yumiko. ‘But my father did not mention it to others because he felt a sense of guilt at having brought suffering to the people of Nagasaki.’ Now, as he approaches the end of his life, Satoru has finally gone public adding his recollections to the complex tangle of history.

    Was a teenage boy charged with lighting a line of coal-tar fires responsible for destroying Nagasaki? Of course not. The significance of Satoru’s story relates not so much to the past as to the present. Japanese are losing touch with the generation that experienced the war; they are vulnerable to the patriotic pitch of revisionists and others who wish to throw clouds of doubt over Japan’s war responsibility. Sometimes, however, one man’s conscience and sense of personal responsibility is able to throw new light on great events, and in that human affirmation we recognise a necessary truth.

    The original report about Satoru Miyashiro was published in the Mainichi newspaper. Walter Hamilton is the author of Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Noura Erakat. Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza Debunked.

    Five Israeli talking points on Gaza debunked.  Why does the mainstream media keep repeating these false claims?

    Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

    Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

    This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.

    Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.

    1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.

    As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.

    The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control. Israel does have the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, but it must do so in accordance with occupation law and not other laws of war. Occupation law ensures greater protection for the civilian population. The other laws of war balance military advantage and civilian suffering. The statement that “no country would tolerate rocket fire from a neighboring country” is therefore both a diversion and baseless.

    Israel denies Palestinians the right to govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking the right to self-defense. This is a conundrum and a violation of international law, one that Israel deliberately created to evade accountability.

    2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

    Israel argues that its occupation of the Gaza Strip ended with the unilateral withdrawal of its settler population in 2005. It then declared the Gaza Strip to be “hostile territory” and declared war against its population. Neither the argument nor the statement is tenable. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.

    Israel argues that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that ending the occupation will not bring peace. Some have gone so far as to say that Palestinians squandered their opportunity to build heaven in order to build a terrorist haven instead. These arguments aim to obfuscate Israel’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank. As Prime Minister Netanyahu once explained, Israel must ensure that it does not “get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria…. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

    Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.

    3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza.

    Israel claims that its current and past wars against the Palestinian population in Gaza have been in response to rocket fire. Empirical evidence from 2008, 2012 and 2014 refute that claim. First, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the greatest reduction of rocket fire came through diplomatic rather than military means. This chart demonstrates the correlation between Israel’s military attacks upon the Gaza Strip and Hamas militant activity. Hamas rocket fire increases in response to Israeli military attacks and decreases in direct correlation to them. Cease-fires have brought the greatest security to the region.

    During the four months of the Egyptian-negotiated cease-fire in 2008, Palestinian militants reduced the number of rockets to zero or single digits from the Gaza Strip. Despite this relative security and calm, Israel broke the cease-fire to begin the notorious aerial and ground offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-two days. In November 2012, Israel’s extrajudicial assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, while he was reviewing terms for a diplomatic solution, again broke the cease-fire that precipitated the eight-day aerial offensive that killed 132 Palestinians.

    Immediately preceding Israel’s most recent operation, Hamas rocket and mortar attacks did not threaten Israel. Israel deliberately provoked this war with Hamas. Without producing a shred of evidence, it accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron. Four weeks and almost 700 lives later, Israel has yet to produce any evidence demonstrating Hamas’s involvement. During ten days of Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. It’s these Israeli provocations that precipitated the Hamas rocket fire to which Israel claims left it with no choice but a gruesome military operation.

    4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.

    Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested. Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate.

    In contrast, Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement and has precise weapons technology. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations.

    The Dahiya Doctrine is central to these operations and refers to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon in 2006. Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that this would be applied elsewhere:

    What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.

    Israel has kept true to this promise. The 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone Mission, concluded “from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy [Dahiya Doctrine] appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.”

    According to the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israel directly targeted civilians or recklessly caused civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. Far from avoiding the deaths of civilians, Israel effectively considers them legitimate targets.

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    5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.

    This is arguably one of Israel’s most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons. The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity.

    International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes:

    The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel’s] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.

    In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding.

    Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.”

    In the over thee weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.

    Beyond the body count and reference to law, which is a product of power, the question to ask is, What is Israel’s end goal? What if Hamas and Islamic Jihad dug tunnels beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip—they clearly did not, but let us assume they did for the sake of argument. According to Israel’s logic, all of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians are therefore human shields for being born Palestinian in Gaza. The solution is to destroy the 360-kilometer square strip of land and to expect a watching world to accept this catastrophic loss as incidental. This is possible only by framing and accepting the dehumanization of Palestinian life. Despite the absurdity of this proposal, it is precisely what Israeli society is urging its military leadership to do. Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace.

    Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and activist, is an Abraham L. Freedman Fellow at Temple University, Beasely School of Law, and a contributing editor of Jadaliyya. 

    This article was first published in Alternet.org on July 28,2014.

     

     

     

  • Wiryono Sastrohandoyo. The new Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

    ​Joko Widodo is an upright, decent and honourable person.

    It is the general feeling in Indonesia that his election is a victory for the Indonesian people and the generally peaceful election process. This is a sign of the growing maturity of Indonesia’s young democracy.
    Jokowi was great during his two terms as mayor of Solo, a small city of half a million people in central Java. He has been less impressive during his two years as Governor of Jakarta with a diverse population of more than ten million people. Now he has to deal with a larger and even more diverse population of 240 million.

    Indonesians are proud that their nation is the third largest democracy. But we also know that whilst our democracy is maturing , the democratisation process must continue. It will not be easy. But since the first elections in 1999 in the post-Suharto period, Indonesians have been able to have free and fair elections. So I am hopeful.

    Probowo’s rejection and withdrawal from the electoral process reflects the inability of his party’s elites and himself to see the reality of his loss. What we need is reconciliation with his supporters who won 47% of the popular vote. They are a significant part of the Indonesian population and must be heard.
    ,
    But Jokowi’s electoral victory was achieved in a very close race. If the president was elected by parliament, the Prabowo-Rajasa team would have beaten Jokowi-Kalla easily. Jokowi-JK is supported by a coalition of parties controlling only 37% of the seats in Parliament while Prabowo-Hatta is supported by a coalition controlling 52.1% of the seats.

    But the president is directly elected and a majority of parliamentary seats does not mean victory. The new president’s first problem, if he is to govern effectively, is how to swing enough of the Prabowo’s coalition parties’ MPs to his side. At this time it is not clear how he is going to do it. But it is not impossible. Party discipline is weak and some politicians have indicated the willingness to swing. Usually – politics being what it is – at a price.

    A problem is how independent is Jokowi going to be? During the campaign Party Chairwoman Megawati Sukarnoputri stressed that Jokowi is mandated by the party and that he is to implement party policy. This involves reviving what is known as Trisaki, that Indonesia is sovereign in the field of politics, self-sufficient in economic affairs and with its own distinctive cultural identity. Fortunately this was not  so strongly emphasized later in the campaign but the relationship between President Jokowi and the Party leadership will have to be worked out. Time will tell. Coalition building is not only done for the purpose of implementing desired policy goals but also as rewards.
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    During the campaign, Jokowi indicated that he wanted a cabinet of professionals. This will be a good indicator of his intentions and priorities.

    Jokowi sees foreign policy as a tool for obtaining benefits for the sake of domestic economic and political growth. He said that Indonesian ambassadors should be the salesmen of Indonesia. In other words: promoting business. And in business relations, business usually takes a longer term and more consistent view. It is in other areas of relations that we usually have worrying problems.

    On the South China Sea issue Jokowi’s statements suggest that he does not see Indonesia in dispute with China. Indonesia will seek to play a constructive role for we need both China and the West in the Pacific. We need to ensure that the rising power of China and the pivoting US do not end in conflict.

    Relations with Australia will continue to be over shadowed by other more important issues. This is particularly so because Jokowi sees that foreign investment should serve domestic economic growth. His focus of attention in this will mainly be people at the bottom, those who are surviving on one dollar a day. Their living standard has to be improved and fast. During his youth he was one of them. But he is also an experienced businessman who knows that Indonesia needs foreign investment. His view on Australia is still to be developed but  he is not confrontational by nature although not unwlling to be tough. In the past there has been too many breakdowns of dialogue. Australians tend to hold dialogue on a head-to-head basis. The Indonesian way is to hold a dialogue on a heart-to-heart basis. The challenge is for both countries to have more cross cultural communication. Australia and Indonesia need to know how to communicate better.

    Wiryono Sastrohandoyo was Indonesian Ambassador to Australia from 1996 to 1999.
    This article is in response to questions I asked.   John Menadue

     

     

  • Ben Saul. The Occupation of Palestine.

    There is very partisan criticism of Hamas for firing home-made rockets into Israel. But the core problem is not rockets. It is the occupation of Palestine by Israel and the imprisonment of two million Palestinians in a sliver of land called ‘Gaza’.

    I often think how we should or could respond if our country was occupied by a foreign power. Surely there would be resistance to that occupation. That is fundamentally what the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians is about.

