John Menadue

  • Annette Brownlie. No new war in Iraq.

    Both major political parties are once again standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the US, in support of what amounts to a new military intervention in Iraq.

    The process began with the dropping of humanitarian aid supplies to the Yezidi. It has now moved on to the delivery of weapons and munitions to Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Meanwhile, Defence Minister David Johnston has indicated that Australian armed forces (Super Hornet warplanes and C130s) are to be made available to support whatever action the US decides upon.

    All of this has happened with scarcely any discussion – in or outside of the parliament. No questioning or dissent has been heard in this drive towards intervention and, possibly, eventual war. (However, a recent poll shows that 78% of the population opposes having Australian ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq.)

    Even the proposal that there be a parliamentary debate about the intervention, so that the government could make its case to the Australian people, has been opposed by both major parties. There is no possibility for the parliament to take any part in the decision to send Australian forces overseas.  Nor has the Abbott government explained the sudden need to switch from aid to arms. And it has certainly not explained what Australia hopes to achieve.

    The horror in Iraq today is a direct consequence of the war on that began with the invasion of 2003. John Howard’s government joined that invasion on the basis of falsehoods and against the opinion of the majority of the population. It appears that the present government is eagerly waiting for a request to follow the US once again.

    The massive “shock and awe” bombing and the 11-year occupation of Iraq created huge numbers of civilian casualties – including more than 1 million dead – and massive internal displacement of people. The West’s propping up of the repressive regime that followed, laid the basis for the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) fundamentalists. IS has become the latest reason for intervention. Ironically, it is using weapons captured from the Iraqi army and originally supplied by the US.

    The lesson that should have been learnt from Iraq is that military meddling in the affairs of the Middle East does not work. There was a disastrous outcome last time and no evidence to indicate anything different this time.

    Australia and the US do not recognise Kurdistan as an independent state. Sending arms to the Kurds means that Australia is continuing to meddle – in this case within the movement for Kurdish self-determination.

    If the Australian government was serious about helping the Iraqi minorities, rather than following the US into military intervention, it would immediately:

    • Expand the refugee program and offer sanctuary to the displaced and traumatised
    • Send humanitarian aid – food; engineers; doctors and constructions workers. 

    Sending yet more armaments to the area, which is already wracked by years of warfare, will not reduce the level of violence it is experiencing. The area needs less weaponry, not more.

    Annett Brownlie is a member of IPAN (The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network)

  • Ben Lewis. The false advertising of mandatory detention and “Stopping the Boats”

    Spend any amount of time listening to Australian policy makers or reading Australian media and you’re certain to hear a familiar phrase: “Stop the Boats”. It has become such a political imperative within the Australian asylum seeker debate that “Stop the Boats” is rarely even challenged.  But putting aside the question of whether Australia should (or even can) “Stop the Boats”, there is a fundamental flaw in the logic . . . the key policy which underpins the “Stop the Boats” thinking—namely mandatory detention—has been shown to be false advertising.

    The truth is that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that harsh immigration policies such as mandatory detention deter irregular migration. That’s because, when it comes to human migration, countries by and large don’t have control over who leaves a territory or to where they are headed. Empirical research for decades has shown that immigration policies are predominantly responsive to, not determinative of human movement.

    According to a 2011 study conducted by UNHCR’s chief detention researcher, Alice Edwards:

    “Pragmatically, there is no empirical evidence that the prospect of being detained deters irregular migration, or discourages persons from seeking asylum. In fact, as the detention of migrants and asylum-seekers has increased in a number of countries, the number of individuals seeking to enter such territories has also risen, or has remained constant.” 

    For example, over the past three decades, many Europe countries have significantly expanded their use of detention in response to irregular asylum seeker and migrant arrivals.  The result?  European migration figures have increased from an estimated 49 million in 1990 to 58 million in 2000 to 70 million in 2010. The same can be shown in the United States. Despite decades of “tough on immigration” policies, including annual detention figures approaching half a million, and a Congressional “bed mandate” requiring 34,000 migrants to be in detention every single day, the period from 2000-2010 was “a record setting decade of immigration” in the United States.

    Detention policies don’t deter. So why then do Australian policy makers stubbornly cling to the assertion that mandatory detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants isn’t simply good policy, but is actually necessary to curb irregular migration when it’s clear the facts don’t support it?

    Part of the blame undoubtedly lies with the Australian public. The Australian policy of mandatory detention—roundly criticized outside of Australia—remains overwhelmingly popular within. Even as recently as last week, Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison defended the practice of detaining asylum seeking children using the staid “stop the boats” rhetoric, and with the legitimacy of broad public support for the country’s mandatory detention policy.

    Part of the blame also lies with Australian policy makers for continuing to use anecdotal rather than empirical evidence to justify the mandatory detention policy. As the editor of this blog has rightly pointed out, this is “sloppy policy evaluation” at best. Experts are in agreement that mandatory detention policies have no measurable impact on the number of irregularly arriving asylum seekers and migrants. There are a number of common sense—and empirically established—reasons for this.  According to Robyn Sampson, a leading researcher from Swinburne University:

    “Several studies have been undertaken to establish which factors most impact the choice of destination of asylum seekers and refugees and irregular migrants.  According to this body of research, the principal aim of asylum seekers and irregular migrants is to reach a place of safety. Asylum seekers and irregular migrants often have very limited understanding of the migration policies of destination countries before arrival and rely on people smugglers to choose their destination. Rather than being influenced primarily by immigration policies such as detention, most refugees and irregular migrants choose destinations where they will be reunited with family or friends; where they believe they will be in a safe, tolerant and democratic society; where there are historical links between their country and the destination country; where they can already speak the language of the destination country; or where they believe they will be able to find secure work quickly due to a perception of the country as one of wealth and prosperity.” 

    So to recap—the principle determinants of the choice of destination country for asylum seekers and irregular migrants are:

    1. Safety;
    2. Family;
    3. Perceptions of democracy;
    4. Historical links;
    5. Common language; and
    6. Perceptions of wealth/prosperity. 

    Most migrants, it turns out, are just the same as you and I.  They want to go to the nearest safe place where they can be together with their families and not be persecuted—bonus points for a common language, culture, or job opportunities. A policy of mandatory detention fails to address any of these; it merely punishes those who arrive in the false belief that if asylum seekers and irregular migrants are punished badly enough, they’ll simply stop coming.

