John Menadue

  • Wooki KIM, Discrimination against Korean school children in Japan today

    On 29 August this year the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) which is under the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) made rulings on Korean schools in Japan. It said ‘The committee encourages the state party [Japan] to revise its position and allow Korean schools to benefit, as appropriate, from the High School Tuition Support Fund, as well as to invite local governments to resume or maintain the provision of subsidies to Korean schools.’

    Korean schools in Japan were established after the liberation of Korean people from colonial rule by Japan in 1945. The schools were established to educate Korean children in Japan who had been deprived of their Korean name, language and culture by Japan. It is estimated that at that time there were 525 Korean schools all over Japan and approximately 44,000 Korean children attended those schools. Today there are about 70 schools from kindergarten to university with approximately 8,000 students.

    In April 2010 the government of Japan introduced the Tuition Fee Waiver Program which would waive tuition fees for high school education. It was planned to include not only Japanese public and private schools, but also foreign schools in Japan that are accredited as ‘miscellaneous schools’ under the School Education Act. It was the first chance for all Korean schools that were accredited as ‘miscellaneous schools’ to be granted subsidies by the central government of Japan.

    However, the government started the program without applying it to Korean schools, because of the abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s by DPRK. This amounted to using Korean children as political pawns between Tokyo and Pyongyang. The Abe Government decided to completely exclude Korean schools from the program by changing the legislative provision of the program in February 2013. As of today five civil suits claiming national compensation have been filed by Korean schools in the district courts of Tokyo, Osaka, Aichi, Hiroshima and Fukuoka.

    Following such discriminatory decisions by the Japanese central government, some local governments also have refused subsidies or cut subsidies that have been granted to Korean schools up to that point. The subsidies have been halted in some prefectures such as Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima as of October 2014. This represents about one third of local governments that have granted subsidies to Korean schools. In Osaka a civil suit demanding the Osaka prefectural government reverse the decision to refuse the subsidy for Korean schools was filed in the court in 2013 by the Osaka Korean school.

    Moreover some municipal governments such as Yokohama and Hiroshima have also followed the decisions of the prefectural authorities and withheld payments of the subsidies. As a result some parents have given up sending their children to Korean schools and sent them to Japanese schools which are granted much more subsidies than Korean schools.

    Our Association raised these discriminatory policies against Korean school children with CERD which we believe amounts to racial discrimination and infringes the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that Japan ratified in 1995. I also visited Geneva in August to raise these issues directly with the members of CERD. As a result of the examination of the government of Japan, CERD ruled as mentioned above concerning Korean schools. This means that in the view of CERD, the exclusion of Korean schools from the Tuition Fee Waiver Program and refusing subsidies at various government levels constitutes racial discrimination.

    The Japanese government has also been directed in the past by several international human rights bodies to revise its policy which infringes on the rights to education in Korean schools.

    The history of discriminatory policy against Korean schools by the Japanese government can be traced back to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910-1945. This discrimination was worsened by the compulsory close-down of Korean schools in 1948-49 which has been called ‘4.24 Gyoyug Tujaeng (4.24 교육투쟁)’ which means ‘struggling for education on 24th April’. The Ministry of Education carried out its plan to prohibit Korean children from attending Korean schools in 1948 and over a million Koreans in Japan struggled against that policy. In case of Hyogo prefecture, 10,000 Koreans gathered around a prefectural office and made the governor reverse the decision to close down Korean schools on 24th April 1948. However the 8th US Army, in association with the government of Japan, oppressed those struggles of Koreans by announcing a state of emergency under the anti-communism and cold war structure at the time. As a result, 3,000 Korean were arrested and a 16 year old Korean boy, Kim Tae-il was killed and Korean activist Park Ju-bom was also killed as a result of shooting and torture by the Japanese authorities. These memories of struggle have been handed on to Korean residents in Japan and many of them say the discriminatory policy of the Japanese government against Korean schools has been continued for about 70 years.

    In the recommendations relating to hate speech and hate crimes in Japan, CERD recommended the Japanese government ‘address the root causes of racist hate speech’ and it should combat ‘prejudices which lead to racial discrimination’. This suggests that CERD recognizes that hate speech and hate crimes against Korean residents in Japan has not occurred suddenly. It recognizes that there are deep-seated causes which go back to the time when Korea was colonized by Japan. This colonization by the Japanese government is at the core of the discrimination against Korean school students and the spreading of hate speech and hate crimes across Japanese society.

    Most Korean residents in Japan are descendants of those who were forced to live in Japan because of the colonial rule of Japan in their homeland. The Japanese government has the obligation to ensure justice to Korean residents in Japan who were deprived of their language, name and culture by Japan. The Japanese government must guarantee ethnic education of Korean children. The Japanese government should immediately stop the discriminatory policies against Korean schools and guarantee right to education for Korean children.

    I hope the civil movement both in Japan and elsewhere will support Korean schools in their plea for acceptance and the elimination of discrimination.

     

    Wooki KIM is on the Secretariat staff of Human Rights Association for Korean Residents in Japan.

  • Malcolm Fraser. Without a ground force and an end point, the war against ISIS will be a farce.

    In The Guardian, Malcolm Fraser has said ‘Air power alone will not make a difference in Iraq. Barack Obama and his allies have the worst strategic understanding possible of what they claim is an existential threat ‘  See link to article below

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/without-a-ground-force-and-an-end-point-the-war-against-isis-will-be-a-farce

  • Understanding the goals of Hamas and Israel.

    Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic on 4 October 2014 said ‘I remain partial to the view that American Jewry is threatened more by its own ignorance than by anything that may happen in the Middle East. But if Rabbis are going to speak about Israel, then they should speak with clarity …’ The article is available online below:

    http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/understanding-the-goals-of-hamas-and-israel/381048/

  • Walter Hamilton. A Chandelier in the barracks.

    In July 1940, five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Emperor Hirohito met with his military planners to discuss the details of Japan’s new “southward advance” policy. An apparently skeptical Hirohito asked them a series of questions, including whether the policy would involve “occupying points in India, Australia and New Zealand.”

    Although Japan’s supreme commander felt nervous about his country’s impending military adventure, he did not resist it––as he had, for instance, in 1936 when his disapproval was sufficient to crush a military coup by disaffected elements of the Imperial Army.

    Both episodes show Hirohito to have been a much more activist leader than some portrayals suggest.

    The latest attempt to paint Hirohito as a strict constitutionalist, obliged to follow the advice of his ministers, and look mildly martial on a white horse, is a 61-volume, 12,000-page publishing colossus, the Annals of the Showa Emperor. (Showa is the era name of Hirohito’s reign that lasted from 1926 to 1989.)

    Commissioned by the Imperial Household Agency, and 24 years in the making, it supposedly brings together all available documents related to the Emperor’s life. The first volumes are due to be published next year, with the remainder dribbled out to the public over five years.

    Although the work contains some new material of interest to academic researchers, critics complain that, on major points of historical conjecture, it is both incomplete and intentionally obscure. The Mainichi newspaper found it contained “hardly anything new” of real significance. The annals’ summaries make it impossible to link information to a particular source; it omits any direct quotations attributable to the Emperor; and some records of his close aides are withheld altogether. (I rely for this analysis on Japanese media and academic sources, since only a select group of individuals so far has been allowed to see the contents of the annals.)

    One example stands out. While the annals make reference to a 2006 newspaper article about a memo in which Hirohito is quoted as criticizing the honouring of Class “A” war criminals at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, the actual memo is not among the documents reproduced. It is not known whether this particular omission was done to appease the Abe Government, with its strong nationalist bent, but there can be no doubt that the project as a whole set out to avoid controversy.

    Professor Herbert Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan* told the New York Times he had been asked by a Japanese newspaper to comment on the annals––on condition he refrained from discussing Hirohito’s “role and responsibility” in World War II. Having expended much time and effort researching the Emperor’s close involvement in military planning, Bix naturally declined: “The very idea of a carefully vetted official biography of a leader fits within the Sino-Japanese historical tradition, but raises deep suspicions of a whitewash…”

    The annals cultivate the image of a leader who was war shy and peace friendly, and yet this analysis cannot withstand even the most superficial investigation. If Hirohito had the power to end the Pacific War in August 1945––and he did play a decisive role––why did he not have the power to prevent it starting in December 1941 or to bring it to an end much sooner? The evidence, in fact, shows he was enthusiastic about Japan’s early military successes and only swung his support behind the “peace faction” once his very existence was threatened by atomic annihilation.

    Australia wanted Emperor Hirohito put on trial as a war criminal, together with the military, industrial and political leaders who were convicted, and in some cases, executed. The United States, however, took the view that hanging Hirohito would play into the hands of Japan’s Communists and make the postwar occupation (and security realignment) of Japan that much harder. The Chifley Government eventually concurred.

    For the President of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Australian Justice William Webb, Hirohito’s immunity from prosecution rankled: “No ruler,” he wrote in his separate opinion on the Tokyo Trials, “can commit the crime of launching aggressive war and then validly claim to be excused for so doing because his life would otherwise have been in danger.” Evidence of Hirohito’s responsibility was suppressed during the actual hearings until Hideki Tojo slipped up while being questioned by a defense lawyer. “No Japanese subject,” insisted the loyal wartime prime minister, “let alone a high official of Japan, would ever go against the will of the Emperor.” Tojo was later given a chance (by the prosecution) to “correct” his mistake, but that ghost could never be laid to rest.

    Hirohito died in 1989 at the grand old age of 87. I remember, on the occasion of his funeral, standing with the crowds lining the streets near the Imperial Palace, sleet falling on a bitterly cold February day, and reflecting on the legacy of a man who had led Japan through its darkest and its brightest days, first by means of war and then by means of peace. The shuffling, bespectacled, grandfatherly figure I had witnessed performing his many official duties––whose only public opinion was an enigmatic smile––seemed to have redeemed himself. Certainly, at least, he and the Americans (those mighty republicans) had saved the imperial institution.

    But there was a cost, which we are still paying.

    Professor Bix, in his analysis of Japanese power, identified a “system of irresponsibility,” a closed circle of buck-passing in which politicians and generals acted in the name of an Emperor who, in turn, acted in accordance with their advice. Thus no individual took the blame (each of the Tokyo Trial defendants pleaded “not guilty”) for ideas and actions that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

    In some respects modern, democratic Japan perpetuates this system of irresponsibility, including in the way it refuses to render a full and proper accounting for the past.

    Japan spent ten years between 1931 and 1941 creeping towards war with the great powers. The imperial institution was the chandelier in the barracks: a decorative incongruity lighting the way for the militarists. Still remote and unaccountable, I wonder what way it will light for Japan in the days ahead.

    * From my reading of his book, Bix seems unable to make up his mind whether Hirohito was a warmonger or an acquiescent nationalist, and some of his conclusions about the personality and temperament of the young Hirohito go beyond the evidence adduced. But, particularly in its second half, the book effectively demolishes the revisionist arguments of Japan’s “textbook” patriots.

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

     

     

  • Edmund Campion. Australian Catholic Lives.

    Fr Edmund Campion has just published a new book. A book review and information about the book can be found on the following link.  John Menadue.

     

    http://tintean.org.au/2014/10/06/australian-catholics-lives-by-edmund-campion

  • Geoff Hiscock. Abbott on the friendship trail with Modi

    China rightly dominates most discussions of Australia’s economic outlook, but Tony Abbott has made it plain he also wants to be good friends with the other emerging Asian heavyweight, India.

    A tangible example came during his visit there early last month (September), when he handed over two ancient Hindu statues that allegedly were stolen from temples in Tamil Nadu and subsequently acquired by Australian art galleries.

    It was a gesture that prompted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to express his gratitude and to say Abbott had shown “enormous respect” for India’s cultural heritage.

    Next month, the two leaders will have another opportunity to get closer. As well as attending the G20 summit in Brisbane, Modi has accepted Abbott’s invitation to make a bilateral visit to Australia — the first such trip by an Indian prime minister since Rajiv Gandhi in 1986.

    As a pro-business leader, Modi’s priority is domestic economic development, including in the manufacturing sector – hence his mantra of “Make in India.” To speed up the process, he needs funding from abroad, which is why he is courting big potential investors in Japan, China, the United States, and to a lesser extent, Australia.

    In his first four months in office, Modi has made a string of overseas visits and played host to some key leaders. Under his “neighbourhood first” approach, Bhutan was Modi’s first destination in June, followed by Brazil in July and Nepal in August. In the last month, he has visited Japan to meet the man he describes as a “dear friend,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and has just caught up with US President Barack Obama in Washington. At home, he welcomed Abbott in early-September and then hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in mid-September. During his visit, Xi committed China to investing a further US$20 billion in India over the next five years.

    That suits the pragmatic Modi, who made some valuable Chinese contacts when he was drumming up business as Gujarat’s chief minister. China, of course, is the object of as much attention in India as it is in Australia. India wants a lot more Chinese investment, but the border issue continues to weigh on overall ties.

    In a September 19 joint statement in New Delhi, Modi and Xi agreed that pending a final resolution of their disputed boundary, the two sides would continue to make an effort to maintain “peace and tranquillity” in the border areas.

    India’s relationship with Beijing is nowhere near as comfortable as the one Modi has with Abe’s Japan. “India considers Japan among its closest and most reliable partners,” Modi told an approving audience during his visit to Tokyo, adding that as “two peace-loving and democratic nations,” India and Japan could “play an influential role in shaping the future of Asia and the world.” Abe has committed Japan to doubling its Indian investment and financing to US$35 billion, also over the next five years.

