Archive for the ‘Australia’ Category
some meandering complaints about our world
It’s a well-known fact, though it should be better known, that being super-rich makes you indifferent to the financial struggles of others. Frump, for example, is very crookedly wealthy and takes advice, if he ever takes advice, from wealthy cronies and tries as best he can to place them in positions of power, and yet his impoverished MAGA fans still think he’s the greatest being in the multiverse. Yes, he’s looking bad percentage-wise, but I’m talking about hardcore MAGA fans who will go down with the ship.
This indifference, and selfishness, of the Elon Skums of the world should always be borne in mind when examining your own government and its advisors. Take note, as I have, of libertarian types, as they’re generally into ‘every bloke for himself’ (it’s a very blokey ‘philosophy’, pace Ayn Rand). And, just as an aside, one of the great joys of life consists of telling a libertarian, in no uncertain terms, that ‘free will’ is a myth, and then watching them boil over with rage.
The difficulty of course, with all governments, is that the powerful, aka the rich, are the ones whose voices are most heard. Their voices always rise ‘above the fray’ somehow, and their ‘magical’ wealth always suggests that they have something better to offer to government than any random street protestor.
So what happens when just about everyone in government is super-rich? This happens in Putinland of course, because he’s basically the only one in government, and the same goes for other bizarro ‘governments’ like Turkmenistan and North Korea.
And then there’s the USA…
It’s so hard to ignore that country, it casts its bleak shadow everywhere, especially in the WEIRD world. And of course it has plenty of billionaires, and the biggest rich-poor gap in the west. And considering its extreme jingoism, and ‘rugged individualism’, that’s never going to change. Its Presidential system is the best/worst example of that individualism. It’s basically an elected Kingship – I’m sure I’ll never see a Queen of the USA in my lifetime. And will they learn from the Frump disaster and develop a more distributed, inclusive political power system? Never never never. And I wouldn’t care but they interfere so much with other countries, pushing their weight around so that we have to sully ourselves by negotiating with them. Australia, at least, is at a safer distance than most. We need to keep minding our own business, but that’s hard, and it could be that their next King is reasonable enough to draw us in against our better judgment.
I’m meandering on with this, but it seems to me that the human world has become a more unpleasant place over the last few decades, at least politically. Crises will grow – climate change, the nuclear threat (Hiroshima-Nagasaki is fading in the public memory, and I recently heard someone suggesting nuking Putinland), the failing of internationalism, it all seems to be going the wrong way. I wish I had some decent, non-political focus to take me away from it all, to some calm, steady Lagrange point where I can indulge in purely autistic speculations.
Perhaps I should focus more on the local, Australian scene, but then I’m such a global citizen (sigh), and I suppose I’m too old and set in my income and circumstances (barring some sudden accident or disease, etc) to be too self-concerned. In Australia the arguments are about tax levels, and there is a concern about extreme right movements drawing their ‘inspiration’ from MAGA (I just now typed into Youtube ‘how do I get rid of Sky News from my Youtube feed’ and the result was a whole heap of Sky News videos. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but….). I do have concerns about Australia’s stance re the ridiculous but dangerous Frump declaration of war against Iran, and I worry about the government’s positioning on the David and Goliath Israel-Palestine conflict, with anti-semitism claims being tossed around like confetti. As to domestic politics I suppose I should be ashamed to say I’m mostly woefully ignorant, though the NDIS cuts have caused serious concern among friends with a severely mentally impaired son (a very rare trisomy), and I’m concerned, as I’ve written before, about funding going to private schools from our largely private school-educated MPs. And we also have a rise in MAGA-type noises from the rabid right, which will no doubt subside when Frump carks it.
Anyway, that’s enough meandering, I’ll try ro find something more substantial to write about next time.
See also
The USA has the worst political system in the democratic world, but they don’t think so
full democracies in v dark green
Okay, so I’ve written along these lines before but I need to double down. The USA has a problem with its history, as well as its national ego. The obvious needs to be pointed out to United Staters – that no other democratic country has ‘no kings’ rallies, because no other democratic country has what is in effect an elected monarchy, with massive pardoning powers, massive immunity, and power to appoint never-elected individuals to positions of great power and impact on the welfare of the state. And he gets to live in a massive white palace surrounded by courtiers for the four or eight years of his reign (and it looks like this king will always be male). Even the judiciary is overly politicised. And there seems to be no limit to the amount of money that can flow to favoured candidates. And yet, ask more or less randomly any bunch of United Staters to name the world’s greatest democracy, and we all know what the answer will be.
Here in Australia, voting is mandatory for citizens of 18 or over. Of course such compulsion is out of the question for ‘the land of the free’, but I do think that mandatory voting does remind us that we’re all in it together, that we’re fundamentally social creatures, and that we would do well to consider seriously the kind of society we want. It is a kind of participation in the broader society, which hopefully should bring us together. But when Australians vote, we vote for a local candidate as well as a set of policies. We don’t vote for anything like a king, or an ‘I alone can fix it’ superhero. As in the USA there are two major parties, but the parties decide on their leader, and they can dump that leader by a simple vote of no confidence if they feel she’s ineffective, or if they feel it’s time for a change, or whatever. She’s like the captain of a soccer team, she’ll be dumped if the team is performing poorly, or if they lose confidence in her leadership and so on. It’s all about collaboration, and the success of the team.
Of course, there is no perfect political system, and reform needs to be ongoing as societies evolve. The White Australia policy, which existed in my lifetime, now strikes us as an embarrassment, and it’s possible that much that seems normal now will strike others as an embarrassment in 60 years time. Maybe by that time the USA will have dumped its monarchy – but probably not.
Change often occurs when a crisis reveals serious problems with a system, and Trump, who is essentially a crime machine, as many have pointed out, has certainly shown how bad a so-called democratic state can get, but there seems to be something in the US psyche, something profoundly insular, and blindly nationalistic, that prevents it from engaging in the kind of root-and-branch reform that outsiders see as necessary.
The Trump saga continues because he hasn’t suffered a moment’s harm from the criminal convictions against him, in a nation that has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democracy, by a very large margin. The only other countries with a higher rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, but it’s unlikely that most United Staters are aware of this revealing fact. It seems clear that those being incarcerated are not the ultra-wealthy, a tiny minority that wields a highly disproportionate degree of power. The vast rich-poor gap and the high incarceration rate are clearly related.
This is a nation that really struggles to be clear-sighted about itself. Its influence on South Korea’s type of democratic system – an imperialistic Presidency, rather than the more party-based, team-focussed system more or less successfully used in Australia and other Westminster-style democracies, has been disastrous, as it would be anywhere else. It’s my own view that even many of these variants of democracy are too individually-focussed. We need governments to be as collaboratively and inclusively based as it is possible to be. We need to reduce, as far as is humanly possible, the old left-right divide, in which one government dismantles the policies of its predecessors, only to have its policies dismantled in turn, often at great cost to the public at large. A more inclusive and collaborative system, devoid of ‘I alone can fix it’ hubris, must surely be the politics of the future, but that future, I admit, seems distant. There are few nations following this model, and if they are, they’re largely being ignored by the rest. I can’t pretend to be an expert on global political systems, but I suspect that some Scandinavian systems are heading in the right direction. I shall look at some of those systems in future posts.
I’ve referenced below an interesting 2020 survey by Wurzburg University, ‘Ranking of Countries by Quality of Democracy’, which tends to confirm those suspicions. The top 5 countries, in order, are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany (perhaps a bit of local bias for number five!). These countries, along with the next 30, are classified as ‘working democracies’. The next country, number 36, the USA, is the first of the ‘deficient democracies’. Few people in the USA would agree, of course.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
the worst of the English-speaking democracies – 1
five Australian PMs, from 2010 to 2019
I don’t like the USA very much. I suppose that’s putting it mildly.
