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Rolling on the river

January 27, 2011 by David Horton

The recent Queensland floods (as do most disasters) brought out the best and worst in politicians. Let’s get the worst out of the way. There were some remarkably silly responses to the floods, and I have picked four from across much of the political spectrum to show my fairness. First, and as usual so quick off the blocks that the rain was still coming down, was Barnaby Joyce (speak in haste, repent in leisure, that’s our Barnaby, although I doubt he does much repenting). “Build more dams” “build more dams” came the cry, a demand that seems to be so ingrained in the National Party psyche that they could repeat it in their sleep. Barnaby seemed to simultaneously want dams kept empty to await a new flood event, and kept full to please the irrigators. Perhaps he is a dam half full kind of guy. The name “dam” is short for “damage” Barnaby, they destroy river ecosystems, and they wouldn’t have prevented the flooding. Destroying a river in order to save it seems an odd strategy.

Then came Bob Katter who seems to think that “climate change” only means one kind of change. He huffed and puffed about how those environmentalists couldn’t make up their minds, one day blaming drought on global warming, the next day floods. Bob, of course, blames nothing on global warming, so I guess he doesn’t think anything is changing, even as he surveys the rural wreckage left by record high temperatures, record long droughts, record high rainfalls, record flood events. The key, Bob, is in the word “record” – quote Dorothea McKellar all you like, the issue isn’t that Australia has had floods and droughts before, of course it has, the issue is the extent of those events. More heat in air and sea and land can add more water vapour in the air and less in the soil, and more energy to weather systems. So yes, Bob, climate change can result, at different times, in both severe droughts and floods. We are starting to see the effects of adding all that CO2 to the air.

Tony Abbott, never missing a chance to say “great big new tax”, said that there was no need for a levy to deal with the unprecedented events, that we should just get rid of the broadband network, oh and sell off another public asset, Medibank, as well. Selling off family silver to pay for a disaster seems to me an odd way to manage your affairs, but then I’m not a Liberal. Tony has a very mentally impoverished vision for the future of Australia, but he might have resisted using a disaster like this to yet again promote it.

And then there was Julia Gillard, completely unable to cut through all the nonsense and say “listen guys, Queensland is a mess, the disaster wasn’t predicted, but obviously we need to help people get back into homes, get infrastructure repaired, help businesses and farmers get back on their feet. The magnitude of the disaster is so great that I am delaying, by a year, the purely arbitrary aim of budget surplus in 3 years. There was never any real reason for picking one year rather than another, so the delay doesn’t matter at all. On the other hand if we leave the Queensland economy as a basket case it is going to have a terrible impact on the budget bottom line. So I am being prime ministerial here and making a decision in the interests of the country”. Did she say that? No she didn’t, the budget surplus year was, it seems, sacrosanct, so in order to pay for the disaster she would cut expenditure elsewhere. It was the same short-sighted and foolish approach as Tony’s.

But there were two good politicians in all this, and again, to be fair, one from each side of Queensland politics. Anna Bligh, a premier I had previously little regard for, rose to the occasion as if her whole life had prepared her for just such a moment. She seemed to work 24 hours a day, she was calm, efficient, empathetic. A great performance. And there was John-Paul Langbroek, opposition leader. Did he carp and criticise and complain in a glass half empty kind of way? He did not, he congratulated Anna on doing a good job. He also rose in my estimation as a result.

An enquiry into the floods is essential – land use and land clearing and vegetation removal from rivers and development approvals all need consideration. Levee banks seem to have been a success in places and redirect water without environmental damage. Re-vegetating water catchments and creeks would be a good longer term strategy. As would reducing global warming. Politicians with vision might start exploring the ways in which human activity contributes to “Mother Nature” disasters, and how it can be used to lessen the impacts. Not much vision from Joyce, Katter, Abbott and Gillard last week I’m afraid.

Posted in Climate Change, Environment, politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Arsenic and old civilisation

January 23, 2011 by David Horton

The story the other day about NASA finding a bacterium that could (possibly) partly use arsenic in its DNA suggests that if we only look for the essentials of Earth life (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulphur) on other planets, then we may be missing some clues about life forms that could have evolved to use other elements instead of the big 6 on Earth.

Got me thinking more generally, this story roughly coinciding with the announcement of the finding of yet another planet (there are hundreds now) circling a different star, some of them now roughly of the size and position to correspond to Earth, and therefore having a dream run into life evolving from the chemistry, and then evolving into more complex organisms (with or without arsenic!). Are we going to find life on these other planets (assuming the technology improves enough for us to be able to sense it from afar)? I suspect not, I guess that we may well find many planets that were capable of evolving life, did in fact do so, and then lost all that life and returned to being a lifeless shell.

