Australian Observer

Which country is Obama running in?

2012-01-26T12:09:00.000+11:00

In a 21 January post on his blog The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah asks whether Barack Obama isrunning for re-election as President of the United States or Prime Minister of Israel,and comments that

A new Obama campaign video makes it increasingly hard to tell, and evenmore ominously ratchets further the Israelization of US politics.

Included in the post is the video in question: a 7-minuteYouTube Obama campaign video entitled Americaand Israel: an unbreakable bond which

… alternates video and audio of Obama speaking before the Israel lobby,AIPAC, and other Zionist groups, and clips of Israeli leaders endorsing Obama’sleadership. It begins and ends with the US flag and the Israeli flag side byside – thus bringing the Israeli flag directly into the US election campaign.

Although the clips of Israeli leaders … appear to have been taken frominterviews, they are cut to look as if they were provided specifically for thepurpose of endorsing the president.

…

As such, Obama is legitimizing the role of foreign – although certainlyonly Israeli leaders – to participate directly in US campaigns. Can we imagineObama issuing a video in which he is endorsed as pro-Mexican by the Presidentof Mexico, or pro-Canadian by Canada’s prime minister? It’s inconceivable.

Barack Obama was elected in 2008 with expectations that hewould establish a new relationship with the Muslim world and bring some balanceto the US relationship with Israel. This was always more of a hope than areality. While he made a promising speech in Cairo and broadcast a greeting forthe 2009 Iranian New Year, he surrounded himself with the same old foreignpolicy crowd who had spent their lives looking after Israel, and as they say inbusiness, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’vealways got.

Sad to say too that when it comes to matters affectingIsrael, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is both smarter than Obama and moredetermined, so by September in Obama’s first year in office I was ready todeclare it all over as far any contest between the two was concerned (see Game,set and match to Mr Netanyahu).

See Ali Abunimah’s post and the video in question here.

Who will write the history of the Egyptian Revolution?

2012-01-22T17:37:00.000+11:00

In a 21 January post on her Democracy Digest blog, looking forward to the first anniversary ofthe Egyptian Revolution on 25 January, Egyptian blogger Ranya Khalifa poses thequestion:

"… who's going to write about January25th and its aftermath in our history textbooks?" How will this revolutiongo down in history and how will the next generations perceive the"facts"? What are the "facts" and who can claim to have aneutral take on what happened in Egypt, not only during the 18 days till thefall of Hosny Mubarak on February 11, 2011, but on the events of MohamedMahmoud street, Maspero and on People's Assembly clashes?

Access her piece here.

For those with a twitter account and an interest in current developmentsin Egypt, @RanyaKhalifa is worth a follow.

Children killed by Operation Cast Lead

2012-01-02T17:29:00.000+11:00

It is just over three years since the Israelis launched OperationCast Lead, their punitive attack on Gaza, the one which then Acting PrimeMinister Gillard characterised as Israel exercising its right to defend itself.

352 children were killed directly by Israeli action duringthe 22 days of Operation Cast Lead. Thatis not just a statistic. Every single one of those children was a livingbreathing human being, of flesh and blood, with hopes, fears and dreams likethe rest of us.

They all had names, and if you click on this link hereyou can find out the names and ages of every one of them, many not yet in theirteens, some as young as three months.

Northern Lawns, Booloominbah, ca. 1955

2012-01-01T22:36:00.000+11:00

Amongst my father’s slide collection I found this little gem,which shows part of the University of New England as was over half a centuryago. It is a photo looking across theNorthern Lawns of Booloominbah towards the Union Building.

I would date the slide to late 1955; the T.R. ForsterMemorial Union, which was opened in April 1956, is at an advanced state of construction,but not yet complete.

Note the absence of the Dixson Library, the first stage of whichwas opened in my first year at UNE, 1961. At this stage the University Library would have been in Booloominbah.The green Morris Oxford in the foreground of the picture belonged to the thenLibrarian, Edith Tattersall.

Reflections on the North Korean regime change

2011-12-20T15:11:00.000+11:00

The international tension associated with feelings of “what’snext” associated with the presumed accession to the North Korean leadership by KimJong-il’s little-known son and nominated heir Kim Jong-un, has been accompaniedby a well-meaning statement (see here)by Acting Prime Minister Wayne Swan and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, addressedno doubt to Beijing, that

It is vital that all thosewith influence on Pyongyang reinforce the need for calm and restraint.

Best of luck. I amreminded of a somewhat more direct appeal to the Chinese leadership in relationto North Korea when I visited China as a member of Bob Hawke’s delegation inFebruary 1984. This was just four monthsafter the notorious Rangoon Bombing in which the North Koreans made an assassinationattempt against South Korean President Choon Doo-hwan, who was visiting Rangoonwith a large delegation. Choon was tolay a wreath at the Maryr’s Mausoleum to commemorate Aung San, architect ofBurmese Independence (and father of Aung San Suu Kyi), who was assassinated in1947.

A bomb concealed in the roof of the mausoleum failed to killChoon, but it killed 21 people, including three senior South Korean politiciansand 14 Presidential Advisers, and injured 46 others.

Our last port of call had been Seoul, including a meetingwith the intended victim of the Rangoon Bombing, and we had flown directly fromSeoul to Beijing in the RAAF B-707 – a rare event in those days of minimalcontact between China and South Korea, and we had been escorted to the limitsof South Korean air space by South Korean fighters. In the meetings with the Chinese leadershipthe subject of our time in Seoul was touched upon and Bob Hawke took advantageof the opportunity to urge the Chinese leadership to attempt to prevail uponthe North Koreans to respect the norms of civilised international behaviour. The Chinese leaders didn’t say anything muchby way of response – no quotable quotes – but the way the roll of the eyes, theshrug of the shoulders and the upturned palms told you everything you needed toknow. The Chinese were claiming noinfluence over the behaviour of the North Koreans. All that was almost 28 years ago, but I don’tthink that situation has changed.

During our stay in Beijing we were quartered in a couple ofvillas in the Diaoyutai State Guest House, a large compound with a series ofdetached villas set in nice gardens with ornamental pools etc. Every evening in that safest of cities that1984 Beijing was, the PLA man on the front gate locked the gate, after whichyou needed a pass to come and go. As it happenedthe only other guests in Diaoyutai at that time were the North Korean ForeignMinister and Party, in an adjacent villa. I couldn’t help remarking to Bob and my colleagues one evening that theonly people in Beijing who might possibly have a go at us were locked in withus.

The summer holiday drive

2011-12-14T22:37:00.000+11:00

Driving home this afternoon I heard part of ABC RadioNational’s Australia Talks, on thesubject of that great Australian summer holiday ritual, the drive to whereverthe Christmas-New Year holiday is to be spent.

The consensus was that, in spite of the vast improvement inour roads, modern, time-poor city folks don’t want to spend more than aboutthree hours in the car to get to where they are going. This caused me to reflect on the summerholiday drives of my childhood and youth.

I grew up in Armidale and from 1948 until I left home at theend of university in 1966 we went every year to Port Macquarie for three weeksfrom a few days before Christmas until the first week in January. The drive wasquite a business – in those days the New England Tablelands were very isolatedby the bad roads which lay in every direction, including, I can dimly remember,the New England Highway to Sydney having eighty miles of unsealed road betweenTamworth and Singleton. Those were thedays when you had to book ahead to get a seat on the train.

There were three possible ways of driving to PortMacquarie. The most direct route was viaKempsey, down the road through Bellbrook. I don’t actually know anyone who went that way, although I have seenphotos taken on that road before the Second World War by an Armidale Greekfamily. In the post-war years it wasdefinitely 4WD territory, but even then it was not always passable. I travelled some way along it a few times inmy early secondary school days when an American student at UNE (David Werner, inevitablyknown as “Hank the Yank”) used to invite me to accompany him in his searches forspecimens in the rain forest at the edge of the escarpment. Stunning scenery, and the leeches were friendly, but the roadwas definitely not in good shape.

The road of choice in those early years (late 1940s tomid-1950s) was the Oxley Highway, a 158 mile journey that included 108 miles ofunsealed road between the outskirts of Walcha and the entrance to Wauchope. This included a stretch of narrow windingroad that wound its way down the mountain through state forest from which timber(the last of the cedar, I fancy) was being harvested, so one would inevitablycome up behind a timber jinker and eat its dust for the rest of the journey,there being no possibility of passing it. The 158 mile journey typically tookabout eight hours in our 1948 Ford Anglia tourer, and one arrived caked withdust.

So when some time in the late 1950s the road to Dorrigo wassealed, it was no contest. The journey via Dorrigo and Bellingen, picking upthe Pacific Highway at Urunga, was a longer journey, but faster, safer anddefinitely cleaner. And by that time we had graduated to an Austin A40, whichat least nominally kept the dust out.

Now the roads are all sealed and Google Maps tells me thatthe journey time from Armidale to Port Macquarie (247km via the Oxley Highway)takes 3 hours and 14 minutes.

Nevertheless, it was exciting doing it the hard way in thelittle old car, to end the day lying in bed at the Beach Park Holiday Cabins withthe sound of the surf crashing onto Flynn’s beach just a couple of hundredyards away.

Jonathan Pollak on the death of Mustafa Tamimi

2011-12-14T16:26:00.000+11:00

In the 13 December online edition of the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Jonathan Pollak, one of thefounders of the Israeli organisation AnarchistsAgainst the Wall, published an opinion piece on the death of the youngPalestinian Mustafa Tamimi at the hands of the Israeli Defence Force. Tamimi was killed by a tear gas canisterfired at his head from close range from the rear of an armoured vehicle, duringthe weekly demonstration at his home village of Nabi Saleh, a demonstration againstthe theft of their water and land by the nearby illegal settlement of Halamish. The settlers at Halamish have appropriated fortheir exclusive use the water from an important natural spring belonging toNabi Saleh villager Mr Bashir Tamimi, and denied the villagers of Nabi Salehaccess to their land.

Under the headline Acourageous Palestinian has died, shrouded in stones, Pollack writes:

The army spokesman was right. Mustafa died because he threw stones; hedied because he dared to speak a truth, with his hands, in a place where thetruth is forbidden. Any discussion of the manner of the shooting, its legalityand the orders on opening fire, infers that the landlord is forbidden to expelthe trespasser. Indeed, the trespasser is allowed to shoot the landlord.

Mustafa's body is lying lifeless because he had the courage to throwstones on the 24th anniversary of the first intifada, which begot thePalestinian children of the stones. His brother Oudai is imprisoned at OferPrison and was not allowed to attend the funeral, because he too dared to throwstones. And his sister was not allowed to be at his bedside in his finalmoments, even though she is not suspected of having thrown stones, but becauseshe is a Palestinian.