I’m not a nationalist. I was for some years involved in the humanist movement, attended meetings and gave, I recall, three talks to humanist groups, one on the free will issue, one on the decline of Christianity here in Australia, and one on the rise of internationalist organisations over the past century or so.
Lately, like many, I’ve become – I don’t know what to call it, concerned, transfixed by the USA, not wanting to know, not wanting to miss anything, a mixture of horror and schadenfreude. But generally, I find it more valuable to listen to those outside looking in, than to US commentators, with their ‘how have the mighty fallen’ fantasies.
This is generally a sound approach. As I’ve written before, if you want to know what an individual is like, don’t take it from the horse’s mouth, because she’s understandably (and healthily) biased. So you ask the people around her, who’ve had dealings with her, some friendly, some not so. This is ‘solid science,’ as they say. And the same goes for countries, generally.
So the most appropriate countries to compare the USA with are, surely, the other English-speaking democracies. That’s to say, Britain, the ‘mother’ of them all, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s important to note that Australia and New Zealand became separated from Britain more or less amicably, while the USA did so via a war of independence. Canada’s history lies between these two extremes. These facts help explain the differences in their polities.
So, to start with Australia, and I’ll try to be brief. It started in 1788 when a British flag was hoisted in what is now known as Sydney Harbour, claiming, rather outrageously, on a ‘finders keepers’ basis, that all of the surrounding land, the extent of which was largely unknown, now belonged to that small densely populated island on the far side of the globe. It all seemed perfectly cromulent to the colonists, and to be fair they had no idea quite how massive the land area was. Later, in spite of the rather obvious presence of non-British humans in the region, the land was declared ‘terra nullius’. Whether this was a convenient fiction, or simply a joke, is anyone’s guess.
The colonists used this harbour region as a prison camp for some decades, adding other camps in the north and south. Crime and punishment was rather fetishised in this period, to the detriment of the so-called lower classes. But further into the 19th century, after the Australian continent became more fully surveyed and explored, free settlements, or separate colonies, developed along the eastern and southern coasts, and in Tasmania, each governed by officials tied to the motherland. The Aboriginal population, more sparse and scattered than the Maori population in New Zealand, and considerably less given to warfare, tended to be brushed aside in the early decades.
The important Sydney region began its transformation from a struggling and near-failing farming and rum-guzzling community into a more civil society under Lachlan Macquarie, governor from 1810 to 1821, yet this seemed to encourage the motherland to send out more of their unwanted. The colonial population rapidly increased, and farming, often conducted illegally (squatting) became quite lucrative for some. Settlements grew beyond Sydney, as well as in modern-day Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston and Adelaide.
So, jumping to the late 19th century, the colony was more or less thriving in spite of a serious shortage of women, especially in the early years. This actually led to supportive treatment such as assisted migration and favoured settlement and employment terms. A mid-century gold rush boosted the population while further contributing to the gender imbalance, as well as racism.
Voices for independence were being raised from the 1830s in Australia, and even in Britain by the 1850s. The self-government process developed in different regions, and was less a national than a colony-based development, since each region had already created governmental systems. Constitutions were created in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania and South Australia and approved in Britain by the end of the 1850s. Western Australia was officially self-governing by 1890.
So with constitutions came legislative councils for each of the far-flung colonies. With variations they created lower and upper houses, with the upper houses being based on a very limited property-owning male franchise. My home state, South Australia, was the first to introduce universal male suffrage in the lower house in 1956. It was also the first electorate in the world to introduce female suffrage, and the right to stand for office, in 1895. Only for ‘white’ women, of course.
So Australia’s move towards complete independence from Britain was piecemeal and peaceful. 1901 was the year that it became a national federation of states, with a governor-general and state governors linking it to the motherland and its constitutional monarch, but with all legislative power in the hands of the federal and state governments. On the federal level it operates largely under a two-party system, with smaller parties on the left and right fringes, sometimes forming coalitions with their corresponding larger parties, and independent members of various types. The head of government, the Prime Minister, is not elected directly by the people, as is the case in the USA, but by the elected members of her or his party, and she can be removed from her position by a vote of no-confidence from those elected members. The opposition leader attains her position by the same process. New legislation is introduced by the incumbent government, debated and voted for in the lower house (the House of Representatives), after which it passes to the upper house (the Senate) for confirmation.
In all of this there’s, unsurprisingly, little difference between the Australian system and the British one. There’s a two-chamber parliament that meets regularly, all made up of locally elected members. Those members choose their leader – the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader, and they in turn choose their ministerial and shadow ministerial ‘teams’, e.g the Treasurer, the Foreign Minister, the Education Minister, the Attorney-General, the Deputy Prime Minister and so on. This collection of ministers is called the Cabinet. Australia also has a Constitution, like the USA, but unlike the USA, it virtually never gets mentioned. It basically explains how the government or parliament is constituted, and there seems to be general agreement about it.
The important difference between Australia’s Westminster-based system (and those of Canada, New Zealand, and of course Britain) and that of the USA is the absence of anything like a President, or immunity from prosecution for any member of government. Pardoning powers are in the hands of the Attorney-General, in consultation with the Cabinet, and are very seldom used. The seven-person High Court of Australia is the equivalent of the USA’s Supreme Court, but nowhere near as controversial (very few Australians would be able to name anyone who’s on it). Mandatory retirement age for its Justices is 70, and new members are selected by the Attorney-General in consultation with the Cabinet.
New Zealand’s democratic or political history (I suppose I’m trying to say ‘white’ history without sounding racist – of course its Maori history was full of politics in the broad sense, as was Australian aboriginal and native American history) can be dated to 1840, the year of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the declaration of British sovereignty over the islands by its first governor, William Hobson. The Maori people, Pacific Islanders who first settled on the North Island some 12,000 yers ago, were generally much more difficult to deal with in these early years of white colonisation than Australia’s Aboriginals. Given to tribal warfare before the whites arrived (much like the whites had been in Europe for millennia), they were well prepared to make life tough for the newcomers. This led to serious warfare from the 1850s to the 1870s when, for some odd reason, many Maori groups refused to accept that their 12,000-year island home now belonged to Britain – or possibly Australia. The British government, which by the mid-19th century had become somewhat overwhelmed by the burden of its own colonial enterprises, generally left developments in New Zealand, which mostly centred around the Bay of Islands at the very northern region of the North Island, to those ‘over there’ who thought they knew what they were doing.
This was generally a good thing. The New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852 led to the first elections in 1853. There was a property qualification, of course, but it was more liberal than that of Britain at the time, and a large number of Maori chiefs could vote. All Maori men over 21 could vote by 1867. This was way ahead of anything in Europe or North America. However, by the early 20th century, Maori had been stripped of almost all of their land. Unsurprisingly this led to uprisings and plenty of violence.
New Zealand adopted a Westminster-based system of course, with a ceremonial Governor-General representing the British monarch, a Prime Minister, and two major parties, Labour on the left and the Nationals on the right. There have been a number of minor parties and independents over the years and recently coalition governments have been more common than not. Here’s how Wikipedia recounts it:
In 1996, New Zealand inaugurated the new electoral system (mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP) to elect its Parliament. The MMP system was expected (among numerous other goals) to increase representation of smaller parties in Parliament and appears to have done so in the MMP elections to date.
New Zealand’s judicial system has been independent and largely uncontroversial, though there have been some important recent changes. A body called the Supreme Court of New Zealand came into being in January 2004, replacing the right of appeal to the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. There was a certain amount of opposition from monarchists about this change, of course.
