Tag: offshore processing

Global Insights On Neglected Political Issues

neglected-political-issues
Image: war-time voting at Perth Town Hall, State Library of WA https://flic.kr/p/eUK9Pa (It’s a long shot but the State Library of WA is keen to identify the people in this war-time photo)

There have been issues aplenty for people to mull over ahead of tomorrow’s Federal election, not all of them as obvious as climate change, refugees or the Murray Darling.

Chair of Australia21, Paul Barratt, named those issues as his top three in a contribution to John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations newsletter. But he also added 10 neglected political issues. They include inequality, reversing the cuts to research and development, early childhood education and a world-class NBN. Barrett, a former Departmental secretary of Defence and Primary Industries and Energy, would be aware of the global statistics on internet speed. Increasing the latter is, after all, the main aim of a world-class NBN.

A report in the Canberra Times last month showed that Australia dropped three places to 62nd for fixed broadband. The latest Ookla Speedtest Global Index showed that Australia is far behind many comparable economies and a few developing nations. The download speed of 35.11 Mbps recorded for March is only 60% of the global average of 57.91 Mbps.

However, a spokesman for Communications Minister Mitch Fifield told the Canberra Times Ookla didn’t measure the speeds of which the NBN is capable.

“It measures the speed packages that households purchase – which is the main determinant of speeds received.” The spokesman said around half of the 5.1 million people connected to the NBN had chosen 25 Mbps or lower, eschewing the faster options.

Australians not yet connected to the NBN network are limited to an average speed of 8 Mbps with an ADSL connection (by way of explanation if I have not replied to your emails).

Barrett points out that faster internet is not just about downloading films or online gaming; it is about the needs of industry in the city and the bush as well as social benefits like remote delivery of medical services.

Coal and climate change

Whether you believe that climate change is the only real issue in this election or not, Australia is demonstrably dragging the chain in terms of mitigation. This is without a doubt the No 1 neglected political issue.

Australia is performing worse than most other advanced countries in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The global SDG Index ranked Australia 37th in the world (down from 26th last year and behind most other wealthy countries including New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Efforts to sway the country away from its love-affair with fossil fuels have struggled against the incumbent government’s determination that ‘coal is good for humanity’. There’s no doubt about the growing demand for coal to generate electricity in China and India and there’s no shortage of players, including Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, poised to open up new mines in the Galilee Basin. It’s not hard to figure out why. Australia exported $US47 billion worth of coal – 36.9% of global trade in 2018. Demand for thermal coal to fuel power stations is highest in China, the US and India. New coal-fired power stations planned by those three nations total 334,773MW of capacity – an increase of about 23%. Research portal carbonbrief.org exposes the folly of this, saying that CO2 emissions from existing plants alone are enough to ‘breach the carbon budget’ limiting global warming to1.5 or 2C.

The good news, if you are a climate change believer, is that 14 countries (including the UK and Canada), have signed up to phase out coal power generation by 2030.The Stop Adani campaign had its genesis in 2007 when environmental campaigner Tim Flannery alerted people to the likelihood of the Galilee Basin in central west Queensland being exploited. The arguments against development of the 27 billion-tonne thermal coal resource include the low quality of Galilee Basin coal, a required expansion of an export port too close to the Great Barrier Reef for comfort and the environmental record of the applicant (Adani).

As the above infographic explains in detail, there are concerns about the amount of water required to operate (a) the mine and (b) the port. The Indian coal and power company has posted a rebuttal of claims that it will take 12 gigalitres of water from the Great Artesian Basin.

Refugees and border paranoia

The United Nations Association of Australia set out its position on refugees and asylum seekers in April last year, saying that current policies and measures need to be reviewed.

“Australia’s current policy only shifts the problem to other countries.”

“Australia’s reputation as a welcoming host country and as a responsible global citizen is diminished by our current treatment of asylum seekers and refugees arriving spontaneously, as evidenced by arguments from within the Australian community and from the UNHCR. There are alternatives.”

The UNAA states the obvious – processing arrivals offshore is not cost-effective. Between 2012 and 2016, the cost to Australia was an estimated $9.6 billion. Though costs have reduced as arrivals have decreased, the estimated cost of offshore processing for 2017-18 was $714 million.

