Camden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.