My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 31 Aiugust 2021

Morrison & Co have let Afghans down

Today is the official deadline for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

As the deadline approached many of us have been questioning the rationale of the west’s invasion, and the consequences of its withdrawal.

Owing to this column’s word limit I have space to comment on only one aspect of this failed western imperialist venture. I have chosen the Morrison/Joyce government’s decision to severely restrict the number of refugees we will admit.

I was deeply saddened but not at all surprised when PM Morrison justified his announcement that we would take a paltry 3,000 Afghan refugees by saying “You would have heard other countries talk about figures of 5,000, some are talking of 20,000. But can I tell you, Australia is not going into that territory”.

The 3,000 is to come from our usual humanitarian intake of refugees, not on top of it, thereby adding insult to injury.

Australia is currently offering 13,750 humanitarian visas each year. That number was cut from 18,750 in last year’s budget.

The ABC reported that our commitment falls short of what is being offered by some other developed countries.

Canada announced a plan to offer 20,000 special humanitarian visas. The UK is also offering 20,000 places. Women and girls and other vulnerable groups will be given priority. It has called on other countries to step up their efforts to assist.

The United States opened up its refugee visas to those who might fall short of qualifying for previously announced special visas, in the hope of bringing more in.

US President Joe Biden recently lifted the United States’ refugee cap to 62,500, reversing deep cuts to the program made under former president Donald Trump.

What has Australia done in the past? There is precedent for setting up special refugee programs with high numbers during times of significant global turmoil.

Even during Abbott’s remarkably uncompassionate tenure the Coalition committed to taking 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees amid the crisis in Syria. Many were Yazidis. A number settled here in Wagga Wagga and have made a much-valued contribution to our multicultural society.

And there are other precedents, too. The withdrawal from Afghanistan has drawn comparisons to the end of the Vietnam War. Between 1975 (when Saigon fell) and 1982, Australia took in roughly 55,000 Vietnamese refugees.

And at roughly the same time, many Cambodian refugees were arriving here. Between 1975 and 1986, more than 12,000 Cambodian refugees were taken in.

After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre PM Bob Hawke offered asylum to 42,000 Chinese students.

Given how parsimonious Morrison’s offer of 3,000 was I researched if there were there calls for Australia to do more.

Indeed, there were. Amnesty International has suggested the efforts by the UK and Canada provide a clear model.

“I think we should we be looking at at least 20,000 places,” said Amnesty’s Refugee Advisor, Graham Thom.

The Centre for Policy Development (CPD) also called on the Australian government to accept 20,000 Afghan refugees, in addition to its normal humanitarian resettlement intake.

Senator Nick McKim, Australian Greens spokesperson for Immigration said, “We have a moral responsibility to grant asylum to 20,000 people from Afghanistan, in addition to our existing humanitarian intake.”

And there are similar calls within the Afghan community here. Refugee advocate Shukufa Tahiri said the promises made by the UK and Canada should be the baseline.

Wagga Wagga City councillors also called for more refugee places to be added to Australia’s annual intake, for the offer of permanent protection to those on temporary protection visas, and to allow people on both temporary and permanent protection visas urgent family reunions.

Mention must also be made of another stain on our good name. Defence Minister Peter Dutton justified our failure to help interpreters by saying they were “males of fighting age” who could commit “an atrocity”. Seemingly, he and Morrison were born without the compassion gene. 

Where does this lack of compassion come from? “To understand the inhumanity of Australia’s position on refugees from Afghanistan, it helps to understand the self-deception at the heart of our immigration policy” wrote The Saturday Paper. The Liberals, Nationals and the ALP have spent decades arguing that any form of compassion would undermine the system. To question one part of it would collapse all of it, they have the gall to argue.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 24 August 2021

Anthropocene age requires cultural change, not just new tech

Today’s column follows last week’s, in which I wrote of the warnings from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Essentially the report told us that major climate change is inevitable, irreversible, and unquestionably caused by humans.

As the SMH noted, “Our fingerprints are all over climate change”, which took me to the focus for today’s column, which is that we are living through what scientists call the Anthropocene. It is a new geological age during which humans have become the dominant force shaping the natural environment. This is in contrast to other geological ages, when the causes were not human. The oldest is the Cambrian, and the youngest, prior to the Anthropocene, was the Permian.

Scientists date this new period to the post-second world war economic boom, the “great acceleration”. We can though see its beginnings in the late eighteenth century industrial revolution, which was powered by burning coal.   

