Monthly Archives: September 2011

A post-Malaysia asylum seeker policy

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I simply can’t understand the strategic or even tactical thinking (if any) behind the Gillard government’s decision to pursue a legislative revival of the Malaysia Solution.  Neither the Coalition nor the Greens were ever going to support it, nor were many voters going to spend enough time actually thinking about the issue to realise that Tony Abbott’s position is not only cynically destructive but logically absurd and unworkable.  Of course the same is true of his climate change “policy” but no-one seems worried about that either.

What Gillard should have done was reluctantly accept from the outset that the High Court’s decision had effectively doomed the Malaysia Solution at least in the immediate future.  Given that this is what all the experts were saying anyway, persuading people on that proposition shouldn’t have been a big ask.  Then she and Bowen could have (and still should) set about constructing a workable policy framework around onshore processing, perhaps also taking advantage of Abbott’s willingness to wave through a revival of Nauru/Manus Island offshore processing merely to be able to say “nah nah nah , told you so”.  Anyway, here’s my rough stab at a post-Malaysia Solution asylum seeker policy:

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Are we in a Golden Age?

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It is easy to become absorbed in particular problems and in the disaster stories that dominate the daily media. Climate change, natural disasters, wars in Africa and Asia, Financial Crises, riots and food price rises: you would be forgiven for thinking the world is going to the dogs. Is it really, however, or is that just the gloom you get from staring at the problems and not smelling the roses?

The major indicators of how we as humans are doing are smelling exceptionally rosy. We are living in a golden age of progress and opportunity for humanity. Let’s list some of the big changes in recent times:

  1. Life expectancy is going up by a lot. Whereas the average Australian would not have expected to see 50 in 1885, the average Australian now can expect to live beyond 80. The same trend goes for both developed and developing countries. For the world as a whole, the World Bank reports that life expectation has thus crept up from about 52 in 1960 to 69 in 2009. And the increase is greatest in poorer countries, so there is even increased equity in terms of life expectancy by country.
  2. There are more of us every year, but the numbers are stabilising. According to this source, we used to be with no more than 50 million some 3000 years ago, reached 1,5 billion in 1900, now count close to 7 billion, and can expect to be with close to 10 billion in 2050 after which a reduction is expected. Whilst the increased numbers, who can all expect to live longer than our ancestors ever could, is itself a sign of success, the expected peaking, due to reduced fertility levels virtually everywhere in the world, is also very good news because it means the old nightmare-scenario of a Malthusian melt-down is now highly unlikely.
  3. We are less and less violent. Trends in murders and homicide are at incredibly low levels from an historical point of view: whereas our hunter-gatherer ancestors were believed to kill off about 1 in a 100 every year, modern Western society sees one homicide per 10,000 as very violent, corresponding to exceptionally violent countries like the US. More normal levels are in the order of 2 per 100,000. Globally, the trends have even been going down in the last 10 years. Trends in armed conflict also speak of exceptionally peaceful times. The Upsalla Conflict Data Program thus collects statistics on how many combatants die in total in organised conflicts around the world. The basic facts are that the period just after WWII was easily 5 times as violent as the 1980s per capita, whilst the 2000s are easily twice less violent again than the 1980s. The trend for the last 10 years too has also been clearly downward in per capita terms.
  4. Less of us are poor and more have access to basic facilities (clean water, sanitation, literacy, etc.). Global output growth in 2011 is in the 2-3% range, the vast bulk of which in poorer countries. Great news for inequality reduction hence.
  5. We are getting happier as the poor amongst us are getting richer. As one can see from the World Value Survey, the relation between income and happiness is very robust by country and we furthermore know that countries who escape dire poverty also increase their happiness. So the world as a whole is almost certainly getting happier. Even within countries that are in an economic downturn like the US, the average life satisfaction is about as high as it was before the downturn.

How Gillard fell victim to the Knobe effect

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By calling it the greatest moral challenge of our generation, Kevin Rudd framed climate change as a moral issue. Now as Prime Minister Julia Gillard is putting a price on carbon. So why isn’t she getting credit from people who care passionately about the issue? The reason is the Knobe effect.

