Population is not a front page issue
By Valerie Yule - Monday, 17 December 2007 |
This article was originally published on Online Opinion. It is reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons License. |
Not openly discussed at the Bali Climate Summit 2007 is the one factor that will make it hardest to stop increasing greenhouse gas emissions - population growth.
Ironically, population growth was the main issue at an earlier Bali international conference 15 years ago. The issue has not gone away. Rather, it has become more pressing in the world, including in the Asia -Pacific region, and it is illustrated by the island of Bali itself.
The 1992 conference was organised under the auspices of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Its outcome was the Bali Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development, 1992. (See here and here.)
Thirty-six of ESCAP's 52 member countries participated, and they reached consensus at a ministerial level on the controversial issue of setting population targets in line with sustainable development goals.
The Declaration stated that the goals of population policy were to "achieve a population that allows a better quality of life without jeopardising the environmental and resource base of future generations ... taking cognisance of basic human rights as well as responsibilities".
This was the first international meeting at this political level that set an objective of attaining by the year 2010 replacement level fertility, which is equivalent to about 2.2 children per woman. In 1992 the countries in the Asia-Pacific region had a total population of about 3.2 billion. Although the annual growth rate has been steadily declining, an increase of 920 million people is still expected by 2010. This increase would be mostly in the less developed countries which have the most acute problems of poverty.
These enormous numbers contrast with Australia?s population growth, from 8 million in 1950 to 21 million now, and 24 million expected by 2050.
The location of the Climate Summit, Bali itself, illustrates the problem of growth. When I travelled around the island in 1969, the population of about two million had no tourist industry to speak of and needed none, although there were social stresses indicated by the violence of the massacres of up to 100,000 suspected communists in 1965.
By 2000, the Balinese population had increased by 50 per cent to over three million, and it continues to grow. The tourist industry and emigration are now essential to economic survival. Other countries in the region with high population growth have severe economic and social problems. They include Papua Niugini, grown from 1.4 million in 1950 to 5 million now and 10 million expected by 2050, other regions of Indonesia (growth 82 million to 224 million and predicted 336 million), and Pacific islands such as the Solomons, (106,000 to 466,000 and predicted 1.1 million) - all stressed by youth unemployment and resources destruction. How can they be expected to stop deforestation? Countries now carrying out family planning policies to restrain population growth include China, India, Thailand and even Pakistan.
Growth in population inevitably means increase in human contributions to greenhouse gases and resource shortages, even if most people still live far below the affluent level of the West that they aspire to. In developing countries, families seek to have sufficient children to ensure that some will survive, and provide for old-age. As security improves, family size can drop, unless pushed by religious or political influences.
However, for Bali Climate Summit 2007, population is not a front page issue, despite our world growth trajectory from 6 billion now to 9 billion by 2050 - almost paralleling how the proverbial lily doubles its size in the lily-pond.
The sticking points are the nations of the developed West, which also provide sticking points for other aspects of capping carbon emissions. Countries like Australia or France can hardly promote family planning in poor countries when they offer baby bonuses to persuade their own women to have more children.
Western countries have still not worked out how to maintain their prosperity with a stable population. They still fear lowered fertility, and have made a bogey of ageing populations, which need not be. Indeed, our increasingly healthy aged need less support than children. Almost every Western country in fact has a greater population than in 1950, and most are still growing. (US Census Bureau International Data Base population tables.)
Meanwhile European countrysides are filling up with housing. Water, oil and fish face future shortages. And millions of economic refugees in the world ensure that no country's population need shrink. Behind the beat-ups of fearing declining fertility rates and suppressing the real issue of world population growth is a different economic bogey. The paradoxical problems that are shaking the United States and hence the world are insufficient consumer spending and building construction in the world's richest country. Yet it is this type of economic activity that most boosts greenhouse gas emissions.
It is possible for our capitalist system, which has always continuously evolved, to develop and be able to sustain prosperity without constant increase in material production, which requires increasing numbers of people to consume it.
As things are, we can only observe. There may be no Bali declaration in 2007 about stabilising populations and thereby cutting the production of waste. Yet this, even more than carbon trading, would be a major strategy in cutting the human contribution to devastating our planet.
Overpopulation, immigration, multiculturalism and the White Australia policy
The article below was originally a comment on webdiary
On December 4, 2003, Australia’s population was estimated at 20 million and projected to reach about 30 million by 2050. Slightly less than 50 per cent of this growth rate resulted from net overseas immigration. By 5 November 2007, Australia’s population had ballooned by more than one twentieth of itself (or 5.66 per cent) to 21,131,216 and was projected to reach 34 million by 2050.#fn_i">[i] In fact, with that growth rate of 1.5 per cent per annum, it is on course to double within less than 50 years. Annual immigration has been responsible for more than half this growth, even though the birth-rate had increased in a context of misleading pronatalist propaganda.
Before British colonization in 1788 the peoples of Terra Australis managed to conserve an almost exclusively hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle. Art#fn_ii">[ii] but no written history, has been found, and reconstruction of their impact relies on anthropological, archeological and ecological studies. “Australia” was transplanted and adapted from a British society which was on the cusp of industrialisation. Pre 1788, Australia’s aboriginal population averaged continent-wide less than one person per 8.5 square kilometers – possibly as few as one person per 51 square kilometers.#fn_iii">[iii] Numerous clans inhabited the continent at different population densities, reflecting regional rainfall, soils and climate.#fn_iv">[iv] Also patterned by climate and soils, the fossil-fuel-era population distribution is similar, but much denser.
Early attempts to establish agriculture failed with some unintensive exceptions recently uncovered.#fn_v">[v] The British managed to gain an agricultural foothold using ‘white’ slaves in the form of convicts drawn mostly from the ragged army of their dispossessed. Their number was later supplemented by indentured labour, displaced aboriginals, and, until Federation, ‘black-birding’ – the practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders and bringing them to work in Australia, principally for the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company. There is thus no history or tradition of an established pre-fossil fuel agricultural society. The gold-rushes of the 1850s attracted capital, finance and economic migrants, resulting in a rapidly morphing population and economy and formation of a working class. This class made a national wage-fixing pact with capital at Federation in 1904 and also obtained the agreement of CSR to outlaw black-birding #fn_vi">[vi] and the importation of other 'non-white' labour, widely perceived as synonymous with slaving.#fn_vii">[vii]
The economy intensified after World War II, but much land was cleared and divided up for development by land speculators from the time of the gold rushes of the mid 19th and early 20th century. When the gold ran out, there was a massive depression, which probably assisted the formation of the above industrial laws.
After WW2 business promoted a fear of population implosion among politicians and a policy for mass immigration came in. High immigration, combined with the unforeseen baby-boom that accompanied the petroleum era, made the newly privatized housing industry very powerful and consolidated an economic addiction to population growth. Although the ‘white-Australia’ policy was dismantled, wages and conditions legislation under the 1904 constitution protected workers and made it unprofitable to import labor simply to undercut wages. However, in 2006-7, the conservative government found a way around this - (Workchoices).#fn_viii">[viii] At the same time net immigration was encouraged to increase from an average of around 75-80,000 per annum to upwards of 160,000 per annum,#fn_ix">[ix] at the behest of the development, housing, mining and financial lobbies. All this took place in the context of a huge increase in mining and construction, including massive engineering projects in most states which have drawn angry but useless protests from Australians. These circumstances underpin Australia’s demographic and material overshoot.
The ideology of multiculturalism has been useful for suppressing protest against this massive population growth by tarring as 'racist' any protest against immigration for whatever reason. It is ironic that the White Australia policy, which was introduced to combat the kind of slavery which the USA was built on, has been replaced with a much nicer-sounding Multiculturalism, which allows the importation of low-wage labour and the flooding of the housing market to benefit speculators, in the context of rising land prices and rising homelessness.
Footnotes
#fn_i" id="fn_i">[i] “Australia’s Population” (Population Clock), Australian Bureau of Statistics, www.abs.gov.au [5 Nov 2007]
#fn_ii" id="fn_ii">[ii] Much of which functioned as maps of areas of land with markers for water, game, people and landmarks.
#fn_iii" id="fn_iii">[iii] Total land stock is 770 million ha of 7,700,000 square km. Estimates of population range between 150,000 through 300,000 to 900,000.
#fn_iv" id="fn_iv">[iv] Joseph B. Birdsell, “Australia: Ecology, spacing mechanisms and adaptive behaviour in aboriginal land tenure”, in Ron Crocombe, (Ed.), Land Tenure in the Pacific, OUP/MUP 1971, pp.334-361
#fn_v" id="fn_v">[v] Jennifer Macey, “Vic bushfires uncover ancient Aboriginal stone houses”, The World Today, 3 Feb. 2006 12:45:00, www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1561665.htm
#fn_vi" id="fn_vi">[vi] “With Federation, the Commonwealth Parliament became dominated by spokesmen for ‘White Australia’. In October 1901 legislation was passed prohibiting the introduction of Pacific Islanders after 31 March 1904.”, McKillop, R.F., referring to Bolton, G.C., A Thousand miles away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, ANU Press, 1972, p. 239, in “Australia’s Sugar Industry” on the Light Railway Research Society of Australia site, www.lrrsa.org.au/LRR_SGRa.htm
#fn_vii" id="fn_vii">[vii] The Colonial Sugar Company aroused similar responses among indigenous Fijians who also objected to black-birding as well as to the importing of Indian indentured labour. “The Indian Connection”, Frontline, Volume 17 - Issue 12, June 10 - 23, 2000, www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1712/17120130.htm
#fn_viii" id="fn_viii">[viii] “How low can you go?”, Colin Fenwick, Economic and Labour Relations Review,5; (2006) 16(2) www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ELRRev/2006/5.html
#fn_ix" id="fn_ix">[ix] “Largest population increase ever: ABS,” Media Release, September 24, 2007, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Latestproducts/3101.0, “Net overseas migration contributed 54% (162,600 people) to this growth, which was more than the natural increase of 46% (138,100 people or 273,500 births minus 135,400 deaths).” This occurred with confusing changes to statistical methods plus new ease of transfer from temporary to permanent migrant (largely equivalent to European citizenship).
Canadian Socialist and Green Icons contest multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is Canada's Ingsoc, a state ideology so powerfully pervasive that few in the media, in the educational institutions or the political parties would dare challenge it. One might think that the left would offer criticism, but apart from journalist and former socialist parliamentarian, Douglas Fisher, and columnist Larry Zolf, none come to mind.
The Liberal Party was able to steal the affections of working class voters earmarked for the social-democratic NDP by appealing to their cultural identities. Running candidates of the same ethnicity as the prevailing group in the riding, and granting federal money for the construction of ethnic centres was a classic Liberal formula for vote-buying. And it usually worked.
The NDP approach has always been to appeal to people's class identity above and beyond the language they speak and to their sense of solidarity to people who live similar lives but have different cultures. Multiculturalism has not been good for class solidarity.
J.S. Woodsworth, the father of Canadian socialism, founder of the CCF-NDP and described as the "Saint of Canadian politics", I think knew as much. Allen Mills in "Fool for Christ-The Political Thought of J.S. Woodsworth", wrote that during his leadership in the twenties and thirties he continued to evince a profound concern for " the social integration of the alien." Allen writes that Woodsworth talked "of uniting immigrants into a new Canadian type: he worried that the melting pot was not working and the country would become 'balkanized', there was a necessity to 'absorb', 'weld' and 'incorporate, immigrants into the Canadian way of life.'p.228
Although Woodsworth was an opponent of immigration in the 1920s and 30s because there were not enough jobs, he also recognized the need for more social cohesion. A higher proportion of newcomers of our own British traditions would mould these incoming armies of foreigners into 'loyal subjects'.
Greens have been among the most effusive champions of Ingsoc, with Green leader Elizabeth May justifying the country's absurdly high immigration levels as Canada's ongoing "multicultural project". Environmentalists claim that "cultural diversity" is the analogue to biological diversity, the necessary variation found in plant and animal forms. Trouble is, the immigration levels required to sustain these culturally diverse ethnic enclaves is fuelling urban sprawl and crowding out wildlife. Variety is the spice of life, but the human is flourishing at the expense of the non-human. Multiculturalism has not been good for the environment.
But there is a JS Woodsworth of Canadian greens. He is none other than the famous co-author of "Our Ecological Footprint", Dr. William E. Rees. This is taken from his "Globalization, Trade and Migration: Undermining Sustainability?"
