Oz Politics

You may have noticed that pro-war blogs have gone kind of quiet about the Oil for Food “scandal’ lately. But unless you follow the Australian press, you probably don’t know why. While the Volcker inquiry turned up lots of instances of oil export licenses given by Saddam’s regimes to various individuals and groups, presumably with some quid pro quo, the real revelation was that Saddam extracted corrupt payments from suppliers of food and other imports. By far the largest party to these dealings was an Australian quango, AWB Limited which, before its privatisation in the late 1990s, was the Australian Wheat Board. Although the story seems complicated, it’s actually fairly simple.

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“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/income_inequali.html quotes “Paul Krugman”:http://krugman.page.nytimes.com/b/a/251584.htm on income inequality in America. (Note the Krugman link is behind the TimesSelect firewall.)

One of the truly strange features about discussions of inequality is the way people shy away from talking about the extent to which the gains from rising inequality have gone to a tiny, wealthy elite … A few days ago Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post — a good guy, and sensible — wrote about income inequality. As I did in my column just a few days earlier, “Feeling No Pain,” he emphasized the “retrospective income” distribution data released by the I.R.S. (Paper at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf. Tables at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.xls.) As he pointed out, those data show that the share of income received by the top 10 percent of taxpayers rose from 33 percent in 1979 to 44 percent in 2003 … But Pearlstein stops there, leaving the impression that everyone in the top 10 percent was a big winner. In fact, there was hardly any rise in the share of income going to people between the 90th and 95th percentiles: almost all the gain went to the top 5 percent. And most of the gain went to a very small elite. The income share of the top 1 percent went from 9.6 to 17.5 percent, accounting for more than 70 percent of the top decile’s gain. The income share of the top 0.25 percent went from 4.9 to 10.5, accounting for a bit more than half the total gain.

Today “this story about income inequality in Australia”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/so-it-emisem-the-rich-what-gets-the-pleasure/2006/03/14/1142098463260.html was on the front page of The Age online.

Appearing to contradict claims that Australia is now a more egalitarian society, research by the Australian National University and Oxford University has concluded that the richest 1 per cent of the population has almost doubled its share of national wealth. The report, by ANU economist Andrew Leigh and Oxford’s Sir Anthony Atkinson, found that the wealthiest 1 per cent of Australians now took 9 per cent of national income, compared with a 5 per cent share in 1980.

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I’ve always thought that the Oil-For-Food scandal and the parallel scandal (promoted mainly on the left of the blogosphere) about corruption in Iraq’s postwar reconstruction were overblown. Under the circumstances, corruption was inevitable in both cases. If you supported feeding Iraqi children or attempting to repair the damage caused by the war, you had to expect, as part of the overhead, that those with power in Iraq would seek to skim money off the top, and that they would find willing accomplices in this task. Having said all that, corruption shouldn’t be passively accepted. It’s a crime and, wherever they can be caught, those guilty of it should be punished.

By far the biggest fish to be caught in the net so far is Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter, AWB, which was, until 1999, the government-owned Australian Wheat Board. It has become evident that AWB paid hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam’s regime, and it has now been stated in evidence that the deals in question were discussed with Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer., who has played a leading role in defending Australia’s participation in the Iraq war.
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Next Friday, Singapore plans to hang Van Tuong Nguyen, a 25 year old man from Glen Waverley, the Melbourne suburb where I grew up. Nguyen’s crime against the state of Singapore was to change planes in Singapore while en route from Cambodia to Australia carrying 396 grams of heroin. I can see, dimly, how doing this kind of thing could be a crime against Cambodia, and a crime against Australia, but I can’t see how this kind of action could justifiably be punished by Singapore, when he hadn’t even “passed through passport control into Singapore”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/singapores-deadly-sling/2005/10/24/1130006058340.html and clearly had no intention of doing so.

And of course even if we do think Singapore is justified in punishing Nguyen for his crimes, the idea that hanging is the appropriate punishment for attempting to sell heroin would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. Either Singapore should hang people for putting together plans to commit murder, or they are implying that drug trading is worse than murder. Either option is nonsensical.

Anyway, at this stage the important thing isn’t to debate just how absurd Singapore’s position is, but to do something. “Amnesty International Australia”:http://www.amnesty.org.au/ has a number of links for writing to the salient Singaporese ministers to beg for them to change their minds. The very least one could expect our government to be doing is not doing more favours for the Singapore government while they plan to murder an Australian, but that seems “too much for John Howard”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/11/23/crime.singapore.reut/, even when proposed by one of his own MPs.

Following the recent discussion here of critics of US foreign policy being labelled as anti-American, I saw a snippet in the Australian Financial Review (subscription required) in which the Wall Street Journal (also subscription required) applied the same epithet to Australians critical of US labour market institutions and their outcomes, even extending this to former Oz PM Bob Hawke, about as prominent a supporter of the US alliance as you could find, though, like many others, a critic of the Iraq war. The relevant quote

Even Labor leaders who have previously been strong supporters of the alliance have not hesitated to stir anti-US prejudices this time. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke warned that making it easier for workers to negotiate wages directly either their employers would be “a move down the path to” -horror of horrors – “an Americanisation of labour relations

Unfortunately, my efforts to find the full piece have been unsuccessful – I assume it’s behind the paywall somewhere. I’d appreciate it it anyone could supply the full text.

I’d be interested to know, for example, whether the WSJ has extended its net to catch that notorious anti-American, John Howard, who has warned against taking the “American path” in relation to gun ownership and tort litigation.