    In a speech given at Parliament House, Canberra, on July 16, Professor Ben Saul, says

    ‘The root cause of the Israel-Palestine conflict is the near fifty year occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel and the illegal colonisation of Palestinian land. Violence to liberate Palestine is inevitable unless Israel withdraws and complies with international law. Australian governments have failed to understand that there will never be peace unless there is justice.’

    A link to Professor Ben Saul’s speech is below.  He is the Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.  John Menadue

  • Another Israeli massacre of Palestinians.

    One thousand and thirty-five Palestinians in Gaza, mainly innocent civilians, women and children have been massacred and so far the world turns its head away. And the number is increasing by the hour. We don’t want to feel the suffering of the Palestinian people.

    Alongside this 1,035 dead Palestinians there are 42 Israeli’s who have died. Just imagine what the Israeli lobby would be saying if 1,035 Israelis had died.

    We are angry and concerned that 297 innocent people lost their lives when MH17 was shot down by separatists in the Ukraine. These separatists were obviously funded and armed by Russia. That is of concern to us. But the US supports, funds and arms the Israeli army which is now conducting this massacre in Gaza. When will we get the balance right.  But it is not only the US government and the Israeli lobby that must be held accountable for what is happening today in Gaza. The Australian government has consistently sided with Israel against the Palestinians and even wants to deny the term ‘occupied’ which is a way any reasonable person would describe what Israel is doing on Palestinian land. The Israelis are occupying Palestinian land and imprisoning Palestinian people.

    There has been a pattern of Israeli massacres and the Gaza massacre is one of many. Just think of the massacres in  Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982.

    Israel is naturally concerned about home-made rockets being fired out of Gaza into Israel but the response is out of all proportion. What is more, the core reason for the dispute is not these rockets, it is occupation by Israel of Palestinian land. That occupation and colonisation must be ended if there is to be a just peace.

    See below an article this weekend by Robert Fisk for The Independent. It is headed ‘Eight hundred dead Palestinians. But Israel has impunity.’  John Menadue

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    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/eight-hundred-dead-palestinians-but-israel-has-impunity-9629726.html

  • John Menadue–President Jokowi and Australia

    The election of Joko Widodo as Indonesia’s seventh president is a victory for burgeoning democracy in our neighbour with 240 million people. It was a victory for civil participation by ordinary people to defeat Prabowo Subianto by a margin of 53% to 47%, by 8 million votes and winning in two thirds of Indonesia’s provinces.

    Prabowo had a very dubious performance on human rights when he was in the military. But like so many people from” born to rule” elites he now refuses to accept the result. What would the lower orders know about the need for strong leadership from his business and military friends?  It is similar to the way Tony Abbott behaved after the 2010 election. Denied the prime ministership by a vote of the House of Representatives he set about with Christopher Pyne to wreck the place.

    Jokowi will not have a majority in the Parliament. He will need to be a good negotiator

    All being well and despite Prabowo, Jokowi will be sworn as president on October 20. President Yudhoyono is likely to smooth any troubled waters in the meantime.

    What could it mean for Australia?

    In the short term I would think not much. Jokowi will be preoccupied with domestic issues that he campaigned on. He has promised two presidential regulations on corruption and expediting business permit licencing. It is also expected that he will release a third regulation that he promised on religious discrimination directed against religious radicals.

    Outgoing President Yudhoyono was well disposed towards Australia and we often tried his patience! President Jokowi does not have the same disposition. We should not take him for granted. He will approach foreign policy issues very cautiously in the early days. He will be guided by professional advisers. Who he appoints to his cabinet will be very important and a good indicator of his priorities.

    Jokowi will not have the same sensitivity as President Yudhoyono has on spying issues which offended Yudhoyono greatly. Our spying agencies are often a menace.

    For Jokowi, boats will simply not be a priority. Given Indonesia’s other problems boats will remain a third rate issue. An important issue however for the Jokowi administration is how it regards the stategic question of the South China Sea. That might begin to emerge in six months or so. All in all I don’t think we will see much departure from existing  foreign policies.

    Attitudes to foreign investment  howeverwill be coloured by economic nationalism which remains a major political issue for all Indonesian political parties.

    In all of this it should not be assumed that Australia will get any preferred treatment. We don’t deserve it and we won’t get it.

    One issue which could shore up the relationship would be a much more robust business relationship, even given Indonesian reservations about foreign investment. Our investment in Indonesia is 0.5% of our total investment abroad. Yet investment into Indonesia from Singapore and Japan pours in. Indonesia is growing rapidly at twice our rate. It is a member of the G20. But our trade with Indonesia as a trading partner ranks number 12.

