I made a few guesses in this blog post as to how Boris Johnson beat Red Ken Livingstone. The skeptical part of the blogosphere, as in Global Warming skeptics, have thrown their vaunted caution to the winds and embraced the Johnson win as a defeat for global warming hysteria. I doubt it.
The speculations on which my doubts are based are more or less vindicated by this report on YouGov polling. It wasn’t a global warming election, other issues were more important to Londoners, and they saw global warming being used as a justification for ripping them off with taxes.
As this video from the Times Online shows, there was also a high degree of antipathy to Lingstone himself, and a sense of it being time for a change. All of which led to a narrow win by Johnson.
I think you will find the lesson governments take from the London result is not that they should give up on greenhouse gas reductions, but that they must find other ways of eoncouraging them than by specific taxes on individuals.
Boris’s win will just see them adjust and regroup, as this article from the Times suggests, and employ subsidies and soak the rich and corporations strategies which will be less effective, prone to rorting, and more distorting of economic incentives than broader based taxes. Note that the Tories are still proposing cuts in carbon emissions of 80% by 2050, which is 20 percentage points (or 33% proportionately) more hairy-chested than Labour, notwithstanding the London result.
May 08, 2008 | Graham
Johnson forces rethink of global warming taxing strategies
May 07, 2008 | Graham
Nervous Nelson at the Brisbane Club
Laser pointers may be endangering more things than aeroplanes landing at Australia’s airports. Brendan Nelson might be another casualty with a jittery laser pointer in his hands showing just how nervous he was when addressing the Brisbane Club yesterday. This, coupled to the fact he uncharacteristically read the speech, apart from the parts so well-rehearsed that he appeared to recite them from heart, and a decision not to take questions at the end, indicate that he knows this budget will make, or break, him, and he’s desperately worried it’s the latter.
I found his speech interesting, but ultimately uncompelling from a political and intellectual point of view.
The public doesn’t want to see programs cut, so Nelson needs to find intellectually respectable reasons for agreeing with them. Not that the public will mind if he doesn’t, but the commentariat, who control his gateway to the public will. Neither Nelson, nor his Treasurer, have quite found the words to keep both constituencies happy.
I suspect that they are to be found in some variation on the theme that cutting government expenditure right now would be fighting the last battle. That rising food and fuel costs, coupled to the interest rate rises we have just had, and the credit rationing that is taking place as a result of the sub-prime crisis, mean that tomorrow’s inflation rate will be very much lower than yesterday’s.
In other words, Kevin Rudd’s government is a government of the past, whose only plan was how to get into government, not what to do once it was there.
The line that this is not a crisis opens him up to the scorn that Wayne Swan heaped on him this afternoon. Swan is another politician for whom this budget is make or break.
There are also other risks for him in the speech that he gave to the Brisbane Club. One is the perception that under the Liberals Work Choices would be BACK. Last time Australia was in similar economic circumstances was in the 1970s when inflation, partly caused by high petrol and money prices, was compounded by a wages break-out worse than anywhere else in the world. Nelson relives those days in his speeches at his peril. A wages break-out is one of the threats that we face courtesy of Labor’s ditching of sensible labour reform, but Nelson can’t say that. If there’s one thing blue-collar conservatives fear more than prices going up, it is losing their job or facing a pay cut.
Another problem in Nelson’s speech was his reliance on a graph going back to the 1950s relating terms of trade to inflation. The economic smarties will have a field day with that. It’s not immediately obvious how the prices we are paid for our exports directly relates to the CPI, and 1957 isn’t just another country, it’s almost a parallel universe as far as the economy is concerned. At that time we had a fixed dollar exchange rate and a heavily protected and much more regulated and centrally controlled economy. One can only think that the chart was chosen because it was the only indicator Nelson’s advisors could find which showed the Howard government’s inflation performance in a benign light.
If questions had been allowed I would have asked Doctor Nelson whether he ever regrets not losing the leadership battle to Malcolm Turnbull. I’m sure he would have had a form of words, but with the weight of a slight 9 percent approval rating obviously weighing heavily on him, who knows what he might have said?
Which is part of his problem at the moment. Whatever the question and whatever the issue, with Labor riding this high, there probably isn’t a right answer to any question, which would make anyone nervous.