One of the many aspects of the genius of Charles Darwin is that his mechanisms for evolution are not specific to Earth but apply to any planet on which life is present. If individual animals vary, then natural selection will act to cause change in populations; if geography varies, then isolated populations undergoing natural selection will become new species. The propositions are simply a matter of mathematics. Any planet, anywhere in the universe, is going to be geographically varied in some way; any species on such a planet is going have individual variation.

It also seems likely that on most such planets with life, at least one life form will have evolved towards relatively high intelligence as a consequence of the accidents of its evolutionary history. Not necessarily true by any means – the myriad of highly specialised and successful adaptations in all sorts of directions on Earth show that you can do a lot with a small brain and strong incisor teeth for example – but with billions of planets with life present intelligence must have led to the glittering prize of world domination not infrequently. Also seems likely that any planet with a long history will have experienced the slings and arrows of galactic misfortune – being hit by meteors; having an imperfect orbit that causes major variations in climate; having a sun that varies; acquiring a moon or two; developing super volcanoes. So, given life forms mainly made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen; and given that radical environmental changes on a planet are going to cause mass deaths and extinctions among the species that have evolved to that point in time; it is obvious that many planets will have buried stores of hydrocarbons in various forms available for use by subsequent intelligent life forms. Hydrocarbons – whether solid, liquid or gas – are an easy and concentrated source of energy. Abundant energy and intelligent life forms and away you go into all kinds of advanced civilisations.

And then? Well, depends. Not going to take whatever these various intelligent organisms call “scientists” on their planets long to realise that burning hydrocarbons releases a lot of trapped carbon and turns it into CO2 and that CO2 will cause their planet to warm. But some members of the species will have discovered that supplying energy from hydrocarbons to the rest of the species is very profitable – a license to print whatever the intelligent race calls money – and those suppliers knowing that if the scientists are listened to their gravy train is in danger of spilling its load, will use whatever they call “think tanks” and “Fox News” to ensure that the population doesn’t believe the scientists. That being the case, the highly intelligent life form, and other life forms it shares its planet with, are destined for extinction.

Oh a few bacteria-like forms may survive, eating arsenic (or rust, like the ones discovered eating the Titanic wreck recently) and other odd chemicals. Might eventually lead to a new flowering of multi-cellular evolution after the few million years it takes for the excess CO2 to be turned into rock and planetary temperatures return to the Goldilocks zone. Even if it does, not much consolation to the dead scientists, or the dead hydrocarbon sellers for that matter. And if it doesn’t, well then, just a bare planet endlessly circling its sun.

On other planets there may be beings called “politicians”. On those planets it might eventually be understood, in spite of the best efforts of energy companies, and a few geologists and retired weather presenters, that their globe was warming, rapidly, and that the climate the intelligent beings had evolved in was changing under their feet. However the politicians (a life form certain to evolve everywhere there is life) believe there is a way to deal not with the causes of the warming but the effects. On these planets you would hear calls from the politicians to damn all the rivers (sorry, that should read dam all the rivers), burn all the forests to stop them burning, radically modify the genetics of organisms to make them more productive, take more marine organisms from the seas, clear more trees to expand farm land. On such planets the environmental damage that these “solutions” cause speeds up and exacerbates the damage caused by the warming itself. The planet will reach bare rock status much faster even than those where nothing was done.

The scientists on some other planets may have an actually intelligent population to work with, think tanks that actually think, and no local equivalent of Fox, and the hydrocarbon extractors may find themselves faced with a demand that burning fossil hydrocarbons stop, now. That use be made of resources that can be used by individual communities, even individuals; sun, wind, geothermal energy, inexhaustible, too cheap to meter. What to do, what to do, can’t keep making money if the population loses its addiction to big power stations. Ah ha, the planet has, as part of the result of its chequered history, radioactive elements, though buried safely underground. Quickly, get a campaign moving. Find some scientists with vested interest in the nuclear power industry to tell the public how safe it all is. Run campaigns on whatever the equivalent of “television” is, where deep voiced men create loud voice overs which consist of just three words – “base load power”, “base load power”, while the screen shows an image of a young girl happily pulling petals off a daisy-like flower in front of a nuclear power station that doesn’t explode even when she counts all the way to ten.