    Business and economic ties could be the ballast in a relationship which has been difficult from time to time. A business underpinning of our relationship with Indonesia would be a great stabiliser.

    Our relationship with Japan was underpinned by business relationships. Leaders on both sides helped us through difficult times particularly after WW2.

    Enhanced business cooperation between Indonesia and Australia would be a great help in the years ahead. Politics and governments change but business interests usually goes on and on.

  • John Menadue–King Coal to be dethroned.

    On May 1 last year I posted “A canary in the coal mine”. It focussed on the growing and wide concern about the damage to the climate caused by coal fired electricity generation. It also drew attention to the action of Jonathon Moylan who sent a hoax email concerning Whitehaven Coal to the ANZ Bank about the risk of investing in coal. The worthy and powerful tut tutted his action but I likened it to the canary in the coal mine warning of danger ahead.

    In the Supreme Court a few days ago. Jonathon Moylan pleaded guilty but it seems unlikely that he will receive a custodial sentence. Good luck to him for acting out his concerns about our planet, the dangers of coal and that the banks should be careful in funding more coal projects

    Only a few days earlier in Texas, Tony Abbott our apparent self-styled “ambassador for coal” said “for many decades at least, coal will continue to fuel human progress as an affordable energy source for wealthy and developed countries alike”

    But the evidence is pointing in the other direction. At the recent midyear climate negotiations in Bonn, an unprecedented 60 countries including Germany called for a total phase out of fossil fuels by 2050 as part of a global agreement on climate change to be concluded in Paris in 2015. If the Paris conference next year is successful the future of coal will be even more bleak than it is now, particularly for steaming coal

    The future of coking coal produced for steel making will be more secure, but not steaming coal. About 13 % of global coal is mined for coking and steel making. Coking coal is about 40% of our total coal exports. The remainder is steaming coal.

    On a global basis 41 % of 0f the world’s electricity is generated by highly polluting steaming coal.

    The International Energy Agency has advised that even if we aim to limit the world temperature rise to only 2 degrees – it could be more in practice – we would have to achieve a reduction of 50 % in the share of global energy from coal by 2035.

    Coal may seem a cheap fuel now but it does not carry the cost of the ‘externalities’ it incurs, the damage it does to our environment and health. That is why proper pricing of coal is essential. As the real cost of steaming coal increases the cost of renewables is moving strongly downwards.

    The signs are everywhere that steaming coal pollution must be reduced in favour of less polluting alternatives. Why in the world would Joe Hockey tell us that the wind farms around Canberra are ‘utterly offensive…I think they are blight on the landscape’? Does he prefer dirty and polluting smoke stacks?

    President Obama has taken executive action to mandate a 30 % reduction in carbon emissions from fossil burning power plants by 2030. As Japan restarts its nuclear power plants it will buy less Australian coal. China is committed to reducing power generation from coal. It is a national imperative. European consumption of coal continues to fall with new air pollution requirements from 2016.

    There are reports that Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Credit Agricole and the Bank of Scotland have withdrawn their support for the Abbott Point Coal loader in Queensland. The Bendigo and Adelaide Bank have said that they would not fund coal projects.

    We are also hearing of new coal projects being deferred and many existing mines losing money. Some of this may be short term but the longer term prospects for steaming coal are bleak. In May the Queensland Resources Council said that 10% of coal mines are “in a very precarious state”

    Or as John Hewson has put it “The days of fossil fuels being burnt unabated are over. Investing in these projects is a losing bet” (AFR 11 June 2014)

    More and more pain is coming for steaming coal.

    Minister Greg Hunt told us a few days ago that clean coal is just around the corner with new technology. But we have been hearing that for over 20 years. It is politics designed to try and prop up a declining industry and shows the risk of Direct Action in handing out money to industrial friends and political supporters.

    Tony Abbott says that action on carbon must not be allowed that damages our economy.  He thinks that the planet and our economy are separate.  Just as there will be no jobs in the Murray Darling Basin if we pollute the river so our economy and jobs will be at risk if we do not safeguard our climate and planet. If our planet is severely damaged, as is in prospect, so will our economy and lot more as well.

    Interestingly the Mining Division of the CFMEU whose members jobs at risk is far more constructive about addressing climate than Tony Abbott. The union has consistently supported a price on carbon with appropriate safeguards and compensation.

