28 October 2008

Corrupt AU - Site Makeover

We're currently undergoing a makeover which includes stamping out some problems related to the Firefox browser and also a general re-design to improve the site's appearance and accessibility in line with its blogging function. We will be back asap!

22 October 2008

Tasmanian Premier vs Old-Growth Forests

"Mr Bartlett told The Australian that calls by the conservation movement to suspend old-growth logging, because of evidence they might be more valuable as carbon sinks, were nonsense.

"If you burn a tree, obviously the carbon is [released]. If you turn it into a coffee table, that carbon is sequestered for life or for a very bloody long time."

::View Article::

Sure, any carbon stored by a tree in its lifetime is not somehow automatically released into the atmosphere when it is simply cut from the ground. However when you cut down some of the oldest and tallest trees in the world, like the ones in Tasmania's old growth forests, you loose some big carbon sequesterers. Replacing them with new smaller and younger trees is obviously not going to be the same.

However not all environmental issues relate back to climate change. The validity of conservation of any sort, flora or fauna, should not simply rest on whether it helps the fight against climate change. Old growth forests in Tasmania represent a beautiful part of our national history and are areas of wilderness that, remarkably these days, still stand. Why not conserve them when so much of our floura has been removed? It's a question of balance. Here are some stats from the Australian Conservation Foundation that are relevant:

"Since European settlement half of Australia's forests and three quarters of its rainforests have been cleared and over 90% of old growth forests have been logged.

113 species of vertebrate forest animals found in forests are formally listed as threatened species on State or Commonwealth threatened species lists. This is over one twentieth of Australia's terrestrial animal species.

Every year the equivalent to 85% of the size of the Australian Capital Territory is logged in Australia's native forests. That's 200,000 hectares, or the equivalent of two million quarter acre suburban household blocks."

::View Article::

21 October 2008

Australia: falling behind in terms of non-economic prosperity?

"Australia ranks 20th out of 27 nations for infant mortality and indigenous Australians rate second last.

Youth road deaths are the third highest in the OECD and Australian children are 12 times more likely to live in a jobless household as those in Japan.

In education, Australia performs relatively well but ranks 17 out of 25 nations for the transition between education to employment.

Family relationships are not strong, according to the report."

::View Article::

This is a bit of a follow up post to 'Do Booming Economic Times = Social Success?' because it concerns the well-being of the next generation of Australians in terms other than the purely material or economic.

A big concern of this blog is Australia's perceived tendency to place materialism and economic growth at the forefront of life. Not because of a dogmatic ideological stance against capitalism, modernity or something reactionary like that, but because it is felt that as a nation we all too often take the necessary requirements simply of open-ended economic growth to be the necessary requirements of a prosperous society, and we frame social success purely in terms of material success when the economy, wealth and products are simply means to ends rather than ends in themselves.

God is dead, and we have replaced him as a social ideal with materialism, or something like that. And we are doing this at the expense of the environment, families, liveability, and social cohesion and community sentiment.

19 October 2008

The Invisible Hand - Not So Visible on its own

"LIKE most of you, I have come from a family that values hard work and that brought me up to take responsibility and appreciate the importance of enterprise. For generations my father's family worked the land as farmers and many Browns still do. So it's hardly surprising that I believe in markets, competition and rewarding creativity and effort.

But I also know that we do not live by markets alone. I have long understood that markets rely on values that they cannot generate themselves. Values as important as treating people fairly, acting responsibly, co-operating for the benefit of all. And these values that our economy and society need in order to flourish are not born in markets, nor in states.

These values - fairness, stewardship, co-operation - are learned in families, neighbourhoods and communities and developed in the relationships we enjoy as a society."

::View Article::

What a nice surprise to hear a most senior politician recognise that the invisible hand, or the unbridled market, is not enough to secure social prosperity.

The idea of the invisible hand is one in which individuals (buyers and sellers) in pursuit of their own self-interests, i.e. in a free market, tend to maximise the good of the whole more than they do when they restrain self-interest for some sort of 'collective goal'. When each individual in a society maximises revenue for him or her self the total social revenue is maximised: implying that the sum of individual revenue equals the wealth or prosperity of society as a whole.

