John Menadue

  • Walter Hamilton. Japanese Sleepwalking

    Defying public protests and opinion polls that show most Japanese oppose the move, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and Shin-Komeito ruling coalition are pressing ahead with legislation to nullify the nation’s constitutional ban on overseas military action.

    The so-called ‘right of collective defense’ law is being voted out of the committee stage of the Diet––thus ending formal debate––and will soon go to the full parliament where Abe has the numbers to push it through. There have been rowdy scenes in the corridors and chambers of parliament as angry Opposition members have tried to prevent the gag being applied.

    Outside, in the streets of central Tokyo, thousands of demonstrators, defying cyclonic rain, have kept up a protest vigil. In Yokoyama, protestors clashed with police. There is a mood of crisis not seen probably since the anti-U.S.-Japan Treaty demonstrations of the 1960s, although that earlier protest movement was far bigger and more determined.

    There is every indication that Japan will take the historic step to free up its military options in a way not seen since the end of the Second World War. The Abe Government will have spent a considerable amount of political capital, but even so its approval rating in the latest survey by NHK (the public broadcaster) showed an improvement to above 40%, which is comparatively good for a Cabinet this far into its term of office.

    On what will the new Japanese posture be built? In terms of historical memory, I would suggest that the foundations are dangerously weak. Unlike Germany––as has often been observed­­­­­­­––Japan has never adequately faced up to its past. In a real sense, Abe’s conservatives are starting again where his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi (a high official in the wartime state and the postwar Prime Minister who forced through the unpopular treaty with the U.S.) left off. In their world-view, Japan was not the aggressor in the 1930s but the victim (of the European powers) and its mission in China and Korea was noble.

    I remember visiting Berlin a few years ago and taking a tram to the Philharmonie. In the tram shelter there I noticed a sign bearing a photograph and some bilingual text. It turned out to be one of a series of historical markers related to the Second World War. To my great surprise, it named and described a German Nazi who had perpetrated crimes against humanity: it was a very public and unalloyed reminder of Germany’s dark past. Places like the Holocaust Monument in Berlin and the museum erected at the site where the Nuremberg Rallies were held are further examples of the clear-sighted German approach to their historical legacy.

    Contrast this with Japan, where places like the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo perpetuate the nationalists’ apologia for decades of aggression in China and Korea and the brutal military occupation of Southeast Asia.

    Whether on a large scale or small, the Japanese are unprepared emotionally and intellectually for a remilitarized future.

    I give as a small example of the unreconstructed attitude to the past one encounters almost every day. I happen, at present, to be doing some translation work connected with art history. In a Japanese commentary I am working on, concerning an artist who painted in Manchukuo (the puppet state set up by Japan) and occupied China, the writer persists in using anachronistic place names dating from the time when the Japanese were master. Instead of describing Japan as attacking China in 1937, she refers to the Sino-Japanese Incident. The involvement of the particular artist in wartime propaganda is also silently passed over. Nothing like this would be tolerated in a German publication of any status.

    I do not for a moment suggest that the writer of this commentary is a right-wing zealot or even politically aware. Indeed, her approach and language are typical of the way these events are written about in Japan. It runs right through the so-called educated classes. Either people do not know or do not care to know what really happened in the past. The education system has failed to prepare the present generation to deal in a different, safer way with the pressures emerging from the Right for a renewal of national pride and self-assertiveness.

    Television coverage of the anti-security legislation protests suggests that a majority of those demonstrating are middle to older-aged Japanese. Perhaps the news programs may be distorting the truth (friends of mine who have attended say around a third are younger people), but what is different about these protests, compared with those in the 1960s, is that they are not being led or joined by mainly student-age Japanese. This is a worrying aspect: the rising generation is either complacent or so badly informed about their nation’s past, the inherent dangers of a society that hides or obfuscates what it should, like Germany, confront every day––whether at a tram-stop or in the classroom or in an art book––are just not appreciated.

    Japan does not seem to know how unready it is.

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bruce Kaye. Refugees in Australia and the Good Samaritan.

     

    When I was a teenager a famous preacher of the day, Dr Gordon Powell, was the minister at St Stephens Presbyterian Church Macquarie Street Sydney. I recall hearing some of his sermons and in particular a sermon from a series of sermons he preached on the “Hard Sayings of Jesus”. He remarked at the beginning of the series that the really hard sayings of Jesus were not those that were complex or oblique. Rather the hardest sayings of Jesus were those whose meaning was all too clear. The difficulty was in how to work out those sayings in everyday life.

    Similarly the Prime Minister’s statement on Thursday (10 September) that Australia will take in 12,000 extra refugees who are fleeing the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Christians in this country should warmly applaud this surprising but very welcome change of policy by the government.

    There are many complexities and concerns in the implications of the Prime Minister’s statement. Already there are questions about priorities in selection of refugees and whether Christians should be given some priority.   It is abundantly clear that Christians in eastern Mediterranean countries have been severely persecuted for several decades. There used to be a large Palestinian Christian community but it has been practically obliterated in the last 40 years.

    This language about the selection of refugees brought immediate reactions in the media and some declared that if this was to be the pattern then that would be the end of social unity in Australia. This kind of reaction is understandable but the government in its policy statements has not endorsed this kind of selection. Indeed the source of refugees is quite specific. They will come from those fleeing the conflict in Syria and Iraq. ‘Our focus will be on those most in need – the women, children and families of persecuted minorities who have sought refuge from the conflict in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey’.

    But the war in Syria is complicated   Ross Burns Australian Ambassador to Syria (1984-87) points out that the

    ‘Syrian conflict is an increasingly multi-layered scene where violence on all sides has risen to catastrophic proportions. It began as a citizens’ revolt against a brutally repressive government but has since become a multilayered civil war in which a bewildering range of Islamist forces have competed to lead the fight against an oppressive regime. All parties to the conflict have their backers outside Syria with some contributing military resupply, others turning a blind eye to movements into Syria of fighters and arms.’

    The first few years of the conflict saw fighting extend principally into Muslim majority areas of the country while many minority groups (among them Christians, Druze and Alawis) found shelter in areas under government control. Many Christians, in particular, became apologists for the regime in its efforts to project abroad its case that it was fighting the threat of ‘Islamic extremists’—a threat which was largely awakened as a result of the regime’s appetite right from the start for violence and repression as the answer to any form of dissent.

    However the most important complications in this matter are likely to arise here in Australia in the reception and settling of these refugees. This is not a straightforward matter.

    1. Not all in Australia support it or will not like some aspect of the way it works out.
    2. for good practical reasons not all can directly help.
    3. Some simply don’t want to be involved because they don’t approve of the government decision
    4. Some are fearful of the effects on their local community. The member for parliament for the seat of Dawson in Queensland, George Christensen, has expressed strong concern on the affect such an influx would have on his electorate where there is already significant unemployment.
    5. Some point to the many disadvantaged in our community already – will they be neglected? Tony Abbot said these issues will be dealt with in the way the project is handled. That will not be easy.
    6. There will be some prejudice against Muslim people and opposition to more coming – no doubt we will see religious and ethnic stereotyping as this programme goes forward.

    All of these concerns have to be confronted and dealt with both sympathetically and constructively. These concerns cannot be simply brushed aside. They must be recognised and addressed.

    How we as a society do this will be vital for the good of those who come and also for those who are the existing Australians.

    There is an underlying moral question in all this. Why should we be doing all this anyway? Ought we to not be protecting our way of life as a model to other nations?

    For us as Christians and as a Christian community there is however a simple and unavoidable challenge.

    Our Archbishop put his finger on it in his excellent article in the SMH last Thursday.

    The parable of the Good Samaritan is an incendiary critique of discrimination based on race, ethnicity and religion. Listening to the story for the first time, many would have been incensed that Jesus had used the word “good” to describe a despised Samaritan. Yet it never crosses the Samaritan’s mind in the story to ask about the religion or background of the man he finds beaten and dying on the side of the road. His response is immediate, generous and unquestioning.

    Our ability to show love and mercy and provide a warm welcome to anyone in distress, regardless of their faith, must serve as a counterpoint to the brutality of IS. Our response needs to be immediate, generous and unquestioning regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.

    Three elements collide in the story.

