Australia Watch

NSW: far right get their foot in the door of public policy

2011-07-30T22:42:00.003+10:00

It's an obvious piece of commentary, but I think still bears noting, that the victory of the Coalition in NSW, and their ability to rule with support from the Shooters and Christians in the Upper House means that the far right have a serious influence now in NSW. OF course, their influence is marginal, and mainly confined to ramping up shooting in national parks and prayer in schools. The exacerbates though what is genuinely awful situation of having the Coalition in government – given that Labour is really already clearly on the right of the political spectrum by any reasonable measure, we're dealing with a radical right-wing government already.

This is dissimilar to the situation federally inasmuch as the need for support from independents federally for Labour to rule means that Labour is not simply dragged to the left by the Greens – more's the pity.

The Chinese Connection

2011-06-07T12:59:00.002+10:00

Optimism about the Australian economic outlook is premised on the idea that Chinese demand for resource exports will carry Australia through. I do not believe that the resources sector is really capable of keeping the Aus economy afloat, and that what is really keeping it afloat is precisely the myth of its own robustness. But in any case, it seems dubious to think that the Chinese demand will last forever. To wit, a couple of pieces by Bloomberg correspondent William Pesek. Firstly, this general piece, warning about the stability of the Chinese economy. Secondly, a more specific warning directed at Australia.

Finally?

2011-06-01T10:51:00.003+10:00

The Australian economy has kept rumbling forward for the last couple of years like a headless chicken. "Look how it runs around! It's not dead!" But, sooner or later, chickens must come home to rot. The key point of vulnerability and volubility in the Australian economy is the house price bubble. This is now deflating everywhere but Sydney. In conjunction, the economy has just nosedived into recession (though not by the strict definition by which only several quarters of recession is counted as recession). The blame for the latter is being placed on the weather, much as it was in the UK earlier this year. But you put these two things together and one may see the crucial puncture. Of course, given a global situation in which capital has nowhere to go, and with Australian interest rates still so high, mass capital flight is not upon us yet. But we may finally see the adjustment to house prices and dollar that we've been waiting for.

Update The chicken is teetering, woohoo.

2011-02-14T21:26:00.001+11:00

David Marr's series on the rights of religions in Australia continues in greater depth: the overall conclusion here must be that the state and churches are not separate in Australia.

2011-02-12T20:53:00.003+11:00

Here's an interesting little nugget: private schools in NSW are allowed to exclude students on the grounds of their sexuality. An interesting way to turn this around, it occurs to me, might be to establish a gay-only private school, pending what I think is the almost inevitable abolition of this law.

2011-01-21T15:09:00.000+11:00

Soldiers at urban military installations to be armed, given immunity from prosecution in cases of killing civilians.

2010-12-13T18:38:00.002+11:00

This story is a little confusing to the capsule narrative I have of Tanya Plibersek, viz. that she's about the most left-wing federal Labor MP in NSW. Here she appears as the right fringe of the Left, demanding action against WikiLeaks. It is hard to imagine how she can be called left-wing at all on this basis. It's an odd thing for her to say, because the ALP strategy for retaining her seat seems to be to compete with the Greens on a left-wing terrain. Perhaps with the precedent being set in Melbourne of the Libs preferencing Labor, a new strategy of wooing Liberal preferences is to be expected in the inner city.

2010-12-09T15:28:00.001+11:00

Wikileaks reveals Mark Arbib's contacts with the US embassy.

2010-12-07T13:38:00.001+11:00

Workers being forced to work through Christmas? This is surely something that will be generally understood as 'unAustralian', that the Right, with their defence of the family and Christian institutions, will oppose, in short, that finds no support within mainstream political opinion.

2010-12-02T00:59:00.001+11:00

A cartoon character that represents Australia meets a kangaroo.

2010-10-23T00:11:00.000+11:00

Terrorism (Police Powers) Amendment Bill 2010 passed in NSW

2010-08-02T00:35:00.001+10:00

This is a rare act of wanton disregard of ecological concerns, representing a reduction of quality to quantity in an absurd way. In a state and a country that just seem to be getting worse all the time, this is beyond satire.

2010-04-06T12:22:00.001+10:00

Marcus Strom on the absence of oppsition within the ALP to the war on Afghanistan.

Anonymous cyber-attacks on Australian government

2010-02-13T06:31:00.001+11:00

I don't necessarily endorse the view that there is anything intrinsically desirable about a total freedom of 'information', but I do share the view that the Australian federal government's moves towards restricting the internet are extremely sinister.

2010-01-28T18:51:00.002+11:00

This is a dark fucking day: the dependence of Sydney on a really unnecessary desalination programme is established.

SMH Election Petition

2009-12-11T08:00:00.002+11:00

The Sydney Morning Herald has launched a campaign to amend the NSW constitution to get rid of fixed terms. A modest, and completely non-specific, reform proposal.

The principle that the people should be able to recall the government tends in the direction of democracy. Though the word 'recall' is being bandied around here, the petition does not include it: the simplest way to end fixed terms is to allow parliament to choose when to call an election. There's nothing particularly admirable about that principle. There's no reason to think that things would be better with it.

The campaign for a recall provision is effectively a secondary, subsidiary objective for the paper. This is a noble cause in itself, however. That said, in our current position, it's not possible to see any particular advantage to it. A new election would either legitimise the Labor government, or install a Coalition government that would scarcely be preferable.

The suggestion we would put forward is to abolish the state of NSW, and the states of Australia generally, as the way to deal with the entrenched corruption that can be found in their institutions. They are outdated colonial institutions for which there is simply no longer any need or advantage, only a financial burden to the taxpayer and an obstacle to clarity for the voters.

Keneally

2009-12-09T00:19:00.005+11:00

I suppose we should find it rather comforting that our leaders aren't surrounded by a phalanx of security goons who would prevent this kind of thing from happening. This is, more realistically, probably because we have so many tiers of government that they can't afford that, not to mention that the NSW premier is just a placeholder and not worth protecting. Anyway, here's to our first American premier.

Ethics

2009-11-25T04:45:00.004+11:00

The putative introduction of 'ethics' classes in NSW is pretty interesting, but hardly great news. It represents certainly a slippage in power of the old, religious ideologies, but indicates the intent of state to ensure that bourgeois ideology is inculcated into Australian workers one way or the other.

By the way, I'm opening this log up to comments as of this post. Let's see how it goes.

Recession-proof?

2009-11-18T11:41:00.003+11:00

Notwithstanding the strenuousness of the technical definition of recession – such that the economy has to keep contracting for multiple quarters, and actually has to contract at that, whereas Ross Gittins points out very low levels of growth will look and feel like a recession – Australia seems to have dodged the recession bullet.

Well, part of this is clearly due to the stimulus package, which meant that the public purse took the hit for the team. But it wasn't Rudd or Swan's fiscal genius that meant that the Australian stimulus prevented recession whereas the American or British ones didn't – something else is going on. Basically, the Australian economy is – no surprises – different from those of Britain or America: less dependent on the financial services sector, more reliant on primary production.

The big surprise to me is that the demand for Australian primary goods hasn't collapsed. That is, that the demand for primary goods hasn't collapsed full stop. Why hasn't this happened? The answer is that Asian demand hasn't collapsed, because Asia's not in recession, and that's where all the coal and shit is going to.

Why hasn't Asian demand collapsed, though? Asian growth has been fuelled by exporting to First World countries, where the economy is in serious trouble.

Has demand for Asian goods outside Asia fallen? Yes, I think so, but not by that much: Asia makes what is cheap, so what is likely to still be bought in the bad times, and the stimulus packages have stimulated purchases of Asian-made goods. Retail spending is resilient in Britain, for example, and this has been ensured by public policy. Moreover, we have the Asian version of the stimulus, the reorientation of the Chinese economy towards domestic consumption.

Well, now what? Is everything going to be fine? I still can't help waiting for the other shoe to drop. The great flaw in the world economic system it seemed to me was that Asia was producing for markets who couldn't afford to buy, and were buying on massive credit lines extended, effectively, by Asia. This is precisely what precipitated the crisis, because the credit stretched to breaking point. Now some of the credit's been nationalised and everyone's trying to get back to business as usual, i.e. running up enormous amounts of credit and importing Chinese plasticware. I can't see this ending well: indeed, what I expect to happen is an almighty crash, again, and at some point there is going to be no restarting the credit-bubble-economy.

Australia is not immune: it runs a substantial current account deficit, if not as substantial, and is also (therefore) a credit-bubble economy, if not to the same extent as other parts of the Anglosphere.

Monopoly of Harm

2009-11-18T11:31:00.002+11:00

One has to say that it is prima facie absurd to shoot someone to stop them harming themselves. You could argue that if they were trying to kill themselves, then wounding them to prevent it would be a public health intervention, but it seems that in this case the police were concerned to prevent their right to harm members of the public from being usurped.

2009-10-14T04:44:00.003+11:00

You know NSW Labor is in trouble when Bob Carr starts criticising them.

So, the state government, notoriously dependent on gaming revenues, scraps a policy of continuous increase in the excise on those same revenues. Surely, this is self-defeating. Well, yes, but it may have its logic. Dependency on the gaming industry could conceivably lead to concessions to it, particularly if there is a belief that raising taxes beyond a certain point will harm revenues.

