I’ve been given a guided tour of fascism, or at least how fascism works, by responses to my OLO article Why it matters that Greenpeace lied and the press doesn’t seem to care. Despite clear video evidence that the Greenpeace Arctic Sunrise rammed the Japanese Nisshin Maru, any number of people have been claiming that I’ve made it up.
They do it by arguing about irrelevancies. For example “Greenpeace had right of way.” Yes…so? You can’t ram someone else whilst having right of way? Have you ever tried looking at an insurance company’s books? Sure they’re full of this sort of bogus claim.
But repetition of bogus claims doesn’t make them valid – although there are studies which show that most people will change their mind to agree with majority assertions, even when they are wrong.
When it comes to road(sea) rage, and what Greenpeace should have done, this lady puts them to shame. She was in the wrong, and she cheefully admits it, and the reader likes her for it.
It has been said that “truth is the new spin”. It is. Tell the truth, and we will forgive you almost anything.
January 31, 2006 | Graham
How Greenpeace should have responded
January 31, 2006 | Graham
AWB – Think East India Company
One of my heroes is Edmund Burke. He is claimed by the conservative tradition, but is persuasively portrayed as a liberal by Connor Cruise O’Connor in his The Great Melody. He spent his last 12 years in parliament working to impeach Warren Hastings. I can’t quite work out the relationship between corporation and state from the web, but Warren Hastings was a functionary of the East India Company, and simultaneously he was also India’s first Governor-General.
The East India Company strong because it was a mecantilist outreach of British Government. In return for a monopoly on trade with India it agreed to pay a large percentage of its income to the government as tax.
What surprises me is that neither our left or right leaning press has fastened on to the parallels between the East India Company and the Australian Wheat Board.
The left in Canada has fastened onto the Hudson Bay Company, another mercantilist enterprise, as a sign of the evil at the heart of colonialism. We don’t have the same history, so the same parallels don’t necessarily present themselves. But as Samuel Clemens said, “History rhymes,” and there are certainly sympathetic harmonics here.
The AWB shows similar traits to the East India Company, even if it is a minnow by comparison. Burke wasn’t successful in impeaching Hastings. Will
Cole impeach anyone? History suggests that the Howard government won’t pay a cost…but it should. And the AWB should be dismantled. It’s a dinosaur in the present age.
January 30, 2006 | Jeff Wall
The Nationals more distant than ever from the Liberals
One of the reasons given by Senator Julian McGauren for his decision to switch to the Liberal Party is that the National and Liberal Parties are virtually indistinguishable does not measure up with a state-by-state comparison of party relations.
Indeed, at the state level, it has been a long time since relations have been more strained, even hostile.
Last week, the WA Nationals Leader, Brendan Grylls, announced that the Nationals would sit on the cross benches even if the Liberals won Government at the next WA elections.
That should help to guarantee the new Labor Premier, Alan Carpenter, at least two terms in office. And the Nationals risk losing party status at the next election now that one vote one value rules will apply.
In South Australia, relations are even worse. The Nationals State Leader, Karlene Maywald, is a Minister in the Rann Labor Government. Not much chance of a Liberal-National Coalition there!
In Victoria, the heady days of the Kennett-McNamara Coalition Government are but a memory.
The Victorian Nationals Leader, Peter Ryan, follows the old Joh-era dictum that the Liberals are the enemy, Labor is just the opposition!
Changes to the structure of the Upper House – to be elected using proportional representation from the 2006 elections – are likely to bring the Victorian Nationals perilously close to losing party status.
And Ryan’s aggressive attacks on the Liberals ease the damage the Bracks Government is suffering from its factional pre-selection difficulties.
In NSW there is a State Coalition, but relations have been strained in the last year or two – and won’t be helped when new federal boundaries make their impact later this year.
And in Queensland there is now a coalition in name, and not much else. Three cornered contests, the cause of coalition tensions in the past will happen in half a dozen seats at the next State Election.