    To an outsider, the irrationality of the mandatory detention policy would be comical if not for all of the pain and suffering it is causing. You may be able to “Stop the Boats” by physically restraining asylum seeking children and families before they reach you, but you certainly won’t deter future arrivals by punishing them once they get here. And why would you want to—especially when the overwhelming majority have been shown to be legitimate refugees, fleeing for their lives? (By the government’s own statistics, since 2008, 92% of all asylum seekers arriving by boat have been granted refugee status.)

    What are needed are not more “tough” immigration policies, but comprehensive regional solutions that attempt to address the root causes of insecurity that prompt human movement. The good news is that better policies do exist; policies that can be supported by empirical evidence and that respect international human rights obligations. But one thing is clear: better policy making won’t be built on the continued justification of mandatory detention as a deterrent. Detention as a deterrent is just false advertising.

    Ben Lewis is the Advocacy Coordinator of the International Detention Coalition (IDC). He is an international human rights lawyer with extensive advocacy experience working with irregular migrant populations in the US and Latin America. The views in this blog are his own.

  • Walter Hamilton. Copy and Paste

    The Japanese have coined a new word, kopipe, from the English phrase ‘copy and paste’. It featured, for instance, in recent reporting of the discredited stem-cell researcher caught out copying images and data from one research paper to another. But the word kopipe has many possible applications, such as in the ongoing debates about history and Japan’s expanding security alliance with the United States.

    On the matter of history, let me do some copying and pasting of my own from the text of the San Francisco Peace Treaty which Japan signed in 1951 to formally bring to an end the Second World War. Here is what it says in Article 11:

                Japan accepts the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East [IMTFE] and of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan, and will carry out the sentences imposed  thereby upon Japanese nationals imprisoned in Japan. The power to grant clemency, to reduce sentences and to parole with respect to such prisoners may not be exercised except on the decision of the Government or Governments which imposed the sentence in each instance, and on recommendation of Japan.

    What are we to make, then, of Japan’s current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who patently does not accept the judgments of the war crimes tribunals? Abe, on the contrary, is a determined revisionist who apparently thinks that those responsible for making war on their neighbours and conducting or condoning systematic atrocities are worthy of celebration. (For the record, the President of the IMTFE was Justice William Webb of Australia.)

    During a parliamentary budget committee hearing last year Abe said the war crimes trials were a case of the Allies imposing their view of events on the Japanese. And in April this year Abe sent a message of support to a Buddhist event honouring Japanese who died after being convicted of war crimes. Abe wrote that they had ‘staked their souls to become the foundation of the fatherland,’ according to a report in the Asahi newspaper. The annual ceremony is held before a memorial statue that describes the war crimes tribunals conducted by the Allied powers as ‘retaliatory’ and calls executed Japanese war criminals ‘Showa Era (1926-1989) martyrs.’ Showa is the era name of the reign of Emperor Hirohito by whose authority Japan waged war in China and the Pacific. The memorial statue records the names of about 1,180 war criminals who were either executed or who died of illness or committed suicide in detention camps.

    It’s not the first time Abe has sent a message of encouragement to the event. Last year he wrote: ‘I want to establish the existence of a new Japan that would not be an embarrassment to the spirit of the war dead.’

    Abe’s maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, wartime Munitions Minister, was held as a suspected Class ‘A’ war criminal himself though never put on trial. He later made a political comeback and served as prime minister between 1957 and 1960. Abe could be described as a kopipe of his blood relation. But while Kishi’s unpopular policy of closer military co-operation with the United States eventually cost him the leadership, Abe’s pushing through of a new interpretation of Japan’s post-war constitution that effectively strips away its pacifist intention has come at little political cost. The Japan of 2014 is much less alert to its wartime responsibilities than the Japan of 1960. (It is worth noting that Abe’s language when addressing the subject during his speech to the Australian Parliament in July was not as conciliatory as that used by Kishi when he visited Australia in 1957.)

    The Japanese Government makes a lot of noise about the importance of observing international law­­­­ in its territorial disputes with China and South Korea, and over issues such as whaling. When convenient, however, it seems ready to bend or ignore laws and commitments. The official explanation that Abe was acting purely in a ‘private’ capacity when he honoured Japan’s war criminals is the usual ‘copy and paste’ for the double standard.

    Abe’s kopipe method was evident, too, during last month’s ceremonies marking the end of the war and the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war dead would be more than embarrassed, one imagines, if they had been able to hear the Prime Minister read out a statement in Hiroshima that was, in large part, identical to the one he made at last year’s ceremony. Some official had simply copied and pasted from the old speech and so little concerned was Abe for reflecting sincerely on the past he read the whole thing without either noticing or caring.

    Finally, and probably most importantly, there is the continuing ‘copy-and-paste’ militarization of Okinawa, the island prefecture that occupies less than 1% of Japan’s landmass but plays host to 74% of its US-only military bases. For decades politicians have promised the people of Okinawa that their disproportionate share of the burden would be reduced. A primary focus of groups campaigning for the pledge to be fulfilled has been the Futenma Air Station operated by the US Marines in the centre of Ginowan City. The facility is an obstacle to local development and seriously affects the lives of nearby residents with its noise pollution and constant danger of aircraft accidents.

    In 1996, the US agreed to return the land––but only on condition that another location was found in Okinawa.  As a result, work preliminary to the construction of a new facility recently began in Oura Bay at Henoko, Nago city, near the existing American base Camp Schwab. The city’s mayor and many others are fiercely opposed to the project, so the Japanese coast guard has been mobilized to haul in any protestors trying to breach a large exclusion zone in the bay proclaimed under a little-used provision of the criminal law.

    According to Professor Gavan McCormack of the Australian National University, Oura Bay ‘happens to be one of the most bio-diverse and spectacularly beautiful coastal zones in all Japan. It hosts a cornucopia of life forms from blue––and many other species––of coral…through crustaceans, sea cucumbers and sea weeds and hundreds of species of shrimps, snails, fish, tortoise, snake, and mammal.’ McCormack goes on to say: ‘If the project proceeds, it will rival in scale Kansai International Airport in Osaka Bay, take a decade or more to complete and cost somewhere in the vicinity of $25 billion. Those [foreign leaders such as Tony Abbott] who believe they share values with [Shinzo Abe] should look carefully at the burgeoning confrontation in Oura Bay between the Abe state, with its monopoly of force, and local, non-violent, democratic citizens.’ 

