Category: Politics

  • Luke Fraser. True Blue

    On Father’s day, anybody around the world lucky enough to have been woken by a happy young son (as I was) would have been hard-put not to have paused and thought of the image of the young Ardyl Kurdi, washed up lifeless on a beach.

    Millions are again on the roads of Europe, running away, looking for safety and stability. Perhaps these are ‘the best of times and the worst of times’ that Dickens wrote of: The worst explains itself in Ardyl Kurdi. Perhaps we see the best in Angela Merkel and a relatively prosperous Germany planning to accommodate 800 thousand Syrian migrants. This will no doubt be resisted by many in that democracy, understandably: it comes with enormous risks. But perhaps Merkel’s pact recognises that Germany – the country of the Berlin airlift and a Marshall Plan beneficiary – still owes some debt of gratitude. If so, it is proposing to pay that debt out in spades. And in doing so it shames many of its neighbours, including countries whose own peoples were on the road not so long ago.

    In Australia things are moving rapidly as politicians grasp at what the public might want and their own ideologies might cope with.

    We have been here before. In 1999 I was a Defence infrastructure public servant charged with selling the surplus Brighton Camp Army Barracks outside Hobart. There were plans for a housing subdivision. Then the decision to grant safe haven to several thousand Kosovans came: the sale of the camp was suspended and work began preparing the camp for its new inhabitants.

    During that process I was a minor cog in a big machine, but I recall the tone set informally from on high: “we aren’t using the term refugee”. “They won’t be staying”. “They won’t be encouraged near the community, or anywhere where the ‘immigration industry’ can get to them”. None of this was official, but the sense of it permeated the exercise.

    Many Tasmanians overcame this callousness through their own acts of welcome and support for the Kosovans.

    The first question for Australia to ask is what to do. John Menadue has proposed an intake of ten thousand. Presumably the UNHCR is equipped to establish bona fides at source and genuine refugees will be flown out. Just as in 1999, there are facilities around the country that could do a job. These are mechanical things.

    The bigger question is how we choose to treat these people once they come.

    Do we treat the arrivals in the way that the Human Rights Commission has witnessed boat people treated in our offshore detention centres?   Do we take all candy off the table? This appears to have been the subtle tone of the Kosovar exercise. That tone has lost all subtlety since and has become macabre. Will our Syrian refugees be given a Manus welcome for the sake of consistency? Or will we allow real people in real Australian communities the opportunity, organically, to show our better side and work with these people to help them along? This is the approach of some Scandinavian countries. Social media helps it along.

    Australian communities never fail to make an effort for neighbours when houses are flooded or burnt down. They don’t wait for a form to be filled out, or to be coerced to assist. We celebrate that quality. We don’t lock flood and bushfire survivors up until new housing can be found for them.

    New South Wales Premier Mike Baird has shown moral leadership by stating publicly that humanitarianism towards Syrian refugees must begin now.

    Once the question of the size of intake and where they are housed is settled – as it surely will be soon by the Commonwealth – will we acquiesce to those political leaders who would be happy to parcel off the inmates in a flat-pack solution? It is passing ironic that we Australians pride ourselves on being laid back and friendly, but increasingly we deputise politicians and bureaucracy to shut out such elements from our lives.

    Presumably smart people will eventually work out a longer-term solution for preserving something of a Syrian diaspora of scale that might one day return to revitalise that country. But for now, our immediate moral challenge seems to be allowing the Syrian intake to co-exist with us in a way that reflects our best selves.

    Our laid-back selves. Not our Manus selves.

    Luke Fraser is an infrastructure policy and investment specialist who contributes occasionally for Pearls and Irritations.

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

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

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

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

    Various models are being suggested, in particular:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Two years in – even supporters despair of Abbott’s feeble government.

    The Abbott government marks its two-year anniversary of winning office today, September 7. I was tempted to begin by claiming that Tony Abbott has established himself as one of Australia’s more successful prime ministers, but I struggled to find a second sentence.

    The headlines in the opinion pages of August 29’s Weekend Australian show that even Abbott’s supporters despair:

    Why the Australian economy is going to hell in a handbasket [Judith Sloan]

    Shazam me some faith because I’m losing it with the Liberals [Grace Collier]

    Forget reforms, fear and loathing will decide the 2016 election [Peter van Onselen]

    Mixed messages on domestic policy

    What Abbott himself claims as achievements are all reversals of previous policies: stopping the boats, repealing the carbon and mining taxes.

    Abbott now tells Australians the government is firmly focused on jobs and growth, and points to small-business tax incentives and free trade agreements as proof of success. But all governments spruik jobs and growth. Good economic management is the lowest common denominator for governments, even if few achieve it in the long run.

    The Abbott government has been remarkable for its mixed messaging. Last year the greatest economic challenge was a ballooning deficit; now it is more tax cuts. Treasurer Joe Hockey proclaimed the end of the age of entitlement, but rejects substantial changes to a superannuation system that perpetuates intergenerational inequality.

    If the Liberal Party combines elements of both conservative and liberal philosophy the Abbott government has shown itself unable to satisfy either. A truly conservative government would see environmental degradation and climate change as central challenges, rather than embark on hollow – and expensive – minimalist solutions.

    A truly liberal government would treat asylum seekers with compassion, and be very cautious in expanding the state’s role in the surveillance of its citizens. Nor would a liberal government refuse a parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage, and risk clouding the much-needed constitutional debate about Indigenous recognition with a face-saving and unnecessary popular vote on same-sex marriage.

    Abbott overshadowed on foreign policy

    As the world becomes increasingly enmeshed in global forces our politics become ever more parochial. Abbott has been largely absent as an international figure, which has allowed Julie Bishop to create the persona of a successful foreign minister.

    Like Abbott, Julia Gillard came to power without much involvement in foreign policy, but she quickly grasped the centrality of the world to any Australian future. Abbott, who had the enormous luck to inherit both a UN Security Council seat and the G20 chairmanship on taking office, has yet to make that transition.

    In opposition, Abbott spoke of the importance of the Anglosphere and of hisdesire to turn Australia’s attention back to Jakarta and away from Geneva.

    In practice, the opposite seems to have occurred. This is in part due to unexpected events – the execution of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan in Indonesia, and the downing of MH17 – as well as his foreign minister having been more successful in the halls of the United Nations than in fostering closer ties with Indonesia.

    While Bishop has taken a strong interest in the Pacific, she has spent much of her time explaining the government’s position on asylum seekers. It is unlikely that the region’s countries are impressed by attempts to move refugees to Cambodia – one of the poorest countries in Asia – or Abbott’s response to the Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar.

    Australia is allied with its North Atlantic allies in attacking Islamic State (IS) militants in the Middle East, but there are major gaps between Abbott and the American and British leaders in attitudes to climate change and international development assistance. Yet climate change and stark inequalities are a greater threat to Australia’s long-term security than is IS.

    And while Abbott seeks support for increasing airstrikes against IS, his government seems oblivious to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, which will require Australia to greatly increase its refugee intake. This is where we can make a far more meaningful contribution to helping end the suffering of the Syrian people.

    Failure to unite and inspire

    Successful prime ministers find means to unite the nation and move it forward in new directions. We remember them for moments when they brought the nation together around difficult policies. John Howard did it in his tough line on guns; Kevin Rudd in his apology to the Stolen Generations; Gillard with the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Gonski school funding reforms.

    So far, Abbott has failed to position himself as anything more than an opposition leader who has been given power and is unsure what to do with it.

    Two years after being elected, the Abbott government continues to campaign against its predecessors, explaining virtually everything it does in terms of the alleged failures of its predecessors.

    The government’s negativity is poisoning political debate, encouraging a response from its opponents that can be childish in its automatic rejection of all government policies. But, increasingly, the prime minister carries the burden – and the opportunity – to appeal above party lines to the best instincts of the nation.

    The Left has consistently underestimated Abbott. He may still win re-election. For now, one is tempted to recall the warning of Edmund Burke, one of Abbott’s favourite philosophers, that:

    Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

    Dennis Altman is Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University. This article was first published in The Conversation on September 7, 2015.

  • John Menadue. The death of Aylan Kurdi may not have been in vain.

    In the last week our media has been extensively covering the plight of Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing into Europe. Their reception has been mixed but the governments of Germany and Austria, and their people, have been extending help and kindness.

    I have posted three blogs in recent days on these issues: Mother Merkel and 800,000 refugees; Suffer the little children; Syrian and Iraqi refugees – a time for a bipartisan and community response (Arja Keski-Nummi and Josef Szwarc).

    In response we are seeing the generosity and concern of many Australians.

    Premier Baird in NSW said ‘We should do more and we should do it now.’ After seeing photos of the lifeless Aylan Kurdi, he said we must move beyond the debate about boats.

    The Tasmanian Premier, Will Hodgman, has offered to help refugees under a safe-haven scheme that was very helpful a decade and a half ago for refugees from Kosovo.

    The SA Premier, Jay Wetherall has said that ‘We will certainly be offering SA as an open and welcoming destination for those Syrians fleeing violence.’

    Barnaby Joyce has said that we need to do more. Many other MPs from all parties have expressed similar views. Trade Minister Andrew Robb has said that an initiative to help Syrians fleeing the war ‘was under review’. Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton will travel to Geneva to ask the UNHCR what more Australia can do to help refugees from war-torn Syria and Iraq.

    Tony Abbott is also responding by saying today that ‘We are proposing to take more people from the region as part of our very substantial commitment to the UNHCR. Mark Butler has said that at its last federal conference the ALP decided to increase the refugee intake from 13,750 to 27,000 pe annum. He said this gave substantial headroom to help Syrian refugees.