According to experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe, people are much more willing to blame a decision maker for bad side-effects than to praise them for good side-effects. And according to the conventional media narrative, Gillard’s decisions on carbon pricing a side-effect of her search for electoral advantage.

When the polls indicated that action on climate change was a vote winner Gillard supported Rudd’s plan for a carbon price. But when public opinion turned, Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar went to Rudd and told him to put the plan on ice. According to commentators like Gerard Henderson, Gillard supported this move. Now that her government’s survival depends on the Greens, Gillard is taking action.

Among those who see action against climate change as a moral imperative, Gillard is held responsible for stalling Rudd’s carbon pricing scheme in order to hold onto office. Then when she does decide to take action, her decision is discounted because it’s seen as an effort to hold onto office by appeasing the Greens.

Knobe tested his ideas on how people make moral judgments in a series of experiments. Here’s how he explains the results in The Edge:

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Craig Thomson (and Labor) might be in even more strife than the MSM currently thinks

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With the noteworthy exception of the Fairfax investigative journalists especially Kate McClymont who continue to uncover new aspects of the story, Australia’s predictably groupthink-oriented political media appear to have concluded (at least temporarily) that the fact NSW Police declined to investigate federal Labor MP Craig Thomson’s alleged misuse of his HSU credit card on call-girls and political donations means that the whole controversy is a damp squib that’s going nowhere as a political issue.  That seems to be the case even despite Tony Abbott’s best endeavours to keep it alive through questions in Parliament last week.

However, what the MSM doesn’t seem to have yet registered is that the newest allegations, to the effect that Thomson and current HSU National President Michael Williamson both secretly received credit cards from a preferred HSU supplier and used those cards for their own private benefit (in Williamson’s case quite blatantly), may well be potentially both more serious and easier to prove than the original call-girl allegations.  As I commented about the original allegations against Thomson:

What may make charges tricky is that the existence and extent of legal (as opposed to moral) authority to incur personal expenses on a corporate credit card can be unclear in such situations. It is very common for executives to be permitted to use corporate cards for personal expenses while travelling on corporate business. While it is undoubtedly clear in a moral sense that this should not include using it for call-girls, if the formal rules (if any) are unclear about what is allowed and what isn’t then establishing criminal guilt might become problematic.

Similarly with donations to ALP campaigning. Affiliated trade unions make donations to the ALP frequently and always have. The extent to which union executives have express or implied authority to do so without a formal resolution of the union executive committee (or whatever) in advance may vary from union to union and time to time. The fact that a later and hostile Union Secretary seeks to impugn the legitimacy of such donations does not of itself establish criminality. There may well be a conflict of interest given that it is alleged that Thomson was in part donating to campaign costs in his own seat, but again conflict of interest is a civil not criminal concept. If there is a history of union secretaries making donations to ALP campaigns on their own authority (as may conceivably be the case) then it could be very difficult to establish criminal guilt.

Ultimately it appears that it was precisely those problems that caused the NSW Police to decide that no formal investigation was warranted.  However, those problems of evidence and proof mostly don’t apply to the latest allegations, which are in the nature of receiving secret corrupt commissions as an agent from a third party.

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The Australian as a dysfunctional group blog

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After his first week of blogging back in 2002 John Quiggin observed that blogging "technology seems ideally suited for individuals and small groups, with no obvious way of scaling it up to corporate level."

Maybe he’s changed his mind. This week Quiggin suggests that The Australian makes more sense if you think of it as a right wing group blog than as a newspaper:

Looking at the Oz now, it’s easy to imagine it as a rightwing group blog that started up in the Triassic era of blogging (say 2002). Lines weren’t drawn so sharply then, so the contributors included some a bit more leftish or just less ideological than the group as a whole. Over time, some have been pushed out, and the others have been forced to demonstrate group solidarity on appropriate occasions, such as attack from the left.