In the meantime, let me suggest that lots of American workers share the “anti-American prejudice” that they would rather have a union on their side than enjoy the benefits of direct “negotiation” with employers. For example, this Gallup Poll reports that 38 per cent of Americans would like to see unions have more influence, as against 30 per cent who would prefer less. And I’ll guess that the WSJ itself would be happy enough to endorse Howard’s anti-Americanism, at least as far as tort law is concerned.

Two stories from the “Sydney Morning Herald”:http://smh.com.au this morning tell us a lot about the Howard government. The “front page story”:http://smh.com.au/news/national/terrorist-laws-to-lock-up-objectors/2005/10/14/1128796712300.html concerns the government’s new anti-terror laws, and “the main feature”:http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-real-deal/2005/10/14/1128796703087.html is about how to decode the government’s industrial relations policies.

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The issue of how (if at all) to regulate political comment and advertising on blogs (and the Internet in general) has been coming up in many countries as the electoral cycle catches up with the blog explosion. In Australia, the last election produced threats to regulate blogs and other Internet comment on political matters, in particular by requiring identifying details to be posted[1].

This was one of the subjects addressed by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto. I made a submission attacking the idea, and arguing that only paid advertisements should be subject to this requirement. Amazingly enough[2], the Committee agreed.

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Following up on Chris’s post, I thought I’d note an interesting contrast between how religion and politics mix in my home country and the country I work in.

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Under John Howard, who built on precedents established by the preceding Labor government, Australia has adopted some of the harshest anti-refugee policies in the developed world, centred on the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers (including children) without trial in camps located either in remote areas or (under deals driven with dependent client states) outsourced to Pacific Islands. This policy was popular to begin with – it won Howard the 2001 election – but as the panic of 2001 has subsided and the evils of the policy have emerged, public opinion has shifted against it, and the worst aspects of the policy have now been abandoned.

The release of the remaining children being held in detention brings an end to the worst single part of this sad and shameful chapter in our history. At the same time, the oppressive use of Temporary Protection Visas has been rejected by the Federal Court. I hope the government will not appeal against this decision, and that we can put the whole sorry episode behind us, and start the search for a more rational and humane solution to the problem of responding to asylum seekers.

All around the world the problem of how (if at all) to apply campaign laws to the Internet is causing plenty of agitation. In Australia, the main problem arises from laws requiring that electoral advertisements should include the name and address of the person advertising. Usually, this means a TV ad ends with an attribution to a party functionary, spoken in a rapid monotone at the end of the slot. But a site called JohnHowardLies.com (it seems to have vanished, but there’s an archived copy here attracted a lot of attention and suggestions that it should be regulated in the same way.

I’ve just come back from an appearance before the Parliamentary Electoral Matters Committee Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto, where I presented a submission arguing that blogs, and commenters, should not be required to identify themselves when commenting during an election campaign, using the analogy of callers to talkback radio, who are allowed to be anonymous. It was a pretty vigorous session, and some members of the Committee were clearly not convinced. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see an attempt to restrict anonymous Internet comment coming out of the Committee’s report.

My immediate analysis is that, if anonymous comments were prohibited, the only way to be safe would be to close down comments during election campaigns. Even if people gave full names and addresses, I don’t have the resources to verify them.

Anyway, it would be good to hear other views: I’ll need to think more about my own.
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Another interesting feature of last night’s was a strong turnout of trade unionists, handing out balloons and footy-shaped brochures about the dangers for working life arising from the Howard government’s proposed industrial relations reforms. Having finally gained control of the Senate a day or two, the government is pushing hard to shift the balance of power in favour of employers and managers, and against workers and unions. The unions are fighting back and seem to be winning the battle of public opinion, thought the immediate practical effect is likely to be limited.
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The Howard government’s partial backdown on mandatory detention laws points up a striking feature of the Australian political system, the iron discipline that makes a threat by four backbenchers to cross the floor and vote against the government a major news event in itself. The government was in no danger of being defeated on a vote, with a majority of 27, and in many other countries an event like this would not be news. But in Australia it happens perhaps once in a decade.

Until recently, the US was at the other extreme. I recall a news story saying that Jimmy Carter had copped some flak for refusing to campaign for any Democrat who hadn’t voted for at least half the legislation he proposed. Apocryphal or not, it was a pretty accurate representation of a system in which the parties did little more than ensure that, most of the time, voters had a choice of two candidates, who would, when elected, vote just as they pleased.

I doubt that either alternative is healthy.

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The big news from Australia this weekend was a relaxation of the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, by far the harshest in the developed world. The changes were forced on Prime Minister Howard by a backbench revolt in his own Liberal Party. Four prominent backbenchers threatened to cross the floor, an event that is extremely rare in Australian politics.

This turnaround may have implications well beyond Australia

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An unexpected outcome of the 2004 elections in Australia was that the Howard (conservative) government somewhat unexpectedly gained control of the Senate, giving it, from July 1, the power to pass legislation without relying on the support of minor parties or independents.

The most significant outcome, so far, has been industrial relations reform. Until now, Australia has experienced much less radical change in industrial relations than other English-speaking countries such as Britain and New Zealand. Not coincidentally, in my view, there has been much less growth in inequality in Australia than in these countries or the US.

Employment relationships are complex, and I can’t claim to be an expert on the details of the Australian system, either as it now exists or as it would operate under the proposed reforms. Having had most of the hard work done for me by the union, and before that by central wage fixation, I’ve tended to neglect the topic, but it’s certainly time for a crash course.

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