The planet is quickly covered in nuclear power stations and every source of uranium ore on the planet is being dug up and shipped to them. The urgency of dealing with climate change means of course that you can’t impose too much red tape on these developments. Huge sums of money change hands as energy companies become nuclear energy companies much of it in the form of taxpayer subsidies. On such planets the huge expansion is much too slow to have any effect in reducing greenhouse gas increase (especially given likely continued use of all the buried hydrocarbons) so the planet continues to warm. Accidents begin to happen – here a train of nuclear waste goes off the tracks, there an electrical fault causes damage to a nuclear power plant, over there a uranium tailings dam bursts during flooding. Everybody knew about accidents in the coal mining and oil industries but no one thought about incidents and accidents in the nuclear industry, however clever the technical whizz bangery. Oh and terrorist groups all over the planet, seeking more bangs for their bucks, with so many more potential sources of radioactive materials, began to find it easier to get hold of dirty bombs, exploded for reasons to do with whatever they called “religion” on the planet. Final outcome – radioactively sterilised bare rock, and no possibility of a new flowering of evolution.

So what do you think? Possible that if there is an arsenic-based life form on another planet in another galaxy, and that such a life form is intrinsically more aware of the fragility of life and therefore doesn’t burn all the available hydrocarbons, or turn to nuclear power, then there may be intelligent life somewhere in the universe. But us phosphorus-based organisms seem unable to sense danger or react to it, valuing stupidity over intelligence in our rulers and advisers. And since the time interval from the moment you discover hydrocarbons burn to the time when you overheat your planet is so short, just a moment in the age of the universe, I am predicting that we will never find intelligent life anywhere. But if those clever arsenic guys are coming to look for us they’d better get a move on, or they won’t find much here at all either.

Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.

Posted in Climate Change, Environment, politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Not cricket

January 21, 2011 by David Horton

My grandfather used to play indoor carpet bowls (the indoor version of lawn bowls). He saw it as a game of great skill, which it is. There are two kinds of shots you can play. One is a draw shot, slow and gentle and accurate, aiming to place your bowl as close as possible to the kitty. The second is the drive, where, with no finesse, you bowl as fast and hard as you can, aiming to smash your opponent’s balls out of the way, and leave some ball from your team closest to the kitty. My grandfather would never play the drive. He thought it ugly and un-gentlemanly. If you weren’t good enough to place your own ball gently and neatly closer to the kitty than your opponent then you didn’t deserve to win and he did. “Good shot” he would say, having maintained a gentlemanly silence until his opponent had completed the shot. It was a case of “to the skilful go the spoils”.

He was also a cricketer, and although I never saw him play that gentleman’s game, I’m sure he would have played it the same way. Doing his best to bowl the opposing batsman out with a fast or deceptive ball, applauding a good shot when he failed. He would have no more thought of abusing the opposing batsman than he would have thought of going out in public without hat, coat and tie; or of sitting down in a bus while a lady was standing. A gentleman to his bootstraps, my grandmother later said of him, and she was right.

Perhaps his example is why I grow increasingly to dislike watching modern cricket or indeed any modern sport. Cricketers these days, at the top levels, scream abuse at opposing batsmen after they fail to get out, fielders niggle away at them with nasty comments to try to unsettle them, the whole team will scream in triumph and make hand gestures when a batsman is out. Same, but worse in football – endless racial, sexual, personal appearance kind of obscene taunts. With the added bonus that being contact sports you can aim to exacerbate an opposing player’s old injury, tackle in such a way as to cripple them (temporarily of course) in order to force them off the field. The more this stuff goes on, the worse it gets it seems. Any comments from people like me about this stuff is met with the response that of course these are men’s games, if you don’t like the heat get out of the kitchen (no, that can’t be right). Well, they may be “men’s games” but they are no longer gentlemen’s games.

Which brings me to politics, once also a game for gentlemen (no women, you understand, they should have been in the kitchen), but no longer. As the recent shootings in America showed, if you have a toxic political environment where radio shock jocks characterise people who disagree with them as traitors, enemies, wanting them shot or jailed, punished; where people take assault rifles to political rallies to intimidate their political opponents; and others draw maps with cross hair targets on people including the politician who was shot, then you have lost your hard won democracy. No democracy can survive where politicians and judges are assassinated for their beliefs, votes, decisions.

I know we don’t have the gun problem here that Americans have inflicted on themselves (although if Australian gun nuts have their way we will one day), but our shock jocks, and some politicians, have taken note of the American broadcast style and copied it. Perhaps most extreme in the columnist who last year called for “greenies” to be strung up from lamp posts, but there is plenty of toxic stuff spewing out just short of murder calls (for example the frequent use by John Howard and others of the notion that some suggestion is “unAustralian”). It comes, you have to say, mainly from the Right, but there are those on the Left who are also willing to consider conspiracy theories, and to ascribe unAustralianness and bad motives to those who simply disagree with them philosophically.