Legalise Abortion

2009-10-05T09:54:00.002+11:00

The existence of this article goes a long way to support its own message: mainstream Australian opinion is outraged by the illegality of abortion in Australia. Not only is Australian abortion law cruel and oppressive, its also unpopular and undemocratic, representative of the power of certain powerful religious lobbies.

Environment, economics, migration

2009-09-23T05:01:00.004+10:00

I'd file this Ross Gittins article under uncomfortable truths. It sheds light on no fewer than three worthwhile things: firstly that our leaders and we are in practice ignoring the urgency of the danger posed by climate change; secondly that GDP growth is being taken as more fundamental then environmental sustainability in our public discourse (a point I've up to now only heard made on the far left); thirdly that Australia is effectively addicted now to mass immigration.

Actually, Gittins doesn't make any of these points quite as I have, least of all the last point. What he says about immigration is simply that people by moving to Australia become greater burdens on the ecosphere. This is a correct argument as far as it goes. It does not have to be an anti-immigration argument. We can deal with this problem by reducing Australia's per capita unsustainability and wastefulness, and indeed should and must do so. Gittins of course is correctly cynical about the chances of this happening.

What he doesn't explore is how immigration ties to the obsession with GDP growth in a way that runs counter to a concern with the environment. Immigration is driven by economic imperatives: it's not popular, nor necessary to placate any external actor. Rather, it is urged on by the bourgeoisie that run Australia, and they want the labour – cheap labour, more to the point, labour which is notionally skilled but doesn't use its skills, which is non-unionised, non-English-speaking, marginalised. And the larger the population gets, the more of this they need (on average, notwithstanding effects of economic decline).

2009-07-13T02:13:00.004+10:00

This article starts with a set-piece of Australian propaganda in the SMH. The scene is set: fog of war, accident, tragedy. The facts: Australian special forces killed an Afghan man. This fact is not in itself important enough to be newsworthy, however – Australians presumably kill Afghans all the time – but that this Afghan turned out to be an important Afghan, and ally of the Western occupiers.

The rest of the article actually is quite interesting, detailing a rather complex set of questions. The problem is the unwillingness of the Australian media to accept that the Australian military are engaged in the practices of bloodletting which has long been associated with imperialist occupations.

Compare indeed this article yesterday. The basic point of it is that an 'atrocity' – committed against enemy corpses – was committed by Australian troops in Vietnam in 1969. On the one hand, the 40 years that have passed allow an admission of what I haven't heard admitted in respect of Australians in the current conflict. Moreover, this doesn't insinuate Australian involvement in any illegal killings, only in the desecration of corpses, the implication being that all those corpses were killed legitimately in the conduct of war. I don't know if that's the case, but of course, Australians did kill civilians in Vietnam.

2009-07-12T16:03:00.002+10:00

The reporting of the shooting of an Australian mining apparatchik in Indonesian-occupied West Papua in Australia is predictably a fog of sentimentality. The obvious individual tragedy that occurs when people are killed – we all have families, many of us have children, etc. – completely obscures the political issues, which are not personal, but larger. This man's personal motivations are relevant to him and his family: yes, surely he was trying to earn money to provide a relatively opulent life for his family in the Australian metropole. This is a consistent motivation among the servants of imperialism. In a sense, the concatenation of such motivations provides the motive force for imperialism: it may even be possible to say that such motivations are, in a strict sense, evil, because of the morally bankrupt behaviour that they lead people to engage in.

For whatever reason, this man has engaged in an operation which is utterly politically dubious: the theft of the patrimony of a colonised and oppressed people. Well should they shoot him. Of course, it's possible that it is not the Papuan resistance that has shot him. It is possible that pro-Indonesian forces shot him precisely to discredit the resistance. It is possible that he was killed for reasons having to do specifically with the politics of business, with commercial interests and bribes, for example. We have only speculation, but the media story casts what has happened banally as 'tragedy', regardless of any facts.

The Absence of Banking Sector Reform

2009-07-08T00:58:00.002+10:00

The intervention of economists to demand a change to the banking establishment in Australia strikes me as rather noteworthy. As is pointed out in the linked article, we are in a period of consolidation between the 'big four', the cartel that already control banking in Australia. The intervention of economists is an acknowledgement of the central role of banking in contemporary capitalism, such that it really can't be left to such arrangements. The government response is even more telling: government is beholden to finance-capital, and will not act against it. The reaction by Christopher Joye, that the government is being 'complacent', is I think too kind. The British government has not been complacent in the crisis: it has acted to rescue the banking sector in a way that has yet to disturb established monopolies, but has rather helped them. Repeated and continuing calls to use the Post Office in the UK as the basis for a national bank, combined with the assets of nationalised banks, have fallen on deaf ears at the centre.

Ross Gittins on tax cuts for the rich

2009-07-01T14:04:00.002+10:00

Rudd's electoral me-tooism trumps his 'fiscal conservatism'. The result: tax cuts keep accruing to the rich, while the economy sinks and the hole in the budget widens.

Sydney water situation

2009-06-21T18:13:00.002+10:00

There's now enough water in Sydney's dams that the water restrictions – which were hardly swingeing – will be lifted. Construction on a desalination plant, now more than ever clearly unnecessary, continues apace.

Same-sex recognition ironies

2009-06-20T04:57:00.002+10:00

This SMH article nicely captures certain ironies around the state recognition of homosexual relationships. The basic irony is that the Australian government will suddenly go from completely refusing to recognise these, to mandating that they be recognised: that is, homosexual relationships will go from being utterly ignored by the state, to being closely surveilled; the state will now actively investigate benefit claimants to determine whether they are in homosexual relationships. This is particularly irksome to those who've been in long term relationships with one set of state arrangements in place, only now to be faced with a completely different set. For example, historically parents in same-sex couples were counted as single parents for the purposes of government payments; now, they face being hounded by the state in an effort to reduce their payments to reflect the financial status of someone in a partnership.

As it historically has, it seems to me that the only equitable way for the state to deal with people's relationships is to stay out of them. The state should not be in the business of trying to surveille people's personal arrangements, but rather should be giving benefits on the basis of people's individual circumstances, not on the basis of presumed economic bases related to sexual activity or cohabitation.

Cooked to death

2009-06-15T08:58:00.003+10:00

For anyone who doesn't already know, the British Guardian's write-up of an Aboriginal elder 'cooked to death' (apparently the coroner's verdict) by a private prison-transport company.

Article on anti-bypass lands right struggle

2009-05-23T09:51:00.003+10:00

I find it extraordinary that articles such as Damien Murphy's Racism and violence emerge in fight over bypass can appear in the bourgeois press. This seems to me to be progressive journalism, pure and simple, which is only harmful to the interests of capital. The possibility of such journalism is one reason that I've historically championed the SMH. I don't see such journalism in the British print media, even that section of it owned by the Scott Trust.

Rudd Money

2009-05-11T16:38:00.002+10:00

Many of the poorest and most vulnerable will miss out on Rudd's $900 stimulus payments.

Rudd's stated aim in providing these payments is to stimulate the economy. Broadly, the poorer one is, the more likely one is to spend the payment, and the more likely one is to spend the payment on basic goods and services rather than luxuries. Any way you slice it, this exclusion of millions of the poor from the stimulus makes no economic sense.

What then is the logic? There are two possible ones: one moral-ideological, the other practical. I suppose both operate to some extent. Morally, the claim will be that only those who've paid tax 'deserve' a rebate, playing on the near-ubiquitous but baseless beliefs that earning money means that one deserves it, that money exists prior to and independently of the state and taxation, that money is real, etc.

Practically, the impetus is simply that it's middle-income earners that decide elections: the poor basically preference Labor; only those who are wealthier can be swayed, and I think many people come 2011 will still remember this bonus – they'll look at their new TV every day and remember Rudd's largesse.

Grants culture

2009-04-28T10:55:00.002+10:00

I am embarrassed to be posting this only now, over a year after it first appeared, but I have only just come across it: Stephen Buckle's 'Starved for some loving attention' which is I think a near-perfect analysis of What Howard Has Done To The Humanities in Australia.

"All good things must come to an end"

2009-04-23T14:56:00.004+10:00

This is the incredible comment made by KRudd in relation to the bonus first homebuyer's grant (SMH article), despite the unwillingness of Rudd and the rest of the Australian political class to acknowledge this in relation to the broader economy.

Pulling the plug on these grants as of 30 June will cause two things to happen. Firstly, it will further overheat the housing market, as thousands upon thousands of buyers scramble to get on the property ladder. Sensible sellers will also be scrambling to sell at the same time. In fact, if you want to move, make sure to sell your house before 30 June and buy after the 30 June, because for once we have advance warning of the date on which a property bubble will collapse. The collapse in value we will see starting on 1 July will exceed the value of the first homebuyers' bonus. It will be an implosion of property prices across Australia, probably unprecedented, since this will occur exactly as the global depression really starts to slam into the country. That is, it doesn't make sense to buy a house before June 30, only to sell one.

The use of a homebuyers' grant as a form of economic stimulus only works if it is supposed to keep values up throughout a recession - yet Rudd is abandoning it exactly as the recession starts to take hold. The obvious conclusion is that that I made as soon as the grant was announced: this is not a stimulus package at all, but rather a bailout of petty bourgeois 'buy-to-let' property speculators, which includes most of the political class itself.