    The generosity of the countries bordering Iraq and Syria has been remarkable. Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have taken millions of refugees. But their generosity has been severely tested to breaking point. That is why we are now seeing the outflow of refugees into Europe.

    We were all appalled by the site of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach. His death and that of his sister and mother may not have been in vain. The human tragedy in a picture tugged at our hearts more than statistics ever could. But what a dreadful prices the Kurdi family has paid.

    Let’s hope that the Australian response both by governments and community groups will be generous enough to meet the tragedy which is now unfolding.

    Can we match Germany’s generosity, perhaps not in numbers but in spirit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Rupert resurgent

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

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

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

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

    Whose side are you on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • John Menadue. Don’t add to the disaster.

    The government is considering adding to the disaster in the Middle East by instructing the RAAF to bomb targets in Syria.

    Will we ever learn from our past mistakes?

    In supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Australia helped trigger the tragedy that is now unfolding. Perhaps a million lives have been lost and refugees are flooding in their millions into adjoining countries and Europe. Our involvement has triggered both ethnic and sectarian conflict. Does Tony Abbott ever stop and think about his role in the Howard Government that helped sow the seeds of this disaster?

    In considering the Middle East, Tony Abbott has two clear objectives that have nothing to do with our national interest. The first is to wedge the opposition and make it appear weak on security. He has instructed his private office to look for regular and if possible daily opportunities to highlight security threats. He wants to make the Canning bi-election a khaki election. Secondly he is determined to show that he is the most loyal ally of the US. He even asked the Americans to ask us to step up our role in the Middle East. He is quite unwilling to acknowledge that we are tying ourselves to a country that is perpetually at war. That is putting us at great risk.

    The West is not winning the war in the Middle East. The history of foreign intervention in the Middle East is one of loss and ignominy. Just ask the Russians.

    There is serious legal doubt about extending our role into Syria. The Saudis, Emirates and Qataris are not contributing to the campaign against IS. Many Saudis privately support and fund IS. Having suffered defeat as a result of the intervention by the US and its allies many Sunni in Iraq now support IS. None of our neighbours in South East Asia is involved.

    The commander of our joint operations in the Middle East Vice-Admiral David Johnson has told us that bombing Syria will not be a ‘game changer’

    Turkey, one of our ‘allies’ in the area, is playing a double game. Despite its alleged opposition to IS, Turkey has remained a major transit country for foreign fighters, including Australians, to join IS in Syria and Iraq. Turkey helps fund IS through large purchases of oil. Turkey is now conducting aerial strikes on IS in Iraq and Syria, but it is using these strikes against IS as a cover for much heavier aerial attacks on Kurdish positions. It is done to play to the domestic hostility to the Kurds living in Turkey. Yet the Kurds are the most effective military opposition on the ground to IS.

    We keep compounding the disaster we triggered in the first place. We cannot undo what we helped create, but we should not make it worse by allowing ourselves to be goaded by IS. Only a diplomatic and political resolution is possible. In any resolution Iran will be a key player.

    We would make a much greater contribution to wellbeing if we agreed to take 10,000 people displaced from Syria and provide refuge for them in Australia as we did for Kosovans in 1999.

    For an outline of the mess, see the link below to an article in the New York Times by Roger Cohen.  Middle East Zen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Alex Wodak. Incarcerating Nations

    In the 18th C Britain struggled to accommodate a growing prison population incarcerated for social reasons, mainly poverty. After the America revolution in 1776, Britain became unable to keep sending its excess prisoners to America. The solution was to establish a prison colony in Australia in 1788. Britain never learnt that incarceration is not a solution for serious social problems. Neither did the USA. Nor for that matter did Australia.

    With 130 prisoners per 100,000 residents in 20012/13, Australia had the 15th highest incarceration rate of the OECD countries, far behind the OECD and world leader, the USA (701) and well behind New Zealand (7th, 192) and just behind the United Kingdom (13th, 147).

    Incarceration rates have been increasing in many countries in recent decades, including Australia. Rent seekers have had a wonderful time. With 4.4 % of the world’s population the USA has almost 25% of the world’s prison inmates. After Nixon declared a War on Drugs in the early 1970s, the US incarceration rate increased five fold peaking in 2007. As with many other fads, California was an early market leader in the US with conservative Republicans, private prison operators and corrections unions working together, each benefitting enormously. Increasing the number of prisoners, building more prisons, improving the wages and conditions of prison guards and expanding the private prison sector worked well at the ballot box as long as voters could continue to be convinced that crime was a serious and ever growing threat. In an era when taxation revenues have been steadily falling, funding extra police, courts and prison costs never seemed a problem. California discovered that cutting higher education could pay for its law and order policies. No one seemed to mind or even notice. The taxpayer even picked up the tab for this electoral Magic Pudding.

    All good things come to an end. Eventually. US incarceration rates started declining 7-8 years ago. Now President Obama, supported by politicians from across the political spectrum, has made it clear that he wants to end America’s jails and prisons binge. In an important 45 minute speech1 on criminal justice policy in Philadelphia on 14 July to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), Obama reminded his audience of the huge gap between the vision of Amertica’s ‘founding [fathers] that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights’ with ‘the realities that we live each and every day’. Obama noted that the aims of the NAACP had moved from ending lynching to ending the now more subtle forms of bigotry and gross disparities in opportunity. He reminded his audience that ‘since my first campaign, I’ve talked about how, in too many cases, our criminal justice system ends up being a pipeline from underfunded, inadequate schools to overcrowded jails.’ Obama noted that ‘We keep more people behind bars than the top 35 European countries combined’. Increasing from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million today.  [The number of correctional inmates] ‘has quadrupled since 1980.  Our prison population has doubled in the last two decades alone’. He went on to argue that the main factor driving up the US prison population has been the steadily increasing number of nonviolent drug offenders locked up for longer and longer periods. As Obama observed, the shocking disproportionality of US prison sentences also ended up costing taxpayers $80 billion/year – a sum that he said ‘could pay for universal preschool for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in America, or a doubling of the salary of every high school teacher in America or investment in new roads, bridges and airports, job training programs, and research and development’. For the cost of keeping ‘everyone locked up for one year’, Obama said ‘we could eliminate tuition at every single one of our public colleges and universities’.

    Minorities in the USA have paid a tragically high price for this binge on incarceration. As Obama noted ‘African Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of our population; they make up 60 percent of our inmates.  About one in every 35 African American men, one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now.  Among white men, that number is one in 214’.

    But nothing lasts forever. Obama observed that ‘for the first time in 40 years, America’s crime rate and incarceration rate both went down at the same time’ last year. He supporting increased investment in communities to reduce crime, increased judicial discretion, greater use of non-custodial sentencing options and prison reform.

    Many fads start in California and then spread to the rest of the USA and then to the rest of the world. America has now woken up to the huge social and financial cost of its addiction to incarceration. But like many other addictions, getting this addiction under control takes time and a lot of energy and motivation.

    NSW recently broke though the 12,000 inmate barrier. More than 30,000 Australians will go to sleep in a prison cell tonight, no doubt some for very good reason. It’s high time Australian political parties agreed to abandon the Laura Norder debate and work together to reduce our prison population. Prisons should only be used as a last resort. And offenders should be sent to prison as punishment and not for punishment.

    Dr Alex Wodak AM is President, Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation

     

     

    1 https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/14/remarks-president-naacp-conference

  • Luke Fraser. Rail infrastructure failure.

    RAIL: FEWER SPENDING CHEERLEADERS, MORE JIMMY CARTER.

    In June the Australian Financial Review hosted an Infrastructure Summit of the great and good in Sydney. It heard about the need for much more infrastructure: Australia was ‘well behind’ other countries in such matters. Nobody dwelt on the possibility that in transport at least, Australia might suffer from a tired and patchy regulatory inheritance and an extremely lazy generation of regulatory policy makers.

    Thankfully, at least one new project is complete: an Inland Rail. New freight ‘inland ports’ are in place along its 4,000 kilometre length. It out-competes trucks for speed and cost of delivery. In its first decade of operation, it’s expected to drag down freight prices, save almost $6 billion in congestion costs, remove 13 million long-haul trucks from the road, save over 8 billion litres of diesel fuel and reduce carbon emissions by 71 million tonnes. It’s a simple public-private partnership: the operator finances commercial aspects; government chips in based on estimated economic benefits.

    The only problem for our infrastructure cheerleaders is this project happened in the United States, not Australia: it’s the $AUD 3.4 billion dollar ‘Crescent Corridor’ – linking Louisiana with New Jersey[i].

    It could happen there because US rail is on a market footing. It wasn’t always so. Until 1980, perverse regulations hampered US rail. Here is what President Jimmy Carter said then, when signing into law the Staggers Act of rail reform:

    ‘By stripping away needless and costly regulation in favor of marketplace forces wherever possible, this act will help assure a strong and healthy future for our Nation’s railroads and the men and women who work for them.

    Carter’s efforts didn’t deregulate rail – it remains thoroughly regulated to this day. His administration’s genius lay in recognising and rewarding commercial rail motivations in a cleaner regulatory framework. Amongst other things, Staggers saw loss-making passenger train obligations removed from US freight rail companies. Freight railways were free to decide where to build new productive rail and where to abandon costly ‘basket cases’. Owners were allowed to sell failing rural rail branches to niche operators who could do a better job. After considerable turbulence, all of these measures succeeded. US rail’s share of long-distance interstate transport now stands at around 40 per cent – on Australia’s east coast it is just over 10. Many smaller regional branch lines work efficiently to support the big ‘Class-1’ railways – in Australia these branch lines languish, museum pieces propped up by taxpayers. Since 1980 US rail has made a stunning $AUD 800 billion of new investment into itself. This underlines what happens when regulations encourage the animal economy:

    US Freight Railroad Performance Pre and Post-Staggers Act Reforms

    https://www.aar.org/Pages/US-Freight-Rail-Performance-Since-Staggers-Act.aspx

    Source: Association of American Railroads

    Back in Oz, a government-owned entity – Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) still owns the interstate rail system and mostly decides what will be spent, when and where. It preserves an historic network, whether it makes money or not. ARTC in turn relies on meagre taxpayer funding from the transport department: excepting the Keating years, this agency has eschewed serious rail investment in favour of roads: 2014’s 5-year budget saw over $46 billion dollars going to more national highways, city motorways and tollways, while less than a billion flowed to interstate rail.[ii] One of the constants of US rail regulation has been that all railways must be interoperable – a common gauge of track and trains. This promotes scale, competition, flexibility and cheaper prices; 114 years after Federation, Queensland is not yet even on the national standard gauge of rail.