"... there is sufficient evidence to hypothesize that multi-racial or multi-cultural countries are more likely to unravel chaotically in the event of rapid ecological change, resource shortages, or economic decline than are more homogenous societies. Because socio-political stability is a prerequisite for ecological sustainability, we thus have yet another reason for a pre-emptive cautionary approach to large-scale migration in coming levels and adopt explicit 'melting pot' strategies designed to facilitate the integration and assimilation of new-comers into the social and economic fabric of their adopted countries. They should also include ongoing public education programs that stress both the need for, and the national benefits of, limited immigration.
The main objectives of this approach are to discourage the development of persistent immigrant enclaves, to accelerate immigrants' development of a sense of identity with the larger society, and to improve public understanding of the modern role of economic and environmental changes that may be required for ecological sustainability. Immigration policies that favour multiculturalism and that apparently succeed during periods of growth and plenty may not be adaptive in the face of rapid global ecological change of economic decline."
So while the sheep continue to bleet "diversity", the wise old shepherds speak of the virtues of integration and cohesion.
Just as Central Asia exported the bubonic plague, and Central Africa exported the Ebola virus, Canada gave the world the ideology of Multiculturalism. It might be cautionary then to heed the words of our brave critics as they spoke them right in the guts of the ogre before the Thought Police could silence them.
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
Canada
December 23/07
Argument with a socialist zealot
Is it reactionary to oppose Immigration?
Note: This article was also published on webdiary on 19 December 2007. It had attracted 69 comments by 24 December 2007.
Andy Kerr, former president of Alternatives to Growth Oregon, posed these questions, "To those who support generous immigration, I ask you this: Why are you are on the same side as Microsoft and the other huge computer corporations and of Archer Daniel Midland and the rest of the agribusiness lobby? How can you support a policy that helps ensure that our existing poor will never be adequately valued for their labor."
Kerr's questions could well be asked of so many left-wing critics whose first reflexive response to closed border arguments are that they are "right-wing", "reactionary", "racist" or "xenophobic", despite the fact that historically the first beneficiaries of mass immigration to North America, and several other localities, have been cheap labour employers. Naomi Klein, in "The Shock Doctrine" blemishes her excellent analysis with this commonplace attitude.
If Klein wanted to probe the shock therapy applied by big capital by using immigration as a battering ram to break down the working class, she need only have looked to the history of British Columbia, where her brother Seth labours for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
In the nineteenth century Chinese labour contractors imported labour to the point that perhaps one-third of the entire workforce had become Chinese. Working for half the wages, paying no taxes, they were prepared to ignore safety regulations, so the Dunsmuir Coal Company used them to break a pivotal miners' strike in 1883.The Miners Union then presented a resolution to government to restrict Chinese labourers from working underground, and another one stating that these labourers were a menace to underground safety, had lowered wages, deterred other Canadians from seeking employment in B.C., offered unfair competition and were provocative to public peace.
In 1907 five Tokyo immigration companies filled an order to bring 6,000 Japanese labourers to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway (C.P.R.) when the province was experiencing a recession. B.C. workers were against the ropes, so the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council met to form an "Asiatic Exclusion League". Two days later a Japanese ship arrived with 1177 labourers. The chemistry was right for the infamous Vancouver anti-Asian riot of September 7, 1907, an incident which has been retroactively depicted as a simple and despicable act of racism. In fact it was a reaction to B.C. businesses which were then using Japanese cheap surplus labourers instead of their Chinese counterparts. It should be known that Native Indians also seethed with resentment at the Japanese presence.
Chinese immigrant labour had finally been slapped by a "head tax" by the federal government in response to decades of lobbying by the B.C. to level the playing field with Canadian labourers. But they wouldn't they wouldn't follow suit with a similar tax on Japanese labour for fear of jeopardizing trade arrangements with Japan. Hence the end run by employers and the pogrom by B. C. workers. To demonstrate labour's outrage at the collusion between now Lieutenant-Governor Dunsmuir and the C.P.R.to orchestrate the Japanese influx, a Socialist legislator moved a motion in the B.C. House that Dunsmuir be impeached.
It should also be noted ---and this is always omitted by revisionists-the Oriental Exclusion Act was actually a misnomer. It was in reality, the Oriental Labourers Exclusion Act. Chinese merchants and their families continued to enjoy access to Canada. The purpose of the omission is obvious, to foster guilt and shame so that an agenda of "justice" an restitution can be pursued by Canada's immigration industry so that corporate Canada can have its labour requirements satisfied in the same way that robber baron Robert Dunsmuir's was. Just 30 miles from where he used Chinese labour to break the miners strike of 1883, the corporation I was working for used Chinese labour to try and break my strike a century later. As waves of Chinese, fresh from Hong Kong, passed through my picket line, escorted by police, it occurred to me that I was having a "multicultural" experience. I was so enriched. Like the miners were in 1883.
The same misrepresentation and spin was made of the "Komagata Maru" incident where East Indians were denied entry at the Port of Vancouver. Does this mean that racist antagonisms did not alloy with legitimate economic grievances? It would stretch credulity to argue that case, particularly in light of the outrageous internment of Japanese-Canadians in 1942, the fact that Chinese-Canadians were denied the vote until 1948, or the right to own property in the exclusive British Properties among other indignities. But should illegitimate motives discredit and invalidate the very cogent arguments of working people to defend their livelihood?
These arguments have been made by socialists and trade unionists not only in Canada but in America a century ago by Jack London, Socialist Party leader Victor Gerber, and the legendary Samuel Gompers. They were also made by the heroic Cesar Chavez who was committed to restricting immigration. Chavez even picketed the border and reported illegal aliens who served as strike-breakers against United Farm Workers.
Today leading labour economists have carried on the fight. Dr. George Borgias of Harvard University is most notably among them. It is his contention that native-born American workers lose $152 billion annually because of job displacement and wage depression caused by immigration. And yet, how does the labour movement respond? This is what the Carrying Capacity Network asks:
"The AFL-CIO, the biggest labor union in the country, is AGAIN urging Congress to give amnesty to as many as 13 million illegal immigrants. Result: depressed wages and lost jobs for Americans while rewarding lawbreakers with the right to work and potential citizenship. Isn't the AFL-CIO sanctioning lawbreaking by pushing for an amnesty?"
Where does the Canadian labour movement stand? You can guess. In a letter dated May 4/06 to Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day and Minister of Immigration and Citizenship Monte Solberg, Secretary Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) Hassan Yussuf complained about the "zealotry" of the Canadian Border Services Agency. "(They) aggressively deported a number of undocumented residents, particularly those from the Portugese community as well as targeting members of the Asian, Chinese, Caribbean and Latin/Central-American communites. The manner in which those deportations were handled exposed a government acting with excessive zeal, hardness, and in some cases, an inexcusable lack of humanity.
I suppose the more "humane" course of action for the CLC would be just to let everybody who wants to come to Canada stay. Open borders. One world. John Lennon's dream. Just imagine. But that's globalism isn't it? Who will speak for the Canadian workers whose wages and working conditions are being hammered by this vision of brotherhood? Why, the CLC of course. Like its political arm, the NDP, it claims to represent them. Yussuf's letter concludes: "The CLC representing more than 3 million workers, joins with those calling for a moratorium on all CBSA deportation/detention activities."
How about a moratorium on immigration instead? That would do more for those 3 million workers. And more than a swift process, in the CLC's words, to "regularlize undocumented workers.whose skills are in need and who have been contributing to the economy." You have to love the CLC's politically-correct language. Calling an illegal immigrant an "undocumented resident" is like calling a drug-pusher an "unlicensed pharmacist". How does the labour movement like it when people call scabs "replacement workers"? And why doesn't the CLC just call "regularize" what it is---amnesty for law-breakers, or, as Geoffrey Blainey once put it, "an incentive for others to arrive, hoping to benefit from further amnesty."
Contemporary socialist and trade union affinity toward international solidarity even at the expense of national well-being can be traced to a Marxist legacy that sees class, not nationality, as the primary divide. Even social democracy taps into this tradition which combines as one strand in a muddled xenophilia with Christian and environmental thought. The latter mutation is expressed quintessentially in the Canadian Green Party line that since global warming is a global problem requiring global cooperation, to obtain this we must not send out an unfriendly message of "fear" by closing our borders, but on the contrary drop them instead. Presumably a radically downward adjustment in consumption habits and greener technology will compensate for all the extra millions who would swarm in. Instead of "workers of the world unite", the Greens offer us a new rallying cry: "more and more people, consuming less and less".
What is interesting is that American icon, Ralph Nader, Green Party candidate for President, does not share this Canadian love affair with the world. He had this to say in 2000: "We cannot have open borders. That's a totally absurd proposition. It would depress wages here enormously, and tens of millions of people from all levels, including scientists and workers, would be pouring into this country."
Australian political scientist Frank Salter had this to say about the socialist attitude to nationalism. "The Left, as it has evolved over the course of the previous century, looks down on the ordinary people with their inarticulate parochialisms as if the were members of another species. since they care nothing for the preservation of national communities. Ethnies are considered irrelevant to the welfare of people in general. It would be understandable to Martians to be so detached from particular loyalties. But it is disturbing to humans doing so, especially humans who identify with the Left."
Such is the European Left's identification with the Other at the cost of the resident national that, in the name of anti-racism, it was possible for left-wing novelist Umberto Eco to declare his hope that Europe would be swamped by Africans and third world emigrants just so to "demoralize" racists. And such is the identification of the AFL-CIO with 13 million illegal immigrants as potential recruits that it supports amnesty and essentially a corporate welfare program that reduces wages for the lowest of American workers. A scheme which advocates call "liberalism" but American workers call an invasion. The CLC (Edgar Bergen) and its social-democratic parliamentary arm, the NDP (Charlie McCarthy), sing the same tune. Crocodile tears are shed for "undocumented" workers who allegedly make great contributions to the economy, according to their hire-a-left-wing-think-tank. But Statistics Canada's conclusions about the effect of immigration on the Canadian work force echo those of Dr. Borgias for American workers. Except the May 2007 Statscan report showed that in Canada, it was the educated workers who were really taking a hit. Between 1980-2000 their wages dropped 7%. And in Britain, careful analysis revealed that the Trade Union Congress was wrong in its contention that amnesty would net the Treasury one billion pounds annually. Rather it would cost taxpayers 1.8 billion pounds a year.
But alas, socialist thought is not monolithic. The Leninists were wrong. For the working class, national identity was as important as class identity, or as Orwell put it, "in all countries, the poor are more national than the rich." If they can't find a voice on the Left, in desperation they will look to the Populist right, as they did recently in Switzerland. But just when it looked like the field was left entirely to globalists, maverick social-democratic and socialist leaders in the tradition of Berger, London, or Canada's J. S. Woodsworth are staking a claim for national, as opposed to international, solidarity. They are doing so after their constituents have been battered by one of the greatest migratory waves in history, that saw the United States for example import the equivalent of three New Jerseys in the 1990s alone, or 25 million people. One would have thought that Naomi Klein, a Canadian, would have known that the Father of Canadian democratic socialism, the Saint of Canadian politics, the Rev. J. S. Woodsworth steadfastly opposed immigration throughout his leadership in the 1920s and 30s. Woodsworth understood that his constituency was in Canada, not overseas. His motto was no doubt that of Vancouver Rev. Edwin Scott: "We are not universal nations yet. Universal nationality and universal brotherhood are two different things."
The Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has begun to make some noise about the disaster that is the illegal immigration invasion in the United States. His voting record in reducing chain migration, fighting amnesty and unnecessary visas rates B-, B-, and A+ respectively from Americans for Better Immigration. "If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don't know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now." To Sanders the American working, middle class is caught in a squeeze. "On the one hand, you have large multi-nationals trying to shut down plants in America, move to China and on the other hand you have the service industry bringing in lower wage workers from abroad. The result is the same-the middle class gets shrunk and wages go down." Five million people have left the middle class during Bush administration, Sanders observes.
Other social-democratic leaders have spoken out against open borders. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt now admits that immigration under his government was excessive and damaging to Germany. In a book published in 1982 he confessed that "with idealistic intentions, born out of our experiences with the Third Reich, we brought in far too many foreigners." Dutch Socialist leader Jan Marijnissen is strongly opposed to the practice of importing East European workers to undermine the position of Dutch workers. East Europeans are hired as "independent contractors" to circumvent labour law. Marijnissen wrote "It is unacceptable that employers pay foreign workers 3 euros per hour and have them live in chicken coops as they were in competition in the nineteenth century of Dickens. The unfair competition and displacement of Dutch workers and small business is intolerable. Therefore we shouldn't open the borders further, but set limits instead."