    Kopipe, rather than original thinking and genuine engagement, seems to be the fashionable way in Japan these days.

    Walter Hamilton is the author of Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story.

     

  • Clare Condon SGS. Sanctioned Violence: What does it do to our society and relationships?

    Some violent acts, depending on where and how they were perpetrated, are regarded as criminal. Others, however, are sanctioned by society, even applauded and cheered. Some are blatant; others are covert and subtle. Some are justified by cultural norms, by the blind eye or the deaf ear; they happen behind closed doors. Others are justified by official permission and approval, or even by public opinion.

    I wish to highlight four areas of sanctioned violence which I believe impact adversely on society and relationships. 

    Australia’s response to asylum seekers and refugees

    Currently in the Australian community, the government is justifying the use of violence to stop the smuggling of asylum seekers. This inhumane approach has bipartisan political support; it is driven by public opinion and generated by the politics of the fear of the stranger. The government’s actions are hidden from the public’s eye through secrecy and by holding people in detention in remote areas of Australia, or offshore in developing countries, such as Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

    The government’s often-used mantra “Stop the boats” demonises desperate people fleeing violence and persecution. By using emotive language, this policy is justified in a subtle but no less sanctioned form of violence towards humans. In letters from the government justifying this behaviour, people seeking refugee protection have been called “illegal maritime arrivals”. Their identity as humans has been expunged.

    Such demonisation sanitizes the reality for the Australian public. As a consequence, our societal and racial relationships are diminished and subtly eroded. We can begin to believe that some humans are more worthy than others, and that such actions are justified and normal, when in fact the government of the nation is engaged in sanctioned violence.

    Children are being held in detention centres. ..These children are exposed to brutal, negative and neglectful modelling. The consequences of such detention are likely to breed a dissociative reality for these children, leading to a spiral of hatred and evil within their own life experiences.

    As citizens we must ask: what behaviour do we propose for the future human development and relationships for these innocent children? Is society encouraged to be vindictive, self-serving, aggressive in all its relationships with anyone who is identified as a stranger, rather than a society which is welcoming, other-centred, and compassionate, respecting the dignity of the other in those relationships? One response from the government stated it would not be involved in “misguided compassion”. True compassion is a strong virtue. It is the antithesis of violence. There is nothing weak and soft about a well-guided compassionate response. 

    Sanctioned violence in sport

    Sport is a feature of a nation’s life and culture, especially in Australia. It has an essential role to play in a healthy society. Violence on the playing field and amongst spectators not only sets a bad example to impressionable young people, it is destructive of basic civil relationships. It can instil fear and anxiety, especially in children. . There are significant vested interests to subvert any attempt to study the area in a serious manner.

    It seems that violence in contact sports has increased. I suspect that the introduction of high monetary stakes, as well as sports betting, has influenced this increase. Do the normal expectations of civil behaviour cease once players step onto the field? Does the constant replay of violence and thuggery seek to justify this behaviour?

    One is not a ‘real man’ unless he is like these highly paid, macho stars. Is it not time for some extensive research on the facts and some community discussion on the type of role modelling that sport ought to be portraying to young people, and what kind of relationships society might expect to support and sustain in an advanced civil democratic society? 

    Domestic violence – the hidden nightmare for many women and children

    You might think it odd that I have placed violence in sport before one of the most hidden and often sanctioned – violence of the household or domestic violence – which impacts mostly on women and children. It is often hidden, excused and justified from a male perspective. The macho image often promoted by sport can become the macho image for some men in their daily behaviour. Are they connected?

    Australian research[1] indicates that: 17% of women aged 18 and over have experienced sexual assault since the age of 15; 87% have a relationship with the perpetrator; only 1 in 7 who experienced violence from an intimate partner had reported the most recent incident to police; women with an intellectual disability are 90% more likely to be subjected to a sexual assault than women in the general population.[2] Between 2010-11 and 2012-13, there was a 29% increase in the number of children who were subjects of substantiations of sexual abuse, thereby reversing previous downward trends.[3] Most of these are from the lowest socio-economic areas.

    These statistics are chilling. Domestic violence often leads to homelessness, further abuse of children, significant health issues for the woman and her children, ongoing economic hardship, unemployment, and social, psychological and family isolation. Thus, the capacity for building strong, healthy and mutual relationships in the future is undermined and damaged severely.

    Does media violence have an impact on human behaviour?

    There would be some who would say the jury is still out. Conflict is what makes a good story! Violence has always been part of the movie world, but now violence in movies, TV shows and electronic games has become the norm. They are louder, bloodier and more vicious. Some US research suggests that by the time a child is 18, he or she has watched some 200,000[4] acts of violence.

    There have been hundreds of reports with diverse views on the impact of media violence, particularly on children. However, there is reasonable consensus that long exposure of children to violence portrayed in the mass media leads to long-term aggressive behaviour.[5]

    My concern is the impact sanctioned violence has on society and our relationships. Some of the consequences can be corrosive and long-term. Where violence is sanctioned and regarded as acceptable and routine, then societal norms are being established for the future. Such acts become embedded in the cultural fabric of society.

    If it is acceptable for a government to treat strangers in a cruel and demeaning manner, then it becomes acceptable for the citizen to treat the stranger in a similar manner. If it is acceptable to use excessive violence on a sports field, then why not off the field in school yards? If it is acceptable to exercise violence in the private space of home, then why not on the streets? If it is acceptable to spend hours watching real or virtual violence on a screen, why not activate the same violence in ordinary relationships?

    My congregation of religious women follows the fifth-century rule of St Benedict, a way of life which helped to civilise Europe after generations of wars. Benedict’s dictum for his followers was that all should be structured so “that the strong have something to strive for and that the weak have nothing to run from”.[6]

    In those areas of our society where violence is sanctioned, we citizens need to actively participate in social engagement and collective action. We need to say no more, we can do much better. “Compassion is the very final possibility for saving the human person in his or her naked existence in the face of the direct negation of this existence”.[7]

    This is an edited version of an address delivered by Sister Clare Condon SGS at the Australian Human Right Commission https://www.humanrights.gov.au on August 13, 2014.