Look I know that conservatives are wrong about virtually everything and it is therefore very tempting, and easy, to pour scorn, heap abuse, throw insults, at them. Easy to pick up a carpet bowl and send it smashing into their feeble attempts at thought. But before you do remember my grandfather, pause, take a deep breath, say, “well played, but I think I can do just a little better than that”, and send a beautifully placed bit of logic bolstered by facts to get much closer to the kitty of truth than they can do. Be civilised in your discourse in other words, point out firmly where your political opponents are wrong but don’t accuse them of treachery, don’t call for their death or torture or exile. Play nice.

Let us all see that there is still room in Australian politics for gentlemen and gentleladies.

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Dear Barry

January 14, 2011 by David Horton

In just three months you will be Premier O’Farrell, running the state of NSW, with a massive majority and a big risk of hubris, so I thought I had better write to you now, sound a still small voice of warning before all the hoopla begins. See I thought a recent story out of Victoria where your Liberal colleagues romped home illustrated the kind of thing I think you really should try to avoid. Honey Bees cause great environmental damage in native forests, not just to native bees and other nectar insects, but to birds and small mammals and indeed the vegetation itself, and so apiarists are restricted in where they can place hives and are kept out of national parks and wilderness areas. With recent droughts and then floods the apiarists of Victoria have been demanding access to nature reserve areas, and with the election of a conservative government they saw their chance. Sure enough the incoming Liberal minister announced that restrictions would be removed. It seems more generally that whenever a conservative government is elected anywhere in the world they have a high priority of removing environmental protections, encouraging environmental damage. The conservative government in Britain for example recently announced it would be selling off all state-owned forests to private enterprise to do with them as they wished. Newly elected Republicans in the US will get rid of Obama’s feeble attempts to reduce greenhouse gas production. When Colin Barnett was elected as Liberal premier in WA he summed up the approach nicely. The state, he announced proudly, immediately the election result was known, was now “open for business”.

You are going to be faced with all kinds of demands to allow open slather on the world we live in. Not just from beekeepers but from people wanting to clear trees; dam rivers and remove all their water; bulldoze sand dunes; build highways; extend suburban sprawls; sell off all national parks and/or allow open access for trail bikes, shooters, 4 wheel drives, horses, developers of tourism ventures; remove pollution controls; get rid of the EIS requirements; end fishing restrictions, and so on and on. These people will be beating a path to your door, donations will be promised, shock jocks will demand action, the far right in your party room will make impassioned speeches and barely veiled threats.

It will be so easy to give in. You see yourself (I guess) as a free market kind of person, a liberal who believes in every cell of his body in pure capitalism, someone who thinks regulation is bad, small government good. You aren’t an ecologist, not even a scientist, so when you see reports, or more likely summaries of reports, outlining the environmental problems that will occur when such restrictions are lifted, it is easy to see these as just a contribution from yet another special interest group, to be weighed up, in a purely political set of scales, against the aforementioned donations, demands and threats.

Look you know I’m no supporter of conservative political ideology, and I think that a Liberal-National government in NSW is going to cause a lot of damage to our society (although I’m hoping you don’t really believe that cutting taxes is going to lead to increased employment) in all kinds of ways as you set out to favour the private interests of the rich against the public interests of the rest of us. But I accept that you are going to get elected by voters who presumably understand that that is your agenda. The changes that result in say the health and education systems, or in infrastructure, will swing things one way and can be swung back another when the Lib-Nats are finally voted out again in 2023. But the damage to the environment that can be caused when you open the state for business is permanent. You can’t bring back extinct species, restore lost habitats, bring forest or marine ecosystems back to health. Not too many among your party who wouldn’t say “so what?” to those effects, but I just have a sneaking suspicion, based on little more than gut instinct (and the Dharawal decision), that you aren’t one of them.

So start by saying no to all these self-serving demands before you are overwhelmed by the pent up development desires of your wealthier supporters, irreversible damage can happen so quickly at the unthinking stroke of a Premier’s signature. Give yourself some breathing space while you put in place a serious advisory committee of ecologists who can warn you of consequences, can help you leave the environment of the state in a better condition than you will find it in (the Labor Party of course having had exactly the same political involvement with developers all these years). Will let you have car number plates saying “NSW The Green State” not “NSW The Developer’s State”

I’m always here too. Any time you have doubts about some request, need a quick response, give me a call, send me an email. I think I can instinctively see dangers ahead, and can help you develop your instincts. It’ll just be between the two of us.