    This year the Commonwealth flagged the sale of ARTC. Tellingly, it didn’t prefigure an effort to review the sector’s regulations or provide a stable, market-led road and rail investment environment. What is in prospect is undoubtedly just a rude carve-up: hire a bunch of merchant bank advisors to auction-off government rail assets, then bank the sale price. This is both primitive and highly irresponsible: it will lead variously to rent-seeking and stranded assets if no thought is given to how the newly-privatised market should be structured for maximum long-run national efficiency. In reform terms, it’s the very shallowest part of the pool. Some call it ‘asset recycling’.

    Meanwhile, Australia’s own Inland Rail project – a line between Brisbane and Melbourne, west of the Dividing Range – is more Eeyore than Tigger: it languishes unbuilt, a feeding frenzy for consultants and a superannuation plan for administering public servants, who at last count have been voted around $400 million dollars by the Commonwealth. Funds are not earmarked for actually building an operational railway, but mostly just for producing designs, route analysis and ‘preparatory works’ – in the belief that if something is begun, a white knight will surely arrive to finish and operate it. But this project is never likely to become efficient: the regulatory settings are non-commercial, so global commercial rail leaders rightly don’t take it seriously.

    For now, such criticisms and alternatives remain academic. Instead of embracing productive reform lessons from elsewhere, our transport bureaucracy’s boilerplate response is to acknowledge any challenge, establish a grand new committee and ask for more money. But what if the agency itself was the problem? Removing the dead hand of agencies on freight solutions and forcing indolent transport regulators to make improvements in the spirit of Carter[iii] should be imperatives for Australia.

    The next summit would benefit from locking out the infrastructure cheerleaders – those unfazed by seeing taxpayers blow yet more billions on dumb projects (to be fair, it’s easier to remain unfazed when your company might be landing the contracts).   An alternative would be an adult discussion about how we improve on the specific regulatory settings which are retarding a brighter future for Australian transport consumers and patient capital investors alike.

    A future post will address desired Australian land freight reform in more detail: it will attempt to sketch out more productive regulatory settings, funding arrangements, matters of financial and economic viability and their implications for pricing as well as the important matter of a better approach to road pricing for the trucks which (mostly) outcompete Australian rail freight.

    Luke Fraser and former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Michael Keating AC recently co-authored the transport and infrastructure paper in John Menadue’s Fairness, Opportunity and Security series.

    Luke Fraser is founder and principal of Juturna, a public policy consultancy specialised in roads, freight and market investment reforms. He is a former national trucking industry CEO and has authored several reform studies for Infrastructure Australia. He was a member of the 2008 review of NSW grain railways and in 2012 he was appointed to the COAG Road Reform Board.

    [i] See http://www.nscorp.com/content/nscorp/en/shipping-options/corridors/crescent-corridor.html or a promotional video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1m_8jRlIwY

    [ii] The National Land Transport Funding Agreement 2014-2019 refers.

    [iii] Carter’s 1980 rail reforms were complemented by sweeping market reform of the aviation and trucking sectors (1978 and 1980 respectively).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

    Let’s do it.   John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Why are we so cruel? The problem starts at the top.

    The news out of Manus and particularly Nauru shows how callous we have become. It is not that we are always as cold-hearted as this. The response to the attacks on Adam Goodes and the murder of an AFL football coach shows our generous and humane side…our better angels.

    But we don’t seem to care about the cruelty being inflicted on children and women in Nauru. The Nauru government is corrupt. There is no rule of law worth the name. Magistrates are sacked by the government. In effect, we bribe the Nauru government to do our dirty work. Women and children in Nauru are crying and we turn away.

    There is poison in our public life but we don’t seem to care.

    I suggest there are three main reasons why we have become so callous.

    The first is the abdication of political and moral leadership. Asylum seekers have been demonized for years. It goes back to John Howard and his exploitation of fear of the outsider. He told us that asylum seekers were so inhuman that they would even throw their children overboard. For years Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison described asylum seekers as illegals and by inference, criminals. Scott Morrison told us that asylum seekers brought disease and wads of cash. He said that we should have a ‘behavioral protocol’ for asylum seekers living in the community. Senator Abetz told us that asylum seekers in the community should be publicly listed like pedophiles.

    If asylum seekers are as inhuman as Ministers have repeatedly told us, why should those with administrative responsibility take particular care?

    Leaders set the tone on how people behave in any organization. Put more bluntly is the old adage that the fish rots from the head down. People dealing with asylum seekers can read the signs from the top. These signs tell them that we don’t need to take particular care of asylum seekers and refugees. Surely the staff in the field for Transfield must be reading these signs. The signs tell them that if you rough up asylum seekers they probably deserve it.

    Every organization has a spectrum of people who are concerned about discipline and police-like roles. These organizations also have people that are generous and humanitarian in their outlook. When I was the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs I was aware of the tension in the department between enforcement and control people on the one hand, and humanitarian and generous people on the other. I was fortunate that I had as Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Immigration Minister Ian Macphee who made it clear where the balance should be. The staff in the department could read the intent of the Prime Minister and the Minister. That strongly influenced the culture of the department.

    I think I was able to shift the culture of the department at least temporarily because we knew what the Prime Minister and the Minister wanted. People in the department today would get a very different reading. It would explain, at least in part the fiasco in Melbourne last Friday.

    The second reason for our callous disregard of asylum seekers and refugees is that there is no effective supervision. Journalists are largely excluded from Manus and Nauru. The President of the Human Rights Commission was vilified for defending the rights of children in detention. There is no UNHCR to assess and report on what is occurring in our name in Nauru and Manus.

    The third problem is contracting out. The government seems to have contracted out both refugee policy and operations. In some respects contracting out makes sense but contractors, with pursuit of profit, have a different ethic to public servants who are directly responsible to the government for the public good. In these circumstances it is essential that departments retain the ability to effectively supervise contractors. But over the years competence in our public service has been stripped away in the name of getting rid of red tape and downsizing government. Our public service must maintain its competence and it cannot contract out its moral responsibility to private corporations. When working holiday makers are exploited as fruit pickers, it is not defensible for the employer to say that hiring of staff has been contracted out to a labor hire company.

    As the prime contractor how could Transfield not know what has been happening!

    If governments won’t listen, we should welcome action by superannuation funds like HESTA and UniSuper and others to withdraw support from companies such as Transfield. I welcome the growing disinvestment from companies who are acting unethically. It gained momentum with divestment in tobacco companies and then companies that did business with apartheid South Africa. It is growing rapidly in fossil fuels. The business elite and their supporting business commentators will tut tut but if governments won’t listen, it is important that civic groups take action when they believe that companies are acting unethically or improperly. Unethical investments, even if they are legal such as investments in tobacco companies are seldom good investments in the medium and long term.

    It is interesting that in 2015-16 the cost of the offshore management of less than 2,000 asylum seekers in Manus and Nauru is expected to be $811 million. Companies such as Transfield have been gorging themselves. Yet UNHCR in South East Asia has a budget of only $160 million to cover over 200,000 refugees, half a million internally displaced people and nearly 1.4 million stateless persons in the region. It says a great deal about our priorities and our morality.

    Our processing in Nauru and Manus is unsustainable. It is unethical. It is wasteful.

    We should not be surprised at what is unfolding in Manus and Nauru. There are prices to be paid when our leaders demonize and dehumanize human beings. Innocent and vulnerable people are paying a heavy price for failed moral leadership and the exploitation of fear in the community. Our problems start at the top and not just in one political party.

    Today is Migrant and Refugee Sunday. Pope Francis has chosen the theme ‘Church without Frontiers, Mother to All’ and asks us to build ‘a culture of acceptance and solidarity, in which no one is seen as useless, out of place or disposable…Suspicion and prejudice conflict with the biblical commandment of welcoming with respect and solidarity the stranger in need..’

  • Julianne Schultz. Why public broadcasting is worth saving.

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

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

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

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

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

    Public good

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

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

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

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

    IPSOS Mori

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

    As BBC strategist James Purnell said:

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

    What is the market?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ABC Annual Report 2013

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

    Cultural bedrock

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

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

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

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

  • Bob Kinnaird. China FTA truth still elusive

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

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

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

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

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

    It is Mr Taylor’s assertions that are false.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

  • Richard Butler. RAAF to bomb Syria: another Captain’s pick?

    Within the next ten days, the National Security Committee of Cabinet will discuss the US request to Australia to deploy RAAF assets in bombing IS targets in Syria. Presumably, senior defense, foreign affairs, intelligence and government policy staff will be preparing assessments of such military action for Committee consideration. It would be normal for such assessments to include: the nature, aims and duration of possible military actions, including target selection, their command and control, risk assessment, actions needed in the event of downing of RAAF aircraft, relationship to Australia’s national security and the impact of such action on its international relationships.