Camden

2009-04-23T09:45:00.002+10:00

The news from Camden is unbelievable Islamophobic twaddle: local residents believe that Islam is a religion of world domination, terrorism and intolerance. I can't help but find their comments hilarious, though doubtless there is very great cause for concern here. I suspect the reaction of most will be to rail against the ignorance and bigotry of the individuals involved, but this I think misses the point, which is that such Islamophobic discourses are alive and circulating in Australia today, discourses which are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of Islamophobia. These people are simply repeating what they've been told. What we are dealing with here is a wider culture of Islamophobia, not some isolated cluster in the backcountry.

Advice to first-home-buyers

2009-04-22T10:44:00.001+10:00

Jessica Irvine's article in this morning's SMH is simply excellent – I couldn't have put it better myself.

Australia adamant in defence of Zionist racism

2009-04-20T08:00:00.002+10:00

Not much media prominence here for the Australian government announcement that they will follow the widely reported announcement of the racist Obama administration that Australia will boycott a UN summit on racism (SMH report).

It would seem that for the Australian government, as for the US government, criticism of Apartheid in Palestine is something that cannot be countenanced, even if this means refusing international cooperation against racism. That is, support for Israel trumps both the UN system and anti-racism. Of course, we knew this: anyone who is genuinely anti-racist could never support Israel, nor could anyone who has any respect for the UN system.

Notable is that the Australian Human Rights Commission, which seems to be operating rather independently of and occasionally in opposition too the Australian government, are nonetheless sending their own delegation.

ATM charges

2009-04-14T17:13:00.004+10:00

Just over a month ago, Australia introduced, for some reason, rules by which all banks would charge the customers of competing banks to use their ATMs, typically $2 a withdrawal. This has kind of fucked those of us who use a credit union, since credit unions don't have big ATM networks of their own. I expect this will in turn fuck credit unions, since customers would save money by moving to a bank with the largest networks. In general, the bank with the largest network will tend to profit from this – it's essentially an engine of monopolisation and not, as the RBA claim, an attempt to increase competition. In light of big banks in the UK and US getting into such trouble of late, it's possible for banks to demand that the government funnel all cash into them to keep them solvent, and I suspect that this is what's happening here.

The big news is a tiny bank, Bankwest, which pays its customers' charges at rivals' ATMs for them. However, the only reason Bankwest does this is because it will has to – this may also be the case for the credit unions, but whether they will be able to, or whether Bankwest can keep this up, remains to be seen. If people move their accounts to Bankwest in sufficient numbers, something might be done, I suppose, but there's not much inducement for people to do this if their current bank has a sufficiently large network, hence little inducement for the large operators to change their undoubtedly lucrative new charging policy.

Fibreoptic rollout

2009-04-11T15:35:00.002+10:00

This article by Peter Hartcher makes for fairly extraordinary reading.

Kevin Rudd's bold election promise in respect of internet access in Australia indeed played a key role in his victory, largely because it was perhaps the most important thing that wooed Rupert Murdoch to his cause (the next most important thing was Howard's contempt for the education system, or perhaps just Howard's arrogance more generally).

Rudd proceeded on his plan by attempting to find a private contractor to do the job. This failed, since there were none willing or able. The main obstacle was that basically the only entity that is able is the telecommunications monopoly, Telstra, and they have an arrogance to fit their monopoly status, combined with the greed of a private-sector corporation.

Rudd's solution here is exactly what one would advise: he decides to do the whole thing as a public-sector project (though one presumes much of the work will still be through private contractors). The main problem for this is that the project as he originally envisaged it, fibre-to-the-node, relied on the usage of Telstra's local copper wire networks. The boldest step of all then, is to simply roll fibreoptic cable to every household in the country, at a gigantic cost of over $40 billion, 49% of the funding of which is to come from public or private subscription.

The genius of this is that it not just sidesteps, but ultimately kills, the privatised behemoth Telstra: Telstra's copper wire network will be reduced to its scrap value once every household has fibreoptic cable.

But of course, this is hardly socialism: it's the government stepping in to do what business demands in terms of providing infrastructure. It's being done on a maximally market model, though there is perhaps here at best a synergy of public and private interest that indicates that capitalism hasn't completely outlived its usefulness to humanity.

Bushfire scapegoating

2009-02-10T14:14:00.003+11:00

A narrative is being constructed around the Victorian bushfires of the last few days, the worst in Australian history, a narrative of "mass murder", in which arsonists have killed 180 or so people.

But this assignment of blame is dubious. The most deadly fires do not seem to have been caused by arson, and though some have been, the usefulness of this reduction of the issue to morality and individual responsibility, through the bourgeois logic of criminal liability, is moot. One cannot stop individual acts of arson – one can do more to prevent them perhaps than one can to prevent lightning strikes, but one can't prevent them entirely – and this means that this can happen again.

Why have the most deadly fires in Australian history happened today? Is it because there are more arsonists today? Or because there are more people living in fire-prone areas today? The first question is impossible to answer with any great degree of accuracy, and the second must be answered in the negative. Rather, we should point to two environmental factors: the first, the impact of Australian colonisation on the bush, which has been to disrupt its established balances, and indeed broadly to forbid fire, which has no commercial application, thus storing up trouble (arguably); the second, which we can point to more emphatically and with more evidence, is global warming. It can surely not be coincidental that the fires coincided with the most severe heatwave in Victorian history. And this cannot be coincidental to climate change caused by human activity.

Economic denial continues

2009-01-19T13:59:00.002+11:00

America I think has tended to accept what's happening fairly well, albeit that there is some naïve hope focused around the new president; in the UK, denial about the crisis mainly focuses on denial about how long it'll last, but there's been a move from imagining it'll be a one-year thing to a more realistic 2–3 years. In Australia, however, denial continues. The Sun Herald yesterday led with a story about how NSW was in recession – but wouldn't be for long. The state government has now retorted that NSW is not in recession at all. The point is really not whether NSW is in recession or not, but rather that sooner rather than later the entire Australian economy will be in a state of collapse. Australia was sustained through the early noughties recession by the fact that primary production remained robust, in particular with there being good harvests, and a lack of exposure to hi-tech industry. Every significant segment of the Australian economy is today rampantly exposed, however. Primary production is primarily geared towards an Asian market that is in collapse, driven as it was by production for the US market primarily. The very significant financial services sector is in itself a sick economic segment. The tourism sector is dependent on overseas visitors who can easily not come to Australia. These are the three segments where the recession will start. The construction industry has already died in the arse, and the housing bubble is due to burst any minute once job losses feed through into forced sales and repossessions. The biggest Australian secondary industry, automotive, is highly prone to recession as it's easy for people and companies not to buy new cars. The education sector will be one of the last to go, with Asian students being unable to afford to come here in such numbers, and more importantly cease to be so interested in immigrating to Australia with the Australian economy in recession. With this goes the demographic increase that is in itself a driver of the Australian economy, particularly construction.

As I argued elsewhere some years ago now (3.5 years ago, I think), the Australian economy is a house of cards in which any slipping element can make the whole thing fall over. There is no way this precarious structure can weather the current international economic maelstrom.

Fiscal stimulus – Australian style

2009-01-15T09:01:00.002+11:00

I note that the Sydney housing market is not behaving like it should giving the looming tide of economic depression – that in fact it remains buoyant, at least as reported by the Herald, a paper which is known for spruiking real estate, however.

Still, there are important things to note here. One is the giant injection of federal money into housing in the form of the increased first homebuyer's grant. I'm tempted to see this as a bailout of the speculative buyers and builders who are currently holding the properties that the first homebuyers will buy, and who are otherwise sitting on unsaleable houses. It is of course obviously also a subsidy to people to buy houses, but this in fact depends on the real value of houses, which is fairly difficult to determine. It's quite possible that in the longer term even with the grant, especially in more expensive properties where the grant is a relatively small proportion of the purchase price, that the homeowners will be left out of pocket in time.

The fundamental driver of any housing market is population growth. In recent times we've seen a massive additional impetus to it in the form of the wealth effect caused by cheap credit, the additional employment seen in the wealth-effect economy, and the high salaries in certain sectors that accompanied it, and then a further major impetus in the form of speculation. The wealth effect one can expect to now disappear – this includes the drying up of cheap credit, rising unemployment and lower household incomes. Speculation worked on a perception that property prices would just keep rising, and in current circumstances has itself largely dried up. This all spells a crash in housing prices. I doubt population growth will hold up either – the collapse of the economy will likely reduce immigration, a major component of Sydney's population growth, and may even result in increased emigration.

The real wild card here is what the government will do. The Australian government is still enamoured of the wealth-effect economy like so other governments, and is trying to jump-start it again, an attempt that may have short-term success, but cannot have long-term success. The value of those grants are being built into the national debt and will have to be paid off by the battlers they are apparently helping, so this 'free money' is rather illusory.

Germaine Greer on Australia

2008-12-17T13:21:00.001+11:00

from yesterday's English Guardian

PPP

2008-12-11T07:47:00.002+11:00

This is your public-private partnership – the public purse lines the pockets of the bourgeoisie. According to this article, the Sydney Harbour tunnel cost $550 million to build. Rather than pay this money, the shifty NSW government of the day got a private company to build it, to operate as a toll road, to recoup vast profits from the users. However, just to make sure they'd build it, the government removed the element of risk on which capitalist enterprise supposedly thrives, and guaranteed not simply the investment, but the profits.