Although religion played some part in the politics of Australia and New Zealand into the 60s, both countries have been ‘losing their religion’, i.e Christianity, quite rapidly since that time, in contrast to the US. This is one of many factors separating the US from the Westminster-based English-speaking nations, as we shall see.
In the next post I’ll take a look at the USA’s unfortunate neighbour, Canada, which also has a Westminster-based parliamentary democracy, as well as the USA itself, as briefly as possible.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Australia
Keith Sinclair, A history of New Zealand, 1969
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Zealand
on indigenous, aboriginal, or first nations people and the literary art
I recently read Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, for a book group I belong to. At our meeting to discuss the book, a rather awkward incident occurred. One of the members, who had issues with the book, which I have to say I didn’t really understand (the issues I mean, not the book), asked, presumably in exasperation, ‘Do you think I’m being racist?’ I believe he was asking the group as a whole, but, since I’d been speaking in praise of it (it was Praiseworthy after all), I spoke up and said, sotto voce, ‘Well, yeah, a bit’, or something similar. This was unfortunate, and I owe him an apology. Anyway, he stormed off to his room (he and his partner were the hosts for the evening), and the group struggled on without him for a while, and soon dispersed.
I don’t know if I remember this rightly, episodic memory being so fraught and entangled with ego and angst and such. Anyway, what I think was bothering me wasn’t so much racism – or not at all racism – but what I perceived as a lack of recognition of a work that played with the combination of oral and written storytelling in a writer who, like all indigenous writers coming from an oral tradition, is interested in displaying the best of both worlds, with an understandable bias towards her own culture. I also found, in the writing, a certain irreverence, if that’s the right word, for the adopted language, which I’ve found in Aboriginal people I’ve spoken to or listened to. An irreverence often laced wth humour.
It should be remembered, as I think it’s really important, that all indigenous/aboriginal/first nations people who have had their culture upended, their best land appropriated, their age-old lifestyles destroyed, are forced, in order to recover anything out of what they’ve lost, to learn and effectively use the language of the colonisers. Because it’s never going to happen the other way round. And Alexis Wright’s whole career illustrates this unfortunate but completely unsurprising fact. Wright’s white father died when she was five, and she was subsequently brought up, by her mother and grandmother, as a Waanyi woman in the highlands south of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her use of the English language, to which she was obviously exposed from an early age, is dazzlingly rich, fertile, and unconstrained in a way that I’ve encountered myself in my all too rare conversations with aboriginal people.
Now I’m going to throw caution to the wind and, just because I’ve been on a Darwin binge lately (Charles, that is, not Garamilla), I’m going to quote from The voyage of the Beagle –
At sunset, a party of a score of the black aborigines passed by, each carrying, in their accustomed manner, a bundle of spears and other weapons. By giving a leading young man a shilling, they were easily detained, and threw their spears for my amusement. They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at thirty yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practised archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity, and I heard of several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them.
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, p 291
So, to Darwin, Australia’s ‘savages’ were kinda noble. His later description of Australia’s ‘freedmen’, those brought to the country from England due to crimes large and small, was much more cloth-eared, classist and offensive. In any case it’s unlikely that Darwin bothered to learn any of the local aboriginal lingo. But then again…
The point here is that, as Darwin’s description tells us, the first humans to make a living on this land became very adept at surviving and thriving here, and as to ‘cultivating the ground’, they had little need to, quite apart from the dubious advantages to be gained by the ‘agricultural turn’, especially as the soil wasn’t the best for growing crops, as the first fleeters discovered. These first humans too might have struggled at first – that’s something we’re unlikely to ever know – but they clearly adapted over time to what was available for hunting and fishing, as well as developing skills to replenish the natural foods they found, as the writings of Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe have shown.
But then the Brits arrived, and they had to deal with foreign diseases, foreign weaponry, culture shock and ‘Terra Nullius’ land-grabbing on a massive scale, though plenty of those early Brits were impressed at the health and vitality of these ‘savages’. All of this makes background for Alexis Wright’s literary work, which presents us with the haze of Carpentaria under the remote overlordship of the Australian Government, and how particular individuals and families try to deal with it.
The first thing that struck me, though, about the book, was the writing style, which I might describe as ‘colourfully rambling’, with particular individuals standing out for their more or less fantastical obsessions. It marries the oral and the literary in such a breezily nonchalant way that all the craziness, the various dreams and schemes, become convincing. And it’s all about how to deal with that oppressive foreign overlordship – every response from suicide, to get rich quick schemes (white folk stuff) to complete identity with the overlord, to retreat into private obsessions. In one memorable passage, for me at least, Aboriginal Sovereignty, the aptly named most tragic figure in the novel, is picked up while apparently trying to commit suicide in the open sea, by a boat full of refugees (Sovereignty had been marked as a paedophile by the White Powers for breaking a certain law):
One of these laws said that you cannot have sex with a minor. He had raped an underage girl. Why did that girl want to get married to her promised one? She said it was the law, their law, the old true law. She said that other people had married same way, and all their families knew that too. She said stop being a pack of hypocrites, she insisted on being married, and went right out there, and claimed her man. There was no trouble about her doing that. Everyone knew. Said it was right. Those two loved each other since they were children. They said that they would spend the rest of their entire lives with each other…
The ‘people smuggler’ in charge of the boat is given a voice – a rare thing. In fact, our former Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described what he and so many others have termed people smugglers as ‘the scum of the Earth’, as though they were a species, like those poor maligned cane toads. So the passage dealing with Aboriginal Sovereignty’s thoughts as he floats in the open sea thinking of ‘her, only her, in his soul’, and of eternity and spirits of time, is broken by this cargo shifter, weather and time-hardened, hunger-hardened, his home washed away by a changing climate, his being shifted from shrinking land to drifting sea, and now through circumstances too wind-blown and divagating to bear in mind, he is responsible for live cargo, so that he needs not to panic, he needs to be calm for others, as time and this boat have taught him, though he too might be drifting between a formless hope and despair.
So Aboriginal Sovereignty is rescued by this boat, this eagle-eyed scummy watcher of the sea and its flotsam, and with Wright’s language spinning its webs we are, or I’m not, sure if he’s dead or alive, and then some coastal military arrive in helicopters followed by customs patrol boats, and all is panic and noise and interpreters and the unconscious man lying on the deck is mentioned, and death is surely unconsciousness and yet… The uncertainties are perhaps deliberate or maybe I’m just being obtuse, but it seems Aboriginal Sovereignty’s ultimate demise results from the sudden brutal occupation of the boat by these officials, but of course it all began with the police and charges of paedophilia and the assimilation soothing the dying pillow wisdom touted by the Adelaide Review back in the eighties and still practised without the name.
In any case we see where Wright’s sympathies lie throughout Praiseworthy – with people who must make the most, if they can, out of displacement and dispossession, a praiseworthy task, often misunderstood, often obstructed, and sometimes, often, something to marvel at.
References
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy,
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, 2018
Bill Gammage, The biggest estate on Earth, 2011
on the French political system, and maybe bonobos
I’ve always had an interest in France, its history and its literature, having done a BA in French language and literature, decades ago, for some reason. Stendhal and Beauvoir are a couple of my heroes. I even stayed in Paris for a week a few years back – bien exotique pour moi. But whenever I read about French politics, I just felt confused. They have a President and a Prime Minister, but which, if any has seniority? Have any of them been female? I knew that, in spite of a prominent female intelligentsia, France has had a reputation as a rather chauvinist nation, but I’ve never made much effort to dig deeper.
So, as I’m just finishing off Cecil Jenkins’ A brief history of France, which, being brief, hasn’t managed to unconfuse me, I’m going to use this post to educate myself a bit more, while keeping bonobos – that’s to say dominant women – in mind, wherever I can find them.