Conservationally yours

Posted in Environment, politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Potted histories

January 11, 2011 by David Horton

I often read, in a newspaper that was once named after a northern British town, interviews with public figures who interest me. The essays are always beautifully constructed. The scene (in cafe, pub, home, park) is always beautifully described in apparent detail including the weather, the food on the plate, the magazines in the rack, the children playing. Or rather in some selected details that produce a setting much as a playwright does. And then the subject of the interview – their late, or early, arrival; their clothes; their expression; their first words; the sound of their voice. Then something of their history, or notoriety, or recent activity that makes them again newsworthy. Again, scene setting of a most selective kind – father’s temper, mother’s early death, sibling’s achievements, school success or failure, first job, most recent album/art/tv series/movie/novel and so on. The reporter will, from time to time, insert themselves into the interview by expressing empathy, or horror, or shared experience, or eating something, or responding to fan/waiter/person staring from next table.

And at the end, with a world weary tone, the reporter will sum up, for the world at large,the character and worth of the interviewee, in such a way that it is clear that (a) No previous interviewer has ever been able to gain such insight, express such empathy, and (b) the interviewer is utterly superior to the interviewee in some aspect of character, or achievement, or making the best of abilities, or overcoming handicaps real or imagined. This superiority expressed by some clever observation of a frown line, or the disposal of a paper napkin, or an undone button, or the hailing of a taxi. The reader will be under no illusion that, but for the grace of god, the interviewer and interviewee could each easily be on the other side of the table, star and reporter swapping places.

And the reader will also have no doubt that the 1000 word essay, including scene settings, has provided a total encapsulated portrait of the celebrity, such that nothing further ever needs to be said, or read, for that person’s character and ability to be totally understood. This procedure is not restricted to the northern exposures that I read, but the form and structure of the narrative is pretty well standard, varying only in the sophistication, and therefore degree of superiority, of the reporter and outlet concerned.

But forget about 1000 words, Australian political journalism is now basing its political reporting on single minor incidents and then pretending that these encapsulate all we need to know about the politician concerned. It is political reporting totally converging on political cartooning. Here a handshake, there a slip of the tongue, a long speech, a pair of boots, a hair style, a publicity stunt, a laugh, a stumble, a sporting event. The political reporter will, just like the Guardian’s celebrity reporter, give great detail on this single moment, with, where possible, a piece of vision showing the character-illustrating event repeated over and over as tv wallpaper while the reporter chuckles his or her way through the account. And when they have finished the public is left with an impression that they now know something profound about Gillard, or Abbott, or Brown, or indeed Joyce, Bishop (both of them), Pyne, Rudd, Katter, Oakeshott, and, in earlier times, Latham, Beasley, Nelson, Kernot, Stott-Despoja.

Oh it’s an amusing game, no doubt, this “gotcha” moment of finding an incident or accident that can be used to characterise a politician once and for all in words, just as a cartoonist does with a nose or eyebrows or ears. Probably serves as a status symbol for journalists themselves, with each glib characterisation being marked by a notch on the gun handle, a small flag on the fighter plane. Where once the well-informed and incisive interview by O’Brien or Oakes was seen as marking the pinnacle of political reporting, now the stars are those whose observations can comfortably fit into a tweet.

And this trend is becoming widespread. Last year, for example, there was a report about a “parenting club” in Britain, which surveyed teachers and found that “teachers think they can tell which pupils are likely to play up [just] by looking at their names”. What they were doing unwittingly, of course, was evaluating which names were likely to be given by middle or upper class parents, and which were popular with the lower orders, and making their decisions accordingly. All reminiscent of the famous study about brown and blue eyed children, and another that found that if teachers were given low expectations of a child they treated that child much worse than one for whom they were given high expectations, and a second teacher would reverse that pattern if given the reverse information. And like police pulling cars driven by men of middle eastern appearance over, unprompted, for a search; or arresting Aborigines disproportionately for “anti-social behaviour”; or being led to believe that refugees were throwing their children into the ocean; or arresting bikies for looking like, well, bikies. None of it different to a political journalist seizing on a single word or aspect of appearance to profile a politician.

Hard to know what to call this trend – twitterisation perhaps, or encapsulisation, or cartoonisation – but it is not a joke in spite of the political reporters guffawing at a long speech, or falling for a 36 hour political stunt, or describing ear lobes. And it is infecting news bulletins more generally, with tabloid headlines introducing each item, and the items themselves, except sporting or celebrity ones, reduced mostly to a single sentence.

I have lately, as well as blogging on politics, been putting together a biography/autobiography on this blog. I find I need thousands of words to adequately describe each event and to try to accurately depict backgrounds, characters, contexts, motives, consequences of that event. If there are political journalists out there who would like to write their own story they will find that tens of thousands of words can get eaten up before they get to high school; tens of thousands more to describe their own beliefs and ethics and actions. Why then are they so willing to pretend to the people of Australia that they can characterise a politician with a ten second strip of film, or a single anecdote, or, indeed, a single handshake or physical characteristic?