Setting limits. Acknowledging limits. That is the great divide. In the past those limits have been perceived to be economic by those with the sense to perceive them. Now, some on the left are beginning to realize that the more unforgiving and immutable limits are set by nature. Former Labor Premier of NSW , Bob Carr, and his fellow Laborite retired veteran MP Barry Cohen joined environmental leaders Tim Flannery and Ian Lowe in exposing the myth of Australia as a big empty land begging to be filled up with people. Said Carr, "our rivers, our soils, our vegetation, won't allow that to happen enormous cost to us and those who follow us." Carr and Cohen call for severe immigration cut-backs and a population policy put in place.
In Klein's Canada, meanwhile, the phrase "carrying capacity" is as unknown in the socialist lexicon as it is the corporate. Biologists and ecologists might as well be speaking ancient Aramaic to leftists to make them understand that their human rights agenda cannot be built on an environment that will not sustain it. Canada cannot become the soup kitchen to tens of millions of refugees, nor can vital biodiversity services coexist with a population of 50 million Canadians. In economic jargon, its called "diseconomies of scale". In the language of real science, its called a "limiting factor".
This essay began with two questions from Andy Kerr. It will end with six or seven of mine.
Why? Why has opposition to a policy of mass immigration, a policy that drives down the wages of marginal workers, middle-income workers and professional workers been characterized and vilified as "right-wing" and "reactionary". Why has earlier socialist and trade union understanding of the negative consequences of this policy been overtaken by "love thy neighbour" zeitgeist of the post-war era? Why is the "Left" on the same side as the "Right"? The same side as Microsoft, ADM, the real estate developers and the cheap labour employers?
It is high time to challenge this labeling and to challenge those who use it to prevent thoughtful discussion. The question that needs to be posed today is not the conventional one, is it Left or is it Right? But rather, do we accept that there are Limits, or do we continue to persist in the fantasy that this country, and others, is a massive treasure trove of boundless resources waiting to be unlocked by an endless number of people who can exploit them without ecological consequences?
History shows, sadly, that the latter delusion is shared equally among the devotees of both Adam Smith and the Communist Manifesto and its derivatives.
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, B.C.
Canada
December 16, 2007.
Victorian Environment Minister fails the Environment
Original media release on Blue Wedges web site.
Media Release 12/15/07
“Channel deepening approval by Environment Minister Gavin Jennings is scandalous”, says Blue Wedges spokesperson Jenny Warfe. “We still do not know the extent of risk from toxic sediment release, and we still don’t know who is going to pay for the project. What's more, he has set an environmental bond of only $100 million - less than the amount PoMC spent on the Inquiry process to date and less than the combined annual salaries of a few top corporate executives. PoMC is a publicly owned corporation so taxpayers will be funding the environmental bond –thus adding another $100 million to the project costs”
Port Phillip Bay provides benefits in the Billions to our economy annually. It deserves better treatment than what Minister Jennings has dealt today. There’s even more we still don’t know:
- Will the public see the monitoring plan or have any say in the monitoring?
- Will the public ever see the data?
- Will monitoring continue after dredging?
- How independent will the monitor be?
- Who funds the independent monitor?
There has been a consistent pattern of PoMC failing to reveal relevant documents in relation to the extent of Yarra sediment toxicity in 2004 and again in 2007 when three crucial documents have been concealed during the public submission period. Two days ago, the Minister refused to meet us to explain why he considers PoMC’s failure to release such contentious documents as acceptable. Today he sees fit to approve a project which he does not have all the facts on.
The SEES did not include the report Minor Maintenance Dredging Campaign. Water Quality Monitoring in the Dredge and Disposal Plumes. December 2006. Hale. J. That report was the basis for all water quality assessments for the Yarra and Hobsons Bay dredging and for conclusions of the Human Health Study. Only after the Inquiry closed did we learn that water quality sampling was collected during a minor back-hoe dredging operation, as opposed to a major suction dredge operation as planned - and NONE of the sampling locations were in the Yarra.
“Omission of these documents has resulted in the Public Inquiry, the Independent Expert Group, and subsequently the Planning Minister, and Minister for Environment failing to adequately consider the impacts of wider dispersal of toxic materials.” said Ms. Warfe.
“We also asked if a properly designed study to measure fish tissue chemistry data for dioxin and dioxin-like compounds called for by a project consultant towards the end of the Inquiry has been undertaken. We still do not know the answer to that” says Ms. Warfe.
Two other studies related to toxic sediments were only revealed after public presentations to the Inquiry had concluded. They are:
- Baseline Benthic Fauna Surveys for the Port of Melbourne DMG, SE DMG and Yarra River Estuary. Sinclair Knight Merz. Sept 2006
- Bioaccumulation Study. Sinclair Knight Merz. April 2006
What do these documents reveal that PoMC would wish to conceal them from the public?
“Minister Jennings has declined to examine all the facts and has de-valued the Bay. Minister Garrett must not rely on the flawed SEES documents to make his decision under the Federal Environment Protection and Bio-diversity Conservation Act” says Ms. Warfe.
Further media releases
Federal Court update 07/12/07
Court Battle to keep dredge out 04/12/07
Industrial civilization Pandora's box
Unsustainability of civilization
Premier Calvert's Big Lie
Peter Garrett in the hot-seat over Channel Deepening
DREDGE THREAT TESTS PETER GARRETT, NEW ENVIRONMENT MINISTER
The Federal Court Case to save Port Phillip Bay is a battle between the Goliath of government and the David of Democracy. It began on Wednesday 5th December in Melbourne’s Federal Court.
Blue Wedges have received little help from iconic personalities and organisations of the environmental old guard. Many very active activists think that the ACF and other big ol' environmental organisations have sacrificed too much for professionalism and to retain their position as the governments' first (and usually last) claim to consulting 'environmentalists.
Peter Garrett, one time President of the ACF, is now Federal Labor's Environment Minister. Surely he will stand up for Port Phillip Bay? I mean, how much bigger could an environmental and democratic issue get? A huge number of Victorians are appalled at the local Victorian Government's capitulation to big business and the port of Melbourne Authority, all in scary cause of continuous economic growth. Today is the second day in Melbourne's Federal Court for the Blue Wedges Coalition and Mr Garrett as the environment minister.
According to Blue Wedges spokesperson Jenny Warfe:
"Our new Federal Environment Minister can reject the State assessment report and there would be no need for this case to proceed, but so far we have heard nothing. This will be the first real test of our new Federal government’s commitment to conserving Australia’s unique natural environments and to international obligations."
"The project would produce massive plumes of mud and silt throughout the Bay for two years whilst underway. Worse still the Bay’s ecosystems would take many more years to recover from its effects, and may never recover from the toxic time bomb contained in over 2 million tonnes of contaminated Yarra sediments which the Port of Melbourne Corporation (PoMC) proposes to dredge and then dump again in the Bay."
"Port Phillip Bay provides jobs for thousands of people who rely on a clean healthy environment for their living. It seems unlikely that the PoMC could afford the necessary environmental bond or to compensate all the businesses that rely on the Bay’s water quality for their livelihoods, let alone conduct this implausible and ridiculous $1 billion plus project”.
"What's more, the State government has asked the Federal government to provide around half the funds required to complete the dredging to maintenance stage. There is nothing in this project for ordinary Victorians or Australians, so why should taxpayers be required to fund the trashing of Port Phillip Bay?"
Source: Blue Wedges Media release.
Newcastle group to act against coal exports
See original page at www.risingtide.org.au/walk-in
Community walk-in against coal exports
Saturday 8th December - International day of action against climate change
11am, Kooragang Island wind turbine
Transport help available
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#what">What will happen?
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#why">Why protest coal exports?
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#ida">What is the International Day of Action about?
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#bring">What do I need to bring?
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#transport">How do I get there?
#what" id="what">What will happen?
We will meet at 11am at the Kooragang Island wind turbine, and you'll be offered a pen and paper and encouraged to write a letter pledging to do what you can to prevent the expansion of coal exports from Newcastle. We will then undertake a colourful protest parade across the site of the proposed new coal terminal for Newcastle to the site of the existing Kooragang coal terminal. We will attempt to walk-in on the coal terminal, to present our pledges. If you decide not to attempt the walk-in, you can read your pledge out on a microphone, and peg it to the fence of the coal loader. You can come to the walk-in without getting in trouble with the police.
#why" id="why">Why protest coal exports?
Coal exports are Australia's biggest contribution to climate change. The greenhouse pollution from our coal exports is greater than all of our domestic greenhouse pollution combined - every power station, vehicle, steel mill, and landclearing operation. Worse still, with the world facing a climate crisis, Australia's coal exports are undergoing a massive expansion. Newcastle - already the world's biggest exporter - is set to double its coal exports. As the new Australian government heads to Bali for the UN climate talks, we need to point out that any realistic solution to climate change must include a transition away from coal. We can start with a ban on new coal exports and power stations.
#ida" id="ida">What is the International Day of Action about?
On the 8th December protests all around the world will take place to demand that world leaders meeting at the UN climate talks in Bali "take the urgent and resolute action that is needed to prevent the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate, so that the entire world can move as rapidly as possible to a stronger emissions reductions treaty which is both equitable and effective in preventing dangerous climate change. We also demand that the long-industrialised countries that have emitted most greenhouse gases up to now take most of the responsibility for the adaptive measures that have to be taken, especially by low-emitting countries with limited economic resources."
This protest is part of the global day of action.
#bring" id="bring">What do I need to bring?
- Parade props of your choice - drums, noise-makers, placards, banners, flags, etc
- Water
- Sun protection
#transport" id="transport">How do I get there?
- The Newcastle Bicycle Ecology Centre is leading a bike-ride to the protest. You can find out more on their website.
- Rising Tide is organising a car-pool from Newcastle. If you have space, or want space, in a car, please get in touch.
- If you are making your own way there, this map , and this map, may help you.
Contact: (02) 4926 1641
Make a donation to Rising Tide
Further stories
"Newcastle group blocks coal train to stop climate change" 20 Nov 07
Coal terminal blockage ended - SMH, 19 Nov 07
Australian coal train blocked from port - IndyMedia Germany, 19 Nov 07
Greenies blockade Newcastle coal train
Protester chained to railway line- Sun Herald, 19 Nov 07
Protestors block coal ships in Newcastle The Age, 19 Nov 07
Blue Wedges take Port of Melbourne deepening to Federal Court
Down on the Mornington Peninsular a group of people who have not yet been ground down, and splintered have managed to unite for around two years a sustained protest all over Melbourne against the radical geological restructuring of the bay that defines the town. This is a real tour de force, an inspiration, which the money-mad government and corporations seem incapable of respecting. There have been Alice-in-Wonderland environment assessments and the government just does not get it that the bay does not belong to business of politicians. It belongs to everyone - and the sea creatures.
This case will show just how bad the rot is in Victoria - Will the judiciary remember what they are there for and represent the people of Melbourne's rights?
"Blue Wedges Coalition is fighting in court tomorrow (Wednesday 5th December) to keep the Boskalis dredge ship, Queen of the Netherlands from beginning work on the channel deepening project early next year.
The Port of Melbourne Corporation (PoMC) wants court proceedings to be concluded before Christmas so work can start on its proposed channel deepening project in January next year.
A Full Court hearing, Blue Wedges claims, should not be before April next year so that the evidence and issues can be properly presented and considered.
This will be argued in Melbourne’s Federal Court this Wednesday (5th December) at 9.30 AM in a Directions Hearing before Justice Weinberg who will decide whether the Blue Wedges application to delay the project can succeed.
"We want to delay the project so that we can get a thorough process and diligent investigation of the impacts," said Blue Wedges spokesperson, Dr Jo Samuel King.
"Crucial information was left out of the Supplementary Environmental Effects Statement prepared by the PoMC and there is no way that dredging should be allowed to begin when they (PoMC) do not know what the environmental consequences will be, or even who is paying for the project"
The Federal Court is at 305 William St. Melbourne near Flagstaff station. The case is listed for Room 6a, Level 6, however check the Law list in the daily press or at http://www.fedcourt.gov.au/ctlists/ctlists.html for further details.
Our Bay is too precious to be treated this way. No Queen of the Netherlands for Port Phillip Bay!"
Domino effect and interdependencies
Article was originally published on www.powerswitch.org.uk.
The modern, commercial agricultural miracle that feeds all of us and much of the rest of the world is completely dependent on the flow, processing and distribution of oil, and technology is critical to maintaining that flow. Without timely and expensive inputs, yields of all basic food crops, as well as seed for the following year's crops, would plummet or stocks simply disappear because....