    1. The context of complacent religion of the lawyer. He keeps the form but lacks the moral substance.
    1. The ordered complacency of the Levite and the Priest who place observance of religious practices before the moral challenge of their faith.
    1. The indiscriminate compassion of the despised ethnically offensive half foreigner was indeed the true neighbour:
      1. Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

    Extending mercy and compassion to the stranger is clearly central to Jesus’ understanding of how to conduct our lives.

    SO WHAT TO DO IN THE PESENT CHALLENGE

    Don’t panic – this is going to be a long haul both in Syria and Iraq and in Australia

    1. We have a record in Australia of adaptation and continuity in our basic values
    2. Those values are clearly embedded in our constitution, laws, institutions and habits – but we need to be constantly strengthening them, especially when we are confronted with a challenge such as this.
    3. The meeting with faith community leaders and settlements service providers with the Prime Minister is a good start in coordinating appropriate systems for settlement.
    4. Our Anglican Church has been on the front foot in this crisis .We should run with our fellow Christians
    5. The Primate, Archbishop Freier and service organisations of our church have declared their support
    6. The Archbishop of Sydney, Glenn Davies, has made public comment and in a letter sent to all parishes given an unprecedented challenge to parishes and organisations in the diocese to be actively involved.

    So what about us and our parish?

    For the parish as a whole

    I believe the Parish Council should lead the way in developing a strategy we can all be involved in according to our circumstances.

    For each of us as a base line we could

    1. Keep informed
    2. Pray – keep our response to this consciously before God
    3. Think what you can offer directly or indirectly e.g. help someone else, or some organisation like Anglicare
    4. Support the Parish Council to keep up to the challenge for the parish as a whole
    5. Speak up for generosity with your friends. It may well be that generosity will be at a discount in public and private conversation in the months ahead.
    6. Support our political representatives so that this task stays at the forefront of their attention.

    This challenge lies clearly before us. Millions of people are refugees. Our government has laid it open for us as citizens to be involved in a national contribution. Whatever we do we cannot avoid the challenge of compassion that lies before us. We can discuss and debate the means and the details, but as Christian people we have a clear choice in this matter.

    We must choose whether we will be complacent religious or Samaritans,

    A Sermon preached at St Michael’s Anglican Church, Vaucluse. 13 September 2015 by The Revd. Dr Bruce Kaye AM. He is Adjunct Research Professor, Centre for Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University.

     

     

     

     

    [1] Media Statement by Prime Minister 14 September 2015 http://www.pm.gov.au/media/2015-09-09/syrian-and-iraqi-humanitarian-crisis

     

    [2] John Menadue – Pearls and Irritations. publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog. Posted on 11/09/2015 by John Menadue

     

    [3] Article in Sydney Morning Herald, September 9, 2015. http://www.smh.com.au/comment/open-the-door-widely-to-syrian-refugees-20150909-gjij0h.html

  • The Exaggeration over Free Trade Agreements.

    I have posted many blogs in the last couple of years concerning the Free Trade Agreements with the Republic of Korea, Japan and China. I have pointed out that the years of negotiation of these agreements occurred under the Rudd and Gillard governments. The Abbott government gave the agreements the final touch. The other issues that I have raised is that the Abbott government has seriously exaggerated the benefits of the FTAs. Andrew Robb has referred to them as ‘turbo-charging’ the Australian economy.  That is nonsense but unfortunately the exaggerated nonsense continues even with the new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The FTAs are useful but we need to keep them in proportion.

    Over a decade ago, we had a great deal of exaggeration about the FTA that John Howard negotiated with President Bush. It turns out that there was a negative effect on Australia of this FTA.

    In this blog on 10 September 2015 I drew attention to an article by Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer ‘What’s really at stake if the China FTA falls through’. Dixon and Rimmer wrote that ‘Economic modelling for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade by the Centre for International Economics (CIE) demonstrates the gains of the agreement (with China) will be modest. The CIE estimates the gain in economic welfare from the three North Asian FTAs … will be 0.4%.’

    In the SMH on September 15, the Economic Editor of the Age, Peter Martin, wrote about the impact of the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. The article was headed ‘How many jobs? The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement will create hardly any’. Peter Martin commented ‘[the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement] will create only a few thousand jobs, according to the government’s own modelling, conducted by the Canberra-based Centre for International Economics. But you wouldn’t know it from the way the modelling has been mangled and butchered by the government.’  For Peter Martin’s article, see link below.  The government’s exaggerations about FTAs have become a scandal. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/how-many-jobs-the-chinaaustralia-free-trade-agreement-will-create-hardly-any-20150914-gjlv06.html

  • Rod Tiffen Lord Leveson, your country needs you, again.

    Two events in the past week show the importance of the Leveson Inquiry reconvening to complete its second report. The Leveson inquiry was set up by British Prime Minister David Cameron in July 2011 at the height of the phone hacking scandal centered on Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper.

    Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry became, as he said in his report, ‘the most public and the most concentrated look at the press that this country has seen’. The proceedings provided many riveting moments as in nine months of oral hearings 337 witnesses gave evidence, including victims of phone hacking. Four prime ministers and a variety of politicians and media figures, including Rupert and James Murdoch also testified and were cross-examined.

    In November 2012, Leveson published a four volume, almost 2000 page report. It recommended a system of press accountability with a statutory basis. Cameron, having earlier promised to implement the reforms, immediately surrendered to the press proprietors’ lobbying and there have been only very partial moves since towards reform.

    Leveson’s report was part one. The second part – looking in detail at News and its web of contacts – was indefinitely delayed because of the necessity to refrain from any publication which would prejudice criminal proceedings. It has been widely assumed that the second part would never be done.

    Now, however, almost three years later, all the major criminal prosecutions are completed, and there is still a need for an authoritative and comprehensive report.

    The legal record over the last few years has yielded some convictions and some important revelations, but also a series of unanswered questions. The most famous trial, the longest completed criminal trial in British history, involved eight defendants, including Rebekah Brooks, on a total of 15 charges. It was also the best funded defence in British history, with some estimates that Murdoch spent more than £30 million pounds, so that the defence was much more lavishly resourced than the prosecution. This eight month trial produced only one guilty verdict, with former News of the World editor and staff member for Prime Minister Cameron, Andy Coulson, sent to jail. It is important to recall however that after those proceedings, there were eight guilty verdicts or guilty pleas to do with phone hacking, and two acquittals (Rebekah Brooks and Stuart Kuttner).

    On charges to do with newspapers bribing officials, codenamed Operation Elveden by the police, dozens of journalists were arrested, but as of now, I think, only one has been convicted – two others were convicted but those convictions were overturned on appeal. The toll among public servants has been greater, and they are subject to much greater legal hazard than journalists. The case of Bettina Jordan-Barber illustrates the difference.

    Jordan-Barber, a Ministry of Defence official, received around £100,000 over nine years from the Sun newspaper. She was sentenced to 12 months jail. Rebekah Brooks, when she was editor of the Sun from 2003 to 2006, authorized eleven payments totaling £38,000. Brooks testified that it never occurred to her that the person, whom her reporter referred to in his emails as my ‘number one military contact’ and ‘ace military source’ might actually be a public official. She was found not guilty.

    Later, that reporter, John Kay, 71, and two of his editors were also found not guilty. Kay had arranged 35 payments to Jordan-Barber for tips linked to 69 stories. The jury members were convinced that the leaks were in the public interest. It is not clear whether the jury looked at all 69 stories, but it seems they must have taken a very broad view of what constitutes public interest.

    One of the two events of the past week which indicate that the Leveson inquiry should be reconvened is the dropping of charges against former News of the World executive Alex Marunchak and private detective Jonathan Rees for hacking into computers between 2005 and 2007. The charges had to be dropped because they were brought later than the three year limit on computer hacking crimes. So, again because of a legal restriction, the substance of the charges will not be resolved.

    There are other remarkable aspects of the relationship between Rees and the paper, which paid him up to £150,000 a year for his services. These included using his extensive contacts among corrupt police to buy information for the paper. He was jailed once for planting cocaine on the wife of a client in a divorce case. The day he was released from jail, the paper’s editor Andy Coulson immediately re-hired him. Rees was also charged in 2002 with murdering his former partner Daniel Morgan, who was killed in 1987 allegedly when he was threatening to reveal corruption among Rees and some police. Some of those police were initially in charge of the investigation. When charges were brought 15 years later, obviously many questions surrounded the evidence presented in court.