In fact the free market only maximises the social good if certain other values also exist and are practiced, values which are holistic (i.e. concerned with a realm greater than the individual) as opposed to purely individualistic. A society cannot function on the profit motive alone. It cannot function if citizens are purely self interested and do not share a consensus over anything other than an interest to get as much out of everyone else as is possible: this is actually the seed of the concept of 'corruption'.

I wonder if the above article is anything more than rhetoric, however, as it is out of character for politicians in the modern political climate of Liberalism to champion a particular set of values beyond materialism: even more to encourage their propagation in the places where they "are learned" such as families, neighbourhoods and communities.

16 October 2008

Girt By Sea - And Pissed By Lunch Time

"Of the 600-odd 24-hour drinking licences across Australia, more than 60 per cent of them can be found in this state. More importantly, though, are our soaring alcohol-related crime figures and social costs. In some parts of the city and along the Central Coast, Sunday morning pedestrians require hopscotch skills to negotiate the patties of dried vomit.

The physical toll is more extreme, with rising hospital admissions, increased incidents of glassings and a culture which has barely changed in more than half a century.

Yet the push to bring some form of restraint to our drinking laws is not a new form of wowserism, despite the claims of some critics."

::View Article::

Intelligent regulation, i.e. not the sort that simply creates a dangerous atmosphere of collective annoyance among hordes drunks suddenly locked out of drinking venues at 2 or 3am, might obviously do some good.

But Australians have always, how do you say, been partial to a drink or two. "Girt by sea and pissed by lunchtime", as the saying goes. IN the past we've gone through waves of regulation and de-regulation in response to scenes of binge drinking and intoxication in bars and on the street, as the body of the article sighted above reveals.

It's only now that we're using those 2 or 3 (or 15+) drinks as an excuse to vent our anger, frustration and ego's onto our fellow man. This might reflect either a society less and less happy with itself and its emerging collective goals (materialism, massification, growth, multi-'culturalism'/social division) or a culture of "me, me" individualism of the Corey Worthington sort, or both.

These notions like 'Individualism' and 'social goals' are not tangible. They are not really discussed as social determinants because they cannot be measured and 'distributed' more or less evenly, like wealth, liquor licences, health-care or even aspects of education. But they are notions that must come into play in society because any society always involves some sort of relationship (often a trade-off) between individual ego and the good of the whole/collective, and also some sort of collective orientation or direction, even if it's an unspoken one.

16 October 2008

Contact Sports Banned in Gold Coast School

"Coombabah State School has banned children from playing lunchtime games of rugby league, Aussie Rules and rugby union, as well as soccer and touch football, the Gold Coast Bulletin reports.

"The school has been forced to restrict Year 7 students from taking part in contact sports following a number of recent incidents that have escalated into fights.""

::View Article::

Yawn. What about getting a staff member outside each lunch time to supervise the kids and keep some order so that the games can continue? I thought we were experiencing a child obesity epidemic, or something.

15 October 2008

Sexual offences increasing among primary students

"EDUCATION chiefs are "significantly concerned" about the rising "inappropriate sexual behaviour" of primary school students in Adelaide.

The offences include rape, attempted rape, unlawful sexual intercourse and indecent assault.

Education Minister Jane Lomax - Smith said data revealed a "very serious" trend, with today's students increasingly exposed to inappropriate forms of media."

::View Article::

This is no doubt at least partly the result of the sexualisation of children that takes place in the media, the music industry, and the fashion industry, to name a few places.

Industry has always capitalised on the creation of need: your need to look stylish in these shoes, to feel comfortable in this couch, and trendy in this car, etc. Economic models and the public might think that 'consumers' drive the demand for goods and services rather than the producers and sellers of those goods and services, but it is in fact a two way street. Consumers demand things, but firms and industry also spend tumultuous amounts of money on sophisticated, psychology based, marketing strategies. This is the creation of demand.

Now it's pretty clear that the media, music and fashion industries are contributing to the sexualising of children at a younger and younger age by producing and marketing things like suggestive clothes and erotic music videos and performers to young people. This reflects the belief, found so often in Australian society, that society is at the service of business and not the other way around.

Framing relationships and sex purely in terms of individual satisfaction in society probably doesn't help either, as it promotes the idea that other people are always simply means to very introverted, personal ends.