    Sister Clare Condon is the Congregational Leader of the Sisters of the Good Samaritan of the Order of St Benedict, Australia’s first ‘home-grown’ congregation of Catholic Religious women www.goodsams.org.au


    [1] Cindy Tarczon and Antonia Quadara, The Nature and Extent of Sexual Assault and Abuse in Australia, December 2012, The Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault www.aifs.gov.au/acssa/statistics.html

    [2] CASA Forum 2014 Victorian Centres Against Sexual Assault

    [3] The Child Protection Australia Report 2012-13 of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

    [4] American Academy of Paediatrics, Media Violence, 19 October 2009 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/124/5/1495.full

    [5] The Australian Psychological Society in 2013 updated its report: Media Representations and Responsibilities: Psychological Perspectives

    [6] Rule of Benedict, Chapter 64:19

    [7] Walter Kasper, Mercy, Paulist Press, New Jersey, 2013, p.29

     

     

  • Richard Woolcott. Indonesia under President Widodo.

    Australia will be dealing with a new Indonesian government in just two months. This will involve challenges and opportunities for both countries.

    The Constitutional Court in Jakarta has now confirmed the election of Joko Widodo as President-elect with 53.15% of the eligible vote. The Court’s decision is not appealable and he will be sworn in as President on the 20th of October.

    All Australians, especially our political leaders and senior officials, should be in no doubt that no bilateral relationship will be more important in the future than that with Indonesia.

    Indonesia stretches across our north, a distance from Broome in Western Australia to Christchurch in New Zealand. It is a country of some 250 million people, 81% of whom are Muslims. It has a literacy rate of 94%, an increasing middle class, and its economy is growing rapidly.

    Prime Minister Abbott has described the relationship with Indonesia as “our most important relationship” in many respects. His policy that his foreign affairs approach would be “more Jakarta and less Geneva” was shorthand for this approach.

    Our relations with the United States, China, and Japan, as well as neighbouring New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, are also of great importance to us. The future stability and prosperity of a democratic Indonesia is, however, of paramount importance to us.

    President-elect Joko Widodo, 53, represents a generational change and the potential for a significant shift away from established Indonesian politics. From central Java, he is a businessman who made furniture. He was the mayor of Solo, and then served 18 months as the Governor of Jakarta. He has a reputation of being a nationalist and a relaxed and friendly “man of the people”.

    While his experience of politics and of foreign policy issues is limited, he has indicated that he wants to unwind corruption and patronage in Indonesian politics and focus on raising the standard of living of the poor. His vice President, Yusuf Kalla, has more experience having been Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s first vice President for several years.

    Our government will need to discuss in depth with Widodo and Kalla, and the foreign minister when appointed, bilateral and wider foreign policy issues. Widodo has said that he is looking to make professional rather than political appointments, and it may be that Marty Natalegawa will be reappointed as foreign minister because of his wide knowledge and experience of foreign policy issues, with which Widodo is not familiar.

    Joko Widodo has said he wants good and consistent relations with Australia, but Indonesian sensitivities about territorial integrity and earlier allegations of phone tapping are seen as irritants in the relationship. Joko himself has referred to a “lack of trust” and he is aware that many Indonesian politicians and officials consider Australia as unpredictable and untrusting of Indonesia.

    The Joint Understanding on a Code of Conduct to manage more effectively the reaction to allegations that the Defence Signals Directorate was monitoring the phones of the President, his wife, and members of his staff is hopefully an important step forward if it is implemented to the satisfaction of both parties.

    The reason for the Indonesian reaction was that SBY had understood from his discussions with then Prime Minister Rudd that Australia was seriously seeking a closer, friendlier strategic relationship with Indonesia. Indonesia therefore saw the allegations as undermining trust. It was not, foreign minister Natalegawa argued, the way to treat a major neighbouring strategic good friend.

    It would be unwise not to acknowledge that the relationship has been damaged. In the 2014 Lowy Institute poll, 40% of Australians polled considered the relationship to be “worsening”. According to the Lowy institute the priorities on which Australia and Indonesia will need to consult most closely are asylum seekers, security, and terrorism. This will be a prickly task, calling for a courteous, culturally sensitive, sophisticated, and professional approach to restore and maintain the firmly based relationship we need.

    In our future relations with Indonesia Australia also will need to avoid several approaches, which have been disruptive in the past. One is “gesture politics” that is making statements and appointments that are insubstantial gestures in response to perceived public opinion.

    Australia should also avoid making statements on foreign policy issues which are essentially made for domestic political reasons but which are criticized by Indonesia, for example the suspension of live cattle exports without any prior consultation and towing boats back to Indonesian territorial waters.

    I believe we should listen more and lecture less. We also need to avoid making unnecessary statements that are seen as unbalanced in the region, for example alleged “assertiveness” by China and Japan are widely seen in Indonesia as responses to United States and Japanese assertiveness towards China.

    Joko Widodo is likely to make it clear that Indonesia will not take sides in China/US disputes, in China/Japan disputes, or on the South China Sea claims. Indonesia is not a claimant and has been assured by China that it does not claim any Indonesian territory. This underlines the desirability for Australia of a more nuanced focus on the region we share, and the regional problems that we need to manage.

    In this context I believe Australia does need a fundamental change to our national psyche, that would focus more on Asia than our traditional and well established links with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada (collectively the “Anglosphere”), and Europe.

    We do need a continuous and sustained approach to the main countries of Asia. In this context a key task for the Australian government, when the new government is formed in Indonesia next October, will be to determine an appropriate and updated balance with our relationships with the United States, China, and Japan and to reinforce the government’s rhetoric about our role in the Asia-Pacific region with action and funding. We should consult Indonesia on a range of political issues, such as the Middle East for example, rather than limit our consultations to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

    There will be a major role for public diplomacy in that Australians and Indonesians do need to know much more about each other. It is regrettable that many Australians still regard Indonesia as a mysterious, chaotic, and corrupt country in which the rule of law is weak.

    According to the Lowy institute polls many Indonesians still see Australia as a potential military threat. This is largely because of historic fears, Indonesia’s size, its proximity, and its presumed potential instability as well as the situation in West Papua.

    While Indonesia, like Australia, welcomes a constructive and continuing United States involvement in the Asia-Pacific there is concern in Indonesia about the so-called “pivot to Asia” – now referred to as “rebalancing”. Many Indonesians regard Australian policy as too closely tied to the United States.