    In 2002 the BBC’s Crimewatch program had presenter Jacqui Hames and her husband police officer David Cook appealing for information about the crime. An associate of Rees contacted News International editors who agreed to ‘sort Cook out’, and placed surveillance vans outside the couple’s house. Out of all the misdeeds revealed by Murdoch’s News staff in London, this – seeking to inhibit police investigation of a murder – is, in my view, one of the most revealing about the corporation’s misuse of power and its immorality. As of this week, Rees’s involvement in computer hacking for the company will not be legally punished.

    The other major event of this week, one that has attracted much more attention, is the reinstatement of Rebekah Brooks as head of News UK. In July 2011, at the height of the scandal, she resigned as head of Murdoch’s UK operations with a severance payout of £10.8 million. In addition, she received full payment of her legal fees plus some ongoing support for office expenses. She remained a Murdoch favourite, sometimes holidaying with the family and for some months now being a consultant in the US.

    Now that the British election is safely over, Murdoch has brought her back to her old job, with a rumoured salary of £3 million a year. When Murdoch appeared before a House of Commons committee about the scandal, he called it the most humble day of my life. As Margaret Simons aptly commented, perhaps the reappointment of Brooks is the most arrogant day of his life – although there are many more days competing for this title than for most humble. Murdoch appears to be taking the criminal not guilty verdict as a much more open-ended view that Brooks did nothing wrong.

    Labour’s shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant, who was one of the phone tapping victims, colourfully and courageously called the move ‘two fingers up to the British public’. He said that Brooks’s defence in her criminal trial was ‘that she was incompetent and had no idea what was going on and the end results was that company lost £300 million. It mystifies me that Rupert Murdoch would want to reappoint her’.

    It is also though two fingers up to two other groups. One is Murdoch’s shareholders, who watch on helpless to stop this commercially perverse move, which shows yet again how feeble are the mechanisms of corporate governance to tame the octogenarian’s power, and must wonder how Brooks’s reinstatement will add to shareholder value.

    The second group is more interesting. There is a ghost army of former Murdoch employees whose careers have been ruined by the scandals. The two leading company executives who oversaw the company during its misdeeds and then its defence, are now sitting pretty: James Murdoch has been promoted to head of Twenty First Century Fox and now Rebekah Brooks has come out of her lucrative retirement into a lucrative executive position.

    Most of the others involved in the scandal are not doing so well. For example the former head of security for the company, Mark Hanna, who was found not guilty at the same trial in which Brooks was a defendant, is complaining that he is damaged goods and cannot since the end of the trial find suitable employment. Soon afterwards the company made him redundant with a payout of £45,000. He is now suggesting that he might participate in a project that would reveal the company’s ‘underhand’ activity which will ‘shock everybody’. Similarly many of the journalists charged are now unemployed, and there are reports of health and marriage problems. Indeed their plight might make good fodder for a tabloid exposé. Like Hanna, the one saleable commodity many of them have is to sell revelations of their previous nefarious activities.

    No-one can guess whether this will happen, and if so their stories may give more salacious details but would not comprise a comprehensive and authoritative account.

    Lord Leveson, your country needs you, again.

    Rod Tiffen is Emeritus Professor of political Science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of ‘Rupert Murdoch: A Reassessment’ (NewSouth 2014).

     

     

  • “U.S. should bear blame for European refugee, humanitarian crisis”

    Disastrous intervention by the US has been the cause of many major refugee flows including the current flows out of the Middle East. The people’s Daily published an interesting article on this subject on 7 September.  The article refers to refugees from Syria, Lybia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It could have added that one of the major refugee flows since WWII was triggered by the disastrous intervention in Vietnam.  See article from People’s Daily below.  John Menadue

     

    Xinhua Commentary: U.S. should bear blame for European refugee, humanitarian crisis

    By Hu Yao (Xinhua)    09:10, September 07, 2015

    BEIJING, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) — When millions of people around the world were taken aghast by the pictures of drowned three-year  old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi lying washed up on a Turkish beach and the massive refugee crisis engulfing Europe, they should see through the fact that the United States is mainly responsible for all the mess.

    The main sources of today’s refugees — Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan –are targets of U.S. intervention, which led to devastation,chaos, deteriorating domestic security and extensive displacements. People in those countries could no longer enjoy even basic human rights. Many of them had no choice but to flee for life, not only to neighboring countries, but to Europe.

    According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, more than 300,000 refugees and migrants have ventured to cross the Mediterranean into Europe so far this year, and over 2,600 didn’t survive the dangerous journey.

    While the European countries are accused of indifference and incapabilities to cope with the refugee crisis, the Unites States, their closest ally and the major cause of the crisis,seems not to have realized its moral obligation to help clean up the mess and work to address the root cause of the problem.

    Syria is the latest country following Iraq and Libya to become the victim of U.S.intervention in the Middle East. Having been mired in a fullblown civil war for four years due to persistent U.S.led Western intervention, the country was the largest source of refugees bound for Europe in 2013, 2014 and the first half of this year. The militants of the so-called Islamic State (IS), emerging from the Syrian oppositions which were supported by the U.S. to topple the Syrian government, have launched numerous attacks against Syrian civilians, who have become targets of kidnappings, suicide and car bombings, among others. Their lives are at peril if they hang on in their own country.

    On other fronts, although the United States has pulled out its troops from some countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be still held accountable for having destabilized these countries in the first place and then leaving them in a hopeless mess.

    As a self-styled leader of the world, it is a shame for the United States to stir up chaos,anarchism and the emergence of extremist and terrorist groups in those countries by its selfish foreign policies.

    Now as Europe struggles to cope with a daily influx of thousands of refugees, the U.S.should act immediately and do more to help solve the refugee crisis and work out long-term measures to help troubled countries and regions restore calm, stability and normal life as soon as possible.

  • Josef Szwarc. Resettling an additional 12,000 refugees.

    The Government has announced that “Australia will resettle an additional 12,000 refugees who are fleeing the conflict in Syria and Iraq.”

    http://www.pm.gov.au/media/2015-09-09/syrian-and-iraqi-humanitarian-crisis

    This note publishes the statement with some comments about various aspects.

    “Our focus will be on those most in need – the women, children and families of persecuted minorities who have sought refuge from the conflict in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.”

    Comment: There were reports of political and other commentators suggesting that people of Muslim faith should not be selected. At a press conference about the decision to take in the additional refugees, the Prime Minister stated that there would not be discrimination against Muslims and said: “if you look at the persecuted minorities of the region there are Muslim minorities, Druze, Turkmen, Kurds, there are non-Muslim minorities, Christians…Jews, Yazidis, Armenians, so there are persecuted minorities that are Muslim, there are persecuted minorities that are non-Muslim….” The explicit rejection of faith-based discrimination is welcome: to act otherwise would be unconscionable.

    “A team of Government officials will depart for the region as soon as possible to begin identifying and processing potential candidates for resettlement.”

    Comment: The commitment to implementation expeditiously is very welcome – the level of immediate need is great.

    “In addition, Australia will provide humanitarian support to more than 240,000 Syrian and Iraqi people who have been forced to flee their homes or seek refuge in neighbouring countries. This is expected to cost $44 million. “

    Comment: The boost in assistance for people in the region is important – international financial support for UNHCR is well short of what the agency urgently requires.

    “This funding will deliver much needed food, water, healthcare, education, emergency supplies and protection, including support for women and girls.”

    “With this additional commitment, Australia’s contribution to help address the humanitarian crisis in Syria and Iraq will be around $230 million since 2011.”

    “Today’s announcement represents a significant contribution to the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.  It is a generous, prudent and proportionate response by a decent and compassionate nation.

    It follows consultations with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other humanitarian agencies in Geneva.

    Our officials will work with the UNHCR to resettle the refugees as soon as possible.

    They will undergo normal security, health and character checks before coming to Australia and receiving permanent protection.”

    Comment: It is to be hoped that the aim of resettlement ‘as soon as possible’ is not hampered by the pace of conducting ‘normal security, health and character checks’ which can be very prolonged and in the order of 12 months and longer. However, there are media reports of the first arrivals by Christmas. Significant additional resources will be required for both the Department of Immigration and ASIO which may mean reallocation of current staff from other tasks or recruitment, but new staff will take some time to be able to do the complex work involved. Other sources will have to be tapped – The Australian reports that “the load on the Australian immigration system could see retired officials and contractors brought into departments to help handle the load….” 