    Modi’s other big bilateral challenge is the relationship with the United States, where business ties have not developed as rapidly as both sides might have liked. Issues such as civilian nuclear power liability, intellectual property rights, foreign investment regulations and delayed financial reforms remain impediments to the fivefold increase in trade that Obama and Modi envision in their September 30 joint statement. Two-way trade in goods and services now stands at just under US$100 billion a year. The leaders also committed to a joint investment initiative on infrastructure. But in agricultural trade, India’s recent action to block a World Trade Organisation deal on food security upset Washington, despite Modi arguing that India had to retain the unfettered right to make food available to its poorest people.

    Like the US, Abbott wants to quickly grow Australia’s two-way trade with India from the current modest figure of $17 billion. He would also like to have some more big-ticket Australian investors entering India. “We are not as close as we should be,” Abbott said in New Delhi on September 5. “My visit to India reflects Australia’s desire for India to be in the first rank of Australia’s relations.”

    The on-the-ground reality is that India is not the easiest place to do business. Plenty of big international investors have burnt time and money trying to make headway there: Wal-Mart and Carrefour in modern retail, for instance, or Posco and ArcelorMittal in steel. Bureaucratic inertia, domestic opposition from vested interests, entrenched corruption in the police, judiciary and government layers, and an ongoing Maoist insurgency in parts of the country, combined with poor infrastructure, difficult labour laws and poor levels of skills and education all make for a testing investment environment.

    That said, with 1.25 billion people and a growing middle class of several hundred million, there is no denying India’s promise. Energy demand is rising rapidly, gross domestic product is approaching $2 trillion (still well behind China’s $10 trillion), economic growth this year should finish above 5 per cent and comfortably pass 6 per cent next year, and there is a big push for more and better food, and more consumer comforts in general. All of that plays to Australia’s strengths in energy, agribusiness and technology.

    Abbott’s focus in recent weeks has been on security at home and abroad, but his long-term economic agenda is unchanged: how best to maintain and expand the prosperity Australia has enjoyed virtually without interruption for the past 23 years. China, Japan, the United States and India are all crucial to that effort (as are South Korea and Indonesia). So far, Abbott has established good relations with their various leaders, but is the first to acknowledge that ties with India in the past have been under-done because of Australia’s fascination with China.  November’s visit by Modi will be a good pointer as to how quickly that situation might change.

    Geoff Hiscock writes on international business and is the author of Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources, India’s Global Wealth Club, and India’s Store Wars, all published by Wiley.

     

  • Mike Steketee. Abbott faces the reality of multicultural Australia

    While many conservatives continue to hold to the Howard line against multiculturalism, Tony Abbott is adjusting to the reality that Australia is a multicultural country, writes Mike Steketee.

    “The Australian Government will be utterly unflinching towards anything that threatens our future as a free, fair and multicultural society; a beacon of hope and exemplar of unity-in-diversity.”

    This is how Tony Abbott expressed his defence of Australian values before the United Nations Security Council this week.

    Many, probably most, Australians will find his words commendable, if perhaps unremarkable. Yet not so long ago, he would never have put it that way.

    His views on multiculturalism used to align with those of his conservative predecessor, John Howard, who hated the “m” word and avoided it at all costs. As he wrote in his autobiography, Lazarus Rising: “My view was that Australia should emphasise the common characteristics of the Australian identity. We should emphasise our unifying points rather than our areas of difference.”

    His views translated into action, with his government’s abolition of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Bureau of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Population Research and with the substitution of “citizenship” for the “m” word in the Immigration Minister’s title.

    Many conservatives continue to hold to the Howard line. According to Senator Cory Bernardi, “the naïve … proclaim multiculturalism as a triumph of tolerance when in fact it undermines the cultural values and cohesiveness that brings a nation together”.

    Queensland National MP George Christensen this week supported a ban on burqas. In 2013, Scott Morrison, then shadow immigration minister, argued thatmulticulturalism “simply means too many things to too many different people and increasingly runs the risk of fuelling division and polarising the debate, which is the antitheses of what it is supposed to achieve”.

    But Abbott no longer counts himself amongst the critics. Two weeks ago, he said: “I’ve shifted from being a critic to a supporter of multiculturalism, because it eventually dawned on me that migrants were coming to Australia not to change us but to join us.”

    His conversion goes back some years. In Battlelines, the book published in 2009, not long before he became opposition leader, he wrote that he previously had underestimated “the gravitational pull of the Australian way of life”. The influx of people from a long list of countries who applied to become Australian citizens, “far from diluting ‘Australian-ness’ …. shows people’s enthusiasm to join our team”.

    That would be Team Australia of recent invocation.

    In 2012, as opposition leader, he explained an experience that helped changed his mind:

    With (historian) Geoffrey Blainey, I used to worry that multiculturalism could leave us a nation of tribes. But I was wrong and I’ve changed my mind. The scales fell from my eyes when I discovered – while running Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, would you believe – that the strongest supporters of the Crown in our constitution included indigenous people and newcomers who had embraced it as part of embracing Australia.

    The irony is that this conversion has come at a time when multiculturalism is under greater stress than at any time since its introduction by the Whitlam government. Each successive wave of immigrants to Australia has caused friction, stretching all the way from the Irish in the 19th century to the post-World War II surge of Italians, Greeks and other Europeans and the large numbers of Vietnamese who arrived in the wake of the Vietnam war.

    Yet the cycle became a familiar and reassuring one, from initial resentment and discrimination towards new immigrants to acceptance and later celebration.

    “Wogs” used to be a term of derision; now it is a badge of honour for many of Italian and Greek origin. Despite some initial tensions and problems with crime, the successful integration of Vietnamese into a nation that only recently had abandoned the White Australia policy was eloquent testament to a tolerant society.

    Immigrants typically worked hard and soon spread out from the then poor inner suburbs as they became more affluent. Their sons and daughters started marrying outside their ethnic group and often became indistinguishable from other Australians.

    In short, as Abbott came to realise, Australia changed migrant families more than they changed Australia.

    The 2005 Cronulla riots, sparked by an attack on lifesavers by young men of Lebanese origin and fuelled by inflammatory comments by broadcaster Alan Jones, shattered the image of Australia as a model of racial harmony. Still, it could be rationalised as an isolated incident. Harder to dismiss is the emergence of home-grown jihadists who regard themselves as enemies of Australia – hardly a stellar example of unity in diversity.

    Unlike previous immigrants, some from the Middle East, predominantly Lebanese with often low education levels admitted by the Fraser government in the wake of the Lebanese civil war, did not follow the traditional path of working, inter-marrying and generally spreading out into society. For some, unemployment, crime and racism contributed to alienation, particularly amongst the young.

    In some senses, Abbott’s conversion may be more rhetorical than real. On coming to government, he shifted responsibility for multiculturalism from the immigration portfolio – something for which Morrison may be grateful – to Social Security, suggesting a narrowed focus.

    That brings it under Kevin Andrews, a big “c” conservative who, as immigration minister in 2007, cut the intake of African refugees because he said they had more trouble integrating into Australian society.

    Deriding their religion, criticising how they dress, let along branding them as terrorists, is seriously counter-productive.

    The Australian Multicultural Council, an advisory body to the previous government, is in limbo, with all its nine positions listed as vacant, although a spokesperson for Andrews told me the Government is in the process of appointing new members.

    The ministry of multicultural affairs under Labor has been downgraded to a parliamentary secretary’s position, filled by Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who, although a member of the hard right of the NSW Liberal Party, is preaching the success of multiculturalism.

    As prime ministers need to do, Abbott is adjusting to the reality that Australia is a multicultural country. The Government frontbench includes members with strong ethnic connections – Treasurer Joe Hockey (Armenian-Palestinian), Finance Minister Mathias Cormann (Belgian), Government Senate leader Eric Abetz (German), suspended assistant treasurer Arthur Sinodinos (Greek) and Fierravanti-Wells (Italian).

    Abbott is conscious that the ethnic vote can swing the result in federal seats, particularly in Sydney. He disappointed some of his strongest supporters with his decision to drop the so-called Bolt amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act after widespread opposition from ethnic groups.

    In this area and particularly in the current context, rhetoric matters – all the more so when it comes from the nation’s leader. Abbott is setting the right tone, balancing his uncompromising language against would-be Australian terrorists with words of reassurance for the Muslim community and an appeal to other Australians not to overreact.

    Given the rise of Islamic State and threats of beheadings in Australia, it is easy to lose perspective. The number of Muslims in Australia has risen rapidly – by 69 per cent between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. But they still number fewer than 500,000 and represent just 2.2 per cent of the population, fewer than the 2.5 per cent who are Buddhists.

    The vast majority are as law abiding as any other Australians. They have alerted Australian authorities to planned terrorist attacks. Deriding their religion, criticising how they dress, let along branding them as terrorists, is seriously counter-productive.

    Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist. He was formerly a columnist and national affairs editor for The Australian. View his full profile here

    This article was first published by the ABC, The Drum, on 26 September 2014.

  • Marilyn Lake. fracturing the nation’s soul.

    You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue.

     

    During World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.

    Marilyn Lake

    World War I had consequences for individuals as well as nations. HB Higgins’s life would be deeply affected by the British decision to invade the Ottoman empire in early 1915. As a member of the new federal parliament in 1901, Higgins had opposed Australian participation in the Boer War, fearing that this would set a terrible precedent for involvement in other imperial wars, whose purpose, goals and strategy would always be determined by other powers. He also doubted the legitimacy of the European war, writing to his friend Felix Frankfurter, Professor in Law at Harvard, ‘What do you think of it? … [T]here are higher ideals than attachment to a country because it is my country. I blame our British jingoes…’ Higgins was deeply troubled when his only child Mervyn elected to join British forces fighting in the Middle East.

    When his son was killed in battle on 23 December 1916 Higgins and his wife Alice were devastated. Higgins poured his grief – and his bitterness over the imperial cant that had justified the war – into a new commitment to internationalism and disarmament. The only good that might come out of the war was not national pride, but a new world order. ‘Vengeance is a fruitless thing’, he wrote to Frankfurter. ‘I feel that the best vengeance my dead boy could hope for would be an integrated world, an organized humanity.’ No nationalist flag-waving or eulogies to the Anzac spirit for him.

    We tend to forget the doubts and expressions of opposition to Australia’s participation in World War I in which in fact only 30 per cent of eligible men chose to enlist. The anti-war mobilisations have largely gone unheeded in official and contemporary accounts of the war, which have recast the widespread destruction as a creative experience, one that gave ‘birth to the nation’, conveniently forgetting that our distinctive Commonwealth of Australia, with its world famous democratic reforms, made its name on the world stage in the years before the war, between 1901 and 1914. Australian nation-building was a peace time achievement.

    A decade before the outbreak of the European war, in 1904, an American visitor to Australia, Victor Clark, one of a number of investigators who journeyed south to Australasia, noted that ‘New Zealand and Australia are the most interesting legislative experiment stations in the world and they experiment so actively because their political institutions are extremely democratic’. The colony of Victoria had first invented the idea of a legal minimum wage in 1896, which was later elaborated as a living wage calculated to meet the diverse needs of workers defined as human beings, in the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court by HB Higgins, in the Harvester judgment of 1907. Australia and New Zealand had pioneered industrial democracy and women’s political rights. ‘While the principles of democracy were first enunciated in the United States’, noted the historically-minded American suffragist, Carrie Chapman Catt, ‘Australia has carried them furthest to their logical conclusion’. Thus did we take our place on the world stage, not in fighting an imperial war.

    In Australia, it was noted by numerous overseas commentators, the working man and the voting woman advanced together, during the first decade of the nation’s existence, which saw a steady increase in the Labor vote, until the Fisher Government was elected, with majorities in both Houses in 1910. By war’s end, however, the Labor Party had split, conservative forces had triumphed, and the British Empire had gained a new lease of life in Australia. In World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.

    Let’s look at this impact further through the experience of Higgins, now a largely forgotten Australian, but one of our unsung national heroes. Henry Bourne Higgins was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1896, when it introduced the minimum wage. He became an opponent, as noted above, of the British imperial war in South Africa, a member of the federal parliament from 1901 and then, from 1906, President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, whose path-breaking reforms, shaped by a profound commitment to social justice and the public good, won him renown around the world. In 1914, he was invited by the Harvard Law Review to contribute an article on his innovative jurisprudence which he titled ‘A New Province for Law and Order: Industrial Peace through Minimum Wage and Arbitration’.

    By 1920, however, the conservative backlash unleashed by the impact of World War I and the fevered imperialism of Prime Minister WM Hughes, who sought to by-pass the Arbitration Court by setting up his own tribunals saw Higgins submit his resignation. It would seem appropriate to remember Higgins, the Australian idealist, and others of his generation, as we prepare to deal with the veritable tidal wave of military commemoration, funded already by $140 million, even as our universities face further funding cuts, increased student fees and the number of historians employed to teach students actually declines. Which funding bodies, one wonders, might finance commemoration of those who fought for Australia’s distinctive democratic and political ideals and support projects to carry their ideals forward?

    My current research project on the international history of Australian democracy has highlighted Australia’s high reputation around the world before World War I as a distinctive, pioneering, bold, independent-minded democracy. It was the perspective afforded by distance that enabled American Professor Hammond of Ohio State University to write of ‘the most notable experiment yet made in social democracy’ established in Australia in the first years of the Commonwealth, in the years preceding the outbreak of war.

    In 1902, in the shadow of the South African War, HB Higgins wrote an essay called ‘Australian ideals’ in which he asked prophetically whether the new Commonwealth of Australia was to become a militaristic nation or a progressive one: ‘Australia must make her choice between two ideals – the ideal of militarism and the ideal of equality’. Australians had to choose between the opposing standards of militarism and social reform, he suggested. He and his generation dedicated themselves to the latter, while we in our time seem to have committed to the former. Australian values we are now ceaselessly told are military values.

    One hundred years on from 1914, Australia has seemingly become the militarist nation Higgins warned about. Rather than celebrate the world-first democratic achievements forged by women and men in the founding years of our nationhood, the years that made Australia distinctive and renowned, we are told that World War I, in which Australians fought for the British Empire, was the supreme creative event for the nation. But those who lived through it knew that our nation was not born in the carnage of the world war, which left the country divided, disillusioned, disoriented, desolate and dependent on a resurgent British Empire.