And in Queensland the unthinkable might happen. The Liberals have their best chance since 1974 of overtaking the Nationals as the major non-Labor Party in the State Parliament. It might not be a strong chance yet, but it cannot be ruled out.
Now Senator McGauren has created potentially very damaging tensions in the federal coalition.
Not a happy “family” all round!
January 23, 2006 | Graham
Things get harder for Howard in Senate
The defection to the Liberal Party of Victorian Nationals Senator Julian McGauran makes things harder for John Howard in the Senate. McGauran’s defection is unconscionable. Senators are elected on a party vote. Hardly any one votes for them in their own right. Therefore, as Nationals Leader Mark Vaile says he should resign if he feels the Liberals are the best to represent rural Victoria and allow the National Party to replace him. The people who voted for him sure don’t agree with his judgement, or they would have voted for a Liberal.
It doesn’t say much for the integrity of the relationahip between the Nationals and Liberals if the Liberals accept this “rat” (Senator Conroy’s description). And if there is no integrity in the relationship, why should the Queensland Nats (theoretically a part of the federal Nats, but in reality a different species) go along with what John Howard wants.
Howard would be best not to support sitting Queensland Nationals Senator Ron Boswell in his preselection battle. It is being said that Ron is really a Liberal in disguise. Bad enough when you are friends, worse when you are really enemies.
All of this will make Barnaby Joyce more toey.
January 19, 2006 | Graham
Those who do not understand the present are bound to misinterpret the past
In his 2004 Massey Lecture (rebroadcast on Australian radio this summer by the ABC) historian Ronald Wright argues that because we can understand what went wrong in past civilisations we can learn their lessons and not repeat them in the present.
In the excerpt I heard he was particularly glowing of the work done on Easter Island, by his pal Jared Diamond.
Diamond has been comprehensively shown to be wrong on Easter Island by Benny Pieser. This doesn’t stop him from using his imagined scenario for Easter Island as a way of lampooning modern theories that he holds to be incorrect.
When Diamond gave a lecture in Brisbane last year he related the story of how he asks his classes to nominate what the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island said. According to Diamond there were a limited number of responses. “Science will find an alternative technology.” “God gave me the right to do it.” “It’s my property, I’ll do with it what I want.” “Market forces will look after us.”
No-one apparently says “How come this is the last tree when I can see lots more.” They should, because apparently trees never disappeared from Easter Island.
Now, I’m not going to hold a brief for religion on this matter, but we do know from some fairly rigorous and contemporary experimental data that societies which honour private property and science, and allow individuals to make their own decisions as often as possible (the market) do better on the environmental front than those that don’t.
So, while it is trite to say that “Those who fail to learn history’s lessons are destined to repeat its mistakes,” if you don’t understand how human societies operate, then you are never going to understand history. Especially if you are dealing with the architectural and detrital remnants of it alone.
Reading current prejudices back onto the past and then extrapolating what you have thereby “discovered” onto the present is at best intellectual stupidity, and at worst intellectual fraud.
January 19, 2006 | Graham
http://www.goodnews.gov.iq
I was unaware until I read this article that until very recently, Iraq didn’t have its own country extension for the Internet.
According to the article:
In a sign of progress for the government, Iraq has secured the suffix “.iq” for its new Internet addresses. The government is in the process of creating e-mails and websites using the country’s suffix abbreviation. The initials will be attached to Internet addresses, indicating they originate in Iraq.
Establishing the .iq extension is considered “a big and important event for the Iraqi nation,” says Siyamend Othman, executive director of the Iraqi National Communication and Media Commission. It “represents in the Internet world the state flag,” he says.
Call me naive, but I had assumed that ICANN had automatically worked out and assigned country extensions to all countries, and that using them was a matter of residing in that country. Obviously not. Anyone with more knowledge out there want to enlighten me?
In any event, as the rest of the story suggests, it’s an important step in socialising Iraqis into the global community.