This rapid increase in our influence over the Earth has brought us to the precipice of catastrophic climate change, triggered extreme weather events, provoked mass extinctions of plants and animals, disrupted our planet’s nitrogen cycles, and acidified its oceans.

Our federal government has come to believe that technology is the solution. Worryingly, this includes a large degree of what is known as “negative emissions”, relying on large-scale carbon capture and storage technology. This is despite the fact that it might not work at all, is far from ready to be implemented, and would be very expensive.

And if all else fails, the story goes, we can ‘geoengineer’ the Earth, which is even more of a flight of fancy than carbon capture and storage.

The constant rhetorical posturing of “technology not taxes” by Morrison et al is of course nothing more than spin designed to secure them an election victory.

They fail to realise that the problem with this narrative is that it focuses on the symptoms, not the underlying causes of our climate crisis.

Even if the technologies on which we pin our hopes for the future deliver as expected and do not lead to much collateral damage, both of which are huge assumptions, they will not have fixed our mindsets, which are what we really need to change.

So this is a crisis of culture and politics, not of science and technology. To believe that we can innovate and engineer ourselves out of this mess is to miss the key lesson of the Anthropocene age: that dealing with planetary-scale processes calls for humility, not arrogance.

Our civilisation is underpinned by extractivism, mainly of minerals, particularly fossil fuels. It is founded on the belief that the Earth is ours to exploit, a cultural concept that began in the bible.

Add to this the nonsensical idea of infinite growth, the inclusion of material possessions as markers of achievement, a drive to consume for the sake of consumption, and blindness to the long-term consequences of our actions. These have all become part of the culture of neo-liberal unregulated global capitalism. But there is nothing self-evident about these things, as indigenous peoples teach us.

Many indigenous groups, as we know full well here in Australia, got to know their natural environments intimately and sustained themselves over millennia, often despite harsh conditions. They came to understand the limits of what these environments could support, and they grasped that caring for the environment was simultaneously an act of self-care.

Yet rebuilding our relationship with our planet does not mean abandoning the many achievements of our civilisation, and some of our technological innovations can help us treat the superficial symptoms of the crisis. But addressing the causes means abandoning some of the assumptions on which our current society is built: infinite growth, and the unlimited exploitation of the natural environment.

What does this look like in practice? Changing the collective mindset of a civilisation calls for a shift in values. It means educating our children about humility and community, rather than vanity and individuality. It means changing our relationship with consumption, breaking the spell of advertising, and the planned obsolescence of manufacturing.

It means political organising, generating demand for a politics that sees beyond the nation state, and beyond the lifespan of the currently living generations.

The Greens four pillars of ecological sustainability, social and economic justice, grassroots participatory democracy and peace and nonviolence are a good place to start.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 17 August 2020

Climate change makes a mockery of returning to normal

We hear almost daily from our federal and state politicians about returning to normal once we achieve control of COVID-19.

Yet when, let alone if, COVID-19 is brought under control, we face the far greater threat of climate change. We need urgent mitigation action, and at the same time put in place firm adaptation measures. Our leading federal politicians are blithely ignoring of this far greater threat.     

With COVID-19, the federal government has shown itself totally incapable of leading or managing its core responsibilities of vaccine supply and quarantine. “The climate challenge is far greater than Covid, and there are no vaccinations or quarantine against climate impacts,” wrote Ian Dunlop in Pearls and Irritations.

Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its most comprehensive assessment yet. After heatwaves and fires in northern latitudes and devastating floods in China and Europe, scientists are warning that this may become the norm unless climate breakdown can be stopped.

Major climate change is inevitable, irreversible, and unquestionably caused by humans, the IPCC report has concluded.

This is the “turning point in the climate change crisis” wrote Crikey.com of the IPCC report. Its periodic reports have never before held the gravity that this one has, released as a time where we could be approaching a point of no return, as it warned that temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5⁰C by 2030, bringing widespread extreme weather.

The report is also a wake-up call that climate impacts are accelerating and ever becoming closer to moving beyond human influence.

Also, despite impassioned pleas from scientists, the political and media emphasis on the net zero 2050 pathway is actually becoming extremely dangerous. Potentially catastrophic climate outcomes will occur much sooner by refusing to rapidly reduce carbon emissions. Such a reduction is now necessary to stop runaway warming.