Mustafa was a brave man killed because he threw stones and refused tobe afraid of a soldier bearing arms, sitting safely in the military jeepcovered in armor. On the day Mustafa died, the frozen silence roaming thevalley was only slightly less chilling than the shrilling sound of his mother'slaments which fell upon it occasionally.

Read Pollack’s full piece here.

One can understand the empathy Pollak feels for MustafaTamimi and his family. Apart from hissupport for their cause, he has been the victim of a remarkably similar attack. Amongst the numerous injuries he has sufferedat the hands of the IDF while demonstrating on behalf of the Palestinians, on 3April 2005 an IDF soldier shot him in the head with a teargas canister from anM-16, from a distance of approximately thirty metres, at a protest against theWall in the West Bank village of Bil’in (see here).

Vale Jock McDiarmid, MM, C de G

2011-12-13T22:31:00.000+11:00

I was very sorry to hear recently from one of his relativesof the death in 2009, at Tugun, of Jock McDiarmid, former School Sergeant atThe Armidale School in northern NSW.

Jock had a very distinguished military career during WorldWar II, which is touched upon in some earlier posts – see JockMcDiarmid, MM C de G, JockMcDiarmid’s MM commendation and Onthe trail of Jock McDiarmid – and was a fine School Sergeant, someone Ifeel honoured to have known.

I now have little more information about Jock, and bycourtesy of a relative a photo of his Croix de Guerre citation, so in due courseI will post a roundup of all the information I now have about him.

Possum on Australian Exceptionalism

2011-12-13T14:10:00.001+11:00

A superb essay on Australia’s economic performance over theperiod since 1985 has been posted on the ABC’s The Drum website. Written byCrikey blogger Possum Comitatus(twitter handle @Pollytics – well worth a follow) it was first posted last weekon Pollytics, his Crikey blog (see here).

Possum analyses the OECD data over the period and finds oureconomic performance to be nothing short of amazing.

He begins:

"Australian Exceptionalism"… let that phrase roll off yourtongue.

Now stop laughing for a moment if you can!

There's something about that phrase that just doesn't sit right withus. We're not only unaccustomed to thinking about ourselves that way, but formany it's a concept that is one part distasteful to three parts utterlyridiculous - try mentioning it in polite company sometime. Bring a helmet.

We'll often laugh at the cognitive dissonance displayed by our Americancousins when they start banging on about American Exceptionalism - waxinglyrical about the assumed ascendancy of their national exploits while they'reforced to take out a second mortgage to pay for a run-of-the-mill medicalprocedure. That talk of exceptionalism has become little more than anexceptional disregard for the truth of their own comparative circumstances.

But in truth, we both share that common ignorance - we share a commonstate of denial about the hard realities of our own accomplishments compared tothose of the rest of the world. While the Americans so often manifest it as abelief that they and they alone are the global benchmark for all humanachievement, we simply refuse to acknowledge our own affluence and privilege -denialists of our own hard-won triumphs, often hysterically so.

Never before has there been a nation so completely oblivious to notjust their own successes, but the sheer enormity of them, than Australia today.

He then goes on to unpack a story that needs to be read infull and savoured, not summarised, with some very compelling charts. In the process he demonstrates the how oureconomic achievements have delivered worthwhile social achievements, not beenat the expense of social achievement. Indeed, I think our social values haveplayed an important part in our economic performance, but that is a story foranother day, to be written by someone with more expertise in this area than Ihave.

Access Possum’s article here.

Avner Cohen: Israel’s Iran dilemma

2011-12-08T13:37:00.001+11:00

In a recent opinion piece in the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, Avner Cohen, Professor of Non-Proliferation studies and senior fellowwith the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and author of twoauthoritative histories of the Israeli nuclear program (see below), writes thatrecent statements by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak on the Iranian nuclearissue only drove home the need for a real public debate on the subject.

The essence of Cohen’s piece, an edited version of a lecturehe gave at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, is tobe found in his last two paragraphs:

The idea of an independent Israeli attack at this time on the nuclearfacilities in Iran is both irrational and megalomaniacal. If somebody thinksthat Israeli military might can in itself put an end to the ayatollahs' nuclearambitions, he is daydreaming. Just as the destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactorin 1981 only bolstered Saddam's desire for the bomb, so a military operationagainst Iran would only strengthen the rule of the ayatollahs and their desirefor nuclear weapons.

In the final analysis, only a renewed peace process, on both bilateral(Israeli-Palestinian ) and multilateral (Israeli-Arab ) tracks, a process thatwould include also delegitimization of nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons,can ultimately remove the nuclear threat from the Middle East.

The full opinion piece may be accessed here.

The video of the lecture on which it is based may be accessedhere.

Note:

Avner Cohen is the author of two important books on theIsraeli nuclear program, both published by Columbia University Press:

- Israel and the Bomb (1998) – more information here

- The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb – moreinformation here

What to do with those old colour slides?

2011-12-03T13:25:00.001+11:00

I have literally thousands of colour slides – probably8,000-9,000 of them, from times which range from when my father bought hislittle Voigtlander Vito B in about 1955 until I took my last colourtransparencies in the 1990s.

The question is what to do with them all in the time poordigital age. How often would one get outthe projector and set up the screen, manually load the slides into the projector’smagazine, and settle in for a slide evening? Answer: effectively never.

Clearly the answer is to harness the technologies of thedigital age and digitise the lot. Tothat end, in about 2001 I purchased a transparency adapter for my HP flatbedscanner, and produced some acceptable digital photos from some of my favouriteslides. I was pretty happy with this atthe time, but it is a process that has couple of downsides It is very labourintensive, and as the scanner is focusing through the screen onto atransparency that is sitting above the glass, its focus will tend to be thrownoff somewhat by backscatter from the surface of the glass. Acceptable resolution is achievable but highresolution is not, and the process struggles to produce a file that will allowa print larger than 15cm x 10 cm.

Also, good old Hewlett Packard decided not to releasedrivers for that particular scanner for operating systems post Windows XP. I found some third party software that wouldallow me to continue to use the scanner but it will only scan at a resolutionof 1200 x 1200 dpi, and while it offers a range of post-scan processing optionsit does not permit the simple option of scanning the slide as is and notmucking about with it.

So after a bit of homework on the I web imported from theUnited States a specialised slide scanner, a Pacific Image Electronics PowerSlide5000, which as its name suggests scans at a magnificent 5000 x 5000 dpi. Thisappears to be a clone of a German original made by Braun; I could not find onthe web any sign of an Australian retailer for either the Braun machine or theUS equivalent.

The machine comes bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0,and there are options which enable files to be sent to that software forprocessing, but as I have a copy of Photoshop CS3 I prefer to take the scans asJPEG files exactly as they come off the scanner, and make any tweaks I want toas a separate step. Any slide with theright exposure will be acceptable without further processing, but the wonderfulthing about digital technology is that those very important under- orover-exposed slides of family occasions or long departed friends can be veryconsiderably enhanced and seen as intended.

The slides are fed into the scanner from a standard slidemagazine which holds fifty slides. Theycan be scanned at any resolution up to 5000 dpi, to either TIFF or JPEG files,using 8-bit or 16-bit colour, with two or three quality options. After a bit of experimentation I amsystematically scanning the whole collection at highest quality in 16-bitcolour at full resolution. This means Iam not having to make decisions about which treatment to apply to which slides,and I also have the maximum opportunity subsequently to crop a slide heavilyand still have a good quality photo of the reduced field of view, or a detailof the photo.

This approach is not for the faint hearted because it isvery heavy on storage; such high quality scans produce files in the range13-15MB, which means that you are looking at about 500MB to scan one 36-exposureroll of film.

Scanning at this quality is a pretty slow process – it takesabout 4-5 minutes per slide, but as they feed automatically into the scanner itis possible to load up a batch and then go and do something else – as long asthat something else is not a process on your computer that requires more than amodicum of RAM, as the process is pretty heavy on memory.

There is a downside to everything of course, and thedownside of scanning at such high resolution is that your scans come up with amagnificent high resolution image of every biological colony that has made ahome for itself on your slide collection over the course of half acentury. That is where Photoshop CS3’sspot healing tool comes in – it really does a great job of cleaning scratches,smears and the spots of bio-debris from the image.

This of course is only half the story – after putting allthis effort in you have gone from having boxes of slides that you never getaround to looking at to having hundreds of Gigabytes of files on a hard drivesomewhere.

I have two solutions for this, to get me to the point whereI actually see some of these precious images. The first is that I keep as many of them as I can in a master folder onthe hard drive of the laptop which I carry backwards and forwards between homeand the office. I point the screensaverto that master folder, so that every time the screensaver cuts in I get arandom display of all of the photos in the folder. As I use an external monitor at bothlocations, I get to see a selection of my slides in a high quality format quiteregularly.

The second (more systematic viewing) solution is that Irecently purchased an Apple TV unit for about $139. This plugs into my TV viaan HDMI cable, so I can view any chosen subfolder of the master folder simplyby firing up iTunes and transmitting the images to the high definition TVscreen over the home wi-fi system. Worksa treat.

Expect more pictures on Aussie Observer.

The Middle East legacy of Dennis Ross

2011-11-29T21:48:00.001+11:00

Readers of this blog will be aware that I am no fan of USMiddle East “expert” Dennis Ross, one of those members of the US foreign policyestablishment who migrates between the State Department and the American IsraelPublic Affairs Committee and its offshoot and its offshoot the WashingtonInstitute for Near East Policy (WINEP), one of those people of whom I feel ifyou asked the question, “Do you serve the United States or Israel”, they wouldnot understand the question.

Ross, who is known around Washington as “Israel’s lawyer” hasnever made any secret of his feelings towards Israel, so there is nothingstealthy or furtive about his manoeuvring in support of that country, but thisbeing the case, the reliance that the Obama Administration, supposedlydedicated to creating a new relationship with the Muslim world and with Iran inparticular, placed upon him is nothing short of extraordinary.

In March 2009, in Hillary'senvoy: not everyone is cheering, I commented on his bizarre appointment asHillary Clinton’s special adviser on Iran, and followed up with a post in May2009 – Iran:Hillary’s envoy (contd.) – in which I noted the views of an Orthodox Jewwho had served as US Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, who commented that inMiddle East peace negotiations:

The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottomline, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to theArabs.

Further postsincluded DennisRoss on the move?, noting rumours that he was moving to the White House,and MakingU.S. Iran policy, an extended analysis of the dysfunctional way in whichthe US Administration was approaching Iran, and Dennis Ross’s role in that.