    Whatever might be a rational preparation of analyses for consideration by Cabinet, Prime Minister Abbott has already stated his preferred position, predictably, in an exclusive interview with The Australian newspaper.

    He stated that the US request to Australia is “a very serious request…We’ll take it very seriously” and on the substance of what might occur, the depth of his analysis was to declare that there is no moral difference between attacking sites in Syria from those already subject to attack within Iraq, and on the international legal aspect, national borders for example, he asserted “This (ISIS) is an evil movement whether it is operating in Iraq or in Syria, it is an absolutely evil movement, and in the end, when they don’t respect where the border is, the question is why should we?”

    In the light of these declarations from the Captain, the preparation of fundamental analyses of what our reply to the US might be can now stop and be replaced by papers simply describing operational and search and rescue arrangements.

    The Prime Minister’s assertion that no difference should be drawn between what is now happening in Iraq and what is planned for Syria, apart from being glaringly wrong, shockingly illogical – justifying a dubious decision by arguing that it’s not as bad as an earlier one – further obscures the fact that the decision to commit Australian military assets to Iraq was itself done without consideration by the Parliament or any consultation with the public.

    The absence of any such consultation on the decision by the Howard government to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the woeful inadequacy of mechanisms through which a decision by Australia to go to war is considered is fully explored by Australians for War Powers Reform. (www.iraqwarinquiry.org.au).

    Abbott is continuing the conservative practice that asserts that such matters as Australia going to war are too difficult for ordinary people to understand. Ordinary people did understand Howard’s 2003 decision. They marched against it in Australia’s streets in record numbers, were ignored, and turned out to have been right. That invasion of Iraq violated international law, killed at least half a million people, settled nothing, and is widely regarded as having given rise to the present chaos in that region, including the emergence of ISIS.

    Prime Minister Abbott is evidently guided by his belief that our national interest, and his domestic political interest, dictate that we agree to this latest US request. He appears to be amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of the notion first enunciated by Menzies to justify our sending troops to support the Americans in Vietnam, that Australia must have a “great and powerful friend”, and crisply encapsulated by Prime Minister Holt at the height of the Vietnam War; “all the way with LBJ”. According to reports just published and not denied, Abbott in fact asked the Americans to request Australia to undertake this proposed action against Syrian targets. This echoes the action by Menzies in 1962 when he claimed Vietnam had invited Australian participation in the war. This was shown to have been false. Menzies had misled the people and the Parliament. Australia had in fact asked Vietnam to invite it to enter the war. So an infamous conservative tradition is extended.

    The idea that we are obliged to align ourselves with the US, abandoning an independent foreign policy, raises among other important things such as our integrity, the risk described by Michael McKinley ( Pearls and Irritations, July 16th, 2015): “minor powers aligned with major powers share the risks and eventually the significant costs of conflicts that are, at root, derived from a status that is beyond them”.

    Virtually automatic commitment to the US’ wars is a prospect that is now almost as limitless as what has become the US’ current continuous commitment to war. On the latter reality, McKinley cites the 2014 report of the Congressional Research Service that, inter alia, between 1990 and August 2014, the US deployed military force 5 times more often than in the prior 193 years.

    In Abbott’s version of great and powerful friendism, as is his wont, he has introduced a moralising element. The problem this raises is not to be found in the notion that there is a moral aspect to international relations, but in the entirely inconsistent and dogmatic application of notions of morality employed by Abbott. His attachment to morality in the field of dealing with “the death cult” stands in stark contrast with his sense of morality on a range of other issues: Aboriginal Australians, taxation of individuals and corporations, education, climate and the environment, asylum seekers. The list is well known and brutal.

    When the current military commitment to Iraq was announced by the Prime Minister, in April 2015, he rejected the notion of mission creep. Yet, here it is, after only five months. Again, no Parliamentary or public discussion is planned. Abbott will consult with opposition leadership, but Leader Bill Shorten has already signaled his readiness to offer bipartisanship on the issue. A commentary published recently in the Guardian newspaper on the current argument in the UK Labour Party about the prospect of a new leader from the left of the Party, was headlined “What is Labour For”, meaning if not for defending social justice and decency in politics. Indeed.

    Leaks from Tony Abbott’s Cabinet indicate that he has been insisting to his colleagues that the key issues for them to remain in power are taxes and national security. What else in new from the conservatives; the conviction that the important human motivations are greed and fear. Abbott is obviously convinced that the latter, in particular, is a winner. So, the drafters of position papers for the National Security Committee can indeed turn off their computers, they have received their basic instruction. The Captain has made his pick, we will again go to war with the USA.

    The Americans can be certain of this as, after all, we asked them to ask us to do so. What Abbott may be less able to rely on however, is that in the crucial by-election in Canning, where environmental issues are considered to be very important, his belief that militarism and xenophobia will always work to his benefit may be tested.

    Richard Butler AC, former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations, and Head of the UN Special Commission to disarm Iraq.

     

  • Stephen Harper. The closing of the Canadian mind.

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

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

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

  • Stuart Harris. Who are we backing in Syria?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    To Do Nothing or Not To Do Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How to turn a mouse into an elephant

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

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

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

    Now that’s a headline.

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

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

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

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

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

    Who is mean and tricky?

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

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

    I can’t finish without one last comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Why are the world’s democrats so quiet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The brutal business of killing politics

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

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

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

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

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

    Faith and freedom defy state violence

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

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

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

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

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

    Ugly geopolitics and the beauty of sun-bright Mecca

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

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

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

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

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

    After the death sentence, Morsi declared:

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

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

    Tell men of high condition,

    That rule affairs of state,

    Their purpose is ambition,

    Their practice only hate;

    And if they once reply,

    Then given them all the lie.

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

  • John Tulloh. Syria; a step too far for Tony Abbott.

    It was said that in World War One the British Army laced the tea of its soldiers with bromide in order to curb their sexual impulses and concentrate on the matter at hand. It would be useful if something could be found to put in Tony Abbott’s morning cuppa to inhibit his desires for military adventures. He is like a corporal trying to please a general.

    Media reports suggest he wants to oblige an American request for the RAAF to extend its Iraqi operation to Syria to combat ISIS or Daesh, as the Prime Minister calls it. At the same time, he acts like the national town crier, drawing constant attention to the threat to domestic security posed by Islamic extremists in Australia, jihadists and impressionable young Moslems who have been radicalised.

    Does it not occur to Mr Abbott that, the more we get involved in a far away conflict, the more resentment and bitterness we cause among disaffected Australian citizens of Middle East origin and thus the greater the threat to the stability of our way of life?

    It also raises other questions which the Prime Minister, given his repeated assertions of his concern for the well-being of Australians, should be addressing, such as:

    + What impact has the air war in Iraq had so far? Has it made any real difference to the strength and influence of ISIS? The Defence Dept’s website has a lot of bland figures which mean little. Occasionally, more meaningful information is released. But overall the fog of war information prevails.

    + Is it not about time that federal Parliament had a proper debate about the pros and cons of our participation in this conflict? Britain’s House of Commons did two years ago, voting down a proposal for military involvement against Syria for its use of chemical weapons? Why all the secrecy of huddled briefings behind closed doors and sealed lips?

    + Why should a country removed as far as we are from the Middle East be lured into its troubles when nations under greater threat, especially in Europe and elsewhere in the Arab world, leave it to others to deal with? Can it be that we are in the permanent thrall of the mighty U.S. war machine?

    + Australia went to great lengths to ‘legitimise’ our return to Iraq almost 12 months ago both on the ground as advisers and in the air. Mr Abbott is quoted as saying there is ‘no moral difference’ whether RAAF attacks ISIS targets in Syria or Iraq. Why the change of policy?

    + It is one thing to go after ISIS, but where does the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda splinter group which also operates in Northern Syria, stand in Australia’s thinking? Australia regards it as a terrorist organisation and yet it operates in coalition with the Free Syrian Army which the West supports.

    + Something like $500 million was earmarked earlier this year to cover the cost of Australia’s return to warfare in Iraq. How much has been spent so far and what domestic needs will have to be sacrificed to cover the inevitable additional funding?

    + If Australia should help in eliminating ISIS, what are the likely political, social, demographic and peace-keeping consequences for the region? In other words, are we inviting a new form of geopolitical crisis? Dr John Blaxland, a senior fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the ANU, told ABC radio that he thought Australia was being baited by ISIS:

    ‘To me, it’s pretty compelling that this is a goading. (It) is a ‘comeon’, if you like: to spill more blood in the sandpit, if you like. And I think we need to be very, very cautious about going down that path.

    ‘While it is attractive to try and topple them, realistically we have to look at it and think: If we do defeat the Daeshists in Iraq and Syria, what then?’

    Mr Abbott may have been a Rhodes scholar, but it is unlikely because he was outstanding at modern history. He should be asking himself: When was the last successful bombing strategy in recent times? The answer is debatable.

    Vietnam was plastered with bombs and napalm, including under the concerted Operation Rolling Thunder. Overall, it made little military difference. Cambodians were subject to secret bombing from unseen B-52s at 30,000ft. The plains of Laos became a bombing free-for-all arena. The aim was to crush the Communists. It failed in Vietnam and Laos.

    In 1999, all of NATO got together to bomb Serbia on the basis that it was committing atrocities in Kosovo, forcing President Slobodan Milosevic to sue for peace. Result: Thousands of Serbs being driven out of Kosovo into exile, seething resentment still to this day and social distress. The Iraqi war in 2003 was fought mainly from the air by the US-led coalition forces. The bombs certainly helped get rid of Saddam Hussein, but the effect on overall life in Iraq was catastrophic and remains so.

    Syria thought it could deal with its civil war in 2011 by concentrating on air attacks, including its terrifying barrel bombs dropped from helicopters at random into civilian areas. The strategy failed catastrophically again and the country is now in such a hopeless state.