    The incoming Indonesian government can be expected to be concerned, for example, about close cooperation on the reported use of US missiles by the Australian navy and the purposes of drone flights from Australia.

    Also there will be concern that the Cocos Islands, so close to Indonesia and Malaysia, yet now part of Western Australia, might be used for security purposes in South-East Asia and the South China region. Such activities would be seen as directed at the containment of China, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary.

    To conclude, the importance of our bilateral relations with Indonesia, and regionally in the context of the Asian century, cannot be overstated.  As a nation we need to be genuinely and continuously engaged with the incoming Widodo government of our very large neighbour of increasing global and regional importance.

     

    Richard Woolcott was formerly Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Australian Ambassador to Indonesia

  • Elizabeth Elliott. Compassion goes missing on Christmas Island

    When it comes to children in need, most Australians feel compassion.

    Most will applaud today’s announcement that ‘Boat Kids’ will be released into the community. However this decision does not go far enough. It includes only kids aged less than 10 years (excluding many vulnerable teens); only those detained on the Australian mainland (excluding kids on Nauru, Manus and Christmas Islands); and only kids who arrived before July 19th 2013. Furthermore, the number to be released includes kids already living in community detention housing.  

    Christmas Island is a remote tropical ‘paradise’ in the Indian Ocean, over 2600 km from Perth or Darwin. When I visited with the Australian Human Rights Commission in July 2014, as part of their Inquiry into Children in Detention, it was ‘home’ to 174 children, including 26 unaccompanied minors – all boys aged between 14 and 17 years.  Australia continues to detain kids, despite the United Nations Guidelines on the Detention of Refugees that ‘Children should not be placed in detention’ and that ‘Minors who are asylum-seekers should not be detained’.

    Compassion, it seems, has gone missing on Christmas Island.

    ‘Home’ for families in these immigration detention centres consists of a small metal cabin, some 3 x 3 metres squared in one of two rows of similar cabins separated by a wooden walkway. Add a bunk bed and a cot to the rooms and there remains little space for a child to learn to crawl or walk, or for exploratory play. According to the father of a 2 year old boy “the housing is dirty, sub-standard, hard to be there. The child keeps hitting his head on items in the room – the bed, the shelf – because of the lack of space.”

    Cramped conditions, a punishing climate and overcrowded living in close proximity to scores of families make for little privacy and dire health consequences. Childhood infections spread quickly. When we were there many children had a respiratory virus and there had been outbreaks of gastroenteritis. We repeatedly heard the refrain “my kids are always sick.”

    The air-conditioned environment exacerbates symptoms in the many children with asthma. Others have medical conditions requiring assessment, medical or surgical treatment on the mainland – and for some the long wait for transfer had been intolerable.  A two and a half year old with no speech, a 6 year old with deafness requiring grommets for glue ear, a child with a facial abscess needing surgical drainage, a boy with an undescended testes, a child with rotten teeth, a girl with sleep apnoea….

    Of greater concern than signs of physical ill-health, however, are the psychological symptoms we heard of from many children.

    They reflect past and ongoing trauma, including the depression and self-harm many have witnessed in their own mothers. Stress in young children was manifest by onset, in detention, of bed-wetting, nightmares and defiant behaviour. In older children we heard of refusal to eat, separation anxiety, regression of speech, development of stutter, mutism and social withdrawal. Some expressed their stress through their art. A 10 year drew his ‘family home in jail’ and a six year old drew herself behind bars, with the caption ‘I want go out’ . Crying was ubiquitous in these images.

    Conversations with teenagers, who could articulate their predicament, were particularly poignant.

    They became distressed, describing flashbacks of trauma experienced at home, during harrowing boat trips to Australia, and during their time on Manus, where some were sent as a result of incorrect age determination. According to one boy who went to Manus, ‘I saw with my own eyes one boy hung himself in a cupboard – they were taken to hospital.’ They talked of their fear of being returned to Manus when they turned 18. 

    All spoke of feelings of hopelessness, sadness and lack of a future. They talked of frequent crying, families missed, lost expectations, lack of education and feelings of guilt because they had not fulfilled their family’s hopes after more than a year in ‘Australia.’  One boy summed this up as ‘a horrible situation. I feel depressed, preoccupied with my misfortune. I have not smiled or laughed the last few months. There is nothing to make me happy or to tell my family to make them happy.’  Some talked of self-harm and some spoke of death. In the words of one 12 year old girl ’My life is really deth. I don’t know why I’m in the jail realy. I don’t kill any body.’

    Detention of children for lengthy periods is in contravention to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. This states that ‘The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.’ The UN Human Rights Committee reiterates this: ‘Asylum seekers who unlawfully enter a State party’s territory may only be detained for a brief initial period in order to document their entry, record their claims, and determine their identity.’  Most people have now been detained on Christmas Island for over a year and the anniversary of their arrival came as a bitter blow for many.  One man asked ‘Is it the Australian government’s aim to make us all go mad?’

    As victims of a policy that dictates that any arrival by boat after July 19th 2013 will never be settled in Australia, many have accepted their fate of settlement offshore. But their arbitrary detention without assessment for refugee status has left them in an intolerable limbo. One father said ‘If they won’t have us in Australia, find somewhere else for us to go. We can’t go home.’ A mother expressed her anguish, ‘The criminals, at least they know their sentence – we don’t.’ Many felt guilty for placing their children in such a predicament. As one mother said, ‘Even if I did something wrong, coming here, why ruin the life of our kids?’

    As a reflection of their increasing despair and frustration about the adverse conditions for their children, a group of young mothers with young infants resorted to self-harm.

    When we visited 10 such women – deemed at future risk – were under 24-hour surveillance by guards, not nurses. Despite this mental health crisis the centre has no resident psychiatrist. ‘I swear the physical health is not so much a problem. It is the stress and the psychological impact of the detention that is getting to us,’ said one mother of two.

    It is outrageous to keep asylum seekers in the limbo of uncertainty. It is unacceptable to keep children in detention on Christmas Island, and it is unjust to deny children optimal health care and education.  One mother said ‘one of the most important concerns for my baby is he has not received his BCG vaccine – when everyone in the world should receive it. They say ‘we don’t have it’ or ‘later’ – the story changes.’ In the words of one child, ‘I not want to sit in jail? I want to go school….in here no have school everyday. Please help me?’