What is the point of such a deal? Well, it means that the state can avoid an initial outlay. But it also means that they are deliberately foregoing a revenue stream that they know will be profitable. Since it will be run as a near-monopoly (actually in competition only with the government's own harbour bridge), there is no likely advantage to consumers or profitability having it privately-run. It's thus simply short-termism.

The claim that the tunnel cannot generate enough revenue to run is total nonsense – the problem is not that the tunnel is not financially viable, but that it's not profitable, that it cannot make the giant returns required by finance capital for them to get out of bed in the morning.

Why the short-termism? Two reasons: firstly neoliberal ideology, and secondly the shambolic Australian federalism. The influence of the first should be obvious enough: cutting taxes is good, private industry is good. The second is less noticed, but operative: the state of NSW is hard-pressed to afford serious infrastructure investment. Nationally, however, it becomes possible for the government to invest $1 billion dollars in an infrastructure project in Sydney, on the understanding that the next time it has money it'll go to Melbourne. To some extent the existing federal government already does operate like this, but imagine what it could do if it had all the money in one pot, and if proportional representation cut out the pork-barrelling.

The strong arm of internet censorship

2008-12-08T16:18:00.002+11:00

Two incidents in a short period of time seem to presage things to come with new internet laws; these pertain to existing laws about the depiction of children on the internet.

A 60 year-old Queensland man arrested for uploading an already widely disseminated video of a man playing with a baby in a way that is dangerous, although not evidently harmful to the baby and asexual.

A NSW man is convicted for possessing (not disseminating) a video depicting Bart and Lisa Simpson engaged in sexual acts, which is covered by the child pornography laws according to the presiding judge, though he sensibly rules that this is not as serious as the depiction of actual children. Nevertheless, the very fact that the mere possession of a single video of actual children is said by this judge to warrant incarceration seems deeply OTT. I could right now (I presume) with a few clicks and keystrokes find and download an image of such actual child pornography, possibly in error. The mere possession would then potentially earn me a jail sentence, despite the fact that there would be no link between my actions and any abuse depicted in the video.

Appeal for contributions

2008-11-17T11:10:00.002+11:00

Though I never intentionally stopped maintaining this site, I must concede that it has ceased to function in fact. It was never my intention to maintain this site by myself – it began as a group blog with the intention of the group of bloggers expanding, but it's dwindled to no-one. I believe that this blog is still necessary, and I hope that someone will put their hand up to revitalise it with contributions. I am still willing to operate it in an editorial capacity. Anyone in any way interested should contact auswatch at gmail.com

2008-10-11T14:00:00.001+11:00

NT Occupation furthers cultural genocide by using law to smash traditional cultural arrangements, does not prosecute paedophiles.

Garnaut

2008-09-09T01:04:00.003+10:00

Condemnation by climate scientists of the Garnaut report is well placed.

Garnaut is an economist, and as such is concerned with the stability of the economic system. He recognises climate change, and tries to put in place a feasible plan for reduction of human activity related to warming.

The scientists however deal in objective reality: we need to radically reduce emissions now, or we're going to die. You can talk about whether other countries should be reducing their output and what is achievable, but all the while we're literally destroying the ecosphere. Preventing this destruction is something in the order of an absolute: we just need to do it, and other costs pale in comparison.

APEC exclusion lists

2008-09-08T16:34:00.002+10:00

We are not surprised by the nature of the APEC exclusion lists, namely that they were devised with the purpose of preventing demonstrations, not at preventing riots or terrorism. Actually, probably the most surprising thing about the news story is that the lists were obtainable under freedom of information protocols at all, which in Australia are notoriously unfree. Of course, the names had been removed from the lists, but I'm still surprised they didn't manage to keep them hidden for decades.

Quotes on mandatory detention

2008-07-19T09:10:00.002+10:00

From an article in the SMH today:*

Labor MP Michael Danby on the $396 million Christmas Island detention centre: "giant Liberal steel prophylactic, a rusting stalag in the Christmas Island jungle and a monument to the folly of the previous government".

Deputy PM Julia Gillard: "We've always said that if people arrived unauthorised, they will have to be detained for health, security and identity checks." (This is a pretty minimal detention regime, more akin to mandatory quarantine. However, it's premises are dubious. Why do unauthorized arrivals have to be detained for such checks? Plenty of people can enter Australia without health checks and with only the security and identity checks in the immigration and customs halls in the airport terminal. The reason to detain immigrants is not for such tests, but precisely to prevent their entry into Australia. As such, the process must lead either to deportation or indefinite detention.)

Former detainee, Morteza Poorvadi: "The Iranian government could break our bones but not break our spirit; we were fighting for some reason. In Australia they break your spirit, they make you feel you are nothing, not in control of your life, they tell you when to sleep, eat, watch TV, what time to smoke. They say you are nothing and if you don't like it, just go back."

*The weird tagline to this article is "The question is not whether we detain asylum seekers, but on what terms, writes Connie Levett." Weird, because Levett does not phrase the debate in this scurrilous way – rather, it is phrased this way by the former detainee at the heart of the article, Morteza Poorvadi, and by the federal parliamentary inquiry, according to Levett.

Right to annoy constitutionally protected

2008-07-15T17:28:00.001+10:00

Australian federal judicial authorities have struck down the outlawing of annoying behaviour towards World Youth Day pilgrims in NSW. This is a significant, but of course incomplete, victory. Political activity that disrupts physically ('inconveniences') the operation of the shebang is remains illegal.

Update: Interesting article in the Herald today by two UNSW legal scholars. Their claim is that the judgment is really anomalous: it's based only on the claim that parliament somehow did not intend to pass an element of the legislation it did pass. As such, it's really a dubious judgment, one that is more by accident than by any check or balance other than the sheer existence of judicial oversight. This really boils down to something that everyone should know, although probably rather few do, namely that there is no overarching protection of freedom of speech in Australia.

Pell on demography

2008-07-14T17:19:00.002+10:00

Very interesting are the Australian Catholic primate Cardinal Pell's comments on the relation between religion and demographics: effectively he's linking the decline of religion causally to a demographic decline, which in turn is characterised as a disaster. There's two dubious steps here: firstly the causal link, and secondly the normative characterisation. I'm surprised never to have heard this line before, thinking about it: for Christians, it is surely our duty to go forth and multiply? Actually, not really, I suppose. While this is clearly a tenet of Islam, Christianity is much more death-driven: for Christian morality sex is bad. So sex without kids is worse than sex with, since it makes it purposeless sin, but no kids and demographic annihilation is the logical consequence of everyone embracing Christ-like celibacy.

The causal link is basically a joke. Demographic decline is occurring, I would suggest, because of a variety of things including the welfare state (you don't have to have kids to provide in old age), relative economic prosperity (ditto), women's liberation (women have something to do other than have kids – although this freedom has of course been turned against us in neoliberalism, with an injunction to toil replacing the former injunction to breed, driving breeding still lower). It's true that women's liberation is to some extent the outcome of the decline of traditional religion that assigned women to a breeding role, but that doesn't mean it's the result of a decline of religiosity per se – if anything, this is another result of the decline of tradition, which mandated both sexual subservience and religiosity. The welfare state has also partially replaced traditional religion, as indeed has relative economic prosperity. In short, the same social shift encompassing secularisation and low rates of demographic increase – getting back into religion isn't going to help, although getting into Catholicism might since it would mean identifying sex with breeding.

The negative characterisation of demographic decline is something I'm even more surprised not to have seen lately. The only place one typically hear's such talk however, is on the extreme right. It's therefore ipso facto worrying to hear a mainstream figure like Pell talking in a way that obviously connotes notions of racial vitality.

Catholics in the NSW government

2008-07-12T01:25:00.002+10:00

Rigorous constitutional separation of religion and state anyone? Succinct Herald article detailing NSW ministers' relations to the religious aspects of World Youth Day. Bottom-line: purported economic benefits of government support of World Youth Day don't stack up. At best, it's electoral pandering; at worst, a hobby-horse of a Catholic regime. Either way there's better things to spend the money on in NSW. The best example would be transportation infrastructure.

Catholic Church in Australia: still in denial

2008-07-08T01:53:00.003+10:00

ABC's Lateline last night staged a timely intervention, showing that the Australian Catholicism was still in the business of protecting its officers who have sexually assaulted its flock.

Specifically, the Australian primate, Cardinal George Pell, misrepresented the findings of Church investigations into one clergyman to that clergyman's victim, Anthony Jones. An internal inquiry into the case found a substantial admission of guilt from the clergyman and upheld the complaints of sexual assault, but Pell in a letter to Jones claimed that the inquiry had found no evidence, that the clergyman involved had denied the claims, and, moreover, that the clergyman involved had never had any other claims made against him. However, it appears that Pell the same day wrote to another victim of the clergyman's upholding their complaint! This kind of dissimulation is breathtaking, and shows the Catholic Church today to be an organisation mired in criminal conspiracy to commit acts of sexual assault against people in its care.

Update: Pell has responded with the fairly unbelievable claim that the drafting of the letter to Jones was a mistake – still in denial indeed.