Have political reporters become merely stand-up comedians with humorous one-liners, or do they see themselves as serving the public interest? Are they going to keep on doing the equivalent of the Guardian celebrity profile with great weight placed on how the subject holds a wine glass or folds a napkin, or will they begin reporting seriously about the qualifications, experience, interests, political beliefs, aims of the people who govern us or wish to do so in future?

Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.

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Money shouts

January 7, 2011 by David Horton

Significant Australian political events in 2010? Well, one or two do come to mind involving the changing of prime ministers mid-stream and the almost changing of the government, but perhaps the one with the longest lasting consequences was the one involving just a tiny handful of people. A tiny, but super rich, handful, the mining magnates. Three reasons why this was so important.

Once upon a time protest movements involved demonstrating that large numbers of people, with little political or economic power, were vehemently opposed to some aspect of government policy. A demonstration would involve thousands of people, and it was understood that this was just the tip of the iceberg – if this many people made it on to the streets then there must be a much larger number of sympathetic supporters at home. The mining protest turned this on its head, because the equation was not with numbers but with wealth. This tiny number of rich people between them represented billions in personal wealth, and it was the wealth that was doing the talking, in a way that usually only happens in secret behind closed doors.

Secondly it was important because it worked. This small number of people, their voices willingly amplified by television outlets, forced a government not to proceed with a matter of taxation for reasons purely of greed. There was no matter of philosophy here, no high moral principles at stake, no support for underdogs at home or abroad, no protection of threatened environments; purely a complete refusal to allow any reduction in enormous personal wealth for the good of the wider society. If you couldn’t see this at the time through all the misleading smokescreen about downtrodden workers and loss of jobs, then the Governor of the Reserve Bank, late last year, put it into context. Australia has been lucky in its mining boom, he said, but unless we make best use of the income from that boom, which will come to an end as all booms do, then when we have sold off all our resources we will be left with nothing to show for it. And that is precisely the outcome that the mining protest achieved.

And finally, since it worked it will serve as a model for any other special interest economic grouping to prevent any kind of government action of which they disapprove taking place. We have already begun to see the same tactics used by the big irrigators as soon as it was suggested it would be in the interest of the country to stop the Murray-Darling dying. What next – coal mine owners, forestry companies, transport companies, developers?

Look I know money talks in politics, always has done, most blatantly in America, but many of our state governments are right up there. Political donations, back room pressure, can usually guarantee an outcome favourable to some large financial interest. The only defences against this up to now have been the ballot box and the protest movement. The ballot box is of little value now that the two largest parties have so converged in their attitudes to “development”. And now we have a corruption of the protest movement, as it is used not by the poor and powerless but the rich and powerful.

It is a gloomy prospect for our economy, our environment, and our democracy.

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Law’n'Order

January 5, 2011 by David Horton

The most striking Australian political event at the end of 2010 was possibly the election of a Liberal government in Victoria. In one sense it wasn’t that startling, since Labor had been in power for 11 years, and Australians are in the sometimes misguided habit of cheering on the underdog and thinking it’s time they had a go. Some commentators claimed that the size of the swing to the Liberals was the surprising thing, given that John Brumby was such a laid back kind of guy that no one, not even the opposition leader, seemed to have a bad word to say about him. But this completely misses the point that the swing was as big as it was precisely because even the Liberal leader couldn’t find a bad word to say about his former schoolmate. You would think if the Labor Party had learned anything in the last couple of years it would be that if you have a Labor Party behaving exactly like a Liberal Party (as they do at state and federal level these days) people will decide they might as well vote for the real Liberal Party, given any kind of excuse.

And the Victorian Liberals gave them the excuse with the familiar conservative Law’n'Order campaign, featuring the usual suspects of “more police on the streets” “armed guards on train stations” (!) and mandatory sentencing. I understand the feelings that people in cities have. As the cities become bigger and bigger and more crowded, crime in total grows. The disparities in wealth don’t help either, nor poor educational resources and lack of employment in outlying suburbs, nor the war on drugs. But mostly statistics show actual crime rates (taking into account population growth) falling, while what isn’t falling is the constant and growing media emphasis on crime in news bulletins. And crime presented in such a way that every citizen in the city (especially those living in “quiet streets”) is meant to feel afraid, very afraid, that at any moment they may be mugged in the street, have bullets fired into their house, suffer a violent home invasion, or be brutally murdered. Every such event is presented to the tv cameras as if it is some random piece of violence that could happen to anyone; only the small print, or a very low key piece days later, point out that most such events happen between people who know each other as a result of domestic disputes, or criminal (often drug related) activity.