14 October 2008

Denmark's Welfare State

"Since 1899, Denmark has gradually developed a system that combines the best features of the free market and the welfare state, providing business with very flexible rules and a well-trained workforce, and workers with income security and a high standard of living.

They call it "flexicurity". It's not perfect, but it shows us how to avoid the pathetic situation in which Australia was being held back by skills shortages while half a million young Australians were in neither full-time work nor full-time study.

When you lose your job, you are immediately eligible for government-financed retraining or education to help you equip yourself for a new job. In 2006, roughly 50,000 unemployed people went through training programs, and employers and unions have signed a new agreement to give employed workers the right to leave their job temporarily on 85% pay to undertake relevant training.

Denmark's system works, Fredericksen says, because it tries to protect incomes, not jobs. "We can't guarantee that your job will continue to exist," he says, "but we can say that if people lose their jobs they don't have to lose their house and home - and we will help upgrade their qualifications so they can meet the demands of new jobs."

::View Article::

In other words the welfare state in Denmark avoids giving handouts to its jobless and unskilled citizens without doing something pro-active like re-training them, avoiding a situation which inevitably encourages apathy and also the purely economic need to import hordes of workers from overseas via immigration, as is currently the case in Australia. This simply divides society along the lines of ethnicity and additionally relegates, in terms of importance, the nation's pre-existing citizen body below the level of abstract short term economic productivity.

In Denmark welfare support for the jobless is not simply delivered in the form of money but also retraining. Thus it's not about reinforcing failure, or providing people with a mere means of subsistence while politicians forget them and replace them with immigrants, but rather the facilitation of holistic nation-focused change.

11 October 2008

Population Expansion = Climate change?

"One of the Garnaut report's themes is that Australia's burden in climate change mitigation must take into account its growing population from immigration.

It reflects a bipartisan choice for Australia: to ensure its climate change policy is integrated into an expanding population. This is pivotal because, sooner or later (probably sooner), the anti-migration wing of the green-scientific lobby will renew its drumbeat for a smaller population by invoking climate change. Watch for the signal from Tim Flannery, whose anti-migration views are a bellwether of populist green extremism."

::View Article::

I'm no part of any 'green-scientific lobby', but I can't see how reducing carbon emissions doesn't contradict the separate pursuit of expanding our national population, at least not in the short to medium term. Carbon emissions come from the likes of power plants, cars and livestock. Cutting down trees contributes to the amount of carbon floating around because trees absorb the carbon: less trees = more carbon and more climate change. Now, more people obviously means more demand for power, cars, food, and land for dwellings and agriculture (less trees). So then doesn't more people mean more carbon pollution?

""It should be no surprise that Australia's greenhouse gas emissions rose 2% last year and the rate is increasing. Separately reported a few days earlier was the rapid rise in Australia's population, which grew more than 1.7% in the last year. This indicates that 85% of the increase in this nation's emissions relate to population increase and 15% to increase in per capita emissions", said Dr Coulter, National President of Sustainable Population Australia, today."

::View Article::

This suggests that the nation's carbon emissions are currently determined most by the number of people living on the continent rather than by the manner in which they live (i.e. how much carbon is emitted per person due to how much energy each person uses). So much for green light bulbs.

The only way population expansion can be anything but contradictory to the goal of reducing carbon emissions is if our lives, and the lives of newcomers, become completely carbon-free, i.e., if things like power plants and cars become completely 'clean': a huge task.

09 October 2008

Do Booming Economic Times = Happiness?

"In an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph today Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Australia's economy was not immune to the global financial crisis, but was coping well so far.

He also took the opportunity to defend his decision not to pressure banks to pass on official interest rate cuts by the Reserve Bank in full.

"The reality is, in the middle of a global financial crisis it is my job as Prime Minister to defend the stability of the financial system because it is mums and dads and small businesses that benefit most from a strong and stable financial system," he said."

::View Article::

It's hard to say who benefits most from a strong financial system, 'ordinary' working men and women with families or those who own and run the various institutions in the financial system like banks and non-bank lenders etc. We do hear this sort of thing from politicians all the time though: "do this or that, because it's in the best interests of the economy, and thus in the best interests "of working mums and dads".

But how closely aligned, exactly, is the well being of an abstraction like the economy with the well being and happiness of flesh and blood human beings, real families and grass-roots communities? A recent book by Australian historian and former academic David Potts called The Myth of the Great Depression offers some interesting thoughts on the topic:

"It turns out that large numbers of those who experienced the 1930s Depression spoke about the time with great affection, claiming that the struggle gave their life meaning. Many even suggested people were happier then.

Potts doesn't deny that some suffering occurred, but it wasn't universal by any means. In any case, the research showed no long-term negative impacts on those who lived through the Depression.

Compared with the previous decade, the 1930s Depression saw unemployment leap threefold and bankruptcy double. Yet the overall health of the nation actually improved and malnutrition declined. What's more, infant mortality, general death rates and suicide fell as the Depression deepened.

Financial and material scarcity appears not to have led to widespread suffering but rather to greater community interaction, increased egalitarianism, a heightened sense of purpose through resourcefulness and, most surprisingly, enhanced overall wellbeing."

::View Article::

'Risking our Kids', a documentary aired on ABC on Tuesday night, was also extremely informative. The focus of the show was child health expert and former Australian of the year Professor Fiona Stanley who heads up The Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. The multi-disciplinary institute looks at how the next generation are raised in Australia and the effects of this on their physical and mental health. It is beginning to find that despite increasing affluence in our society, many health problems more often associated with adults are now being seen in alarming numbers in young children.

::View Documentary::

Professor Stanley reports that the most common health problem in young people today is depression, that the rate of adolescent male suicides has "quadrupled", and that 1 in 7 young Australians now have mental health problems which are serious enough to effect their daily lives.

1 in 4 Australian kids are apparently currently overweight or obese with type 2 diabetes, which was never a children disease, "rocketing up".

1 in 4 four children aged twelve to fifteen currently consume alcohol weekly, with 40 per cent of teenagers being supplied by their parents.

Of particular interest are the reported findings from studies being done in affluent suburbs in Western Australia: 2 in 5 five year-olds are deemed not up to the developmental level required to start school due to insufficient social development, communication abilities and physical health and wellbeing. Linked to this are findings of high levels of post natal depression among local mothers because of a lack of community resources and isolation from neighbours. Parents with affluent professions are not only shut up in their McMansions but also lack appropriate knowledge about child development, leaving them with no understanding regarding the needs of their children. The fact that Australia is only one of a few OECD countries yet to implement paid parental leave is also sighted as a significant concern.

Next time a politician tells you that your interests are bound to economic growth and economic 'prosperity' (read: materialism), don't take it for granted. Bear in mind that in any healthy society materialism is seen as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

05 October 2008

Teachers Unions

"Consider the union reaction to the Rudd Government's education revolution outlined last month by the Prime Minister and his deputy, Education Minister Julia Gillard. Reforms to make education more transparent by mandatory reporting of student results, allowing parents to compare school performance? Opposed by unions. Transparency and accountability reforms that will enable the most disadvantaged schools to be identified and receive extra funding of $500,000 for your average school so that they may improve? Opposed by unions. Moves to give greater autonomy and flexibility for principals to hire staff? Opposed by unions. Moves to introduce performance-based pay for teachers to encourage better teachers? Opposed by unions. Moves to introduce a national curriculum so that students moving between states and territories can access a seamless education system? Opposed by unions. Queensland Teachers Union boss Steve Ryan summed up the reforms as "beyond insulting".

It's not news that teachers unions remain the single biggest hurdle to improving public education in Australia. They are wedded to an archaic public system that has long protected teachers, not promoted the interests of students. What is news is a federal Labor government is apparently willing to tackle the union influence that has long infected state and federal politics. The Howard government talked about reforming public education but achieved very little.

So it was powerful symbolism and pragmatic politics for Gillard, from Labor's left faction, to pose the killer question to union critics: "I cannot understand why public institutions such as schools should not be accountable to the community that funds their salaries and running costs." If any other group, drawing on the public purse, were exempt from disclosure and accountability, union activists would be the first to cry foul, demanding to know what was being hidden from the taxpaying public."

::View Article::

Unions can act as vehicles allowing individual workers without much bargaining power to gather together and negotiate as a collective. This has both positive and negative effects. Employers finds it harder to exploit workers and society does not descent so easily into a two tier system comprised of a manipulating upper class on the one hand and a permanently exploited, animal like underclass on the other who's constituents never have a hope of affording the environmental factors, for example good education, which might allow some of them to realise their full potential and rise up out of the lower class.

However unions can also provide a platform for the type of herd instinct which protects mediocrity. If it is true that the teachers unions in Australia are the main barriers to improving public schools or at least maintaining public schools at a high standard, then they are one of the key causes of public schools increasingly loosing children to private schools and the associated shift in government focus towards private funding.

03 October 2008

Homo Apiens

"Researchers have laid bare the behaviour of Australian bosses, revealing how everything from the pink shirt under their power suit to the size of their leather-backed chair and their choice of jargon-heavy management speak mimic the strutting and chest puffing seen among our animal ancestors.

They say bosses don't spend as much time reading or working at their computer alone as employees think they do, and instead pass the vast majority of the day in meetings where they stamp their authority with the biggest chair, a louder voice and frequent interruptions to conversation.

"What we found was universal animalistic displays of power, masculinity, sexuality and authority that seem to be hard-wired in," Prof Braithwaite said."

::View Article::

Despite our every-day intuitions, we're not all that much different from Apes. Our brains have been built upon and expanded at each stage of our evolution from ultra-simple single cell organisms to the relatively complex organisms we are now, and a large amount of our mental activity occurs in the more 'primitive' and archaic regions of the brain that we possessed when we were still swinging from trees, or earlier.

It varies according to individual genes and upbringing (we're not all equal in this regard), but our thoughts and actions are often characterised by purely subjective ego-centric emotional reactions and symbolic gestures of status rather than rational and objective reflection: i.e. the placing of our individual selves in the context of a greater whole such as our society or our natural environment.

This probably explains most of question time in parliament, and also why the results of democracy are sometimes quite painful to contemplate.

01 October 2008

Final Garnaut Report In

"Professor Garnaut reiterated his controversial recommendation that Australia aim for emissions cuts by 2020 of between 5 and 25 per cent, depending on the scope of the international agreement. Modelling conducted by Treasury for the Garnaut review found that an emissions trading scheme starting with a carbon price of $20 a tonne would result in a one-off increase in inflation of about 1per cent.

By 2020, household incomes would be only 2 per cent lower than they would have been without an emissions trading scheme, with the biggest impact coming from electricity prices, which would be between 21 and 37 per cent higher by 2020 than if an emissions trading scheme had not forced massive restructuring in the electricity sector.

But the overall economic impact would still be significant, shaving about 0.2 per cent a year from Australia's average annual economic growth through to 2020, with annual growth predicted to be around 2.5 per cent.

And Australia had more riding on a successful outcome than most countries, because even small rises in temperature could cause massive damage, such as rendering the Murray-Darling foodbowl barren and destroying the Great Barrier Reef, and because Australia stood to do "relatively well" in a carbon-constrained world."

::View Article::

According to the professor, warnings of economic disaster largely represent scaremongering by business and industry heads as they look to maximise profits rather than consider the national interest. Sounds about right.

A promising feature of this report, perhaps, is that it takes an appropriate middle ground. It does not embrace calls from green groups to set a fixed and absolute reduction target for carbon emissions of 25 per cent by 2020, which is at the upper end of considerations, but rather a flexible target of between 5 and 25 per cent by 2020, depending on the scope of the international agreement. This displays some realism and logic...

Australia emits something like only 1.4 per cent of global carbon emissions. This means we cannot go it alone. A reduction target at the upper end, i.e. 25 per cent by 2020, without key players like the US, China, etc also taking on measures to reduce their own emissions, would mean a bigger toll to the Australian economy for nothing. Australia reducing its measly 1.4 per cent of global emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, with massive economies like the US and China maintaining a 'business as usual' attitude, will do very little to avert global warming and would represent the nation simply taking the moral high ground to feel better about itself without the actual problem being addressed realistically.

Neither does professor Garnaut's report advocate the 'business as usual' position of doing nothing until other global players do something first. This line of reasoning, if held by all global players, will see nothing get started while eco-systems in Australia such as the Great Barrier Reef and Murray-Darling basin go under. We have the opportunity to take the initiative and spur economies around the world into both assessing and facing up to the costs of carbon pollution and industrialisation.