By now however, a tribalist mode of groupthink has taken over the blog. Its members spend a lot of time reassuring each other that, in spite of all contrary evidence, they are right about everything. Even when they are demonstrably wrong on some particular point, they are still right in a way their opponents can never be. Conversely, no matter how bogus the argument, if it’s on the right side it has to be backed all the way.

It wasn’t always this way . Michael Stutchbury writes: "yours truly commissioned Quiggin (along with The Weekend Australian‘s Christopher Pearson) to write a column in The Australian Financial Review in the mid-1990s." As for Christopher Pearson, it’s hard to imagine him writing for the Fin now.

The truly national footie code?

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I grew up playing rugby union and rugby league in northern beaches Sydney.  But you couldn’t call rugby (union) Australia’s national game, especially after tonight’s depressing tryless loss by the Wallabies to Ireland.  A top class rugby game exhibits all the skills, as we saw in the last Bledisloe Cup fixture where Australia actually beat the ABs.  But the current rules of rugby mean that the majority of games are boring, grinding affairs fascinating only to boofhead afficionadoes (any suggestion that I’m thinking of Chris Sheil is emphatically if unconvincingly denied).  Moreover, in Australia at least, rugby is an elitist game for private school self-appointed toffs, whose administrators made little or no effort to broaden the game’s appeal in the wake of previous lucrative World Cup successes.

Soccer doesn’t cut the mustard either, despite having far more players at junior level than any other code.  At senior level it still doesn’t seem to have severed the noxious ethnic allegiances that have always blighted the code.  And a sport that thinks it’s a great idea to pin its fortunes to the signing of a geriatric  self-obsessed superstar like Harry Kewell has truly lost its way, even leaving aside the sleaze and dodginess of the Frank Lowy-inspired dual World Cup bid dissected in last week’s Four Corners program.  Moreover, at international level most soccer games exhibit all the excitement, tension and blood and guts of a chess game (no offence Nicholas).  The most exciting thing about most soccer games is judging which player pulled off the most convincing if spurious Dying Swan Act in or near the penalty box.

For Australians at least, the award for most truly national footie code comes down to a contest between rugby league and Australian Rules, and this weekend’s sudden death finals highlight just how close that contest really is.  In rugby league,  last night’s match where the NZ Warriors overhauled Benji Marshall’s Wests Tigers with a fluky try with only a couple of minutes to go, and then tonight’s game where retiring superstar Darren Lockyer won the game for Brisbane against last year’s premiers St George Illawarra with a wobbly field goal in extra time, both showed NRL at its best.

On the other hand, in AFL Sydney Swans left their run too late against Hawthorn last night and then, when it seemed a crippled Adam Goodes might nevertheless conjure a miracle, an equally crippled Buddy Franklin saved the Hawks’ feathers at least for another week.  In a sense, tonight’s sudden death final was almost a carbon copy, with the Weagles looking like relatively comfortable winners for most of the night until a late surge from Carlton got them within three points at the death.

You can make a plausible case that the makeup of the final four makes NRL more truly national (deeming New Zealand to be part of greater Oz – which may be the least depressing way to look at the rugby World Cup after tonight’s game).   The Weagles is the only non-Melbourne club left in the Aussie Rules finals race.  By contrast,  Brisbane, NZ Warriors and Melbourne Storm are all still in the NRL contest with Manly Sea Eagles the sole contender holding up Sydney’s honour as the home of rugby league.  Will the rest of Sydney swing in behind the team once known as the “Silvertails” until they spent all their cash reserves loyally fighting to save rugby league from the Murdoch Anti-Christ?  Don’t count on it.

Despite growing up with the rugby codes, I can’t help concluding after an intensive weekend of footie watching that Aussie Rules is a better game to watch than rugby league, with a wider range of skills regularly on display. Even so, I’ll be watching the remaining finals in both codes with equal fascination, and hoping against hope that the Wallabies stop reading their own publicity and start playing consistently to their potential.  Go Manly! Go Geelong!  Go Wallabies!