- oil refined for gasoline and diesel is critical to run the tractors, combines and other farm vehicles and equipment that plant, spray the herbicides and pesticides, and harvest/transport food and seed
- food processors rely on the just-in-time (gasoline-based) delivery of fresh or refrigerated food
- food processors rely on the production and delivery of food additives including vitamins and minerals, emulsifiers, preservatives, colouring agents, etc. Many are oil-based. Delivery is oil-based.)
- food processors rely on the production and delivery of boxes, metal cans, printed paper labels, plastic trays, cellophane for microwave/convenience foods, glass jars, plastic and metal lids with sealing compounds. Many of these are essentially oil-based.
- delivery of finished food products to distribution centres in refrigerated trucks. Oil-based, daily, just-in-time shipment of food to grocery stores, restaurants, hospitals, schools, etc., all oil-based, customer drives to grocery store to shop for supplies, often several times a week.
So what, you ask? We have plenty of oil? Think again.
Our food supply, and our economic survival as a whole, depends on the steady availability of reasonably priced oil. Oil is our Achilles heel. We use oil every day to sustain our current lifestyles. We have a small amount of oil stockpiled to see us through any short term disruption. Life as we know it stops if we drain that supply. The big question is, when.
Bottom line?
If we think we are food secure here and in other industrialized countries simply because we have gas in the car, frankly, we are delusional. Despite the appearance of an endless bounty of food, it is a fragile bounty, dependent upon the integrity of the global oil production, refining and delivery system. That system is entirely dependent on the thread of technology. Modern, technology-based agriculture produces both food, and seeds for next year's food, just-in-time. There are precious little reserves of either food or seeds to sustain any protracted interruption.
In the warm, sunny and food-abundant summer and fall, the "dumb" gophers, squirrels and ants know enough to store food for not-so-abundant days. Our grandparents and their grandparents knew how to grow and preserve their own food to ensure their survival. What makes us think that we are different--that we don't have to look ahead to leaner days when we might have to depend only on ourselves to eat? Technology and the incredibly rich tapestry it has made possible has created a false sense of security for so many of us. The thread is flawed; the tapestry is now fragile; famines are possible. We must take that seriously.
A Circle of Dominoes
The fact that each infrastructure element of modern society is threatened by the Peak Oil problem is not well established. It has not been thoroughly investigated or publicized, nor have the effect of the interdependencies of these infrastructure sectors and the overall probabilities of society staying up or going down.
It is in the interdependencies, in fact, where the soul of the Peak Oil problem lives. That these interdependencies have been largely ignored by the press and the public is perhaps the most alarming realization of all. Almost nobody has a realistic understanding of the bottom line odds we really face. ...
The iron triangle is three interconnected systems: power, telecommunications, and banking. These three systems make modern society possible
The three core infrastructure sectors
Three sectors must remain in operation in order for the rest of society to function. These are, as already stated above, banking, power, and telecommunications. The failure of any of these three sectors will cause the failure of the other two within a matter of days or weeks (at most), which will then result in the failure of civilization as we know it.
For example, the loss of power would render banks and phone companies useless. The loss of telecommunications would render power companies and banks useless. And the loss of banking would eventually render power companies and telecomm companies useless (although this would take longer). If banking, power, and telecommunications fail, the affected nation (or planet) suffers mass famine, unprecedented internal turmoil, and eventually returns to a pre-1900's or earlier civilization.
But this definition is incorrect for local, personal planning. The local iron triangle is power, water, and telecommunications. The modern urban world could survive without fractional reserve banking, although a horrendous depression would result in the transition to an alternative means of payment. But a modern city could not exist without power and telecommunications (which depend on each other) and water and sewerage treatment facilities. This item alone could render all other items irrelevant. If water treatment facilities fail, the affected cities are wiped out. People either leave or they die. And dead people can't work at the banks, the telecomm companies and the power companies. Without water, no city survives. But by far the greatest of these is power.
The problem is that, overall, human beings have developed a tendency to deal with problems on an ad hoc basis - i.e., to deal with "problems of the moment". This does not foster an attitude of seeing a problem embedded in the context of another problem.
Domino Effect and Interdependencies
We live in an increasingly interdependent world in which complexity has been magnified as computers and technology progressed. The relationships between businesses, industry and government are like a spider's web with many nodes. For the whole web to remain intact, individual nodes must be attached at all times. Computers have made us interdependent as never before.
This networked interdependcy of the economy is not as resilient as it may appear. In fact, it is more fragile as there more nodes to fail in a complex modern industrial economy. As long as there are no major shocks everything runs smoothly. When there is an outside shock (like the 1970's oil shortages), the resulting economic dislocation cascades through every sector causing immediate and staggering losses. The sudden rise in oil prices raises business costs, which in turn lead to cut backs, lower profits and layoffs. Some companies will go out of business, causing a downturn in the general economy which then feeds on its self in a downward spiral.
Then we must deal with business failures and disruptions of suppliers to which the death of only a few would severely hamper or completely halt any large and complex large corporation's ability to produce a product or service. So even if company 'A' is able to function, it will have to deal with suppliers who may not be able to deliver because of other system failures and disruptions. Losses are enormous if company 'A' cannot temporarily deliver its product and therefore collect sales revenue. By the time it finds and co-ordinates other suppliers, if it can find them, to keep its production or business running, it may already be too late; it will have gone bankrupt.
"There's no point in sugar-coating the problem. If we don't get this thing sorted, we will see something worse than your average Saturday-night horror film."
Aside from failures within industries and suppliers, organizations must worry about outside factors which enable it to conduct business. This means water, electricity, heat and fuel must be freely flowing, and a means of payment, financing and capitalization (banking and stock market) be operational.
This is the circle of dominoes which threatens:
To keep fuel flowing, you need electricity.
To keep electricity flowing, you need fuel.
To keep both operational, you need a means of payment.
To keep a (modern) means of payment going, you need functional telecommunications system to transfer funds. With out a functional telecommunication or banking system, the economy and division of labour would utterly collapse.
Moving beyond local and regional interdepencies is the relationship of finance and trade between modern nations which, to a degree, has recently created a Global Economic Instability which will create financial havoc.
This may mean a great shift in decentralization of organizational and institutional power to the local level lies ahead. It could also mean a historic consolidation of power into the oligopolies. Or even a combination thereof. In the case of Peak Oil it could very well be true: bigger they are the harder they fall. One thing is certain about Peak Oil... the dominoes will be very large, and will fall very hard.
Panic:
This is different from "social unrest." This represents the tendency of the population to cause huge problems in their eagerness to stock up on emergency items like food. If the grocery stores are cleaned out, it interferes with the normal operation of "life." The possibility of having no food is a major distraction that could dramatically affect the population's ability to do anything productive (like running the banks, the power companies, etc.).
This reveals the vulnerability of any highly-specialized, high division-of-labour civilization. One weak link in the chain can disconnect the other sectors from critical resources, causing a cascading disruption in services that takes out subsequent sectors, one by one, resulting in a complete collapse.
Perhaps most interesting is that this situation has only existed for a few decades, and the very technology that gave us the ability to run a high division-of-labour civilization is precisely the same technology that now threatens to take it away.
The interconnection problem is what threatens us. Even if one organization could get through, it is still part of a system in which all organizations depend directly or indirectly on oil and oil based products. The division of labour is at risk. This means that our civilization is at risk.
Norman
How the media control elections
Economic Growth Fails to Eliminate Child Poverty - Are you surprised?
Save the Gold Coast's seagrasses!
Media Release Thursday, 29th November 2007
Gold Coast seagrasses are valuable fish habitat
The Gold Coast’s seagrass beds are valuable resources that provide food and shelter for a multitude of species, including prawns, fish, sea turtles, dugongs and shorebirds and they should be on the maps, a Seagrass-Watch training workshop was told on the weekend.
Chief Scientist of the Northern Fisheries Centre at Cairns and Program Coordinator for Seagrass-Watch HQ, Mr Len McKenzie, speaking at the workshop held at Gecko House in Currumbin last Sunday, 25th November, said that it would be very useful to have all the Gold Coast’s seagrasses mapped.
Gold Coast Seagrass-Watch Coordinator, Sheila Davis, said that the Gold Coast is developing a team to keep an eye on the Gold Coast Broadwater’s vital seagrass beds and volunteers are keen to map seagrasses in the rest of the waterways.
Participants at the workshop were trained on scientific procedures to collect data on the health and condition of seagrass, monitoring it three times a year. “We did our fieldwork in Currumbin Creek and used seagrass beds that are not on the map,” said Ms Davis. “Workshop participants are keen to find more and ensure that all the Gold Coast’s seagrass beds are mapped.”
“The health of our seagrass is under constant threat from both natural and human impacts, and Seagrass-Watch experts train volunteers to monitor its condition,” said Ms Davis. “This data is sent to Seagrass-Watch HQ where it adds to the knowledge about seagrass throughout the Asia Pacific and contributes to the management of our waterways.”
Seagrass-Watch is an award winning, community based, habitat assessment program, monitoring the health and extent of seagrass beds over time. Survey methods are scientifically rigorous but simple and easy to learn and the results help guide decision making in areas such as Marine Park planning and ecosystem health monitoring. The Gold Coast team is funded by SEQ Catchments as part of the Moreton Bay Seagrass-Watch.
“If the idea of an afternoon with nature, and the knowledge that one’s participation assists in the management of our natural resources appeals to people, then they are welcome to join the Seagrass-Watch team,” said Ms Davis. “It’s a fun activity and provides a great opportunity to get to know our waterways and their wildlife including many interesting birds and invertebrates and the chance to spot turtles and dugong.
Call Sheila Davis, Gold Coast Seagrass-Watch Coordinator (ph: 5530-6600) or email gcseagras|AT|vis.id.au to find out how you can get involved with this program.
Gold Coast Seagrass-Watch, PO Box 199, Mudgeeraba Qld 4213 5530-6600 0423-305-478
South East Asian wetlands threatened by overdevelopment
Article by Song Kinh, 29 November 2007.
The sea of nodding pink lotus extends into a misty horizon. Fishermen and women catch tiny fish in hand nets, while others herd ducks in the open water. Some net the quarrelsome crabs recently identified as being unique to this wetland. Rice fields hem the wetlands, heads stooped with ripening grain. A hunter in baggy cutoffs passes with a home made rifle, looking up at the trees in the hope of bagging some flying protein. The rural world in an urban confined space.
I wondered what this small piece of paradise would look like covered with the promised Chinese-built factories and houses.
The seemingly doomed 20 square kilometers of That Luang wetlands, that embrace Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, are a source of joy for the eye and for the belly. Even the Buddha gets a cut of the action, as women gather lotus buds to sell at the markets for offerings at temple ceremonies. In times of floods, the wetlands act as a reservoir, absorbing the excess waters and preventing the city from being submerged.
Areas such as this are under threat in all parts of Asia. In late October this year, Greenpeace, aided by hundreds of local villagers, blockaded a palm oil development site in Riau, Indonesia. They back-filled the eight-metre-deep canals being dug to channel water out of the peat swamp.
Just like in Indonesia, Vientiane’s wetlands provide food and generate income for the poorest of the city’s urban population. The day I visited, teenagers were collecting snails for sale and for food. The place is a haven for the poor, particularly women. Widows and divorced women without other means of support, fish here. "I was born here" one man told me. "My family has always lived here. The water is clean. Closer to the city", he said, waving his hand in the direction of the metropolis, "it is polluted and no fish live there. But here we can still catch them."
Yes, the fishermen and women knew about the plans. The swamp would be filled as far as that galvanised iron factory one said, pointing his chin to the west. Where would he go? He shrugged and looked at the water. The vast amount of pollution generated by the proposed development would kill the surviving aquatic life, overwhelming its capacity to biodegrade waste. What would that do to the livelihoods of the 38,000 people who are thought to live around the wetland’s rim?
Unlike Indonesia, protest is impossible, even if it was culturally appropriate. Individual and family punishment is still the norm for those that speak up in Laos.
It is said that the King, when he was alive, would attend the annual Ork Phansa (end of Buddhist Lent) celebrations by sailing down the Mekong to a wharf located near where the Beer Lao factory is currently situated. From there he would take a small but highly decorated pirogue to the highly revered That Luang temple for prayers. Some old Laotians can remember seeing that event, and remarked that it was a wonderful time when the marshes were full and water reflected the clouds and rich blue of the sky.
Wet Dreams
In 1995 I visited a wetlands project in South Sumatra, Indonesia. Labeled a swamp reclamation project, it supported the then President’s Soeharto’s fanatical if not deluded vision of making Indonesia self sufficient in rice-growing. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) had supported this delusion by lending more than US$200 million, most of which was filched by the nimble and creative bookkeeping of the Indonesians involved.