France is currently experiencing its Fifth Republic, constituted in 1958 under then President Charles de Gaulle. The Constitution of 1958 still operates, apparently. From Wikipedia,
The constitution provides for a separation of powers and proclaims France’s “attachment to the Rights of Man [sic] and the principles of National Sovereignty as defined by the Declaration of 1789”.
Whenever I think of the ‘Rights of Man’ and 1789 I think of honorary bonobo, Olympe de Gouges, playwright, political activist, humanist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, whose moderate opposition to Robespierre and the radicals led to her execution during the Reign of Terror.
The first thing I should say about the current French political system is that it seems brain-befuddlingly complex to me. Cutting to the chase, the President has, these days, a considerably more powerful position than the Prime Minister, whom he’s responsible for appointing. There has of course never been a female President, hardly surprising for a nation that didn’t even allow women to vote until after the Second World War. At least there have been a couple of female Prime Ministers, Edith Cresson (1991-2) and Elisabeth Borne (2023-Jan 2024), neither of whom managed to last a year.
French state politics seems based on a key, controversial concept – dirigisme. Often associated with de Gaulle’s post-war government, and the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, a thirty-year period of largely state-managed growth following WW2, dirigisme is an odd amalgam of authoritarianism and something like socialism, which has seen France benefit from some of the most generous health and welfare benefits in the world. I can well remember my shock when riots broke out last year because of a proposed raising of the pensionable age by the Macron/Borne government, from 62 to 64 (the original plan was to raise it to 65). I found it hard to believe that any wealthy, healthy nation could maintain such a low pension age. In Australia, the age is now 67, and rising. It should also be noted that, according to the New York Times:
Macron sought to gradually raise the legal age when workers can start collecting a pension by three months every year until it reaches 64 in 2030 (!).
Such generosity seems scarcely credible to other WEIRD world countries, surely, remembering that increased longevity means many pension payouts for upwards of 30 years. They do have some kind of pay-as-you-earn scheme, but it doesn’t seem to be as comprehensive as Australia’s superannuation system.
So, Presidential elections are held every five years (reduced from seven in 2000!), and Emmanuel Macron won the last election in 2022, defeating the less than bonoboesque Marine Le Pen in a run-off second vote. So Macron will have been Prez for ten years at the end of his term, which seems a bit much.
So the run-off system clicks in when no candidate gets a majority – 50%+ – in the first round, which will be commonplace when there’s a large field and a diversity of public views/ideologies out there. My own personal view is that the two or three candidates with the most votes should get together and form a collaborative governmental team, but that’s no doubt way too idealistic. However, bonobos come close to managing it, according to Wikipedia:
At the top of the hierarchy is a coalition of high-ranking females and males typically headed by an old, experienced matriarch who acts as the decision-maker and leader of the group.
Ah, if we could only achieve the emotional maturity of bonobos, what a wonderful world it would be.
So the Presidential elections in France don’t involve anything so pesky as an Electoral College, and they don’t pit one I-alone-can-fix-it guy against another, instead they have any number of I-alone-can-fix-it guys, but someone has to get that 50%. And then there’s the legislative election, the last of which was held in June 2022, shortly after the Presidential election, and that’s the way it has been since 2000 – in other words they’re also held every five years, and candidates are elected as députés to the National Assembly, the Parliament’s lower house. There are no less than 577 of them, including eleven who represent, surely rather vaguely, the ‘French overseas’. This presumably multi-party crowd makes for interesting decision-making, or not. And finally there’s the upper house, the Senate (at least it’s not the House of Lords, which should’ve been killed off by now – how many female lords are there?), which consists of 377 six-year term senators. I would say ‘don’t ask’, but I suppose these long terms at least reduce the cost of more regular elections. I just wonder how this rabble of almost a thousand politicians ever gets things done. Then again I’m in favour of more collaborative government, with lots of involvement, so I should be careful what I ask for…
So who/what are the main French parties? Australia has the Liberals (actually conservatives), the Nationals (rather more conservative, and in coalition, sometimes fractious, with the Libs), the Labor party (generally centre-left, and currently in government), the Greens (further left), and a semi-connected group of independents, with a large proportion of women. Currently, 44.5% of Australian federal parliamentarians are women. In France, the percentage as at 2017 – I can’t find more recent figures – was 38.8%.
The French parties are a little more numerous – on the more or less extreme right is Marine le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National), then there’s the more centre-right Les Republicains, and in the centre is Macron’s party, Renaissance (formerly La Republique en Marche!). On the centre left is the Parti Socialist, with La France Insoumise (rebellious France) on the radical and greener side. In the last elections, the ‘old guard’ leftist and rightist parties, i.e the Republicans and the Socialists, performed very poorly,
Pretty straightforward, but I’m trying to work out how it all comes together, particularly relating to the President (currently Macron), the Prime Minister (Gabriel Attal) and the president of the National Assembly (Yaël Braun-Pivet, the first woman to hold the position) and their respective powers. In Australia, there’s no President, and the Prime Minister leads the lower house as the head of government, though there’s a Speaker, chosen from among the governing party MPs, who keeps order in the house (and maybe that’s the role of the National Assembly prez). Anyway, the role of the French PM is nothing like that of our PM, in that he (Gabriel is male) is appointed by the President and ‘is the person who controls the government of France day-to-day’ (Wikipedia), presumably leaving the President to hob-nob with other world leaders and promote the country overseas.
So it sounds like the French President, like the US President, doesn’t have to lower himself by sitting in the parliament, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous opposition members and back-benchers. And he gets to dump his PM, it seems, whereas our PM can only be dumped by a full party vote.
Anyway, that’s enough of this sujet for now – I’m sure I haven’t fully worked it out but it’s been fun trying… and I’ve note an occasional ‘first female’ along the way. Vive les bonobos en humaine – it may take a thousand years, but it will happen.
References
Cecil Jenkins, A brief history of France, 2011
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_French_presidential_election
on US jingoism and nationalist dishonesty – plus ça change…
should be billions more people in this pic
It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any nation, at least in the WEIRD world, that’s as jingoistic as the USA. Now whether nationalism is a good thing is always arguable. I take the view that, while nobody gets to choose the nation of their birth, so that it’s a matter neither of shame nor of pride, it’s more than reasonable to be interested in that nation above others (assuming that you still live in your birth nation), because you want it to be as good as can be, for yourself and your peers. Whether you call that nationalism or patriotism or whatever is of no great interest to me. And if you espouse humanist values you will be concerned also about the quality of life in other nations, any of which you could’ve been born and brought up in. But clearly we have more opportunity to improve things in our own nation than in others.
And here’s the obvious thing. Every nation can be improved, in terms of its governance, its laws, its quality of life, its fairness, its health and welfare and so on. And considering that social evolution is a never-ending story, we need our social structures and our governance systems to keep up, to evolve, if not in tandem with, at least not far behind the tides of change.
So, back to the USA. I’ve spent too much time in the past few years, really since the advent of Trump and the meaningless MAGA slogan, listening to US pundits, mostly liberal, bemoaning the fate of their country. But the fact is, I very very rarely hear talk of reform. nor do I hear much in the way of reflection as to why someone so utterly incapable of governance of any kind could have won the favour of so many United Staters, even if they’ve always been in a minority, albeit a vociferous one (and thus seeming to be more numerous than they are).
I was born in Scotland and have lived in Australia since the age of five. Scotland has long had a testy relationship with the country south of the border, with which it is united, sort of, under the UK, but it has its own government headed by a First Minister, as opposed to England’s Prime Minister. What’s the difference between a First Minister and a Prime Minister, you ask? Good question, for which I have no answer, but they’re both based on the principle of primus inter pares, as the leader of the governing party. That party has been elected by the voters, and it has decided upon its leadership by an internal vote of its elected representatives. The party can replace its leader at any time via a vote of no-confidence by those same elected representatives.