History of Sydney WYD by Linda Morris

2008-07-07T17:01:00.003+10:00

here

Incredibly, this is entitled 'Almost There: The Long Road to Success', despite the fact that what it details is more in the order of a farce than a success – modest governmental support for WYD, becomes a ballooning burden to the public purse, federal, state and local, and a pain in the arse for Sydneysiders. From figures at the end, it looks as if we're talking state subsidies to WYD in the order of $500 per pilgrim.

RTBU call strike action for WYD

2008-07-07T14:42:00.004+10:00

The Rail, Tram and Bus Union have called a strike on the trains in Sydney for World Youth Day. I suppose this may by brinkmanship and may not actually happen, but if it does it is very significant, in that it means that the RTBU are acting with complete indifference to both the Catholic Church (which has historically had a good deal of interpenetration with the Australian labour movement, particularly in Catholic strongholds like Sydney) and the Australian Labor Party, or more specifically its Right faction, which governs NSW, thus are the bosses as far as CityRail is concerned, and, as we've previously reported, is Catholic-dominated and sponsoring WYD in Sydney. This is not a complete surprise, in that it's in line with the RTBU's criticism of the ALP for some time, as well as being part of a general hostility from the labour movement towards the NSW government that has even included many of the elected ALP politicians in the state.

It's difficult to know, certainly for an outsider like me, what's going on here. The RTBU's story is that they are simply trying to achieve maximal leverage for their workers' demands. The threat of strike follows that logic. An actual strike goes further. While demonstrating the seriousness of the workers' demands, it feeds into discontent around WYD and the NSW government to provide leverage for forces trying to remove the current NSW ALP regime.

Update: the SMH is reporting that the strike is off, amidst the most florid use of the passive voice I have ever seen, extraordinary even by the grammatical standards of Australian politics today:

"Industrial action has been agreed to dropped," Mr Watkins said.

What this use of the passive indicates is the attempt by the government to cover up the fact that it has shat its already shitty pants and acquiesced to the union's demands rather than face the clusterfuck this strike promised to bring on.

Solicitor allegedly brutalised, arrested by NSW Police for offering legal advice

2008-07-07T14:39:00.002+10:00

Story here.

One odd thing about this story is that it was fairly prominent in the SMH print edition, but conspicuously absent from their online frontpage – one has to fossick for it in the 'National' sub-page (which is a designation I find a little weird as it's really a local, rather than national, story – I think 'Australian' would be a better heading for this area, but perhaps that adjective in itself connotes Fairfax's arch-rival in a way they want to avoid).

World Youth Day legislation

2008-07-01T01:09:00.004+10:00

It will be made illegal to 'annoy' World Youth Day pilgrims, on the pain of arrest and $5,500 fines.

This is an extraordinary bias towards the rights of pilgrims at the expense of the rights of ordinary people, towards visiting outsiders at the expense of locals.

The NSW government is engaged in a wholesale sponsorship of World Youth Day that I think may be understood by reference to 3 factors:

1. (Maybe) Catholics are perceived to be an important electoral constituency

2. (Maybe) Catholics have serious weight within the NSW ALP, particularly the Right

3. (Definitely) the NSW government is dominated by and headed by a Catholic.

It's both emblematic of and the apogee of the blurring of church and state in NSW.

Aboriginal Control of Aboriginal Affairs

2008-06-21T19:34:00.002+10:00

The numbers today were very small – tiny, really, when you consider that the vast majority of those involved in the protest in Sydney were non-indigenous, in a city where there are 10s of thousands of indigenous people.

We think it is significant and worth reporting that Aboriginal people march under a banner demanding not only formal equality before the law, but sovereignty. Of course, such an objective can never be achieved fully without the agency of Aboriginal people in general, not just a tiny conscious minority.

Henson case precedents

2008-06-06T16:23:00.002+10:00

Well, the police have given up charging artist Bill Henson with anything. They never charged him in fact, never arrested him. Rather all they did was to barge into his exhibition and confiscate his work pending a charge, which is now not forthcoming, so the pictures will be returned.

No one is being charged because there is no case to be made. I.e. no law was broken in showing the pictures.

In this case, one wonders how it was possible for the police to move in to prevent the pictures being shown. The police furnish the answer that they had three complaints from the public. Moreover, they say that they would have acted on the basis of only one such complaint.

This is a truly extraordinary and completely unbelievable claim. If I phoned the police and complained that I, as I often am, am offended by some sexist piece of advertising, would the police move in to confiscate the offending hoarding? Or would they rather tell me to piss off? I presume rather heavily that the latter would be the case. Perhaps some kind of experimentation is called for. . .

Ruling class rule

2008-05-27T05:49:00.003+10:00

Via dan's blog, bubblepedia, Terrorgraph story on NSW pollies' property speculation; click graphic to see more:

2008-05-26T16:02:00.001+10:00

"You get the property development industry bleating about how they need to produce 1000 dwellings a week to meet housing demand," he said. "I say to them, "Well, guys, there's 120,000 houses out there you are not doing anything with."

Map of empty properties at Bubblepedia.

Onward Christian Soldiers

2008-05-23T10:35:00.005+10:00

We are still getting an idea of what the new regime will bring in Australia. The indications are that if anything government by the ALP now means more, not less, social conservatism.

The first sign of this was clearly Rudd's lash-up with Family First to attack "binge drinking". Actually, the first sign of this was the endless, focussed rhetoric about "working families", combining the valorisation of "work" emblematic of a conservative socialism, with the "family values" so beloved of the right.

Australia remains the Western society with the highest degree of censorship. Far from moving to change this, the Rudd government's aggressively pursuing the same kind of internet-monitoring nonsense beloved by the Coalition.

And today, Rudd's intervened in a debate to clearly signal the limits he thinks should apply to artistic expression.

While adult nudity in art might be OK, the budding forms of those underage are not - a taboo is thus placed on their forms that in fact in and of itself makes their exposure artistic regardless of Rudd's complaints. It seems obvious that Rudd is without artistic sensibility, and as such should refrain from commenting on this, or similar, issues. The difference between the exposure of young women's bodies in the artistic space of a gallery and their exposure as pornography is so gaping that Rudd's naïve protestations about protecting the innocence of children beggar belief.

Girt by territorial claims

2008-04-23T00:51:00.004+10:00

Click to enlarge:

Note in particular that Australia claims about as much land in Antarctica as in Australia, and of course the point of this map, which is to show the oil in the Timor Sea Australia claims by dint of military strength.

The NT Occupation – Colour Blindness

2008-04-14T22:58:00.003+10:00

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as any Liberal will tell you, is the media wing of the Australian Labor Party. For the most part, insofar as we've been concerned to see the Liberal government replaced by an ALP one, and insofar as we've believed the truth favored this transfer, we've been pleased with the ALP in the foregoing period, for its commitment to truth against the Liberals.

Now that the ALP is in power, we begin to see the danger of this conjunction, however. The ABC remains to the left of and more reliable than the commercial media outlets (with the possible exception of the generally left-liberal-bourgeois-dominated Fairfax broadsheets). This is precisely the danger: people, particularly educated liberals, who are not a politically critical segment of Australian society, but nevertheless have some significant weight, rely on the ABC for accurate reporting and are thus susceptible to being bamboozled by it.

This danger comes into stark view when it comes to the issue of the Australian occupation of the Northern Territory, or rather the current phase of this occupation, in which the limited autonomy of Aboriginal people qua Australian citizens has been drastically rolled back.

On this issue, the ALP federal government is basically indistinguishable from its Coalition predecessor. And the ABC is an uncritical cheerleader for its racist policies. I just watched the ABC's Lateline on this issue. Their story was unbievably partisan. It resembled nothing so much as US media reports from Baghdad which find isolated success stories and present these as representative. Though the ABC did present critical voices, it prefaced these with the line "some people are still critical of the intervention" - essentially misleading the audience into thinking that criticism of the intervention is a marginal view within the Aboriginal community. Conversely, a part-Aboriginal Territory parliamentarian was uncritically presented as an authentic, representative voice of Indigenous Territorians. The local Aboriginal voices in favour of the 'Intervention' were two old men whose English was poor.

The issue of Aboriginal sovereignty and the cultural genocide and expropriation of Aboriginal people dwarfs every other 'domestic' Australian issue - except insofar as saving Aborigines from Australia seems to depend on changes within Australia itself. However, we would argue that co-ordinated strategic resistance by Aboriginal people would go a long way to shattering the hallucinatory fantasy of Australians about Aborigines which is evidence by government policy and ABC coverage.

Growing apartheid in NSW public schools

2008-03-10T16:28:00.002+11:00

White students move to cheap-private Catholic schools, leaving Aboriginal-dominated schools in rural areas, and ethnic-minority-dominated schools in urban areas.

The urban issue seems to be dual, with white students fleeing Asian-dominated schools, and Asians fleeing "Muslim"-dominated schools (I don't know about this "Muslim" business - is it that Islamic faith of the students or their Arabness that is the issue?).

The key issue here is not the apartheid, but the fact that apartheid public schools are bound to be worse than the private schools. Firstly, in Australia, government funding of the private sector ensures that private education is better than public. Secondly, the advocacy of white people for educational standards in public schools will be lost.

Still, one must remember that this is a somewhat marginal issue. Even busing in the United States failed to eliminate the clear black-white race divide in that country. Australia is no less historically racist - what hope can we have for the elimination of the divide here? Even integrated schooling is not busing, which in turn is not a solution.

