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All will be revealed on Tuesday night.

I thought this was a teriffic op ed on the Cronulla riots.

It’s got a ‘down the middle’ format that many Troppodillians will know that I’m attracted to. But I think the points it makes about the standard left and right views of the issue are spot on.

I would have liked to have added that it seems highly implausible that even with the incitement by Alan Jones, a racist riot of the kind that occurred would have developed without genuine grievances.

As a resident of the area said to me once some gangs act aggressively and a particular ethnicity is identified rightly or wrongly (in this case Lebanese Muslim), the blame can continue to be sheeted home to them even when other gangs do the next bit of dirty work.

And of course pretty obviously even if the gangs against whom the rioters were rioting were Lebanese Muslims and they’d done aweful things, it hardly detracts from the outrage of attacking anyone who’s got a passing resemblance to them. What a horrible thing it was and how fortunate that, at least to this point, things have calmed down so decidedly.

This is a quote from a sympathetic review of a book I am reading called “Children of the Lucky Country”. I hope to write more on it soon.

Paul Kelly – (not the journalist but the board member of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth) writes this:

Australian policy has failed. Obesity and diabetes are on the rise. Asthma rates have lifted from 10 per cent to 30 per cent over three decades.

Reporting on the increase in asthma, the book says (on page 53) “Why this has occured is not yet known”.

A bit tough to blame policy for it then it seems to me.

I’ve previously written up the idea of charitable giving at Christmas. It’s a bit late now I guess, but, in doing some reading around for next week’s column I came upon an Australia Institute paper (pdf) that I’d missed on Christmas giving. It gives a bunch of links to Christmas giving programs of various charities which I reproduce below. Bookmark it for next year!
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In 1959 Michael Harrington shocked America with the claim that 50 million of its citizens were living in poverty. His magazine article turned into a book and by 1964 President Johnson was standing outside a shack in Kentucky announcing that the nation was at war with poverty. Ever since, anti-poverty activists have cranked away at the same formula but without the same success. If the strategy worked then, why doesn’t it work now?

One reason is that small government activists are a lot more savvy these days. They know that if claims about widespread poverty are allowed to go unchallenged political leaders are likely to attach themselves to the problem. Politicians thrive on problems — creating a sense of crisis is an essential skill. As Johnson’s aide Harry McPherson explained:

The problem of democratic leaders, little "d" and big "D", is that they must grab the attention of the public; they must convince the public that there is an urgent problem that needs to be solved, and to do that they really have to hit him like the old farmer hits the mule between the eyes to get his attention. And once he has his attention, then they have to come along and say "But all is not lost. We have a solution." That’s the format that has always been used (pdf).

National capitals like Washington and Canberra are filled with people marketing problems and solutions to political leaders. Harrington knew how this game worked and never apologised for talking up his statistics:

If my interpretation is bleak and grim, and even if it overstates the case slightly, that is intentional. My moral point of departure is a sense of outrage, a feeling that the obvious and existing problem of the poor is so shocking that it would be better to describe it in dark tones rather than to minimize it. No one will be hurt if the situation is seen from the most pessimistic point of view, but optimism can lead to complacency… (p 171-172)

For Harrington, arguments about statistics were ‘dry, graceless, technical matters" and "any tendency toward understatement is an intellectual way of acquiescing in suffering" (p 172). Even in 1963 Dwight Macdonald was describing this tactic as "moral bullying."

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At the end of each year, like migratory birds, the world’s international greenhouse diplomats over ten thousand of them hear a mysterious call. And each year the tell-tale trails of greenhouse gas seem to stretch yet further across the sky as planes descend on another exotic location. And another Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) takes place.

This year the 11th COP took place in Montreal, French Quebec from 28 November to 9 December.

The third of these migrations (COP3) occurred in Kyoto in 1997 producing the eponymous Protocol in which developed countries took on binding emission reduction targets. But Kyoto has it’s problems.
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