This system, which, mutatis mutandis, also pertains in Australia, bears little comparison with the US Presidential system, in which one individual, almost always male, is pitted against other, in a kind of ‘I alone can fix it’ contest of patriotic manliness. The USA, to its detriment, doesn’t have a multi-party system, so its two sole parties tend to duke it out man-o-man-like, in a profoundly adversarial way, which appears to get more block-headed over time. It’s also the case that anyone can run for President, whether or not they’ve had any political experience, or any but the most basic level of education, or know anything of their nation’s history. It certainly helps, though, to have lots and lots of money, or to know how to get it, because campaigning for President, and getting the ‘right’ backing by the ‘right’ people, is hugely about finance. And it’s highly relevant to the politics of the USA that the gap between the rich and the poor there is far greater than what we find in Australia, which of course makes it more plutocratic than it is ever likely to admit.
It’s clear that the US political system has become much more adversarial in recent times, and the advent of social media ‘bubbles’ is at least partly to blame. This has become a problem more generally in the WEIRD world and I’m not sure how to address it, though I’m sure that it needs to be addressed. The problem is greater in the USA, however, due to a number of factors. One is its sub-standard basic public education system, which, together with its comparative lack of a social welfare safety net, its abysmal minimum wage rates and inadequate healthcare provision, leaves millions feeling disenfranchised and ‘left behind’. How else can we explain the religious-style hero worship of an ignorant narcissist who did virtually nothing while holding the office of national President (an office which he ‘won’ in spite of losing the popular vote by almost 3 million).
But the original aim of this essay wasn’t to criticise its system – though while I’m at it I’ll mention that the USA has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, and the longest prison sentences, as well as huge rates of firearm deaths, as Wikipedia relates:
More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year, if suicides are included.
My aim was to criticise the USA’s image of itself as some kind of model to the world. Of course, nations tend to lie about their own history, so it’s up to other nations to confront them with those lies. Just recently, I heard yet again a US political commentator claiming, in passing, that the War of Independence and the subsequent drawing up of the US Constitution were all about ‘the people’ rising up against a ‘tyrant king’. This reference to George III – a constitutional monarch who was more or less non compos mentis during this time, is risible. The colonists of that part of the ‘New World’ were rising up against a bullying and exploiting nation. Many of those colonists had recently fled that nation, for various reasons, but often related to their ‘puritan’ values. Powerful nations have bullied and exploited smaller nations, subject nations and their neighbours for thousands of years, and as the USA has become a powerful nation, it has bullied Pacific peoples in the Philippines and elsewhere, as well as the peoples of Indo-China, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also engaged in the bullying of allied nations, which again shows that there’s nothing exceptional about the USA.
Of course, the ‘New World’ wasn’t new at all, in terms of population. It was for some time understood that the Clovis culture had migrated to the Americas between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have pushed human habitation back another several thousand years. The War of Independence and the subsequent US Constitution and the election of Washington as the colony’s first President, hailed today by United Staters as marking the beginning of modern democracy, was but one of many baby steps, albeit an important one, towards full democracy anywhere in the modern world. Less than 1.8% of the population voted, and eligibility, based on property ownership, varied widely between states. So it was hardly any better than the British system of the time, upon which it was largely based. Of course women couldn’t vote, nor of course could slaves, who formed the backbone of the colony’s economy. As for the First Nation peoples, the following decades brought nothing but dispossession and devastation, and, as in Australia, they’ve received little in the way of compensation since.
So, ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ and ‘the leader of the free world’ are still terms I hear gushing from the lips of US pundits, often accompanied by those glazed expressions suggestive of having learnt a kindergarten mantra. Better to try just a bit harder to accept that there’s no ‘greatest’ and no ‘leader’, just a lot of more or less flawed nations with more or less flawed political and social systems that need regular analysis and upgrading and repair. We can all do better, and maybe that’s what we’re here for. Or at least we can imagine that’s the case.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1788–89_United_States_presidential_election
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/whats-the-earliest-evidence-of-humans-in-the-americas
Australia Day? Hmmm…
too black and white?
Canto: Okay, so today marks the day, 235 years ago, when British arrivals in what is now known as Sydney Harbour hoisted a British flag and declared that the land they were now standing on belonged to Britain. And this day has been commemorated ever since as Australia Day. These arrivals – a collection of convicted criminals, their minders and British government officials – had no idea of the extent of this ‘southern land’, the eastern coast of which had been mapped in around 1770 by Captain Cook, nor did it greatly concern them that the land was inhabited by other humans. The descendants of those earlier inhabitants are of course still with us, and many of them are still rather miffed about the events of that day, and its commemoration.
Jacinta: Interesting times for the Brits. Their colonies in North America had rebelled rather nastily. In fact, that’s why they were ‘down under’. They’d lost the American War of Independence a little over four years earlier, and the northern regions – Canada today – were too politically unstable for the British government to offload their felons. Having a whole new territory to call their own seemed an irresistible proposition. But I’m wondering – exactly how much did they know? You had Abel Tasman encountering what’s now Tasmania almost 150 years before, but managing to miss the mainland, and then there was Dampier…
Canto: Actually Tasman came up with one of the first names for the southern land – New Holland. He was Dutch of course. Or it might have been one of his compatriots – the Dutch were around the place in numbers at that time. Willem Janszoon was the first back in 1608, and then there was Torres, hence the Strait. But he was Spanish. On his second voyage, from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, Tasman mapped much of Australia’s north and north-west coast. William Dampier used his maps in his own little trip to the west coast around 1699-1700, and himself charted the coast from Shark Bay to Broome, so, yes, the Brits did have a fair idea of the extent of this land. But getting back to Australia Day…
Jacinta: Well, yes, they must have had a fair idea of the enormity of their proposed acquisition, as well as the difficulty of maintaining such a claim to land so far from home.
Canto: And they didn’t even call it Australia at the time. It was generally known as New Holland still. So the Dutch must surely have been miffed as well.
Jacinta: Anyway there wasn’t much in the way of international law, or any sense of internationalism, in the eighteenth century, and it’s easy for us to be holier-than-thou when talking about the past. It’s another country, on dit.
Canto: Well even so, the day has earned an alternative moniker, Invasion Day. What thinks thou?
Jacinta: Well I thinks it’s complicated, as always. I do think we should change the date, but to call it an invasion is a bit harsh. What Putin has done in Ukraine, I’d call that an invasion. Also what the USA did in Iraq (with the help of Australian forces). I’d say that what the Brits did in 1788 and subsequent decades was colonisation. You might call it illegal colonisation, but of course there were no legal avenues.
Canto: Like what Britain did throughout the world in its Empire days.
Jacinta: And the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Italians, Belgians… And there have been attempts to make them pay for the damage done, but we can’t expect too much can we?
Canto: Others have suggested that we – I mean Europeans – brought civilisation to benighted peoples. Or, to be more even-handed, that they ultimately might have brought more good than harm.
Jacinta: Well, anyway, Aboriginal people have a good argument – a very good argument I’d say, for objecting to the celebration of Australia occurring on January 26, because the landing of the first fleet was a disaster for a culture that had established itself here, no doubt with great difficulty at first, over tens of thousands of years.
Canto: Yes it raises the question, what was this land like, in terms of climate and resources, 50,000 years ago? Probably a dumb question considering the enormity of the land-mass.
Jacinta: Yes and I’ve often wondered how long the first ‘Australians’ have been here, I’ve heard so many conflicting estimates, and also it’s sometimes hard to tabulate with the out-of Africa story for H sapiens.