    The commitment to permanent protection is welcome: the refugees have endured traumatic events, so this is a critical measure of security to allow them to rebuild their lives.

    “The 12,000 places will be in addition to the existing humanitarian programme of 13,750, which rises to 18,750 in 2018-19.

    This decision represents a significant increase in Australia’s humanitarian intake.

    We are able to make this contribution because the Coalition Government has stopped the flow of illegal boats to Australia, easing the pressure on our humanitarian programme.

    It will require the support of all Australian governments and community organisations.

    We will engage State and Territory leaders and community organisations in coming days to discuss how the nation can contribute to this effort.”

    Comment: A number of State governments and community organisations have indicated their willingness to support the settlement of an increased intake of refugees, building on the important roles already played by State, territory and local governments and civil society over many years. New models of collaboration and engagement are needed and we can draw on a history of effective responses to the intake of large numbers of immigrants and refugees.

    Josef Szwarc is Manager, Research and Policy, Victorian Foundation for survivors of Torture.

     

  • Ross Burns. Syria and Persecuted Minorities.

    The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international legal instrument to which Australia was an original signatory, contains a clause making clear that ‘The Contracting States shall apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin’.

    It therefore seems curious that at least three Ministers, most notably the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, have made statements that echo the wording that Australia’s new program to take 12,000 Syrian refugees under UNHCR auspices announced on 9 September would give preference to ‘persecuted minorities’.

    While on the surface this wording may sound consistent with the convention it has rightly raised a few eyebrows in the Australian Muslim community. In the Syrian context, does this reference indicate that Australia only considers ‘minorities’ as persecuted? Must members of the majority community in Syria have their claims under the convention downgraded?

    The Syrian conflict is an increasingly multi-layered scene where violence on all sides has risen to catastrophic proportions. It began as a citizens’ revolt against a brutally repressive government but has since become a multi-layered civil war in which a bewildering range of Islamist forces have competed to lead the fight against an oppressive regime. All parties to the conflict have their backers outside Syria with some contributing military resupply, others turning a blind eye to movements into Syria of fighters and arms.

    The first few years of the conflict saw fighting extend principally into Muslim majority areas of the country while many minority groups (among them Christians, Druze and Alawis) found shelter in areas under government control. Many Christians, in particular, became apologists for the regime in its efforts to project abroad its case that it was fighting the threat of ‘Islamic extremists’—a threat which was largely awakened as a result of the regime’s appetite right from the start for violence and repression as the answer to any form of dissent.

    The latest dimension to the conflict in the past year is the rise of ‘Islamic State’ or ISIS—a spillover from the Sunni vs Shi`a conflict in Iraq and thus another product of the Allied contributors’ failure to appreciate the consequences of the Malaki government’s marginalisation of the Sunnis. It is in this phase that many Christians in the eastern provinces of Syria—mainly poor agricultural communities not affiliated to the main Orthodox or Catholic streams that had congregated in the regime-held centres to the west— found themselves trapped by ISIS’ lightening rise. In the early years of the conflict, however, undoubtedly the Muslim suburbs of the major cities bore the brunt of the regime’s violent onslaught which brought the major waves of refugee outflows still trapped in the camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. In this situation, only a strictly needs-based selection process would be warranted. Part of that assessment process needs to take into account whether communities could ever safely return but that is a question that hangs over virtually every community that once comprised Syria’s mosaic of cultures and faiths.

    Picking favourites in this maze of tragic complexity is not a good idea. There is no Syrian community, ethnic or religious, which has avoided exposure to the violence that has washed across Syria. The pattern does not discriminate by race or creed. Even those who have found refuge in regime-held areas can suddenly find the lines have changed.

    The Abbott government’s new program is an admirably generous development. It is regrettable, though, that it has to be ‘sold’ to one element of the Australian public (the Coalition’s right wing) by code-worded rhetoric suggesting that the UN convention can be manipulated in a way that would minimise Muslim participation. Everyone will need to be on board to make this program a success. There is every reason to believe that Syrians have the background, particularly educational, and motivation to make their new lives a success. It would be tragic to spoil the program’s chances by allowing it to be labeled as an exercise in selective compassion, thus alienating parts of the community whose cooperation is essential to making it a success.

    Ross Burns was Australian Ambassador in Syria from 1984 to 1987.

     

  • Ian Marsh. What wrong with Australia’s political system?

    Most readers of this piece will not need lessons about the power of economic incentives. They know that efficient price signals can channel investment into productive assets and these same signals will drain funds from unconstructive pursuits. The same process more or less works at individual levels. Both good and bad performance is demonstrated by similar calculations. In turn these calculations draw on a variety of other metrics – prices, volumes, demand, supply, growth estimates and so forth.

    Readers also know these numbers are reasonably reliable because they come from credible institutions. Thus markets are reasonably ‘free’ and undistorted. The Bureau and Census and Statistics is honest. The Stock Exchange is not manipulated. The judicial system acts according to the rule of law.

    At a tertiary level, a variety of other institutions – the Productivity Commission, APRA, the Reserve Bank – police these secondary systems and reframe them when necessary to ensure that they continue to support wider public interests. This in essence is the familiar economic system.

    Why do so many people then approach the political system with naïve or simplistic assumptions? Why do they not recognise that the political world is also a complex interdependent system where immediate incentives depend on the effective working of more embedded institutions?

    If they did, the reasons for the current impasse in public policy in Australia might be more apparent – perhaps along with the profound nature of the present political challenge.

    But let’s start with a fact. Since 1983, only one major piece of economic reform requiring legislative endorsement has passed in this country without bipartisan support. That was the GST which John Howard successfully navigated into law after winning the 1998 election. But he won that election and lost the popular vote. Hardly an auspicious signal to his successors.

    Every other major measure in Australia since 1983 has required bipartisan support.

    Why, short of a palpable crisis, is bipartisanship so elusive? Look first at immediate incentives. Politicians live in a two party, winner-takes-all world. Conceding common ground can spell disaster for a leader. Look no further than Malcolm Turnbull.

    This adversarial system was conceived to highlight the choice between major parties that differed in their basic policy orientation. In the process, common ground, which was essential to sustain continuity in governance, was deliberately disguised or concealed. The parliamentary theatre was deliberately designed to highlight programmatic differences. The forms and procedures of parliament – question time, the allocation of time, executive prerogatives etc. – work to sustain this divide. The late Bernard Crick captured this perfectly in his depiction of parliamentary routines as ‘tantamount to a continuing election campaign.’

    This political architecture was indeed appropriate and relevant for much of the period from the birth of this system in 1909 until the adoption of a softened neo-liberal programme by the Hawke-Keating government after 1983. Now party differences do not turn on the basic longer term agenda. The market system has more or less won.

    But political leaders still live in a world in which immediate incentives dictate sharp product differentiation. How to respond? Is it surprising that from Tampa on we have seen a turn to populism and worse?

    But you might say – OK, the major parties have converged in their fundamental approach. So why not share this agreement with the public and fight over the detail of measures. Why not make clear we agree that the states need more tax revenue – but we disagree about where this should come from. The blue side says a GST of 15% and the red side says the Medicare levy. Why not play the game that way.

    The old problem of incentives recurs. Earlier we noted the political incentives that, on controversial issues, discourage disclosure of even partial common ground. These are reinforced by executive arrangements. Our present political system makes it impossible to separate debate into longer term and more immediate streams. The political system as it operates in parliament is governed by three basic conventions – ministerial responsibility, collective cabinet responsibility and confidence. Note these are conventions. They are not enshrined in the constitution. They have no wider legal base. They can be changed by votes on the floor of parliament. But they do determine the structure of executive power. They are long established. They distribute many privileges. And these rules of the game are sustained by the power and force of inertia. These conventions make it impossible to separate debate into longer term and more immediate components.

    Then there are the distorting incentives that are associated with the media cycle. This reinforces populism and a short term orientation. Why does this incentive structure now exercise so much power?