The swamps were converted into concentrated rows of rice fields, and hapless families were imported from Java and Bali to work the land. It was one of the worst projects I have ever seen. People’s lives were made a misery. The daily tide floated human waste to the surface where it contaminated drinking water; children died in huge numbers. The soil was acid when exposed to air, as well as saline, so nothing would grow. In despair, the valiant farmers grew orchids which they sold to nearby Singapore. The Department of Agriculture, keen to show the ADB their diligence, forced the farmers to rip the orchids out and replant the doomed rice seedlings. During later storm surges, the conversion of mangroves to rice-paddies enabled the seas to enter. It was development torture.
Recently World Vision, the Poverty Reduction Fund and World Food Program collaborated on a similar completely ill-conceived, but probably well intentioned, project in southern Laos. By filling the chain of wetlands they thought to provide poor farmers with more rice fields. What they did not understand is that the wetlands are sources of valuable protein and micronutrients. The local people had developed both a taste for the aquatic foods and well developed ways by which to maximize the haul. Filling the wetlands increased poverty and malnutrition, as fish is more expensive than rice. Selling fish had enabled landless farmers to buy rice, and rice farmers to balance their diets. Without the wetlands, malnutrition quickly set in.
Wet Waste
Wetlands are there because of subsurface run off and geological strata that funnel water into the ponds. Vientiane simply does not have alterative drainage and infrastructure to carry that amount of water. The Mekong in 2007 rose higher than it has in many years due to typhoons in the north. Now more than at any time, Vientiane needs these wetlands to ameliorate any future flooding arising from global climate chaos. Those needing a reality check should look at the photos of Vientiane in 1967, when flood waters engulfed the famous Morning Market.
However, wetlands seem to be perceived as wastelands. Engineers dream of filling them and town planners see flattened expanses to be covered in urban development. Already the incremental filling of the Vientiane wetlands have sent several animals into local extinction, the most dramatic being the population of Siamese crocodiles as well as several species of birds and fish.
While countries of the economic North are seeing the error of filling wetlands, and are now trying to reconstitute marshes, Laos seems to be hell bent on selling one of its national treasures to its neighbours. According to the Vientiane Times (October 12), the Government who owns most of the wetlands is about to re-zone them as a development area after a Chinese group showed interest and the colour of their money to some of the more starry-eyed in the government. There is I gather, a lot of controversy, as many in government are bitterly opposed to the conversions.
A significant amount of the already shrunken wetlands will be handed to Chinese developers for suburban development to house, it is said, 18,000 Chinese. The Times went on to say that the Chinese company is ready to invest billions, and turned down another site offered to them, claiming it was too far out of town. The developers promise shops, factories and hotels; and of course, housing for an increasingly visible number of Chinese people in Laos.
It is hard to know who will benefit, except maybe the folks that take the inevitable kickbacks. Laos is regarded as one of the more corrupt regimes by Transparency International who ranked them with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Several donors nations have threatened to pull up stakes, but they will not be missed, as private equity pours in.
Moreover, construction logistics are a nightmare. Structures need extremely deep footings and structural cross bracing, or will crack and crumble. Rising damp eats construction materials. In Florida, anyone who wants to build something as small as a boat ramp on the famous Everglades, has to get planning permission from the Environmental Protection Authority and the US Army Corps of Engineers.
A Laotian engineer commented "It’s the craziest idea I have ever heard in my life", suggesting it was an ecocidal money laundering project.
The ex-head of the newly defunct Mekong Wetlands Project suggested that the sacrifice of the marshes represented the crush between development imperatives and rising land prices. That may be true, but the land is clearly not for Laos but for Chinese companies and speculators, and the land loss will seriously compromise the livelihoods of thousands of Laotian residents. Rather it is a mark of the more brazenly open influence of the Chinese on the Laotian government. This year the Chinese government requested and were granted the ability to influence planning and development strategy in the northern provinces which border China. It is, some say, colonisation by stealth.
Wet Services
As the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported, the That Luang Marsh helps keep Vientiane's head above water.
The conservation of urban wetlands leads to economic gains for both urban residents and municipal councils, generates goods and services with an economic value in excess of US$ 4.8 million per year. These benefits accrue to the 38,000 people that live directly around the marsh, and the estimated 161,000 residents of Vientiane.
The wetlands offer flood attenuation and wastewater treatment services valued at US$2 million a year according to the IUCN and WWF. In the wet season, some city roads quickly become impassable. Existing urban infrastructure and the lack of reticulated sewage treatment means that Vientiane is unable to provide the vast sink that the marshes offer, much less convert the water into income. It has been estimated that the services offered by the That Luang ecosystem constitute investment savings of more than $18 million in damage costs avoided, and $1.5 million that would need to be spent on technologies required to fulfill the same functions. I now understand the engineer’s response.
These marshes have some of the densest settlements found in Laos and have the longest history of settlement, not surprising in view of the sheer generosity of the natural environment. In the 1990s about 1,000 hectares were reclaimed by rice farmers. Gordon Claridge, a specialist in wetland ecology and birds, reported that in the 1990’s the municipality dug a drainage channel and constructed a pumping station to enable new rice fields to be claimed, cutting off the direct link between the Mekong and the wetlands. The marshes have been decreasing ever since.
As pointed out by several Laotian scientific writers - Chanphhenxay, Latsamina and Xaphakdy - the problem is that there are no unified rules or regulations related to town planning, urban development or in this case wetlands. A Laotian economist recently calculated that the value of the rice produced is overwhelmingly trounced by the value of the wetlands just being there. The claims that filling and growing rice on the wetlands alleviates poverty may be true for the rice farmers, who often come into conflict with the landless over creeping intrusions, but not for the broader population.
The Laos Constitution insists that the state and the people have a responsibility to protect and use natural resources renewably. The development of the That Luang wetlands would seem, then, to run counter to the Constitution.
The ink has not been put on paper, so there is still time for those opposed to this project to make their voices heard. But the case is hindered by the absence of an avenue for protest, well resourced and independent town planning expertise or a cohesive city plan, and the fact that they stand between a minister and his payoff. Blatant land grabs by the well connected ensure that land is used according to economic gain and not national benefit. One only has to see the brands of cars that prowl the streets of Vientiane to realise that some are making lots of money in the least developed country.
The symbol of the Buddha, the lotus, may well soon be overtaken by the symbol of capitalism, the factory. That it is being done in and by nations that at one time eschewed capitalism, is the final irony.
Originally published in Online Opinion on 29 Nov 07. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Joe Hockey's "Work Choices" back flip: too little, too late
November 2005, WorkChoices legislation was rammed through Parliament. Barely a week in the House; just three weeks for Senate review.
Now, suddenly, former Work Place Relations Minister Hockey proclaims
that WorkChoices "went too deep; it was a mistake," even though it was introduced with "the best intentions."
"We should never have got rid of the old 'no disadvantage' test ... ". Tens of thousands of vulnerable workers, waiting for their agreements to be assessed against the "fairness test," agree with Hockey.
Too little; too late, Mr Hockey! Why was Hockey so silent two full years ago, and when the no-disadvantage test was chucked over-board? What will Hockey do now, once Labor introduces its legislation to redress the "mistakes" of the Howard Government?
Judy Bamberger,
O'Connor ACT
bamberg|AT|eaglet.rain.com
See also Work Choices went too far, says Hockey 28 Nov 07
Federal elections and Queensland local government amalgamations
Australians, finally able to rejoice at the demise of the hated Howard government, can count themselves lucky that the Queensland Labor Government's undemocratic local government amalgamations program enacted at the behest of the Property Council of Australia did not fatally undermine Federal Labor's election campaign in Queensland as had been feared earlier earlier by Margo Kingston amongst others.
In the early stages federal Labor Leader Kevin Rudd did publicly oppose the forced amalgamations and correctly supported Prime Minister John Howard's Federal legislation#fn1">1 to over-ride the now infamous Queensland Government's legislation under which councils which attempted to consult their communities about the amalgamations through ballots could have been dismissed and under which any councillor who even voted in favour of any motions enabling such ballots could have been fined.
In spite of Rudd's support public distancing of himself from the Queensland Government the "Friends of Noosa", opposed to the forcible amalagamation of the Noosa Shire Council into the Greater Sunshine Coast council, launched a "Dump Labor" campaign in early September 2007 which featured demonstrations in which effigies of Rudd, as well as Beattie, were put in a bin. A large hoarding on a major road on the northern approach to Brisbane also featured the "Dump Labor" slogan.
Had they succeeded and returned a Howard Government this could have paradoxically, been counterproductive to their stated goals. State Labor governments, including the Queensland Beattie Labor Government have been notorious for their undermining the electoral prospects of Federal Labor in order to serve their own cynical survival strategies#fn2">2. This is because the state parliament election dates have tended to occur near the middle of the three year Federal parliamentary election cycle, when the Howard Government had felt most immune from popular opposition. At these moments, when the Howard had chosen to inflict his nastiest policies upon the Australian public, state Labour governments have been able to exploit the resultant public backlashes in order to be able to cling to office themselves. Thus, former Victorian Premier Steve Bracks was re-elected in 2006 in spite of breaking a 2002 election promise to build a freeway, instead deciding to have a privately operated tollway built. The unpopular New South Wales state Labor Government of Morris Iemma was re-elected in March 2007 largely as a result of a backlash against Howard Government's "Work Choices", even though the Government in which he was a minister under the leadership of former Premier Bob Carr helped bring about "Work Choices" by undermining Mark Latham's election chances in 2004.
Given all of this there would have been little reason to suppose that either Premier Peter Beattie or his successor Anna Bligh would have been concerned in the least by the "Dump Labor" campaign.
As the election date drew closer other leaders of the anti-amalgamation movement appealed to Kevin Rudd for his public support. Had he done so, there would have been every reason to expect that the Queensland Government would have have been forced to abandon the amalgamations. However, he did not, even ignoring appeals for him to do so contained in full paid advertisements from the "Local Democracy" group (one partially in Chinese in which Rudd is fluent) published in the Courier Mail prior to the elections. Predictably, at least two large advertisements which called on Queenslanders to vote against Federal Labor were published in the Courier Mail in the last week before the election.
However, Rudd's gamble appears not to have backfired against Federal Labor and the appeals of the anti-amalagamation movement to vote against Labor went largely unheeded by Queenslanders, most fortunately for both Queensland and the rest of Australia. There was a 8.31% swing against the coalition in Queensland (as of 3.45pm AEDST) giving Labor 51.22% of the vote on a two-party preferred basis.
Whatever the reason for the high vote for Federal Labor may be, Queenslanders, opposed to the Howard Government, who may have objected to the anti-Labor campaign, would be ill-advised to turn their backs on their rural cousins. If the undemocratic amalgamations are not stopped it will eventually harm the interests of ordinary Queenslanders to the benefit of land speculators, property developers#fn3">3 and other powerful vested interests, who at the moment have at least the Queensland Government in their collective pocket, if not the now defunct Federal Liberal Government.
It is important that people vote in the areas living in council areas affected by the amalgamations use Australian Electoral Commissions plebiscites, scheduled to begin on 26 November with the mail-out of postal ballots, to make their opposition to amalgamations emphatically clear.
Furthermore, if the democracy is to have any real content in this state the Queensland Government must be made to accept the outcomes of these plebiscites and, if necessary reverse the amalagamations now underway.
Footnotes
#fn1" id="fn1">1. Howard's support for democracy in Queensland stands in stark contrast to his own record in Government and to his own attitude to forced amalagamations in New South Wales and Victoria. See, for example, Media releases by the Indepenendent NSW Federal MP Peter Andren (since deceased) Howard's paper thin hypocrisy on amalgamations and my article Dictatorial Conduct published in Online Opinion on 21 Sep 07.
#fn2" id="fn2">2. This was revealed in the Latham Diaries, with examples of how the Victorian, New South Wales and Tasmanian state Labor governments had acted to harm his own election prospects. Sadly, Mark Latham has, himself, more recently emulated this behaviour which he had so rightly exposed in his own diaries, by turning on Federal Labor in two articles published in the Australian Financial Review (see article Mark Latham's Political Gift to John Howard dated on 19 Nov 2007 on Margo Kingston's web diary).
