Back in 2001 an expert panel recommended that Portugal decriminalise drugs, from cannabis to crack. The government did and went one step further. As British author Johann Hari put it:
“let’s spend all the money we currently spend on arresting drug users, trying drug users, imprisoning drug users, and just put all that money to reconnect drug addicts with society. To give them a purpose in life.”
Continue reading Portugal decriminalised drugs, from cannabis to crack
That’s the title of a Four Corners program on working conditions in Australia’s fresh food industry.
A union official contends:
The bottom line appears to be that what the AFP did in alerting the Indonesian police about the Bali 9 was legal, but was it moral, and were there other alternatives?
Brisbane solicitor Stephen Keim says that Lee Rush, father of Scott Rush, one of the Bali 9, had his lawyer approach the AFP because his son was going to Asia for no good reason. Rush’s lawyer was left with the impression that a passport alert had been raised and that his son would be going nowhere. Because of this he didn’t approach his son directly.
The contention is that Lee Rush was intentionally deceived. Continue reading Bali 9: AFP says it was legal, we might do it again
Nurses again rate, for the 21st year in a row, the highest in esteem amongst the professions. Fully 92% of Australians over the age of 14 rated them either high or very high when asked the following question in the Roy Morgan Image of Professions Survey 2015:
“As I say different occupations, could you please say – from what you know or have heard – which rating best describes how you, yourself, would rate or score people in various occupations for honesty and ethical standards (Very High, High, Average, Low, Very Low)?”
Like others, I have been appalled by the barbaric execution state murder of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran together with six others by Indonesia. Our northern neighbour defends the killings as part of their ‘war’ on drugs. Continue reading A sorry tale
John Quiggin has written about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade talks (article here, plus commentary at his blog).
This is meant to be a link post, but knowing how lazy people are with links I’ll highlight a few points here with a few comments of my own.
So far the negotiations involve twelve countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. Potential members include India and Indonesia. China, not so far but perhaps eventually.
Quiggin says that apart from agricultural products tariffs, quotas and other restrictions on trade have largely disappeared in our region. The TPP represents the emergence of “new generation” agreements. At the core of these agreements lie investor-state relations where a transnational corporation can sue a government for damaging its commercial interests by passing laws the detract from the corporations profits. Investor-state disputes are settled by a trade panel, usually three lawyers. Their rulings stand and are not appeallable in any court of law. Concerns include the environment, human rights protection, public welfare regulation, and health effects. Any law found u in the dispute ruling to inhibit a corporation’s profits is simply set aside.
For an overview, see AFTINET’s pamphlet and links at the end. For example, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA):
Currently, the US Lone Pine energy company is using ISDS [Investor-State Dispute Settlement] provisions in NAFTA to sue the provincial government of Quebec for $250 million because it suspended shale gas mining pending an environmental study in response to community concerns.
Quiggin didn’t mention this, but the precautionary principle doesn’t apply. Under NAFTA a product must be proven to cause harm before it can be restricted. Any law based on the precautionary principle could be set aside in a dispute.
It’s beyond the imagination to think that the Americans would agree to labelling GM foods in the TPP.
The new generation agreements also have intellectual property components, which enhance the rights of corporations beyond what would be commonly thought reasonable.
Investor-state relations and intellectual property are being used already by Philip Morris and Big Tobacco in an attempt set aside Australian tobacco labelling laws. Philip Morris, for example, has incorporated in Hong Kong to bring a case under investor-state provisions we signed up to way back in 1993. If successful under trade dispute provisions a 6-1 High Court decision supporting the labelling regulations would be set aside.
Politically there has been strong bi-partisanship in Australia under the banner “free trade is good” since Latham and Conroy went to water over the US Free Trade Agreement in 2004. Hence recent agreements have been seen an an unmitigated good. Quiggin points out that one way of concluding agreements quickly, as Robb has done, is to concede the other party’s demands.
In the case of the agreement with Japan, for example, Australia secured some modest concessions regarding tariffs on beef, which will be reduced from 38.5 per cent to 19 per cent over a period of fifteen years. In return, our government accepted the total exclusion of rice from the deal, and the maintenance of most restrictions on dairy products.
The Korean agreement, KAFTA, was arguably even worse. Reversing our previous position, the government agreed to the inclusion of investor–state dispute provisions. This was apparently done not in response to Korean demands but because US negotiators were pushing the provision in the parallel negotiations for the TPP.