    Australians might well ask ‘Where is the compassion on Christmas Island?’

    If we are to retain our international standing as a civilised society, we cannot continue to persecute children seeking asylum as a deterrent to others.

    Elizabeth Elliott AM, is the Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health, Sydney Medical School and Consultant Paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

     

     

     

     

     

  • An abuse of power by the Israeli lobby.

    In 1967 the Israeli military attacked the USS Liberty, an American spy-ship which had been monitoring Israeli transmissions about the conflict during the Six-day War. Intercepted Israeli communications indicated that the goal was to sink the Liberty and leave no survivors. 

    As the story reveals, – see link below – both the US President Lyndon Johnson and the Secretary of Defence, Robert Macnamara, did their best to ensure that this action by the Israeli military – an attack on the US navy – never became public. 

    This story is written by Ray McGovern who works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After serving as an army infantry/intelligence officer, he spent a 27-year career as a CIA analyst. He is co-founded of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

    During the tenure of President George Bush, he provided daily intelligence briefings to the Vice President and the Heads of National Security.   John Menadue

     

    http://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/17/a-uss-libertys-heros-passing/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So what can explain this difference?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What are the implications?

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • David Zyngier. Senate committee backs Gonski.

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

    (more…)

  • Kerry Murphy. The persecutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Walter Hamilton. One Man’s War.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

  • Wiryono Sastrohandoyo. The new Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

  • Ben Saul. The Occupation of Palestine.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Another Israeli massacre of Palestinians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Richard Rigby. Tiananmen 25 years on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

    May 18 Beijing

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

     

  • Walter Hamilton. When Local Becomes Global

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Bugger the planet, ignore our children and trash our reputation.

    The repeal of the carbon tax is a political victory for Tony Abbott but it is hard to imagine a worse combination of poor reasoning and bad policy making. It shows little appreciation of economics. It will increase the budget deficit. It shows a mistrust of the market. Tony Abbott’s political legacy will be defined by the repeal of the carbon tax. It is one of the worst examples of policy vandalism in our history.

    As the world’s greatest carbon polluter per capita, we are now probably the only country in the world going backwards on carbon reduction. We will be left with a nonsense called ‘Direct Action’ which Malcolm Turnbull rightly described as a fig leaf when you don’t have a real policy to reduce carbon.

    All the expert advice around the world from the climate scientists and economists is that we have a real problem which is best addressed through a market mechanism – either a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme. Our own Treasury, Ken Henry, Bernie Fraser and Ross Garnaut, all tell us that the best and cheapest way to reduce carbon pollution is through a market mechanism rather than direct action. Tony Abbott prefers to take the advice on climate change – not of the experts but of Rupert Murdoch and other foolish people.

    Our political system and our political leaders have failed us badly. John Howard reluctantly said in 2007 that he would introduce an emissions trading scheme, but told us later that he really didn’t believe in it but he had to do it because of political pressure. Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme was pursued more in the end to skewer Malcolm Turnbull. It was at the cost of a good policy outcome. When the Liberal Party dumped Malcolm Turnbull for Tony Abbott, Rudd refused to call a double dissolution on the ‘great moral challenge of climate change’. Julia Gillard told us that she would never introduce a carbon tax, and then did just that under pressure from the Greens. Then Tony Abbott, despite having favoured a carbon tax in his Daily Telegraph blog of 2009, played the carbon tax issue like a dog with a bone. No untruth was out of the question. No scare was too great.  He played to the climate sceptics and the extreme right wing of his own party and in the community. As the chair of the G20 in Brisbane later this year, he will do his best to keep climate change off the agenda.

    And then there were the Greens who must bear a huge responsibility for their policy purity that denied us a sensible outcome in 2009. The Greens joined with the Coalition in the Senate to vote down Kevin Rudd’s proposals because they ‘locked in an inadequate 5% target’. Five years later we still have a 5% target with no clear or efficient way to get there. The Greens should hang their heads in shame. They took no risks but kept parading their policy purity. Their hypocrisy continues on one issue after another. Just think asylum seekers when they sided with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison on critical issues. In parading their self-righteousness the Greens invariably ask for more than is on the table and finish up with nothing. It is often better to hold your nose and make some real progress.

    But in it all, Tony Abbott stands out as the greatest vandal. He warned us about dramatic increases in power prices that the carbon tax would incur. Those scare tactics are turning out to be largely nonsense. The price rises due to carbon tax have been so small that the Australia Bureau of Statistics has had trouble measuring them. There certainly have been increases in electricity prices but they have little to do with the carbon tax. Only 7% of power prices are due to the carbon tax and another 7% is due to various other means to encourage energy saving and use of renewables. The big increase in electricity prices has been the gouging by the state-owned networks in NSW and Qld. On top of this gold plating by the networks which has forced up prices, we are likely to see a doubling of gas prices in the next two years as the domestic price of gas rises to the world price.

    The price increases from the carbon tax have been minimal, the economy has continued to grow and Whyalla has not been wiped off the map.

    And the carbon tax has been doing what it was designed to do in reducing carbon emissions. Only yesterday Frank Jotzo, Director, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU said in The Conversation

    ‘Carbon emissions in Australia’s national electricity market would have been 11 to 17 million tonnes higher if Australia had not introduced a carbon price. New research using the latest data indicates that the policy was working despite its imminent Senate repeal. Over the first two years of operation of the carbon price (July 2012 to July 2014) carbon emissions were down by 29 million tonnes or 8.2% across the national electricity market compared to the two years prior. The conclusion from our research is that the carbon price has been performing well in its main job; delivering emission cuts in the power sector, which is the largest source of emissions and the sector with the biggest opportunity for cuts.’

    Frank Jotzo adds that the reduction in carbon emissions would have been higher if companies had been confident that the carbon tax was here to stay. With Tony Abbott raising doubts some companies deferred decisions to reduce pollution.