    The media cycle exercises its power because it now provides the primary link between political leaders and their publics. Earlier more complex tissue has largely dissolved. Once around 50% of the community had strong or very strong affiliation to one or other of the major parties. Party organisations enrolled activists. Party brands cued public opinion. Party programmes signalled longer term values and ambitions. Each party stood for a clear and distinctive position in the eyes of its supporters.

    Political loyalty then turned primarily on class identification. This was the dominant social fault line. Class remains an important marker. But it no longer predominates. The women’s, gay, environment, consumer, animal rights, Indigenous, ethnic and other movements of the 1970s have busted that simple binary divide. And they have stimulated conservative reactions which have further compounded differentiation. Australian society is now pluralised in a way that would be unrecognisable to Alfred Deakin or Billy Hughes much less to John Curtin and Robert Menzies.

    The major parties try to contain these internal pressures, not surprisingly often not very effectively.

    So if you want to understand why the Australia political system is in trouble look no farther than this catalogue of distorting incentives and hollowed out systems. My personal view is that the two party system has past its use-by date. But this is a large judgment that is likely to be hotly contested – not least by those who in one form or another are advantaged by the present structure of power. Or by those whose political imaginations cannot extend beyond the existing architecture.

    Were we to move beyond it, what should count as the central challenge? Surely the primary concern must be to renew the tissue that links the system to the people? In our more fluid and more pluralised society we need capacities for a more informed public conversation. We need to be able to debate single issues and we need capacities to do this initially at the level of strategy – is this an important issue for our country? What are some options in responding?

    In other words we need an institutional design that can separate the longer term strategic conversation from a more immediate one about responses. Ideally the main parties would campaign fiercely over the latter issue – but bipartisanship would reinforce public support for the former. By such means, majority coalitions that can underwrite (or prevent) policy action could be constructed.

    How to do this? We do not need wild schemes. This is how the Senate worked from 1901 to 1909. Ministers were drawn largely from the House. The Senate and its committees were custodians of longer term issues.

    But this is a bigger story. We may need new political architecture for a more pluralised twenty-first century. But before there is even a remote possibility of that happening, the distorting incentives and dysfunctional institutions that are causing our present political discontents need to be frankly acknowledged.

    Ian Marsh is a Visiting Professor at the UTS Management School. His study, Democratic Decline and Democratic Renewal:  Political Change in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (with Raymond Miller) was published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press.

  • Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer. What’s really at stake if the China FTA falls through.

    Earlier this month Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott sounded a warning on the impact to Australia’s economy if the recently signed China-Australia Free Trade Agreement were to fail.

    In a statement, Abbott said:

    “If Bill Shorten and the Labor Party try to reject the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement they will be sabotaging our economic future and they will be turning their back on one of the greatest opportunities our country has ever been offered.”

    Economic modelling for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade by the Centre for International Economics (CIE) demonstrates the gains of the agreement will be modest. The CIE estimates the gain in economic welfare from the three North Asian FTAs (the recently activated agreements with Japan and Korea and the agreement with China awaiting parliamentary ratification) will be 0.4%.

    We could call this an annual boost in welfare of A$3 billion or A$300 per household or A$130 per person. If we want an impressive number we could work out the present value of a A$3 billion annuity, and call the gain A$50 billion. All of these numbers are being quoted by proponents of the agreements. But whatever way we dress it up the gain is still 0.4%.

    The FTAs will give Australia a welfare gain because they will enable Australian firms to receive higher prices for their products in the three North Asian countries. The main reason is that these countries already have agreements with some of Australia’s competitors, including New Zealand.

    If the Chinese tariff on beef is 15% for non-FTA partners, then, in the absence of the China-Australia FTA, for Australia to compete with New Zealand in the Chinese beef market the Australian pre-tariff price (the price received by Australian producers) must be 15% less than the New Zealand price. When Australia becomes an FTA partner with China, it can edge up its pre-tariff price towards that of New Zealand.

    The FTA tariff reductions by the North Asian countries that will significantly benefit Australia are confined to a few agricultural products. For example, in the China-Australia agreement, Chinese tariffs on imports of Australian dairy, beef, lamb and wine all fall by more than 10 percentage points.

    In total, the CIE estimates that the FTAs will give Australia an increase in the prices it receives for its exports of about 1.2%. With exports being only a fraction of GDP, this translates into a welfare gain of 0.4%.

    Proponents of the FTAs claim they will create jobs. Trade Minister Andrew Robb has said Australian jobs would grow by 9,000 per year to be 178,000 higher in 2035.

    This is incorrect. The CIE study says the agreements will cause jobs to be 5,434 higher in 2035. It seems that Robb erroneously derived his figure by adding the employment effects in each of the 20 years and assigning the grand total (178,000) to 2035.

    More than jobs

    Despite assertions to the contrary by our political leaders, FTAs are not primarily about jobs. Aggregate employment depends on macroeconomic conditions, particularly the balance between real wages and productivity. The path of employment over any period longer than a couple of years will be determined independently of whether or not Australia completes the trifecta of North Asian FTAs by ratifying the agreement with China.

    As with other favourable microeconomic policies, the FTAs with the North Asian countries are about improving wage rates by increasing the value of what Australian workers can produce. The CIE projects a long-run real wage increase in Australia from the agreements of 0.3%.

    As well as goods and services trade, the three FTAs deal with foreign direct investment (FDI). CIE’s view is that there will be no discernible effect on inbound FDI for Australia. The China-Australia FTA may encourage Australian outbound FDI in the Chinese service sector, but it is doubtful this will have a noticeable effect on the welfare of Australian households.

    Why are FTAs such hot political issues?

    Lack of community understanding often creates controversy over trade policies. These policies are often blamed for structural adjustment problems that arise from other factors such as appreciation associated with the success of our mineral industries.

    But even when they are understood, trade policies are contentious because they are approximately zero-sum games. There are domestic winners and losers, and although the national welfare gain is not zero, it is usually small. Unlike a good health or social policy, which can make everyone a winner, a trade policy tends to pit the interests of one part of the community against those of another.

    Australian winners from the North Asian FTAs are industries producing agricultural and related downstream products subject to substantial reductions in Japanese, Korean and Chinese tariffs. This is illustrated in the right-hand panel of the chart below.

    Percentage impact on Australian output of FTAs with North Asian countries

    Agriculture and downstream product sectors stand to gain disproportionately. Centre for International Economics

    The losers are mainly in manufacturing (left-hand panel). For them, the main negative impact is via the exchange rate, which appreciates in response to increases in agricultural exports and the terms of trade. Appreciation hurts import-competing manufacturing industries by lowering the $A price of imports. Appreciation also explains why the CIE projects negative effects for some Australian mining industries.

    Spinning the benefits

    In the debate about the China-Australia FTA, the Abbott government is exaggerating the potential benefits. By not engaging in an evidence-based truthful discussion, the government runs the risk of creating unrealistic expectations and eventual disillusionment. This has the potential to inhibit Australia’s participation in future FTAs, which will be necessary to safeguard our competitive position as FTAs between other countries proliferate.

    The opposition, led by Bill Shorten, has focused attention on the labour-market aspects of the China-Australia FTA. The proposed agreement largely eliminates the requirement for businesses operating in Australia to look for Australian residents to fill vacancies before bringing in workers from China under the 457 visa program. There are many other requirements under this program that Chinese workers would still need to meet.

    Expert opinion suggests the liberalisation of entry requirements under the China-Australia FTA will have a negligible effect on job opportunities for Australian workers. Whether this opinion is right or wrong is not the main point here. Eliciting and testing information and analysis relevant to policies proposed by the government is a vital role of the opposition.

    Rather than branding Shorten as an economic saboteur, Tony Abbott would serve the community better by laying out the evidence on how the China-Australia FTA will affect the Australian economy, including the labour market.

    Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer are both Professors, Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University. This article was first published in The Conversation on September 8, 2015.

  • Rod Tucker. The NBN: why it’s slow, expensive and obsolete.

    The Abbott Coalition government came to power two years ago this week with a promise to change Labor’s fibre to the premises (FTTP) National Broadband Network (NBN) to one using less-expensive fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technologies, spruiking its network with the three-word slogan: “Fast. Affordable. Sooner.”

    But with the release in August of the 2016 NBN corporate plan and in the light of overseas developments, it is clear that the Coalition’s broadband network will not provide adequate bandwidth, will be no more affordable than Labor’s FTTP network and will take almost as long to roll out.