Canto: You’re not kidding. Estimates of the Aboriginal presence here are all over the map. Australia’s National Museum, which is presumably reliable, says this:
Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
And I recall an Aboriginal elder (though he looked rather young) disputing the date with a sympathetic scientist, insisting that his people have been here since ‘the beginning of the world’. I’m not sure if he meant 4.6 billion or 13.8 billion years ago.
Jacinta: Another site, an indigenous one I think, claims their presence could date as far back as 120,000 years, but no evidence or dating techniques mentioned. As to the other question – when H sapiens first left Africa, here’s something from a National Geographic article:
Though it is unclear when some modern humans first left Africa, evidence shows that these modern humans did not leave Africa until between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago. Most likely, a change in climate helped to push them out.
So if these dates can be trusted – and I remain skeptical – the 65,000ya date for arriving in Australia is plausible.
Canto: So getting back to Australia/Invasion Day, what is to be done?
Jacinta: Well, to me, the screamingly obvious solution would be to celebrate the day when Australia ceased to be a colony and became an independent nation. That was 1901 I think…
Canto: Would this be acceptable to first Australians? They didn’t exactly have much in the way of rights in 1901.
Jacinta: Did anyone have rights before the 1948 Declaration? People are always screaming about rights these days, they don’t seem to realise how recent the concept is.
Canto: Hang on – Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (September 1791)..
References
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples
https://www.nla.gov.au/faq/who-was-the-first-european-to-land-on-australia
http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_2_60,000_years.html
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/their-footsteps-human-migration-out-africa
How Australia is faring on global indices
park yourself here?
Many Australians were greatly relieved at the change of Federal government from May 21 2022. Australia hadn’t been faring well on the international stage, especially with respect to the global warming crisis, but also regarding political governance and other issues. Of course the Labor government has only been in office for three months, so I don’t expect judgements to have turned around significantly at this point. The purpose of this piece is to describe Australia’s position on a number of international surveys, and then to return to those surveys in about twelve months’ time to see if and how the view of Australia internationally has changed.
I was motivated to write this by a passage in David Brophy’s book China Panic, in which he mentioned two such international surveys, the CIVICUS monitor, which apparently measures democratic credentials, and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. I’d never heard of these surveys, which is hardly surprising for a dilettantish autodidact. Three surveys I have monitored are the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the OECD’s Better Life Index and the UN’s Human Development Index. So now we have five, and counting. What follows is my attempt to summarise their most current findings.
The CIVICUS monitor. CIVICUS is, as far as I can tell, not an acronym. Based in Johannesburg, the organisation describes itself as:
a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world…. Our definition of civil society is broad and covers non-governmental organisations, activists, civil society coalitions and networks, protest and social movements, voluntary bodies, campaigning organisations, charities, faith-based groups, trade unions and philanthropic foundations. Our membership is diverse, spanning a wide range of issues, sizes and organisation types.
According to Brophy, the CIVICUS monitor downgraded Australia’a democratic status (in the broad sense described above) from ‘open’ to ‘narrowed’ in 2019. The latest findings, from 2021, are unchanged. To explain, the monitor divides the world’s nations into 5 levels, which, top to bottom, are open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed. On further inspection, I’ve found that there’s a ‘live rating’, last updated for Australia on 25/5/22, a few days after the election. Hopefully things will have improved by 2023. To compare a few other countries – New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Uruguay, Suriname, Taiwan, Portugal and most Northern European countries are classed as ‘open’. Other ‘narrowed’ countries include Namibia, Italy, France, the UK, Japan and Bulgaria. Obstructed countries include the USA, Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine, Poland, Indonesia and Morocco. A colour-coded map provides an at-a-glance reference to any country of interest. The repressed and closed countries can generally be guessed at. China, Vietnam and most Middle Eastern counties are classed as ‘closed’.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The CPI is a product of Transparency International, which advertises itself thus:
Transparency International is a global movement working in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption. We focus on issues with the greatest impact on people’s lives and hold the powerful to account for the common good. Through our advocacy, campaigning and research, we work to expose the systems and networks that enable corruption to thrive, demanding greater transparency and integrity in all areas of public life.
First set up in 1993 by an ex-World Bank official, Peter Eigen and like-minded associates, first-hand witnesses of global corruption, the organisation was established in then recently re-unified Berlin.
An article in The Conversation, posted in late January 2022, points out that in 2012 Australia ranked level with Norway in 7th position as to ‘cleanness’. The 2021 index, to which The Conversation refers, sees Australia as having slipped to 18th while Norway has risen to 4th, out of 180 countries. Much of what Brophy writes in China Panic is an account of why the country I happen to have ended up in has fallen so far so fast. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which publishes the Democracy Index, is one of the sources for this index, along with Freedom House and the World Justice Project. The three equal top countries on this index are New Zealand, Denmark and Finland, and the bottom three are Somalia, Syria and South Sudan. Anyway, re Australia, this one will be worth watching over the next few years.
The Democracy Index. I’ve written about the Democracy Index, inter alia, in a previous piece. It’s produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, associated with The Economist magazine in the UK. Here’s their raison d’être blurb:
The EIU Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of world democracy for 165 independent states and two territories. The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. Based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime or authoritarian regime
Australia ranks a fairly creditable 9th on the Democracy Index list for 2021, well below NewZealand (2nd) but also well above the country we’ve been showing so much allegiance to in recent decades, the USA, which ranks 26th and is considered a flawed democracy. According to the index’s ratings, the world is inching towards hell in a hand basket – 70% of the world’s nations have become less democratic in the last twelve months, and this downward trend has prevailed for some years. Australia, though, has been faring worse than most. I don’t have access to the previous rankings, but each nation is given an annual score out of ten. Australia’s 2021 score is 8.90, compared to 8.96 in 2020. The score has regularly dropped from a high of 9.22 in the years 2010-2012, the period of the Rudd-Gillard Labor Prime Ministerships.
The OECD Better Life Index. This measures the ‘life experience’ of an ‘elite’ group of about 40 of the world’s wealthiest countries, members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to eleven different criteria, including education, environment, safety and health. When I first accessed the index, about 6 or 7 years ago, Australia was ranked number 2 across all criteria, behind the ever-triumphant Norway, and well ahead of the US in around 12th spot. Currently Australia is ranked 7th, and the USA 8th. Norway still ranks first.
On looking into Australia’s ranking for each criterion (the 11 criteria are housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance) I can’t help but scratch my head at some of the results. Australia ranks 1st for ‘civic engagement’, but 20th for ‘community’ (!!??). I would have thought that one entails the other. Also, Australia ranks 2nd for housing (but city rental has become unaffordable for most young people), and 2nd for education, which again surprises me from a general persecutive, though our post-grad sector definitely punches above its weight. At the other end of the spectrum, Australia ranks 30th for safety, another surprise. The OECD claims that the average homicide rate for member countries is 2.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia’s homicide rate for 2019-20 was 1.02 per 100,000, the highest in nearly ten years, but clearly well below the OECD average. Of course, homicide is only one measure, but I’ve not heard of Australia having a high crime rate in general. Strange. But the worst ranking is 33rd for work-life balance!? But having rarely worked a day in my life, I couldn’t possibly comment.
The UN Human Development Index (HDI). Here’s the blurb about this one:
The Human Development Index, or HDI, is a metric compiled by the United Nations and used to quantify a country’s “average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living.” Human Development Index value is determined by combining a country’s scores in a vast and wide-ranging assortment of indicators including life expectancy, literacy rate, rural populations’ access to electricity, GDP per capita, exports and imports, homicide rate, multidimensional poverty index, income inequality, internet availability, and many more.