    We need to stop shoring up industries that are carbon polluting. As Ian McAuley has put it capitalism thrives on change and the opportunity for countries like Australia to modernise the energy sector can be a major driver of change. There are jobs in de commissoning coal fired plants, in building solar and wind plants and the accompanying infrastructure in energy research and development and in making domestic buildings and industrial plants energy efficient. If this isn’t economic activity, what is?

    King coal is not the energy source of the future regardless of what Tony Abbott says. The canary in the coal mine is screeching louder and louder and we had better take notice.

  • Richard Rigby. Tiananmen 25 years on.

    On the night of June 3-4, units of the Peoples Liberation Army entered Beijing, killing some hundreds of ordinary Beijing citizens as they made their way to their objective, Tiananmen Square, the focal point of massive protests that had begun in late April following the death of former Party Secretary Hu Yaobang. The square was cleared of protestors. Further killings and arrests ensued over following days. A small number of soldiers were also killed. Protests in scores of other Chinese cities were simultaneously brought to an end, with varying degrees of violence. Significant protests in Shanghai were settled largely peacefully. Beijing was the worst. This much is known; although a final, credible death toll has not been published to this day.

    After the event Deng Xiaoping famously said ‘this storm was bound to happen’. Not necessarily. The country wide protests, against corruption, against rising prices, against an array of contradictions between what opening and reform seemed to promise and the realities of daily life, and yes, in the case of some, demands for greater freedom and democracy – these were almost certainly inevitable; but the bloody denouement in the nation’s capital was not. The crucial element here was a serious power struggle at the centre of China’s leadership, a struggle that was both exacerbated by, and in which the contending parties sought to use, the popular protests.

    There were of course other, contingent, elements as well: the sensitive 70th anniversary of the May 4th Movement, the meeting of the Asian Development Bank, and, in particular, the historic visit of Mikhail Gorbachev, which made Beijing the focus of global media attention, quite apart from the events in the square – which also led to the humiliation for the government of having to cancel the official welcome at that site; and there were divisions amongst the student leaders and their supporters too, between those favouring a degree of accommodation with the authorities, with others more intransigent. But in the end it was the hard-liners in the government who won the power struggle, and who, backed by Deng Xiaoping, must take responsibility for the tragic way in which the protests were suppressed.

    It was this same Deng, though, who also ensured that, against the clear inclinations of a number of those on the winning side, this did not mean turning back from the policies of opening and reform that he had himself initiated at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in late 1978. He understood, even if not all his colleagues did, that his own dictum that stability takes precedence over all else demanded that those processes, and the resultant economic growth, be pushed forward. The domestic and international shocks resulting from the events of June 1989 notwithstanding, his Southern Tour of 1992 unleashed the second wave of the process of opening and reform that has resulted in the China we see today, with unprecedented levels of prosperity, openness to the world, international standing and influence.

    For one who lived through and closely followed the events of 1989 in Beijing, it is at times hard to realise that a quarter of a century has now past, and that vast numbers of adult Chinese today were only children, or not even born, when those events took place. June 4 means little or nothing to many of them. At the same time, China, and Beijing, have changed beyond recognition, and in terms of people’s lives, in many ways for the better. Millions of Chinese travel overseas on holidays every year, and when the holidays are over, they return home with no greater reluctance than tourists of any other country. Their lives are not bad. They take pride in China’s global standing. For many Chinese, particularly intellectuals and students, the 1980s were a period of unalloyed admiration for the West, but this has been tempered not only by patriotic education and warnings of the dangers of peaceful evolution, but much more effectively by Western failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Asian Financial Crisis, the Global Financial Crisis, the negative examples and unmet policy challenges of the Arab Spring, Israel/Palestine, the Ukraine…the list goes on.

    Of course China has huge problems and challenges of its own, some of which, such as pollution, result from its own successes, while others are more traditional, such as the corruption which now greatly exceeds that which was such an issue in 1989. But while ‘mass incidents’ resulting from particularly egregious and localised causes continue to take place across the country, the idea that the central leadership is vulnerable to challenge by mass protests in the heart of the nation seems inherently implausible. This is not what people want, and even if it were, the range of coercive means – lethal, and significantly, non-lethal –  at the disposal of the authorities gives them a far greater degree of flexibility and effectiveness than was the case 25 years ago.

    And yet, those same authorities are worried. They have not forgotten what happened. Some of them are the direct or indirect beneficiaries of the power struggle that Zhao Ziyang lost and Li Peng won, resulting in the subsequent promotion of Jiang Zemin, still exercising at least some influence despite his advanced age. (It is perhaps noteworthy, though, that Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun honourably but fruitlessly opposed the decision to use the PLA.) Neither have millions of Beijing citizens who themselves lived through the events forgotten, whatever roles they played or didn’t play, and whatever they thought then or think now. Neither have the parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, friends, of those who died, and the greater numbers injured or imprisoned or exiled.