Andrew Sullivanaddressed this theme in March 2010 in a post DennisRoss Bats for Netanyahu on The Atlantic’s blog The Daily Dish.

A more extended summary of Ross’s contribution to thefailure of Obama’s Middle East policy may be found in my 15 January 2011 post Pro-Israelcontrol of Obama’s Middle East Policy.

An interesting addition to the dossier was published as anop-ed piece in Al Jazeera, 23 November 2011, following the announcement thatRoss is leaving his post. Entitled The incompletelegacy of Dennis Ross, it was contributed by Robert L. Grenier, chairman of ERG Partners, a financial advisory andconsulting firm. Grenier retired from the CIA in 2006, following a 27-yearcareer in the CIA's Clandestine Service. He served as Director of the CIACounter-Terrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2006, coordinated CIA activities inIraq from 2002 to 2004 as the Iraq Mission Manager, and was the CIA Chief ofStation in Islamabad before and after the 9/11 attacks.

During the Clinton era he was thedeputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, and sawat first hand how Ross exercised his undoubted influence to undermine ratherthan strengthen efforts to create a durable peace following the signature ofthe Oslo accords.

Grenier’s summary assessment ofRoss’s contribution over his time in US Government is:

During his eight years as chief architect of the peace process underBill Clinton, Dennis was not so much a cause as a symptom of the deep,disqualifying political dysfunction at the heart of US policymaking in theMiddle East. Without the dysfunction, you would not have had a Ross to exploitit.

And now, we are told, Dennis is leaving, after nearly three years inthe Obama administration. His increasing prominence over those three years is amark and a measure of Obama's growing disappointment and failure. For anadministration which started with such elevated goals in the Middle East, ithas come to this: Instead of engaging Iran constructively, as it had hoped, ithas devolved instead to a sterile, sanctions-based stalemate, with scantinternational support, strongly shaped by Ross, who advocates an Israel-centricposture against the Islamic Republic. And instead of exerting judiciouspressure on both Israel and the Palestinians to achieve the two-statebreakthrough which US interests would dictate, Obama has had to cave instead tothe overwhelming political influence of Binyamin Netanyahu, and has looked to Rossas his shield against a pro-Israel lobby which would otherwise turn againsthim, and may yet do so.

The problem is, as Grenier puts it:

In his many years of successful advocacy, he has precisely mirroredboth the strengths and weaknesses of his client, and therefore must be assessedas having represented his client badly: Like the Israelis, he is a brillianttactician and a strategic ignoramus. A better advocate might have saved hisclient from himself. Instead, Dennis' many years of successful temporising havehelped to bring Israel to the point where a two-state solution is no longerpossible. Thanks in some measure to Dennis' efforts, Israel in future can beJewish, or it can be democratic: It cannot be both. Having served Israel to thepoint of helping to destroy Zionism: That is the very definition ofcatastrophic success.

Read the complete Grenier piece here.

Defence: expenditure delayed is expenditure denied

2011-11-29T16:17:00.001+11:00

In an interview with Lyndal Curtis on ABC NEWS 24 on 22November 2011 (see here)Defence Minister Stephen Smith commented on the need for Defence to contributeto the savings necessary for the government to bring the budget back tosurplus:

LYNDAL CURTIS: If there are savings found in Defence will there be realsavings or delaying spending? And could, if there is a delay in spending, couldthat create a capability gap?

STEPHEN SMITH: Well two things. Firstly, again I won’t get into thedetail; people should wait until my MYEFO comes out or, in some respectsmore importantly, wait until the budget comes out next year before descendinginto the detail.

But in terms of capability as we know because you’re dealing with a bigcapability program and you’ve essentially got a capability plan which covers aspan of a decade or more, there’s always movement, there’s always movingaround. We’ve seen that in the past and there are no surprises there. And thatalways occurs not just under this Government but under previous Governments – Isuspect it always will. What we don’t want to do is to do things that have anadverse impact on capability or on operations and I’ve consistently made itclear as Minister that if Defence does make a contribution to a general budgetoutcomes then that will not in any way adversely impact upon our operations.Firstly whether that’s Afghanistan, Solomon Islands or East Timor and secondly,we are always very conscious about capability; but there’s always movement onthe capability front either as a result of action by industry or as a result oftechnical or other difficulties. There’s always movement at that station.

The Minister’s assurance that the savings will not have an adverseimpact on operations is entirely appropriate and in the short run at least isentirely achievable, but that is only part of the story:

(1) The corollary of the protection ofexpenditure required for operations is that the savings will come from amixture of the capital equipment program and the budget for through lifesupport (maintenance) of valuable, complex equipment, both of which are anessential part of capability. This hasan inevitable consequence for future operations and the military responseoptions available to future governments.

(2) As the Minister reminded us earlier in theinterview:

In the course of the last budget, Defence effectively made a contributionof about four billion dollars over five years to help return the Government tosurplus and that was as a result of more effective work we were able to dounder our Strategic Reform Program.

(3) The savings garnered under the StrategicReform Program were to have funded the very ambitious re-equipment of theAustralian Defence Force outlined in the 2009 Defence White Paper, but as theMinister’s remarks make clear, they have instead been harvested as savings.

(4) …Thenotion that savings merely “delay” defence expenditure (“slip everything to theright”) is a spurious one – in plain English, any savings represent a reductionin expenditure. In last year’s BudgetDefence had its budget reduced by an average of $800 million per annum for fiveyears. That sounds like real money tome.

(5) Thosesavings and the prospect of more in the next Budget make a mockery of the “certainty”that the Rudd Government gave to Defence, in the context of the White Paper, thatthe Defence budget would increase in real terms by 3.3% until 2018 and 2.3%after that.

Some over-arching comments about the state of the Defencere-equipment program:

(1) Asnoted in Defencesavings: the impossible dream, I do not think the proposed savings arethere.

(2) Even if they were, nowhere does the DefenceWhite Paper demonstrate that the combination of the $20 billion in savings plusthe then projected growth of the Defence budget would be sufficient to coverthe cost of the ambitious re-equipment program, let alone the increase inthrough-life support and personnel costs for an expanded and modernised defenceforce.

(3) The reductions in Defence outlays onlyserve to take the re-equipment program even further from being achievable.

(4) Delays in decision-making at the NationalSecurity Committee of Cabinet are further compromising the program. To take just one example, as I remarkedalmost two years ago in Futuresubmarine: no time to waste, the Government was even then bumping upagainst some severe timelines if it wishes to bring a replacement submarineinto service in 2025. In order to dothat we would need to be undergoing sea trials in 2022, and working back fromthere we would need to be cutting metal in 2016. That is no longer achievable, so the delayshave already committed the Australian public and a future Australian Governmentto a multi-billion dollar refit of the Collins class submarines, in order toenable us to maintain a submarine capability at all – and that will be a 1990ssubmarine operating in the demanding environment of the 2020s. These delays have real consequences.

I think we have arrived at the stage where we need to goback to the drawing board on the Defence White Paper and re-define what it isthat we want the Australian Defence Force to do, what capabilities it will needin order to perform its allotted tasks, and what funds Government is preparedto commit to that end. Above all, the stated requirements must be backed up bythe necessary resources, or they are just words on paper.

Exporting uranium to India

2011-11-25T11:30:00.001+11:00

The announcement by the Prime Minister that she intends atthe forthcoming ALP National Conference to seek a change in the Party’sPlatform to permit the export of uranium to India is of concern on threegrounds: the content of the policy change; the apparent failure to extractanything in return for what is by any measure a major policy shift; and theextraordinary decision-making process by which this change is to be broughtabout.

The change has been presented publicly as little more thanan administrative matter designed to correct an anomaly in our current exportpolicy. The narrative runs that thepolicy discriminates against India because we are prepared to export uranium toChina, a nuclear weapon state, but not to India for peaceful use. This isarrant nonsense.

Australia’s uranium export policy was established in thelate 1970s following an extensive public inquiry (the Ranger UraniumEnvironmental Inquiry 1976-77) chaired by Justice Russell Fox. The policy was a product both of Australia’sstrong commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which hadentered into force in 1970, and to the finely balanced set of recommendationsproduced by Justice Fox to garner the widest possible consent to the mining andexport of uranium within an area of extraordinary environmental value,inhabited by indigenous people living a traditional lifestyle.

Under the framework set forth by Fox, mining would be ableto proceed under a strict regulatory regime, with strong environmentalmonitoring and research, the Kakadu National Park would be established, andAboriginal title would be granted over a number of areas of land in the region,including the Ranger Project Area.

This was a package deal, and the Fraser Government wiselydecided not to tamper with it.

On the question of exports of uranium, the Fox Reportrecommended:

Nosales of Australian uranium should take place to any country not party to theNPT. Export should be subject to the fullest and most effective safeguardsagreements, and be supported by fully adequate back-up agreements applying tothe entire civil nuclear industry in the country supplied. Australia shouldwork towards the adoption of this policy by other suppliers.

This has remained the basis of Australian policy to thepresent day. It is an approach that hashad the advantage not only of supporting the NPT (and hence our ownnon-proliferation objectives) by making access to the world’s largest supply oflow cost uranium available only to parties to the NPT, but also of enabling usto use the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s safeguards andinspection regime as our primary worldwide infrastructure for verification ofthe appropriate handling of “Australian Obligated Nuclear Material” (AONM).

In implementing Fox’s recommendations the Fraser Governmentwent beyond simply requiring states wanting to purchase Australian uranium tobe parties to the NPT. They wererequired to enter into a bilateral safeguards agreement which required, interalia, that in relation to all AONM the importing party would seek Australia’sprior written consent to transferring the material to any third party,enriching it beyond 20% U-235, and reprocessing it. This has remained the policy to the presentday, and the April 2006 agreement between Australia and China embodies thoseprinciples.

India is not a party to the NPT, has never been, hasdeveloped a nuclear weapons capability as a non-member of the Treaty, andaccordingly, is in an entirely different position from China vis a visAustralian uranium export policy.

As part of a deal to enable India to gain access to US andother nuclear technologies, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then PresidentGeorge W. Bush issued a joint statement in July 2005 to the effect that Indiawould separate its civil and military nuclear activities and place all itscivil facilities under IAEA safeguards, in return for which the United Stateswould work toward full civil nuclear cooperation with India. An IAEA Safeguards agreement was signed in2008, and India was granted an exemption by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, anexport control group that had been established mainly in response to India’sfirst nuclear test in 1974.