#fn3" id="fn3">3. See Cate Molloy : Forced council amalgamations planned by Property Council of Australia, 7 Sep 2007
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Links
Peter Beattie bent on destruction of Rudd's chances Margo Kingston, 18 Aug 2007
Online Opinion discussion forum: Don't let Peter Beattie save John Howard's political hide 8 Aug 2007
Dictatorial conduct by James Sinnamon, 21 Aug 2007
Queensland's burning - local government amalgamations Beattie-style by Scott Prasser, 27 Sep 2007
How the bean-counters took over the campaign
This article by IanMcAuley has been reproduced under the conditions of the Creative Commons license from Online Opinion. The original article can be found here.
There is an anomaly at the heart of this election campaign. Although Kevin Rudd's Labor continues to enjoy a strong lead in the polls, Labor scores poorly in response to the Newspoll question on which party would best handle the economy. On that dimension, Labor scores only 29 per cent against the Coalition's 53 per cent.
In light of the economic performance of the Howard Government, it is strange that anyone would give it a passing grade. While Australia has had a period of high growth, low inflation and falling unemployment during the Coalition's term, this good fortune can hardly be attributed to sound economic management. As the #cpd">Centre for Policy Development (CPD) paper Reclaiming Our Common Wealth argues, Australia's continued prosperity is not assured.
We are living off our assets and mortgaging our future. A resources boom and the delayed benefits of the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating years have given Australia an easy ride over the last ten years. To borrow a line from Bill Hayden, even the "drover's dog" would have had difficulty in messing it up.
Unfortunately, only now are warning signs emerging. Our worsening inflation is due in large part to our failure to invest in skills and to replenish our tired physical and social infrastructure. Blaming inflation on the drought and high oil prices only reinforces the point of policy neglect, for we have had plenty of warning about the need to put our agriculture on a more sustainable basis and to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
An indicator our Government does not want to mention is our current account deficit. It is extraordinary that even at the peak of the commodity boom, we have to import more than we export. We cannot count on the rest of the world continuing to lend us money to finance our habit of consuming more than we are producing.
It's not as if people are unaware of these economic shortcomings. Long before the September quarter consumer price index (CPI) was released, many Australians have been feeling the pinch of inflation in life's necessities, like school fees, health care, electricity and other household essentials. Price rises in these items have been offset by falls in more discretionary types of consumption such as overseas travel, household appliances and electronic gizmos. In fact, inflation would be higher if it wasn't for the Chinese economy, which not only buys our coal and iron ore, but also returns some of it in low cost manufactures. The worst inflation is in housing, but for technical reasons this is barely registered in the CPI.
Besides inflation there are many other signs of poor economic performance. Evidence of infrastructure neglect surrounds us whenever we drive on a highway or catch a suburban train. Our public schools and hospitals are under stress. People feel insecure in their employment, and are wondering why, if we are so prosperous, we have to work such long hours. Anyone can see the distortions in our economic rewards: the share of GDP going to wages compared to profits is at a 35-year low, executive pay continues to blow out, and our tax system rewards speculators and rich retirees. At the same time, poverty is becoming more entrenched. And our most precious asset - our physical environment - is being sorely stretched.
Perhaps we have come to take a narrow view of what is meant by "managing the economy". In an extension of the economic management anomaly, Labor scores well ahead of the Coalition in education (50 per cent to 30 percent), welfare and social issues (51 per cent to 28 per cent), industrial relations (47 per cent to 34 per cent), health and Medicare (47 per cent to 33 per cent) and the environment (39 per cent to 25 per cent). These are all important economic matters, involving the allocation and distribution of scarce resources, but they don?t seem to register with the public as having an economic dimension.
The likely explanation is that for the mainstream media and government spin doctors, economic management has been confused with what economists call fiscal management - in other words, the balance-sheet of public revenues and expenditures. So long as expenditure does not exceed revenue, our Prime Minister and Opposition Leader can both boast of being "fiscal conservatives" and "responsible" economic managers.
This narrow view is dangerous, because it fails to consider the purpose of public expenditure. The philosophy of fiscal management is that nothing matters apart from the monetary aggregates; it's all just public expenditure. A million dollars spent on a dead-end "road to recovery" in a marginal electorate has no more value than a million dollars spent on a vital transport link. A handout of middle class welfare like Family Tax Benefit A has no more value than the same amount spent on childcare, health or public education. A budgetary saving achieved by cost shifting is "good", even if it simply shifts the burden from taxes to individuals, and even if it has no effect on resource allocation.
The present government, in its Charter of Budget Honesty, has encouraged this way of thinking. This pre-election exercise in costing of election commitments takes a purely fiscal view of election promises. It does no more than to analyse the effect of policy proposals on the budget bottom line. There is no wider economic assessment of election promises and no distinction made between capital and recurrent outlays. Nor is there any assessment of the costs and benefits of various proposals. It is a purely fiscal exercise.
It's as if the authors of the Charter of Budget Honesty consider all government expenditure to be wasteful anyway. Therefore, the less government spending, the better, and if governments must spend money, they should never spend more than they raise. Private debt is good, public debt is bad.
In essence, what "economic management" has come to mean is the government's ability to manage the equivalent of a domestic cheque account. That has been an easy task for the Howard Government, taking office as Australia was in the upswing of a business cycle, and, in all probability, leaving office just as the cycle starts to turn down. If Labor wins it may have a much more difficult fiscal task ahead of it, for it could be taking over a weakened economy just as the business cycle turns down.
Not only does this narrow fiscal construction trivialize the whole notion of economic management, it also constrains the options for prudent government policy making - as Fred Argy points out in his recent CPD paper Australia's Fiscal Straightjacket.
If the incoming government faces a period of sluggish growth or a recession, it would make good sense to run a temporary budget deficit and to borrow to finance productive infrastructure. Worryingly, there is a risk that a future Rudd or Costello Government - committed to the mantra that the budget must always be in a cash surplus - will decide it is not politically feasible to practice sound counter-cyclical economic management. As a result, if we do run into a recession, it could be much more costly and painful than necessary.
The economic debate we should be having is about the structure of the Australian economy. How can we ensure prosperity once the commodity boom is over? What do we need to spend on our collective assets - our physical infrastructure, our human capital, our environmental assets - to ensure our economic resilience and international competitiveness? How can we restore proper incentives into our taxation and welfare systems to distribute the benefits of economic growth and to preserve trust in our reward systems? How can we restore household balance sheets with real, liquid assets and reduce the insecurity of personal debt? How can we supply housing in places where people want to live? How can we bring the excluded and marginalized into the mainstream economy?
These are all difficult tasks - much more difficult than managing a cheque account.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
#links" id="links">
Links
Original article: How the bean-counters took over the campaign, Friday, 23 November 2007
Living standards and our material prosperity by James Sinnamon, Thursday, 6 September 2007
#cpd" id="cpd">Centre for Policy Development (cpd.org.au)
A public interest think tank which was formed around June 2007 to advocate creative, forward-looking ideas for fair and sustainable policy change by exploring new approaches to the relationship between governments, markets, society, and the environment.
Greens welcome Rudd family calls to stop Traveston Dam
Media Release - 22 November 2007
Today’s reports of Kevin Rudd’s own family decrying his silence on the proposed Mary River dam are sentiments shared by many Queenslanders, who deserve to know what Labor’s position on the dam is before voting on Saturday, said the Greens today.
“Kevin Rudd owes it to Queenslanders to make his position clear on the Mary River dam before Saturday’s poll,” said Greens lead Senate candidate for Queensland, Larissa Waters.
“Would a Rudd government approve the dam based on the hasty EIS that ignores the impacts of climate change and admits uncertainty on the future of endangered species? Or would Kevin Rudd stick up for Australia’s special wildlife and the Mary Valley community?” asked Ms Waters.
“If Labor’s answer is another rubber stamp like we saw on the pulp mill, The Greens will be the only party for Queenslanders to support to save the Mary.
“The Greens call on both the Queensland and federal governments to apply the precautionary principle and refuse to approve this environmentally, socially and economically destructive dam.
“The state Labor government has tried to keep the Mary River dam off the radar until after the federal election, by releasing an 1800 page EIS open for public comment until one week after polling day,” said Ms Waters.
The EIS, released on 18 October 2007, fails to properly address the key issues of alternatives, the impacts of climate change on rainfall and the survival of the lungfish.
“Despite these gaping uncertainties, the EIS alarmingly recommends the dam proceed, subject to a raft of further plans and measures.
“The EIS puts the cart well before the horse to recommend the dam go ahead when its full impacts are not known.
“This dam is a cruel hoax. It won’t solve the water crisis but it will destroy good quality farm land, send ancient species like the lungfish, Mary River Cod and turtle towards extinction, impact on the Great Sandy Strait downstream, displace hundreds of families and waste nearly $2 billion of taxpayer’s money that could be better spent on providing tanks for every South East Queensland home,” concluded Ms Waters.
For more information contact:
Larissa Waters
larissa.water|AT|qld.greens.org.au
For biographical information see: www.larissawaters.net
Staff cuts blamed on sale of Telstra
Article is from the <a href="http://nyngan.yourguide.com.au/news/local/general/staff-cuts-blamed-on-sale-of-telstra/1090414.html">Nyngan Observer</a> of 21 November 2007. Also see <a href="http://www.citizensagainstsellingtelstra.com/content/4/StaffCutsBlamedOnSale-21nov07.html">www.citizensagainstsellingtelstra.com</a>.
Review of Naomi Klein’s "The Shock Doctrine"
I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.
The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.
Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.
Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.
A review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine ( Penguin Australia, 2007)
By Sheila Newman. Also published on Web Diary. (2233 words)
Klein is a Canadian political scientist. She put this book together over a four year period, employing different teams of researchers for each chapter. The documentation is awesomely solid, making her assertions difficult to tear down, and thus supporting a theory which would otherwise seem almost fantastic, were it not also supported by more and more freestanding works.
The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.
But the robber-barons, land-sharks and bankers were only waiting for an opportunity to break down any political system which would stop them from having anything they wanted. Their method was tried and true: a religion embracing trickle-down economics, endless growth and total deregulation. I have wondered for some time how so many dim-witted, narrowly educated people going by the tag of ‘economist’ came to inhabit the corridors of power in our society. This has been somewhat explained to me by Klein, who identifies the genesis of a theoretical basis, defence and propaganda effort for corporatist free-market replacing real government. She places the rise of the shock doctrine of economic rationalism at Chicago University in the Chicago School of Economics, led by economist Milton Friedman, the author of Capitalism and Freedom.
She describes how this school set about training people in its atrocious doctrine all over the world. Its practitioners sought to break down all examples of egalitarian, community oriented democratic states, speciously linking ‘democracy’ to the imposition of ‘free-market’ economics.
Although Klein does not make this connection, their program began in 1973 which was the time of the first oil-shock. She describes a course of corporatised looting, torture, slavery and repression which begins with Pinochet’s rise in Chile, with Milton Friedman as his advisor, and passes through similar horrors in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Poland, South Africa, Russia, and Irak. She finishes this incredible expose by describing the nauseating excesses of developers masquerading as foreign AID in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the tsunamis which so many Australians and others contributed their money to help.
Within 24 hours of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, where land had been 80% publicly owned, processes demanded by the World Bank, US AID, and the Asian Development Bank began to change the laws to transfer public land to private ownership, and to privatise public utilities and resources. Indeed those seem to be the signs that the shock doctrine is operating in a country – privatisation of public land, telephones, water, power and pharmaceutical distribution. Obviously I think that Australians should act quickly to familiarise themselves with Naomi Klein’s book and to begin to appreciate the danger to what remains of our democracy, public wealth and institutions. The possibility for land redistribution in South Africa by Mandela’s government had been similarly hamstrung.
Familiar bland illogical assertions come up along with the names of familiar corporations. Klein quotes (p. 355), “Michael Fleisher, the founder of the Chicago School based Shock Doctrine, saying in 2003 of Iraq that ‘protected businesses never, never become competitive’, and she comments: “he appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other US corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the US government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense. The Chicago School crusade, which emerged with the core purpose of dismantling the welfare statism of the New Deal, had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal. It was a simpler, more stripped down form of privatisation – the transfer of bulky assets wasn’t even necessary: just straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers. No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits. The double standard was explosive, as was the systematic exclusion of Iraqis from the plan.”
Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park (Melbourne central) to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.
Klein argues convincingly that the Chicago school acolytes have supported reigns of pure terror where peoples have, almost overnight, been reduced to poverty and starvation, with their states brought from sovereignty to economic indigence and crippling debt to the International Monetary Fund and other private agencies as they paid for ridiculously expensive, publicly resisted corporate projects and sold off state assets.