January 18, 2006 | Graham
Will this Cole inquiry get a different reception?
Terence Cole QC was the uncompromising head of the Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry. He found evidence that fraud, bribery, corruption and stand-over tactics were endemic in the industry. No surprises there. For his troubles he was villified by the some in the union movement, as well as Labor members of parliament, with his commission being referred to as a “Kangaroo Court”.
Now Cole is inquiring into whether the Australian Wheat Board knowingly paid $290 million to Saddam Hussein to facilitate sales of wheat. Evidence presented to the commission implicates foreign minister Alexander Downer in the payments. An adverse finding against Downer should see the end of his political career. Aferall, how can you preach about the need to bring democracy to the Middle East as a way of halting terrorism at the same time that you are effectively funding a regime that you accuse of being the chief sponsor of this terrorism?
This may be the last mishap to batter Alexander Downer in his parliamentary career. And it may also affect others. Who might Downer have discussed the matter with? More than a quarter of a billion dollars is a lot of money. And to a rogue regime.
Now that Cole is in a position to damage the government, left-wing opinion is right behind him. Will the government now become Cole’s enemy. Or is his appointment an indication that they really do want to know the truth of the matter and are not playing politics on it?
I have a theory that left-wing politics is more prone to villification than right-wing politics. Cole provides a natural experiment for testing this theory.
January 17, 2006 | Graham
The Australian solution to Greenhouse
AP6 which just held its meeting in Sydney, is little more than a public relations exercise. Just like Kyoto. The solutions to earth’s problems are intractable. At the moment we are concentrating on moderating energy requirements by trying to limit carbon dioxide emissions per person. This is fraught, because it ultimately will require decreases in standards of living unless other power sources can be found, or we achieve unimaginable standards of energy efficiency.
What politician in recent times hasn’t called for us to leave the world a richer place for our children? Fixing global warming by limiting per capita carbon dioxide levels has formidable political hurdles to clear.
The “Ecological Footprint” concept shows us an alternative way of addressing the problem. I will call it the Australian solution, but I could less chauvinistically call it the Gabon solution.
We are used to being told that Australia is one of the highest per capita emitters of carbon dioxide in the world. But does that matter? According to a spreadsheet produced by the Footprint Network Australia has an 11.5 hectares per person ecological surplus. What this means is that because of the land mass of Australia, as a country we absorb more than we emit. Gabon does even better. Bolivia, Mongolia and New Zealand are close.
The corollary of this is that, if every country had our population levels per hectare of land, we could live with these levels of energy consumption, and therefore these levels of carbon dioxide emissions, with no problems at all.
Maybe the problem has less to do with energy consumption than it does with population levels. How about birth control as a Greenhouse strategy? Sequestering carbon under the doona rather than undergound!
January 17, 2006 | Jeff Wall
A tragic story you won’t read in the newspapers.
The truly tragic resignation of Geoff Gallop as Premier of Western Australia – announced yesterday with great courage – has prompted me to write about another tragedy likely to have been due to a form of depression you won’t read about in the newspapers.
One morning last week a young man, dressed in a business suit, jumped to his death from one of the city’s bridges, landing on the bikeway below. Apparently it was at least the fifth suicide at that spot in the last three years.
My local shopping centre had to install a high metal fence around its top floor car park because of the number of suicides resulting form young men, and women, jumping from the car park to the footpath below.
Over the Christmas period – a time we know is a vulnerable one for those suffering from depression and loneliness – it is likely that around 80 to 100 Australians, the majority of them under 30, took their own lives.
That is about the same number of deaths that occurred on the nation’s roads over the same period.
The road toll made the headlines, as it should have done. But the suicide toll passes largely unnoticed.
And in my view – a view confirmed some years ago by a very senior police officer – the road toll masks the true suicide level in our society. The number of late night single vehicle road accidents in which the car slams inexplicably into a tree or goes off a bridge is very high – and police believe that a number are in fact suicides.