    With the benefits of two years’ hindsight since 2013, let’s look at the Coalition’s performance against each of the three assertions in their 2013 slogan.

    Affordable

    The graph (below) shows funding estimates for the NBN from December 2010 to August 2015. Labor’s funding estimates for its FTTP NBN rose from A$40.9 billion in December 2010 to A$44.9 billion in September 2013, an increase of 10%. By comparison, the Coalition’s funding estimates, both for FTTP and the so-called multi-technology mix (MTM), have fluctuated wildly.

    Labor and Coalition peak funding estimates from December 2010 to August 2015. *December 2013 data adjusted to account for different contingency. Rod Tucker, Author provided

    The estimated funding required for the Coalition’s NBN has almost doubled from A$28.5 billion before the 2013 election to between A$46 billion and A$56 billion in August. Before the 2013 election, the Coalition claimed that its proposed multi-technology-mix network would cost less than one-third (30%) of Labor’s FTTP-based NBN.

    But in new estimates released in the 2016 corporate plan, the cost of the multi-technology mix favoured by the Coalition blew out and rose to two-thirds (66%) of the cost of a FTTP-based network.

    Also, the cost of repairing and maintaining Telstra’s ageing copper network was likely underestimated, as was the cost of retraining and maintaining a workforce with the wider range of skills needed to install and maintain the multi-technology-mix network – costs that are unique to the MTM.

    In the space of two years, the lower-cost deal the Coalition spruiked to Australian voters has turned out to be not so affordable after all.

    Sooner

    The Coalition probably underestimated the predictably lengthy delays in re-negotiating the agreement with Telstra as well as delays in re-designing the network the new IT systems needed to manage a more complicated network with multiple technologies.

    The graph (below) shows the actual and planned number of premises passed (or in today’s parlance – ready for service) for the original FTTP network and the Coalition’s network.

    Premises ready for service, plans and actual, as published by Labor and the Coalition. Rod Tucker, Author provided

    The Coalition’s original target was to bring at least 25 Mbps to all 13 million Australian premises by 2016. That target has now been quietly dropped and replaced with a target of more than 50 Mbps to 90% of premises by 2020.

    At the end of July 2015, almost two years after the 2013 election, only 67 premises had been served by multi-technology-mix technologies. In the meantime, as shown (in the graph above), the roll-out of FTTP has continued, albeit at a lower rate than Labor originally intended.

    This lower roll-out rate has led to fewer connected customers and lower revenue. It will be interesting to see if the newly released targets for premises ready for service will be achieved (blue broken line in the graph above).

    Labor certainly had its problems when it was in charge. For example, slow negotiations with Telstra and asbestos in Telstra’s infrastructure caused delays of around one year. The funding requirements for Labor’s FTTP network crept up by about 10% from 2010 to 2013.

    But the delays and cost blowouts have been very much worse under the Coalition than under Labor.

    Fast

    Australia’s broadband capabilities are falling behind its international peers. According to internet companies Ookla and Akami, Australia’s broadband speed lags well behind other advanced and even emerging economies.

    In 2009, Ookla ranked Australia’s average broadband download speed as 39th in the world. Since then, our international ranking has steadily declined and slipped to 59th place earlier this year.

    What’s worse, my studies of trends in internet speed in Australia and in a range of developed and developing countries show that FTTN technology – a key part of the Coalition’s MTM – will not be enough to meet the needs of Australian broadband customers.

    In short, FTTN technology will cement Australia’s place as an internet backwater. Our world ranking could fall as low as 100th by 2020.

    In many forward-looking nations, fibre-to-the-node technology has never been entertained as an option. In some countries where it has been installed, network operators are planning to move away from FTTN in favour of more advanced broadband technologies like FTTP. In doing the opposite, Australia is moving backwards.

    If FTTN magically appeared on our doorsteps by 2016, as originally promised by the Coalition, there would certainly be a short-term advantage. But the 2016 target has been missed and the FTTN component of the network will be obsolete by the time the roll-out is completed.

    Of course, there is no point in speed just for speed’s sake. Studies in Europe and the United States have shown a strong correlation between GDP growth and internet speed.

    In the US and elsewhere, increasing numbers of homes and businesses are receiving services at 1 Gbps and higher. A recent study presents evidence that communities served by 1 Gbps and more are faring better economically than communities with slow-speed broadband.

    If in 2013 the Coalition had simply allowed NBN Co to get on with the job of rolling out its fibre-to-the-premises NBN, rather than changing it to an inferior multi-technology mix, it may well have ended up spending less money and delivered Australia a much better network.

    The Coalition sold the Australian public a product that was supposed to be fast, one-third the cost and arrive sooner than what Labor was offering us. Instead the Coalition’s NBN will be so slow that it is obsolete by the time it’s in place, it will cost about the same as Labor’s fibre-to-the-premises NBN, and it won’t arrive on our doorsteps much sooner.

    By my reckoning, we didn’t get a good deal.

    Rod Tucker is Laureate Emeritus Professor at University of Melbourne. This article was first published in The Conversation on September 8, 2015.

     

  • Peter McNamara. Are all Australians just ‘Bad Samaritans’, or is it just the media?

    I always thought Australians were good Samaritans, welcoming people from all backgrounds, all races, all religions, to their rich and prosperous nation.

    It belies belief to see the media reporting that Australian Christians, including Catholic Archbishop Fisher, say that preference should be given to Christian refugees from war-torn Syria. The Australian does not ring true with its leader: “Fleeing Christians should go to front of queue – archbishop” above Archbishop Fisher’s photo (The Australian online, Sept 8 2015, Tess Livingstone)

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/europes-migrant-crisis/fleeing-christians-should-go-to-front-of-queue-archbishop/story-fnws9k7b-1227516995573

    This reported urging is ignorant of the fundamental principles of refugee resettlement under the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; and it is ignorant of the fundamental principles of the Christian faith.

    First, the International Refugee Convention, to which Australia is the first named signatory, (as is the Holy See) and to which Christian and Catholic lay and religious organisations were observers, provides at the very outset in Article 3:

    Non-discrimination: The Contracting States shall apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin.

    Second, if this were not enough for Christians to pause for thought, for even a minute, before calling for discriminatory refugee selection, then they should consider the principles of their own religion.

    How can Australians, and Australian Christians in particular, be such bad neighbours?

    Of course, the story is that the Samaritans were a minority, and unwelcome. Today’s Samaritans are the Australian Muslims that seem so hated by a noisy minority of Australians.

    Jesus, according to Luke, urged his listeners to follow the law that required Jews like Jesus to love “your neighbour as yourself”. The lawyers asked Jesus to define “neighbour” and Jesus in return asked the lawyers:

    “Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” 

    The expert in the law replied: The one who had mercy on him”. 

    Jesus told him: “Go and do likewise”. 

    It would be a horrible thing for Australian Christians to be seen as priests and Levites that pass by the injured because they are not Christian.

    Of course, one should not take the media on face value. The media has cynically taken Archbishop Fisher’s press release, and given it the emphasis it did not have: Fisher’s press release did not say, as quoted by The Australian “Fleeing Christians should go to front of queue”. To the contrary, Archbishop Fisher pleaded for religious minorities – he urged that “particular preference be given to persecuted Christians from Syria and Iraq and other religious minorities who have nowhere else to go…. We should also keep in mind the minorities within the Muslim community in these countries who are persecuted by Islamists and other Muslims”.

    Now the media, of course, would like to exploit divisions between religions. Heaven knows why? Surely not from some bigoted zealotry, that moreover fans the flames of debate, circulation, sales and advertising revenue? Have our editors become the priests and Levites in our own Australian parable of the Good Samaritan?

    Christians generally and Catholics in particular should decry this misrepresentation of their religion and ethics. Christian and Catholic organisations stand ready to welcome refugees of all, any and no religion, race or country, to help them resettle in a place safe from war and religious and racial discrimination. 

    Peter McNamara is a Sydney lawyer.

  • Klaus Neumann. Stepping up to the plate.

    Angela Merkel said last week ‘There will be no tolerance towards those who question the dignity of others.’