    In the inimitable words of novelist Miles Franklin, writing to her American friend Margaret Drier Robins in 1924,

    it seems to me that Australia, which took a wonderful lurch ahead in all progressive laws and women’s advancement about 20 years ago has stagnated ever since. At present it is more unintelligently conservative and conventional than England and I am sad to see the kangaroo and his fellow marsupials and all the glories of our forests disappearing to make room for a mediocre repetition of Europe.

    Miles Franklin knew that although men could do many things they could not give birth to nations. Only women could do that. And in 1902, Australian women’s political ‘lurch ahead’ had made Australia the most democratic country on earth, an object lesson to humanity.

    _____________________________

    Marilyn Lake is Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. This is a revised version of a keynote address presented to the Annual Conference of the History Teachers’ Association of Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 23 April 2013.

     

  • Peter Day. The Middle East: it’s important to talk.

    David was a good Jewish man: faithful to his God; devoted to his family, and deeply connected to his land.

    Khalid was a good Palestinian man: faithful to his God; devoted to his family, and deeply connected to his land.

    Each year, in early spring, David and Khalid would meet for a chat at a small cafe. It always began with a respectful, silent handshake. Then, after a kindly nod towards the waiter, the pair would sit down.

    More silence would follow, usually a couple of minutes at most, until their coffee and sweet biscuits arrived. Then, without any small talk, off they went – as they had done for 34 years:

    Said the Jew: “I think it’s important we are allowed to state our case.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “I think it’s important we are allowed to state our case.”

    Said the Jew: “This is rightfully our land.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “This is rightfully our land.” 

    Said the Jew: “We are victims of your aggression.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “We are victims of your aggression.” 

    Said the Jew: “We will fight ‘til the bitter end.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “We will fight ‘til the bitter end.” 

    Said the Jew: “You killed my family.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “You killed my family” 

    Said the Jew: “We are a brutalised and traumatised people.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “We are a brutalised and traumatised people.” 

    Said the Jew: “You hate us.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “You hate us.” 

    Said the Jew: “There can be no peace ‘til you change your ways.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “There can be no peace ‘til you change your ways.” 

    Said the Jew: “Look, this is our land.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “Look, this is our land.” 

    Said the Jew: “Mmm, a nice coffee. Give my regards to your family. See you next year.” 

    Said the Palestinian: “Mmm, a nice coffee. Give my regards to your family. See you next year.”

    The conversation continues …

    Fr Peter Day is the Parish Priest at Corpus Christi, Canberra.

  • Mike Steketee. Buying favours of politicians.

    You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue

     

    If the staggering evidence before the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption has taught us anything, then it must surely be to end the charade that democracy can function properly when people are buying favours of politicians, directly or indirectly.

    The standard argument that political fund-raising is conducted at arm’s length and that the politicians making decisions are not involved or even aware of who the donors are, no longer has an ounce of credibility. The Chinese wall is rice paper thin.

    Geoffrey Watson, SC, a person who does have credibility, arrived at this position a few months ago. The counsel assisting in recent inquiries by ICAC brought up the idea of full public funding of political campaigns. That is, taxpayers would foot the bill and all private donations would be banned.

    It seems a radical idea and it may be unattainable in pure form, given the constitutional hurdles. But it also is a logical extension of where the debate about corruption in politics is heading. If politicians so readily and willingly get around NSW laws that they themselves introduced for the purpose of cleaning up their act, or giving the appearance of doing so, and that on paper are the toughest in Australia, then drastic alternatives deserve consideration.

    After prosecuting the case against Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald and sundry other malefactors with Labor connections, Watson turned his attention to the Liberals. In his opening address for Operation Spicer, he laid out another remarkable saga of politicians rorting the rules to their own advantage. As he put it, “this inquiry will expose the systematic subversion of the electoral funding laws of NSW”.  Watson detailed how the office of Chris Hartcher, who resigned as minister after ICAC launched the investigation, had used front organisations to accept some $165,000 from property developers, who were banned from making political donations and some of who had planning applications before the state government.

    He argued that the systemic failure of the system of political funding encouraged and rewarded corruption. “Something must change,” he told the Commission hearing, adding that “the problems caused by election funding are not intractable.” One suggestion that had been floated, he said, was full public funding as a way “to free political decision makers from the insidious effect of improperly motivated donations”. While ICAC was not the place for the debate, he pointed out that the Commission had an arm devoted to corruption prevention, whose experts “would be more than pleased to assist”.

    Tony Abbott didn’t think much of the proposal. “At a time when we’re talking about a very tough budget indeed, the idea that we should scrap private fundraising and fund political parties through the taxpayer, I think, would be very, very odd.”

    Hello! We’re already doing that. Last year’s federal election cost taxpayers $58 million, calculated on the basis of $2.49 per vote received. Four of the six states also have public funding systems – NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia – as well as the ACT.

    The implication in Abbott’s comment and the assumption of many others is that public funding would have to be increased to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of private donations. Politicians can make that argument if they like, though Abbott obviously doesn’t have the appetite for it. The major parties even could agree on a bipartisan approach and justify it on the need to end the corruption, which is the position that NSW political leaders have taken.

    But there also is a clear alternative: restrict spending to the present amount of public funding. It is not as though the taxpayer contribution is parsimonious – given they have a vote for the House of Representatives as well as the Senate and that not all voters pay taxes, taxpayers are contributing well over $5 each to federal elections.

    The major parties in particular might complain long and hard about such belt tightening. But what a relief it would be to be spared of much of the largely fact-free deluge of election advertising that soaks up most of the money donated to the major parties. This competition between the parties has turned into an obscene arms race, in which parties feel compelled to spend more and more on advertising just because the other side is doing so, all the while admitting that they may not be getting much return on their investment.

    The campaign managers are coming up with ever more far-fetched schemes for raising money, like conducting auctions at fundraisers for private meetings with prime ministers, premiers and ministers, all the while arguing that no favoured treatment ever flows from this. And they wonder why public trust in them keeps falling.

    NSW Premier Mike Baird thought Watson’s idea had enough merit to send it off for review. Or perhaps more correctly, he didn’t feel he could dismiss the idea out of hand. He may have been relieved when the head of the panel he appointed – former senior public servant Kerry Schott – said she thought full public funding would fall foul of the High Court. Last year, the court declared invalid the law by the O’Farrell government banning all corporate and union donations on the grounds that it breached the freedom of political communication implied in the Constitution.

    Graeme Orr, a law professor at Queensland University and an expert on electoral funding, does not see the High Court as an insuperable barrier. Rather, he says, the court said in last year’s case that the NSW government had not given a proper rationale for the legislation. “The court is really saying we require you to have an evidence-based explanation for these laws that restrict the implied freedom of political communication.”

    He believes a system can be designed that could withstand challenge. It would need to allow for some private funding but a low limit could be applied – perhaps $1000 a year – that could not be considered potentially corrupting.

    What about fabulously wealthy individuals like Clive Palmer funding their own parties? Caps can be set on campaign expenditure as well as on donations. They already exist in NSW and Queensland, although the Newman government has announced it will abolish them, together with the cap on donations.

    There would be complications in implementing a system relying predominantly on public funding. While it may be possible to stop third parties, like trade unions or business lobbies, from donating directly to parties, they could still run their own partisan campaigns. But if the argument against radical reform is that loopholes will emerge, we may as well throw up our hands and give up. As Watson says, “something has to change”.

    Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist.

  • Portraits of Humanity

    An exhibition by Wendy Sharpe is planned for February/March next year.   See details below and contacts for Wendy Sharpe and Lee Meredith of the Asylum Seekers Centre. JohnMenadue.

    Renowned artist, Wendy Sharpe, is developing a portrait exhibition to highlight our common  humanity with asylum seekers.  A previous Archibald winner and 2014 finalist, Wendy is drawing portraits of 39 refugees and asylum seekers as her contribution to creating public awareness and putting a human face to the issue.

    “This is not about politics.  I want to show our common humanity,” she said.  “I want to show that they are people like us, with hopes and dreams just like ours.

    “Many of those I have met during this project have fled situations of great danger, whether it is political, cultural or religious.

    “I can’t imagine how it would feel to have to leave everything behind.  But they have had to leave their family, their home, their culture and their country.  All of these form your personal identity.  But they have survived and are now focussed on rebuilding their lives and starting all over again.  It has been an inspiring experience for me.

    “Through these portraits I want to reach out to as many people as possible, especially those who may be confused by the many myths about the issue or feel uncomfortable with what is currently happening.”

    The exhibition will portray people who are living legally in the community while they wait for their applications for protection to be processed as well as some who have recently been granted protection.

    “This exhibition will continue projects I have undertaken in the past, particularly as an official war artist,” said Wendy.  “The portraits will be displayed in a major exhibition and then placed on sale.  I will not be receiving any commission and intend to donate the proceeds to support the vital work of the Asylum Seekers Centre in Sydney which provides personal and practical support to asylum seekers, such as legal advice, accommodation, health care, food and employment assistance.

    Melanie Noden, CEO of the Asylum Seekers Centre, said it is an incredible honour to have the support of an artist of Wendy’s status.

    “We believe that most Australian’s want to see asylum seekers treated with respect and dignity while they are in our care and waiting for their applications to be processed.

    “Through her art Wendy will be sharing the lives of asylum seekers with the general public, and show that underneath all the troubles and politics around the issue, we are all the same.”

    The exhibition will run for four weeks in February/March next year at The Muse Gallery, Sydney TAFE, Harris Street, Sydney.

    We are grateful to the following supporters for their contribution towards making this exhibition possible:  Sydney TAFE,  Michael Amendolis and Kadmium Art+Design Supplies.

    Contacts:  Wendy Sharpe:  0448 887 319, 

    Lee Meredith, Asylum Seekers Centre:  0432 062 122

     

  • Robert Manne. “When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, Sir.” JM Keynes

    You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue.

     

    I have been a supporter of refugee rights since the mid-1970s, when with others I formed the Indo-China Refugee Association. During the period of the Howard government I wrote tens of thousands of words in defence of the asylum seekers fleeing from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. This interest arose from family history. Not only was I the child of refugees from Nazism. I very recently discovered that not long after my father was accepted by this country he wrote passionate articles in The Jewish News expressing, on the one hand, gratitude to Australia, and, on the other, radical astonishment that the most anti-fascist element in the community, Jewish refugees, were subject to petty forms of discrimination as enemy aliens. I mention all this to make it clear that what I am going to say this afternoon is delivered with a heavy heart.

    The asylum seeker issue, or more accurately, the issue of those asylum seekers who arrive by boat, has been near the centre of Australian politics for the past fifteen years. Opinion has generally fallen into two broad camps—the friends of the asylum seekers and their enemies. These camps have now become very rigid. Thought has become frozen. As happens when thought is frozen, dishonesty abounds.

    The dishonesty of the enemies of the asylum seekers is familiar. They deny or diminish the human cruelty of their deterrent policies—mandatory indefinite detention; temporary protection visas; offshore processing; tow-back to Indonesia. They close their eyes to the damage these deterrent policies inflict upon the reputation of this country, especially in the Asia-Pacific region where the White Australia Policy is remembered. Their attitudes moreover reek of hypocrisy. The enemies of the asylum seekers opposed the idea of deterring boat arrivals by sending eight hundred to Malaysia on the grounds that it was not a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention. They simultaneously advocated towing boats back to Indonesia, itself not a signatory to the Convention. In public, they shed crocodile tears about the hundreds of drownings that occurred under the policies of Rudd and Gillard. In private despite the mass drownings they were delighted with the political advantages the accelerated arrivals offered to the Abbott Opposition, as a WikiLeaks cable revealed.

    Of more interest to me however is the dishonesty that I have witnessed among my former allies—the friends of the asylum seekers.  From late August 2001 the Howard government introduced the policies of offshore processing on Nauru and Manus Island and occasional tow-back to Indonesia, known as the Pacific Solution. Between 2002 and 2007 virtually no asylum seekers arrived by boat. And yet throughout these years, almost without exception, the friends of the asylum seekers refused to admit that in its deterrent objective the policy had worked.

    In 2008 the Rudd government dismantled the Pacific Solution. Shortly after, the asylum seeker boats returned, eventually in much larger numbers than during the Howard period. Under Howard there were approximately 13,000 boat asylum seekers; in just the final year of the Gillard government some 25,000. And yet the friends of the asylum seekers rarely admitted that it was the dismantling of the Howard policies that was primarily responsible. Frequently the friends of the asylum seekers claimed that with firm political leadership the anti-asylum seeker sentiment of the Australian people could be turned. This denied the meaning of hundreds of public opinion surveys and flew in the face of common sense.

    Most troublingly, the friends of the asylum seekers failed to register the moral meaning of the 1100 certain or probable drownings that took place under Rudd and Gillard. There was great anguish at the time of the mass drowning following the sinking of SIEV-X in October 2001 for which the Howard government was blamed. There has been even greater anguish following the recent terrible death of Reza Berati on Manus Island for which the policies of the Abbott government have been blamed. But among the friends of the asylum seekers, the mass drownings that took place under Rudd and Gillard barely registered or lingered in collective memory. I frequently read articles by prominent friends of the asylum seekers berating the present policies of offshore processing and tow-back where even the fact of mass death by drowning is not mentioned.