The HDI website only provides information from 2019 and places Australia in a tie with The Netherlands at 8th in the world, with a score of .944 on a scale from 0 to 1. Norway again gets top spot, just ahead of Ireland and Switzerland. Interestingly, Australia ranks higher than four countries it likes to compare itself with, the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, but little explanation is given for the ranking, which appears to be have been stable for a few years.
So, to summarise, I don’t know what to make of all these indices, which I suspect subtly influence each other in their ratings. We appear to always make the top ten, but rarely the top 5. If we could take advantage of our climate and resources to be be a greater power in renewables, instead of lagging (except in domestic rooftop solar) as we have done over the last decade, we could really make the world pay more attention to us, for better or worse.
References
David Brophy, China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-country
Amazing internet, female science communicators and fighting global warming: an interminable conversation 4
from Renew Economy – SA doing quite well
Jacinta: As I’ve said many times – or at least I’ve thought many times – the internet is surely the greatest development in human history for those interested in self-education. Can you think of anything to compare?
Canto: Not really. The printing press was important, but literacy rates were much lower when that came out – which makes me think that universal education, which includes literacy of course, must be up there. But of course it was never really universal, and I suppose neither is the internet, but it appears to have penetrated further and wider, and much faster than any previous technology…
Jacinta: Universal education was more or less compulsory, and so very top-down. Not self-education at all. The internet gives every individual more control…
Canto: And most choose to stay within their own social media bubble. But for those keen to learn, yes the internet just gets more and more fantastic.
Jacinta: And the trend now is for spoken presentations, with bells and whistles, rather than reams of writing, which can be off-putting…
Canto: Well, our stuff is pretend-speak. We don’t do videos because we’re both extremely ugly, and even our voices are hideous, and we haven’t a clue about bells and whistles.
Jacinta: Sigh. Consigned to obscurity, but we must perforce mumble on into the vacuum of our little internet space. Even so, I’d like to enthuse, however impotently, about the many excellent female science presenters out there, with their vodcasts or vlogs or whatever, such as Australia’s Engineering with Rosie, as well as Kathy loves physics and history, Sabine Hossenfelder and Dr Becky. And I’ll keep an eye out for more.
Canto: But of course we still love books. The most recent read has been Saul Griffith’s The Big Switch, a call to action on renewables, particularly here in Australia.
Jacinta: So with a change of government, Australia is now going to try and catch up with the leading nations re renewable energy and generally changing the energy landscape. So it’s time to turn to the Renew Economy website, the best Australian site for what’s happening with renewables. First stop is the bar graph that’s long featured on the site. It shows that the eastern states, Queensland, NSW and Victoria, are the problem states, still heavily reliant on coal. Victoria is arguably worst as it relies on brown coal for about two thirds of its supply.
Canto: And the other two states use black coal, but they’ve developed a lot more solar than Victoria. They are, of course, a lot sunnier than Victoria. What’s the difference between the two coals, in environmental terms?
Jacinta: Black coal, aka anthracite, is generally regarded as a superior fuel. It contains less water than brown coal, aka lignite, and more carbon. You have to use quite a lot more brown coal – maybe 3 times as much – to extract the same amount of energy as anthracite. According to Environment Victoria,
Brown coal is pulverised and then burned in large-scale boilers. The heat is used to boil water and the steam is used to drive turbines that generate electricity. When brown coal is burnt it releases a long list of poisonous heavy metals and toxic chemicals like sulphur dioxide, mercury, particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. By world standards these pollutants are poorly monitored & controlled, and they impose a staggering health cost of up to $800 million every year.
I’ve left in the links, which are to other Environment Victoria articles. Clearly this website isn’t government controlled, as it castigates heavily subsidised ‘boondoggle’ projects intended to keep the brown coal afloat (very problematic for mining). These projects have apparently gone nowhere. However the site does mention the ‘recent’ announcement of an electric vehicle manufacturing plant in the Latrobe Valley, providing at least 500 jobs. But since the article isn’t dated, I don’t know how recent it is. PLEASE DATE YOUR ARTICLES.
Canto: Yeah, and please do your research Jazz. That plant, announced in 2018, was scrapped last November. Apparently it was announced ahead of the 2018 election. And over-hyped, as it was never guaranteed that the ‘promised’ 500 jobs would be created. Politics.
Jacinta: Sad. Manufacturing has been in a sorry state in Australia for years. As Saul Griffith points out, we rely largely on the raw materials – crushed rocks – we export to keep our economy going, but if we could switch to other crushed rocks for the growing renewable energy economy we would be even better off. Further, if we added value through processing this material at home, we might be even better off financially, and we wouldn’t have to import those processed materials as we do now. Our two biggest imports are petrol and cars. If we could produce that stuff here we wouldn’t be paying for another country’s production costs, according to Griffith. Though I’m not quite sure if it’s that simple.
Canto: So you’re talking essentially about manufacturing in Australia. The Reserve Bank (RBA) has an interesting article on this topic, and here’s a quote from the opening summary:
Manufacturing output and employment have fallen steadily as a share of the Australian economy for the past three decades… the increase in the supply of manufactured goods from low-cost sources abroad, exacerbated by the appreciation of the Australian dollar during the period of rising commodity prices, impaired the viability of many domestic manufacturers and precipitated the closure of some manufacturing production over the past decade. While the recent exchange rate depreciation has helped to improve competitiveness of Australian producers, so far there is only limited evidence of a recovery in manufacturing output and investment.
Economics isn’t my strong suit, but I think I understand what ‘exchange rate depreciation’ means. Something like the exchange rate has swung a bit more in our favour (for home-grown manufacturing) than it was before..
Jacinta: But wouldn’t the exchange rate between us and other countries vary greatly from country to country? Or maybe they take an average, that’s to say of the countries we tend to trade with?
Canto: I suppose so. The article goes on to say that manufacturing hasn’t declined so much as commodity exports have increased. Commodities being raw materials, mostly. And by the way, this article is from the June quarter of 2016, and I suspect things have gotten worse for this gap between manufacturing and commodities. So, not so out-of date re trends. It claims that ‘over the 2000s, strong Asian demand for Australian commodities led to a sharp increase in the terms of trade and an appreciation of the Australian dollar’.
Jacinta: Well, we all appreciate the Aussie dollar…
Canto: Appreciation just means a rise in value. An increase in the terms of trade means an increase in the trading price agreed by any two countries, for example Australia and China, our big bogey man trading partner. Here it might mean beneficial terms of trade for Australia specifically. So basically, manufacturing has stagnated, and declined as a percentage of total output, which includes commodities. Manufacturing industries as an employer have declined quite sharply – as I can personally attest to. I’ve worked in five different factories in my life, all of which have since closed down – for which I take no responsibility.
Jacinta: So there would be a lack of skilled workers in manufacturing, unless… do we make solar panels here? And what about the old car factories we had here – Mitsubishis and Holdens, remember? Though I presume making EVs would require a whole different skill-set, and besides, wouldn’t it be largely automated?