    Prime minister Tony Abbott is in favour of increasing the number of Syrian and Iraqi refugees allowed to resettle permanently in Australia. But when he announced on Sunday that Australia would “step up to the plate,” he didn’t have in mind an increase of the overall number of visas for refugees, who currently make up just 3 per cent of migrants accepted into Australia each year. More Syrian refugees would simply mean fewer refugees from other countries, including those in our region. (Under pressure from NSW premier Mike Baird and other influential members of his own party, he is now likely to increase the overall intake.)

    Contrast this with Germany. Last weekend alone, around 15,500 displaced people crossed the border from Hungary. The German immigration service expects a total of 800,000 new asylum applications this year, and many of the new arrivals will be allowed to stay.

    Those figures don’t put Germany in the same league as Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan, which are accommodating close to four million displaced Syrians between them. But 800,000 is a frighteningly large number, and taking in that many people will stretch the capacity of Germany’s local governments and welfare organisations. In comparison to other affluent countries, Germany can claim with some justice to be doing more than its fair share.

    What explains the willingness of the German government, and also of the majority of Germans, to welcome such a large number of displaced people? The reception is all the more remarkable because it’s not too long since the arrival of a smaller number of asylum seekers triggered a public outpouring of hatred and eventually prompted the German parliament to water down the right to asylum enshrined in the national constitution, the so-called Basic Law.

    This was during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people fled to Germany from the former Yugoslavia. Refugees were frequently referred to as Scheinasylanten – “pseudo asylum seekers” – and told to go back where they came from. On at least two occasions, angry mobs tried to burn down hostels in which asylum seekers had been housed.

    We shouldn’t idealise Germany’s reaction to the latest surge in numbers. Arson attacks and xenophobic demonstrations have occurred this time, too, particularly in the southeastern state of Saxony, and there has been much racist chatter online. But these responses have been dwarfed by an overwhelmingly welcoming attitude.

    Germany has good reason to welcome refugees – particularly those who are young and have transferrable skills. It has an ageing population, and there are real concerns that the age pension system will become unsustainable. It also has a perennial image problem. Most recently, it has made itself unpopular among some of its European neighbours by vetoing Greek requests for debt relief. Opening its doors to refugees highlights Germany’s credentials as a good global citizen.

    But pragmatic reasons alone can’t explain why most Germans seem relatively relaxed about the large number of non-German-speaking foreigners being allowed across the border. Nor do they explain why Germany’s response contrasts so sharply with Australia’s: after all, Australia, too, has the opportunity to make its neighbours forget, once and for all, about the White Australia policy by leading the way in providing security to forcibly displaced people in the Asia-Pacific region.

    Anyone looking for the reasons for the differences – between then and now, and between Germany and Australia – could do worse than have a close look at a recent statement by chancellor Angela Merkel.

    For months, while a small minority of xenophobes had become increasingly vocal and violent, Merkel did what she does best: she adopted a policy of wait-and-see. Or – to use a term that is likely to be voted the 2015Jugendwort (youth slang word) – she merkelte, appearing to dither about an appropriate response both to the refugee crisis and to the racist reaction among some Germans.

    Last week, she finally spoke up. And when she did, she didn’t mince words: “Es gibt keine Toleranz gegenüber denen, die die Würde anderer Menschen infrage stellen.” (There will be no tolerance towards those who question the dignity of others.)

    The key word here is Würde, or dignity. It had also been used by interior minister Thomas de Maizière, who said that three principles ought to guide the approach to refugees: dignity, security for those seeking Germany’s protection, and decency.

    Würde resonates powerfully in Germany. Article 1(1) of the Basic Law of 1949 begins with the words, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (“Human dignity shall be inviolable”). This and the next eighteen articles of the Basic Law constitute a German bill of rights; for West Germans, in particular, the rights enshrined in the Basic Law have been an important part of what it means to be German.

    Merkel’s and de Maizière’s emphasis on Würde signals that any debate about how to respond to the thousands of migrants arriving every day in Germany will not just be about Germans’ compassion or anger or fear but will also be about the rights of the new arrivals.

    This is the vital difference between the current discussions in Germany and Australia, where an outpouring of public support for Syrian refugees didn’t happen until viewers and readers were shown the heart-wrenching image of a drowned boy on a Turkish beach.

    The second sentence of the Basic Law’s Article 1(1) is also relevant: “To respect and protect [human dignity] shall be the duty of all state authority.” Merkel – as well as just about every other mainstream political leader in Germany – has been unambiguous: the government will come down hard on anybody who does not respect the human dignity of those seeking Germany’s protection.

    German political leaders agree that in dealing with xenophobes there is no alternative to the zero tolerance approach. Not least, this consensus is the lesson drawn from the racist rhetoric and violence of the early 1990s. The genie of a populist xenophobia was briefly let out of the bottle when mainstream politicians empathised with Germans who said they were afraid of being swamped by foreigners. It took many years and the concerted efforts of the political establishment and civil society groups to put it back in.

    Merkel is afraid the genie could be unleashed once more. She knows the importance of not kowtowing to the populist far right. She was asked how to respond to xenophobes, racist thugs and people regurgitating the ideologies of right-wing extremists. Did she think it was important to establish a dialogue with people on the far right? She replied:

    We need to clearly distance ourselves. There can be no apologies… The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.

    In the second half of the 1990s, Pauline Hanson claimed to speak for millions of disaffected Australians when she railed against asylum seekers and Indigenous people. Australia’s mainstream leaders tried to accommodate some of the views of her followers, and publicly empathised with those who feared that “boat people” would take their jobs or that their front gardens would become subject to native title claims.

    Unlike in Germany, racist innuendo and the demonisation of asylum seekers arriving by boat still have a place in mainstream political debate in Australia. Politicians are still suggesting that seeking Australia’s protection is illegal. Shock jocks still have licence to make inflammatory statements directed at people on account of their religion or ethnicity.

    As long as the Australian conversation about refugees and asylum seekers is guided by feelings rather than by a human rights framework, and as long as mainstream political leaders try to gain electoral mileage by condoning views and policies that don’t respect the dignity of all human beings, citizens and non-citizens, Australia’s response will differ starkly from that currently on show in Western Europe. •

    Klaus Neumann is the author of Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History, which was published by Black Inc. in June. He is Professor of History in the Swinburne Institute for Social Research.

    This article was first published in Inside Story on 7 September 2015.

  • David Isaacs, Alanna Maycock, The Senate Report on Nauru.

    On 31st August 2015, the Senate finally tabled its lengthy report on conditions at what is euphemistically called the Regional Processing Centre in Nauru (http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Regional_processing_Nauru/Regional_processing_Nauru/Final_Report). The RPC is in reality a prison camp where people live indefinitely in tents, their applications are not processed for over a year, and they are kept in ignorance of when if ever the applications will be processed. It is possible to appeal against a rejected application, but not against one which sits in limbo.

    Will the report make any difference? We know the Government will ignore its recommendations because the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection dismissed the enquiry before the report was published as “a political witch-hunt by an opposition-dominated committee.” He would know, because Liberal Governments have spent millions of tax-payer dollars on political witch-hunts called Royal Commissions.

    Will the public pay attention? We know from recent opinion polls that over half the Australian population believe we are not being harsh enough on asylum seekers. Little wonder when they are demonised by both major political parties and the Murdoch press, talked about as if they are terrorists and deemed unworthy of our compassion or even of being treated like human beings.

    The Abbott Government’s mantra when asked about detention centres, “we have turned back the boats and saved lives at sea” is dishonest on three counts. Firstly, refusing to reveal the truth about turn-backs because they are “operational matters” (another attempt to confuse asylum seekers with invading terrorists) means we have no idea whether the people turned back survive and one estimate suggests as many as 10% may be killed when returned to the country they fled. Such estimates cannot be confirmed or refuted because information is suppressed. Secondly, turning back boats contravenes International Law. The Europeans, who face a problem immeasurably worse than Australia, do not turn back boats; they try to prevent them leaving and they imprison captured people smugglers. The reason for not turning back boats is that in 1939, the SS St Louis sailed out of Hamburg carrying 907 Jewish refugees and was turned away from Cuba, the USA and Canada. The “Voyage of the Damned” retuned to Europe and over a quarter of the asylum seekers are thought to have perished in concentration camps. The UN Refugee Convention in 1951, to which Australia is a co-signatory, deemed turning back boats as unlawful. The third dishonesty is that turning back boats and mandatory detention are different and independent things. Whether or not turning back boats is effective or ethical, imprisoning innocent people fleeing persecution and making conditions so unbearable that they will opt to return to their country of origin is torture. The United Nations has said so, although Tony Abbott “will not be lectured to by the UN on our moral responsibilities.”