    We are out of step with all other major countries. A month ago China and the UK signed an agreement to work together towards a global framework for combatting climate change. China has emission reduction schemes in six major provinces which will lead to a national scheme. China is the largest investor in renewable energy and coal use is being scaled down. President Obama is pushing ahead with ambitious carbon reduction policies. Ten US states are well ahead in carbon reduction. The Europeans have had an emissions trading scheme since 2005. Commenting on the Abbott government’s decision to abolish the carbon tax, the European Union’s Climate Commissioner said today ‘The EU regrets the repeal of Australia’s carbon pricing mechanism just as new carbon pricing initiatives are emerging all around the world. The EU is convinced that pricing carbon is not only the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions but also the tool to make the economic paradigm shift the world needs.’

    The repeal of the carbon tax will have some short term benefits for business. The chief beneficiaries will be the heavy polluting electricity generators in the La Trobe Valley who burn brown coal. But there will be significant down-sides in the long term. A carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme is essential in both reducing carbon emissions and helping organisations switch to low emissions technology. Companies will not be able to avoid making this transition. The sooner they do it the better. But there will now be fewer incentives for Australian businesses to develop low emissions technology. We will continue to depend on fossil fuels both as a major domestic energy source and an export product.  Tony Abbott prides himself in becoming an ambassador to the world for highly polluting thermal coal.

    Direct Action is not a serious policy. The cost will be higher than a market mechanism. The carbon tax penalised polluters, but Direct Action will be paid by taxpayers as an incentive for polluters to reduce pollution. What an absurd idea! Perhaps Tony Abbott has in mind paying people to give up smoking!

    If the world and Australia are to grow and prosper our polluting industries must decline and industries based on renewable sources of energy must expand. To delay that process is foolhardy…

    Tony Abbott and all Australians will come to rue the decision to abandon the carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme. Politics has won in the short term but at great cost to our future.

    Can Bill Shorten lead us out of this mess? He bears a heavy responsibility

  • Refugee success

    In recent years we have been getting a diet designed to diminish, denigrate and demonise asylum-seekers and refugees.

    We have lost a sense of proportion and the enormous contribution which refugees have made to this country.

    I have set out below links to information and articles which describe the remarkable way in which we have accepted refugees in the past and the way that they have helped build Australia. It is a thrilling story. These links are provided courtesy of the Refugee Council of Australia. Some of the information may be a few years old but the stories are current. John Menadue

     

    http://refugeecouncil.org.au/r/rpt/2010-Contributions.pdf 

    http://www.theage.com.au/executive-style/strive/they-came-they-conquered-20130419-2i4wf.html   

    http://www.21stcenturynews.com.au/refugees-great-australian-entrepreneurs/

     

  • How does Australia’s health system compare.

    The Treasurer, the Minister for Health and the Commission of Audit have warned us in one way or another that the Australian health service is unsustainable, particularly with an ageing population. The Treasurer tells us that the age of entitlement has to end in health as elsewhere.

    We need to keep modernising Medicare but by almost any international comparison we have one of the best and most sustainable health services in the world. We need to keep our problems in perspective.

    The Commonwealth Fund publishes a regular research report on health systems in major countries. The Commonwealth Fund is a highly regarded private US foundation that compares major systems around the world to stimulate innovative policies and practices in the US and elsewhere.

    In its 2014 report ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’ it compares the performance of healthcare systems in eleven major countries. The comparisons cover quality of care, access, efficiency, equity,‘healthy lives’ and health expenditures per capita.

    Its overall health ratings for these eleven countries were as follows:

    1. UK
    2. Switzerland
    3. Sweden
    4. Australia
    5. Germany and Netherlands (equal)
    6. .
    7. New Zealand and Norway
    8. .
    9. France
    10. Canada
    11. US

    On almost all the measures the UK with its National Health Service is a stand-out performer. It has well and truly stood the test of time. The single payer nature of the UK health service is its strength. The regular laggard in almost all these rankings is the US. It tells us a great deal about the failure of a health service based on multiple private insurance payers. (Our private health insurance lobby is trying to take us down this disastrous US path.)

    When one looks at the break-down of these rankings, the UK ranks at the top in quality of care, access, efficiency and equity. US ranks last in access, efficiency and equity. What is more, the UK system is the cheapest at $US3,405 per capita in 2011 compared with the US, the most expensive at $US8,508 per capita in that same year.

    As indicated above, Australia stands at number four in overall rankings amongst the eleven countries. In particular areas we ranked as follows

    • In quality of care we ranked number 2.
    • In access, we are well down the list at number 8. This reflects in part our high level of co-payments or out of pocket costs. The proposed $7 co-payment will add to our problem of access.
    • In efficiency, we rank number 4.
    • In equity we rank number 5, which reflects in part our failures in mental health, indigenous health and in remote healthcare.
    • In ‘healthy lives’ we rank number 4.
    • In health expenditure per capita in 2011 at $US3,800 we were the third lowest amongst the 11 countries.

    Another measure of our success of course is our high life expectancy.

    It is quite clear that by world standards we rank quite well. We are behind the UK, but far ahead of the US. The single payer Medicare has also stood the test of time.

    But there are ways that we could improve our health services.

    • Mental health, indigenous health and remote healthcare are major shortcomings.
    • Our co-payments are confused and inequitable.
    • Subsidised private health insurance makes it harder for Medicare to control costs. (I find it hard to put up with the gall of the private health insurance funds that will never publicly debate their cause, privately lobby ministers in order to achieve results that will take us down the disastrous US path.)

    There are many ways in which the efficiency of our system could be improved and costs better managed.

    • The split of commonwealth and state responsibilities adds to costs and hinders integration of hospital and non hospital care.
    • The remuneration of doctors through fee-for-service is a perverse incentive which encourages over-servicing and over-prescribing. It also hinders the treatment of long-term chronic sufferers.
    • The government subsidy to private health insurance adds $5 billion plus per annum to government costs, benefits the wealthy and weakens Medicare.
    • Australian drugs cost substantially more than in NZ..at least $2b. pa.. because of the clout of Medicines Australia in negotiating prices with the Australian government.
    • With its lobbying power, the Australian Pharmacy Guild protects pharmacists from competition.

    There is a lot we can do to improve healthcare in Australia and better manage costs. But overall, we have a very good and sustainable health service which ranks well against comparable countries. We need to keep a sense of proportion.

    For further information on the Commonwealth Fund Report, including the overall rankings, google The Commonwealth Fund and search Mirror, Mirror on the Wall 2014 Update.

  • Take your pick on the way News Corp operates.