    In 2011, many NATO countries got together to deal with Libya and behead the Gaddafi regime. They succeeded except look at the fractured, shambolic state that Libya is now. It back-fired in a way because Libya has become an easy conduit for thousands of asylum-seekers and economic immigrants wanting to settle in Europe.

    Look also at the situation in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has plunged into mainly an air war against the Houthi rebels in the south of the country. An International Red Cross official said only this week that ‘Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years’. What’s more, the UN says the conflict has left Yemen on the brink of famine.

    If there is a moral in all this, it is that meddling by anyone in the Middle East or the Arab world is asking for trouble. The best of intentions never succeed.

    If there is a certainty in all this, it is that meddling causes death, displacement, destruction, untold misery and even more woe on a scale that in our comfortable Australian lives we cannot even begin to imagine.

    Mr Abbott might care to listen to his chief of joint operations, ViceAdmiral David Johnston, who also told ABC radio:

    ‘The contribution of Australia, while always welcome, isn’t a game-changer one way or the other’.

    That begs the obvious question. So does whether we would still feel strongly enough to get involved closer to the ground if we did not have the advantage of overwhelming superiority in the skies.

    John Tulloh had a 40 year career in foreign news, much of it dealing with warfare and its consequences.

  • John Menadue. The Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing.

    I have frequently raised my concerns about the ability of the Department of Health and Ageing to develop good health policy and manage health reform. A test of the new Minister is whether she can help facilitate the necessary reform. See below links to two earlier articles I wrote on this problem. The first is a capability review of the Department of Heath and Ageing by the Australian Public Service Commission. The second is a report by the Australian National Audit Office of DHA’s administration of the Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement.

    Both reports raise very serious issues.

    https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=3411

    https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=3453

  • David Stephens. ‘There will be blood’: ministerial remarks on the responsibility of children.

    There will be blood from the sword up to the belly of a horse, and the thigh of a human, and the hock of a camel. And there will be great fear and trembling upon the earth. And those who see that wrath will be terrified, and trembling will seize them. (6 Ezra, Old Testament Pseudoepigraphica)

    Blood has always fascinated authority figures and their acolytes, from high priests then to ministers now. In ancient Israel, the old men who ran things got so hung up on blood and blood-letting that they invented the cult of Moloch and similar ritualistic practices. Moloch followers supported the passing of children through fire or sacrificing them to idols.

    Since these early days, war and the idea of blood sacrifice have become intricately entwined. One leading study ‘argues that violent blood sacrifice makes enduring groups cohere, even though such a claim challenges our most deeply held notions of civilized behavior’.

    Historian Carolyn Holbrook, in her book, Anzac: the Unauthorised Biography, traced the connections between the growth of the Anzac legend and yearnings about the spilling of blood. Before the Great War, even a ‘radical’ poet like Henry Lawson noted the disappointing lack of blood in Federation.

    A nation’s born where the shell falls fast [Lawson wrote in The Star of Australasia in 1895], or its lease of life renewed.

    We in part atone for the ghoulish strife, and the crimes of peace we boast,

    And the better part of a people’s life in the storm comes uppermost.

    The 1981 film Gallipoli famously riffed on blood sacrifice with its final scene of a ‘crucified’ Archie, brought down at The Nek.

    Another historian, Frank Bongiorno went further, asking an important question.

    The defence of Anzac Day commemoration – as common in the 1920s as today – turns on some fairly familiar arguments. It does not glorify war; it does not cultivate hatred; it is about honouring and remembering, not celebrating. Yet a sense of sacred nationhood created through the blood sacrifice of young men remains at its core today, as in 1916. Is this not to glorify war?

    When Fromelles, 19 July 1916, was ‘rediscovered’ as an Australian battle of the Great War, the blood shed there was the main point of significance, even becoming the sub-title of a book for young people, Carole Wilkinson’s Fromelles: Australia’s Bloodiest Day at War. The book was shortlisted for a Children’s Book Council Award in 2012 and promoted by Junior Bookseller and Publisher as ‘exactly the kind of book that will inspire a love of history for years to come’. It has a suitably ruddy cover with blood-red Flanders poppies.

    When Defence Minister Andrews spoke on Anzac Day this year at Villers-Bretonneux he quoted the Bishop of Amiens in 1920 about how Australians had restored the Bishop’s diocese by the spilling of blood. The Minister added:

    The sacrifice that the bishop speaks of – sacrifice made in blood by those brave Anzacs – must be understood and carried on in the hearts and minds of our young people. It must never be forgotten.

    But it is Minister Andrews’ colleague, Senator Michael Ronaldson, Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, who has been most vocal on the twin themes of blood sacrifice and the responsibility of children.

    Last year the Minister talked about how children ‘must understand that’ in many cases their ‘freedom has been paid for in blood’. This year he has warmed to the theme.

    We [he told the Queensland RSL on 20 June] must also do whatever we can to ensure that the future generations of young Australians understand as well what that service and sacrifice is for them in a personal sense.

    The freedoms that we enjoy today have come at a huge price. It is incumbent on you and I to ensure that our kids understand, the next generation of young Australians understand, what their responsibilities are as well as what their rights are …

    [The next four years] is an opportunity that you and I, quite frankly, must ensure that we maximise with another generation of young Australians who understand. I think we can be rest assured that they will reward us accordingly.

    Ten days later, the Minister opened a memorial park in Cheltenham in Victoria:

    [W]e’ve got to make sure that our children understand that the 102,700 names in the cloisters of the Australian War Memorial had given their own blood to enable us to live our lives in relative freedom today …

    [T]his has come at an enormous price and they will be carrying the torch of remembrance well after many of us who are here today are gone … It’s a community obligation to ensure that our children understand …

    [W]e must teach our kids that these freedoms are incredibly important and they must stand and defend them as well as others have before us.

    The Minister’s speeches as recorded are a touch incoherent but we can trace his argument well enough:

    Children must understand the concept of blood sacrifice.

    They must carry the torch of remembrance of this sacrifice.

    They must be prepared to defend our freedoms, as was done by those who are being remembered.

    Thus will be ensured the necessary blood sacrifice by future generations.

    This will be an appropriate reward for the current generation’s advocacy of blood sacrifice.

    It is notable though that this generation – the Minister’s generation – has mostly not had to make such a sacrifice itself. And blood in these remarks is always in the abstract; nothing about the details – evisceration, decapitation, or slowly bleeding to death, screaming, alone, trying to hold your intestines in.

    This rhetoric effectively conditions the next generation for military endeavours involving blood sacrifice. That’s our legacy to our children and grandchildren: the expectation that honouring the war dead of the past – carrying the torch – requires the preparedness to become the war dead of the future. There will be blood.

    David Stephens is secretary and editor of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au), a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.

     

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

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

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

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

     

  • Cavan Hogue. Russian and Chinese naval exercises.

    From August 20-28 Russia and China will conduct a large scale naval exercise in the Russian Far East and the Sea of Japan. Russia will send 20 ships and China seven plus11 aircraft. They will practice air defence and anti-submarine drills as well as a beach landing.

    Both countries are publicly beating up their defence ties as part of a closer relationship. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jin Ping have met and made appropriate noises about their growing friendship. Clearly both countries see advantage in closer relations as they face criticism from the USA and some other countries.

    We sometimes forget that while its primary focus is Europe Russia is a Pacific power and sees itself as a global power. Western sanctions are driving it to seek friends elsewhere. Similarly, while China’s focus is primarily on Asia Pacific it also has pretensions to being a global power. Both countries resent what they see as American meddling in their affairs.

    Given the long history of troubled relations between the two it is hard to know how long this rapprochement will last. Is it just a reaction to outside criticicism or will it develop into something deeper? At least in the short term, the more both countries see themselves, rightly or wrongly, the victims of foreign interference, the more they will move away from the West and seek friends elsewhere. Both do want good relations with the the USA and others but on their terms.

    Watch this space.

    Cavan Hogue was Australian Ambassador to Mexico, USSR, Russia and Thailand, and High Commissioner to Malaysia. 

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

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

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

    See link to Melbourne Age article below:

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

  • Jon Stanford. The government’s new naval shipbuilding policy

     

    I think this is an outstanding article on naval shipbuilding, industry policy and economic prospects in South Australia. Jon Staford suggests that in terms of industry policy, ‘continuing to prop up the car industry … would probably have been a much cheaper way of [creating jobs]’. In case you have missed it, I have decided to repost.  John Menadue

    The recent statement by the Prime Minister on the naval shipbuilding industry is highly problematic. By committing up to $89 billion to a continuous warship-building program in Adelaide, the government’s largesse knows no bounds. This policy seems irresponsible, not just financially but also in terms of both industry policy and defence requirements. Yet, in political terms, it may seem a masterstroke, not just in shoring up the Coalition vote in South Australia but because none of the other political parties will oppose it.

    1. National security argument for building warships locally

    In the current debate over naval shipbuilding it is taken for granted that there is a strong defence argument in favour of building naval platforms in Australia, almost regardless of cost. Not only do politicians and trade unions assert this, but it goes generally unchallenged in the media. Yet it is simply not correct.

    From a Defence policy perspective, the role of industry is to provide through life support for military assets, to upgrade them as required and, in any conflict, to repair combat damage and return the asset to the front line as expeditiously as possible. It is not necessary to have built a warship in the first place to be able to undertake these tasks. Local industry has always provided through life support to the RAN fleet, irrespective of whether the ships were built locally or procured offshore. In recent times, for example, the Oberon class submarines were built in the UK but were both sustained and upgraded to challenging RAN specifications in Australia.