ASIO is recruiting

2008-03-04T14:46:00.003+11:00

The meaning? Protecting the property and privileges of the Australian ruling class. As a descendent of white settlers, you may feel you have some share in and affinity for this group. This giant, stolen landmass is hard for the paltry millions of whites who currently claim it as their own to hold onto, so more and more of us can be employed in guarding our ill-gotten treasure.

"Rudd should hold his head in shame"

2008-02-19T16:01:00.004+11:00

Via not the motorcycle diaries, a post from Sydney indymedia:

Driving 1,500 km to shop - “Rudd should hold his head in shame”
Posted February 17th, 2008
By Diet Simon

Sydney, 17 February 2008 — How would you feel having to drive 1,500 kilometres to buy your household supplies, limited to 60 dollars per person?

How would you feel about police and troops with guns swarming through your community, your house, your possessions totally accessible to them without any legal instrument?

How would you feel about not being able to spend your own or your dead husband’s war veterans pension after he served in Vietnam?

All of that and more is happening in the intervention in the Northern Territory, which is moving up community after community from the South Australian border to the coast, terrifying people.

And now the architect of it, former army man and minister for Aboriginal affairs under John Howard, Mal Brough, has been invited by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to be part of his “war cabinet” to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage.

“The people are screaming in horror at this,” says Aboriginal leader Michael Anderson, “in one fell swoop he has unwound all his good intentions in the sorry speech.”

“People are terrorised by the number of police around them, their limitless powers, soldiers with guns.”

Workshop with elders

The prime minister should hold his head in shame, says Anderson, who workshopped on Tuesday with key leaders from NT communities in Canberra before parliament opened. The workshop was held in the grounds of the Aboriginal Embassy, founded in 1972 by four black power activists, of whom Anderson, aged 56, is the sole survivor.

Those leaders described what was happening in the communities as the imposition of martial law and charged that the media and politicians are misrepresenting the whole situation.

“They told me of extreme police powers, with total access to communities, vehicles, homes – they need no legal instrument to do whatever they want, they can stop and search wherever and whoever they want,” Anderson told me.

Anyone found with an empty beer can in their car faces a fine of $1,000 the first time, $2,500 the second time, Anderson reports from the meeting. “At the third time they are classified as a supplier – without any definition of quantity – which carries a minimum fine of 75,000 dollars.”

No vehicles of white people, just those of Aborigines are searched, the elders told the workshop, which they ran to try to get public attention.

“The quarantining of war widows’ or veterans pensions is hurting in a big way, it’s the biggest hurt,” Anderson quotes the community leaders as saying.

Shopping 750 km away

Most of the people in the communities affected by the intervention have to shop at Centrelink-approved stores a long way from their homes in the bush, up to 750 kilometres in some cases. They’re all Coles, Woolworths and K-Mart stores. They are not allowed to shop in their own community stores.

“The leaders say this is forcing people off their land to come into the cities. They see it as a stealthy move to seize Aboriginal lands,” Anderson quotes from the workshop. “It’s a very well thought-out move.”

To shop and get their welfare benefits, people have to prove their identity to get ID cards, usually by birth certificate. “Most of the old people were never recorded, they don’t have a piece of paper on them. That even applies to some of the younger ones because they were born in the bush.”

“So, they get no card and get no money. How are they supposed to live? And on $60 dollars per person per week no-one can feed and clothe kids. How do they survive? This is worse than the original situation.”

“We don’t need to be treated like this, it’s gone back to the 50s, it’s more of John Howard.”

Anderson, a lawyer by training and the elected leader of the 16 Gumilaroi clans in northwest NSW and southwest Queensland, accused Rudd of “shallow dealing” with Aboriginal affairs.

Talks on the ground

“He has to open his eyes a little wider. He has to talk to the people in the communities, not some bureaucrats in Sydney or Canberra.

“This has to be fixed from the bottom up. He has to get out there and listen to them, community after community. He should just look at his own speech.

“One size does not fit all. There’s been much talk of the culturally appropriate approach. Well, in these communities, not by their choice, there are mixtures of clans and tribes who don’t get on.

“In past mistakes bureaucrats and pollies saw single, homogenous communities and policies have been very divisive.”

After the apology, the war

2008-02-14T06:10:00.002+11:00

Having issued a crocodile apology for the treatment of Aboriginal people by the Australian government, Australia has immediately holus bolus declared "war" on Aborigines. Of course, the war is not officially on Aborigines at all, but rather on Aboriginal separateness. While closing the gap between Aboriginal people on indicators like life expectancy and education is "justice" in a Rawlsian sense, it also constitutes a declaration of the intention to wipe out difference and create via a crusade a unified Australian nation on this continent. This intention was laid out in Rudd's "apology" yesterday.

That apology in full . . .

2008-02-13T06:01:00.000+11:00

Here. No great surprises.

It's assimilationist, although to an extent that is banal and utterly unsurprising: it asserts that Aborigines are "our fellow Australians" (with Australia defined implicitly as a nation), and most ridiculously that the apology is "part of the healing of the nation". Insofar as this refers to the actual nation that Rudd represents, White Au$tralia, this is perfectly sensical. But the attempt to assimilate Aborigines to Au$tralia is not an act of healing, but an act of ingestion!

It does however apologise in much too limited a way. It apologises specifically only for the Stolen Generations (capitalised!). It does not apologise for the murdered generations before that, nor for the stolen land before that, or since. It does not apologise for the continuing oppression of Aborigines. Here it is particularly invidious in declaring "this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again" and that "the time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future". Unless this signals a coming massive change of public policy, it's outrageous.

DOCS and Death in Bree

2007-12-01T19:28:00.002+11:00

The knives are out for DOCS in the NSW media these days, and I don't like to join in, given that many of the complaints leveled at DOCS amount to a call for children to be taken away from their families more easily, but this case seems to be rather different.

An infant has been killed by his carers in Brewarrina in Western NSW (this is a coroner's finding – since it is not possible to determine which of the two did it, prosecution has been ruled out). DOCS failed to intervene to prevent it, failed to notice abuse of the boy despite having visited his home. In this respect the case is similar to a number of recent DOCS scandals. What marks this case out is that DOCS had placed the boy there in the first place, against the wishes of his mother, moreover. Caution in intervening to take children away from people is advisable – giving custody of children to people who kill said children is quite another.

Now, the people who were given the custody of young Mundine tick two boxes: they were related to Mundine (an aunt and a cousin) and they were (therefore), like Mundine, Aboriginal. It is clearly preferable for Aboriginal children to be housed with relatives, or at least with Aboriginal people, all other things being equal. But, DOCS ruled out the mother's father, the boy's grandfather, who the mother wanted as carer, on the basis of a background check, before giving the boy to other relatives against the mother's wishes with no background check:

Had DOCS checked their background it would have found the foster father, Eric Orcher, a cousin of Mundine's father, was wanted by police, had "an extensive history of violence including domestic violence", and had served time in jail.But no assessment was undertaken and this "gross breach of departmental procedure" remained unexplained, the Deputy State Coroner, Paul MacMahon, found yesterday.

While we should be mindful of the racism which leads to children still being taken away from Aboriginal families in this country, we see here a different aspect of racism, a racism of indifference which allowed an Aboriginal boy to die.

Clearly, I think, there should be an inquiry into this, and I wouldn't want to prejudge the issue. Having some experience of the NSW public service, I wouldn't be surprised if the problem was not one of simple racially-biased negligence,* but rather one of a lack of training, staffing or funding, although this might also turn out to be a matter of allocations that reveal racial or regional discrimination. Brewarrina is the only local government area in NSW with a majority Aboriginal population, note.

Changing of the Guard

2007-11-26T10:33:00.000+11:00

Now we have new Prime-Minister, a new government, that of the Labor Party. The Labor Party are imperialist and racist through-and-through, as they always have been. I am unconvinced it is much worth covering this event then. Unconvinced, but receptive to the possibility that things will change. Clearly, there are differences, most clearly Labor's organic links with the unions. But there is also the possibility that Labor in power will change the public discourse and the ethos of Australia in a more progressive direction. But it remains to be seen. My thesis continues to be that Rudd is nothing other than an Australian Tony Blair. It is unclear to me that any overall change for the better has occurred in the UK with Blair really – many things are better, but other things are worse. The growth in income inequality there is the great scandal.

While Rudd's promise to pull our of Iraq is welcome, official Labor Party policy is simply to use the troops from Iraq to strengthen Australia's revolting intervention in Afghanistan. The day before the election, and Australians are killing civilians in Afghanistan. We can only expect more of this under Rudd.

2007-11-14T07:12:00.001+11:00

Izhar ul-Haque: kidnapped, blackmailed by Australian federal agents.

Tony Tran: imprisoned for over five years by Australian immigration authorities for being Vietnamese, despite being legally present in Australia.

2007-11-07T17:56:00.000+11:00

Surely this is Australia's worst nightmare:

It is understood the workers were supposed to take an Aboriginal girl by the same name but instead took a white child after telling her teacher they were there to take her on an outing.

It's good that nowadays social workers can think they're supposed to take a white child away and not a black one. OTOH, it's not super that they take kids away with such disregard, and the fact remains that they take away black ones more than white ones.