May 06, 2008 | Ronda Jambe
The blight that the ALP has become
Nearly every day some bright spark suggests in the letters to the editor that technology will save the world. One day the focus is on carbon capture, the next on GM foods. Desalinisation and nuclear energy are other scientific saviours.
The reality is: only democracy can save the world. The coming crisis is one not of humanity’s limited cleverness in the face of mounting pressures, but of our limited capacity to be truly human, to think about ‘the other’. It is a crisis of governance, in the widest possible meaning of that term: how we relate to and regulate each other. My concept of ‘democracy’ is equally sweeping: a system that collects data and informs in a suitably accountable way so that it delivers the best possible outcomes for the greatest number, including future generations. (I draw on Robert Dahl.)
A great distortion of governance is now available for all to see as the NSW Labor Party negates its own reason for existing. Why have a party conference at all, if their preference not to privitise electricity counts for nada? In just the past few days, the SMH reveals additional distortions: the north west of Sydney won’t have the rail links it needs as it expands, and the water catchment legislation will be ‘relaxed’ (a popular term that conceals great tensions) to allow for expansion. Water quality could suffer as a result.
Bob Carr chuckles and encourages Iemma from his comfy Macquarie Bank position. The received wisdom is that privitisation should never be stopped, how else can we possibly develop the energy? Jeff Kennett agrees, so everyone is singing from the same hymnbook. Geraldine Doogue interviews someone from an infrastructure company, who also supports privitisation. She politely calls it ‘electricity reform’, but no one mentions renewables, efficiency, or other approaches to becoming energy sufficient. Rudd gives his full support, not for him to get in the way.
And why is privitisation of essential infrastructure so bad? You probably can’t go beyond Sharon Beder’s Power Play, with lots of Australian and international examples, for foreground. And if you are not clear about where such measures lead in the longer term, just google Cochabamba + Bechtel.
Here in the ACT, Labor is spending up big in the lead-up to the election, without asking the electorate to establish priorities. The suburbs are restive, as the schools are sold off and the dams dry up. The Liberal leader is putting in a FOI request about the billion dollar gas plant which will be located close to houses, and the Weston Creek Community Council had standing room only at a meeting about proposed new suburbs, which will flood the formerly quiet cluster with unwanted traffic, pollution, intrusion, and other accoutrements of ‘development’. The multi-million dollar aboretum, meanwhile, seems to have dubious value. Perhaps the wrong project for a drought-stricken capital, even though the water is recycled from a treatment plant?
It’s actually becoming quite funny, as Ross Gittens points out that Brendan Nelson is now offering a critique of the endless growth scenario. But ideology has always been mutable, depending on who’s in power. Which way is left? which way is right? It’s getting harder to distinguish.
Our confusion multiplies when we read that Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who spear-headed huge sell-offs of public infrastructure in Bolivia, Russia and elsewhere, now warns in his latest book, Common Wealth, that the world really needs to solve some big issues like global warming, poverty, and population. Does he realise he helped create these problems, or at least delayed their recognition?
Even Thomas Friedman, not known for questioning the benefits of globalisation, thinks it is time for the US to develop a more realistic energy policy. He says the jobs in clean energy are going off-shore, and the US will be left behind. Much of this is due to the clout, both military and policy-wise, that has supported the oil industry.
I am convinced that religion arose from these needs to manage society. The fundamental strictures that prevent chaos are the same for every religion. They just get dressed up in strange ways as the innate desire for power and control overwhelm their usefulness. Much more fun to bind women’s feet and hobble them, or make them wear black body bags, than to embrace justice and egalitarian principles.
It always seemed to me that the left of politics in general, and the Australian Labor Party in particular, was a voice for that very basic concept of humanity: let’s think about each other and get the balance right. But the growing gap between classes that has flourished during many long years of Labor governments in all the states and territories, as well as getting a good kick-off during the Hawke-Keating years, belies that concept.
Of course much easier to think about those close at hand than about ‘the other’ in distant countries. How can we imagine the poor of Burma, after this latest catastrophe, when we can’t easily empathise with Sydney fringe dwellers whose trip to work might become a nightmare for lack of adequate public transport?
You tell me, wise readers, where is our democracy headed?
May 04, 2008 | Graham
How could climate sceptic Boris Johnson beat true believer Livingstone?
Boris Johnson is a well-known climate sceptic, and fellow sceptics are pointing this out to suggest that his victory means that climate scepticism isn’t a political handicap afterall.