The Australian mainstream media, with a few exceptions, blithely ignores these realities, consumed with the supposedly disastrous short-term economic implications of any climate action, oblivious to the infinitely greater cost of inaction. The Australian Financial Review (AFR), recently claimed that “Coal, along with oil and gas, will continue to supply the world’s energy during the decades-long transition to net zero”.

Organisations like the AFR, the Murdoch press, ideologues and fossil fuel vested interests around the world whose denialist stance has succeeded in allowing carbon emissions to continue to rise at worst-case rates, placing humanity in grave danger with their insatiable greed and determination to hang on to the reins of power at all costs.

Quite apart from the implications for humanity, directors of organisations such as Shell, BHP, Rio, Woodside and Santos, are now in clear breach of their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders because they are destroying their future. Ben van Beurden, Managing Director of Royal Dutch Shell conceded last year that: “Yeah, we knew. Everybody knew. And somehow we all ignored it.”

But nowhere is this leadership failure, and the moral and ethical vacuum behind it, more evident than with our current federal government.

Australia is one of the regions most exposed to climate threats, as we are only too well aware from our recent drought, bushfire and flood experience. New research from Hugh Saddler for The Australia Institute shows, with the exception of Poland (which generates about 75 per cent of its electricity from coal), Australia has the most emissions-intensive energy system among wealthy, developed OECD countries.

Yet politically, it is as if this never happened. For example, none of the recommendations of the Bushfire Royal Commission has been implemented, and many communities remain without adequate recovery support.

Policy, to the extent it exists, aligns with fossil-fuel interests, and is ideologically committed to the neoliberal unregulated market which has created the climate crisis and proved incapable of solving it.

So reality is swept under the carpet as the government rushes headlong into its own gas-led recovery, quite deliberately designed to maximise the use of fossil fuels.

This is the normal they want us to return to, when to save the planet and the people we should be aiming at least for net zero emissions by 2030. As The Guardian wrote “Nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe”.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 10 August 2021

Tax cuts bad news for our social health

This week I will devote my column to analysing recent moves by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to prepare for the next federal election by making drastic amendments to its policy platform.

Readers may wonder why I would devote a column to a policy adjustment by one particular party. My rationale is that these amendments will have a severely detrimental effect on the social health of Australia.

The ALP announced it would support the Morrison government’s stage 3 tax cuts, which favour higher income earners. Simultaneously it dumped signature policies it took to the 2019 federal election: changes to negative gearing, and a reduced discount on the capital gains tax.

These changes were quite openly designed to remove any reasons for voters to not vote for Labor at the next election. Instead, Labor aims to keep the focus on the government and its handling of the pandemic.

They amount to “decisions which even further remove any obvious policy difference, or ambition, between the major political parties” wrote Laura Tingle of ABC TV’s 7/30 Report.

This is a move which brings Australia closer to a more regressive, flat income tax system than at any other time in our history. “These changes mean that Australia’s future will be economically and ethically poorer” wrote Louise Devine in Pearls and Irritations.

The ABC reported that “Anthony Albanese this week sent a clear message, he intends to use John Howard’s 1996 model as his strategic guide to the election.”

The Liberals in 1996 adopted a very low profile, relying primarily on people swinging against the Keating government. Being as small a target as possible, including limiting the range of election promises, is regarded by Labor as a sensible course.

Keep in mind that most governments since Whitlam’s 1972 victory have adopted the small target model, winning government by pointing out the failures of the incumbents. Such tactics don’t always work though, and there’s a strong argument voters looking to change government want an appealing alternative.

Now to the detail of the tax cuts. Sarah Martin in The Guardian Australia pointed out that “Tax cuts backed by Labor will give men $2 for every $1 women get, Greens modelling shows”. This is worth exploring in some detail.

Adam Bandt, Australian Greens party room leader, said Labor is ‘gutless’ for supporting stage three cuts. He released modelling showing the cuts will worsen the gender pay gap and give high income earners up to 400 times the benefit of the lowest paid.

Note that Mr Bandt is not making political capital through unproven statements, for analysis prepared by the parliamentary budget office (PBO) shows that men will receive about $2 for every $1 women receive under the government’s tax plan.

On average, this will see a woman receive an annual tax cut of $1,180 by the end of the decade, compared with $2,150 for men.

The PBO analysis also shows that the vast bulk of the tax plan’s benefit will flow to the highest paid, with about 45% of the cost of the package going to fund tax cuts for those earning more than $180,000 a year.

Under the controversial final stage of the government’s tax package, the 37% tax bracket will be scrapped and the top 45% bracket will be lifted and kick in at $200,000.