    More recently, the US origin Perry class FFGs have been upgraded very substantially to a local design. But the contract went not to the Williamstown shipyard that built the two Australian sourced ships but to Thales/ADI in Sydney, which had played no part in constructing the ships. The current leading-edge upgrade to the Anzac class frigates is being undertaken not in the Williamstown yard that built them, but in Western Australia. Indeed, the Navy prefers to have maintenance and upgrades undertaken at the fleet bases in Sydney and Henderson (WA), while construction generally takes place elsewhere.

    In practical terms, when we consider Air Force and Army assets the national security argument for building naval platforms locally is soon shown to be false. The Mirage was the last RAAF fighter to be assembled locally in the 1960s and there was no argument from Defence that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter should be built here. The RAAF and defence industry have done a fine job in maintaining and upgrading the fleet of Hornets, which were bought off the shelf from the US. Although some helicopters are being assembled in Australia, it is not clear what the benefits are and there have been some significant costs. While the Army was keen to acquire the Abrams Main Battle Tank (to what end has never been entirely clear), there never seemed to be any suggestion that it was necessary to build the platforms in Australia.

    It is also notable that the Prime Minister appears to support the RAN’s next submarine being sourced from Japan. While he may compromise on this position, it does suggest that he does not accept that there is a national security argument for building naval platforms locally.

    From a Defence perspective, there can also be significant downside in building warships in Australia. First, they are likely to cost more (30-40 per cent more according to the RAND Corporation). Within a constrained defence budget, this reduces the ‘bang for the buck’ very significantly. For example, for the eventual cost of three locally built air warfare destroyers, we would probably have been able to buy off the shelf from the US five larger and more capable Arleigh Burke class destroyers or, more realistically, buy three and divert the savings into other defence priorities. Secondly, delays in delivering locally built ships can lead to significant problems and costs for the RAN where obsolescent ships that were due to be replaced have to be kept in service for longer.

    Continuous build: the tail wagging the dog?

    Establishing a local industry to build warships for a small navy leads to major problems in terms of maintaining a skilled workforce. If there is no new build program on the horizon to take over from another program that is nearing completion, there is no alternative but to discharge the shipyard’s workforce and put some of the capital on care and maintenance. This leads to a major loss of skills in the workforce that can pose substantial risks to a new build program and take years to rebuild.

    The Prime Minister’s solution to this problem is to establish a continuous build program for warships. Note that this will not commence in this decade; the Anzac ships with their current upgrade are among the most capable frigates in the world and do not need replacing yet. This means that most naval shipyards will need to pay off most of their current workforce. Some shipyards, such as Williamstown, may even close permanently as a result.

    Given that the sole purpose of a local naval shipbuilding industry is to service the requirements of Defence, what are the benefits to Defence of a continuous build program in the future? The answer, surely, is very few. The Navy needs to retain maximum flexibility in its future requirements. It may need a new class of vessel quickly that does not accord with continuous build. Given rapid changes in IT and systems as technology advances ever more quickly, it may be much more efficient to upgrade existing platforms rather than prematurely replace them with new ones. The RAN is not the US Navy; it may not require a new ship every two years. The only benefit is to the industry, which should be a servant of the Navy. This is truly a case of the tail wagging the dog.

    1. Industry policy perspective

    Apart from national security, the main argument for building warships locally is that it creates jobs for Australians rather than for foreigners if the same ships were built overseas. Given Australia’s commitment to free trade, it is curious to see this mercantilist argument, which takes no account of comparative advantage, proposed by a Coalition government that supposedly supports a market economy, as well as by an Opposition that surely retains in its veins some of the competitive blood from the Hawke/Keating years.

    It is also particularly odd to witness a government that virtually shooed the car industry out of the country on the basis of the subsidy it required as being so keen to pay enormous sums of money for locally built warships in order to create jobs. If job creation in South Australia’s engineering industries is the policy objective, continuing to prop up the car industry (particularly under a much lower exchange rate) would probably have been a much cheaper way of achieving it.

    The inconvenient truth is that, with two exceptions, Australia has never been very good at building warships. We have a long history of building copies of overseas designs in government-owned shipyards. Often these have taken twice as long to build as they should have done and have come at a significant cost premium compared with overseas acquisition. Notably, it was Gough (“I am a Rattigan man”[1]) Whitlam who brought the party to an end by rejecting a proposal for a locally designed and built frigate in favour of acquiring the cheap, off the shelf Perry FFG class from the US.

    Two successes: Anzacs and Littoral Combat Ships

    The one outstanding domestic shipbuilding success story is the Anzac frigate program. Eight ships of German design were built at Williamstown for the RAN (and two more for New Zealand) and delivered over ten years from 1996 on time and on budget. Although cost comparisons are difficult because of differences in specifications, it is generally agreed that the ships were procured for much the same cost as if they had been acquired from Germany. Even the German shipbuilder conceded that they could not have delivered the frigates for a lower cost.

    So what was the secret of this success and how did the government exploit it? The main reasons for the success were that:

    • The Williamstown shipyard had been privatised by the Hawke government and had developed its experience in both management and the workforce in building the last two FFGs immediately before the Anzac program commenced
    • The company had a visionary leader in John White, who was highly committed to the idea that Australia possessed the engineering and manufacturing skills to build warships competitively
    • The shipyard maintained highly productive industrial relations protocols
    • The ships were built on the basis of a fixed price contract, so that the company had extensive skin in the game and the risk to government was much reduced
    • The terms of the fixed price contract virtually precluded Defence from making costly and time consuming changes to the design during the build
    • The design of the Anzac class was both mature and simple – to justify an eight ship acquisition, the frigates were ‘built for but not with’ a number of weapons systems and associated sensors that were added later
    • A ten ship program allowed considerable economies of scale to be exploited as well as moving a long way down the learning curve – the last ship, HMAS Perth, cost far less to build than the first one.

    As to how government exploited this success, the short answer is extraordinarily badly. As the Anzac program reached completion, the three ship air warfare destroyer program was put to tender and was being pursued by both Victoria (at Williamstown) and Adelaide, where the government-owned ASC had largely paid off its workforce from the Collins class submarines and had never built a surface warship. With an experienced workforce available and at the peak of its game, it seemed obvious that Tenix at Williamstown should be awarded the contract.

    But this didn’t happen. Defence was not enamoured of Tenix, which tended to keep them at arm’s length, and it had developed its own plan to concentrate naval shipbuilding in Adelaide. The risks of not awarding the project to an experienced builder were ignored. The membership of the Cabinet committee that made the decision had a majority of South Australians, including the Ministers for Defence, Foreign Affairs and Finance (who also happened to be the shareholder for ASC). The shipbuilder itself inevitably had a conflict of interest, being both owned by the government and with the government as the client. The alliance-based contract was not based on a fixed price and the cost blew out significantly as design changes were brought in, while accountability was not always clear. Inexperience in the workforce, including at sub-contractors such as Williamstown where the Anzac workforce had been paid off, led to costly mistakes and blow-outs both to the budget and the delivery schedule.

    The other success story is Austal, an entrepreneurial Western Australian shipbuilder that was one of the pioneers of fast aluminium ferries in the global market.[2] Austal opened a shipyard in Alabama, which enabled it to get around the protective Jones Act in the US and compete to build ships for the US Navy. As well as other high speed aluminium warships, Austal is completing a contract to build ten Littoral Combat Ships for the US Navy, with an objective of upgrading future ships to frigates. According to the Western Australian government, Austal is currently building 15 per cent of the US fleet.

    Yet the Prime Minister could find no room for Austal in his announcement last week. While the RAN, with some justification, has reservations about aluminium warships (as do all navies since the Falklands War), it is worth considering whether Austal’s highly competitive offerings could meet some of its future needs. It is worthy of note that Austal also built the RAN’s current patrol boat fleet, the Armidale class.

    The PM also failed to mention BAE Systems at Williamstown, one of the world’s largest defence contractors with a very significant naval shipbuilding business.

    Current situation

    As of now, therefore, all the benefits of the Anzac program have been lost. Australia is left with a dominant government-owned shipbuilder and, according to the RAND Corporation a cost disability of 30-40 per cent vis-à-vis best practice overseas. Assuming a materials to output ratio of 50 per cent, the effective rate of protection (or assistance to value added), for naval shipbuilding comes out at around 70 per cent, a figure far higher than that for the car industry.[3]

    With no significant defence benefits from a local build, it is impossible for the government to justify providing massive contracts to an industry that requires an effective rate of protection of 70 per cent. To do so is totally contrary to the thrust of industry policy since the Whitlam government and implies a considerable misallocation of highly skilled labour resources that could be used much more productively elsewhere. Indeed, this government was not able to tolerate the car industry’s subsidy requirements, which would have equated to an effective rate of protection of around 10 per cent.

    Conclusion

    The government’s announcement appears to give an open-ended commitment continuously to build future warships in Australia, or more specifically in Adelaide. There is no mention of how great a cost disability the government is willing to tolerate, how it plans to make ASC more efficient or why the Navy needs a continuous build program. There is no explanation as to why a government-owned shipyard, which is yet to deliver a surface warship, is being preferred over privately-owned shipyards in Victoria and Western Australia that have a record of success. In particular, the government has not enlightened us as to why the naval shipbuilding industry should be accorded a much higher level of assistance than it was prepared to provide to the car industry, which generates many more jobs throughout the economy, particularly in South Australia and Victoria. The justification for the taxpaying community to support a massive entitlement to the naval shipbuilding industry has yet to be explained.