Klein tells how the IMF came about through an international agreement to prevent countries from falling into desperation and war by loaning them money to get through rough spots. It was modelled on the post WW2 Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan for Germany was particularly careful to preserve protection for Germany’s industry and workers. But Chicago-school economics came to rule the IMF, she says, and the book is about how this doctrine stripped its victims of democracy, labour protection and public assets, and, when war broke out or torture and imprisonment were rife, its practitioners turned a blind eye, instead celebrating the chaos as a clean slate for the birth of a rational economy.
The hypothesis is that democracy is destroyed by causing social shocks to countries and, in the ensuing panic and disorientation, the political system is dismantled and the economy pillaged through privatisation and government contracted debt. The International Monetary Fund is severely implicated in this as are a number of international corporations.
Examples of things which socially shock a country, most of which are dealt with by Klein using examples in many countries, are:
- The Breaking down of labour laws and trade regulations
- Mass immigration and the Contracting of business to foreign imported labour in preference to local labour
- Falling wages
- bank privatisation, deregulation of the economy
- Breaking down of the public service, public welfare
- Loss of public subsidy of therapeutic drugs
- Privatisation of public hospitals, schools…
- Privatisation of public technology, power and utilities – telephones, electricity, water and energy resources like oil and gas
- Unaffordable privatised housing and land development
- Land speculation leading to homelessness
- Unaffordable justice systems
- Privatisation of the military – use of mercenaries and contractors
- Torture, disappearance, and war
- Natural disasters
Signs of the dismantling of a political system and its reinvention as a corporatocracy include:
- education of young people, educators and politicians, in economic rationalist doctrines as the only true way
- growth economics
- the normalisation of theft of the public wealth through its transfer to the private sector
- loss of restrictions on investment by political regulators
- acceptance of ostentatious lifestyles in politicians and their public frequentation of corporate figures
- Phoney enquiries
- Commercial-in-confidence activities which make it impossible for the public to obtain information
- the privatisation of areas normally administered by government, for instance mercenaries for soldiers, corporations for military support and logistics like accommodation, clothing and food, immigration (immigration agents)
- The institutionalisation with public funded support for corporations. (The Victorian Government’s gift to Australand of public land and $80 m in exchange for what many would call very little, comes to my mind).
At the end of the book Naomi Klein tells us about countries which are fighting back against the robber-baron corporatisation of their governments, land, and industries. Examples are described in Latin America, Lebanon, Thailand, and many other places.
Chavez Venezuela:
(p.455) “In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”
Lebanon:
(p.459) “So when delegates from thirty wealthy nations got together in Paris in January 2007 to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction loans and grants, they naturally assumed that Lebanon’s government would accept whatever strings they attached to the aid. The conditions were the usual ones: phone and electricity privatizations, price increases on fuel, cuts to the public service and an increase to an already controversial tax on consumer purchases. Kamal Hamdan, a Lebanese economist, estimated that, as a result, ‘household bills [would] increase by 15 percent because of increased taxes and adjusted prices’ – a classic peace penalty. As for the reconstruction itself, the jobs would of course go to the giants of disaster capitalism, with no requirement to hire or subcontract locally - ” …
(p.460): “Many Lebanese citizens, however, were distinctly less cooperative. Despite the fact that a lot of their homes still lay in ruins, thousands participated in a general strike, organized by a coalition of unions and political parties, including the Islamist party, Hezbollah. The demonstrators insisted that if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved to be called aid. So while Siniora was reassuring donors in Paris, strikes and road blockades brought the country to a halt – the first national revolt specifically targeting post-war disaster capitalism. Demonstrators also staged a sit-in, which went on for two months, turning downtown Beirut into a cross between a tent city and a street carnival.” … “The biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn’t Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It’s the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It’s a poor and working-class peoples’ revolt.”
Thailand:
(p. 402), “Some of the most direct clashes took place in Thailand, where, within 24 hours of the wave, developers sent in armed private security guards to fence in land they had been coveting for resorts. In some cases the guards wouldn’t even let survivors search their old properties for the bodies of their children. The Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters group was hastily convened to deal with the land grabs.”…
(p. 463) “…villagers approached all government promises with intense scepticism and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called ‘land reinvasions’. They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been…” (p.464) A Thai NGO, commented that, ‘With the entire community camping out there, it became difficult for the authorities to chase them away, especially given the intense media attention being focused on tsunami rehabilitation.’”
[Should the homeless in Australia and those who stand to lose their overly expensive homes due to government facilitation of land-speculation consider such a move?]
New Orleans:
And, with the dispossession by corporations and public private partnerships in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (with which the book begins): (p.465) “In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects that the Bush administration was planning to demolish began ‘reinvading’ their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apartments and raised money to buy generators and solar panels.”
Klein concludes (p. 466), “The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping – having the right to be part of a communal recovery.”… “These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people , taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience – for when the next shock hits.”
I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.
Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.
The myth of the Howard Government's defence competence
This article was originally published in Online Opinion on 21 November 2007 and on Margo Kingston's webdiary. Comments can be posted below, to Online Opinion or to webdiary
The same opinion polls which predict that John Howard will lose the election on 24 November, nevertheless, also consistently show that Australians still perceive his Government to be competent at handling Australia's defence, or at least more capable than the Labor Opposition. The figures given in the 23 October NewsPoll were 43 per cent to 39 per cent in Howard's favour.
However, this perception is not borne out by the evidence. Although Australia was once governed by leaders who capably managed our defence, this is no longer the case.
Andrew Ross's meticulously researched book Armed and Ready published in 1995 conclusively shows, contrary to the widely promoted myth, that Australia was ready to face a Japanese invasion in 1942 thanks to the visionary work of a number of far-sighted politicians, both conservative and Labor, public servants and industrialists. Since the 1920's they worked hard to make Australia capable of defending itself without any need for the supply of military equipment from elsewhere as had been the case in the First World War. The policy goal was to become known as "self containment".
As a consequence, after war was declared in Europe in September 1939, Australia was able to rapidly convert its peace-time economy so that by June 1942, which is the earliest date before which Japan could possibly have launched an invasion, Australia had eight fully equipped Army divisions and an air force that was at least capable of denying them total air supremacy. Supplies for this defending force would have been maintained by one of the world's most advanced industrialised economies of the time using local raw materials. What little Australia could not have supplied itself could have been obtained from overseas as the invading Japanese would not have been able to maintain an effective naval blockade without having first captured a port the size of Sydney or Melbourne.
Short of the United States reaching a separate peace with Japan, there was no realistic prospect that an invasion could have succeeded. It is for this reason that the Japanese Army vetoed a plan by the Japanese Navy to invade Australia before the US victory at the Battle of the Coral Sea in March 1942.
After the Japanese advance was stopped Australia played the major role until 1943 supplying the manpower and military hardware which drove back the Japanese on land. Of Australia's contribution to the Allied war effort, US President Truman was to say in 1946:
"On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having a population of about seven millions, approximately equalled the United States". (Report to congress on Lend Lease, 27 Dec 1946, cited in Armed and Ready)
Moving forward 65 years to 2007, how does the Howard Government's record stand against the proud record of its ideological predecessors?
Informed Australians understand that in the broader sense of looking after Australia's defence needs by pre-empting likely causes of armed conflict, the Howard Government is a dismal failure. Its role in starting the Iraq war, having previously allowed AU$296 (all dollar figures are Australian dollars unless stated otherwise stated) in bribes to be paid to the regime of Saddam Hussein, has undoubtedly made the world a more dangerous place and raised Australia's own profile in the eyes of terrorist organisations. Furthermore, John Howard's sabotage of international efforts to confront the problem of global warming has exacerbated a threat which even the Pentagon considers greater than that of terrorism.
However, many Australians may be surprised to also learn that the militarily aggressive Howard Government has, paradoxically, been no more competent in safeguarding Australia's security even in the more narrow sense of managing its defence forces.
This has been shown categorically in the groundbreaking book National Insecurity - The Howard Government's betrayal of Australia published earlier this year and, more recently by the Four Corners documentary Flying Blind, which screened on Australian TV on October 29.
F111 and air supremacy
Flying Blind showed how Prime Minister Howard and his Defence Minister Brendan Nelson have scandalously mismanaged the procurement of replacements for Royal Australian Air Force's (RAAF) ageing, but still capable, fleet of F111 fighter bombers.
The F111's are due to be replaced by the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), but the original decision to purchase the JSF was made counter to all well-established defence force equipment procurement procedures. In June 2002 during a visit to the US, aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin made a presentation to the Prime Minister in his hotel room. During the presentation John Howard suddenly agreed to purchase the fighter that was still on the drawing board at a projected cost of $16 billion. According to National Insecurity, he agreed so quickly that even senior Lockheed Martin executives were 'flabbergasted'. "That was just amazing, it stopped everything in the room at the time", said Lockheed's international programs director for the JSF, Mike Consentino, about Australia's surprise announcement. "This was our first international customer so it was a memorable day".
The JSF, however, may not be ready until 2018, and it appeared that the service lives of the F111's and FA18 Hornets were to have been extended with modifications and the use of an abundant supply of cheap spare parts.
This ran counter to the plans of another aircraft manufacturer Boeing, who had seen an opportunity to sell its Super Hornet, for which it was having difficulty finding customers.
At first, the Air Force was not interested in the Super Hornet, but after an F111 wing had cracked during a maintenance test, the new Defence Minister Brendan Nelson seized upon this to convince Cabinet that the Super Hornet was necessary, at a cost of $6.6 billion. It was subsequently found that the crack in the F111 wing had only been caused as a result of a fault in the test design. Professor Hugh White (Deputy Secretary of Defence, 1995-2000) told Four Corners that he could not "recall in Australia decisions of this magnitude ... being made so quickly on such a slender basis of advice".
The Hornet is markedly inferior to its likely adversaries in the region which would include the new Russian built Sukhoi 30's with which the air forces of Indonesia, Malaysia, China and India are soon to be equipped. Retired Air Vice Marshall Peter Criss said to Four Corners, "I cannot believe that we would waste $6.6 billion of the taxpayer's money on an aeroplane that has no practical use against any modern, new generation fighter coming into our arc of interest to our north".
As a consequence of these decisions, Australia stands to lose the regional air supremacy that allowed it to safeguard the independence of East Timor from Indonesia in 1999.
The decisions to buy the JSF and the Super Hornet are not the only questionable defence equipment procurement decisions made by the Howard Government in recent years. Others include:
The M1 Abrams tank
In 2004 Australia agreed at a cost of $539 million to purchase 59 second-hand Abrams M1A1 main battle tanks to replace Australia's current fleet of 100 German-built Leopard tanks purchased by the Whitlam Government in 1974. Due to the necessity having US contractors service the Abrams, rather than domestic contractors, only around 30 are expected to be operational at any one time. In contrast to the life expectancy of the Leopard, which have so far been operational for 25 years, they are expected to last only 10 years.
The Abrams is too heavy for use on Australian bridges and roads. It cannot be airlifted by any of the ADF's transport planes and cannot even be loaded onto any of the Navy's six heavy landing craft, let alone its smaller LCM8 landing craft, so they are entirely unsuited to the defence of the Australian continent and could only conceivably be used as part of joint combat operations with the US.
The Abrams' reputation for indestructibility has been laid to rest by the experience of Iraq where its armour has been penetrated with surprising ease by low-tech bombs and rocket propelled grenades used by Iraqi insurgents. At least 80 have so far been destroyed.
The Collins class submarine combat system
In 2001 the tendering rules for the contract to supply a combat system for the Collins class submarine were changed to make the prime criterion 'interoperability' with the US.
Additionally, in a number of smaller acquisitions, domestic Australian suppliers have been systematically discriminated against.
The Government refused the Army's request to purchase the Australian manufactured Aerosonde Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) used successfully for surveillance in the Solomons in July 2003. Instead of purchasing this proven and relatively cheap technology, the Government opened a tendering process for the supply of a more expensive high-tech version, then cut short the tendering process, instead opting only to field test two systems - both from the US.
According to a report "Auditor lashes $2.1bn frigate upgrade" in The Australian newspaper of 1 Nov 2007, the privatisation of the Australian Defence Industries in 1999 appears to have led to a delay, so far, of four and a half years in the upgrade of six frigates and a $275 million cost blowout. In spite of the blowout, the navy will only be getting four frigate upgrades instead of six. Other projects which have incurred cost blowouts include the navy's Seasprite helicopter, the army's M113 personnel carrier upgrade, the RAAF's Wedgetail surveillance planes and the Tiger reconaissance helicopter. Total cost blowouts for Australia's Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) are running at $13 billion according to Labor's defence spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon.