    The international media have been scathing about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Extreme right wing politicians have toyed with Australia’s policies but been shouted down in their own countries. Outrage characterised reports from New Zealand (http://www.radionz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/283029/australia’s-senate-report-on-nauru-defended), the UK (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-34111019), Canada (http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.3211233) and the USA. The Editors of the New York Times wrote: “Some European officials may be tempted to adopt the hard-line approach Australia has used to stem a similar tide of migrants. That would be unconscionable. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has overseen a ruthlessly effective effort to stop boats packed with migrants, many of them refugees, from reaching Australia’s shores. His policies have been inhumane, of dubious legality and strikingly at odds with the country’s tradition of welcoming people fleeing persecution and war.” (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/03/opinion/australias-brutal-treatment-of-migrants.html?_r=0).

    The Senate enquiry found increasing numbers of whistle-blowers willing to tell the truth, doctors, nurses, social workers, carers and even security personnel. The Border Control Act 2015, which the Labor Party supported, is designed to deter any more whistle-blowers and suppress freedom of speech. The Australian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs has warned how the creeping powers of government infringe civil liberties, citing many new laws, including meta-data retention laws, mandatory detention of asylum seekers, paperless arrests, and the Border Force Act ((http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/04/gillian-triggs-powers-for-australian-border-force-disrespect-human-dignity). Triggs said it was “particularly troubling” that the major political parties in a “complicit and compliant parliament” passed laws threatening civil and human rights, compounded by the militarisation of the government.

    What can we do? Protest to politicians, in person and in writing. Write to newspapers. Use social media. Persuade people to meet asylum seekers and volunteer their help. Joan Baez said: “As long as we can get shocked…there is something healthy about it.”

    Perhaps we can be optimistic. The photo of the body of three year old Syrian boy Aylan has affected many Australians. Thousands of men, women and children have taken to the streets all over Australia in “light the dark” candle vigils. Aylan’s image has touched the hearts of many Australians who seem now to favour welcoming refugees and are putting pressure on the Government to be more generous to those fleeing the war in Syria.

    David Isaacs is a consultant paediatrician and Alanna Maycock is a a paediatric nurse. They have both worked with children who are refugees or seeking asylum for over 10 years and run a Refugee Clinic at a tertiary children’s hospital in Sydney. They visited Nauru in December 2014 to consult on children in detention. They defied a restrictive contract to reveal the horrific conditions to the media and gave evidence to the Senate Committee.

     

  • Josef Szwarc. Measuring our response to the refugee crisis of Syria and Iraq

    “PM RESCUE MISSION” shouts the headline of the morning newspaper. My heart races with expectation that is immediately deflated by the first sentence: “Australian will open its doors to more Syrian refugees fleeing the troubled nation but won’t increase the overall humanitarian intake.”

    The prospect of an increase was hinted at by a press release from the PM, Foreign Minister and Immigration Minister yesterday as the latter prepared to travel to Geneva for “urgent discussions with the UNHCR and other partners” to inform the government’s consideration of “what further significant contribution we can make through our Humanitarian Programme to resettle those affected by the conflict in Syria and Iraq.” It went on: “as a result of the Government’s success in stopping illegal boat arrivals to Australia, we are now in a position to take more refugees from offshore refugee camps.”

    During the last week, particularly following the tragic deaths of 3 year old Aylan Kurdi and his mother and brother, a rapidly expanding body of federal and state politicians, non-governmental organisations (including my own) and members of the general public has been calling on the government to increase the number of refugees we accept who have fled and continue to flee the wars in the Middle East and elsewhere.

    Various models are being suggested, in particular:

    • expanding the general resettlement program  – this was about 10,000 places in last financial year’s Humanitarian Program, with around 4,400 people from Syria and Iraq – the program is currently scheduled to be increased to 18,750 by 2018/19;
    • implementing a ‘safe haven program’ as was used to bring people from Kosovo (around 4000) and Timor (around 2000) when there were crises there;
    • expanding a model of community sponsored refugees, which is presently on a small scale (500 per year) pilot basis.

    The calls have been for additional refugees from Syria to be permitted to settle here as part of an expended humanitarian program.  In rejecting this plea, the government states that “Australia, on a per capita basis, is the UNHCR’s leading nation for the permanent resettlement of refugees.” The PM has further claimed that Australia was “ahead of the curve” in allocating places specifically for people from Iraq and Syria last year.

    The claims may be accurate but are also misleading as to the proportion of the world’s refugees Australia hosts and our relative ‘generosity.’  They might cause noses to twitch when tested on customers at the very tiny pub frequented by a fairly small number of people familiar with the complexities and mass of refugee data.

    The government’s statements relate to the “resettlement” of refugees, a term that refers to the transfer of refugees from an asylum country to another country that has agreed to admit them and ultimately grant them permanent settlement.  There are only around 30 countries which offer resettlement in conjunction with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), and in total the program places less than 100,000 people annually i.e.  a very small proportion of the 19.5 million refugees in the world at the end of 2014 (up from 16.7 million in 2013).

    A number of countries have quite small resettlement programs but host large number of people recognised as refugees and asylum seekers who have applied to be recognised as refugees. For example:

    • Germany resettled around 4000 refugees in 2009-13 yet at the end of 2014 had over 200,000 refugees and 200,000 asylum seekers; as widely reported, it is anticipated that over 800,000 people will register for protection there this year;
    • Finland (population 5.4 million) resettled around 3000 during the same period and prepares to accept perhaps 25000- 30,000 asylum seekers this year – Finnish Prime Minister Sipila has said he will offer  a home he owns (not the one in which he usually lives) to house refugees.

    Almost nine out of every 10 refugees (86 per cent) are in regions and countries considered economically less developed.  Of the 4 million Syrians who have been forced to flee, 1.8 million are in Turkey, 1.1 million are in Lebanon, 250,000 in Iraq, and 630,000 in Jordan. Refugees from other countries also generally reside in neighboring states such as Pakistan (2.6 million) and Kenya (650,000).

    Australia’s contribution to assisting refugees by allowing them to settle here has not matched the increase in need. Over the last 20 years, government has planned to accept around 12,000 – 13,750 people each year (with the exception of 2012-13, when it was 20,000). In terms of our population and economic growth, this form of critical assistance has shrunk.

    In the face of the highest level of global displacement since World War II, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Gutteres has stated that “for an unprecedented mass displacement, we need an unprecedented humanitarian response.” That provides a meaningful measure of Australia’s response.

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Rupert resurgent

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

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

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

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

    Whose side are you on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Suffer the little children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

    Let’s do it.   John Menadue

  • Julianne Schultz. Why public broadcasting is worth saving.

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

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

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

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

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

    Public good

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

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

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

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

    IPSOS Mori

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

    As BBC strategist James Purnell said:

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

    What is the market?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ABC Annual Report 2013

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

    Cultural bedrock

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

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

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

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

  • Bob Kinnaird. China FTA truth still elusive

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

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

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

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

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

    It is Mr Taylor’s assertions that are false.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

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

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

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

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

  • Stephen Harper. The closing of the Canadian mind.

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

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

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

  • Stuart Harris. Who are we backing in Syria?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    To Do Nothing or Not To Do Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How to turn a mouse into an elephant

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

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

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

    Now that’s a headline.

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

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

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

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

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

    Who is mean and tricky?

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

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

    I can’t finish without one last comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Why are the world’s democrats so quiet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The brutal business of killing politics

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

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

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

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

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

    Faith and freedom defy state violence

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

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

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

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

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

    Ugly geopolitics and the beauty of sun-bright Mecca

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

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

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

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

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

    After the death sentence, Morsi declared:

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

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

    Tell men of high condition,

    That rule affairs of state,

    Their purpose is ambition,

    Their practice only hate;

    And if they once reply,

    Then given them all the lie.

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

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

    FEATURE, The Good Oil, August 18, 2015

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

    BY Theresia Hiranabe SGS*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

    See link to Melbourne Age article below:

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

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

    (or – Murdoch and Abbott in climate dial duet)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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