    However, there may well be a good case for reforming the naval shipbuilding industry. Such a program would involve:

    • Ensuring the industry is in a fit state to undertake its major Defence functions, ie the efficient provision of through life support of assets, upgrades and swift repair of combat damage
    • Privatising ASC in Adelaide in the context of a comprehensive rationalisation of the industry to reduce excess capacity
    • Making no commitments about building future warships locally unless cost competitiveness can be achieved
    • In future programs local procurement would only occur if competitive (within, say 5 per cent) with offshore acquisition
    • A continuous build program would be undertaken only on the basis of a rigorous cost/benefit assessment
    • All acquisitions would be on the basis of a fixed price contract, albeit with possible increases in the budget for new or unforeseen changes.

    Given that the government’s announcement appears to satisfy none of these criteria, there is an opportunity for the Opposition to propose a rational industry policy more in accord with its approach under the Hawke and Keating governments. Unfortunately there are no signs that this will happen. Indeed, Bill Shorten wants to outdo the government in pork barrelling by going totus porcus (as the British Admiral Jackie Fisher used to say) and committing, cost unseen, to building the submarines in Adelaide as well.

    The current ALP leadership might usefully pause to remember that they are walking in the shadows of giants in these critical areas of public finance and industry policy. The legacy of Peter Walsh and his helper and friend John Button should not lightly be cast aside.

    As a consultant, Jon Stanford has undertaken significant work on Australia’s naval shipbuilding industry, for both government and defence contractors. Previously he worked on industry policy in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

    [1] Alf Rattigan was the Chairman of the Tariff Board, which became the Industries Assistance Commission, under the Whitlam government, and took a strong position in favour of low industry protection.

    [2] Austal has often flown under the radar. When Prime Minister Thatcher commissioned the first Australian-built Austal fast ferry on the cross-Channel route in the 1980s, she called it “a triumph for British technology”.

    [3] Even if we assume a materials to output ratio of 30 per cent, an implausibly low figure given the cost of modern missiles, sensors and systems such as Aegis, on the basis of RAND Corporation figures the effective rate of protection comes out at 50 per cent.

     

  • A tribute to Hugh Stretton

    Hugh Stretton, one of the greatest social scientists and public intellectuals that Australia has produced, passed away in late July after a long illness. His legacy as a thinker, writer, activist, advisor, teacher, mentor and friend is vast. Those of us who have had the honour of his advice and support can only marvel at the way in which Hugh balanced his great mind and deep knowledge and engagement across a very wide intellectual terrain with human capacities to connect with others at all levels with an inner calm, wisdom, kindness, humility and self-deprecation.

    Hugh’s life was one of high achievement from the outset. After, as he put it, ‘a happy childhood down the bay from Melbourne’ and success at Melbourne University interrupted by war service, he won a Rhodes scholarship to study history at Oxford. His achievements there saw his appointment in his early 20s as a tutor in modern history at Balliol College before the award of his Oxford degree. He was then appointed Professor of History at the University of Adelaide in 1954 at the age of 30, the youngest professor in an Australian university at the time. Over the next 15 years, he presided over the establishment of a history department whose members would go onto play central roles in reshaping historical scholarship in Australia and beyond.

    In 1968, he stepped down from his professorship to a readership at the University of Adelaide to concentrate on research and writing. The high achievement continued. From the late 1960s to the mid 2000s, he published seminal books and essays, and delivered public lectures in what is perhaps the most impressive output of any Australian social scientist of his generation.

    The Political Sciences (1969) challenged the growth of positivism and abstraction in political, social and economic understanding. The book promoted a view of the social sciences as inherently valued-based, moral and practical in nature. It was widely influential both locally and internationally.

    His work on cities and housing is perhaps best known. His self-published Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) offered powerful histories of city planning in Australia while developing the idea that the good city is of human scale needing urban planning much more concerned with its social, distributional and equity impacts. His 1974 Boyer Lectures Housing and Government put the case for better recognising the productive economic and social activity enabled by good housing (the ‘domestic economy’ as Stretton put it) and the virtues of a mixed private and public housing system. He defended the need for national housing policy to address new market and public failures then on the horizon. Urban Planning in Rich and Poor Countries (1978) distilled insights from rival theories about cities and trends in urban planning across the world in what was described by one reviewer as ‘like one of those rare miniatures that reveal more sheer skill than many a famed old master’.

    The future of social democracy and the attack it has faced from economic rationalism and neoliberalism were other foci of Stretton’s work. Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (1976) deployed many of the ideas about values, choices and the ‘imagination of alternatives’ of his earlier work. The book offered a powerful analysis of the options and possibilities for democratic socialist reform in capitalist democracies taking heed of new problems of inflation, economic inequality, and environmental limits. Neal Blewett described the book as ‘a classic both of, and for, our times’. Political Essays (1987) brought together many of Stretton’s shorter writings on business and government, housing, public service and the nature of the social sciences assembled against the rising tide of economic rationalist change in Australian politics and public policy. Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice (1994 co-authored with Lionel Orchard) developed a critique of public choice theory, by then a very influential stream of neo-liberal, anti-government thinking. It reminded readers about the virtues of the mixed economy balancing private markets with public enterprise, and provided insight about the nature of politics and governing gleaned from other traditions of non-reductive political thought.

    What some saw as the product of a lifetime of reflection, Stretton’s magnum opus Economics: A New Introduction (1999) offered a comprehensive new curriculum for teaching economics based on his views about value-based social science, this time expressed through a comprehensive defence of an ‘institutional’ view of the modern mixed economy. His last book Australia Fair (2005) presented a social democratic manifesto taking heed of many new economic, social and environmental problems facing Australian society, and proposing ideas about how to manage them equitably and fairly. For him, better, more active government was and is central to that task.

    Alongside his academic work, Hugh Stretton was widely admired as an activist and advocate. He was also much sought after as an advisor across the political spectrum. Much of his engagement was focussed on where he lived much of his life – Adelaide and South Australia – but his voice was strong on the national stage. He served as Deputy Chairperson of the SA Housing Trust from 1973 to 1989 and on various planning bodies particularly in the City of Adelaide. Some of his most engaging writing on public issues appeared in a diverse range of media outlets, Christopher Pearson’s Adelaide Review perhaps most prominently. Reflecting his open and practical disposition, Stretton was involved in and often lead policy experiments and initiatives particularly in urban and housing policy. The Ramsay Trust, a venture to marshal savings into a new kind of capital-indexed structure for housing finance engaged him in the 1980s while he was proud of documents he wrote or contributed to in the 1970s leading to the establishment of the Noarlunga Centre in Adelaide’s southern suburbs and the preservation of old housing fabric in Hackney, an inner Adelaide suburb threatened with redevelopment.

    As an engaged public intellectual, Stretton took his role as critic seriously and responsibly when the need arose on many issues both local and national. Mainstream economists, and politicians in their thrall, took exception to Stretton’s thinking throughout his career – from those critical of his Boyer Lectures, to those critical of his views about positivism and the winding back of social democratic governing in Australia in the 1980s, to Paul Keating’s attack on his Political Essays in 1987. Stretton always engaged critics with respectful, reasoned responses.

    Through all of this high level intellectual and policy work, Hugh was also widely admired as a gifted teacher and mentor. I speak with first hand experience of his skill and generosity on these fronts. As with many others, Hugh went out of his way as supervisor of my PhD research to guide and support me both intellectually and personally in his unobtrusive but firm way. In these respects, I was very fortunate.

    No man is an island and this is true for Hugh Stretton too. The wide group of intellectuals he had as friends and advisors is testament to that. In the Australian context, he was an original but he belongs in the company of other giants on the international stage. Some suggested after the publication of his early books that he was the ‘nearest thing to an Australian JK Galbraith’. Indeed, like Galbraith, his work echoes and connects with the work of social scientists and philosophers – Albert Hirschman, Martha Nussbaum and Charles Taylor among others – struggling to maintain and hold to a liberal, social democratic, pluralist centre in the face of the limits of the positivist mainstream, relentless economic and social change, and post-modern pressure to abandon any such ambition. The task we face is to draw on Hugh Stretton’s legacy in this spirit.

    Lionel Orchard taught public policy in Flinders University’s Graduate Program in Public Administration from 1989-2015. In the 1980s, he wrote a PhD on urban and regional policy with Hugh Stretton’s supervision and, in the early 1990s, jointly researched and wrote the book Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice (Macmillan, 1994) with him.

  • Michael Keating. Is there a trade-off between equality and efficiency?

    A critical policy issue has always been whether greater equality inevitably comes at a cost to the economic growth. For example, historically economists have typically believed that there is a trade-off between increased equality and efficiency. Even those economists who favour policies to improve equality have generally acknowledged that the transfers involved could reduce incentives and result in some loss of national income – with the critical question being by how much? Thus those economists who favour redistribution to lower inequality think that such action comes at little or at least an acceptable cost to economic output. While the counter-argument from conservative economists is that inequality is a necessary evil if we want higher incomes all round.

    Recent research published by the traditionally conservative International Monetary Fund (IMF) has however questioned this conclusion that increased equality comes at a cost to growth. Instead the IMF research has found that higher inequality is associated with lower output growth over the medium term. More specifically the IMF found that ‘If the income share of the top 20 percent increases by 1 percentage point, GDP growth is actually 0.8 percentage points lower in the following five years, … [while] a similar increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent is associated with 0.38 percentage points higher growth’ (emphasis in the original).[1]

    Somewhat surprisingly these important conclusions from this widely respected international organisation have received almost no media attention in Australia, while the barrage of comment in favour of so-called ‘industrial relations reform’ and lower taxes continues unabated, notwithstanding the risks they represent for future income equality. Accordingly what follows is a summary explanation of the reasoning that has led the IMF to conclude that ‘Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time’, and how best to reduce this inequality and what are the benefits.