(Offshore processing costs blew out by 52% during 2018-19. The latest Budget records that estimated actual spending in 2018-19 on offshore processing will be $1.158 billion – Ed)

Despite the weight of international criticism, Australia has persisted with the practice of detaining refugees offshore and turning boats around.

It is important to know that the Labor Party has largely promised to maintain the status quo, although it would look at New Zealand’s offer to resettle refugees from Manus and Nauru,

Australian expat musician James Fagan, who has been living in the UK for 20 years, has often had to wear criticism of Australia’s refugee policies.

But he is being asked less often, since the Brexit campaign revealed what he called the “dark underbelly of xenophobia and racism in the UK”.

“Five or 10 years ago, when Tampa and all that stuff was in the news, I used to get a lot of questions in the UK.  The one that sticks in my mind was the Armenian delicatessen owner who asked me about how I felt about my homeland’s treatment of refugees. He had Armenian friends and relatives in Australia and had been following the Tampa situation closely. He asked me if I was embarrassed. I said yes!

“But I’ve stopped being asked the question and the sad truth of it is that the longer a country persists in a particular course of action, the less it becomes newsworthy.”

Which brings us to No 10 in Paul Barratt’s list of neglected political issues – the need for empathy and compassion in government.

“It should be a matter of conscious public policy that empathy and compassion underpin everything we do in the public sphere,” he writes.

“Recent Royal Commissions have demonstrated how strongly human motivations drive behaviour. Humans have a powerful competitive and acquiring motivation, which tends to turn off other motivational systems that link to caring and supporting others.

“So developing a compassionate mindset is important because it has shown that this mind-set organises our motives, emotions and actions in ways that are conducive for our own and other people’s wellbeing.”

“Recognising the needs and aspirations of every human being necessarily implies refraining from demonising any social group – refugees, the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, etc.”

Mr Speaker, I commend the Mindful Futures Network to the House (and the Senate).

 

(The above quote could well have come from the late ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Valé to a great Australian politician who was respected by both sides of politics. SWETB) (SheWhoEditsThisBlog)

More reading – what Labor and the Greens were saying about a coalition before the 2016 election. https://bobwords.com.au/greens-coalition-bridge-far/

Medevac, May Election, 3m missing voters

Parliament-Election-Missing-Voters
Parliament House, Canberra 1979, image by Steve Swayne https://flic.kr/p/q1Jkuq

If one believes that the Australian government will delay holding a Federal election until the last possible date (May 18) that’s just 92 sleeps away. Given the Morrison government’s historic defeat (75/74) when Parliament passed the so-called Medevac Bill, this week, I can’t see ScoMO heading up the hill to the Governor-General’s whare* for an early election. The electorate is clearly polarised and there is a high degree of suspicion about what both major parties say they’ll do and what they actually do when in power.

The problem for political parties running campaigns in such a tense environment, and why they need every one of those 92 days, is to work out how to recapture the estimated 3.14 million Australians who do not participate. That’s right, even though we’ve had compulsory voting since 1924, that’s the estimate of how many people failed to vote in 2016.

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) analysis found that turnout at the 2016 House of Representatives was 91%, the lowest recorded since the introduction of compulsory voting ahead of the 1925 Federal election. Turnout at the 2016 Senate elections at 91.9% was also the lowest recorded since the 1925 federal election. The missing include 1.78 million who were enrolled but did not vote, an estimated 816,000 who should be on the roll and aren’t, and 550,000 who cast a ballot paper but either filled it in incorrectly or deliberately defaced it (informal).

We know some scrutineers who, over drinkies after election night, swap notes on the best insults or graffiti on informal votes. Penises are common, so too an added box to tick with a substitute name, e.g. “Duck, D (Animal Welfare Lobby), “Trump, D (Socialist Left) or SCOTLAND!

The informal vote includes ballot papers where voters intended to make their vote count but did not fill it in correctly. Australia’s enormous Senate ballot paper, which can have more than 100 candidates, claims many victims in this way.

Why are these numbers so important, then? In 2016 the not-for-profit Y Vote claimed that people aged 18-24 who were not on the roll, didn’t show up, or voted informally could have swayed the election result one way or the other in 10 marginal seats.

Y Vote calculated wasted votes using AEC data that one quarter of Australians aged 18-24 were not enrolled. The number of wasted votes outnumbered the margins several times over in key Liberal marginal seats.