But because the media is constantly running a fear campaign on law and order it is very easy for politicians to piggy back on it and indulge in bidding wars in which the two political “solutions”, more police, mandatory sentencing, are ratcheted up ever higher. No one pausing to ask whether people really want to live in a society in which armed police are everywhere in our cities, and where our jails fill up (as in America) by people with ever increasing minimum and mandatory sentences for often minor crimes. Nor does anyone pause to ask what the politician claiming to be “tough on crime” is going to do about the root causes of that crime in terms of education, employment, and economic viability.

Don’t get sucked in by all this – treat the media, and politicians, talking about crime and law and order with the same skepticism you apply to them talking about anything else. I have a feeling that if you had a quiet chat with most Australians and asked them what they want their politicians to do, the answers would involve better hospital services, more funding for public schools, more aged care and child care support, attention to local infrastructure (bridges are dear to my heart after the flooding of December), intelligent support for farmers, and a determination to leave the environment of state or country in a better state than when they took office (returning more water to rivers, and stopping tree clearing would be places I might start). Sure we all support our local police, and a commitment to improving their pay, facilities, and technology would go down well with everybody. But this is not what “law and order elections” are about, and when you hear a politician using this as the main reason to vote for them you might ask yourself, and them, what are they going to do about the really important, and real, issues we all face.

Of course we all want order in our society (and my goodness, Australians really don’t have to worry too much about lack of order in any rational assessment of our society), but a more important question to ask, of those who want to govern us, is what kind of a society do we want the order in?

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For old times

December 29, 2010 by David Horton

End of another year coming. Can’t be long, perhaps by the middle of next year, before the “noughties” are the subject of fashion retrospectives, and sneers, and experts are telling us about how the objects from those golden years have become valuable antiques.

I’m losing track of time I’m afraid. Once it seemed a thousand years between turning, say, 10, and waiting to turn 11 when you had been promised a new bicycle. Then you barely had time to put away the birthday cards for your 39th birthday before people were gleefully making cakes with 40 candles tightly crammed on top. And now I scarcely have time to get used to one decade before another one bounces in.

Funny how much attention we pay to “New Year’s Eve”. It is of course a totally arbitrary and meaningless date. Roughly marks the same spot, wherever that is, that the Earth was at in its orbit a year earlier, but so what? And it isn’t exactly 365 days anyway (no reason why it should be), so every 4 years we have to fudge an extra day, except every 100 years, but again every 400 years. And the present “New Year’s Day” only dates to 1582 when 10 days got taken off that year because of the 11 minutes difference between the “leap year” calculations and the real world. And of course earlier than that the Roman calender was different to the preceding one and to calenders in other parts of the world.

So arbitrary. Would make more sense, I suppose, to celebrate a “new year” starting, or an old one ending, at the Winter equinox in June, since we celebrate Christmas in association (roughly) with the Summer equinox (southern hemisphere, remember). But I don’t suppose anyone will listen to me.

So we are stuck with a New Year’s Eve just a week after Christmas, and stuck, it seems, with increasingly commercialised mass gatherings of people all counting out the old year and then saying ooh and aah as fireworks burst in the sky. In the old days, you young folks, it wasn’t like that, and families tended to celebrate quietly, together, perhaps observing some quaint old custom like “first footing”, or might have invited a few friends or neighbours in to talk about days of auld lang syne, absent friends, and hopes for the future. Better, and more personal, I think, than standing in a city centre with thousands of total strangers, but that’s just me, grumpy old man.

If you have had a bad year in 2010 I hope 2011 is a beauty, and if you had a great 2010 then I hope you get more of the same next year.

Happy New Year to all, and see you again in January.

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Green Christmas

December 23, 2010 by David Horton

Spent much of the last ten years dreaming of a green Christmas, and now, well, be careful what you wish for I say, because I would probably be happier with a little less high green pasture, so high that not only are sheep invisible but the horses occasionally disappear from view. You need more stock, said my bush fire brigade friend, as he nervously looked at my pasture a week ago, which is all very well but a year ago I didn’t have enough feed for the stock I had then, and now those same stock are overwhelmed by it – couldn’t eat what is there in a thousand years. And next year? Who knows. Does the La Nina continue, or do we swing back into the dreaded El Nino, while all the time average global temperatures keep rising and rising. Always been tough to be a farmer, predicting a year ahead what conditions would be like, what demand there would be, going to get tougher.