Negotiations are going on in secret, but sections revealed through Wikileaks give cause for alarm. In the end:
It seems certain that the final agreement will involve a substantial loss of Australian sovereignty and an acceptance of economically damaging intellectual property rules. In return, Australia will receive marginal and long-drawn-out improvements in market access for agricultural commodities. While a Labor government might perhaps have held out for a better deal, it seems unlikely that the opposition will reject legislation implementing the agreement.
Quiggin is right, I think, when he says:
The new generation agreements are primarily about imposing a particular model of global capitalism, with the United States as the model and multinational corporations as the main engines of economic activity.
Back in 1999 massive protests disrupted the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in the ‘Battle in Seattle’. The WTO countered by holding the next meeting in Doha in 2001, where protester access was impossible, and promoting it as the “development round” ostensibly to meet developing country concerns. Against developing country resistance “New Issues” including investor-state relations, were forced onto the agenda. See the Road to Cancun section of my Webdiary piece Reaching for the Moon: how the poor lost and won at Cancun.
The so-called “New Issues” stemmed from a special WTO meeting in Singapore back in 1996 and included investor-state relations, which were pursued under the infamous and controversial MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) under the aegis of the OECD until they were defeated in 1998.
At Cancun although investment was taken off the table during the meeting, some of the New Issues remained. However, through Japanese and Korean stubbornness and developing country resistance the talks collapsed. Attempts were made to revive the Doha round, but Quiggin says here that it finally broke down in 2008. Since then the US and other free trade advocates have been pursuing their ends through bilateral and regional agreements.
There were protests at Cancun, although the site was a peninsula which was blocked off. A South Korean farmer, Lee Kyung-Hai, famously committed suicide, apparently unable to compete with cheap Australian beef.
Since then there has been little protest and little public discussion in spite of the efforts of AFTINET, Getup and Choice.
Behind closed doors trade negotiators are determining the kind of society in which we will live, and we are letting them do it.
Ironically our best chance is a US Congress stalemate. Not good enough.
Since John Davidson posted the Greens’ ideas on tax there has been a lively debate. Here I give some links to views I have found interesting.
John Quiggin has started his own tax policy review Rethinking tax policy for Australia, a work in progress with a proposal so far to tax the “immensely profitable” banks to the tune of $5 to 10 billion.
Quiggin’s Guardian article is essential reading. Amongst the points he makes:
Ben Eltham at New Matilda points out “reform” has become a dirty word. With this government it has come to mean mostly policies that are deeply regressive and unpopular. The government discussion paper on tax:
is the latest front in the Coalition’s neoliberal war on working Australians. It will fail for the same reasons the “reforms” to health and education failed: voters don’t want reform. They want high-quality public services, affordable housing, and a good job. They know companies aren’t paying their fair share, and they want them to pay more.
When will the government and business spinmeisters learn that “reform” is a massive turnoff for voters?
Clearly we need to pay more tax. The government’s way around this problem is to increase the GST. Peter Martin says that we should concentrate on captive sources of revenue:
The trick is to grab more of the money that’s bolted down and unable to leave the country, and less of the money that’s footloose. It’s anything but fair, but tax is about raising revenue more than it is about fairness, and we can’t raise revenue we frighten away.
So that means eliminating dividend imputation for shareholders, taxing superannuation and taxing people for owning property rather than buying it.
Don’t worry about the Googles, Microsofts and Apples. They’ll gravitate to the cheapest tax haven they can find.
Martin reckons that is we knock off dividend imputation the company tax could be reduced to 19 or even 15%. In any case it’s trending to zero.
Ian McAuley at New Matilda has a perceptive piece. He says:
Australia does need tax reform. There is even a case for increasing the rate and extent of the GST, but only if it is part of a comprehensive package aimed at collecting more revenue and making the whole system fairer.
But when tax reform is in the context of revenue neutrality, or even a reduction in overall taxes, and the message is that corporations should pay less tax while consumers pay more, the proposals are politically dead in the water.
McAuley is also not impressed with the notion that companies should pay less.
The regular World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Reports tend to show that business tax concessions are the inducement of last resort, offered by countries with low education standards, poor infrastructure and unstable government.
Perhaps Hockey’s push for lower corporate taxes is in realisation that Australia is becoming that type of economy.
So to sum up, the Government’s main strategy seems to be to hold Commonwealth taxes to current levels, or less, but to shove off responsibility to the states for hospitals and schools necessitating an increase in the GST
However, they say that a change to the GST needs to be bipartisan. Labor sees it as highly regressive and won’t have a bar of it. Similarly the LNP won’t go near a price on carbon or a mining tax. There does seem to be some consensus now that super has to be part of the equation. In itself it’s unlikely to be sufficient.
What the exercise does do is to put the wood on both major parties to come up with proposals to take to the next election that are coherent, understandable and make a difference.
Generally speaking the Abbott government lacks recognition of science, to the point where its stance can be characterised as anti-science. That is certainly the case in climate science, but can be seen in many other ways, not least in the use of science infrastructure funding as a pawn in the political wars over how university teaching should be funded. Certainly too, the Abbott government lacks an appreciation of the contribution science and mathematics can make to transitioning out of our dependence on mining and other product exports in the economy.
In this context the Chief Scientist and the Australian Academy of Science commissioned a report The Importance of Advanced Physical and Mathematical Sciences to the Australian Economy. The report was produced by the Centre for International Economics (CIE).
The aim has been to produce an economic framework that can use the available statistics and economic modelling techniques to provide a timely reminder of how much of our national economic activity depends on the advanced physical and mathematical sciences (the APM sciences). The APM sciences comprise physics, chemistry, the earth sciences and the mathematical sciences, where ‘advanced’ means science undertaken and applied in the past 20 years. Biology and the life sciences were not covered in the report.
The direct contribution of the APM sciences is estimated to be 11% (or about $145 billion per year of the Australian economy). The contribution in additional and flow-on benefits equals another 11%, bringing the total benefits to 22% or around $292 billion per year.
This exercise was not helped by Age journalist Gareth Hutchens with an article entitled Australia’s scientists forced to rely on pseudo-science to be taken seriously in Canberra starting with:
It’s a shame that scientists have to stoop so low.
Climate scientist Roger Jones defended the report and its progenitors in a blog post.
We can all agree, Hutchens included, that it is a disgrace that such a report should be felt necessary for science to be taken seriously by those govern and plan for our future. There should be no need for a “timely reminder”; our leaders should have science and knowledge-based industries front and centre in their thinking. But to dump on the report in the way Hutchens does is in my view inflammatory, derogatory and misleading in that it gives the impression that the exercise was worthless. What Hutchens calls “guesses” were in fact informed estimates by the most knowledgeable people available.
In large part Hutchens is entering with hob-nailed boots the old argument of how much science there is in economics. I don’t know enough science or economics to usefully contribute, but Hutchens own account of the methodology used suggests a disciplined and rational approach.
Well strictly speaking Neanderthals are humans too, so for “humans” read Homo Sapiens, that is us.
I intended to write a post on taxation policy, but then I heard Phillip Adams’ segment Dogs: not the Neanderthals best friend, an interview with retired anthropologist Pat Shipman on her hypothesis that the domestication wolf-dogs gave us the critical edge to out-compete the Neanderthals. It reminded me of an article by Shipman in the New Scientist. If that’s paywalled there is an excellent exposition of her ideas by Steve Donoghue at Open Letters Monthly.
Anyway Sapiens vs Neanderthalensis won out over tax policy.
Shipman uses the example of Yellowstone National Park to demonstrate the effect a top predator can have on a whole ecosystem.
Though wolves were integral to that ecosystem for millennia, they were wiped out there by settlers by about 1920. The effects of removing the wolf were striking. Coyotes formed larger, more wolf-like packs, while elk populations soared, changing the vegetation close to rivers by eating young trees and shrubs. Pronghorn antelope populations dropped as more coyotes preyed on their offspring; beavers disappeared from the park and songbirds declined in number.
Then:
Reintroducing just 31 wolves in the mid-1950s transformed the ecosystem again. Wolves targeted their closest competitor, killing coyotes in confrontations over carcasses and consuming enough prey to hinder their survival. Coyotes avoided areas favoured by wolves and shifted to smaller prey. Coyote packs fragmented and their overall population declined sharply. More pronghorns survived; elk herds diminished; and riverine vegetation came back, encouraging the return of beavers and songbirds.
Neanderthals survived for about 250,000 years in an environment that presented challenges. Donoghue describes it thus:
Their populations had endured sweeping climate changes over the centuries, and they shared their landscape with animals as monstrous as anything the world had seen since the dinosaurs: massive cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, lions bigger than any in Africa today, cave hyenas, huge woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceri, wolves, leopards, roving packs of dholes – a world as fearsome and strange as something out of a science fiction novel.
A few thousand years after Sapiens arrived some 45,000 years ago, apart from wolves all these large animals were gone, and the Neanderthals with them.
Shipman says that the common belief was that the Neanderthals moved south to avoid the advancing ice, and lingered until 27,000 years ago. However, she says that modern dating technology shows no southward movement and no trace of Neanderthals after 39,000 years ago.
Sapiens had two big advantages. One was projectile technology to enable killing at a distance. The other was possibly the assistance of the domesticated wolf-dog. Dogs assisted Sapiens in hunting and acted as guards.
It seems likely that Sapiens did not tolerate the presence of Neanderthals in ‘their’ territory. It seems likely also that with projectile weapons Sapiens would win any direct confrontation. If the Neanderthals crept up at night, the dogs would likely smell them and sound the alarm.
The effect of dogs was to increase the ecological niche in which Sapiens could operate. For the Neanderthals there was simply no good place to go, so they were squeezed into areas where they could not support themselves in the longer term. In this, climate change was still certainly a factor.
Shipman says we are “natural invaders, the mammalian equivalent of Burmese pythons, cane toads and Asian carp.”
Shipman stresses that her hypothesis “still requires elaboration and testing.” Nevertheless it is certainly food for thought.
Shipman’s book on the topic is The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction.
You might also be interested in Neanderthals r us and Sex with Neanderthals was good for us from 2011. Seems like yesterday.
The Romans, came, they saw and they conquered. But they left no genetic imprint. The same goes for the Vikings and the Normans, with the exception of the Orkney Islands, which were Norwegian for 600 years. Nevertheless Viking DNA only accounts for 25% of today’s Orcadian DNA.
The New Scientist reports on DNA mapping undertaken of Britain’s Caucasian population. To qualify for sampling people had to have all four grandparents born within 80 kilometres of each other. So I guess there’d be a bias towards clustering, and clustering is what they got.
There were two main findings. First, the only invaders to leave a distinct genetic genetic footprint were the Anglo-Saxons in the east and the south, who arrived from AD 450. Still the DNA of earlier settlers dominates, with at least 60% deriving from earlier immigrants.
Secondly, there is considerable variety in the DNA of those earlier settlers, especially in the west and the north. In the south and the east the effect of the Romans was to dissolve somewhat the tribal clustering, partly through building roads.
The first immigrants arrived from about 9000 BC, as the ice melted, via land bridge from Belgium and Germany and by boat from France. The overall pattern is captured in this image:
The article does not mention language.
English, of course, is a Germanic language which came with the Anglo-Saxons. German as a language only developed from about 500-0 BC in what is now southern Scandinavia. The Germans emerged from the north onto the main European continent and beyond from about 0 AD. The Celts were already there. But the Celtic language only dates from about 1350-850 BC and appears to have arisen in central Europe. It’s part of the Indo-European family, which arose far away in the steppes north of the Black Sea, probably around 4000 to 3000 BC.
Quite obviously the early settlers of Britain spoke something else. But the Celtic language when it came took over to become the language of the masses. Whether this was a matter of sheer numbers, or cultural influence I don’t know. How this all came to be goes beyond my pathetic knowledge of ancient history.
My first paid work was in the Automotive Plant division of the PMG – later to become Telstra and Australia Post. I copied figures from operators’ returns onto a summary sheet, added them by hand and had them typed up to be sent off somewhere. I was told they would contribute to the graphs on the wall of a controlling engineer in Melbourne.
There were no electronic calculators. Engineers used slide rules.
That was in 1963. In 1964 I worked in a university library, where they were automating their loan system with punch cards and knitting needles. When I joined the Education Department in 1969 we had small committees because the minutes had to be produced using extra sheets of carbon paper in a typewriter. Photocopiers had not yet arrived.
Since then robotics, automation and communications technology have brought vast changes to the work place in all sorts of fields. Another tsunami of change is about to hit us according to Oxford University expert Michael Osbourne. He said that 47% of jobs in the US were at high risk of being replaced by automation within a generation.
“Increasingly, algorithms are able to perform not just routine manual labour in the way they have done in the past but also cognitive labour in a way that makes it much more difficult to draw that line between what is automatable and not,” he told 612 ABC Brisbane.
Jobs linked to data entry, accountancy and heavy vehicle driving would dramatically decrease and in some cases vanish completely.
Driverless vehicles would be made possible as massive low-cost data storage capacities allowed for the creation of highly detailed 3D maps – an area already being explored by large mining companies, he said.
The more creative you are, the safer you are from automation.
He stresses that he is talking about technological capacity over a 20-year time period. What happens in reality will depend on social acceptability and other factors.
The construction industry is one sector being affected already. Modules of bathrooms and kitchens are being prefabricated offsite. In fact 30 stories of a building can be put up in 15 days as sections come pre-wired and pre-plumbed.
John D has also kindly sent me a link to ABC Fact Check which has detailed 11 ways the Australian workplace has changed. Since the statistics show that readers tend not to follow links, I’ve transported the text here, for your interest.
1.