    In their principled opposition to all forms of deterrent policy, many friends of the asylum seekers are wedded to a Kantian absolute—for them it is never permissible to save a greater number of lives by treating certain people, like those presently marooned on offshore processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island, as a means to an end. Others are legal absolutists, for whom, no matter what the consequences, it is never permissible for what they believe is the letter or spirit of international law, in this case the UN Refugee Convention, to be violated by a regime of offshore processing. Yet others are indifferent to the political dimension of the asylum seeker question. For them there is no problem for the Labor Party, the only opposition party that is a serious contender for government, to hand a permanent political advantage to its Coalition opponents. This position implies that in Australia today the asylum seeker issue should trump all other considerations, for example whether or not our country becomes involved in the most vital question of our era—the struggle to combat global warming.  In my view, all these forms of absolutism—moral, legal, anti-political—are wrong-headed. On the asylum seeker issue many moral, legal and political questions have to be balanced and taken into account. The world is complex. Asylum seeker policy is inherently very difficult.

    Because of their commitment to one or another form of absolutism, almost all friends of the asylum seekers now advocate the dismantling of the policy of offshore processing and tow-back, in other words a return to the policy of the Rudd government in 2007-8. Our only reliable guide to what might eventuate if they succeeded in their ambition is what happened in the past. Following Rudd’s abandonment of the Pacific Solution, three things occurred. The issue of asylum seekers helped undermine the government’s popularity and served the interests of the Coalition. Asylum seekers arrived by boat in accelerating numbers—in 2010-11, 5,000; in 2011-12, 8,000 and in 2012-13, 25,000. Most importantly, in these few years, on their way to Australia, some 1100 asylum seekers died at sea. Those who now advocate the end of the current policy of offshore processing and tow-back, a policy that has quite predictably stopped the boats, need to explain why history will not repeat itself.

    There is another consequence of the present position of the friends of the asylum seekers—by campaigning for the dismantling of offshore processing, they have abandoned any prospect of contributing to the formulation of a more humane and politically realistic asylum seeker and refugee policy. One aspect would be to look to conditions in the offshore processing centres and the ultimate fate of those presently there in such a way that suffering was diminished but the deterrent purpose maintained. The other would be to look to the future of the thirty thousand or so recently arrived asylum seekers in Australia who are being treated with great cruelty by the present government. Some of these people are in detention centres. A larger number are on one or another form of bridging visa, waiting for their asylum seeker claims to be assessed. Some with adverse ASIO assessments have been imprisoned without trial for life. Many are living in penury. Many are not allowed to work. These people are promised that even if they are assessed to be genuine refugees they will never be allowed to become permanent citizens.

    Through the combination of these policies, Australia for the first time in its history has a government that is consciously engineering the creation of an immigrant under-class.  As there is now an effective deterrent at the border, older ineffective domestic deterrent policies—like mandatory detention, temporary protection visas, absence of work rights or access to decent welfare services—are not only cruel but entirely purposeless.  They are also quite predictably creating social problems for Australia in the future. All these policies should be abandoned.

    It is, moreover, a misunderstanding to think that Australians are hostile to refugees. Historical experience and almost all opinion polls show that Australians are opposed not to refugees but to those who arrive without visas by boat. It was more politically difficult for the Fraser government to accept the 2,000 Vietnamese spontaneous boat refugee arrivals than the tens of thousands selected by the government from the South-East Asian camps.

    Rather than advocating the dismantling of offshore processing, the friends of the asylum seekers in my opinion could play a far more fruitful role by the advocacy of full human rights for those asylum seekers presently on Australian soil, and an annual refugee intake of 30,000 refugees chosen from among those in most desperate need, like the persecuted Hazaras of Afghanistan or the Rohingyas of Myanmar, the ethno-religious groups most closely experiencing what the Jews of Central Europe experienced in the late 1930s. This is the kind of policy that the Labor Party could realistically take to the next election. It is the policy for which I intend to fight.

     

    This talk was delivered to Limmud Oz in Melbourne on Sunday, June 8 2014. Limmud Oz is a Jewish Festival of Ideas.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Andrew Kaldor. Are We Paying Too Much To Stop The Boats?

    One of the claims that some commentators like to make about Australia’s asylum seeker policy is that it saves money. It’s got to be cheaper to stop the boats than to have people coming to our shores that way to seek refuge. Right?

    Wrong. It is not easy to find the actual total costs of Australia’s policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing across all agencies because no government has ever provided a total figure. But the National Commission of Audit recently released data which shines a light on the huge and rapidly increasing costs of our policies.

    By the Audit Commission’s reckoning, Australia now spends the same as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) spends on its entire global refugee and displaced persons operations.

    The UNHCR is responsible for helping and protecting some 50 million displaced persons around the world, including 11.6 million refugees. It expects to spend about $3.5 billion (US$3.3bn) in 2014. To cover 10,000 staff and all relief for the emergencies in Syria and Iraq, and Africa, as well as the protracted situations worldwide.

    Compare that with the $3.3 billion Australia spent in 2013-14 on the detention and processing of boat arrivals. It has been the fastest growing Government programme over recent years, increasing from $118 million in 2010 at the average annual growth rate of a staggering 129 per cent.

    Next year, the Department of Immigration’s budget is about $2.9 billion for that operation. But this number probably understates the total costs. It appears to ignore the extra aid to Papua New Guinea for signing the Manus Island deal, $420m over four years. It also ignores the costs of the AFP, ASIO, and State judicial system. Moreover, the value of current contracts issued by the Immigration Department, just for offshore detention for the 2014-15 fiscal year, has been estimated to be $2.7 billion [Source: data compiled by Nick Evershed, The Guardian, 25 August 2014].

    The most expensive and least efficient part of Australia’s policy is offshore detention. The commission calculated that offshore processing costs Australian taxpayers is 10 times more than letting asylum seekers live in the community while their refugee claims are processed. The cost for detaining one asylum seeker offshore for one year is over $400,000, compared with $239,000 for onshore detention and under $100,000 for community detention. The cheapest option is a bridging visa which costs $40,000 a year. Moving all the asylum seekers to bridging visas, which are no guarantee of permanent settlement, would save the Federal Budget around $2 billion.

    The huge cost of overseas detention should be carefully examined particularly when other programmes are subject to budget cuts. An assessment should include a comparison of our expenditure with other countries, other government programmes, and particularly to the UNHCR.

    Given that Australia currently has about 34,000 people at various stages of the asylum process, expenditure of $3.5bn is extraordinarily expensive and wasteful.

    Sweden, which received around 54,000 asylum seekers in 2013 and expects more than 60,000 this year, spends some $1bn (7B kroner ) – a third of our costs – to manage almost double the number of asylum seekers.

    The UK will spend $3.13 billion (1.8bn pounds) on its entire immigration and border operations in 2014-15. Compare this with the Immigration Department’s total budget for 2015 of $4.8 billion.

    Compare this also with our spending priorities domestically. Proposed higher education cuts will save a total $3.1 billion over the next four years, equal to the costs of deterring the boats for one year.

    Using the data made publicly available, the savings from placing all asylum seekers on bridging visas for one year would equal, for example, the revenue gained from the unpopular fuel excise indexation over the next four years.

    Australia spends more on managing maritime asylum seekers than the total government funding for R & D. Total budgeted funding for research in 2014-15 is $2.55 billion.

    The $7 Medicare co-payment, designed to build a $20 billion research fund, is forecast to raise about $2.7 billion next year – still less than our cost of deterring asylum seekers.

    And to put these costs into a cultural perspective, stopping the boats costs about as much as funding the ABC, SBS, Arts Council, Australian Institute of Sport and National Parks put together.

    The “Winning Edge” plan by the Australian Institute of Sport to move our performance from world class to world best, receives an appropriation of $180 million. That is equivalent to holding about 450 asylum seekers in offshore detention for one year.

    In a new book Refugees: Why Seeking Asylum Is Legal And Australia’s Policies Are Not, authors Jane McAdam and Fiona Chong argue that the extraordinary expense of our deterrence measure is not justified by empirical evidence about the behaviour, threat or legitimacy of asylum seekers. We have better, cheaper options.

    The economic burden of stopping the boats is massive and unnecessary. Politicians on all sides of the debate should take the cost of our current approach into account.

    The question we should all be asking is this: is stopping the boats as important as our spending on research, or the entire budget of recreation, sport and culture?

    Andrew Kaldor is a Sydney businessman, philanthropist and founder of the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at NSW.

     

     

     

  • Kerry Murphy. Kurds in the way.

    Since the collapse of three divisions of the Iraqi army at Mosul in June 2014, it has been the Peshmerga, Kurdish militias, that have strongly opposed the apocalyptic death cult of ISIS in Iraq. Already Syrian Kurdish forces had strongly defended their territories in Syria. The relief of the besieged Yazidis on Mount Sinjar saw Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Turkish PKK forces help on the ground. The conflicts in Iraq and Syria are continuing to mutate and some of the results mean that western countries have to support groups such as the PKK previously labelled terrorists.

    The Kurds have long sought their own country and they were right to feel they were misled after the First World War when they were promised independence in the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 only to lose it with the resurgence of Turkish nationalism under Ataturk and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Since then, the estimated 30 million Kurds have been split between Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. They have risen in rebellion in Turkey on a number of occasions and the Marxist PKK is their armed wing. There have also been Kurdish rebellions in Syria, Iraq and Iran, all have been severely repressed. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein infamously used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the Al Anfal campaign against the town of Halabja, during the time of the Iran/Iraq war. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal_Campaign)

    With the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Kurdish region in northern Iraq was established under the protection of the West’s no-fly zone. Since then, the Kurds have managed their own territory with little control from Baghdad. The new Iraqi State saw the Kurds gain the positon of President and further develop the Kurdish Regional Government, where Kurdish in the main language, not Arabic. Until recently, even speaking Kurdish in Turkey was likely to get you targeted by the Turkish security forces. US forces worked well with the Kurds and there were no reported deaths of US military personnel in the Kurdish region after 2003.

    Now we have the PKK and Iraqi Peshmerga fighting ISIS in Iraq, with the Syrian Kurds (YPG) and some PKK fighting ISIS in Syria. The Kurds have a formidable reputation but are not well armed, as the Iraqi Government did not agree to the Peshmerga being equipped with modern weapons, so the old Soviet era Kalashnikov is still their main weapon.

    Now it has changed and Australia, the US, France and other western powers have sent modern weapons to the Kurds, with the reluctant agreement of the Iraqi government. Combined with US and western airpower, the Kurds are holding their ground and recovering some territory in Iraq from ISIS.   (http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iraq-situation-report-september-18-19-2014) They have also expanded their territory to include the ‘disputed’ city of Kirkuk, and its surrounding oilfields. The Kurds have long wanted to control Kirkuk and get the economic benefit of the oil fields nearby.

    Meanwhile in Syria, Kurdish YPG forces have held their own territory whilst Assad and the mainly Sunni rebels fought it out. In some places, the Kurds were supported by regime forces to defend their territory against rebels, especially those of Jabhat Al Nusra (JN is the Al- Qaeda linked opposition force).

    The Kurds now are threatened by the rise of ISIS which is advancing against the Syrian regime, JN, the Free Syrian Army and several Islamist opposition forces. In the last week thousands of Kurds have fled into Turkey seeking shelter from ISIS, whilst their militias try to hold the ground and repulse ISIS. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/22/syrian-kurdish-fighters-islamic-state-isis-kobani) . It is estimated that 100,000 Kurds have fled to Turkey in a week. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/21/isis-kurds-escape-into-turkey-from-syria-kobani )

    The Syrian Kurds have worked with the Turkish PKK forces against ISIS and now it seems a coalition of US lead airpower is helping them, as well as their fellow Kurds in Iraq. It is likely that the Syrian Kurds will also need more weapons to help them hold back an expansionist ISIS so will these weapons be supplied by the West? This would be an intervention without the support of the Syrian regime, but ironically, it would support the aims of the Syrian regime against ISIS.

    A week ago we saw the smiling face of unveiled female Kurdish fighters in Iraq on the front pages of the Fairfax papers. (http://www.theage.com.au/world/is-australia-arming-terrorist-pkk-fighters-20140915-10h8cc.html) The PKK is more political than religious, and religious extremism like you see in ISIS is rare amongst the Kurds.  She was with the PKK, and the PKK and Turkish government have only recently reached a truce after decades of fighting which has cost the lives of thousands. We must remember that Turkey is a member of NATO, and so it would be difficult for the West to supply weapons to armed militias that have until recently been involved in armed conflict against the Turkish State. However the advent of ISIS means that survival trumps politics.

    It is possible that if ISIS can be constrained, or even seriously depleted, then the Kurds in Iraq will be in their strongest position to claim de jure independence since 1920. Such a move would be provocative for Turkey and Iran, neither of which would want to recognise an independent Kurdistan as that would only encourage the minorities in their own countries. What will happen in Syria is a harder question, but if the Kurds can survive and hold back ISIS, it will make their bargaining position much stronger for a post war Syria.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in Immigration Law

     

  • Walter Hamilton. A paranoid state?

    The same question might be asked of many places on earth in these security-conscious times. On this occasion, however, the subject is Japan: a state several times removed, one would have thought, from legitimate concerns about an imminent threat from an alien creed enforced by a ruthless blood-cult. (Enough of that; you only have turn on commercial radio to know what I mean.)

    Japanese paranoia comes to mind for several reasons. I could hardly believe my eyes when watching the main evening current affairs program on NHK (the national broadcaster) the other night. During a story on last week’s International Whaling Commission meeting, a graphic appeared giving the reason why New Zealand had brought a motion to impose stricter conditions on “scientific whaling”. The purpose, said NHK, was to “cause Japan international embarrassment.” It’s believed the program, News Center-9, is closely monitored by NHK’s conservative president––a man who on taking up his job stated that it was not the business of a public broadcaster to contradict the government of the day­­––and, under pressure from above, nervous editors can go to absurd lengths to toe the line. By the way, I can report that whale meat has just been added to the menu at the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s headquarters in Tokyo. If that is not a snub to the International Court of Justice, which this year ruled against Japan’s whaling program, I don’t know what is.