Howard on Australia

2007-10-12T12:48:00.000+10:00

Howard has pronounced federation non-existent in Australia. We are not a federation he says. A country conceived as a federation is not one.

Well, this is hardly a problem. Australia is a federation of a collection of white settler states. Let's abolish these states. But Howard actually doesn't want to do that. Howard doesn't oppose federation as long as the federated units are each of them white settler states. He opposes a federation that would actually recognise and respect minorities. He opposes a federation with Aborigines. He denies the existence of Aboriginal peoples on this continent not part of the Australian imperialist settler state.

He proposes a referendum – a referendum of the majority to deign to acknowledge a minority, but not as an equal, merely their very existence, but then only on the caveat that it is as a part of Australia dominated by Howard and his ilk, a small trace in the lineage of contemporary Australia that confers legitimacy on this brutal construct by giving it a claim to be the heir of the indigenous people of this land.

Australia, 2007

2007-09-21T17:07:00.000+10:00

Troops out of Aboriginal lands NOW.

APEC summary

2007-09-11T11:27:00.000+10:00

We said that the media and police were preparing people for violence around APEC. That violence did not occur is, in this context, entirely to the credit of protesters and not to the credit of the police. Equine influenza also possibly played a part, as did the protesters' willingness to accede to police demands, to ignore police provocations, even including police brutality. It is possible too that the government side decided to avoid the spectacle of violence. Both sides in a sense had something to lose from that spectacle, although the media of course longed for it.

Horse flu interferes with plans for APEC repression

2007-08-28T15:42:00.000+10:00

Look how forlorn they are. It looks like the horses won't be in use at APEC. But don't worry. I'm sure they'll find plenty of other ways to brutalise the protesters.

2007-08-28T12:28:00.000+10:00

The Australian 457 guest worker visa kills recipients, is denounced as slavery.

Jennifer Martiniello press release

2007-08-27T17:04:00.000+10:00

Dear Kerry O'Brien and 7.30 researchers,

I have just returned from the Northern Territory. I
want John Howard to explain why house to house raids
without warrants are being conducted by the AFP in all
the Alice Springs town camps.

I also want to know why at least two of the senior
women who toured major cities speaking out against a
uranium waste dump on their traditional lands have
been raided by the AFP on warrants issued by a Federal
Magistrate in Canberra, their furniture slashed with
knives, belongings damages, laptops and mobile phones
seized, and phones tapped. I was told by one of the
women that the warrant gave 12 hours access to her
home, and that she was told that the measures were
justified because of the security crackdown for APEC
ministers. One of those women is an elderly
grandmother.

I have also been told by town camp residents that the
AFP has set up surveillance on all households in the
town camps,and have photographed without consent,
every Aboriginal child in those town camps. In the
1990s the AFP were successfully taken to court for
exactly the same violations in Redfern.
Please report on this disgraceful conduct, and pursue
a full explanation from the Howard Government.
regards,
Jennifer Martiniello
Member, Advisory Board
Australian Centre for Indigenous History,
Australian National University

Australia to ban boycotts

2007-08-23T16:22:00.000+10:00

Story.

This is surely an extraordinary measure, almost unbelievable. Organising boycotts will be banned. Of course, it doesn't ban simply making an individual choice not to consume from a given corporation, one presumes. Many I know effectively boycott McDonald's for example.

The government's defence that the measure doesn't infringe free speech is an interesting one. It's interesting in that free speech is conventionally disallowed in cases where it is dangerous – the famous 'shouting fire in a crowded theatre' case. Conveniently, of course, Australia doesn't have a legally-enshrined right to free speech, so there's no way to test this claim; in the US, where such a right is in the constitution, it has had the effect of covering the right to call boycotts.

This is another attack on the right to collectively organise in Australia.

Terrorgraph, @PEC

2007-08-22T13:21:00.000+10:00

Obviously this jpg is pretty small, but you can certainly still see the menacing anarchist @ on APEC – @PEC.

What's going on here? Firstly, of course, it's a sensationalist headline to sell papers. But what's the ideological function?

1. To shift the blame for the disruption to Sydney from APEC, which is being created by the summit itself being held in the centre of the city with paranoid security measures, disruption caused essentially and purely by government,, onto the protesters. APEC itself becomes @PEC – a creature not of government but of protesters.

2. To prepare the protesters in advance as targets for attack. The government too is preparing hard for its planned assault on protesters (see multiple previous posts also), but the Telegraph takes it further than ever today. It mercilessly and ludicrously tars all protest groups with the same brush. Inside, an anarchist symbol appears next to a listing of a Falun Gong protest planned during APEC. The message is clear though, that the protesters are planning violence. Thus, when violence occurs, we will be prepared to blame the protesters. We are even being prepared for the Police to attack children, with the Police themselves warning that they 'cannot guarantee the safety' of children on the protest. This is sheer intimidation.

2007-08-21T01:41:00.001+10:00

Australian occupation forces in Timor Leste target Fretilin, admits 'Defence'.

Police tool up for planned APEC repression

2007-08-20T16:21:00.000+10:00

Gender unbending

2007-08-19T11:06:00.001+10:00

Australian government has removed flexibilities from the recognition of transgender people – apparently it's no longer possible for anything to appear on a passport other than a definite M or F.

Watch out online!

2007-08-11T12:56:00.000+10:00

The Australian government is coming to get you:

$189 million Federal Government crackdown on online bad language, pornography and child sex predators.

The crackdown includes a $40 million increase in funding for the Australian Federal Police to track internet predators and a $90 million scheme to provide every household with software-based internet filters to install on their home computer.

Voluntary filters are fine, but hardly worthy of a government spending spree of this nature. How can it possibly cost so much? More than likely we are talking $20+ per filter installed, when the real cost of serving them should be cents.

The police honeypots for paedophiles are completely outrageous, and hardly 100% effective. While we can expect sexual predators to be more wary, a deterrent effect, this strategy will not prevent all such predation, if predation it indeed is. The strategy is based on the ridiculous assumption that anyone who takes the bait of someone posing as a worldly-wise 14 year old asking for sex is basically a monstrous pervert who will sooner or later rape a child.

When Aborigines attack the police

2007-08-06T12:27:00.000+10:00

I don't know anything about the events, but we have today on smh.com.au an article, 'Rival Aboriginal gangs riot in NT'. One might think that the story is about inter- or intra-communal violence, and that is certainly how it is presented, but look at the detail:

Rioting between rival gangs at the troubled Aboriginal community of Wadeye has again erupted, resulting in minor injuries to police officers and two arrests.

Additional police reinforcements were called to the Northern Territory community, about 400km south-west of Darwin, over the weekend to try and quell the violence.

Fighting between about 200 people escalated on Sunday night when a police patrol was attacked and the car pelted with rocks.

Well, we hear it began with fighting among Aborigines, but the arrests that were made were all in connection with Aborigines attacking the police. This is in fact the typical pattern of the criminalisation of black people in Australia and of Aboriginal interactions with the police – Aborigines are typically not arrested for the crimes which the police were allegedly investigating, but for their interactions with the police. Given that the only arrests in this case resulted from the police intervention (this is not spelt out in the report, but we have two arrests and two police injured . . .), and that the police intervention seems to have resulted in an 'escalation' of the violence, is it not unreasonable to suggest that said intervention was not particularly helpful? Of course, it depends what said intervention was designed to do. The police presence in Aboriginal communities clearly has nothing to do with helping those communities qua communities, and everything with keeping them downtrodden.

Stop the presses: Australian soldiers are racist

2007-08-06T00:47:00.000+10:00

John Howard is quite right that we shouldn't be concerned in young Australian men dressing up in KKK robes (SMH). After all, they don't have much resonance in Australian society. What we should be far more worried by is the other uniforms the boys were wearing, namely those of the ADF. Unlike the Klan, the ADF is a real and enduring force for racism and imperialism in Australia and overseas. The ADF membership is a far more likely indicator than a white hood that these men have racist sympathies, because the ADF's explicit purpose is and has always been racist: to advance Australia's interests against those of non-Australian people. Even the notion of the defence of the territorial integrity of Australia should only be seen in these terms, since the far reaches of the country in which invasion might be a remote possibility are not so much part of the Australian nation as areas occupied and defended for the mineral wealth and other potential they represent for Australian capital.

APEC medical planning

2007-08-04T12:49:00.000+10:00

The Health Department denied the shutdown yesterday, despite confirmation from doctors at hospitals that they were freeing resources in the event of a disaster during the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum next month.

Now this scarcely makes sense. While there is some credible belief that a terrorist attack is more likely in Sydney during APEC, the number of victims would be less than on a normal day since there will be fewer people in the city. Consequently, there should be no need to have greater than usual contingency planning. Unless they are basically certain there'll be a lot more hospitalisations – perhaps injured protesters?

The explicit logic is in fact actually belied by the revelation that doctors have been asked to take leave. This in fact means that the hospitals will have less emergency capacity – in an emergency, they can simply turn away patients for scheduled surgery, but it the doctors aren't there – well, they could be called in if they're still in town, but it doesn't make sense as an emergency measure. Rather it would seem that the aim is to reduce the number of people, doctors and patients, in the area. Perhaps it's as simple as reducing traffic that might slow down motorcades, or preventing dignitaries from seeing sick people wandering around the beautiful harbour city.