Canto: Well, in February – that’s 2022 – the Australia Institute posted a highly optimistic media release entitled ‘Australia ready to become sustainable EV-making powerhouse: new research’. And with the new federal government elected in May, this hope, expressed in a report from the AI’s Carmichael Centre, Rebuilding Vehicle Manufacturing in Australia: Industrial Opportunities in an Electrified Future, may actually be realised, at least partially. But before I explore that report – solar photovoltaic manufacturing in Australia. A recent (early July) Guardian article reports that ‘China controls over 80% of the global photovoltaic (PV) solar supply chain, with one out of every seven panels produced worldwide being manufactured by a single factory’. And China is actually increasing production, so as to dominate the market. Diversification is urgently required. Meanwhile, Australia is suffering a labour shortage in the field. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has found that ‘one in three installation jobs in Australia – including electricians and installers – were unfilled and at risk of remaining unfilled in 2023’. Tindo Solar is our only home-grown PV manufacturer, and is expanding its output, but clearly this is dwarfed by China’s production. Also there’s a problem with expending production here because, currently, it actually creates more carbon emissions. We need to ‘create renewables with renewables’, which local experts are saying is now more cost-effective than ever. So, back to the report on vehicle manufacturing in Australia. It’s a job trying to access the full report, so I’ll rely on the media release. It describes our country as ‘uniquely blessed’ to rebuild our car manufacturing capabilities, retooled to EVs, but this will require essential government input – a view very much consistent with Griffith’s. Here are some of the recommendations from the report:
- Establishing an EV Manufacturing Industry Commission
- Using tax incentives to encourage firms involved in the extraction of key minerals – primarily lithium and rare earths – with local manufacturing capabilities, especially emerging Australian EV battery industries
- Introducing a long-term strategy for vocational training, ensuring the establishment of skills to service major EV manufacturers looking to set up operations Australia
- Offering major global manufacturers incentives (tax incentives, access to infrastructure, potential public capital participation, etc) to set up – especially in Australian regions undergoing transition from carbon-intensive industries
- Introducing local procurement laws for the rapid electrification of government vehicle fleets
Jacinta: So, as Griffith points out, we need to do some lobbying for this ourselves. Here in SA, we have a sympathetic state government as well as a federal government keen to make up for lost time, or at least saying all the right things. Where do we start?
Canto: The Clean Energy Council has a website that encourages everyone to get educated (they cite a number of resources such as Renew Economy and ARENA), to spread the word, and of course to actually invest in renewable energy, which we, as impoverished public housing renters, aren’t in a great position to do, though we are trying to get our Housing Association to explore renewable options, and to lobby the government in our name.
Jacinta: I think I’m starting to feel more optimistic…
References
Saul Griffith, The big switch: Australia’s electric future. 2022
Difference Between Black and Brown coal
Nem Watch
Australia ready to become sustainable EV-making powerhouse: new research
https://www.carmichaelcentre.org.au/rebuilding_vehicle_manufacture_in_australia
Australia, religion and the appeal of eternity
The latest Australian census figures are out, and as always I zoom in on religion and our quite rapid abandonment of….
It’s not that I’m against religion exactly, I recognise it as an attempt to understand our world, before science came along. Often to understand it as story. The story of how the world formed, and who formed it. Religions, I notice, are always about personae, doing Very Powerful things. Creating the heavens and the earth, plants and animals, and of course humans. For some kind of moral purpose, which we must constantly try to discern, from the signs and stories of the creators. And some humans are better at pinning down this purpose than others, and they become elevated as intermediaries between the creators, to whom we owe everything, and our benighted selves, tossed on the waves of godly caprice, which only seems like caprice, because the gods have a higher purpose which even the most blessed and spiritual of mortals can only partially comprehend.
Anyway, the census. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), ‘A question on religion has been included in all Australian censuses since 1911. Answering this question has always been optional but is answered by nearly all respondents’. In that first census, over 100 years ago, pretty close to 100% of Australians described themselves as religious – essentially meaning Christian. And things hadn’t changed that much by the 1971 census, when still a vast majority – 87 to 88 percent – described themselves as Christian, and the number of people who dared admit to any other religious belief was virtually zero. But by the seventies, the hodge-podge of regulations that made up the White Australia Policy had been dismantled, so that by this latest census (2021), religious beliefs other than Christianity were being admitted to by just over 10 percent of respondents.
But Christianity has fared particularly badly over the past fifty years, as the graph above shows. I first started paying serious attention to this trend away from Christianity after the 2006 census, and from memory, I gave a talk to the SA Humanist Society after the release of the 2011 census, noting the trend, particularly the fact that the abandonment of Christian belief was accelerating. However, I predicted, at least to myself, that this trend would soon start to ‘plateau’. My reasoning was partly based on the breakdown of Christianity into denominations. Not a complete breakdown, from my very basic research. The ABS broke it down into Catholicism, Anglicanism and Other Christian, and it was very clear that Anglicanism was fading most quickly, and Catholicism most slowly. It seemed to me that Anglicanism, which, unsurprisingly, had been the most practiced Christian religion in the early censuses, had suffered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries due to its reforms and increasing liberalism (though of course it has its conservative faction). Considering that religion is supposed to be about the eternal values of the creator, unchanging since our creation, rather than about values that simply change with the times – what some call social evolution – it may have caused many Anglicans to lose faith in religion altogether, or even to switch to something more ‘eternal’, such as the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. My prediction was that Anglicanism would continue to lose support until it bottomed out, in the fairly near future, and that Catholicism would also start to level out, what with all those cultural Catholics who built their social lives around the Church. And there was also the popularity of those Big Church evangelicals and Pentecostals, the ‘Charismatics’ that I kept hearing about.
So I was taken by surprise by the 2016 census, which saw the biggest drop in the Anglican religion of any previous census, as well as a more substantial drop in Catholicism than anticipated. The ‘other Christian’ category had also dropped, and the no religion category had risen to just over 30%. These figures upended my expectations completely, so I was more open to what the 2021 census would bring. Even so, a jump from 30% non-religious to 39% in five years is pretty amazing – but rapid change has been the norm in modern times, at least in the WEIRD world. Today we talk in terms of generations – the baby boomers, the millennials, generations X,Y and Z, and it’s all a bit hard to parse. I don’t think the generation of the 1740s would have had much difficulty in dealing with gen 1760, except of course to complain about their youthful foolishness, as Aristotle was wont to do.
So, as you can see from the graph, ‘no religion’ is pretty well certain to replace Christianity as the largest religious category in the next census, while owing to our increasingly multicultural mix, other religions will continue to rise, though not substantially. Interestingly the largest jump in religious presence since the 2016 census is that of the Yazidis, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group from northern Iraq and surrounding regions, fleeing from persecution by the so-called Islamic State. Though it only ‘took off’ in the 12th century, its origins are apparently pre-Islamic and pre-Zoroastrian, later tinged with Sufi and Islamic influences. So, I learn something new every day.
Of course, the cultural make-up of Australia is changing, but slowly. We could do with expanding our immigration program, and behaving in a less hostile and cruel way towards refugees. I’m not religious of course, but bringing into the country a wider variety of religio-cultural groups might tend to water down the influence of the very male Judeo-Christian god that has been worshipped in this country for so long. Even if these new religions have their own patriarchal features, as most do, the divisions between them might tend to dilute the patriarchy of Catholicism, the Christian religion that has always most concerned me. Catholicism began to challenge Anglicanism as the most practiced, or at least believed in, denomination in Australia in the post-war period, though there was always a large Catholic presence, particularly Irish-Catholic, before that. It continues to be the most persistent denomination, but it will clearly never be the politically dominant influence it was in the 1950s. Even so, it’s noticeable that the religiosity of our political leaders, our parliamentarians, in terms of numbers, is greater than the general population – just as the average age of parliamentarians is greater than the general population.
As mentioned, the above graph clearly shows that the biggest religious category in the next census will be ‘no religion’. And that category will continue to grow over the next decades, and even the immigrants with their different religious varieties may go the way of the majority.
But us oldies may not, or will not be here to witness what happens. What will these developments mean for the nation? How will it have changed our politico-social landscape after we have passed? That’s the sad thing, life is very addictive, and we don’t want it to stop. We always want to know what happens. No wonder eternal life is so profoundly appealing.