The IAEA Safeguards Agreement with India is not without itscritics. Daryl G. Kimball, ExecutiveDirector of the Washington based Arms Control Association notes that:

The agreement is based on the IAEA's facility-specific safeguards (INFCIRC 66 Rev. 2 ) but contains a number of"India-specific" modifications that raise serious questions about themeaning and legal requirements established by the agreement, particularly asthey affect its entry into force and the conditions under which safeguards maybe terminated on facilities and materials subject to the agreement.

He goes on to say that the agreement contains importantambiguities because there does not appear to be common understanding betweenthe Government of India and the IAEA Board regarding three critical areas:whether or not India can withdraw facilities from the agreement in certaincircumstances, i.e., whether material and facilities once placed undersafeguards must remain there in perpetuity; the absence of a declarationstating the facilities, items and materials that India is intending to placeunder safeguards, and the status of material subject to safeguards underprevious agreements. The full analysisof the Agreement by Kimball et. al.may be accessed here.

As a consequence of these changes India is now in theprivileged position of being the only known country with nuclear weapons whichis not a party to the NPT but is permitted to carry on nuclear commerce withthe rest of the world. Thediscrimination is in India’s favour, not against it.

It may be that this change in India’s circumstances warrantsa review of Australian policy, but that is by no means clear. An equally tenable position for Australiawould have been to state that for over 30 years Australia has had a policy thatit will not export uranium to countries that are not parties to the NPT andthat is not going to change.

Certainly granting India this favoured status has served nodiscernible non-proliferation objective, and one of the questions which oughtto be addressed by Australia is whether any benefits to our non-proliferationobjectives can be secured as a quid proquo for a modification of our longstanding policy. Perhaps not, but the question ought to becalmly and systematically addressed, and used as part of the bargainingprocess.

Unfortunately, what we have seen here is yet another exampleof the Prime Minister’s penchant for making announcements first and enteringinto the negotiations later. We saw aclassic example of this in relation to the “Malaysia Solution” for the offshoreprocessing of asylum seekers, and one would have hoped that the lesson wouldhave been learned by now. One of theessential criteria for success in any government to government negotiation (asin most other negotiations) is to have time on your side. It is of fundamentalimportance to be able to communicate to the other side that you are not in ahurry regarding the matter in question. Once the other side knows you are in atime bind, they have only to wait you out. So once the Government has made anannouncement on any matter that it is going to negotiate a with another countrya “solution” to what is presented to the Australian public as some kind of aproblem for us, the other side knows that the Government looks and feelssillier with every passing day that an agreement is not in place and it is justa matter of time for the prize to fall into their hands on the most favourablepossible terms. The Gillard Governmentis not unique in this respect. John Howard made it clear that he was so anxiousto have a Free Trade Agreement (sic.) with the United States that our greatally knew it would not have to give much away.

As for the process by which this momentous change is to bebrought about, it is so extraordinary that you couldn’t make it up.

Julia Gillard is the Prime Minister of Australia. As such, she leads the Executive Government,sets the Cabinet agenda and chairs, leads and controls its deliberations. She has commenced the process of changingAustralian uranium export policy by announcing to the Australian public, andthen telling the Prime Minister of India face to face, not that Cabinet, afterdue consideration, has made a decision on this matter, but that she has decidedto go to her party’s forthcoming national conference and seek a change in theparty’s platform.

This approach apparently sets aside the requirement to consultcolleagues or seek advice from officials beyond her own immediate circle. It has become a matter of public record thatshe did not consult the Foreign Minister, the Minister principally responsiblefor Australian nuclear safeguards policy, indeed all matters relating tonon-proliferation, arms control and disarmament. She is quoted in the 20 November edition of The Sunday Age (see here)as defending her decision not to consult the Foreign Minister on the basis that“It’s a leader’s decision, and I made it”.

Surely the more appropriate sequence would have been to havethe Cabinet discussion first, and make a fully informed decision as to whetheror not a change in the policy is desirable, and what its ramifications are, thentake the matter to the party if needs be, armed with the support of a properlyconsidered Cabinet decision.

When it suits her, the Prime Minister ignores the partyplatform – vide her steadfast refusal to contemplate abandoning the “MalaysiaSolution” and implementing that part of the platform which commits the party toonshore processing of asylum seekers. And when it suits her, she invokes the Departmental “experts” as thelast word in authoritative policy-making (same issue – the “Malaysia Solution).

So why the rush to judgement on this one, why the need tochange the platform before the due process of governmental deliberations has takenplace, and once she has made an exception for India, what is she going to sayto our allies in Pakistan and her dear friends in Israel?

Note: This itemwas first posted on the ABC’s The Drum websiteon 21 November 2011. Access it and 136 comments here).

Bionote: As Deputy Secretary in the Department of Tradeand Resources in the late 1970s I was directly involved in the FraserGovernment’s consideration of the recommendations of the Ranger UraniumEnvironmental Inquiry, and in the negotiation of several bilateral safeguardsagreements.

What should we make of Iran's nuclear program?

2011-11-18T13:15:00.001+11:00

The Iranian nuclear program is back in the news, with themedia publishing a restricted report to his Board of Governors by theDirector-General of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, on the subjectof the implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) SafeguardsAgreement with Iran, and the compliance of that country with relevant UNSecurity Council resolutions (see full report here).

As predictably as death and taxes the news has beenaccompanied by Israel indicating that it is considering a pre-emptive militarystrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and demands from the United States fortighter sanctions.

This report has received more than usual attention on thisoccasion because the IAEA has crossed a kind of nuclear threshold of its own,coming explicitly to the conclusion, for the first time that I am aware of,that there are aspects of the Iranian program that are only relevant to thedevelopment of a nuclear explosive device, and stating in its concludingsummary:

53. The Agency has seriousconcerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclearprogramme. After assessing carefully andcritically the extensive information available to it, the Agency finds theinformation to be, overall, credible. The information indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevantto the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information alsoindicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under astructured program, and that some activities may be still ongoing

Decoding that paragraph just a little, the IAEA feels it hasa good picture of a structured program relevant to the development of a nuclearweapons capability prior to the end of 2003, but is not sure what the Iraniansare up to now. This does not tell usmuch that is new. A 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate stated (see here) as the first of its“Key Judgements”:

We judge with high confidencethat in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assesswith moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open theoption to develop nuclear weapons.

The incoming Obama Administration was briefed in similarvein by US intelligence agencies in 2009.

This leaves us with many questions to be addressed. DoesIran have a “legitimate” reason for a nuclear electricity program, and if itdoes, why is it so insistent on developing its own enrichment capability andfacilities? Why does it have undeclaredsites that come to light from time to time, and why are so many of thesefacilities, ostensibly for peaceful purposes, buried deep underground? Is Iran developing a bomb, and if so, howworried should we be, and should we try to do something about it?

Many have for a long time drawn dark conclusions fromIranian insistence on having the full suite of nuclear fuel cycle capabilitiesin-country. This insistence is in factof little evidentiary value concerning the peacefulness or otherwise of Iran’snuclear intentions, because Iran’s experience in this field would provideadequate justification for full independence for a purely civil program – whichindependence is the treaty right of all members of the NPT.

The history of the Iranian nuclear program dates back to thedays of the Shah. In 1978 I was involvedin negotiating a nuclear safeguards agreement to cover the intended supply ofAustralian uranium, visited Tehran, and was given a site tour of the powerstation which had been under construction at Bushehr since 1975 by the Germancompany Kraftwerk Union AG – the same plant that was finally completed by theRussians and began feeding power into the Iranian grid in September of thisyear (not much sense of urgency there!). The Shah saw a nuclear power program as an alternative to burning thenation’s valuable petroleum resources, a sign that Iran was at the first rankof technological capability and hence a source of international prestige, andin all probability, the source of a nuclear weapons option – all views that intime came to be adopted by his Islamic Revolutionary successors.

In light of its historical experiences Iran’s attitude toany proposal for dealing with its emerging nuclear technological capabilitywill be governed by three headline considerations:

(1) Iran will not agree to any proposal whichaccords to it a status that is inferior to that of other nations. As is thecase with China, Iran regards itself as the heir to one of the world’s greatcivilisations, and is a country which was very much put upon by the West at atime when it was militarily weak. Over the last century or so it has knownforeign military occupation (Britain and Russia), resource theft (theAnglo-Iranian Oil Company, now known as BP), intervention in its internalaffairs (the 1953 overthrow by the CIA of the Mossadeq government), militaryinvasion (Iraq, assisted in a variety of ways by the United States), and ofcourse economic and financial sanctions (ongoing). Accordingly, it will notsettle for any arrangement which it regards as humiliating, even if there arecosts in rejecting what might look like an attractive deal.

(2) Iran lives under the constant threat of attackby Israel and will not do anything to limit the development of its militaryresponse options. I believe for a variety of reasons that Iran has not yet madea decision to move to a military nuclear capability, and is unlikely to do soif it feels it can avoid it, but the ambiguity about the extent of its nuclearcapability is part of its deterrence strategy.

(3) Iran has absolutely no reason to trust theWest on this matter. In 1974, during the Shah’s time, Iran lent $US 1 billionto the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to build its Eurodif enrichmentfacility, and acquired a 10 per cent indirect interest in Eurodif through theFranco-Iranian company Sofidif – a stake that still exists. Iran paid another$180 million for future enrichment services to fuel its nuclear power plants.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Khomeini regimecancelled the Shah’s nuclear program and sought refund of this investment.There followed a decade of bitter litigation, as a result of which Iran wasreimbursed a total of $1.6 billion for its 1974 loan plus interest. It remainsan indirect shareholder in Sofidif, but under the 1991 agreement which settledthe litigation it has no access to technology and no right to take enricheduranium. It has the shareholder’s right to dividends, but financial sanctionsagainst Iran mean that it cannot even receive these dividends.

Iran also has a 15% stake in the Rössing uranium mine inNamibia, the world’s third largest uranium mine, of which the main other ownersare Rio Tinto (68%) and the Government of Namibia (10%). There are two Iranian Directors, Messrs S.N.Ashrafizade and A.V. Kalantari, but Iran does not have contracts for thepurchase of uranium. It is ironic that a company partly owned by Iran, and whichsells uranium to the United States, cannot sell uranium to Iran.

So a country which has for thirty years had a stake in oneof the world’s largest uranium mines and in a uranium enrichment plant, but hasseen those stakes effectively frozen all that time, is being asked to believethat it can “trust us” to look after its civil nuclear power needs. IranianPresident Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has referred explicitly to this situation in variouspublic comments.

The development of nuclear weapons capability by Iran or anyother country can hardly be viewed as a positive development, but it is not anoccasion for the international hysteria that Israel and its US partisansconstantly attempt to drum up. Since theearly 1990s, when Israel started to run out of the sorts of threats that wouldenable it to engage Washington’s attention in a convincing manner, we have beenhearing about how Iran is an ‘existential threat’ to Israel.

There are two elements to this preposterous claim:

- An Iraniannuclear weapons capability is just around the corner, perhaps only months away

- Iran isrun by mad mullahs, irrational and unpredictable people who could do anything,and who therefore could not be entrusted with nuclear weapons.

Regarding the first element, in 1992 Benyamin Netanyahu toldthe Knesset that Iran was 3-5 years away from being able to produce a nuclearweapon, and on the other side of the political fence, Shimon Peres told FrenchTV that Iran would have nuclear warheadsby 1999. The Christian Science Monitor recently published a timeline of the“breathless predictions that the Islamic Republic will soon be at the brink ofnuclear capability” going back to 1979. Thefact that Iran has been “on the brink” of a nuclear capability for almost twodecades speaks to the credibility of that argument.

As for the notion that Iran is run by “mad mullahs”, thefact is that the Iranian leadership has been quite rational and cautious in theconduct of its foreign and military policies, and can be expected to continueto be so.

On the subject of the supposed “existential threat”, no lessan authority than Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak has said

I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue forIsrael. Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existentialthreat.

Before he left office in 2008, former Prime Minister EhudOlmert said:

Part of our megalomania and our loss of proportion is the things thatare said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of proportionabout itself.

Whether anything should be done about Iran’s nuclearactivities, that is partly a function of how serious the threat is, and partlya function of what the options are. There are only two options for direct action: sanctions and air strikesagainst the Iranian nuclear facilities.

While restrictions on sale of relevant equipment andtechnologies make some sense, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hassomething else in mind: the “crippling sanctions” that she calls for from timeto time.

Thisis a seriously dumb idea, for too many reasons to enumerate here, but here aresome of the main ones:

- It is highly unlikely that the UnitedStates will get sufficient support for such sanctions to gain agreement totheir imposition.

- Even if sanctions are agreed, theywill be almost impossible to enforce – Iran has land borders with too manycountries, plus coastlines on the Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Caspian Sea. Itis altogether too porous.

- Enforcing sanctions would almostcertainly require patrolling of Iran’s offshore waters, with a high risk ofconfrontation and military escalation.

- The sanctions regime would cause allkinds of grief for the oil companies that need to do business in Iran in orderto supply the West with crude oil.

- Iran demonstrated during theIran-Iraq war an immense capacity to endure suffering. It is unlikely to buckleunder any sort of sanctions regime that the West would be prepared toestablish.

- Also, this is a society that is proudof its long history and possessed of great self-respect – the sort ofself-respect that led Britain to resolve to fight on in the dark days afterDunkirk; in its own mind there was no alternative, no real question to beaddressed. Iran will not buckle under external economic pressure.

- As explained in my 2009 blog piece Chokepoint: the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has the option of retaliating by closingthe Strait of Hormuz. The United States would have to respond, and the ensuingconfrontation would pose a high risk of spiralling out of control.

Asidefrom all of the above, there is the morality of imposing “crippling sanctions”against anyone. As the sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime demonstrated,general economic sanctions (as distinct from export controls on particularitems of military significance) hit hardest the most vulnerable in society –infants, young children, the ill and the elderly. They do so by reducing accessto electricity, clean water, safe food, emergency transport, spare parts forimported equipment upon which life or safety depend. Iran’s very poor air safetyrecord is in part a product of the unavailability of aircraft spares under theexisting sanctions. If the proposed “crippling sanctions” are introduced, thescarce available supplies of liquid fuels will be reserved for what the regimeconsiders to be their highest and best use – the uses of the regime itself andof the Iranian military. For everyone else, life will be just that muchtougher. In a country of 66 million, a 1% impact on whether any given personwill live or die in the next twelve months amounts, across the population as awhole, to 660,000 avoidable deaths per annum. Sanctions are not a peaceful orlow-harm way of going to war.

As for the pre-emptive strike option, that is dumberstill. Iran has nuclear facilitiesscattered across a country the size of Queensland, some of them deepunderground and/or defended by Russian surface to air missiles. Mounting the necessary air raids would be astretch for the Israeli Air Force, and afterwards the IAF could never be surewhether the known facilities had been destroyed or whether there werealternative unknown facilities that had not even been attacked. And anyone who thinks that the only possibleconsequence of an Israeli attack on Iran would be retaliation by Hezbollah fromthe Lebanon is dreaming.

There are some things in life that one just has to learn tolive with, and I think an Iranian nuclear capability, if Iran chooses to gothat way, is one of them.

Note: This itemwas first posted on the ABC’s The Drum websiteon 14 November 2011. Access it and 298 comments here).

Are KPIs appropriate to the public service?

2011-11-09T22:18:00.000+11:00

An article in the 25 October 2011 edition of The Age (see Ombudsmanblasts child protection) cites a “scathing” recent Victorian Ombudsman’sreport as saying that managers in Victoria's child protection system failed toinvestigate reports of children at risk so they could meet numerical targets.

Acting Victorian Ombudsman John Taylor said his investigationsinto the Department of Human Services child protection program in the LoddonMallee region revealed serious and significant failures to provide safety andwellbeing to the state's most vulnerable children.

In his report tabled in the Victorian Parliament on 25October Taylor said the failures were caused by deliberate policy decisions ofcertain managers to reduce the number of child protection reports investigated:

I consider the failure to investigate these reports to be a consequenceof an intentional policy decision by the Bendigo office of the Loddon MalleeRegion of the department to reduce the number of child protection reports thatit investigates.

Despite receiving more reports in 2010-11 than the previous year, theregion conducted less than three quarters of the number of investigations.

I believe a practice has developed where the drive to meet numericaltargets has overshadowed the interest of children despite evidence that theymay be at risk.

The managers deny this, however, I consider that the evidence speaksfor itself.

It is not the first time – indeed, the article says that itis the fourth Ombudsman's report in two years raising serious concerns aboutthe performance of Victoria's child protection system. Almost two years ago wesaw Childprotection workers fudging figures: report in the 26 November 2009 editionof The Age, which begins:

A scathing Ombudsman's report has identified gross deficiencies inVictoria's child protection service, with workers manipulating figures to coverup children neglected by the system.

This report was never released tothe public but the then Brumby Government’s Community Services Minister LisaNeville said that each of the Ombudsman’s 42 recommendations would be implemented.If they were, not much seems to have changed.

At a superficial level reportslike this raise the question of what is wrong with the relevant agency, but ata deeper, more fundamental level they raise the question of whether theimportation into public service of business practices like giving agencies andindividual officers numerical targets (“Key Performance Indicators” – KPIs) isappropriate to the public policy and service delivery purposes for which publicsector agencies are created.

Key Performance Indicators are aproduct of the business maxim, “What gets measured gets done”, which in itselfis a warning to those responsible for leading our public sector agencies, forthe corollary is that what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done. KPIs tellstaff in no uncertain terms that when it comes to the crunch, certain thingsmatter and nothing else does. Messageslike that are barely appropriate in business. They have no place in the publicsector.

KPIs work best when the requiredresults are simple and easy to specify. It is easy to set KPIs for thedistributor of a standardised manufactured retail item like, say, soft drinksor breakfast cereal, which might specify for example that the goods must bedelivered to a retailer within a specified time of the order being placed, thatthe consignments must be accurately made up, that there must be no breakages orspillages, and perhaps that the quantity or value of goods sold in a particulardistribution zone should increase by a certain percentage over the previousyear.

The Soviet Union discovered a longtime ago that even in as standardised a process as the manufacture of everydayitems, the specification of required outputs requires great care. If you tell amanager to produce two tonnes of nails you will get two tonnes of 6 inch nailsbecause they are easier to produce. Ifyou tell them to produce 10,000 nails you will get 10,000 panel pins, becausethey will require less metal.

When it comes to the delivery ofcomplex services, these Victorian Ombudsman’s reports scream out the messagethat KPIs break down completely. They are simply inappropriate to measuring theperformance of complex tasks. Whatshould be a high resolution colour photograph of a complex job, with all itsnuances and subtleties, gets reduced to six or eight data points.

KPIs are also an open invitationto game the system. Tell a manager thatwhat is required for performance pay or for promotion is to meet certainnumerical targets and they will be met, by a combination of concentrating onthe easier cases and fudging the figures. There is money and position at stake,and people will duck, weave, dissemble and tell outright lies in order toestablish that they have met their KPIs. “Follow the money trail” is as reliable a guide to human behaviour hereas elsewhere.

The result is that in anenvironment infected by KPIs managers at every level will have less knowledgeof what is really going on than they otherwise would, and that in itselfcompromises organisational effectiveness.

To understand what is required to manage and measureperformance in a large hierarchical organisation it is necessary to recognise threekey principles.

The first is that a “manager” is by definition a person whois accountable for the performance of others. In the course of delivering onthat accountability managers at every level are responsible for advising peopleof their duties and giving them the authority to act, ensuring that they receiveadequate training to carry out their responsibilities, coaching them in thefiner points, deciding what needs to be done and what doesn’t, allocating tasksto people who are equipped to carry them out, and allocating the necessaryresources.

Recognise that central hierarchical accountability point andyou are well on the way to understanding how a public service department in aWestminster system (and indeed any well run large organisation) is meant towork. The Department Secretary is accountable to the Minister for theperformance of the Department as a whole. In turn, the Division Heads areaccountable to the Secretary for the performance of their Divisions, the BranchHeads are accountable to the Division Heads for the performance of theirBranches and so on. In a very real sense only the individuals at each level andtheir immediate supervisors have a full understanding of what the work in theirlocal workplace is: what the current and emerging issues are, the workloadpressures, how easy or difficult the people with whom they must interact are, andthe priorities determined in the light of guidance from above.

There is not space to develop this line of thinking fullyhere, but what emerges from it is that the only KPI that has any meaning isthat individuals at each level, whether they be managers or front-line staff,perform to the satisfaction of their immediate supervisor. Supervisors being by definition responsibleand accountable for the work of everyone below them, it matters not to peoplefurther up the line how the work getsdone or who does it; what matters is whetherit gets done, and to what quality.