It is true that the suicide rate has declined in recent years, but that may be due to improved economic conditions, or it may be due to a greater awareness about depression. But it remains high by world standards.
For males, it is about 17 per 100,000 a year. That means around 120 men commit suicide in Brisbane each year. For males under 30, the rate is higher.
Can you imagine the outcry if 120 men died each year in Brisbane in house fires, or as a result of murder?
There would be an inquiry and maybe even a Royal Commission. Yet one cause of death among young men, and young women, that is preventable seems to attract only the most marginal community interest and concern.
And this is one public health issue we must not blame governments alone for. Federal and State Governments have increased funding for suicide prevention and community education and that may have helped reduce the level from what it was a decade ago. But it remains tragically high.
The level of suicide among those with serious mental health problems is a real concern, as is chronic government under-unding of mental health.
But many suicide victims, and especially young victims, don’t fall into the mental health category as we know it.
I believe one way to address the issue among our young men and women, and those not so young, is for society to discuss more openly the causes of depression and what can be done to address it.
And if that happens, then the family and friends of those who suffer, often in silence, from depression may just be in a better position to recognise symptoms. Though we know that, as in the case of Geoff Gallop, not even his closest colleagues and staff – let alone the probing media – had even the slightest indication.
Over the last week I have thought often about the young man in the business suit who clearly could not cope any longer. For society he has become just another statistic, but his is a young life tragically lost. And my wonder is whether he could have been helped had those closest to him, and wider society, better understood his problems.
I do not know Geoff Gallop. But from a distance he came across as a wholly decent person and an effective Premier. The electorate certainly thought so. And that is how his predecessor, Richard Charles Court, described him yesterday.
His candour about the cause of his resignation is commendable. Commendable because of its courage, and commendable because it might help awaken society – and not just governments – to one of the truly tragic and growing health issues we face today.
January 14, 2006 | Graham
Marine Lawyer speaks for himself on ramming
I’ve corresponded with Eric Wilson, the marine lawyer referred to in my previous post, and he is happy for me to post the contents of his email to me. It raises its own issues about how the media is dealing with this issue, and by extension, media conduct in general. We refer to what we do at On Line Opinion as “gatekeeping lite” – the aim is to let people speak for themselves. Wilson draws attention to how far in the other direction “gatekeeping heavy” can go.
Frankly, I was a little upset with the story that the NZ HERALD ran. We were on the phone together for 20 minutes and for 18 minutes of that we were discussing the Whale Sanctuary, the Antarctic Convention, and the International Whaling Convention, which is what I thought the interview was actually about. None of that actually appeared.
I made it clear that we were geting unclear, conflicting, and garbled reports about what was actually happening. I also made it clear that we all required much more information than was currently available, including the captain’s logs and satellite positions, if any were available.
I also did not say that the MARU rammed SUNRISE; you will notice that I specify that SUNRISE did the actual ramming i.e. contact of prow into hull. What I DID SAY was that IF the MARU skipper wanted to create an incident he COULD have done so by executing a 360 degree turn under the right conditions.
When I was doing the Channel 9 “sound-bite” interview – 95% of which did not make it to air – I said three things.
1. From the Japanese video that I saw, it would appear that the MARU was always to the port of SUNRISE, which would normally place the burden upon them to avoid a collision; I believe that the Japanese have recently conceded this, but I may be mistaken. However, there is ALSO a report that the SUNRISE was slowly turning towards MARU while it was executing its turn; I have no evidence of this one way or another.
2.My overall impression of both reports is that there is a very dangerous game of “chicken” going on in the Southern Ocean, and things may have gotten out of hand in this instance, with neither side acting in especially good faith.
3. That the issue of collision, while certinly serious in itself,in this particular instance, is quite subordinate to the overarching legality of the whaling and the jurisdictional aspectsof the Anarctic Ocean.