qed’s blog

Ziggy Switkowski, one time millionaire manager of Telstra, now occupying his Howard appointed position of president of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation is today pushing the nuclear power hobby horse. Good ole aunty also briefly mentioned in its news at noon that BP would be axing production of solar cells in Australia. This is hard on the heels of the WA government’s announcement that uranium mining is now perfectly fine since it means money and jobs, a decision that environment minister Garret (former NDP candidate) seems happy to consider as he says
“I’m not going to start speculating on the number of mines. Our job is to apply the proper regulatory approaches under EPBC Act (Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999) and that’s what we’ll do. We will, as we always have, wait until any specific proposals come through to us for consideration under the EPBC Act. That’s our requirement as regulators.”

If this bunch of pseudo lefties ever wanted an opportunity to make a relatively low cost statement about their credentials, today’s developments give them a perfect opportunity. BP’s decison means a loss of jobs but more importantly it also represents a loss of capacity to make something that utilises Australia’s most abundant resource, solar power. The government is again failing to act with any long term vision, having the capacity to manufacture solar power generating equipment is by far substantially more important to our long term than subsidising GM and Ford to continue to make gas guzzlers and infinitely preferable to having a nuclear power plant in someone’s back yard.

Its days like today that make you really appreciate just how far to the right this country has come and is going…

It seems that a new mantra is popping up in contemporary political journalism, the idea of getting rid of so-called middle class welfare. Paul Daley of the Fairfax group called for it today but he is not alone. The idea is that wealthier parts of the middle class enjoy a form of welfare in terms of subsidies and tax breaks which reduce the amount of money available to help the really needy.

In the economic contraction taking place money for welfare is going to be in short supply, hence from the government’s perspective these measures may well be unavoidable. Some may even argue that such measures should be taken regardless on the state of the economy, rewarding people for buying new laptops or driving their leased cars everywhere is hardly responsible government. However in attacking the lurks and perks of the middle class we are being blinded to protection afforded to the very rich. Hence this debate that journalists now wish to generate is in part a smokescreen, one that shifts public attention away from the real benefactors of government and those that profit immensely from the economic system onto a class of people that one can more easily identify.

By all means get rid of the government handouts to those who don’t really need it but don’t stop with the middle class. Let’s have a seriously good look at the monstrous inequities between the very rich and the very poor and how time and time again the government makes decisions that favour them at the expense of the rest of us.

I was in NZ recently, it is a fantastic place largely unspoilt and populated by friendly people. It seems strange that our media constantly refers to their economic malaise as though that was indeed the only thing that matters. My impression was the blessings of fertile agriculture and unsurpassed tourist potential give the Kiwis a standard of living second to none in the world. Which makes the election of a socalled self made millionaire to the position of Prime Minister all the more curious.

I hope to figure this out one day but in the meantime I find the tendency of people towards adulation of those who become rich by way of the economic system slightly curious, particularly when it is the very people who are victims of inequity who seem the most adoring. Another observation about such leaders (and we have not one but two here in Oz) is that they like to talk a lot about economic policy but steer well clear of any debate about equity and egalitarianism. In a very real way, John Key’s victory speech in a casino is so very fitting given his political inclination. He got lucky but as anyone who understands gambling knows, the system is about winners and losers, a few winners and lots of losers. The only way to read the NZ result is that enough people are prepared to gamble their country’s future for the chance to strike the own personal jackpot. It looks like the same seeds of greed that took root here some years ago have crossed the Tasman in search of more fertile ground.

God knows we need them. Imagine life without them, inconceivable! So the Kruddmaster’s foray into the heart of Aussie manufacturing should be seen as pragmatic politics, keeping Aussies at work making things we all need. Good one Kev!

Hang on a minute. Car sales are down, and those cars that people prefer are tiny little asia numbers that run on the sniff of an oily rag, or better still run on Electricity! Hmm. And what about our little carbon problem? And then there is the question of oil which is clearly running out…all of this suggests to anyone who might be able to add two and two and get four that maybe what people really need are alternatives to the petrol burning behemoths that are perhaps single handedly responsible for more environmental degradation than any other man made invention.

Question? Do anyone think that if we spent a couple of billion dollars we might come up with something that fits the bill? The Indians did but then they aren’t overly concerned with kissing the arse of GM and Ford. However given that the local car making industry was taken over by Detroit a few years back and continues to stifle any genuine competition aided and abetted by governments for decades, today’s little announcement should come as no surprise.

Rudd and Carr have failed Australia. They have wasted taxpayers money on propping up an industry which is likely to become irrelevant. Making stuff like cars is vaguely useful in a variety of ways but what is needed today is a vision for the future, not a gaze firmly fixed on the rear view mirror. Given the breadth of talent and ideas in this country, coupled with our resource base it IS a safe bet that for the money the government plans to put in the pockets of GM and Ford we could have a car that meets the needs of Australians, doesn’t cost the earth to run and is likely to be something others in the world might want to buy from us. The only problem is that such a car would truly be Australian owned and made. Oh and it mightn’t do too well at Bathurst either.

Little attention was paid to the WWF report the other day that underlined a somewhat significant aspect to our ordinary daily lives. James Leape who is the international director of WWF put it this way
“Most of us are propping up our current lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing - and increasingly overdrawing - on the ecological capital of other parts of the world - if our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.”

On the same day as the rather conservative WWF was pointing out the bleeding obvious, good ole Kev was addressing the Business Council of Australia. Dinner speeches these day are all about the economy, the REAL economy and Kev was up to it, delivering an apocalyptic message gilded with some confidence that the Oz economy will survive the twin traumas of excessive blood loss and declining usefulness. No doubt Kev would not be pleased by the Age’s headline story about a sudden collapse in big building projects in Melbourne’s CBD, but it does illustrate how quickly the crisis in capitalism is impacting the so-called real world.

Yet some people might start connecting some dots here. The WWF report is one of those dull boring bits of scientific analysis that academic people do to pass the day, it measures things and puts numbers into a computer and generates some models. All very dry, but frankly you can reason it out for yourself, the world is finite, we can only dig so much iron and oil out of the ground and there is only so much arable land in the world even if we do chop ever tree down. On the other hand somehow economies, which in the real world rely on things like food and steel and transport, are expected to just keep growing. By magic!

I doubt Mr K Rudd is stupid. He went to uni, he speaks more than one language and he ties his own shoelaces. So what’s going on when he tells the Business Council of Australia that the government’s actions to maintain the confidence in the banks are intended to avert consequences that might have “affected investment and consumption and ultimately our growth and employment.” No doubt he is aware of the WWF report, he employs people to watch the news and presumably they talk to him every now and then.

It might seem like a good thing to keep up confidences in these trying times, however there is a problem that such confidences are build on faulty assumptions. Assumptions like unlimited natural resources with which we can continue our wasteful consumption and economic growth. You could say that Kev was really just affirming his governments commitment to the notion that it is government’s job to make sure people keep economy afloat by continuing to consume. All this talk of carbon trading is just for show and as for the broader issue of ecological credit, well that’s not even on the agenda.

Ultimately the government of the day is not an agent of the people despite the claim to contrary. At best they are our self appointed managers who are supposed to ensure that business conditions remain as favourable for the wealthy as is humanly possible. This means gobbling up the world’s resources and pretending it isn’t a problem, because in truth it isn’t a problem for the likes of the Business Council of Australia.