The second is that performance at any level – theperformance of managers and the performance of individuals – can only reasonablybe measured in the light of the resources made available, a fact which isnotoriously lost from sight when meeting KPIs is the order of the day. It is not under-performance for an individualto be unable to carry out a task, or a series of tasks, or a volume of tasks,for which they have not been given the necessary resources, the necessaryguidance or the necessary training. The November 2009 Ombudsman’s Report blamedlack of resources for poor service quality and said the failures it reportedwere not a reflection on the staff. Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary said that the report reflected anoverwhelmed department where beleaguered workers were often vilified forshortfalls in the system. No doubt theyare both correct. Governments are notorious for under-resourcing functions thatthey see as necessary but politically unglamorous, and then blaming the haplessstaff and/or senior management when things go wrong.

The third essential principle is that senior people in anylarge organisation are paid to make judgements, and the performance of staff isquintessentially a matter for judgement, not something that can be reduced to aseries of numbers that would enable a chimpanzee to assess performance. Priorities change, resources that were meantto be available are delayed or unavailable, things beyond the control of theindividual go wrong, other matters intervene. Only someone in a position to observe closely – the immediate supervisor– can make a fully informed judgement about the performance of a subordinateunit or an individual, and making those judgements is a key part of their job.

Consequent upon this, another key responsibility oforganisational leadership is to speak truth to power – to advise people up thecommand chain what resources are required in order to carry out the unit’sfunctions to an acceptable standard, and not allow themselves to be fobbed offwith bromides about having to learn “to do more with less”. Everyone should be striving to improve theirpersonal effectiveness and that of their organisations, but there are limits towhat any one human being can do.

So I say it is time to throw the whole silly business ofpublic sector KPIs overboard. Statistics can inform management decisions but shouldnot be allowed to substitute for them. It is time to get back to the holding our politicians accountable forproviding their agencies with the resources they need to carry out what isexpected of them, for appointing mangers who have the skills and the authorityto lead the organisation and ensure that it delivers, and holding thoseauthorised managers accountable for their performance.

In conclusion it is worth noting that, aside from thebusiness of giving everyone Stakhanovite KPIs, I fear we have learned anotherbad habit from the deservedly defunct Soviet Union – the selective enforcementof requirements, to the disadvantage of those who are out of favour. When the Soviet Union began to becomesensitive to international criticism of its nasty habit of locking updissidents, it for the most part ceased locking them up for their dissidentbehaviour but pinged them for the sorts of economic sins that were endemic,part of making life tolerable in the centrally planned economy – crimes likeacquiring a bit of foreign currency to buy small consumer items like jeans andBeatles records, or paying someone to give you their place on the waiting listfor a fridge, a television set or a car. There were no political prisonersanymore, only people who had violated the foreign currency or other economicregulations.

KPIs are a marvellous vehicle for selective enforcement, amarvellous cover for favouritism or covert discrimination. It is so easy to be understanding about allthe extenuating circumstances that explain why the chosen ones didn’t meettheir KPIs, but the advancement of those who are not favoured is easilyexplained – “they didn’t meet their KPIs”.

If you disagree with the above analysis, ask yourselfwhether you think that a quarter of a century of managerialism in our publicsector has improved the quality of policy making or service delivery. I do not think so.

Note: A slightly shorter version of this piece wasposted on the ABC’s The Drum on 3November 2011 (see here).

Keating in Laos

2011-10-15T22:29:00.002+11:00

In April 1994 then Prime Minister Paul Keating visited Laosfor the official opening of the Mekong Bridge, the first ever bridge across theMekong, which crosses the river from the Thai provincial capital Nong Khai tothe village of Thanaleng, just south of the Lao capital, Vientiane. It was constructed as an Australian aidproject, and I had the privilege to serve as the Chairman of theAustralian-Lao-Thai Steering Committee which negotiated the arrangements and oversightedthe construction.

The day before the official opening of the bridge PaulKeating attended the official opening of the border facilities, on the Lao sideof the border, which were also constructed as an Australia aid project.

The border facilities of necessity include a trafficinterchange; Thailand drives on the left hand side of the road and Laos on theright.

The opening of the border post was also attended by thePrime Minister (Chairman of the Council of Ministers) of the Lao PDR, Mr KhamtaiSiphandon, seen here meeting with Keating at the opening.

And just for the record, here is the official plaque.

Andrew Farran on the Malaysia Solution

2011-09-24T17:51:00.000+10:00

The following letter by my friend and colleague AndrewFarran, former diplomat, Defence official and Senior Lecturer in InternationalLaw at Monash University, was published in edited form in both The Age and The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday 20 September 2011.

With Andrew’s permission the full text as submitted isreproduced below:

Re: Migration Act- does the government wish to denounce the UN Convention?

Dear Sir,

If the governmentproceeds to amend the Migration Act by removing the rights and protectionsaccorded to asylum-seekers and refugees under the UN Refugee Convention (1951)and Protocol (1967), it would in effect be denouncing the Convention. It may as well go the whole way and do itformally, giving 12 months’ notice under Article 40 of the Convention.

Whileinternational law may not be directly enforceable in domestic law, treatycommitments carry a duty to incorporate, and a presumption that theirprovisions would be construed in the courts, to further their purpose, withoutundue derogation.

If the governmenthas problems with the Convention, as apparently it does, there is the right torequest its revision under Article 45. It cannot pretend to be adhering to its internationalobligations while stripping these out of domestic law. Nor, as the High Court has made clear, can anynumber of Ministerial declarations regarding the rights and protection ofrefugees and asylum seekers in another jurisdiction stand up if a legal basisfor those rights and protections does not exist in that other jurisdiction, asis the case with both Malaysia and Nauru.

Use of terms inlegislation relating to arriving refugees and asylum-seekers such as “unlawfulnon-citizen” and “offshore entry person”, regardless of the fact that under theRefugee Convention their arrival per se is not “unlawful”, and that they mayalready be on Australian territory, is prejudicial. Under the proposed changes it would appearthat these persons will be treated as “unlawful”, and the distinction of beingon-shore and off-shore will be irrelevant in exercising the new powers ofdeportation.

While Conventionobligations may be excepted on national security grounds, this has to be shownto be the case with each individual applicant, which would be a long shotindeed in most cases.

Yours, etc.

ANDREW FARRAN

Beaumaris, Vic.

Former Senior Lecturer in International Law

Monash University

Richard Farmer on the Gillard Government

2011-08-31T14:07:00.000+10:00

Regular readers will know I have a particular antipathy tothe whole business of government spin, of the endless repetition of carefullycrafted messages full of vacuous phrases like “moving forward”, in the apparentbelief that once we have been exposed to them often enough we will begin tosalivate like Pavlov’s dogs every time we hear them. Perhaps some of these people have seen The Manchurian Candidate on too manytimes for their own good.

As I wrote in Spinundermines government resilience over a year ago, I don’t think thesecreatures do governments any good, and their pernicious influence helps to reducethe public service to a state of learned helplessness.

I also think that because their style is reactive anddefensive, they let the Opposition set the agenda, and lure government intospending too much of its time talking to people who are simply not on itswavelength and never going to vote for them anyway.

I am tired of seeing politicians in hard hats and fluorojackets on the nightly television news. Like historian and former Keating speechwriter Don Watson on Monday night's Q&A, I wish theywould put them all away and begin to speak to us like adults.

And I think that our political leaders should spend far moretime in their offices going about the nation’s business and a vanishingly smallamount of time performing stunts and chasing media opportunities.

I have written on this topic and tweeted about aspects of itoften, but I don’t think I have yet managed to put the issue as succinctly orcompellingly as Richard Farmer in yesterday’s edition of Crikey:

Taking the bait. What doyou do when your tactics are completely failing and defeat is looming? Somepeople might decide to try something different but not the Australian LaborParty. Its response to medicine that makes things worse rather than better isto increase the dose.

The government of Julia Gillard is now a victim of its inability tostop playing politics in the way dictated by its opponents. The Prime Ministerseems to believe she has to respond to the bully-boy tactics of Tony Abbott inkind. Insult is matched by insult; distortion by distortion; spin by spin.Running the country is reduced to a series of corny photo opportunities.

The topics for this unedifying national debate are chosen by theLiberals and Nationals. And if opinion polls mean anything at all then Labor issick and getting sicker.

A radical change in approach is called for. It is time for Labor tobecome the serious ones that avoid the gimmickry of modern perpetualcampaigning. Forget the 24-hour news cycle. Stop the farce of what they theseday call "the doors" where members repeat the carefully crafted andmeaningless attack or defence words of the day.

Actually answer Opposition questions in parliament as they deserve tobe answered, with a brief yes or no normally, without the debating schoolrhetoric. Abolish Dorothy Dixers from your own side. Let Labor backbenchersactually think for themselves and seek information about things of interest tothem rather than raise subjects some whiz-kid thinks will make for a tellinggrab on the nightly television news.

Let Tony Abbott bore everyone on his own.

Put away the funny hats and fluoro vests. Keep the Prime Minister inher office most of the time and let her out to give an occasional speech thatactually says something. And instead of those door-stop interviews, schedule aformal press conference once a fortnight.

Future submarine: informed debate needed.

2011-07-10T17:47:00.001+10:00

An unhelpful and regrettably uninformed contribution to the debate about Australia’s future submarine capability, and indeed about the current Collins Class submarines, was made last week by a senior official who ought to know better, and upon whom we ought to be able to rely for public utterances underpinned by careful research and analysis.

In Australia’s mining boom: what’s the problem?, an address to The Melbourne Institute and The Australian Economic and Social Outlook Conference, 30 June 2011, Productivity Commission Chairman Gary Banks had this to say, in a section of his address which canvassed areas which might contribute to fiscal consolidation:

But no doubt there is more low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. For example, the case for Australia spending $36 billion or so on another dozen homemade submarines, when imported alternatives could be purchased for a fraction of the cost (and risk) has never been adequately explained publicly — notwithstanding the generally acknowledged failure of the Collins Class precedent. The whole area of defence procurement seems ripe for a thorough independent review.

While I would agree with Mr Banks about the need to review defence procurement, his comments about the availability from an overseas supplier of an acceptable future submarine are remarkably ill-informed. He appears to believe that a submarine is a commodity, like sand or cement – as long as the article travels under the label “submarine” it will do the job.

In fact a submarine is one of the most complex pieces of military equipment in existence, the design of which involves wicked trade-offs between range, capability and stealth. Because of these trade-offs, submarines are carefully designed for the particular roles they are to perform, with equally careful regard to the geographical environment in which they are to serve.

To put it in a nutshell, European submarines are typically built for short patrols in deep cold water. Australia needs long range submarines, to operate in warm shallow water. All other navies which operate long-range submarines operate nuclear fleets, so if we want a long range fleet it is going to have to be purpose designed.