In any case, it seems clear that there is simply no good reason to deny people their medical procedures.

APEC and the militarisation of Sydney

2007-08-03T17:47:00.000+10:00

It has become clear that not only will the policing of APEC be heavy, but that Sydney will be turned into a fortress in a strict, military sense, to protect it. This being the case, it is unclear why the organisers don't, or didn't, simply elect to hold the meeting on an existing military base: if they require such security, why hold the meeting in a manifestly unsafe place (by these insane standards of security), and then insist on spending the money to make that location secure. Why does it have to be the centre of Sydney, moreover? Couldn't they house it on the outskirts? Or perhaps at the empty Olympic site in Homebush, where a WTO trade round mini-ministerial meeting was held in 2002? The reason of course is probably that the meeting is all about showcasing Australia to visiting dignitaries, the heads of states of major powers, and this means holding it in the centre of Sydney, probably the most impressive place in Australia, or at least the one that will give the most desirable impression in this case.

So, the militarisation, the military occupation of the City of Sydney: 1500 military personnel. I wonder how many terrorists they are anticipating might try to attack – it seems to me that 1500 soldiers is clear overkill. Given that there is no indication that terrorists might actually attack, one should be worried that these troops might end up being used on peaceful protesters, which, as I discussed before, is, I believe, the planned use for the thousands of police rostered for duty. Of course, it seems unlikely that the government would want to provoke a massacre, unless it is an excuse to impose martial law in order to indefinitely postpone the federal election and hang on to power. Really, I don't think this will happen, but the militarisation of the Sydney unnecessarily puts the men and materiel there to make a massacre possible.

APEC cometh

2007-08-02T18:23:00.000+10:00

Over the last few years there has been a general tendency observed for the NSW Police to become more aggressive in policing protests – and this is from an already aggressive base. Horses have been used against protesters and arrests made even when protestors were peaceful and not causing obstructions. All the evidence suggests a massive, aggressive police attack on protesters is being planned for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation [sic] (APEC) meeting in Sydney next month. The evidence I speak of is the aforementioned increasing tendency of the police to break up peaceful protests with force, and the political value of doing so on this occasion. APEC will have unprecedented, and quite unwarranted, security for an event in Australia. The City of Sydney will effectively be closed down for the weekend. This will clearly impact negatively, if not too crucially, on the majority of Sydneysiders. Enough to piss people off, enough to reflect negatively on the power and privilege of the international elite who run their lives. The answer? Make damn sure that you deflect attention, and produce something that retrospectively justifies all the bullshit: in other words produce a scapegoat. There's a ready-made scapegoat in the form of protesters. Some protest group or other is bound to do something that serves as a pretext for a police attack, and if not, who cares? The important thing is that the police attack will translate to 'scenes of violence' that can be played on the news and thus legitimise the whole expense and inconvenience to the taxpayer.

It's difficult to know how the left should deal with this. The most obvious option I think is to refuse to protest. This would only work if everyone on the left agreed to it, however, but I think it makes sense, on the principle that direct action doesn't work unless it does something unpredicted, and summit protests have become entirely predictable, and thus containable. Still, this is somewhat 'unrealistic' in that left groups will not decline to protest, although they have all been playing APEC down to some extent. The reason I suspect they will not decline is moreover a fairly good one, namely that to yield to intimidation provides a victory to the government of sorts. So ultimately, I think we're just in for a kicking. My advice to protesters would be to try to do something unexpected.

Only terrorists doctor their CVs

2007-08-01T13:49:00.000+10:00

The latest allegation against an Indian doctor: CV fraud.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the accusations of academic fraud against Ward Churchill in the US. Just as many prolific academics would be in trouble if every single one of their footnotes were investigated, but only Ward Churchill's have been, so too would many, many people be in trouble if their purported curricula vitae were examined in minute detail. Mohammed Asif Ali is not the only person ever so-examined but there's no question that his discrepancies are getting a lot of attention compared to the average petty fraudster's, despite their being completely irrelevant to his migration situation or the former criminal charges against him, and there's no question that if he hadn't been Ali none of this would have come to light at all, certainly not at this time.

Only terrorists are afraid of the Australian government

2007-08-01T07:20:00.001+10:00

Well, the government now seems to have revealed its information on Haneef – dispelling completely the nonesense that it was secret and sensitive, as Haneef's lawyer has pointed out.

Here is the story: Haneef was warned that his brothers had been arrested and that he should therefore return to India, precisely because the Australians might arrest him for guilt by association. His decision to leave suddenly for India, has been taken as an indication of his guilt, rather than what it is, a reasonable concern that the Australian government will act to detain the relatives of

Here's the scenario: Haneef is linked to his brothers Haneef in England via the fact that when he last saw them, he left them with his British SIM card. Given that they are being detained for terrorism offences, it is reasonable to suppose that Haneef might be taken into custody in Australia. His natural response is to seek refuge in his home country, where the same levels of racist persecution of Muslims and suspension of habeas corpus do not apply. Discussions with his family of such matters are taken to imply Haneef's guilt by the Australian government, eventhough they would never stand up in court, so Hanif is barred from Australia by executive fiat.

Trust your government or you support the terrorists

2007-07-31T18:01:00.000+10:00

Hey, great: the Australian government has good reasons for kicking Dr. Haneef out of the country, it's just that they can't tell us what they are, because they're secret. This is exactly what the Blair government said about its reasons for invading Iraq at the time.

There's something clearly outrageous about the line of reasoning the Australian government are following in addition to this comparison, however. It is that their information is not enough to secure a conviction, but that it is enough to throw the man out of the country. This means that, were an Australian citizen to have done exactly the same things that Haneef did, they would be walking around in Australia. This either implies there's a loophole in the law that needs to be fixed (and I'm pretty sure there isn't), or Haneef isn't actually that dangerous. Moreover, the implication is that it's fine for Haneef to be on the loose in his home country, but not here, which is again nonsense if he's actually a terrorist, which of course, he is not, even a little bit. As if Haneef would be able to mount terrorist operations given the amount of scrutiny he'd be under after this anyway.

Haneef

2007-07-17T19:44:00.000+10:00

I've been silent on the Haneef case till now. I think two things have happened in the case which are relatively new and important.

Firstly, the use of immigration powers against Dr Haneef. It's not the first time Australia has used immigration powers against someone, but the modality is somewhat new. Scott Parkin was deported in 2005 for clearly purely political reasons. Haneef however is not being deported, but held in detention in Australia, and not pending deportation, as Parkin was briefly, but pending trial for a criminal offence, despite the fact that a magistrate granted Haneef bail. The immigration powers of the state simply gives the state the ability to detain people without proper judicial oversight, and this is extremely worrying. Of course, this power is only applicable clearly to non-citizens: although the state has imprisoned and deported citizens under immigration powers, it did not actually have the right to do so, and was only able to do so because the people concerned did not have the wherewithal to mount a legal challenge, which Haneef would.

The other point which is novel is the justification for this, namely deterrence. Since Haneef has not been found guilty, but rather is thus far only tarred by association with relatives of his who are also yet to be found guilty, it is rather unclear what is being deterred. Should we not associate with our relatives in case they turn out to be charged with crimes relating to terrorism? Even if his relatives are guilty, what would be the message? Commit terrorism and we'll come after your whole family? This kind of guilt by association goes against liberal juridical principles and invokes an older form of guilt by blood, as does the whole spectacle of these men being hounded for their ethnic origins.

Australian mercenaries die in Iraq

2007-07-16T10:09:00.000+10:00

As the panegyrics flood in for the Australians latterly dead in Iraq, one would do well to understand what these people were doing in that country. While the media refers to them as 'contractors', a word that brings to mind for Australian certain types of worker in the building trades, and while these men presumably did work according to contracts, the more apt word to describe them would be 'mercenaries'. Yes, mercenaries have children and families, but they are paid to kill, and the people they kill have children and families of their own.

2007-07-10T14:40:00.001+10:00

Sydney awash with fresh blood-money, imperial solidarity.

2007-07-09T21:46:00.000+10:00

This is really old (last year), but I've only just seen it; a Chaser vox-pop that showcases white Australian racism. 'I'm not a racist but . . .'

This does not constitute an endorsement of the Chaser.

2007-07-03T08:42:00.000+10:00

The important resistance will be happening in the outback – though the Aboriginal people of this continent are so grotesquely outnumbered, technologically disadvantaged, and beaten down that their resistance can be easily crushed. With that in mind, bloc with Aboriginal people in Sydney to resist:

Stand up with the Aboriginal community on Saturday 14th July at
10:00am at the Block to demand:

* Stop the genocide, end Indigenous deaths in custody

* Land Rights not mining rights - no mines and no dumps

* Funding for community controlled services not cops and troops

Rally at 10:00am at the Block (next to Redfern Station) for the march

These details come from Jenny Munroe, a local Redfern activist.

John Howard reinstitutes Apartheid in the Northern Territory via excutive fiat

2007-06-22T09:34:00.000+10:00

Once again, in the NT, it is illegal for a black man to have alcohol, to have pornography. Once again, Aboriginal monies will be held in trust by whites. Once again, whites will have the unconditional right of trespass onto Aboriginal land. Aboriginal ownership of land is suspended. Police numbers will be increased massively to enforce all this.