    But enough of cetaceans, there are bigger “fish” to fry in this discussion.

    A Japanese friend of mine recently returned from a visit to Uluru. She enjoyed the trip very much, she said, especially the cordiality of the Australian tourists she encountered at the Rock. Most had either visited Japan or knew people who had, and they were eager to share their favourable impressions of the country. This affability came as a shock to her: “I had the impression foreigners did not like Japan,” she told me. My friend is a well-educated and widely travelled individual; so how can we account for her paranoia?

    The “foreigners” to which she refers, of course, are Chinese and Koreans––although NHK’s characterization of New Zealand as a hostile state suggests a deeper strain of vulnerability and grievance.

    Japanese antipathy towards China and South Korea, and vice versa, has rarely been as intense as it is now. About 53% of Chinese respondents (and 29% of Japanese), in a recent poll, said they expected a war to break out between the two countries before the end of the decade. The percentage of Japanese respondents who said they had a negative impression of China increased to 93% from 90% a year earlier, according to Genron NPO, a Tokyo-based non-profit group. Similar findings have emerged from surveys on attitudes between Koreans and Japanese.

    This siege mentality has been on display, too, in the nation’s mass media. I’ve mentioned NHK. There’s also the case of the Asahi Shimbun, the country’s venerable, left-of-centre newspaper that has been under fire from rivals on the right over its coverage of the “comfort women” issue. Some of the Asahi’s assailants have even called for its closure on the grounds that it willfully damaged relations with South Korea by publishing a false account of the Imperial Japanese Army rounding up Korean women on the island of Cheju during the war and forcing them into prostitution. The articles that ran in the newspaper in the 1980s and 1990s were based on the testimony of one Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have witnessed the round-ups (his evidence is also cited in several “authoritative” books). The Asahi now accepts (many years after his claims were first challenged) that Yoshida fabricated his testimony and, under relentless attacks from right-wing commentators, the president of the newspaper group has made a public apology.

    In the context of the “history wars” now raging in Japan––fed, as I suggest, by a siege mentality verging on paranoia––this admission of error is not necessarily beneficial to the cause of reasoned debate. While the Yoshida claims undoubtedly should have been retracted earlier, the public is now being led into believing his testimony singularly brought about South Korea’s hardline position on the issue and caused the breakdown in bilateral relations. Some on the right are demanding that Japan abandon its earlier admissions of culpability, despite an abundance of other, unassailable, evidence of state-sponsored prostitution in Japan and its colonies. (Readers may care to review the treatment of this issue in my book Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story.)

    A far-right candidate in the last Tokyo gubernatorial election, Toshio Tamogami (who garnered 12% of the vote), has joined the chorus with a new book entitled Why Does the Asahi Shimbun So Hate Abe Shinzo? General Tamogami served as Chief-of-Staff of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force until he was sacked in 2008 for publishing an article justifying Japanese imperialism: “If you say that Japan was the aggressor nation, then I would like to ask what country among the great powers of that time was not an aggressor?” If the Asahi can, at one stroke, be discredited in the public eye, then alternative versions of history propagated by Tamogami and his ilk gain traction by default.

    In the interest of disclosure, I should point out that I have used this blog-site to criticize Shinzo Abe myself on a number of occasions. I don’t hate him and neither do I judge, from reading its editorial pages, does the Asahi. Its criticisms of Abe’s new security laws, military ambitions and other actions provocative of Japan’s near neighbours reflect policy disagreements not personal animus. Given that the government has a skilled and well-resourced public relations machine at its disposal (not excluding NHK) to prosecute its side of any argument, the attacks on the Asahi seem superfluous, except for an ideological purpose.

    But if this blog is about paranoia, perhaps the author should take care not to succumb as well. And what is paranoia, anyway, but an unreasonable sense of persecution. When we take a look behind the poll figures quoted earlier, we find evidence of just that: a common tendency of human beings to feel antagonistic towards those whom it is presumed harbour ill feelings towards us. Both the Chinese and the Japanese are convinced that the other is hostile towards them, and because of this they must return hostility. In the vicious cycle the origins of their discord disappear into a fog of self-justification. Opinion polls may tap into the public consciousness, but they are often poorer predictors of behaviour. Is the prospect of war, alarmingly foreseen by a majority of Chinese respondents, as real if we also know that they expect the other side to start it?

    Contrary to the opinion-poll view of the future we have evidence that Chinese tourists, for instance, are growing tired of Japan being unofficially “off-limits” to their curiosity. As reported in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun: “In July, Chinese visitors to Japan doubled on the year to 281,000, making them the largest tourist group from aboard, according to the Japanese government. The figure has climbed back above the level seen in July 2012, before tensions flared.” Japanese businesses are said to be growing more optimistic about the Chinese market, as political considerations give way to pragmatic commercial interests. Perhaps the many Chinese tourists mingling with the temple crowds in Kyoto or taking their lunch at a noodle bar in Tokyo will discover that ordinary Japanese don’t really feel about them quite as they imagined they did.

    It would be a good beginning to a sounder dialogue.

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Xanthe Emery: Family violence and immigration – is the message getting across?

    Family violence in Australia is at epidemic levels, with some horrific high profile cases dominating the news in 2014. Migrant women in Australia are extremely vulnerable to violence from their partners. Threats to cancel a woman’s visa are used to frighten, intimidate, and coerce her to stay in a violent relationship. More could be done to ensure that migrants are aware you don’t have to remain in a violent relationship to obtain a visa.

    Visas for family members of Australian citizens, permanent residents, and some eligible New Zealand citizens will make up 32% of the migration programme for Australia in the 2014-15 financial year. Partner visas (including spouses, de facto couples and fiancés) make up the vast majority of the visas in the family stream. In the 2014-15 year, the government has planned for 47,825 partner visas.[1] Generally, partner visas are granted first as temporary visas. After approximately two years, temporary partner visa holders can move to a permanent partner visa, once they have satisfied the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (“DIBP”) that the relationship with their sponsoring partner is genuine and continuing.

    However, in certain circumstances, a person can be granted a permanent partner visa, despite the fact that the relationship with their sponsoring partner has ended. One of these exceptions is where a visa applicant can demonstrate that they have experienced family (or domestic) violence at the hands of their sponsoring partner during the relationship. Very specific evidence is required to satisfy DIBP that violence has occurred, and the burden of providing the evidence remains with the visa applicant. These are referred to as the ‘family violence provisions’, and are part of measures to ensure that vulnerable migrants (predominantly women) don’t have to choose between their visa and their safety. 

    A number of recent high profile cases of family violence have caused politicians, the media, and the public to turn their attention to an issue that is a national disgrace. In 2013, there were 27,000 domestic assaults reported to NSW police.[2] And this only reflects assaults actually reported. An Australian Bureau of Statistic study in 2005 found that 82% of women who experienced violence from a current partner did not report it to police. Globally, intimate partner violence is one of the leading causes of death for women.[3]

    For migrant women in Australia, social isolation, lack of English language skills, unfamiliarity with Australian law, or dependence on sponsors, means they may be particularly vulnerable to domestic violence, and less able to take steps to leave a violent relationship. One of the most powerful tools partners use to suppress and control migrant women is the threat to have her visa cancelled or have her “kicked out” of Australia. Many women disclose a fear of immigration officials appearing at their front door and escorting them straight to the airport. Coupled with this, is the fear many women have for their futures if they return to their home country, separated and shamed. Additionally, the fear of losing access to children influences women to remain in violent relationships.

    In the 2012-13 financial year, there were 867 family violence claims made to DIBP. This is a small proportion of the number of partner visas but likely doesn’t reflect the true number of women at risk because many women do not report violence to police, let alone to Immigration.

    Family violence is not unique to particular ethnic groups or people from low socio-economic backgrounds. Migrant women from a variety of countries, ethnicities, religious affiliations and economic standing experience family violence from their sponsoring partner.

    So are we doing enough to ensure that migrant women are aware they can access protection in Australia and don’t need to choose between an abusive relationship and being forced to leave Australia? Many victims do not know that their partner has no power to cancel their visa and are unaware of the existence of the family violence provisions.

    The challenge for DIBP and Australian policy makers is to protect the family violence provisions from fraud, whilst ensuring that migrant communities are aware of the existence of the provisions and the help that is available. Abuse and misuse of the family violence provisions will have the biggest impact on genuine family violence victims. If the family violence provisions are viewed as a loophole for gaining residency, genuine family violence victims are likely to be viewed with suspicion. Seeking and then accessing help, as well as speaking up about their experiences, can be an extremely difficult ask for migrant women. Adding to this a sense that they must prove what they have been through is real, can be too much for some to cope with.

    Additionally, many women are unable to access legal assistance during this most difficult time. Financial vulnerability, and limited community legal services, means many women must try to fumble through complex immigration regulations unguided. For example, providing a letter instead of a statutory declaration, or a social worker failing to name the perpetrator of the violence in their evidence, can mean a person’s visa is refused. The consequences for mistakes here are serious. What is also important to remember is that while negotiating their immigration status and dealing with DIBP, many migrant women are also suffering from the trauma of their experiences, homelessness, and abject poverty.

    Funding has been cut to women’s refuges in NSW and a number of refuges are closing down. This is a big problem because many women are referred via the refuge for further help, including legal assistance. Often, a victim’s first point of call is the Domestic Violence Crisis Line and/or the police. Victims who are then homeless are usually assisted to find accommodation in a women’s refuge. The refuges have great staff and social workers who then assist their clients to sort out their various issues. There are serious concerns that without refuges, many women will become homeless, but also this vital referral ‘hub’ will be lost. This will mean more women are unaware of what to do about their immigration situation if their relationship ends with their sponsor.

    Australia’s migrant community, particularly women at risk of social and cultural isolation, would benefit from a targeted campaign that makes clear what their rights are once they arrive in Australia, and that violence need not be tolerated in order to hold on to a visa.

    Xanthe Emery is a solicitor at the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre, a community legal centre in Sydney.

    [1] Migration Programme statistics from the Department of Immigration an Border Protection: https://www.immi.gov.au/media/statistics/statistical-info/visa-grants/migrant.htm

    [2] ‘Time to act on domestic violence’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March 2014: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/time-to-act-on-domestic-violence-20140307-34cqt.html

    [3] K.M. Devries et al, ‘The global prevalence of intimate partner violence against women’, June 2013: http://www.cugmhp.org/gamma/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TheoVos2013-article3WomenViolence.pdf

  • Peter Day. An Open Letter to Cardinal Pell

    Dear Cardinal Pell,

    In the lead-up to next month’s Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family you and a number of your confreres are re-asserting the church’s longstanding exclusion of divorced and remarried people from communion.

    Your foreword to The Gospel of the Family appears to leave us with little doubt: outsiders are not welcome.

    As you have said, “The sooner the wounded, the lukewarm, and the outsiders realise that substantial doctrinal and pastoral changes are impossible, the more the hostile disappointment (which must follow the reassertion of doctrine) will be anticipated and dissipated.”

    Respectfully, I have a number of questions I’d like to consider with you; conscious, of course, that neither of us in our grappling can claim to really know the mind of Christ.

    So, what was it that our Lord had in mind when he instituted the Eucharist with these self-emptying words, “This is my body, this is my blood?” Whose hunger was he responding to? Who was welcome? And what are the implications for our Sunday worship and beyond? 

    Well, we do know this: The tax collectors and sinners were all crowding round to listen to him, and the Pharisees and scribes complained saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them …’ (Lk 15:2-3) 

    And this: It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Go and learn the meaning of the words: ‘Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice.’ And indeed I came to call not the upright, but sinners. (Mt 9:12-13)

    And this: Let anyone who is thirsty come to me!

    Let anyone who believes in me come to drink! (Jn 7:38)

    And this: When he arrived at the Pharisee’s house and took his place at table, suddenly a woman came in, who had a bad name in the town … She covered his feet with kisses and anointed him … the Pharisee said to himself, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would know … what sort of person [was] touching him and what a bad name she has …’ (Lk 7:36-39)

    And this: They were at supper … and he got up from table, removed his outer garments … and began to wash his disciples’ feet … (Jn 13:2, 4, 5) 

    And this: Peter said …‘You know it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race or visit them; but God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean … God has no favourites … and who am I to stand in God’s way?’ (Acts 10:28, 34 & 11:17)

    Could it be, given the exclusivity of our Communion, that when we proclaim these words we are potentially condemning ourselves as well?

    Just think: Jesus, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of sinners (Lk 7:34), real and present in our Breaking of Bread. Wow. Extraordinary. Out of this world. We actually believe this … don’t we?

    If we answer in the affirmative, there are profound consequences: are we not also compelled to look beyond the in-crowd and welcome outsiders; are we not also compelled to take risks: like the risk of being labelled and pilloried for sharing our table with those we are not supposed to; for doing something that is forbidden by law. I am not thinking here of people who do not care. I am concerned for those who are hungry for love and long to share even the crumbs from the table.

    Can any of us truly look at our Lord and Master and say without a profound sense of foreboding: ‘Yes, I am a follower; but you must understand there are rules …’

    His disciples were hungry and began to pick ears of corn and eat them. The Pharisees noticed it and said to him, ‘Look, your disciples are doing something that is forbidden on the Sabbath’. (Mt 12:1-2)

    If the Eucharist is essentially an encounter with the real presence, rather than essentially an institutional-cum-cultic event, then surely the Master’s social interactions make it abundantly clear: hunger, not worthiness underpins Table Fellowship. To allow the law, cultic statutes, and theology to take precedence over mercy and love and encounter, is tantamount to perpetuating the hard line rigour of those Pharisees who complained bitterly and moralised pompously about so many things.

    Their approach fostered a cold, superficial temple-based religion. But Jesus invited his followers to a change of heart, a heart oriented to the one called, Abba – Father : a relational, God-based faith.