I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the UK local government elections, and we obviously don’t do any polling there, so this post is quite speculative. In fact, I’d welcome comment from voters or observers in London on the hypotheses I’m about to advance because they are the only ones who would know for certain what happened.
Knowing the style of Australian political advisors Crosby Textor, who ran Johnson’s campaign, and with some understanding of the issues, I’d guess that congestion charges, and the threat of more, but not necessarily greenhouse itself, were a strong factor in Johnson’s win, coupled to concerns about crime, housing and immigration.
After the Liberal Party’s drubbing in Australia’s last federal election, in large part because of its stance on greenhouse, it is unlikely that they would have launched a full-frontal attack on climate change polices per se. But it is quite possible that they pointed to the cost of such policies, like congestion charges, the fact that London is stil congested, and other problems that were seen to be more pressing, to make an argument that Livingstone was out of touch with real concerns, and ineffectual. In other words, the cost, and the lack of return for the cost, is likely to have been the issue, rather than fact of climate change.
Certainly Ken Livingstone tried to turn the election into a referendum on his environmental credentials. If his campaign advisors were competent this suggests that polling showed scepticism as a problem for Johnson. And if it was a weakness for Johnson, you can bet that Crosby Textor would have looked for a way to redefine the environment issue in ways that played to Johnson’s strengths. My bet is that Johnson’s strength would have been in the economy, and that the environmental issues would have been redefined as economic ones.
This is the mirror image of what happened in Australia where Labor managed to define the economy in terms of the environment.
So the takeout for sceptics and global warmers should likely be not that scepticism can be an asset or a liability, but that the public has a limited tolerance for measures that reduce their standard of living, and which have little or no measureable effect on the problem they are supposed to fix, while diverting attention from issues they see as more pressing.
Watch out Kevin Rudd if the boom stalls.
May 01, 2008 | Graham
Hospital pass
First we have Wayne Swan promising a Robin Hood budget which will take from the rich and give to the poor. Then, almost simultaneously we have elite sportsmen in Australian football, rugby league, rugby union, cricket, swimming, netball and basketball demanding a tax break.
I don’t like their chances. Talk about bad timing.
According to the radio interview I heard this morning the argument is that the breaks are necessary to stop these sportsmen and women going overseas where salaries can be packaged to attract a much lower rate of taxation. My heart bleeds for them. Even in a short career these sort of people earn as much as most of their contemporaries earn in an entire lifetime, so why should they expect their contemporaries to pay higher taxes so they can pay lower?
In truth, this looks more like the sporting clubs trying a dummy pass in the hope of scoring a subsidy from the government in disguise. When you package a salary, the ultimate consideration is after-tax income. To give sportsmen the same after-tax income in Australia that the same sportsmen can get overseas at a lower tax rate, all you have to do is increase their before-tax domestic income until their after-tax income reaches the overseas equivalent figure.
What the clubs are conceding is that they can’t match the incomes being paid overseas. It probably has more to do with the scale that access to larger markets gives overseas clubs, than the tax system. And would it really stop the talent drain in some sports? If you were a soccer player, wouldn’t you rather be fronting for AC Milan than the Queensland Roar, even if they paid less _and_ the tax rate was higher? You could come back and play for The Roar in your semi-retirement. And in others, well, what exactly is the overseas market like for AFL players?
May 01, 2008 | Ronda Jambe
This time Chris wasn’t Masters-full
What was this week’s Four Corners all about? Chris Masters, an icon for investigative journalists in Australia, delivered a squishy program that was all fluff. Was it a travelogue about the gentrification of Harlem? Was it a very vague look at race relations in the US, 40 years after Martin Luther King’s death?
Perhaps there is something deeper going on, and Auntie is herself getting older, gentrified, and somewhat calcified by endless politicisation. Whatever it is, this is the second time recently that Four Corners has seemed more like a ‘postcard’ on Foreign Correspondent, during the super-fluffy days of Jennifer Byrne’s grinning tenure as host.
Easy to show multiple shots of young, white, attractive women in the cool Lenox Lounge, with the owner saying, ‘see, we’re now integrated’ (gee!) . Easy to have black, equally attractive, academics and well-connected community activists discussing the fringe issues. And very easy to cut to Oprah saying race isn’t why she is choosing Obama, ‘I’m better than that’. And indeed, she is.