As long ago as 2008 a group of some of the nation’s leading experts on submarine design and operation advised the Government that there is no military off the shelf option which will provide the capabilities which Australia requires, and that this will of necessity be a developmental project. The nearest design which meets Australia’s capability requirements is the Collins Class submarine, and accordingly this represents the lowest risk starting point for the development of a new design for the mid-21st century.

In addition, there is good reason to believe that the United States will refuse to release certain critical technologies for incorporation into a European designed and/or built submarine, for fear of technology leakage.

This advice of these experts informed the Government’s thinking about the requirements for Australia’s future submarine capability and was reflected in the 2009 Defence White Paper. The case which was made and accepted had nothing to do with “skilled job creation or technological spillovers” as suggested by Mr Banks in his presentation – it was purely and simply a clear case of there being no off the shelf option that goes even close to meeting the need.

As for his claim about “the generally acknowledged failure of the Collins Class precedent”, I know of no-one in the submarine world who thinks that the Collins Class was a failure. The Defence Materiel Organisation has never provided enough budget to maintain them properly, but that is another story.

And just for the record, there was no significant cost over-run with the Collins project, notwithstanding the Howard Government’s beat-up to the contrary, which as far as I can discern was intended to demonstrate that the then Leader of the Opposition, Kym Beazley, had made a foolish decision when, as Defence Minister in the Hawke Government, he had opted to have the submarines built in Australia. Of the $1.7 billion allocated to “fix” the submarines following the 1998 McIntosh-Prescott Report, only $143 was for areas where the submarines failed to meet the requirements of a contract well in excess of $5 billion (in other words, to fix the submarines); $300 million was for changed operational requirements and $727 for technological obsolescence (i.e., technological developments which had taken place during the build).

These remarks by Mr Banks were a reprise of a comment he made in his keynote address to the Annual Forecasting Conference of Australian Business Economists in December 2010 (see here), at which he referred to “submarines costing multiples of equivalent imported models”. The key word there is “equivalent” – the best advice available to the Government that Mr Banks serves is that there is no equivalent imported model. Who told Mr Banks that there was?

Comments by senior commentators like Mr Banks matter. His recent remarks were enthusiastically quoted by Australian Financial Review Economics Editor Allan Mitchell in an opinion piece on Wednesday 6 July, and by columnist Brian Toohey in a piece posted on Inside Story on 7 July (see Luxury vessels here). And so the notion that building the submarines is an unnecessary indulgence receives further confirmation in the public mind.

There is a debate to be had about Australia’s future submarine, an important debate – so let’s hope that it can be a better informed debate than it seems to be at the moment.

Note: The information cited above about the budget allocations for completion of the Collins Class project was drawn from Peter Yule and Derek Woolner, The Collins Class Submarine Story: Steel, Spies and Spin, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 324.

Foreign investment and food security

2011-07-03T17:53:00.002+10:00

The question of whether or not the purchase of Australian farmland by foreign governments or foreign government agencies or enterprises, or indeed by any foreigners at all, will have an impact on Australian food security continues to bubble along in the nation’s political discourse. Associated with these concerns are claims that the purchase of Australian assets by foreign government owned agencies or companies involves a loss of Australian sovereignty.

The two hot items currently giving momentum to this debate are the purchase of farmland in Western Victoria by a Qatar Government-backed entity, and the purchase of 43 farms outside Gunnedah by the Chinese Government-controlled Shenhua Watermark Coal Corporation, whose interest in these farms is clearly the coal that lies under them.

One of the latest contributions to the debate is an opinion piece by CIS Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Economics at UTS Business School Stephen Kirchner, in The Weekend Financial Review, 2-3 July 2011.

Kirchner sees no problem in foreign investment in our farm sector – he says it will enhance our food security – and he sees only base motives in those who wish to “meddle” in commercial transactions and thereby prevent Australian farmers from getting the highest sale price they can for their farms:

What unites politicians on this issue is not so much xenophobia but their conviction they have the right to meddle in commercial transactions they don’t like.

….

Xenophon’s proposed national interest test is more prescriptive than the existing national interest test under the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act, which is deliberately open-ended.

Ironically, this would open the door to administrative and judicial review of the Treasurer’s unbounded discretion to reject foreign acquisitions that fall within the terms of the act.

This may not bother Xenophon, but it certainly bothers other politicians and Treasury, who want to preserve their ability to meddle without scrutiny by the courts.

…

The FIRB is just a fig-leaf of bureaucratic respectability for political decisions to interfere in commercial transactions and deny the resident owners of Australian equity the right to realise its full value by selling to the highest bidder.

There is some silly ideological stuff here: Kirchner appears to believe that nothing should be permitted to get in the way of a “commercial transaction” – being “commercial” puts it off limits, apparently – and his imputation of base motives to anyone who believes otherwise almost obscures the key policy point he makes in his article:

In the unlikely event of a serious international conflict or crisis, foreign-owned assets in Australia can be nationalised or exports of food restricted.

There are some important issues to be considered in relation to large scale foreign investment in Australia, but as Kirchner’s comment immediately above indicates, they have little do with either food security or sovereignty.

To deal with the latter point first, investment in Australia by sovereign entities or sovereign-owned or –controlled entities involves no compromise to Australian sovereignty. This is because, while the entity might exercise the powers of the sovereign in its own country, it can only be present in Australia as an Australian natural or corporate person, its actions within the Australian jurisdiction entirely subject to Australian law. Foreign entities farming in Australia, for example, are subject to the same rules about land clearing, control of noxious weeds, plant and animal health, use of agricultural chemicals etc. as everyone else, and to tax laws including those relating to transfer pricing.

Similarly, any entity, sovereign or not, wishing to convert farmland for purposes of mining will be subject to the approval of the responsible State and Commonwealth authorities. There is a debate to be had about whether or not 43 farms outside Gunnedah should be made over for coal mining, but that debate has nothing to do with the fact of the 43 farms now being owned by a Chinese Government-owned company.

Unlike Mr Kirchner I do not believe that nothing should be permitted to get in the way of a commercial transaction and I think that from time to time particular transactions raise important matters of national interest for consideration by the Government of the day.

Nor do I share his view that Treasury officials are motivated in this matter by a desire to meddle. In the days when I was directly involved in advising on foreign investment in mining (1970s-80s, as a senior officer of the Department of Trade and Resources) I was far more often concerned by the desire of Treasury officials not to meddle in transactions that I saw as raising serious national interest questions. This was particularly the case when John Howard was Treasurer; to my recollection John Howard never saw a foreign investment proposal he didn’t like, and most of the relevant Treasury officials were of a similar view.

As I wrote back in March 2009 about the proposal for Chinalco to increase its stake in Rio Tinto (see State-owned is not the main problem):

The principal reason [why the application should be declined] is not, as often asserted in the media, the fact that Chinalco is a state owned enterprise (SOE), and might not therefore behave in accordance with normal commercial considerations. The most important reason is that Chinalco is a major player in its own right in the international minerals market, which is why it wishes to increase its stake in Rio Tinto, and likely to become more so. Either now or in the future, its commercial interests as a buyer and investor elsewhere might well diverge from the Australian national interest as a seller. We should examine carefully for its potential impact on the national interest every proposal for a major foreign purchaser of minerals to take a stake in the Australian minerals industry.

Issues raised by proposed investments which establish foreigners in a position on both sides of the commercial negotiating table are:

- Transfer pricing issues

- Access through taking a minority stake to commercially sensitive price information – very important in relation to monopsony buying practices of the Japanese steel industry before market conditions put market power in the hands of the producers rather than the consumers.

- Issues to do with foreign government coordination of purchasing by enterprises within their jurisdiction, public or private. Two examples will suffice:

(1) In the late 1970s when the contracts were being negotiated, the sum of the amounts that the nine Japanese power utilities wished to take from the Northwest Shelf LNG project was vastly in excess of the amounts that the project would produce. Having secured from the NW Shelf consortium a rather unwise undertaking that they would not sell any of the gas to other than Japanese customers, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry then proceeded to allocate amounts determined by it to the individual power companies, so that suddenly Japanese demand was equal to Australian supply, and there was no price auction. I will leave it to the reader to judge what impact this may have had on the project’s revenue stream.

(2) In 1986, when China ceased buying all its wool through a single government agency (Chinatex, represented at the Australian wool auctions by the formidable Mme Zhu Youlan) and four separate agencies began to compete with each other in the market, there was a major spike in the Australian wool price – a fact which Mme Zhu in conversation with me attributed to the inter-agency competition. Clearly the reduced coordination in China was good for Australian woolgrowers.

- The willingness of foreign executives to abide by Australian Government policy (very difficult in my experience with US companies which for entirely understandable reasons put US laws such as the Trading with the Enemy Act and the extraterritorial reach of US antitrust law ahead of Australian law).

The above examples should be sufficient to indicate that large-scale foreign investment does indeed raise national interest questions which it is proper for governments to consider. To those who find it troublesome that the national interest is nowhere defined in legislation, and believe that it ought to be, my response would be that determination of the national interest is properly a matter for the elected government of the day, in the circumstances at the time, and the capacity of a present or future government to determine the national interest should not be constrained by an attempt to define it in advance in legislation at a particular moment in time. There was a time when State Governments felt that it was in the public interest to legislate that no Asian person can own an interest in a mining lease or a boat, and sooner or later such legislation can become, well, downright embarrassing. As a 1963 article in Time magazine noted (see here):

Whim Creek. The White Australia policy is often carried to absurd, esoteric extremes. Recently, five Japanese technicians employed by a Japanese-controlled mining concern—at, of all places, Whim Creek in Western Australia—were convicted of violating an obscure 1904 law specifying that "no Asiatic or African alien shall be employed in any capacity whatever in or about any mine claim." As a result, Western Australia's state legislature last week repealed the law, but virtually negated its action by adopting an amendment specifying that Asians must still get government permits to work in the mines.

As for those governments who believe that they are increasing their resource or food security by investing in production in Australia, my advice would be that the investment achieves very little by way of security over and above that which can be obtained simply by signing a commercial contract with an Australian-based supplier.

On the one hand, contracts are enforceable at law, and there is every reason for the buyer to expect them to be performed if at all feasible. On the other hand, the Australian Government has clear power under the Constitution to prevent or control exports, and nothing written into a commercial contract will prevent an Australian Government from exercising that power if it saw it as being in the national interest to do so. In the unlikely event that Australia ever faced food shortages, it is hard to imagine an Australian standing idly by and permitting food supplies needed in the home market to be exported.

There can be all sorts of valid reasons for foreign governments and their controlled entities to invest in Australia, but security of supply is not really one of them.

There can be all sorts of reasons for Australian Governments to decline to approve proposed investments by foreign government entities, but loss of sovereignty is not one of them.