The founder of Y Vote, Skye Riggs, said young Australians felt their voices were not valued because “they don’t see politicians investing a lot of time in them”.

I’d say the close tussle between the Ayes and Noes on the Medical Evacuation Bill reflects a deeply polarised electorate; polarised and politically volatile. Remember the Wentworth by-election – when former PM Malcolm Turnbull’s solid blue ribbon seat went to cross-bench Independent Senator Kerryn Phelps? There’s no telling what the people will do.

After reading on Monday how Labor intended to insist on amendments to the Medevac Bill, She Who Takes Direct Action rang Bill Shorten’s office. She was assured Labor was not going soft on the Bill but was just ‘having a look at the language’. As it turned out, Labor wanted three amendments (one of which insisted upon a ‘character test’). Labor wanted the Minister rather than doctors to have the final say on who is flown to Australia for treatment. The Greens refused to support the amendments as proposed.

A late amendment to Dr Phelps’s Bill stipulated that the advisory panel picked by the government to oversee decisions, receive no remuneration for their role. This nicely worked around the government’s late-mail advice that the Bill was unconstitutional.

It is important to note, given the government’s steamy rhetoric that it will encourage people smugglers to send more boats, the Medevac Bill applies only to the cohort currently held on Nauru or Manus Island and is (thus far) not extended to new arrivals.

One ought not to forget, as an astute friend reminded me last week, that 80% of Australians voted for either the LNP or Labor at the last Federal election. She reminded me that Labor’s policies on immigration and refugees are not that dissimilar to the current regime. Bill Shorten’s speech to the Labor Party conference last year made that clear enough.

“We cannot and we must not and we will not allow the criminal people smuggling syndicates to get back into business…

…It is not a crime to want to come to this country. But it is a crime to exploit vulnerable people, to put them in dangerous and unsafe vessels, and have them drown at sea.

We cannot, we must not and we will not permit the re-opening of their trade in human desperation and the drownings and the irreplaceable loss of life that it brings.”

To this end Labor would insist upon:

  • Rigorous security, character and health assessments throughout humanitarian and general migration programs
  • pursuing regional resettlement.
  • turning back boats where it is safe to do so.
  • maintaining offshore processing

Those who do not care for selective quoting can look it up (Chapter Nine of Labor’s policy platform).

So while Labor appears to be prepared to give the poor a better deal (e.g. promises to review NewStart and fast-track the NDIS), if you vote Labor you are voting for a continuation of the policy of processing asylum seekers and refugees through offshore detention centres.

Offshore processing is just one of the many important issues one could sift through when deciding who would best represent a voter’s interests. There are other key issues (many now showing up in the ABC’s social media poll), including climate change, the environment, water security, health and education, not to mention whether any government should allow a foreign company to dig up Australian coal and export it.

I was talking to a Labor stalwart who had been door-knocking in one of the Sunshine Coast’s blue-ribbon seats, electorates where you’d need a 11% swing to unseat the incumbent. Our doorknocker persisted, even when faced with less than polite rebuke from Sunshine Coast Tories. What surprised him, though, was the level of ignorance/apathy: “What? Are we having an election? When? Why?”

Some of those people were probably among the 1.78 million who were enrolled but did not turn up in 2016. No doubt some of them received infringement notices and a $125 fine.

The AEC says declining voter turnout observed at Australian federal elections reflects international trends. Voter turnout has been steadily declining in most developed countries over several decades. How do we lift our game, then? And why is it that Malta’s best voter turnout (92%) exceeded Australia’s effort, yet Malta does not have compulsory voting? Perhaps Malta is less exposed to ‘shouty’ commentators?

Defence Minister Christopher Pyne declared on Monday that politics in Australia was “trapped in a self-obsessed and panic-prone spiral that is damaging Parliament’s ability to work for the good of voters.” (Probably the first and last time I’m likely to agree with Christopher Pyne. Ed)

He told the Sydney Morning Herald’s David Wroe the political environment, which had bowed to irrational pressure from “shouty” commentators, was not good for the country and that he can’t see that changing.

Yep, that ought to get the 3.14 million Australian slackers motivated to contribute to the political process. No worries, mate!

*Maori for house

Further reading: