It’s now nine days since the Australian election produced a “hung Parliament”. This term is used rather loosely for any outcome in which neither major party wins a majority of seats, but in this case it’s entirely appropriate. Labor and the Liberal-National coalition[1] each won 72 seats, which means they need the votes of four out of six independents/minor party reps to form government, and the six are wildly disparate.
Anything could happen: four of the six have in the past been Nationals (rural conservatives), though they have gone in very different directions since. If they let bygones be bygones we could have a very conservative government. On the other hand a couple of them now have a greenish tinge, and, with the remaining independent and the single Green party member, we could get a government more progressive than the one that went out.
Overall, this was the kind of election that both major parties deserved to lose and, in some sense, they both did. Isn’t democracy wonderful?
fn1. Here I’m counting as independent one candidate from a dissident branch of the National Party who has stated that he won’t join the coalition.
Australia will elect a new government (more precisely, will probably re-elect the current Labor government) on Saturday. Although I promised I would say something about this, the whole business has been too depressing for words. The government has offered nothing but weaselly spin doctoring, and the Opposition has been even worse, playing to anti-refugee xenophobia, and offering nothing but slogans and bribes. In the forty years in which I’ve had some political awareness, I can’t remember anything as bad. [1]
A year ago, I would have thought it impossible that we would be reduced to this. [click to continue…]
One of the benefits of living just west of the date line is that we in Oz get first crack at celebrating anniversaries and holidays of all kinds. Here’s a May Day post from my blog, with a bit of Oz content, but hopefully of broader interest. As with most of my posts recently, it’s not a well-worked exposition of firm conclusions, but a set of ideas that I think need to be explored.
Lots of folks seemed to think that Japanese paper theater manga book sounded pretty interesting, and many had good suggestions for related material; so here’s something vaguely similar – proto-pop culture-bleg-wise. The new The Wizard of Oz blu-ray set is on sale cheap [amazon]. Apparently they’ve toiled to improve the visual quality and the thing includes extras I want: namely, the early silent films. These are public domain, so you can watch them courtesy of the Internet Archive: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910); The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914); The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914); and His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (1914). May I recommend, in particular, the fight scene between Hank the Mule and the Witches! (For anyone looking to extract baffling visual material to incorporate into your clever hipster music video project – here you go!) But the Internet Archive quality is poor, bless their charitable hearts. I’m hoping they’ve done a bit better with these new discs.
Fun facts! The Scarecrow of Oz – the 1915 book – is based on the film, not the other way around. Although I have to say: the relation is kinda loose.
The 1939 film we know and love was not, in fact, the first version to present Kansas in b&w, Oz in color. That honor goes to a 1933 cartoon included with the new set, which was originally released all b&w due to a lawsuit about the color process. You can watch it on YouTube but, again, quality not great. (Music by Carl Stallings!)
Also, The Wiz (1978) was not the first crazy blacksploitation installment of the franchise. That honor goes to the far crazier, Larry Semon-directed/starring, young Stan Laurel-containing 1925 version (again, YouTube provides, at least a bit). It has Spencer Bell as “Snowball”, the black farmhand who is send skipping to Oz on lightning bolts. (He is billed as G. Howe Black.) So far as I can tell, this version is not included in the new set, but one Amazon reviewer seems to think it is. I guess I’ll find out for myself. [click to continue…]
While Australia has been transfixed by the meltdown of the Liberal (=conservative) party over climate change, there have been a string of positive developments around the world, which make a positive outcome from Copenhagen, leading over the next year to an intermational agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, much more likely than it seemed two years ago, or even six months ago. Among the most important developments
* Obama’s commitment to a 17 per cent (rel 2005) target, which essentially puts the Administration’s credibility behind Waxman-Markey
* China’s acceptance of a quantitative emissions target, based on emissions/GDP ratios, but implying a substantial cut relative to business as usual
* The change of government in Japan, from do-little LDP to activist DPJ
* EU consensus on the need for stronger action
* Acceptance of the principle of compensation for developing countries, and acceptance by countries like India that they should take part in a global agreement and argue for compensation [click to continue…]
For anyone interested, the Liberal (=conservative) Party of Australia is imploding, in real time, on Twitter
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23spill
The issue: climate change.
Update: Five shadow ministers, including the Senate Leader and Deputy Leader have resigned. All climate delusionists, who make up about half the party. Turnbull (current leader, moderate in politics but not in temperament) has announced he’s staying on, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. At least for tonight, both camps have retired to plot.
The conservative political parties in Australia are in total chaos trying to come up with a response to the Rudd government’s (not very impressive, but better than nothing) proposals for an Emissions Trading Scheme. The fundamental problem is that the majority of them, along with virtually all of the conservative commentariat share the delusional view that the whole body of climate science is a hoax, got up by a coalition of grant-grubbing scientists and environmentalists bent on world domination. But within this majority, a substantial group are sufficiently in touch with reality to realise that 80 per cent of the Australian population disagrees with them, and will hand them a thrashing at the next election.
So, they have a problem. They’ve used their near-majority in the Senate to block the ETS legislation, but now its coming up again. On a second rejection the government can dissolve both houses of Parliament and call an election which would almost certainly produce a crushing defeat. But, for a number of technical reasons, the government doesn’t want to go this way and might just be willing to do a deal. The party leader, Malcolm Turnbull (the most able they have by far, but not known for sound judgement) is desperate to do such a deal and has put his leadership on the line. But the hardline delusionists are, so far, unwilling to go along. All in all, there’s plenty of pain to go around, and the government has been happy to watch the Opposition wallow, arguably at the price of a less effective response to climate change.
There’s a bit of a puzzle to me here. In the US and UK, as in Australia, the conservative commentariat is solidly delusionist. In the US, Republican politicians, activists and voters are similarly deluded, so there is no coherence problem. But in the UK, it seems as if Conservative politicians ought to be facing a difficult choice between going with the majority of their supporters (sane, on this issue at least) and the commentariat (delusional). But as far as I can see, the Conservatives are at least as good as Labor on this issue, yet they don’t seem to cop any flak from the Telegraph, Spectator, Times etc, all of which push a solidly delusionist line. I’d be interested in observations from those closer to the action.
* On top, from an equally valid perspective, but I’ll let the northern hemisphere majority have their comforting conventions on this one.
Australia is well known as a sophisticated modern nation, prominent in scientific and cultural endeavors of all kinds, and not characterized by marsupials in the main street, top paddock or other incongruous locations. That’s why I hasten to forestall the rumors that Western Australian Opposition leader Troy Buswell may have done something inappropriate with a quokka. Sad to say, all the other rumors are true.
As the Olympic torch touches down in Australia, it is hard to see how any good can come of the entire exercise.
After Kevin Rudd’s visit to Beijing, which seemed to herald a newly mature relationship between Australia and China, we’ve spent a week or more embroiled in a petty squabble, of a kind which is all too familiar in international relations, over the role of Chinese torch attendants/security guards, with the Australian government insisting that all security will be provided by our police and the Chinese saying that the attendants will “protect the torch with their bodies”.
George Orwell observed over 60 years ago that
Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.
and history since then has given plenty of examples. It looks as if the 2008 Olympics will join them. [click to continue…]
I only saw this item flashing briefly across the TV screen, but I’m sure it will be of interest to CT readers. The new Australian government, which is withdrawing combat troops (though not some troops guarding our embassy) from Iraq, has announced that Iraqis who have worked with Australian forces in Iraq will be offered resettlement in Australia. The estimated number of Iraqis to receive visas, including family members, is 600. Australia had only about 500 troops on average, so that gives an idea of the scale of commitment that might be expected from the UK and US if they met their obligations in a comparable fashion.
The decision to accept the interpreters ahead of other refugees has been criticised, but I think this is justified. The essential point should be to treat this intake as additional to, rather than part of, our general obligation to accept refugees.
Updating on the same point, this Times story indicates that the first three workers to be accepted under the much more restrictive British program have finally arrived in the UK, and that the program has so far delivered visas to a total of 12 Iraqis and their families. The total estimated intake is 2000.
My namesake, Canadian terrorism expert Tom Quiggin, takes a look at the Guantanamo Bay trials, and notes their adherence to the principles laid down by Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky.
Quiggin notes that
According to Col. Morris Davis, who is a former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, it appears that the plan was made ahead of time to have no acquittals, no matter what the evidence was to reveal. General counsel William Haynes is quoted as saying (according to Col. Davis) “We can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? … We’ve got to have convictions.”
As Australian readers will recall, Davis resigned his position in disgust after the only trial to reach court, that of David Hicks, was shut down when the Australian government intervened to secure a plea bargain, with Hicks pleading guilty in return for a sentence that saw him returned to Australia then kept in prison just long enough to ensure his silence for the election.
Hicks’ guilty plea led to his being described by the Howard government’s fan club as a “self-confessed terrorist”. Of course, the same description applies to many of those convicted in Stalin’s show trials, where charges of sabotage and terrorism were a routine part of the rap sheet (as with all show trials, some may even have been guilty, but their confessions prove nothing).
My column in last week’s Australian Financial Review was about the spreading crisis in financial markets. In the same week, we saw the first indication* that the crisis was spreading to the market for credit derivatives. The possibility of a full-scale financial crisis arising from these markets, which financial market bears have been talking about for years. Whereas the losses from sub-prime loans and related derivatives markets are likely to be in the hundreds of billions, the nominal volume of outstanding contracts in the credit derivatives markets is in the tens of trillions, and interest rate swaps are in hundreds of trillions.
Such amounts cannot possibly be repaid by anybody, so a breakdown in these markets would imply either wholesale bankruptcy or a government rescue involving the abrogation of existing contracts on a scale unprecedented in history. Either way, as noted in the article, large classes of financial assets, and the associated financial markets, may simply disappear. Hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivative contracts may be unwound, reversing the explosion of asset and transaction volumes over the three decades since the Bretton Woods system of financial controls broke down in the 1970s. [click to continue…]
Australian politics this year has been dominated by the incoming Rudd Labor government’s commitment to offer a formal apology to indigenous Australians for discriminatory laws and actions of the past, most notably the policy of removing children from their families, with the ultimate aim of assimilating them into the white population. The policy, later referred to as creating the “Stolen Generation” was directed mainly at mixed-race children, since it was assumed that the remnant population still living in their traditional lands would “die out” within a couple of generations.
The previous Prime Minister, John Howard, had resolutely resisted an apology and in particular the word “Sorry” and the issue was one of the focal points of the culture wars that went on under his leadership. Continued resistance to an apology was the main reason the Liberals (= conservatives) passed over their most able remaining figure, Malcolm Turnbull, who supported an apology, in favour of the amiable but ineffectual Brendan Nelson, who indicated opposition, but was ultimately forced by public pressure to change his view.
The apology was the first business of the newly elected Parliament this week, and received the unanimous support of the House of Representatives, though given with obvious reluctance on the part of some Liberals. All of Australia’s previous Prime Ministers, except Howard, were present, and the TV coverage (at 9am) drew over a million viewers.
Apologies for various kinds of past national actions have been debated in quite a few countries in recent years. Perhaps because we’ve been arguing over the question for a decade or more, or perhaps just because I’ve followed it more closely, the Australian debate seems to me to have clarified some of the general issues.
blu-ray set is on sale cheap [amazon]. Apparently they’ve toiled to improve the visual quality and the thing includes extras I want: namely, the early silent films. These are public domain, so you can watch them courtesy of the Internet Archive: