Posts Tagged ‘Australia’
Iran, football, refugees, war…
in the spotlight, but not as they hoped…
There’s an argument going round that we (in Australia) are now at war with Iran because we’re allied to the US. Not that the people pointing this out are happy about it – it’s more like ‘an inconvenient truth’. And AI (never lies) agrees, sort of:
As of March 2026, Australia is peripherally involved in the US-Iran conflict through intelligence sharing, AUKUS personnel, and regional base support, though it has not engaged in direct offensive action. Australian personnel were aboard a US submarine that sank an Iranian frigate, and a base in the UAE hosting Australians was targeted.
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
Antarctica, global warming and our endless complacency
The most recent New Scientist podcast has reported from a big meetup re global warming, melting ice, disappearing islands and such, and I feel that’s something I need to know much more about. The Australian Antarctic Research Conference was just held in Hobart in late November, attended by some 500 researchers.
So here’s the grim. According to an interviewee who attended the conference, ‘there was a precipitous drop-off in the extent of the winter sea-ice around Antarctica in 2023 and again in 2024, 2024 being nearly as bad as 2023’. The 2023 data for winter sea-ice was the lowest with regard to expectations since data has been recorded. Seven standard deviations off the mean, apparently. Whateva, that doesn’t sound good. So the decrease in Antarctic sea-ice over this past decade is equivalent to that in the whole Northern Hemisphere in the past 45 years. And if those magnitudes continue, the Antarctic could be free of summer sea-ice even before the Arctic, which is expected to experience that scenario by around 2050.
So this will certainly lead to changes in ocean currents, and other mostly unpredictable knock-on effects, supposing the changes being measured down south represent something permanent. The fall in sea-ice became measurable from 2016, but has become more dramatic recently. Ice reflects sunlight back into space, so its reduction will lead to oceanic warming, which in turn will lead to a more rapid reduction of ice. One of the key areas of concern is the Denman Glacier and the surrounding Shackleton Ice Shelf, which is melting quite quickly. The complete melting of that particular system is calculated to lead to some 1.5 metres of global sea level rise (which seems hard to believe, I must say).
So what is to be done, and how are those most responsible for the global warming that’s causing all this, responding? Well, it doesn’t seem to be getting much airplay on the internet at present, and apart from New Scientist, there hasn’t been much reporting on the above-mentioned conference and its findings, so I’m having to dig deeper.
I’ve picked up a new term: the cryosphere. That’s the Earth’s icey stuff, in all its forms and habitats. And of course most of it exists at or near the Poles. The IPCC released a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) in September 2019, all available online, and chapter 4, ‘Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands, Coasts and Communities’, is obviously of particular interest. It found that the dominant cause of the rise in global mean sea level (GMSL), at least since 1970, is ‘anthropogenic forcing’, which presumably means something like ‘humanity’s typically forceful influence’. It also found the GMSL rise is accelerating. The situation was worse in the past, though. Way back in the last interglacial, some 120,000 years ago, and also on other occasions millions of years ago, but there were a few H sapiens and other hominins around at the time of the last interglacial, and they obviously survived, so why worry?
Seriously the effects of sea level rise (SLR) on coastal communities are enormously complex and multifaceted, with human-induced habitat degradation muddying the waters of coastal ecosystems, so to speak. There are obvious reasons why humanity tends to congregate around coastal regions – and it’s particularly obvious why it happens here in Australia – and where humanity congregates in large numbers, there’s bound to be a cost, in particular to other species, with rebound effects. Here’s how the IPCC puts it:
Coastal ecosystems, including saltmarshes, mangroves, vegetated dunes and sandy beaches, can build vertically and expand laterally in response to SLR, though this capacity varies across sites … These ecosystems provide important services that include coastal protection and habitat for diverse biota. However, as a consequence of human actions that fragment wetland habitats and restrict landward migration, coastal ecosystems progressively lose their ability to adapt to climate-induced changes and provide ecosystem services, including acting as protective barriers….
Again, this doesn’t sound like deadly serious stuff, to selfish humans like us, but global SLR, estimated by the IPCC to be around 3.3 mm annually (and likely set to increase), will clearly affect islands and coastal regions worldwide. It’s also important to note that global warming isn’t occurring uniformly – Africa’s Central Sahel region, effectively the Sahara Desert, is warming at 1.5 times the global rate. War-torn regions such as Syria and the DRC are also more vulnerable to climate change. Afghanistan is now experiencing its worst drought in decades, while paradoxically there is severe flood damage in some areas. Lack of foreign aid due to the Taliban takeover has created an economic and humanitarian crisis there.
Finally, to focus more on Australia, our future scenario depends muchly on global greenhouse gas emissions, and we, globally, have done little, in spite of all the fuss, to reduce these emissions. The levels reached a new high in 2023, with CO2 ‘accumulating in the atmosphere faster than any time experienced during human existence, rising by more than 10% in just two decades’, according to a report from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Sea level rise is more of a factor here than in most regions – 85% of our population now lives within 50 km of the coast. This will of course affect coastal infrastructure and our celebrated beaches, but the real issue, for Australia and elsewhere, is that the fact that previous records are ‘falling like dominoes’, according to one expert, is still not being taken seriously enough by the major contributors to the problem, both on a corporate and national level. Australia’s native islander peoples, in the Torres Strait and elsewhere, are facing threats to their very way of life due to sea level rise, but most Australians don’t feel much affected, and many are in denial about the issue, like frogs in the proverbial warming pot.
So, what more to say? It’s hard to keep watching this all happening…
References
https://www.newscientist.com/podcasts/
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/greenhouse-gas-concentrations-surge-again-new-record-2023
https://www.rescue.org/article/10-countries-risk-climate-disaster
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
more frayed and fractured thoughts on the long and winding road that leads to your bonoboism
I have attempted to show, in my book The Second Sex [1949], why a woman’s situation still, even today, prevents her from exploring the world’s basic problems.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1960
L’admission des femmes à l’égalité parfaite serait la marque la plus sûre de la civilisation et elle doublerait les forces intellectuelles du genre humain.
Stendhal, De l’amour, 1821
Little Women
The move towards female dominance in the WEIRD world has begun. Or has it? If so, it has a bloody long way to go. Here in Australia, our Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are male, but at least our Foreign Minister is female. As a relatively new country, federated in 1901, we’ve had 31 Prime Ministers, 30 of whom have been male. That’s slightly (or much?) better than the USA, with 45 Presidents, all male, from 1789. Of course, Australia’s only female PM, Julia Gillard, came to power in the 21st century (unelected ‘by the people’, due to internal ructions in the sitting government, though her party, the Australian Labor Party, went on to retain government in 2010 – but then the party dumped her before the next election). Our neighbour New Zealand has had three female PMs, one of whom, Helen Clark, managed to hold the post for nine years. And New Zealand was the first country in the WEIRD world to allow women to vote, in 1893.
We don’t have a presidential system, we have a far better party-based system, in which we vote for policies and party platforms rather than a one-on-0ne between two ‘I alone can fix it’ noise-makers. Having said that, I’m being a bit disingenuous – it’s very likely that a lot of Aussies vote based on the ‘personality’ of Mr Labour or Mr LNP (the federal LNP has never had a female leader, while federal labour has had only Gillard). But at least the party can dump their leaders at the behest of the elected members, and there’s nothing in the way of immunity or ‘pardoning powers’. And that goes for virtually every democracy in the WEIRD world, apart from the USA. Getting rid of all that bullshit would, I think, be a move in the bonobo direction for that teetering nation. Don’t hold your breath.
The bonobo world, as I see it, is not just a predominantly female world, it’s a collaborative world. And with a greater spirit of collaboration in the structure or design or evolved culture of a company or a discipline – think education, the law, but above all the sciences, which don’t suffer from the negativities of in-built adversarial systems (politics, courts, industrial relations) – more women will be attracted, and will succeed. The horrorshow regions of the world – China, Russia, the Middle East (including Israel) and much of Africa, Asia and South America, are mucho macho. Which, frankly, doesn’t leave much territory for women to display their wares. Those that succeed, politically, often do so by aping the confrontational male approach, to the delight of their male ‘advisors’. Pew research from a few months ago tells us that fewer than a third of UN member states have ever had a female leader, and that of the mere thirteen current female leaders, nine are the first female leaders of their nation. Of course, if we go back 100 years, when the League of Nations was struggling to survive, the situation was far worse. So unless change occurs exponentially, we’ll be waiting a few centuries before bonoboism takes its rightful place in our world.
And yet, we must take the long view. It has amused and annoyed me that so many scholars, who should know better, take issue with Steven Pinker’s ‘better angels of our nature’ and Peter Singer’s ‘expanding circle’. The evidence of extreme, mass human violence and cruelty going back centuries into millennia has been gathered and presented by countless historians, and the fact that so many millions were killed in just the past century or so of warfare is not due to our growing thuggishness and indifference to suffering, but the greater efficiency of our killing machinery, culminating in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki horror. Some may say this is wishful thinking, but I consider that double event as a watershed in our history. What followed was a period of unprecedented peace in the WEIRD world, and the establishment of a concept of universal human rights, developed and promoted by the indefatigable Eleanor Roosevelt, among many others.
Over the years I’ve known many individuals to sneer at and dismiss the UN as a toothless tiger, and it would be easy enough to enumerate its failings, but the very existence of ‘peacekeeping forces’ is, historically, a completely novel, and quite bonoboesque, phenomenon. After all, bonobos aren’t entirely non-violent, but they tend to employ violence only to prevent further violence.
Bonobos are less territorial than chimps. They both live in distinct troupes (think ‘nations’) but while bonobos are observed to share food (and cuddles) with bonobo foreigners, chimps are just as likely to engage in death-fights. In recent centuries, humans have created nations, whose integrity obsesses us, so that we patrol borders, we obsess over the ‘legality’ of those who cross those borders, we pride ourselves on being ‘us’ and not ‘them’. Before we developed those obsessions, an intrepid voyager, or ‘immigrant’, might have travelled from Albion, where I was born, to the European mainland, and on east for thousands of kilometres, to arrive at the northern Pacific, perhaps around where Vladivostok is now, without ever having crossed a border, or been asked to produce her ‘papers’. Of course she may well have been robbed or raped a few times along the way, all part of the adventure, and would’ve learned about safety in numbers, and the art of ingratiation… Intrepid travellers generally have many skills to rely on, for surviving and even thriving in new arenas, enlivening and enriching those arenas to the benefit of all, a process that has occurred time and time again – but when males have dominated, there has aways been a conflictual downside. If female dominance manages to become the norm, as one day, long after the eight billion humans currently doing their diverse things around the biosphere have passed away, I believe it will, this downside will be greatly reduced, and a true golden age for humanity, and for the biosphere within which it is enmeshed, will begin.
Or maybe not. I always like to have an each-way bet, even when I’ll never know in my lifetime what the outcome will be. Got to protect my future rep after all. But I really don’t think a future without greater female empowerment can be contemplated with equanimity. China, Russia, the Middle East and most of Africa are currently shithole regions for women, but arguably this isn’t because women’s situation has deteriorated in these regions. It has never been good for them, since their history has been recorded. Or perhaps not never. There have been brief periods – before the Ayatollahs turned Persia into Iran, for example, or when Catherine the Great introduced the idea of (limited) education for women in Russia – but it so often seems like one step forward then two steps back.
Anyway, Vive les bonobos. We need to keep learning from them.
References
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eleanor-Roosevelt
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Universal-Declaration-of-Human-Rights
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
a glut of greed – on high gas prices and who’s to blame
Crisis? What crisis….?
So Australia’s industry minister Ed Husic has come out with a claim that I’ve heard from renewable energy journalists more than once before in recent times – that the gas industry is pocketing record profits while households suffer from record power costs. So what exactly is happening and how can it be fixed?
Husic’s remarks were blunt enough: ‘This is not a shortage of supply problem; this is a glut of greed problem that has to be basically short circuited and common sense prevail.” As I reported before, gas companies are more interested in exporting their product overseas, at great profit, than selling it domestically. All the major news outlets are reporting much the same thing – the political right, under conservative leader Dutton, is blaming the overly-rapid shift to renewables (he wants to open up more gas fields), and gas companies are playing the victim role.
The ACCC has been complaining for some time that there isn’t an effective mechanism to prevent gas companies from selling to the highest bidder, at the expense of the local market. There are, of course, worldwide gas shortages, causing the value of the commodity to shoot to record highs. The Financial Review reported on the situation back in July:
The ACCC says prices for east coast domestic gas that will be delivered in 2023 have rocketed to an average of $16 per gigajoule from $8 per gigajoule. Exporters have also dramatically widened the spread of prices offered to domestic buyers from between $7 and $8, to between $7 and as much as $25. This is despite the fact that the estimated forward cost of production is steady at just over $5.
The government clearly has little control over gas exporters – ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ aren’t really cutting it, and domestic costs are affecting businesses as well as households, adding to the many woes of local manufacturing. So I’ve turned to the ever-reliable Renew Economy website in the hope of hearing about plausible solutions. Their journalist Bruce Robertson, of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, is arguing for a gas reservation policy:
Such a policy on new and existing gas fields means gas companies must sell a portion of their gas into the domestic market – rather than putting it all out for export – with an immediate downward effect on prices. Similar to the reservation policy in place for over a decade in Western Australia, the east coast gas reservation policy could be set at $7 a gigajoule (GJ), a price allowing gas companies to achieve a profit over and above a return on investment. In turn, energy consumers would see their electricity bills cut.
It sounds like magic – like, if it’s that easy why wasn’t it done ages ago? The reason Robertson appears to be putting forward is price-fixing and the unwillingness of east coast governments, and the federal government, to deal with it:
In Australia, gas prices are fixed by a cartel of producers on the east coast… – Shell, Origin, Santos, Woodside and Exxon. For decades they have set the price above international parity prices.
It does seem, well, a little unseemly, that Australia, the world’s largest LNG exporter, is having to pay such exorbitant prices for domestic usage – though, in fact, other countries are suffering more. Locally though, South Australia, where I live, is particularly hard hit. Unlike the eastern states, coal plays no part in our energy mix – it’s all gas and renewables, with wind and solar playing a substantial part, more so than in the eastern states. And yet… Sophie Horvath reported in Renew Economy back in May:
A draft report from the SA Productivity Commission finds that despite the state’s solar and wind delivering some of Australia’s lowest wholesale spot prices, prices faced by the state’s consumers were around 20% higher than consumers in New South Wales. And it warns that without the rapid implementation of market and policy reforms, the situation for consumers will only get worse as more and more renewable energy capacity is added.
This sounds, on the face of it, as if SA’s take-up of renewables has backfired, but the situation is rather more complex, as Horvath explains. One problem is variable demand, which ‘produces challenges for the grid’, and another, highlighted by the SA Productivity Commission, is the ‘various market flaws that are stopping the benefits of renewables being passed through to consumers’.
So what are these market flaws? And what are ‘wholesale spot prices’ and why are they so different from the costs to suckers like us? Here’s an excerpt from a ‘Fact Sheet’ from the Australian Energy Market Commission about how the spot market works:
The National Electricity Market (NEM) facilitates the exchange of electricity between generators and retailers. All electricity supplied to the market is sold at the ‘spot’ price…. The NEM operates as a market where generators are paid for the electricity they produce and retailers pay for the electricity their customers consume. The electricity market works as a ‘spot’ market, where power supply and demand is matched instantaneously. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) co-ordinates this process.
The physical and financial markets for electricity are interlinked. Complex information technology systems underpin the operation of the NEM. The systems balance supply with demand in real time, select which generators are dispatched, determine the spot price, and in doing so, facilitate the financial settlement of the physical market. And all this is done to deliver electricity safely.
So far, this bureaucratic lingo doesn’t inspire confidence. Complex systems synchronise and balance everything, both financially and powerfully, ensuring our safety. Praise the lord. This Fact Sheet, from early in 2017, goes on for three and a bit pages, and I’m trying to understand it. Maybe Ed Kusic is too.
Meanwhile, back in South Australia, it was reported a few months ago that…
Tens of thousands of SA households are set to be hit with increased electricity bills after the energy industry watchdog made the ‘difficult decision’ to increase benchmark prices by hundreds of dollars a year.
So why indeed was this decision so ‘difficult’? The Australian Energy Regulator (AER – there are a headachy number of acronyms in this business), which sets the Default Market Offer (DMO) – a price cap on the charge to customers who, shockingly, don’t bother to shop around for a better deal – has increased the cap due to an 11.8% increase in wholesale electricity costs ‘driven by unplanned power plant outages and the ongoing war in Ukraine’. The fact that SA experienced massive power outages in the last 24 hours due to extreme weather conditions won’t help the situation. The Chair of the AER, Clare Savage, advises shopping around for cheaper deals rather than just accepting the DMO. The AEC (groan) also recommends shopping around, and even haggling for a better deal from retailers. The state government, in response to criticism from the opposition, emphasises focusing on the long-term and the ongoing shift to renewables. State energy minister Tom Koutsantonis expresses his faith – “Our government will reactivate investment in renewables as a hedge against price shocks on fossil fuels”.
Great – I can’t wait.
References
SA renewables surge bringing down energy prices, but consumers miss out
an interminable conversation 7: East Turkestan and the question of genocide
the uneasy life…
Canto: So several years ago I was invited, sort of, to take over an English class for NESB students at Wandana Community Community Centre in Gilles Plains, a north-eastern suburb of Adelaide, here in sleepy South Australia. Some of the students had been coming to my class in the city, because they were unhappy with their then teacher at Wandana. My city class had people of all ages, from 16 to 60, Indians, Africans and Europeans. The Wandana group was always women, of Middle Eastern appearance, most but not all wearing hijabs. So I accepted this offer, and found myself in the pleasant company of a lively group of women, many of them young mothers taking advantage of the community centre’s creche facilities. During introductions I asked about their native countries. There were a couple of Iraqis (Kurds in fact), one Afghani, and a large number of women from East Turkestan, a country I’d never heard of. I’d heard a bit about the ‘Stans’, but other than Pakistan and Afghanistan I wasn’t sure of any other names or locations…
Jacinta: East Turkestan is their name for Xinjiang Province in north-west China.
Canto: You’re spoiling my story. I just accepted that there was a country called East Turkestan, and that these women were Muslim, and seemed to know each other well, and liked to ask political questions and engage in argument, and seemed to amusingly dominate their husbands who came to pick them up after class. I became friendly with the centre’s social worker, also from East Turkestan. She it was who ‘recruited’ me to Wandana. She spoke perfect English, and filled me in on the East Turkestan story. The region was, as you know, called Xinjiang Province by the Chinese, and had been part of China for some time, but its inhabitants were clearly not Han Chinese, and saw themselves as completely separate as a people, if not as a nation. So I was intrigued, but just accepted it as one of the anomalies of cultures and nations…
Jacinta: Like the non-existent but presumably real Kurdistan?
Canto: Precisely…
Jacinta: Life is weirdly unfair like that, when you have cultures or language groups that would make sense as properly official nations, with their recognised boundaries, their vote at the UN, their good or bad governments, and then you’ve got made-up nations, created by exterior forces, like Afghanistan, and dozens of African nations decided at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 or the Balkan and other states at the Other Berlin Conference of 1878, or was it the other way around?
Canto: Yes, nations are often such arbitrary creations and then their inhabitants get all nationalistic and xenophobic and irrational about ‘their’ piece of land. Anyway, my thoughts on East Turkestan took a different turn when the social worker asked me to help write a letter to the Federal Immigration Minister regarding her brother, an Australian citizen who had returned to his native region for a holiday and had ended up in prison in Kazakhstan, across the border from Xinjiang. I was assured that he had done nothing wrong, but I couldn’t get any more details apart from the claim that Uyghurs (she didn’t use this term, which I didn’t know about until after I’d left Wandana) were being arbitrarily imprisoned in the province, and if they fled to Kazakhstan they were also in danger, due to dodgy dealings between that country and China. Anyway, I left for more lucrative pastures shortly afterwards, but I very much doubt that our letter had the required result.
Jacinta: That Adelaide suburb, Gilles Plains, apparently houses the largest Uyghur community in Australia.
Canto: Yes, and since I left Wandana, more than a decade ago, the oppression of the Uyghur people has worsened – or maybe I just know more about it. It seems their region was kind of in the way of the Belt and Road project, and/or some of the population there were getting uppity about autonomy, and certainly not conforming to a one-China ideology, so the Party started getting aggressive, which bred more Uyghur violence, which led to mass disappearances and ‘re-education camps’ and some talk about using them as fields for harvesting organs.
Jacinta: Yes, these claims have been aired for years, and of course strenuously denied by the Party, though a paper was quite recently published in the American Journal of Transplantation(!), entitled ‘Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China’, which purports to find evidence of such things, though as far as I can see, no evidence is provided as to specific ‘donors’.
Canto: So all of this Uyghur stuff has been brought back to mind by my reading of the book China Panic, by David Brophy, a historian of Uyghur nationalism and a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at Sydney University. Chapter 6 of the book is called ‘Human rights and Xinjiang’, and it provides much interesting and sobering background info. It seems that the Uyghurs, and Muslims in general (not all Uyghurs are Muslim), have become the Party’s new villains, replacing the Falon Gong of recent years. Promoting their faith to their fellows can elicit a hefty prison sentence. As with the Party’s treatment of Tibetans, but more so, Uyghurs’ visible and behavioural differences from bog-standard Han-ness are seen as a security threat. They’re also stigmatised as ‘backward’, hence the re-education gimmick, which taps into the standard racism that will be familiar to Australians who know our history of stealing indigenous children and providing them with a proper Christian education. With the USA still under the influence of the post-September 11 ‘war on terror’ it was hard to garner too much sympathy for the Uyghurs from that country and its allies, including Australia, but the lack of response, and worse, from Muslim countries has been disappointing, to say the least. Here’s how Brophy puts it:
In fact, at the most recent meeting of foreign ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, they went so far as to ‘commend the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens’ – an appalling stance.
It seems that some of these countries had their own problems with minorities, and felt that crack-downs in the name of ‘national solidarity’ were justified – and of course there’s the question of valuable financial ties with China. And there was also just plain ignorance about Uyghur identity, at least early on.
Jacinta: Well, think of the Palestinians – it seems nobody is on their side, certainly on a national level, outside the Middle East.
Canto: Well, I’ve read at least two books by Palestinians about their history and their plight. And there are pro-Palestinian movements and groups, here in Australia and elsewhere, but the Uyghurs don’t have that profile…
Jacinta: I bet they have some articulate spokespeople and writers…
Canto: They’d have to be outside China. But that’s worth exploring. Anyway, Wikipedia has an article, Uyghur genocide, which says it straight, and makes for sickening reading.
Jacinta: So what is to be done?
Canto: The big question. China under The Party is, unsurprisingly, more than reluctant to sign up to any human rights conventions. As Wikipedia puts it:
In December 2020, a case brought to the International Criminal Court was dismissed because the crimes alleged appeared to have been “committed solely by nationals of China within the territory of China, a State which is not a party to the [Rome Statute of the ICC]”, meaning the ICC couldn’t investigate them.
The lack of public awareness and sympathy for these people, who could be described as just as in thrall to their religion as many United Staters are to theirs, might also be due to the lingering ‘war on terror’, and the consequent anti-Muslim prejudices evident here in Australia as elsewhere. All we can do here is highlight the plight of these people, and counteract propaganda against them, which is going on here, courtesy of Chinese pamphleteers, young people who I suspect know nothing about the real situation.
Jacinta: That’s an important point. A recent study found that the Chinese have far more faith in their government than, for example, Russians have faith in theirs. I presume that’s because Russians are more connected to the WEIRD world than the Chinese, most of whom have never at any time sniffed the chance of getting out from under paternalistic fascism. Their media has been far more controlled for far longer. Though still, there is hope from expat Chinese, and even temporary residents, students who express love for being in a ‘freedom country’, if only for a few years.
Canto: Well, you may have gotten this idea about China’s faith in their government and its media from the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, episode 893, in which, in its science or fiction section, Steve Novella trumped most of the Rogues with the item – ‘Reported trust in the media in 2021 was highest in China at 80%, and lowest in Russia at 29%, with the US in between at 39%’, which turned out to be ‘science’. As Novella pointed out, this was reported trust. It may well be that the Chinese population, after what they’d been through with Mao and the Tiananmen crack-down, and now with their latest thug, wouldn’t dare to stand up against the ubiquity of state media.
Jacinta: So it’s up to outsiders to speak up, and to encourage Uyghur expats to speak up, to allow them a voice and provide a listening ear and a sense of due outrage at the horrors being inflicted upon them.
References
David Brophy, China panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering, 2021
resetting the electrical agenda
the all-electric la jamais contente, first car to break the 100 kph barrier, in 1899
In his book Clearing the air, Tim Smedley reminds us of the terrible errors we made in abandoning electric vehicles in the early 20th century. Smedley’s focus was on air pollution, and how the problem was exacerbated, and in fact largely caused, by emissions from car exhausts in increasingly car-dependent cities like Beijing, Delhi, Los Angeles and London. In the process he briefly mentioned the electric tram systems that were scrapped in so many cities worldwide in favour of the infernal combustion engine. It’s a story I’ve heard before of course, but it really is worth taking a deeper dive into the mess of mistakes we made back then, and the lessons we need to learn.
A major lesson, unsurprisingly, is to be suspicious of vested interests. Today, the fossil fuel industry is still active in denying the facts about global warming and minimising the impact of air pollution on our health. Solar and wind power, and the rise of the EV industry – which, unfortunately, doesn’t exist in Australia – are still subject to ridiculous attacks by the heavily subsidised fossil fuel giants, though at least their employees don’t go around smashing wind turbines and solar panels. The website Car and Driver tells a ‘funny story’ about the very earliest days of EVs:
… Robert Davidson of Aberdeen, built a prototype electric locomotive in 1837. A bigger, better version, demonstrated in 1841, could go 1.5 miles at 4 mph towing six tons. Then it needed new batteries. This impressive performance so alarmed railway workers (who saw it as a threat to their jobs tending steam engines) that they destroyed Davidson’s devil machine, which he’d named Galvani.
If only this achievement by Davidson, before the days of rechargeable batteries, had been greeted with more excitement and wonder. But by the time rechargeable batteries were introduced in the 1860s, steam locomotives were an established and indeed revolutionary form of transport. They began to be challenged, though, in the 1880s and 90s as battery technology, and other features such as lightweight construction materials and pneumatic tyres, started to make electric transport a more promising investment. What followed, of course, with the development of and continual improvements to the internal combustion engine in the 1870s and 80s, first using gas and then petrol – the 1870s into the 90s and beyond was a period of intense innovation for vehicular transport – was a serious and nasty battle for control of the future of private road transport. Electricity wasn’t widely available in the early twentieth century, but rich industrialists were able to create a network of filling stations, which, combined with the wider availability of cheap oil, and the mass production and marketing capabilities of industrialists like Henry Ford – who had earlier considered electric vehicles the best future option – made petrol-driven vehicles the eventual winner, in the short term. Of course, little thought was given in those days to fuel emissions. A US website describes a likely turning point:
… it was Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T that dealt a blow to the electric car. Introduced in 1908, the Model T made gasoline [petrol]-powered cars widely available and affordable. By 1912, the gasoline car cost only $650, while an electric roadster sold for $1,750. That same year, Charles Kettering introduced the electric starter, eliminating the need for the hand crank and giving rise to more gasoline-powered vehicle sales.
Electrically-powered vehicles quickly became ‘quaint’ and unfashionable, leading to to the trashing of electric trams worldwide.
The high point of the internal combustion engine may not have arrived yet, as numbers continue to climb. Some appear to be addicted to the noise they make (I hear them roaring by nearly every night!). But surely their days are numbered. What shocks me, frankly, is how slow the public is to abandon them, when the fossil fuel industry is so clearly in retreat, and when EVs are becoming so ‘cool’. Of course conservative governments spend a fortune in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry – Australia’s government provided over $10 billion in the 2020-21 financial year, and the industry in its turn has given very generously to the government (over $1.5 million in FY2020, according to the Market Forces website).
But Australia is an outlier, with one of the worst climate policies in the WEIRD world. There will be a federal election here soon, and a change of government is very much on the cards, but the current labor opposition appears afraid to unveil a climate policy before the election. The move towards electrification of vehicles in many European countries, in China and elsewhere, will eventually have a knock-on effect here, but the immediate future doesn’t look promising. EV sales have risen markedly in the past twelve months, but from a very low base, with battery and hybrids rising to 1.95% of market share – still a paltry amount (compare Norway with 54% EVs in 2020). Interestingly, Japan is another WEIRD country that is lagging behind. China continues to be the world leader in terms of sheer numbers.
The countries that will lead the field of course, will be those that invest in infrastructure for the transition. Our current government announced an infrastructure plan at the beginning of the year, but with little detail. There are issues, for example, about the type of charging infrastructure to fund, though fast-charging DC seems most likely.
In general, I’ve become pessimistic about Australians switching en masse to EVs over the next ten years or so – I’ve read too many ‘just around the corner’ articles with too little actual change in the past five years. But perhaps a new government with a solid, detailed plan will emerge in the near future, leading to a burst of new investment….
References
Tim Smedley, Clearing the air, 2019
https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car
https://www.marketforces.org.au/politicaldonations2021/