But New York isn’t the US, and even in Manhattan the values are so far to the liberal side that the other boroughs are uncomfortable about some of the content on the community TV station. And while it might seem trivialising to say that race is a fringe issue in the US, what I’m getting at is that like binge-drinking stories here, it doesn’t cut to the chase of social and economic dynamics.
I watched the program, believing that Chris Masters would come up with something useful, so that I might understand the Obama phenomenon a bit better. But there was no enlightenment, not even a clear focus, or a persuasive narrative thread which might give a broader perspective on attitudes over there. Instead, I was drawn again to the analysis of Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine – the rise of disaster capitalism. She gives a clear narrative about economic might and its handmaiden, political repression. She goes through a number of case study countries: Chile, Argentina (which were both rapidly democratising and developing during the 70s and 80s), Poland, China, Russia, and I’m just coming to the chapter on Iraq.
She teases out, in well researched detail, how the West only considered the human rights abuses, while the economic ‘reforms’ of neo-liberalism ploughed ahead with US blessings. Did you know Milton Friedman was a consultant to Pinochet, before the overthrow of Allende? And that his Chicago trained Latino economists had a plan ready for the ‘shocks’ of privitisation? Clinton praised Yeltsin, and threw billions at him, even while the elected Russian parliament was being dissolved. We know what happened next, and Russian life expectancies reflect the carnage of their economic ‘reforms’. But hey, at least they have lots of billionaires now.
What does this have to do with our precious Auntie and our coverage of the US elections? Well, quite a bit. As the US clings tenuously to ‘positive’ growth, there is no one telling the story about exactly how much of the GDP is dependent on wars, past, present and future. Without military spending, where would their economy be? And how soon before it becomes so stretched that it just snaps?
We all understand now that people see Obama as somewho who can bring change. But Chris Masters missed a wonderful opportunity to tell us what that might mean, and who in fact needs to change. Try to tell poor folk that their jobs which depend on military contracts need to end. Try to tell rich folk, rather, that wouldn’t do at all. Tell us about the growth in income inequality, failing health care, crumbling infrastructure, and then ask: who and how will this be paid for and fixed? Give us something more than a story about big chains moving into Harlem, because oh dear, we’ve got the same story in Canberra, and the underlying power dimensions are also the same.
But without going beyond the surface to tell us who is controlling who, and who is contributing to Obama’s campaign, how can we know what is really going on?
My understanding is that Obama plans to expand the military; all 3 remaining serious candidates plan to do that. While reading Klein, I feel embarassed: why didn’t I know all this? How come I knew about Pinochet’s human rights crimes and the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina, but didn’t realise these were part of the plan to sell off their economies? How come I knew about the growing crisis of sustainability in first, second and third world countries, but not about how closely tied this is to the evil twins of privitisation and political repression? And while I knew the big global institutions such as the IMF and World Bank insist on these forms of ‘liberalisation’, I didn’t really grasp the extent to which they are always accompanied by force, to keep democracy from rearing its inconvenient head.
Often, when reading newspaper articles about conflicts, I wonder what is really going on, it all seems so confusing. Or so black and white. Neither is usually the case. Gradually I have come to understand that the reason I don’t know is that we aren’t being told, the narrative is usually somewhere else, with trivia or with a story of the developed countries, particularly the US, as saviours and bringers of democracy. (But never to Saudi Arabia). This puts me in John Pilger territory, and I find his books almost too depressing to read. But my fallback has been our public media.
For these reasons I donate to groups like Z-net, the Institute for Public Accuracy, and FAIR (fairness and accuracy in reporting). They are all US based, and maybe Australia needs our own versions, maybe Crikey is still filling this role. I know Graham Young has provided a valuable service, and he is a stayer. Maybe Chris Masters just needs to lift his game, or retire.
CODA: I was at uni in New Jersey when Martin Luther King was killed. All classes shut down, and students wore black arm bands. Living in a basement apartment, I remember hiding out while the windows were smashed in the black shops down the street. There were tanks on the suburban streets where my hippie boyfriend used to get macrobiotic veggies. In another dodgy flat, a converted butcher shop, where the cold store became a music room, we were kept awake by the endless rolling of dice from the crap games going on upstairs. I wonder how gentrified that area is now?