Bandt said Labor had chosen to “join the Liberals in being a flat tax party”, and the Greens would be vigorously campaigning against the party on the decision.

“We don’t throw our values overboard. We will go to the next election fighting for an Australia that is more equal – we won’t waiver on those values.

“Elections should be about offering different visions for the country. It has to be about reaching for the stars, not a race to the bottom.”

Given this, I’m interested in finding out if there was an alternative that might be both socially just and at the same time an election-winning formula.

There is. Apart from not supporting the wealthy favouring tax cuts, the Greens are proposing something that is long championed by many, an annual extra 6% wealth tax on billionaires for Australia’s 122 wealthiest citizens. It would raise about $40bn over the decade. Such a wealth tax would be a step towards a more socially just society.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 3 August 2021

Politicisation of lockdowns not good news

The recent lockdown protests in Sydney and Melbourne brought to mind the question of why people would feel compelled to protest against such essential public health measures.

I came to two conclusions. The first was the growing influence of libertarianism. The second is the influence of the right-wing media, particularly the outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch. Let’s explore both, to see if my conclusions carry weight.

True, some of those opposed to lockdowns belong to specific groups such as the anti-vaxxers and QAnon, but all are infected with libertarianism.

Put simply, libertarianism is a philosophy that advocates only minimal state intervention in the private lives of citizens and the market. Taken to extremes it means no government involvement in our lives at all. Libertarians put an exaggerated sense of ‘freedom’ above all else. We saw it carried to excess last year during the presidential campaign in the USA.

Though the Liberal Party was founded on a principle of individual freedom it grudgingly supports a social safety net, albeit a very poorly funded one that is weak and far too exclusive.

Libertarian principles may explain its refusal to commit to meaningful action to combat climate change, such as a price on carbon and net zero by 2050, let alone 2030.

Nonetheless, we haven’t embraced libertarianism to the same extent that millions of people on the USA have.

Or so I thought, until I saw placards at the Sydney lockdown protest loudly proclaiming ‘Freedom’. Presumably the protesters though their individual freedom was more important than the health of the entire community. If so, libertarianism is a philosophy that we need to nip in the bud before it becomes majority opinion.

Now to the influence of the media. “True to form, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has been whipping itself into a lather to condemn the lockdowns” wrote Russell Marks in The Monthly.

By Murdoch’s media empire I’m referring to tabloid newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph, the Herald-Sun and broadsheets such as The Australian, as well as Spectator Australia, and the television station Sky News.

All give free rein to a bunch of extreme conservatives. Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, for example. They hold enormous influence, as the recent anti lockdown demonstrations show.

For well over a year now, Murdoch’s right-wing demagogues have unleashed fury each time a state premier announces temporary restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19. Andrew Bolt, The Herald Sun columnist and Sky presenter is certain that the primary COVID-19 problem is the lockdowns. Each premier who calls a lockdown cops hellfire from Bolt and others of Murdoch’s right.

One of their tactics is to use inflammatory words that clearly don’t fit any reasonable assessment of the situation. The Australian’s Adam Creighton tweeted last August that “devastating, destructive power of the state” was “on full display”. ‘Dictator Dan’ has become their favourite pejorative nickname for the Victorian premier.

What are Bolt, Jones etc advocating instead of lockdowns? The fruits of the alternative approach can be seen in places that have tried to avoid lockdown, where cases are very, very high.

Alan Jones, on his nightly hour-long Sky News show, and in his recently cancelled Daily Telegraph column, maintained that the daily reporting of new cases has a distorting effect, by pointing out that Australia’s death rate is just 0.003 per cent.

Jones & Co urged the NSW premier not to lock down as COVID-19 cases began surging in Sydney during the second half of June. It took weeks to impose a half-hearted lockdown, and even when tougher restrictions were put in place it was still referred to as ‘lockdown lite’.

Murdoch’s right has been extraordinarily successful in politicising lockdowns, despite abundant evidence that they’re the only response proven to control and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Vaccines will probably also achieve that aim, but we won’t know that for at least six months.

Berejiklian’s government must have known all this. But through its organs Murdoch’s right has convinced a significant proportion of Liberal voters in NSW that lockdowns are unnecessary, wasteful and socialist. Berejiklian blinked, and so instead of shutting down for a week, greater Sydney is staring down the prospect of a third month locked down.

Will Murdoch’s arch conservatives now dub such a true-blue Liberal ‘Generalissimo Gladys’?