    Indeed, if Jesus himself was bound by the strictures of his religious tribe and the social mores of his day, he would never have encountered the woman at the well because ‘Jews, of course, do not associate with Samaritans’ (Jn 4:10). Thankfully, he was not. Thus, a women consigned to the margins, and thirsting for love, was afforded one-on-one time with the One who risked everything to offer her living water.

    Yet, despite the extraordinary inclusiveness and openness of our foot washing Master; not to mention the accusations his behaviour attracted – blasphemy, law-breaking, ‘prince of devils’ – there are still those who insist that the meal instituted by him who emptied himself, taking the form of a slave (Phil 2:7) be an exclusive, High Church event with all the accoutrements, pomp and ceremony, do’s and don’ts, and rules about who’s in and who’s out, as if the Holy One needs protection and distancing from an encounter with the great unwashed.

    If this non-relational Temple-centred worship takes hold, then we too leave ourselves open to the criticism:

    Now here, I tell you, is something greater than the Temple. And if you had understood the meaning of the words: ‘Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice’, you would have not condemned the blameless. For the Son of Man is master of the Sabbath. (Mt 12:5-8)

    And if, in the depth of our being, we believe Jesus is real and present at the breaking of bread, then how do we justify the exclusion of so many? Can we in good conscience continue to turn away those longing to drink from the well-of-life because Catholics, of course, do not break bread with …? 

    There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can neither be male nor female – for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28-29)

    I do not presume to know the mind of Pope Francis either, but his musings on spiritual worldliness seem especially apt:

    [There] are those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelising, one analyses and classifies others, and instead of opening the door of grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. (Evangelii Gaudium #94) 

    In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time. In this way, the life of the Church turns into a museum piece or something which is the property of a select few … The mark of Christ, incarnate, crucified and risen, is not present; closed and elite groups are formed, and no effort is made to go forth and seek out those who are distant or the immense multitudes who thirst for Christ. (Evangelii Gaudium #95)

    It prompts the question: has a simple, inclusive and profound ‘family’ meal been overwhelmed by an impersonal and, often times, sterile institutional sacrifice; one that tends towards mass exclusion?

    Peace and regards,

    Fr Peter Day, Parish Priest, Corpus Christi

    Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, Australia

  • Gaza, Israel and Palestine.

    In the link below from AlterNet, published on 9 September 2014, you will find a very important analysis by Noam Chomsky. John Menadue.

     

    http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-real-reason-israel-mows-lawn-gaza?akid=12222.32110.TSqdYT&rd=1&src=newsletter1018632&t=2&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

  • Will we ever learn?

    In an article in the Washington Post – see link below – Katrina vanden Heuvel says

    ‘Our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan should have made one thing clear: we have neither the patience, the resources nor the willingness to wreak the violence needed to suppress the regional sectarian conflicts. For more than a decade, we have spent trillions, sacrificed lives and rained bombs on assorted targets from Pakistan to Libya. And the civil wars, tribal rivalries and sectarian violence have only increased.’

    Tony Abbott said that he agreed with Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia. Tony Abbott spoke of ‘more Jakarta and less Geneva’.

    It now seems that we are pivoting back to the Middle East.  John Menadue

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/katrina-vanden-heuvel-obama-reneges-on-his-foreign-policy-promises/2014/09/16/7490e1ee-3d0c-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html

  • Secrecy and Propaganda.

    Yesterday Richard Ackland in theGuardian.com highlighted the way that the media cooperated with the government in the propaganda about raids on potential Muslim terrorists in Sydney and Melbourne. Both the NSW and Commonwealth Governments spared no effort to highlight the raids. What a contrast this is to the secrecy of ‘on water matters’ in Operation Sovereign Borders.

    Richard Ackland’s article can be found on the following link

    John Menadue.

     

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/19/sydney-dawn-counter-terrorism-raids-why-now-and-why-so-few-answers

  • Richard Norman, Suzanne Robinson. Health lessons from England.

     

    While Australia and England share much of their cultural heritage, the countries have answered the challenge of funding health care in quite different ways.

    The Australian Medicare system is predominantly based around private practice and fee-for-service. The English National Health System (NHS) is based on capitation, in which doctors are paid a fixed amount to manage a group of potential patients irrespective of the actual level of care.

    Neither system is perfect, but each can learn from the other; after all, they both aim to achieve efficient, equitable, high-quality health services is the same.

    Fee-for-service vs capitation

    Australia’s emphasis on fee-for-service funding reflects both a strength and weakness. Paying for each consultation or service, mainly through the Medical Benefits Schedule, incentivises doctors to do more.

    But it can also lead to over-provision of care. Most of us have anecdotes about returning to the doctor for procedural issues, such as renewing prescriptions, or receiving test results, which might be more efficiently done over the phone, or by a nurse or pharmacist.

    The English system, with its focus on capitation, may be too far in the opposite direction. Under capitation, doctors are paid an amount to manage a set of patients, this amount usually determined by estimates of need.

    If doctors are effectively paid no extra for providing additional care to a patient, then you can reasonably expect an average level of service below what is optimal.

    Both the English and Australian systems have tried various ways of blending fee-for-service and capitation, but the two systems continue to sit some distance apart.

    Pay for performance

    One possible way out of this impasse is to move towards a system in which doctors are paid for results, rather than activity.

    The English system has considerable experience in this area – good and bad – with its Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), which attempts to pay doctors directly for their patients’ health outcomes.

    Under this system, surgeries are awarded points for a range of outcomes including chronic disease management, practice organisation, positive patient experience, and the provision of extra services such as child health and maternity services. These points are then translated into a financial payment for the surgery.

    In England, there is mixed evidence about the appropriateness of this system. Design has proven a major challenge; in the first year, there was a cost blowout as surgeries achieved a much higher proportion of points than was expected.

    So, could such an approach be taken in Australia?

    The answer is that it would be difficult. Patients are registered to surgeries in England, meaning it’s easier to link clinical outcomes with the activity of particular doctors.

    But Medicare data does show us which patients see which doctors, so linking to outcomes might be feasible in Australia.

    However, as with much of the area of international transferability of health policy, the basic policy idea would need to be adapted to reflect the existing health system architecture.

    Keeping people out of hospitals

    Over the past decade, the English health system has pursued a policy of local commissioning of services. Led by local GPs, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are responsible for allocating their local community’s health budget on emergency care, elective hospital care, maternity services and community mental health services.

    CCGs place general practitioners at the heart of health care funding decisions, giving them a role previously undertaken by lay managers in primary care.

    The aim is to strengthen primary care and keep people out of hospitals. If you make one body responsible for purchasing primary care (such as GPs) and secondary care (predominantly hospitals), you’re likely to make better use intensive GP interventions that would reduce the use of considerably more expensive hospital care.

    In the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, the Conservative-led coalition placed £65 Billion into the hands of 211 newly-formed CCGs, 65% of a total NHS budget of £95 Billion. The English experience of commissioning is still a developing story. It appears to offer benefit, but the design of the system is crucial. Those doing the local commissioning must be supported both logistically and financially, so they have the time to dedicate to this work and it isn’t just passed on to bureaucrats.

    Australia’s fragmented system

    Our health system is funded from a mixture of state/territory and federal money. Primary care is predominantly paid for by Medicare, while much of the financial cost of providing hospital care is met by the states and territories.

    This poses a major problem for health-care reform. There is an incentive for both the states and the federal government to shift costs towards the other, which can be easily done by moving patients between primary and secondary care.

    Further, the incentive to keep people out of hospital by providing more high-quality primary care is weak, because the government level responsible for primary care (federal) does not reap any savings from this extra investment.

    Community-level organisations such as Medicare Locals are being given small pockets of funding to commission locally, and it is likely that this role will be included in the new Primary Health Networks (PHNs) when they replace Medicare Locals.

    One option is to give local commissioners more power through the PHNs and redirect some state government funding directly to the community-based organisations.

    But caution is required, as English history demonstrates high-quality commissioning requires substantial time and financial investment, as well as effective leadership and the willingness of clinicians to engage.

    Designing a better health system

    Like most other countries, Australia cannot continue to fund the increasing demand for health care, and we need to look for ways to strengthen the role of primary care and keep people out of hospital.

    In the endless debate around how to pay doctors in a way that doesn’t cause over- or under-servicing, adding payments for keeping people healthy is one possibility Australia should consider. But we need to keep in mind the possible negative consequences of such a policy.

    Similarly, Australia should consider supporting local clinicians to make decisions that benefit their community. But because our health systems are so structurally different, the design of such a system for Australia would be a challenge requiring considerable thought.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on 4 September 2014. Richard Norman is Senior Research Fellow in Health Economics at Curtin University, Suzanne Robinson is Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Curtin University.

     

  • Philip Kokic, Mark Howden, Steven Crimp. 99.999% certainty humans are driving global warming.

    There is less than 1 chance in 100,000 that global average temperature over the past 60 years would have been as high without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, our new research shows.

    Published in the journal Climate Risk Management today, our research is the first to quantify the probability of historical changes in global temperatures and examines the links to greenhouse gas emissions using rigorous statistical techniques.

    Our new CSIRO work provides an objective assessment linking global temperature increases to human activity, which points to a close to certain probability exceeding 99.999%.

    Our work extends existing approaches undertaken internationally to detect climate change and attribute it to human or natural causes. The 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report provided an expert consensus that:

    It is extremely likely [defined as 95-100% certainty] that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [human-caused] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.

    Decades of extraordinary temperatures

    July 2014 was the 353rd consecutive month in which global land and ocean average surface temperature exceeded the 20th-century monthly average. The last time the global average surface temperature fell below that 20th-century monthly average was in February 1985, as reported by the US-based National Climate Data Center.

    This means that anyone born after February 1985 has not lived a single month where the global temperature was below the long-term average for that month.

    We developed a statistical model that related global temperature to various well-known drivers of temperature variation, including El Niño, solar radiation, volcanic aerosols andgreenhouse gas concentrations. We tested it to make sure it worked on the historical record and then re-ran it with and without the human influence of greenhouse gas emissions.

    Our analysis showed that the probability of getting the same run of warmer-than-average months without the human influence was less than 1 chance in 100,000.

    We do not use physical models of Earth’s climate, but observational data and rigorous statistical analysis, which has the advantage that it provides independent validation of the results.

    Detecting and measuring human influence

    Our research team also explored the chance of relatively short periods of declining global temperature. We found that rather than being an indicator that global warming is not occurring, the observed number of cooling periods in the past 60 years strongly reinforces the case for human influence.

    We identified periods of declining temperature by using a moving 10-year window (1950 to 1959, 1951 to 1960, 1952 to 1961, etc.) through the entire 60-year record. We identified 11 such short time periods where global temperatures declined.

    Our analysis showed that in the absence of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, there would have been more than twice as many periods of short-term cooling than are found in the observed data.

    There was less than 1 chance in 100,000 of observing 11 or fewer such events without the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions.

     The problem and the solution

    Why is this research important? For a start, it might help put to rest some common misunderstandings about there being no link between human activity and the observed, long-term trend of increasing global temperatures.

    Our analysis – as well as the work of many others – shows beyond reasonable doubt that humans are contributing to significant changes in our climate.

    Good risk management is all about identifying the most likely causes of a problem, and then acting to reduce those risks. Some of the projected impacts of climate change can be avoided, reduced or delayed by effective reduction in global net greenhouse gas emissions and by effective adaptation to the changing climate.

    Ignoring the problem is no longer an option. If we are thinking about action to respond to climate change or doing nothing, with a probability exceeding 99.999% that the warming we are seeing is human-induced, we certainly shouldn’t be taking the chance of doing nothing.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on 4 September 2014.

    Philip Kokic is the Senior Statistician at CSIRO, Mark Howden is the Research Scientist, Agriculture Flagship at CSIRO, Steven Crimp is the Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO.

     

  • Rod Tucker. Broadband projects fail reality test.

    In an article in The Conversation on 8 September 2014, Rod Tucker points out that the broadband projections will fail a reality test.  He said ‘If they [the Vertigan report] had used realistic data for growth in demand, their cost benefit analysis may well have shown that a FTTP network will provide Australia with the best long term value for money.’  Rod Tucker is Laureate Emeritus Professor at University of Melbourne.  See link to full article below.

    http://theconversation.com/broadband-projections-fail-reality-test-31341

  • Gavan McCormack. Disturbing trends in Japan Part 4

    Friendship, states, peoples and Australia

    The government of Japan struggles to reconcile servile incorporation in today’s US hegemonic project with Japan’s own nationalism, but the circle is not easily to be squared. Nationalism is distorted, denied and channeled into a ‘correct history’ movement, beautiful Japan campaigns, and antagonism to China and Korea. The wave of xenophobic abuse of China and Korea, speculation about a possible war, and ‘hate speech’ bullying of Zainichi resident Koreans, helps consolidate Abe’s support base and justify frontier militarisation. It constitutes the reverse side of his stealth revision of the constitution and promotion of military-first, US-serving priorities. Furthermore, basic insecurity is exacerbated by neoliberal policies that for more than a decade now have functioned to replace regular jobs with part-time, temporary or other non-regular ones (now accounting for 19 million people, or 38 per cent of the total workforce).

    It is not as though the Abe agenda has widespread national support. He took office after the lower-house election in December 2012 delivered his party a substantial majority on the basis of 27.6 per cent of the vote in the national ‘bloc’ component (hardly different from 2009, when it took 26.7 per cent and suffered a humiliating defeat), and 16.62 million votes in the small electorate seats, more than two million fewer than the 18.81 million it took on the occasion of its 2009 defeat. Since then support levels have wavered, kept high through his first year of government by the rhetoric of Abenomics but suddenly dropping below 50 per cent (from 54 to 47 per cent] in July 2014 as the ‘collective self-defence’ doctrine was adopted.