Fifty years ago the expectation was that a man went to work and a woman stayed at home. But that has changed dramatically. In the years between 1961 and 2011, the proportion of women in the workforce almost doubled from 35 per cent to 59 per cent. Until 1966 married women were not employed by theAustralian Public Service and single women were forced to “retire” when they married.
2.
In the 1960s Australia was moving from being a primary producer still “riding on the sheep’s back” to an economy with a strong manufacturing base. In 1966 more than 25 per cent of the workforce were in manufacturing, but that’s fallen in the past few decades. Now just 8 per cent of workers are in manufacturing.3.
The rise and fall of trade unions in Australia has been dramatic. In 1912, 30 per cent of workers were members of trade unions, by 1961 that had reached 61 per cent, but by 1999 that had fallen to 26 per cent, and by 2011 it had dwindled to around 18 per cent.4.
Child labour was not uncommon for much of the 20th century. In 1940, 6 per cent of all factory workers were under the age of sixteen, fifteen in NSW. The number fell sharply after World War II to 2 per cent of factory workers in 1948 and less than 1 per cent by 1968 as higher levels of employment for adults let them keep their children in school and out of the workforce longer.5.
One in 10 full-time workers in Australia earns more than an average of $2,548 per week, and one in 10 earns $800 per week or less. The rest are somewhere in between.6.
The Australian workforce is split fairly evenly along gender lines. Of the approximately 10 million employees in Australia, 50.5 per cent are women and 49.5 per cent are men. But men still tend to earn a lot more than women – an average of $1,429.80 for male employees, compared with $940.20 for female employees. That in part is due to the number of hours worked: 76.6 per cent of men work full time compared with 43.7 per cent of women.7.
Mining is the best paid industry, where average earnings are $2,499.60 per week, compared with the lowest paid industry, accommodation and food services, where workers make an average of $561.60 per week. The largest industry is health care and social assistance, making up 12.8 per cent of employees.8.
Managing is the best-paid occupation, with average weekly earnings of $2,113.80. Sales workers get the lowest average pay, with just $628.60 per week.9.
The occupations with the highest rates of work-related injuries and illness are machinery operators and drivers, followed by community and personal service workers. The industries with the highest rate of work-related illness or injury are manufacturing, followed by transport/postal/warehousing and agriculture/forestry/fishing.10
Education matters. Of Australians with a tertiary or higher education, 83 per cent have a paid job, compared with 59 per cent of those without an upper secondary education.
11.
Australian jobs are pretty secure compared with other nations. Australian workers have a 4.4 per cent chance of losing their job, which is lower than the OECD average of 5.3 per cent.
Today the obnoxious and juvenile Christopher Pyne has backed away from the threat to make science infrastructure funding contingent on support for the university deregulation bill. The science funding will be continued for 12 months, but it appears that cuts to that funding may be on the agenda. The total funding of $150 million for the 27 facilities employing 1700 people and supporting the work of some 35,000 scientists is small in the context of a budget of $414.8 billion. Any savings would be miniscule.
I believe that Pyne never seriously intended to cut the funds entirely. We have been told that within Cabinet Abbott, Hockey and Macfarlane had reservations about the linkage. Crossbenchers went ballistic. Senator Cory Bernadi was identified as one of the party who was upset. It’s a fair bet that he had plenty of mates.
Chief Scientist Ian Chubb told us on the box that science infrastructure workers were already actively making arrangements to find work elsewhere. The ethics of playing with people’s lives in this way is downright despicable. Moreover irreparable damage would already have been done to Australia’s reputation as a good place to do science.
Now the opportunity arises for Pyne to negotiate university deregulation with the crossbench, free of childish threats and blackmail. So far only Family First Senator Bob Day is on board and he has demanded that course fees charged students be capped at 70% of overseas student course fees.
The basic problem, according to Melbourne University Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis (on the 7.30 Report and the Fin Review), is that university education comes at a price that no-one wants to pay. University education funding is not high in the priorities of Australian voters or politicians. Funding for university teaching, already stripped to the bone by Swan and Gillard, was scheduled now to suffer a further cut of $1.9 billion.
Leaving aside free market ideology, Davis sees the deregulation of fees as the only way to prevent university teaching in Australia from becoming third rate. “Third rate” is not his language, but I think it’s a fair representation of what he said.
Now in a truly surprising second backflip, Pyne has found another $1.9 billion to continue the former rate of funding for the time being. That will tell you how arbitrary and hollow his complaint really was that he couldn’t find $150 million for scientific research infrastructure.
Count me confused, but I’m sure the cuts will reappear down the line, because it’s either that or higher taxes. Davis is right. University education comes at a price that no-one wants to pay.