    The increase in inequality

    The IMF found that ‘Measures of inequality …. of both gross and net incomes have increased substantially since 1990 in most of the developed world’. The principal drivers of this increased inequality have been an increase in the share of the top 10 percent, and even more so the top 1 percent. Much of this increase at the top reflects the appropriation of increased economic rents, and as such they are totally unnecessary to economic growth.

    In addition, technological progress has probably been biased in favour of increasing skills, thus increasing the wage premium for skills, and the substitution of new capital investment for unskilled labour. Consequently technological progress has also improved the income share of people with skills and/or capital, both of which tend to be concentrated among the top income people. Most importantly technological progress has impacted on middle level jobs in the goods sector of the economy (the traditional blue collar jobs) and that hollowing out of the middle has almost certainly been the biggest driver of increased inequality in Australia as conventionally measured[2].

    Some readers may be surprised to learn that shifting jobs offshore in response to increasing globalisation has been a much less important driver of inequality, and of course that “off-shoring” is itself dependent on improved transport and communications technology.

    How can reducing inequality improve economic growth

    The main reason for the IMF finding that inequality can damage economic growth is because higher inequality can deprive the ability of lower-income households to stay healthy and accumulate physical and human capital. Furthermore, ‘countries with higher income inequality tend to have lower levels of mobility between generations, with parent’s earnings being a more important determinant of children’s earnings’. In effect, inequality can perpetuate itself, and reduce the potential growth of human capital which is vital for future economic growth.

    In addition, the IMF notes that:

    • A prolonged period of higher inequality in advanced economies was associated with the global financial crisis by intensifying leverage, overextension of credit, and a relaxation of mortgage underwriting standards.
    • Higher top income shares coupled with financial liberalisation, which itself could be a policy response to rising income inequality, are associated with substantially larger external deficits, which can be challenging for macroeconomic and/or financial stability, and thus growth.
    • In addition to affecting growth drivers, inequality can result in poor public policy choices if it leads to a backlash that fuels protectionist pressures against growth enhancing economic reforms.

     

    Policies to reduce income inequality and improve economic growth

    The IMF finds that ‘Redistribution through the tax and transfer system is … positively related to growth for most countries, and is negatively related to growth only for the most strongly redistributive countries’. For that reason alone it is important to maintain the taxable capacity of the government so that it can afford these transfers.

    In addition, the IMF found that ‘In a world in which technological change is increasing productivity and simultaneously mechanising jobs, raising skill levels is critical for reducing the dispersion of earnings. Improving education quality, eliminating financial barriers to higher education, and providing support for apprenticeship programs are all key to boosting skill levels in both tradable and non-tradable sectors.’ These educated individuals will then be better able to cope with technological and other changes that directly influence productivity levels.

    Active labour market policies that support job search and skill matching can also be important. Moreover, policies that reduce labour market dualism, such as gaps in employment protection between permanent and temporary workers, and appropriately set minimum wages, can help to reduce inequality, while fostering greater labour market flexibility.

    Conclusion

    The IMF concludes that ‘The key to minimising the downside of globalisation and technological change in advanced economies is a policy agenda of a race to the top, instead of a race to the bottom’.

    Unfortunately too often the so-called ‘reform agenda’ proposed by business and its supporters in the media seems to be closer to a race to the bottom with its focus on cost-cutting rather than more innovation and increasing productivity. Instead we need to improve the skills of our workforce and how those skills are actually used. And in the government’s case it is important that it retains its capacity to intervene successfully, including its fiscal capacity to support the income transfers and investment in human capital that are required if we are to achieve improved equality and economic growth. 

    [1] This analysis was based on a sample of 159 advanced, emerging and developing economies for the period 1980-2012. It is reported in IMF Staff Discussion Note, Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective by Era Dabla-Norris, Kalpana Kochhar, Nujin Suphapiphat, Frantisek Ricka, Evridiki Tsounta.

    [2] If middle-level jobs disappear that means that the shares of jobs at the top and the bottom increase relative to the jobs in the middle, and mathematically that means that the top decile is re-defined upwards in terms of incomes and the bottom decile is re-defined downwards in terms of incomes. Consequently the income distribution can then appear more unequal even though there may have been no change in any individual’s income or relative rate of pay for those people who continue in their jobs.

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

    (or – Murdoch and Abbott in climate dial duet)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Walter Hamilton. It’s not the apology, stupid!

    We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.

    This comes from the statement issued during the week by Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific. It is perhaps unfair to highlight one sentence from a longish document, but, in my reading of it, this accurately summarizes its abiding sentiment.

    Abe wants to draw a line under the past. He wants to end the culture of contrition that, he believes, has crimped nationalist sentiment in his own country for a generation and prevented Japan acting to its full and sovereign potential.

    Personally, I do not believe anyone can ‘apologize’ for the mistakes of others. To apologize means to take responsibility before the public for one’s own error; it is expected that a correction or an act of restitution will follow. Real apologies exist in the present, when something can be done about the mistake, as opposed to retrospective compensation. The rest is an ex-post facto judgement: approval or regret, disgust or admiration. We may feel our forefathers, former governments, dead Popes or whomever have made mistakes we would not have committed, and wish they had not acted as they did. But we are not they; we are actors operating only within our particular circumstances, milieu and knowledge, not theirs. Apologizing on their behalf, therefore, is mere cant and nonsense.

    I say this because for too long Japan, its neighbouring countries, and others who suffered at the hands of the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s have been fixated on the quality of the apologies post-war leaders have been obliged to utter for the deeds of the past. Every statement, especially on the anniversary of the war’s end, is scrutinized for its ‘grief’, ‘remorse’, ‘regret’, ‘apology’ words, in a fruitless game of semantics, as if this changed anything.

    (In his own, much briefer, commemorative speech on the weekend, Emperor Akihito for the first time used the phrase ‘deep remorse’ to express his feelings––well and good, as far as it goes. This liberal-minded emperor is perceived by some to be a counterweight to the bellicose Abe. On such a formal occasion there was never much scope for him to articulate an alternative narrative, but the fact that he broke new ground––when Abe merely re-hoed old ground––is worth mentioning.)

    The past rules a line under itself. What matters, the only thing that matters, is the quality of our understanding of history and our ability to admit and learn from the mistakes of the past. On this score, Abe’s statement fails miserably. It provides an apologia for Japan’s actions rather than a nuanced and forthright account of the policies and actions that brought disaster upon Japan and inflicted suffering on millions of others.

    The statement was drafted by a committee of ‘experts’ whom Abe appointed, in characteristic manner, to shift from him the responsibility for its particular contents. And yet it is pure Abe in its thesis.

    Time and again, the Japanese Prime Minister recounts events leading up to the war in terms of Japan being forced into a corner: threatened with loss of sovereignty by the American/European imperial powers in the 1850s and threatened again with economic ruin by their trade protectionist policies in the 1930s. Japan always acted out of a sense of ‘crisis’, a need for survival. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole truth.

    What this thesis fails to acknowledge is the agency of Japan’s own leaders in planning and executing an imperialist policy from the very start of the nation’s modernization in the second half of the 19th century and the many steps taken to suppress democratic movements inside Japan in the first half of the 20th century. Japan’s ‘manifest destiny’ of imperial aggression in Asia (thence extended to the broader Pacific) was not something it had to invent because the nation was excluded from the benefits of international affairs and commerce––it was an exercise in hegemony intended to ‘perfect’ the colonial empire of the ‘White’ powers.

    Abe states: ‘The Japan-Russia War gave encouragement to many people under colonial rule from Asia to Africa.’ I have heard this sort of comment from all sorts of right-wingers in Japan. It is laughable, in the sense that one colonial power, Russia, was simply replaced by another, Japan. Abe cannot talk about the ‘encouragement’ of 1906 unless he is willing, in the same breath, to admit the disillusionment of 1910 (the year Japan annexed Korea) and beyond. The feelings of ‘profound grief’ and ‘eternal, sincere condolences’ expressed on several occasions are empty without an acceptable historical accounting for the events one is ‘grieving’ about.

    Abe is forthright when he chooses to be and evasive when it suits him. For instance, we have this about Japan’s sufferings: ‘The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the air raids on Tokyo and other cities, and the ground battles in Okinawa, among others, took a heavy toll among ordinary citizens without mercy.’ The ‘without mercy’ here, the only use of the phrase in the speech, is applied exclusively to the Allies. But when it comes to acknowledging the so-called comfort women, the many mainly Korean women organized into brothels to service the Japanese military, this is his oblique way of addressing the issue: ‘We must never forget that there were women behind the battlefields whose honour and dignity were severely injured.’ The ‘we’––and not ‘I’––of this statement is particularly greasy; Abe requires others to ‘never forget’ what he himself has previously denied ever happened.

    In describing the postwar setting in which Japan re-emerged as a great power, Abe makes no acknowledgement of the reforms undertaken during the Allied Occupation––he doesn’t even mention that there was an Occupation (just as he fails to mention Pearl Harbor). He talks about never again resorting to the threat or use of force to resolve conflicts, but omits to say that this principle only came into existence through the 1947 Constitution adopted by Japan under the watchful eye of the Americans. Since Abe considers this document does not represent the will and culture of the Japanese people, and wants it changed, he commits a double hypocrisy by paraphrasing its Article 9.

    Australia is referred to several times in the statement, generally in the context of the POW issue. There is acknowledgement of the POWs’ mistreatment, though the main reason they are mentioned is to stress how Japan has been so graciously forgiven by its former enemies. The whole second half of Abe’s statement is about receiving forgiveness and moving on from a position of apology. For every mistake, whether by Japan or its opponents, he offers ways in which Japan has learnt and will act differently in the future. Sounds fine, except, as itemized in this blog, promises built on a shoddy foundation of historical distortions and wishful thinking do not carry much weight.

    Forget the ‘apology’ trimmings, feel the cloth.

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