You can’t really go past Christmas Day as the best day of the year, can you. Especially if, by good luck or judgement, you manage to be in a household where young children are starring in the celebrations. The form of the celebrations we now have are themselves surprisingly young, dating back only 150 years or so, and owing a great deal to Charles Dickens and Prince Albert, Queen Consort. Prior to that there had been much frowning on Christmas by puritans in England and America, with celebrations banned by the evangelicals of their day.

But much further back Christmas began as a mid-Winter celebration at solstice time. A feeling of relief, no doubt, that from the shortest day on the days would get longer again, and you were past the mid way point and were headed for Spring. A chance no doubt to have a decent feed by putting together whatever delicacies could be found to contrast with the dried and preserved scanty rations that were getting you through the snowy winter. In Australia it is the opposite, the height of summer and the longest day being a promise that more pleasant days of Autumn are not totally out of reach.

Oh of course it is over commercialised these days. Almost as if the post Christmas sales are a more important celebration than the day itself. And far too much, for my taste, whizz bangery electronic gear, bah humbug. Back in my day stockings were filled, as much as financial circumstances permitted, with actual solid toys – trains and cars and lead toy soldiers and board games and books books books – even occasionally home made toys, hard to imagine as that might be at Christmas 2010. But never mind. The nature of gifts has changed a great deal over the last 150 years, will no doubt keep on changing into the future. What is important is the giving itself, and the pleasure of seeing the receiving, and the even greater importance of good companionship with family and friends.

If you are travelling in the holidays then travel carefully, come back safely. If you have friends or relatives coming, then have a good time eating, drinking and laughing loudly. If you are doing neither then sit back, relax, watch some cricket on tv, with beer, or good cold white wine in hand.

And Merry Christmas everyone.

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Leaking like a Wiki

December 8, 2010 by David Horton

Don’t know what to think about Wikileaks? It is a bit of an ethical dilemma, although the magnitude of that dilemma has been grossly exaggerated by outraged politicians around the world including our Julia and their Hillary. The ethics could be put under two headings. First that the release of secret documents puts lives (of informants, secret agents, collaborators, undercover police etc) at risk. But Wikileaks went to great pains to ask that the US point out parts that should be deleted for “national security” reasons, and as I understand the US refused to do so. But the media outlets who were sent the documents put in their own efforts with the help of Wiki to remove sensitive material. This ethics question seems to have no basis other than to make the public thing that the Wikileaks people are “evil”, “traitors”, “should be assassinated”, as a number of US politicians were calling for.

The second ethical issue is the suggestion that diplomats must be free to discuss, report, frankly and fearlessly, without having to worry about being exposed at some time in the future. Well, some truth in that, as there is in most things, but so little as to be laughable as a reason for closing down websites and hunting down Julian Assange. It is really only of concern where what is being said publicly by a government is totally at odds either with what its diplomats are reporting about the real world, or with what its diplomats are being sent to lie about for their country. We don’t conduct our ordinary everyday lives on the basis of lies and deliberate attempts to mislead (I exclude of course the advertising industry) so why is it considered ok to do this for dealings between countries?

And because we are doing this for dealings between countries, how can we have a well informed populace who can make decisions, at the ballot box, about how they want their country to behave? If we are knowingly playing footsy with some thug of a dictator because he is willing to buy military equipment from us or sell minerals to us at a bargain price or go to war with a neighbouring country that isn’t, shouldn’t the public be aware of this? Should we be lied to about what a wonderful democrat the thug is, and how he is fond of children and dogs and growing orchids? Or conversely, should we be told that someone is a communist dictator who hates children and dogs, when in fact his only crime is being critical of the west? Those kinds of lies enable all kinds of bad behaviour by countries, all kinds of damage to the people of countries where either a thug is being supported or a social democrat is being demonised, and can and do lead to wars which the public supports because they know no better.

There is far too much secrecy by governments supposedly acting on our behalf. The cry of “national security” can always be used to silence whistleblowers and critics, as can the cry of “cabinet confidentiality” or “commercial in confidence” (as the business of government increasingly becomes just business).

Oh of course there are exceptions. In World War 2 careless talk could certainly cost lives. If our police are tracking down a major drug dealer, or a terrorist, then there should be absolute secrecy until the investigation is complete, as long as there is then a transparent open trial. But we haven’t been in World War 2 for 65 years now, and the occasional action by police doesn’t justify the level of secrecy that governments now operate under.

Oh, and if you want to talk ethics, Mrs Clinton, perhaps you might discuss the ethics of US actions in Iraq, and Afghanistan and elsewhere, actions kept secret until Assange brought them to light. Who is the most dangerous, the whistleblower/leaker or the political leader that orders wars, assassinations and bombings, for spurious reasons?

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