    June 4, like it or not, is another of those dates, like March 18, May 4, May 30, September 18, and more, that have entered Chinese history, and as such demand an explanation. From time to time an official Chinese spokesperson says, usually responding to a journalist, that this issue has been settled years ago. It hasn’t. Were this the case, the date would not be as sensitive as it is. Every year in late May numbers of people associated with the events of 1989 are encouraged in one way or another to keep quiet, take a holiday, or something less pleasant. This year, a significant anniversary, has already seen a number of arrests, but also newer forms of activism, including a privately sponsored seminar and a series of messages on Weibo, China’s Twitter. The truth is, the issue is not going to go away, and the truth is…the truth. About what happened, and why.

    One may fully understand the desire of the Chinese authorities, faced as they are with massive challenges, to avoid rancorous disputes and whatever runs the risk of undermining China’s hard-won stability and prosperity. One should wish them every success in their efforts to achieve their stated goals for the the ‘two centenaries’ (of the Party and of the PRC), including moderate prosperity for all (2021) and democracy (2049). But sooner or later it should become clear that a truthful accounting should help, not hinder, the realisation of a China that is the stronger for the acknowledgment of its tragedies as well as its stunning achievements.

    Some years ago, invited by two graduate students of my acquaintance from the PRC, I visited the February 28 Memorial Museum in Taipei. I had wondered whether they wished to remind me of the sins of the KMT, but this was not their point. As we walked out, one of them said to me, ‘we wanted you to see this – the day we can take you to the June 4 Memorial Museum in Beijing, we’ll know our beloved Motherland has come of age.’*

     

    Richard Rigby was an Australian diplomat with postings in Tokyo, Beijing (twice), Shanghai (Consul General), London and Israel (Ambassador). He was also Assistant Director General of ONA. 

    May 18 Beijing

    *The February 28 incident occurred in 1947. Martial Law was lifted by President Chiang Ching-Kuo in 1987. The Executive Yuan promulgated a Research Report into the Incident in 1992. In 1995 President and KMT Chairman Lee Teng-Hui issued a formal apology and declared February 28 as an official day of commemoration for the victims. It took a long time.

     

  • John Menadue–A lot of nonsense about productivity.

    A lot of nonsense about productivity

    For years the Business Council of Australia and News Corp have been warning us about our poor productivity record and the need to change our industrial relations laws to bring trade unions to heel.  A part of this campaign against unions is now being played out in the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption. The partisan nature of this action is obvious when we see that the government has refused a Royal Commission on governance and corruption by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and other banks in the treatment of thousands of investors in superannuation. But the unions are easy game for a vindictive government.

    It is not that productivity is not important, as the BCA reminds us. It is important, but we have been doing much better than the BCA is prepared to admit. We are also doing much better in labour flexibility than the BCA is prepared to admit. But invariably business interests take the political path of urging changes to industrial relations legislation rather than focussing on improved relations in the work place. That is where real labour productivity is and must be achieved…in the workplace and by members of the BCA.

    In his speech in Hobart to the Econometrics Society on 3 July this year, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Glen Stevens, pointed out that the value of output produced per hour of labour time, increased at an annual rate of 2% in the three years to June 2013. They were the three years of the Rudd/Gillard governments. Stevens commented ‘[This] better trend for [labour] productivity, if we can sustain it, and especially if it can be further improved, would be a reliable base for optimism about the longer-run prospects for the economy and our living standards’.

    There has been no productivity crisis despite what the BCA and News Corp have been telling us month after month.

    The BCA and other large employers were also telling us that the labour market under Fair Work Commission was too rigid and that employees should be much freer to change jobs and move into areas of high demand like mining. But again the facts pull the rug out from under this specious argument.

    In the same week that Glen Stevens was speaking in Hobart, Dr David Gruen of Treasury spoke of a survey of nominal wages over the decade to March 2014. Wages in mining rose 9.7% more than the aggregate increase. Wages in construction rose by 5.4% more than the aggregate. And wages in the professional, scientific and technical sectors rose by 2.5% more than the aggregate. By contrast, wages in the manufacturing sector rose by 0.9% less than aggregate wages. In retail the increase was 4.3% less than the aggregate and in the food sector 7.6% less.

    As Ross Gittins in the SMH has pointed out ‘We now have a genuinely decentralised and more flexible wage fixing system, delivering wage growth in particular industries more appropriate to their circumstances’.

    The clear facts are that productivity and wage flexibility have been improving. Unfortunately much of the rhetoric about industrial relations legislative reform distracts from the need for both employers and employees to concentrate on the work area, in the work place where productivity and wage flexibility is best achieved. The outcomes we seek will not be obtained in ideological campaigns about industrial relations law like the Fair Work Act. Competent and engaged employers know that. But the shrill spokespeople for the BCA and News Corp don’t want to listen. They want to blame others.

  • John Menadue–Power prices – we ain’t seen nothing yet!

    We have seen wild exaggeration about the effects of the carbon tax on prices and the economy. It has all turned out to be quite a fizzer. The price increases we have seen have little to do with the carbon tax and the economy continues to grow steadily. Whyalla has survived.

    But we have a real problem just around the corner in energy policy. The price of domestic gas is likely to at least double in the next year or so as the domestic price of gas rises to meet the international price. Compared with the impact of the carbon tax, this increase in domestic gas prices will be quite severe.  By comparison, the carbon tax will be seen like a blip on the horizon.

    Deloitte Access Economics has just warned that if the gas rise goes unchecked, the manufacturing sector alone will contract by as much as $118 billion by 2021, with nearly 15,000 jobs lost. It suggests the mining sector might contract by $34 billion and agriculture by $4.5 billion.

    Australian gas consumers are naturally concerned because of the $70 billion coal seam gas export project at Gladstone. It is nearing completion and it is likely that our domestic prices for gas will increase to match the export prices from Gladstone.

    Gas is vital for a whole range of industries in Australia – electricity generation, glass and plastics, fertilisers, cement, metals and ceramics – and of course home heating and cooking. Our manufacturing sector has been struggling with the high dollar, but relatively low gas prices have been very important. That is going to change.

    As Bruce Robertson in the SMH has pointed out, historically our east coast had relatively cheap gas from Bass Strait and the Cooper Basin. It was a domestic market largely shielded from world prices. That will change dramatically with the export gas terminal in Gladstone which will draw gas out of the domestic market into the export market because of higher prices overseas, particularly in Asia.

    The coal seam gas moratorium in NSW and Victoria is peripheral at the moment. The main driver of increased gas prices in the years ahead will be the catch-up to export prices driven by the very large coal seam gas project at Gladstone.

    This seems absurd for a country that has some of the richest energy and gas fields in the world. Tony Abbott says that Australia aspires to be the ‘affordable energy capital’ of the world.

    We need to seriously consider reserving necessary gas for Australia’s domestic purposes including the 40% of our gas used by industry.

    Free marketeers will tell us that we should not interfere in the market – that we should let domestic prices rise to export prices, otherwise it will discourage investment. But how ‘free’ is the market? There is concentrated ownership of reserves and limited competition with tightly held gas fields reserved for LNG export. The major companies have joint marketing arrangements which limit competition. There is really a cosy club of big international players that distorts the market.

    We have given some of these major international companies the right to reserve our gas for export. Some of our very large gas resources are, or will be, held back for export where there will be higher prices.

    In 2012, the OECD observed ‘these [gas] markets are far from being liberalised. [They are] characterised by a lack of competition both upstream [where relevant] and downstream’.

    Many countries insist that their substantial gas reserves must pass the test of ‘value-adding’. Gas is reserved for domestic use if it can be demonstrated that that ensures greater value for the supplier country. After all, the gas belongs to the country and its people – and not the international companies. In WA the government has enacted legislation to shield domestic gas consumers. In the US, domestic gas prices are kept low by limiting export licences. In different ways most other countries with large gas reserves ensure that there is adequate domestic supply.

    On the ABC on the 30th April this year, asked by Tony Jones ‘Should a national energy policy include putting aside gas reserves for domestic use’, Jeff Kennet replied ‘Well, certainly, if you don’t provide for your own you, very quickly find out that your own aren’t there or they are of a sub-class in terms of the region in which we live’.

    The ‘debate’ about the carbon tax is really just a curtain-raiser to the very serious discussion we need to have about the reservation of Australian gas for domestic use.

    To what extent are we prepared to limit export licences for gas until the domestic market is adequately supplied? I am not persuaded that the large international gas companies will put Australia’s interests first.

  • Walter Hamilton. When Local Becomes Global

    Why is Vladimir Putin calling down upon himself the ire of the world by failing to help secure the crash site of MH-17 for international investigators? The answer, I think, is pretty obvious. He does not want to demonstrate how much influence, if not control, Russia has over events in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s response has been to blame the government in Kiev and hold it responsible for the situation.