    There is now a thick fabric of cooperation and exchange between Australia and Japan. In both countries, the image of the other is generally positive, and they are urged to the embrace by their key security partner and ally, the United States. However, official Australia has a distinctive agenda not necessarily widely shared or understood in the community. It has long favoured Japanese constitutional revision and showed no sign in 2014 of concern at the way the Abe government was going about accomplishing it. It also favours an expanded Japanese regional military role and closer integration of Australian, Japanese and American forces. Official Australia is not known to have any reservations about the way the government of Japan has gone about constructing a new facility on Okinawa for the US Marine Corps or to have any apparent qualms about moves to switch the Japanese nuclear power grid (frozen in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster) back on and promote the export of nuclear-power-generation systems as a core sector of the Japanese economy. Australian silence on issues such as Yasukuni and the ‘comfort women’ is also appreciated in Tokyo, and naturally taken to signify agreement, or ‘shared’ values.

    In short, Australia has yet to disentangle affection and respect for the Japanese people from identification with the values and policies of the Abe government. For the moment, few seem conscious of the distinction and so support for the Abe government and its agenda is scarcely challenged. However, those who believe they share values with the Abe government should look carefully at contemporary Japan’s complex crisis of identity, history and role; at the radical but contradictory agenda pursued by Prime Minister Abe; and not least at the burgeoning confrontation in Oura Bay in Okinawa, where the juggernaut of the state, with its monopoly of force and readiness to sacrifice nature to military ends threatens the local, non-violent, democratic and fundamentally ‘conservative’ citizenry.

  • Jane Tolman. I don’t want to get Dementia.

    Dementia is what many of us fear most, and the effective risk is largely related to age.   The statistics say that at 65 years of age, only 2% have dementia.  But this figure doubles with the passage of each five year period.  By 90, the risk of having dementia is about one in four.  Because of the “survivor effect” (those with the fewest risks will live to old age), the subsequent risk no longer increases at this rate.

    There is no guarantee that dementia can be avoided, whatever we do.  But what does the evidence say about what strategies can reduce the risk? Genes account for only a small percentage of those with dementia, especially among the elderly.

    There is now evidence that the risk can be reduced, and that this will lead to fewer people with dementia.  In fact, we think that if the onset of dementia could be delayed by five years, then the numbers would be halved (Dementia Risk Reduction, prepared for Alzheimer’s Australia, 2007).

    Despite much controversy in recent years about the exact cause of Alzheimer’s disease- the most common form of dementia in the western world- it turns out that the factors which protect against heart disease also protect against dementia. The UK Blackfriars consensus produced this year suggested that within two decades up to 20% of predicted new cases of dementia could be prevented with lifestyle alterations designed to reduce blood pressure, obesity, cholesterol and diabetes.

    So what can we do to minimise the risk of developing dementia?

    The brain is arguably the most important organ and should be treated with respect at all times. “Getting knocked out” sounds bad, and it is. We are now aware that episodes of concussion are bad for the brain and there are reports that head injuries contribute to dementia.  Protect your brain, and not just from toxic substances.

    It’s never too early to start with life style changes. Both physical and mental activity are critical, and the earlier they start, the better. Regular is good- say 30 minutes every day of sustained physical exercise.  Patterns established in youth are harder to break in old age.  When it comes to mental exercise, repetition of familiar tasks is not particularly useful (such as Sudoku or crosswords); there must be real stimulation and challenging to the brain. Learning a language or taking a university course in a new field is what’s needed.

    Connectivity is the new buzz word for dementia.  This relates to the structure of the brain (how nerves connect with each other) and the disruption of neuronal connectivity is emerging as a key component in the impairment of brain function. But it also relates to social connections. People don’t thrive in isolation and neither do brains. As we age, we lose social connections (people die) so it’s necessary to have a large social network when we are younger. Being with people- having relationships, joining groups, developing interests which involve human contact- these will all improve brain function and help to reduce the dementia risk.  Ideally, you should have friends who are younger than you are, but at least a mixture of ages.

    Nurturing the senses is about maximising the inputs to the brain.  Good vision and hearing are among the important predictive factors for a good memory in old age.  Fifty percent of older people have an incorrect prescription for their spectacles, and while most very elderly people have some deafness, hearing aids are often not worn. Now is the time- however young or old you are- to have a check and correct any sensory deficits as soon as possible.

    What should you eat? Moderation and balance will usually do the trick.    Having a healthy weight before old age is critical: in older age weight loss means losing muscle, and this is a sure way of triggering falls, impairing the circulation and immune function. For most older people, care needs to be taken to maintain weight, and to have protein at the centre of every meal.  Salt is bad for the brain as it contributes to hypertension which itself causes damage.  Fats are essential, but are best in balance; avoid saturated fats as these may double the risk of dementia.  Fruits and vegetables are associated with longevity, but also promote good bowel function.  Constipation in old age is the enemy of health, happiness and functioning well, each of which helps us to live the dementia journey better. Broccoli and cauliflower also contain Vitamin E which is thought to be protective against dementia. If you need more guidance, the Mediterranean diet has recognised benefits.

    Alcohol in moderation may be protective, but with excessive amounts (regular consumption in excess of two drinks a day or four in a single session) come increased risks for hypertension, cardiovascular disease and dementia.  Binge drinking may increase the risk of dementia three fold after 65.

    Smoking is a serious risk for a range of illnesses, and if you survive cancers, chronic lung diseases (especially emphysema) and vascular disease (heart attacks and strokes) then dementia is also more likely in your old age.

    Regular blood pressure checks and careful control are essential, as hypertension is the enemy of brain health. Avoiding diabetes, similarly dangerous for brains, means a healthy diet, weight control and regular screens.  See your doctor if there are any new symptoms, especially lethargy, blurred vision, increased hunger, unexplained weight loss or increased thirst.  If you have diabetes, keep the sugars under control.

    Your psyche should be as important to you as your physical health. The responsibility for your state of mind rests with you, and while stress might not be avoidable, how you deal with it is up to you.  If you need help, get it.  Whether you get dementia is not up to you.  But there are ways to reduce the risk, and to make the journey less traumatic if you are unlucky.  What is up to you, is what you know (keep up to date) and your attitude to your health (be positive).  Reducing your risks for dementia is a lifelong undertaking and will make you a happier and healthier person.

     

    Jane Tolman is Director of Aged Care, Royal Hobart Hospital.

     

     

  • Gavan McCormack. Disturbing trends in Japan (Part 3 of 4)

    Abe, the radical

    Nominally conservative, Abe’s political career has been devoted to an extraordinarily radical agenda, nothing less than revision of all three of the country’s basic charters: the Constitution (1946), the Fundamental Law of Education (1947) and Ampo (the 1951/1960 security treaty with the United States). He aspires to ‘liquidate the post-war regime’ and replace it with a ‘new’ and ‘beautiful’ Japan.

    Abe’s party has from its inception in 1955 been committed to revising the constitution, especially Article 9, the declaration of state pacifism. The current LDP draft constitution (of 2012) widens state prerogatives while narrowing citizen rights and transforms the existing Self-Defense Forces into a ‘national defence army’. But overt revision has never been politically feasible given the strength of public opposition. Abe has chafed especially under the constraint that all previous governments had accepted—that Japan might possess an ‘inherent’ right to collective self-defence, but the constitution ruled out its exercise. On the eve of his Australian visit Abe’s cabinet disposed of this problem by simply adopting a new interpretation, reversing the restrictive interpretation and freeing Japan’s forces for future global missions. The Japan that under its constitution from 1947 to 2014 could not go to war now can.

    The evasion of constitutional principle by the simple device of reinterpretation, praised by Abbott and by the Obama government, was widely seen in Japan as a constitutional coup-d‘etat. It was in keeping with Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro’s encomium (in a speech to party faithful on 29 July 2013) that Japan should learn from the Hitler example, the people in Germany simply waking one morning to find that their constitution no longer meant what they had thought it did. The New York Times editorialised that Japan was ‘facing a genuine test of its democracy’.

    As for education, in his first term Abe succeeded in revising the Fundamental Law of Education, making it an educational requirement that schools promote ‘love of country’. Early in 2014, Abe’s Education Ministry announced that moral education was henceforth to be given a core part in the school curriculum and that history, geography and civics texts for junior and senior high schools would, from April 2016, have to ‘reflect the government’s official position on contentious historical issues’.

    As for the security treaty with the United States, revision in 1960 caused such political turmoil that it has not been formally revised since then. Instead, however, de facto revision has been unceasing and fundamental, in accord with high-level governmental and inter-governmental understandings, including the National Defense Guidelines (1978, 1997 and forthcoming 2014) and the 2005–06 Agreements on ‘Transformation and Realignment’ of US forces in Japan. The fullest expression of the Abe security stance is expected to come in the late-2014 National Security Guidelines, but it is indicative that he has already opened the door to the export of Japanese weapons, established a National Security Council that concentrates power in his office, passed a ‘secrets protection’ law that prescribes draconian penalties for whistleblowers and investigative journalists and reminds some of the infamous 1925 ‘Peace Preservation Law’, is planning or constructing new Japanese bases in the far-southwestern islands of Amami, Miyako, Ishigaki and Yonaguni, and is working on plans to establish Japanese versions of the CIA and the US Marine Corps.

    Australia has no known stance on educational policy, but it has long favoured constitutional revision and a ‘normal state’ (‘strong’ and war capable) agenda for Japan. The fact that Abe takes aim in particular at Japan’s democratic, citizen-based and anti-militarist elements, preferring instead a paradoxical mix of the Shintoist, the American, the beautiful and the new, seems not to have registered in the Australian consciousness.

    Though Abe offends and worries the United States on many fronts, his redeeming quality is the enthusiasm he brings to the security agenda, implementing a substantial military build-up, merging with and functionally subordinating Japan’s military to that of the United States and building major new facilities for the Marine Corps in Northern Okinawa (as well as, more recently, in US territory (Guam and the Marianas)). For the cash-strapped Pentagon the prospect of such largesse,and of a 225,000-person subsidiary force, all costs met by Japan, well-trained and -equipped and ready for action on the Pentagon’s behalf under ‘collective self-defence’ principles in future wars, is irresistible.

  • Mike Steketee. Politics vs Science.

    “THE laws of physics are non-negotiable,” observed Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organisation, this week. https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1002_en.html

    You wouldn’t think so listening to the often frenzied debate about global warming or, according to Tony Abbott’s senior business adviser Maurice Newman, what is really global cooling http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/were-illprepared-if-the-iceman-cometh/story-e6frg6zo-1227023489894 .

    Jarraud was commenting on the release of the WMO’s annual greenhouse gas bulletin https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/documents/1002_GHG_Bulletin.pdf  , based mainly on data collected by 50 countries. It shows a 34 per cent increase in the warming effect of greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2013. Most of this is attributable to carbon dioxide, atmospheric concentrations of which have risen by 142 per cent since the start of industrialisation in the 18th century, “primarily because of emissions from combustion of fossil fuels and cement production”. The WMO recorded an increase of 2.9 parts per million in 2013 – the largest rise since 1984 – although it added the figure was subject to seasonal and regional variations, such as a changing balance between photosynthesis and respiration or the amount of biomass burned.

    The figures put the best face on things, more or less. The WMO’s bulletin reports on concentrations of greenhouse gases rather than emissions – that is, what remains in the atmosphere after the estimated 25 per cent of emissions that are absorbed by the oceans and a similar amount by the biosphere, particularly plants. That means we are producing around twice as much long-lived greenhouse gases than can be taken up by the earth and the oceans. Moreover, the increasing amounts of CO2 going into the ocean is causing acidification at a rate that “appears unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years”. The consequences are not fully known but include reduced calcification, relied on by corals, molluscs and other organisms.

    Jarraud said the bulletin “provides a scientific base for decision-making. …Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.”

    So much for the science. Back in the world of politics, where just about anything is negotiable, apparently including the future of the planet, Australia has decided that it has been doing far too much to deal with global warming. The price on carbon emissions has been removed, despite the evidence, both direct and indirect, that it worked. Most of the sharp increase in electricity prices in recent years has been due not to the carbon tax but the cost of upgrading infrastructure – the poles and wires – often unnecessarily because of perverse incentives. But the response from consumers has been exactly what you would expect from a price rise, whatever its origins – they have reduced their demand for electricity. This has been one of the factors in the break since 2010 in the long-term trend towards rising electricity demand. file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Kate/My%20Documents/Downloads/IP%2014%20Power%20down_0.pdf

    Prices in the electricity market have responded in another way. In the words of the report https://retreview.dpmc.gov.au/ret-review-report-0 of the inquiry established by the Abbott government into the renewable energy target, “analyses suggest that, overall, the RET is exerting some downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices. This is not surprising, given that the RET is increasing the supply of electricity when electricity demand has been falling”.

    Indeed, if the reduction is passed on in lower retail prices, as it should be in a competitive market, and offsets the higher cost of producing renewables, it might be thought of as a positive outcome by a government that hails the reduction in electricity prices brought about by the abolition of the carbon tax. However, the inquiry into the RET, headed by businessman and climate change sceptic Dick Warburton, had another purpose: to find a way of scaling back or eliminating the RET. As a result, the report argued that “artificially” low wholesale electricity prices could distort investment decisions.

    Thankfully, the report did not ignore some other facts, even if it put its own peculiar interpretation on them. Modelling it commissioned found the net impact of the RET on retail prices was small, including into the future. It concluded that the scheme had broadly met its objectives, with output from large scale renewable generators, mainly wind farms, almost doubling and that from small scale systems, mainly solar, already exceeding levels forecast for 2020. The cost of renewables had fallen, particularly for rooftop solar and the small scale renewable industry was becoming commercially viable.

    All this might sound like good news but the report thought otherwise. It found the RET to be a high cost approach to reducing CO2 emissions – $35 to $68 a tonne and $100 to $200 a tonne for small-scale renewables.