An earlier and tragic consequence of outsourcing of defence force responsibilities to private companies was the HMAS Westralia disaster in 1998 in which four sailors were killed in a fire caused by the faulty installation of hoses by poorly trained private contractors.
Australian taxpayers have also yet to learn the costs of the Howard Government's propensity to sell defence force buildings, including housing for defence personnel, to private investors and then to lease them back.
These decisions show a record that compares very unfavourably to that of those previous governments which led the country prior to, and during, the Second World War.
The corporate newsmedia such as Rupert Murdoch's News Limited does nothing to make this fact apparent to its readership. As an example, the scandalous mismanagement of the procurement of the replacement for the F111 reported by Four Corners was not pursued by News Limited or any other of the newsmedia. Instead, it repeatedly reports without comment, NewsPoll results favourable to the Howard Government in this area.
In past elections this perception has helped unravel Labor's election winning lead and even at this late stage a recurrence of this cannot be entirely ruled out. If, as a result, Howard should win a fifth term of office, then the health of Australia's democracy will have been shown, once again, to have been wanting.
This article is largely based upon the following resources:
Linda Weiss, Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews, National Insecurity - The Howard Government's betrayal of Australia, 2007, Allen and Unwin, pages 133-173.
The Four Corners episode "Flying Blind", which screened on ABC Television on 29 October, 2007. The transcript is available at: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2007/s2073943.htm.
Andrew T Ross, Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945, 1995, Turton and Armstrong.
#links" id="links">Other useful links
Transcript of of the National Interest's "Fighter jets stalk Nelson" December 2007 of 9 Dec 2007.
Transcript of the National Interest's "Joint Strike Fighter: enough bang for our billions?" of 15 April 2007.
Topic:
Greens shred WorkChoices on building site
Media Release, 20 Nov 2007
Greens lead Senate candidate Larissa Waters will join building workers on a Brisbane building site this morning to launch The Greens Charter of Workplace Rights, and pledge to abolish all of the government's WorkChoices laws and the controversial Australian Building and Construction Commission.
Ms Waters will use a shredder to destroy a copy of the Work Choices legislation at the Petrie Terrace Barracks building site at 9:30am, joined by members of the CFMEU.
“The Greens are the best option for workers and unions seeking strong and fair IR laws at the federal election,” said Ms Waters.
“The Greens are now the only party committed to replacing WorkChoices with a truly fair and equitable industrial relations system that protects the rights of workers and their families.
“The Greens stand for family-friendly industrial relations laws which enable workers to balance work, family and community life.
“We want a strong expanded safety net of minimum conditions, including overtime pay, penalty rates, public holiday pay, rest breaks and redundancy entitlements, and for collective bargaining to be at the centre of our industrial relations system.
“Prime Minister Howard’s WorkChoices continue to hurt workers and Labor has caved in to pressure from big business and weakened its policy to ‘WorkChoices-Lite’.”
“The Greens will be essential for delivering genuine IR reform if a Rudd Labor
Government is elected. Workers and unions will want the third-party insurance of a strong and independent Green voice in the Senate,” said Ms Waters.
The Greens Charter commits to:
- Scrap AWA’s and individual agreements that override awards and collective agreements;
- A strong, fair and enforceable set of minimum conditions for all employees;
- Universal access to unfair dismissal protection and redundancy pay;
- An enforceable right for employees to collectively bargain;
- Workers representatives to have the right to enter workplaces to talk with members and to ensure employers are complying with the law;
- Legal protection for democratic rights, including the right to strike; and
- Immediately abolishing the Australian Building and Construction Commission
.
A full copy of the Greens Charter of Work Rights is included below.
The Greens 'Charter of Work Rights'
- Everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and have an equal opportunity in the workplace.
Everyone has the right to a safe and healthy workplace. - Everyone has the right to decent pay and to hours of work that let them live a full, happy and healthy life. This right should be protected through enforceable minimum legal standards and fair collective agreements.
- Everyone has the right to join a union, and it is essential that unions have a right to visit employees at work to make sure employers are complying with workplace and safety laws, or to discuss union membership.
- The rights to collectively bargain, to collectively withhold labour and to collectively organise in a workplace or industry are essential to achieving a sustainable and democratic future.
- Disputes about industrial action and workplace matters should be dealt with by an industrial relations commission, not by the courts.
- Individual contracts (like AWAs) undermine awards and collective agreements. AWAs should be abolished and workers should be able to move off AWAs immediately.
- Employers should not be allowed to use ‘independent contracting’ arrangements or other such devices to undermine the rights of workers.
- The Australian Building and Construction Commission and the building industry laws undermine democratic rights.
- The ABCC and the building industry laws must be abolished.
- ‘WorkChoices’ must be repealed.
Labor’s proposed ‘WorkChoices-lite’ must be amended to reflect the above principles.
Newcastle group blocks coal train to stop climate change
Original story from www.risingtide.org.au/coaltrainblockade
Grassroots climate change action group Rising Tide has blockaded a coal train on its way into the world’s biggest coal export port, at Kooragang Island in Newcastle Harbour. No trains are able to enter Kooragang Coal Terminal because of the blockade.
The blockade comes just two days after the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report warning that the effects of climate change will be worse than previously anticipated, and five days before the Federal Election.
Spokesperson for Rising Tide, Georgina Woods, said, “Our Governments have failed us: both major parties are terminally addicted to coal. The situation is dreadful and we have been forced to take this action because the leadership of this country is morally bankrupt.”
The IPCC reports that two degree Celsius warming of the globe will put about one third of species at risk of extinction. Billions of people are predicted to be at risk of water scarcity.
“There is no longer any room for vacillation: we must act, and that is what we are doing today.”
“When faced with an overwhelming problem and a Government unwilling or unable to take action to solve the problem, it is the duty of all citizens to take action on the community’s behalf.
“There is no way Australia can continue passing the buck on climate change. We are the biggest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases and the biggest coal exporter in the world.
“Hundreds of community members have pledged to take direct-action to prevent the expansion of the coal industry.
“We are taking action today on behalf of our children, and for all those species that will be pushed to the extinction by climate change. It is unconscionable for the Government and the coal industry to continue profiting from accelerating greenhouse gas emissions in this way.”
Contact: (02) 4926 1641
Make a donation to Rising Tide
Further stories
Coal terminal blockage ended - SMH, 19 Nov 07
Australian coal train blocked from port - IndyMedia Germany, 19 Nov 07
Greenies blockade Newcastle coal train
Protester chained to railway line- Sun Herald, 19 Nov 07
Protestors block coal ships in Newcastle The Age, 19 Nov 07
Comment added by CoalPortal on 17 Nov 2011 and reposted here.
Boswell’s Senate record reveals why he’s scared of the Greens
Media release 19 Nov 2007
Senator Ron Boswell’s record of Senate inactivity could be the reason for his stated concern about losing his seat to Greens lead Senate candidate Larissa Waters.
An analysis from the Parliamentary Library shows that since the end of 2005 Ron Boswell, the leader of the Nationals in the Senate, has only managed to get to his feet 61 times, whereas Greens Senator Christine Milne has made more than four times that, at 253 speeches.
“It’s sad to see Senator Boswell resorting to attacks on the Greens, instead of hard work in the Senate for Queenslanders,” said Ms Waters.
“The Greens instigated the Senate Inquiry into Australia’s future oil supplies and alternative fuels, and it was the Greens that convinced the Liberals to support a Senate Inquiry into the impact that climate change is having on agriculture and the need for an adaptation strategy.
“No wonder Ron Boswell is worried about the rising Green vote. It’s because the Greens are a strong voice for rural Australia on climate change, water, biosecurity and quarantine.
“Just ask the citrus growers at Emerald or the taro growers from North Queensland who has taken up their issue – the answer is not the Nationals’ Ron Boswell, but the Greens’ Christine Milne.
“The Nationals have turned their backs on their own farming constituents by continuing to doubt climate change and its link to the drought.
“If Ron Boswell was genuinely concerned about Queensland workers, he would be supporting the Greens’ climate change and renewable energy policies, which will safeguard the 63,000 jobs based around the Great Barrier Reef and build on Australia's existing 20,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector.
“Queenslanders have a choice between a party that has no long term vision for the state, or a progressive party with policies to secure the future on issues like climate change, water, sustainable agriculture, good quality public health and education and respecting human rights.
“Queensland stands to gain economically, environmentally and socially from a low carbon economy, but Ron Boswell would have us continue with last century thinking and miss the boat on these new opportunities.
“On election day, Queenslanders have a clear choice of who they want to represent their state in the Senate - the progressive Greens or the short-sighted Nationals.
“Ron Boswell might as well be a Liberal party Senator, since he votes with John Howard on the vast majority of issues including the unpopular industrial relations reforms, sending troops to Iraq and selling off Telstra.
“A vote for the Greens will ensure that the Senate is restored to its role as a house of review and is not just a Coalition rubber stamp,” concluded Ms Waters.
For more information contact:
Larissa Waters
0421 844 280
larissa.waters|AT|qld.greens.org.au
Greens condemn Flannery's support for Environment Minister Turnbull
From ABC Online News, 19 December 2007:
Greens leader Bob Brown has attacked environmental scientist Dr Tim Flannery for endorsing Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
In The Age newspaper today the Australian of the Year says he would vote for Mr Turnbull, and that Federal Parliament needs more people like him to tackle climate change.
Senator Brown says he cannot understand the endorsement.
"How Tim can support a Minister who's backed a pulp mill which is going to keep 200,000 hectares of forest ... to be logged and burnt over the next 20 years is beyond me," he said.
Poor Howard government advertising standards exposed.
Release Monday 19 November 2007
The Australian Democrats continue to be outraged at the poor standards of the Coalition on Government advertising, exposed again in the annual report of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet for the year
ending June 30 2007.
"The Annual Report shows $281.3 million was spent on 'campaign' and 'non-campaign' advertising in 2006-07. A good portion of this was designed to help the Coalition retain power, rather than being useful information," said Senator Andrew Murray, Democrats Accountability spokesperson
"Following last week's scathing Audit Office report on regional funding scheme rorts, this Annual Report also does little to signal any acceptance of the need for higher standards or greater integrity by this
Coalition Government. They do have a sense of the absurd though. They measure self-satisfaction and give themselves a tick for positive feedback from members of the government and advertising agencies! If
they surveyed the citizens of Australia they would get a different picture.
"The Democrats take no issue with genuine advertising informing citizens of government programs and services. However, we do take issue with advertising that has a clear partisan and political content. Our long campaign for reform has been ignored by the Coalition.
"Together with the Labor Party and based on the Auditor-General's guidelines, the Democrats successfully moved a Senate order for more stringent controls on government advertising in 2003. To its shame, the Government has contemptuously refused to comply with this order.
"Similarly, the Government would not implement the recommendations of the December 2005 report of the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee into Government Advertising and Accountability, which laid bare the aggressive misuse of taxpayer money by the Coalition.
"This Government remains unabashed by the squandering of taxpayer funds to promote party political propaganda. It has no shame," Senator Murray concluded.
See www.democrats.org.au/docs/ActionPlans/Electoral_GovernmentAdvertising_2007.pdf
Media contact: Senator Murray 0419 958 038 or 08 9481 1455
Appendix
A quick comparison of the PM&C Annual Report with the December 2005 Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee's recommendations in its report on Government Advertising and Accountability.
The Annual Report provides information to fully satisfy one of the four items set out in recommendation 10. That is, it provides the totalfigure for government expenditure on advertising activities in 2006-07
(item 1 of recommendation 10, see p76 of the annual report, $196.4 M on campaign advertising and $84.9 M for non-campaign advertising in 2006-07).
There is some information on expenditure by agency (item 2 of recommendation 10). However this is limited to information on major campaigns, not all campaigns. The disaggregated information accounts for $124 M (around 63%) of the $196.4 M total.
The annual report does not provide any information on the media type and time (item 3 of recommendation 10) nor detailed information about major campaigns (item 4 of recommendation 10).
Information relating to recommendation 11 (disaggregated agency figures) appears to be included to some extent in individual portfolio reports. For example a quick check of DOFA (p102) and DHS's (p225) annual reports
shows that this information is being included by individual portfoliosin compliance with section 311A of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.
There is some limited information on PM&C's expenditure in relation to recommendation 12 (public opinion research). Page 191 for example shows $50,782 to Corporate Diagnostics for 'client satisfaction of campaign
and non-campaign media placement agencies'. Similar limited information is provided in the DOFA (p102) and DHS's (p225) annual reports again as a result of section 311A of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.
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