    On oath before the Leveson Enquiry, Rupert Murdoch said “I’ve never asked a prime minister for anything’. (Leveson transcript 25 April 2012)

    In his book ‘The Whitlam Government 1972-75’, published in 1985, Gough Whitlam says

    ‘ … in the week after the 1972 election, Menadue, who had become my private secretary at the beginning of 1960 and had then become Murdoch’s financial manager in mid-1967, saw me on Murdoch’s behalf to put the proposition that Murdoch should become High Commissioner in London. Murdoch was confident that there could be no conflict of interest, since he would put his British interests in trust and there would be no public outcry since the media proprietors would not oppose the appointment of one of themselves.’ (p.581)

    In my book ‘Things you learn along the way’ published in 1999, I said

    ‘Murdoch certainly believed that he had played a major part in the 1972 election result and that something was due to him. What he asked for was that he be appointed as Australian High Commissioner to London … Murdoch raised the appointment with me and explained that if he was the High Commissioner he would put his newspaper and television interests in trust so that there would not be a conflict of interest. He believed also that he could influence other Australian media proprietors and avoid medial flak for the new government over the appointment. He has since denied that the sought the High Commissioner’s job. … But Whitlam was adamant about Rupert for London. “No way” he said.’ (p.113)

    He boasted way back in 1997 “I bet if I was going to be shot at dawn, I could get out of it.” (Shawcross, Rupert Murdoch, The Making of a Media Empire p62/3)

    On his latest trip to Australia Murdoch gave us the benefit of his well-researched and in depth  understanding on climate change…”we should not be building windmills and all that rubbish” and to meet rising sea levels. “we have to stop building vast houses on the seashore”   His loyal employee and interviewer, Paul Kelly, did not even blink.

     

  • Chris Mitchell, The Australian and Iraq

    As part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Australian, the editor, Chris Mitchell, revealed on Monday 14 July that he was a secret opponent of the invasion of Iraq. This will come as a surprise for many who followed The Australian’s wholehearted support of the Iraq invasion and hectored and criticised those who opposed it.

    In The Monthly magazine yesterday, Robert Manne tells us about this remarkable confession by Chris Mitchell. See Monthly link below.  John Menadue.

     

    http://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/robert-manne/2014/07/14/1405315103/chris-mitchell-australian-and-iraq

  • Malaysia, Manus, Nauru and offshore processing.

    I have not always held the view that asylum seekers who come to Australia could be transferred and processed in another country. I changed my mind on that partly because of the rapid increase in boat arrivals after the Agreement with Malaysia fell over in 2011. The large number of boat arrivals was reducing public support for a generous and humane refugee program.

    I came to the view that what was important is that asylum seekers are treated with humanity and that the process is fair and efficient. The issue of where that processing occurs, on shore or offshore is a secondary issue.

    For the present we have comprehensively lost the argument of opposition to offshore processing of boat arrivals

    I also supported the proposed Malaysian Agreement for two other reasons. First, I saw it as part of an important building block in regional cooperation. Secondly, the UNHCR was prepared to work with us in the proposed arrangement with Malaysia. The UNHCR does not support the transfers to Manus (PNG) and Nauru and the processing in those countries.

    Unfortunately the agreement with Malaysia was made impossible by the combined support of the Greens and the Coalition in the Senate to block amendments to the Migration Act. The action of the Coalition and the Greens in the Senate was supported by refugee advocates across Australia. .

    The collapse of the Malaysian Agreement was the turning point. We have been on a slippery slide ever since. Boat arrivals quadrupled as a result of the High Court decision and the collapse of the Malaysian Agreement. In the second half of 2013 asylum seekers arriving by boat were running at a rate of over 40,000 per annum. We may wish it otherwise but no Australian Government can keep intact a generous humanitarian refugee program with boat arrivals at over 40.000 pa. At the peak of the Indo China outflow the largest number of people arriving by boat was 1423 people in 1977/78. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Malaysian Agreement it was almost thirty times higher.

    My own view is that the Fraser Government could not have sustained our generous acceptance of Indo Chinese refugees if boat arrivals had been anywhere near the rate the Rudd government faced in mid-2013. To think otherwise is kidding ourselves. I was Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs for some of the time involved

    The failure of the Malaysian Agreement triggered Manus and Nauru.

    The UNHCR has a long history of support for the transfer of asylum seekers in appropriate circumstances. Late last year the UNHCR issued a ‘Guidance Note on Bilateral and Multilateral Transfer Arrangements of Asylum Seekers’. It set out clear conditions, including important issues of non-refoulment and protection of the rights and the safety of asylum seekers in the country to which they were to be transferred.

    In the Melbourne Age on 13 December last year, Arja Keski-Nummi and I outlined a system of ‘effective protection’ that should govern any transfers of asylum seekers in our region. We set down several important criteria.

    • All countries should commit to the principle of non-refoulment.
    • Provide asylum seekers with a legal status and access to work and education.
    • Work to help not only displaced people but also host communities.
    • Increase our refugee intake from our region.
    • Work with partners in the region in association with UNHCR to create an atmosphere of safety and trust.

    Clearly few of the conditions have been met in the arrangements with PNG and Nauru. Importantly, the UNHCR will not cooperate in our arrangements with either country.

    We need to think again about total opposition to transfers and regional processing. That opposition has led us into a tragic cull de sac

    A way to minimize the damage to asylum seekers and our own credibility is to now press for such things as

    • Increasing the annual “regular” refugee intake to 25,000 from its present 13,750.
    • Negotiate Orderly Departure Agreements with Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. The governments in those countries are likely to welcome the departure of some of their opponents. In 1983 we negotiated an ODA with Vietnam under which 100,000 Vietnamese came to Australia without risky journeys.
    • Develop alternate migration pathways e.g. 457 visas for Iranians. There is often a blurred line between refugees and persons fleeing for economic reasons.
    • Wind back mandatory detention which is cruel and expensive.It punishes but does not deter as we have seen time and time again. Stopping boat arrivals in recent months is not because of mandatory detention. It is not because of Operation Sovereign Borders. It is because of government policy that no boat arrivals will ever be settled in Australia. That is the deterrent.
    • Allow asylum seekers in the community to work

    We may indulge ourselves with tears and criticism over what has happened but we need to apply ourselves where improvement is possible to help people in great need. It will require political pragmatism and compromise.