    So it is but it depends on the alternatives. At the moment there are none. The Gillard government set the carbon price at $23 a tonne and the international market price has moved much lower since. The report suggests the Abbott government’s direct action policy would produce cheaper abatement than renewables. But that remains to be seen – that is, if the policy is ever implemented in a viable form, given that it currently is blocked in the Senate.

    The government says it remains committed to reducing emissions by 5 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020, although the Climate Change Authority, among others, argues that this is less than required for Australia to meet its fair share of the international effort. The RET is the only remaining significant mechanism for at least heading in the right direction. Its role is to increase the share of emissions-free electricity, not, as the Warburton report argues, to solve the problems facing fossil fuel generators because of falling demand by winding back the RET.

    According to Andrew Blakers, director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the Australian Natonal University, Australia could achieve 90 per cent renewable energy by 2040 by replacing coal and gas fired stations that are due to be retired over the coming decades http://theconversation.com/renewable-energy-target-review-experts-respond-31050 . Solutions would need to be found for storing power from wind and solar, given their intermittent nature, but developments in battery technology suggest that this is in prospect. Blakers offers another option that he says would be cheaper: “pumped hydro”, under which water is pumped up to a reservoir when there is spare electricity from renewables and then run downhill through a turbine when needed. http://theconversation.com/how-pushing-water-uphill-can-solve-our-renewable-energy-issues-28196

    In a world that gradually is doing more to address climate change but still not enough to meet the target of limiting warming to 2C, Australia  has become the international laggard, despite being one of the highest producers of greenhouse gases per capita in the world. The International Energy Agency has estimated http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/25recom_2011.pdf  that taking a range of measures merely to improve the efficiency with which we use energy can reduce total global energy consumption by 17 per cent by 2030, making a big contribution towards cutting greenhouse gases.

    But according to an American study http://aceee.org/portal/national-policy/international-scorecard , Australia ranks 10th out of 16 OECD countries in overall energy efficiency and last in transport. Under the Abbott government, it “has dramatically reduced its investment in efficiency and has rolled back its efficiency incentive programs, causing its score to decline.” An example is this year’s budget, which withdrew commonwealth funding of public transport projects and increased it for roads.

    Given the relentless long-term trend towards global warming (memo Maurice Newman: periods of short-term cooling have been declining http://theconversation.com/99-999-certainty-humans-are-driving-global-warming-new-study-29911?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%201899&utm_content=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%201899+CID_02ac31e1fe595615139d593549d1aefb&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=99999%20certainty%20humans%20are%20driving%20global%20warming%20new%20study ), it should be a case of all hands on deck. The opposition already has voted against direct action legislation in the House of Representatives on the grounds that it is a poor substitute for an emissions trading scheme. Perhaps it is but that does not mean the kind of projects that could attract funding under direct action, such as for increased energy efficiency in commercial buildings and industry, reafforestation and improved soil carbon, are not worth doing.  Labor should reverse its position and support the legislation in the Senate.

    As the WMO’s Michel Jarraud put it this week, “we are runnning out of time”.

    This article was first published in The Drum on 12 September, 2014.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Gavan McCormack. Disturbing trends in Japan (Part 2 of 4)

    Shared values

    Much was made during the visit of the ‘shared values’ that unite Australia and Japan. But are the values of Abe or his government really widely shared? From the time of his entry into the national Diet in 1993, Abe immersed himself in the historical revisionist cause, resisting moves towards formal apology for the war and compensation for war victims and objecting to what he and his colleagues refer to scathingly as a ‘Tokyo Tribunal view of history’. He believes Japan was unjustly blamed for the China and Pacific wars of 1931 to 1945. As his friend Hyakuta Naoki, Abe-appointed director of national broadcaster NHK, put it earlier this year, the Nanjing massacre of 1937 never occurred and Americans had ‘fabricated war crimes against Japanese leaders in order to cover up American atrocities’. He and most of his cabinet today belong to organisations that look back to wartime Japan for inspiration, with names such as Dietmembers Associations ‘for the Passing on of a Correct History’, for a ‘Bright Japan’ and ‘Reflection on Japan’s Future and History Education’, and the ‘Shinto Politics League’. The basic principle of Shinto politics was articulated in January 2000 by then prime minister Mori Yoshiro, who referred to Japan as an ‘emperor-centred country of the gods’—precisely the view held by those who led Japan to the disastrous wars of the 1930s and 1940s.

    The politician Abe professes to admire most is his own (maternal) grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987). Kishi was economic czar of Manchuria (Northeast China) in the 1930s, became minister for trade and industry in the Tojo Hideki cabinet from 1941 and signed the declaration of war against the United States, holding office in the wartime government till shortly before war’s end and being then held for three years as a suspected Class ‘A’ war criminal. Released, however, in December 1948, he became prime minister from 1957 (in which capacity he first visited Australia) to 1960. Tim Weiner’s History of the CIA refers to him as ‘one of the two most influential agents the United States ever recruited … [and who] helped carry out the CIA mission to control the government’ (which continued up to the 1970s). Commonly seen as nationalists, Abe and his grandfather are both better seen as servants of the United States posing as nationalists.

    Unlike Australia, in the United States it is clear some harbour serious doubts over what values are shared with Japan. When Tony Abbott extended the invitation to Mr Abe to address a joint sitting of the Australian parliament, one wonders whether he was aware:

    • that the US government has consistently denied the honour of a formal congressional address to Japan’s leaders, even though it has extended such an honour to successive Korean presidents (five in all).
    • that Abe in his first spell in government (2006–07) had been subject to formal rebuke by the United States on human-rights grounds (House of Representatives Resolution 101 of 2007) for failure to acknowledge and compensate the victims of the wartime ‘comfort women’ system, and that similar resolutions had also been adopted by Canada and the EU.
    • that while Abe in 2013 had to be satisfied with a businesslike White House lunch with President Obama, with no shared press conference, Chinese president Xi Jinping shortly afterwards got a respectful reception and spent a couple of days with Obama on a California ranch.
    • that, when Abe brushed off strong US objections and in December 2013 visited Yasukuni Shrine, the US embassy in Tokyo released a statement that ‘the United States is disappointed [sic.] that Japan’s leadership has taken an action that will exacerbate tensions with Japan’s neighbours’, and ordered him not to repeat it.
    • that President Obama himself directly rebuked Abe (in reference to his China policy) in front of a Tokyo press conference in April 2014. 

    In short, the present government of the United States has serious differences with the Abe Japanese government on both war memory and China (and Korea) policy. Japanese governments have striven desperately to secure from Washington the sort of honour bestowed on them in July 2014 by Canberra. Indeed it may well be that it was Washington’s ‘Japan handlers’—some at least of them also its ‘Australia handlers’—who put together the Australia honour. Much as the George W. Bush administration put together a visit by Prime Minister Koizumi in 2007 to the Elvis Presley shrine in Memphis to compensate him for the invitation to Congress he too desired but could not be granted, so for Abe Canberra would substitute for Washington. In its apparently unlimited enthusiasm over its new ‘special relationship’, Australia now is notably out of step with Washington, and Abe’s uncritical and extravagant Australian reception must have delighted him.

     

  • Gavan McCormack Disturbing trends in Japan (Part 1 of 4)

    These posts (published over 4 days) are extracts from an article by Gavan McCormack, entitled ‘Partnership 135 Degrees East’ which will be published in Arena.org.au. 

     

    Our best friend

    The current Japanese and Australian governments came into being in December 2012 and September 2013 respectively. Both are headed by conservative, neoliberal, climate-denialist, pro-American leaders, of similar age, who quickly established a close rapport. Following their first meeting, at an ASEAN summit in October 2013, Abbott declared Abe Australia’s ‘best friend in Asia’. In meetings that followed, in Tokyo in April and Canberra in July 2014, they resolved to transform the ‘strategic partnership’ into a new ‘special relationship.’ Both made unprecedented invited appearances at the highest-level national-security-council meeting of their counterpart country, and signed agreements for free trade and defence cooperation (including ‘trilateral security cooperation with the United States’) and closer scientific and academic links.

    Before the national parliament, Prime Minister Abbott delighted his guest and astonished many Australians by referring to the ‘skill and sense of honour’ of the imperial Japanese soldiers of seventy years ago. For his part, Abe resolved to ‘stay humble against the evils and horrors of history’, offering ‘sincere condolences towards the many who lost their lives’ and expressing his determination to do more to enhance peace.

    The Murdoch press waxed hot with excitement. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan declared the Abe performance ‘masterful … as intricate as a fine Noritake pottery work, with as many moving parts seamlessly working together as the robotics of a Nagoya car plant’, signifying ‘nothing less than the birth of a new Japan’.

    Abe’s expression of ‘condolences’ and his resolve to further the cause of peace were widely praised. Yet his ‘condolences’ were calibrated to convey sympathy while avoiding responsibility, and the greatest Japanese crimes—of Nanjing, Unit 731, and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of women across Asia—went unmentioned. It was as if those who ‘lost’ their lives at Kokoda and Sandakan had fallen victim to some mysterious ailment. Furthermore, by his references to peace, Abe plainly meant shedding the shackles of post-war constitutional pacifism and joining the United States in future wars because he sees it as heading the cause of global peace. Peace, in short, calls for war. It is a proposition worthy of Orwell.

    As for his professed commitment to settling disputes by dialogue and the rule of law, Abe in fact has ruled out discussion with China on the territorial issue that China sees as critical (contested sovereignty over the uninhabited islets known in China as Diaoyu and in Japan as Senkaku). There is, he insists, no dispute, no room for discussion or negotiation. What is called for is ‘not negotiation but physical force incapable of being misunderstood’ (brute force, in other words).

    Gavan McCormack is emeritus professor of the Australian National University, coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (http://japanfocus.org), and author of many books and articles on modern and contemporary Japan and East Asia.

  • David Isaacs and Ian Kerridge. Asylum seeker’s ‘brain death’ shows failure of care and of democracy.

    The news that Hamid Kehazaei, a 24-year-old Iranian asylum seeker detained on Manus Island, has been diagnosed as brain dead following his transfer to the Mater Hospital in Brisbane is a tragedy. That it is a tragedy for this young man and his family is unquestionable The news – but the extent of this tragedy may be much more pervasive than we realise.

    If the emerging details of his case are correct, Kehazaei developed septicaemia as a complication of cellulitis (skin and soft-tissue infection) arising from a cut in his foot. This, in itself, is disturbing.

    Severe infection can result in brain death – either from infection of the brain itself (meningitis, encephalitis or brain abscess), or from brain injury due to a lack of oxygen resulting from cardiac arrest (as appears to be the case here), or from reduced blood supply to the brain. Yet it is very uncommon, especially in a young, previously healthy man.

    Such a case could occur in Australia and has been described in 2012 in young Indigenous adults in Central Australia. Nevertheless, severe sepsis resulting from a foot infection is preventable. And a case like this occurring in an Australian national would raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the antibiotics used and the timeliness of care.

    Most cases of brain death result from traumatic brain injury, stroke or lack of oxygen to the brain following asphyxia, near-drowning, or prolonged cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

    What happened to Hamid Kehazaei raises concerns about the adequacy of care provided to him during initial treatment, including wound care and antibiotics, and how soon he was transferred to expert medical care, first to Port Moresby and subsequently to Brisbane.

    If this young man became ill and had his brain die while seeking asylum in Australia and while in our care, then we must examine the details of his case and ask ourselves not only whether it was preventable but whether our policies and processes actually contributed to his death.

    But how can we even begin to ask these types of questions when we know so little about the circumstances in which he became ill, and his subsequent care?

    Protestations that this is due to the necessity of respecting privacy and confidentiality, ethical principles that are core to the health professional-patient relationship, are to some extent correct. But they also obscure important features of this case.

    The government is simply wrong to claim that this issue should not be “politicised”. What is ultimately at issue here is the way in which domestic politics and border policy impose norms (rules of behaviour) that are antithetical to medicine and health care and, fundamentally, to democracy.

    Medicine, like biomedical science, requires transparency and honesty to be clinically and ethically sound. Peer review, clinical audit, root-cause analysis, family conferences, conflict-resolution strategies, case consultation, multidisciplinary team meetings, mortality and morbidity meetings, open disclosure policies: all rest on the importance of transparency and respect.

    In contrast, we know very little about the people who seek asylum in Australia. Everything is secret – their arrival, their situation, their medical need, their illnesses, and their death.

    This requirement for secrecy has largely overwhelmed efforts by many good people – legislators, human rights lawyers, refugee advocates, health workers, politicians and ordinary citizens – to shine a light on what is happening to people in detention.

    The Immigration Health Advisory Group has been disbanded, restricting the degree to which the health professions can critique the care available to asylum seekers. And even those tasked with providing medical care to asylum-seekers struggle to advocate for the people under their care.

    Policies restrict the degree to which they can care for their patients or refer them for specialist care not available in the detention centres. Contracts bind them to secrecy and many, often shocked by what they have seen, are prevented from speaking out by legal threats and intimidation long after they’ve returned to the mainland.

    The language of “border control” has been used to excuse political secrecy. But such secrecy is what we usually associate with autocratic governments and is the antithesis of democratic ideals.

    What this case illustrates, yet again, is that the asylum seekers detained on Manus and Christmas Islands and Nauru have been excised not only from the laws that determine access to Australia but from the care we should provide any vulnerable person for whom we are responsible. And from the ethical principles upon which medicine and our health system are based.

    If we care about these people, and if we truly believe in the humane values that ground medicine and the moral principles that ground democracy, then we need to do two things. The first is to hold a truly independent inquiry into the care of people in detention. And the second is to end off-shore processing.

    David Isaacs is Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at University of Sydney.

    Ian Kerridge is Associate Professor in Bioethics & Director, Centre for Values and Ethics and the Law in Medicine at University of Sydney. 

    This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’.