    Since the fall of the Moscow-backed regime in Kiev, it has been Russian policy to destabilize its neighbour so as to discredit and weaken the pro-Western government that has taken over. It has used existing ethnic and religious divisions in Ukraine to hive off the Crimean peninsula and turn a large swathe of territory in the east into a war zone.

    For historical reasons many people living in the east of Ukraine identify with Russia; in Europe, where borders have changed often in the past century, this kind of cross-border allegiance is not unusual. Before now Hitler and Stalin, among others, exploited similar sources of tension. Putin has used pro-Russian Ukrainians––advised, trained and equipped by his own military intelligence services––together with a ‘free corps’ of Cossacks and other Russian mercenaries, some of them veterans of the fighting in Chechnya, to pursue his anti-Western agenda.

    He may have good reason to fear the loss of a satellite state, but his actions only serve to underscore why most of Ukrainian citizens want a future in the EU.

    Putin’s particular approach has been conditioned by a desire to localize the conflict as much as possible, thus avoiding a direct confrontation with member states of the European Union. Until this week he had been partially successful. Although both the United States and the EU imposed sanctions against Moscow following its invasion of the Crimea, there have been signs recently of a split in the trans-Atlantic response to Russia’s aggression. Washington expanded its sanctions regime after it determined that Moscow was supplying ever-more sophisticated weapons to the rebels, including surface-to-air missile launchers, but the EU did not follow suit. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande (who have not been the most outspoken of world leaders condemning the attack on MH-17) are the chief architects of a ‘slowly-slowly’ approach to Putin. Their approach, along with Putin’s ‘localizing’ strategy, has crashed just as surely as the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines plane.

    Local has become global. In an interconnected world, a conflict in the very centre of Europe in which the most sophisticated types of conventional weapons are deployed was never going to remain local for long. International travel is just one way in which humanity is knitted together; we cannot turn our backs on any festering conflict and hope it goes away. The complaint that the aircraft should not have been using air space above a conflict zone (as was done by many other commercial flights) completely misses the point. Whoever supplied and wantonly fired the missile, having failed to even identify the target, bears the whole responsibility.

    Putin has been hoisted with his own petard: if he continues to stand aside from this tragedy he is condemned as irresponsible and ruthless; if he exercises the authority of his office to clear the disaster area for a proper recovery and investigation, he demonstrates the true extent of Russia’s involvement. Alternatively, if indeed he cannot influence the disparate militias that are roving over the disputed territory, it will become clear that he has engineered a crisis over which he has lost control.

    Putin faces an unenviable choice, as far as his own prestige is concerned (and that, rather that the dignified recovery of the remains of 298 innocent people, seems to be the overriding consideration in Moscow). It is hard to imagine how this terrible situation can play out to his advantage. The best outcome, and the best memorial to the lost lives, would be an end to the fighting and a political settlement that respects the sovereignty of Ukraine and the rights of all its citizens.

    Walter Hamilton reported from foreign bureaus for the ABC and AAP for 14 years.

     

     

  • MH 17-Light a candle rather than curse the darkness

    In the horror and sense of evil we all feel about the downing of MH17 how should we respond?  Perhaps out best response is summed up in the above exhortation which is attributed to Peter Benenson the founder of Amnesty International. The candle cycled by barb wire has become the emblem of Amnesty. The quote was also used by Adlai Stevenson in a speech in the UN in tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt

    As a Christian I find such horror and pervasive evil hard to understand or explain. We particularly respond to MH 17 because of the large number of Australians who have been wantonly killed. But at the same time more have been killed in Gaza. And even more are killed almost every day in Syria and Iraq. Evil, violence and injustice are pervasive.

    That evil is personal as well as national and global. We each struggle with our own selfishness and fear.

    But we also have what Abraham Lincoln described as our better angels of generosity and concern for our neighbour. And that internal struggle between good and evil, between our better angels and our darker angels is played out in our wider community and the wider wold. We are affected by what happens even in remote Ukraine.

    Lighting candles seems to me to be best response or perhaps the only way in the long term not just for our own mental and moral health but to shift the balance against violence and injustice. There are many small and perhaps even large things that we can do; helping asylum seekers and our  indigenous people; the homeless; the poor of the world; advocacy for the vulnerable; resistance to the violent and the warlike and support for peacemakers. Cursing the darkness or wringing our hands is not helpful either for us or others.

    My father often told me to “stop complaining and do something about it”. I try to respond that way, inadequate as it is. We must take personal responsibility for the wrongs in the world. I see no other sensible way but to keep lighting candles.