Armidale Demonstration School 150th anniversary

2011-06-06T23:23:00.003+10:00

Armidale City Public School, known when I attended it (1949-55) as the Armidale Demonstration School, is this year celebrating its 150th anniversary. Three days of events to celebrate the sesquicentenary will be held in Armidale over the Queen’s Birthday weekend, from Friday 10 – Sunday 12 June 2010. The program for the celebrations may be accessed here, and the arrangements for present and former pupils to assemble at the post office and proceed together to the school on Saturday morning may be accessed here.

Over the course of its 150 years the school has been known by several names:

- Armidale National School

- Armidale District School

- Armidale Superior Public School

- Armidale Demonstration School (because of its association with the Armidale Teachers’ College)

- Armidale Public School

- Armidale City Public School

Because of the school’s close association with Armidale Teachers’ College in my time we always had excellent classroom teachers, as trainee teachers would be marched down the hill from time to time to stand at the back of the class and see how it was done, and we would always have a couple of “prac teachers” when all of the trainees were sent on a three-week stint of practice teaching under supervision. The fact that the university offered external degrees also made Armidale a desirable destination for teachers wishing to complete a degree.

Unfortunately I have no photographic memorabilia from those long ago days, but my friend James Belshaw, who was one year behind me, has on his blog a photo provided by his classmate Bruce Hoy, which may be accessed here – click the photo to enlarge it.

The faces are all familiar still, and I can remember most of the names. Cliff Johnson, the classroom teacher, also taught me in Fifth Class, as we called it. He had served in the Army in World War II; perhaps he is the Clifford Charles Johnson who, according to the war service record here, was born in Armidale on 16 May 1921, and enlisted in Armidale, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, on 1 August 1942, and served as a trooper in 15 Australian Motor Regiment (motorised infantry supporting armour – an update to the mounted infantry of the Light Horse tradition). I have no way of knowing; there are service records for a couple of other Clifford Johnsons from Northern New South Wales (one from Urunga, one from Glenn Innes and one from Grafton).

He was a firm but kindly man whom I remember for his capacity to deliver four levels of spelling and arithmetic to his large classes which widely dispersed abilities, containing as they did children of academics and children of agricultural smallholders, who journeyed in from the countryside by bus each day, and he managed to do that in a way that was not disrespectful of the kids who were struggling. His aim was to teach everyone something, and as you can see from the photo, there were 44 kids in that 1995 class (only about 35 in mine – the baby boom had not quite taken off in my cohort, but was getting under way.

I remember that Cliff also played the saxophone and had a particular fondness for the old Italian songs, which he taught us to sing – to this day I cannot hear “Santa Lucia” or “Back to Sorrento” without thinking of Cliff.

A couple of other people in the photo that I could mention:

- The future Senator Bob Brown (fifth from the right in the front row)

- The Somerville twins, Paul and Malcolm (sixth from the right in the front row and the far right in the second row), sons Professor Jack Somerville, Professor of Physics at UNE, and one of the original staff members at the New England University College. Paul and Malcolm were two of the five students in my Physics Honours year at the University of New England, and became notable geophysicists. Malcolm was on the staff of the Australian Geological Survey Organisation (AGSO) when I was Secretary, Department of Primary Industries and Energy, and tragically died in a house fire in Adelaide a few years later. Paul is Deputy Director of Risk Frontiers, the Natural Hazards Research Centre at Macquarie University (see here). The twins’ older sister Susan was one of my father’s students in Psychology, gaining First Class Honours and the University Medal, and is now Professor Emeritus in Psychology at Arizona State University (see here).

- Peter Kemp (sixth from the right in the second row) was the son of the Deputy Principal of Armidale Teachers’ College.

- Roger Lamb (third from the left in the back row) was the son of Paul Lamb, another staff member at Armidale Teachers’ College.

- Peter Ash (tall boy immediately in front of Cliff Johnson’s right shoulder – eighth standing boy from the left), who died recently, served in Vietnam and I recall seeing a photo of him on the front page of one of the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian when he and his fellow “Tunnel Rats” discovered a large tunnel complex in the early years of the war. He is listed on page 23 of the April 2007 edition of Holdfast, the newsletter of the Vietnam Tunnel Rats Association (see here), as having served in 3 Field Troop (1965-66).

- Jim Belshaw, son of Professor “Jimmy” Belshaw, Professor of Economics at UNE and a foundation staff member of the New England University College. The Jim’s father appears as coach in the photo that is the centrepiece of my post New England University Rugby Team 1939. His grandfather, D.H Drummond, is one of the stars of my post Booloominbah, about the background to the establishment of the New England University College.

Regrettably I do not have such a photo of my own class, which included Peter Woolnough (known to the world as Peter Allen) and Jack Knight, the first Liberal Senator for the ACT, who died of a heart attack at the extraordinarily young age of 39. I have lost contact with the majority of my classmates, but I do have regular contact with my old classmate Harry Pidgeon, who has featured in a couple of my posts – see Harry Pidgeon at Cooks Hill and Harry Pidgeon's opening at Cooks Hill.

When I mentioned the forthcoming event at our old primary school Harry sent me a scan of an unfinished watercolour of the old Girls’ Department building which he painted in the early 1960s, and kindly gave me permission to upload it in this post.

Any hope for Palestinians in Obama’s speech?

2011-05-20T10:03:00.000+10:00

In this must-read post on the blog Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah puts a compelling case for why President Obama’s speech on US Middle East policy, delivered overnight, changes little. The introductory paragraphs sum it up:

“Obama Endorses 1967 Borders for Israel” as part of a “Broad Speech Rejecting Status Quo in the Middle East” – that was the instant spin on the front of The New York Times website within minutes of the president speaking.

But while President Barack Obama laid out in a little bit more detail a US “vision” of what “peace” would look like in his much anticipated speech on US policy in the Middle East and North Africa, there was precious little new.

Moreover, the speech affirmed that the United States will not take any effective action to advance its vision of a two-state solution.

Read the entire post here.

Who’s afraid of WikiLeaks?

2011-05-19T22:11:00.000+10:00

Tomorrow (Friday 20 May) in Sydney I will be chairing a session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival entitled Who’s afraid of WikLeaks.

The members of the panel will be

- Suelette Dreyfus, author (with Julian Assange) of Underground, William Heinemann, Sydney 2011 – the story of the 1980s-1990s hacker underground, an important segment of which was operating out of Melbourne.

- Andrew Fowler, author of The Most Dangerous Man in the World, Melbourne University Press, 2011

- Barbara Gunnell, author of Rebel, public nuisance and dreamer: Julian Assange standing alone, GriffithREVIEW 32, March 2011.

- Robert Manne, author of The Cypherpunk Revolutionary, The Monthly, March 2011.

- Guy Rundle, author of Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take, Overland, Issue No. 202, Autumn 2011.

The session will take place at Sydney Town Hall, 6.00-7.30 pm. The SWF webpage for the session may be accessed here.

I have signed a release for the ABC to make audio or video recordings of the session, and will post links for anything that goes to air after the Festival.

Previous posts on WikiLeaks include Seven key things we have learned from WikiLeaks, Do WikiLeaks cables put informants’ lives at risk?, Guardian columnist on the responses to WikiLeaks, The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks, Secrecy, national security and the internet, Julia Gillard on WikiLeaks, What do the WikiLeaks Cables reveal about our leaders?, The dark side of WikiLeaks, Greg Mitchell’s list of WikiLeaks revelations and The Guantánamo Wikileaks.

Gideon Levy on the requirements for Middle East Peace

2011-05-19T21:26:00.000+10:00

Columnist Gideon Levy has an opinion piece in today’s edition of Ha’aretz on the essential requirements for reconciliation and peace with the Palestinians, an essential precondition for which is understanding the perspective of the Palestinians.

He begins:

Look what a few hundred demonstrators can do in a day: 1948 is on the agenda. The breach of the fence in the Golan Heights was enough to breach a far older and more complex fence, bringing 1948 to center stage in the political discussion.

We're still screwing things up and babbling ourselves to death about 1967 - will or won't Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utter the words "1967 borders," as if it makes a difference what he says.

Later in the piece:

Anyone who didn't want 1967 is now getting 1947. Anyone who didn't want to evacuate the settlement of Ariel will now be forced to discuss Carmiel. Anyone who didn't want a historic compromise is now getting the 1948 portfolio on his doorstep. The right is rejoicing, it's not clear about what, the left has long been dead and the caravan is galloping forward, leaving Israel in a situation that is deteriorating by the day.

1948 received a donkey's burial in Israel; there has never been a genuine public discussion of it here, but its spirit never died for a moment in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. Its survivors, the refugees and their grandchildren carry its memory and their pain to this day, just as the Jews carry their own memories and pain. That should have been acknowledged long ago. In that sense we can actually appreciate the behavior of the demonstrators from Syria: They reminded Israelis of forgotten events.

Levy concludes:

The time has come to remove the abscess and air out the wound. We're not talking about an impossible turning back of the wheel of history, about the return of millions and the end of the State of Israel, as the right is trying to scare us into believing. We're talking about understanding the other side and granting some of its desires - accepting moral responsibility for 1948, a solution to the refugee problem, and of course, that very minimum, the 1967 borders. Anyone who still doesn't understand that is invited to waste more time and see how this benefits us and them.

It is hard to imagine a hard-hitting piece like this receiving an airing in any mainstream newspaper in Australia. It is worth reading in full; access it here.

Yitzhak Laor: Which chapter of Joshua?

2011-05-19T20:59:00.000+10:00

Today’s edition of the Israeli daily Ha’aretz contains an opinion piece by Yitzhak Laor entitled Which chapter from the book of Joshua? He denies that the prevention of Palestinian return has much to do with security, and says that in any event what Israel is dealing with

… is not the Palestinians' return to Israel at all. The issue at stake is the refugees' return to the Palestinian state alongside Israel. Israel has no other way to take part in solving what it created in atrocious innocence in 1948.

The article begins:

Between 1949 and 1956, in what Israel calls "retribution operations," thousands of Palestinians, who did not come to attack, were killed on the borders. Hundreds of others, probably fewer, who came to kill or steal or take what was theirs, were also killed. Those thousands were all killed, and others were imprisoned, because the new state's laws categorized them as "infiltrators."

The argument about whether the Palestinians were driven out or fled is sanctimonious. From the moment hundreds of thousands of them were forbidden to return, their flight became a deportation. Civilian populations flee at a time of war and return, all over the world (Israel's defenders always point out the exceptions). But preventing their return, the killing and the internal debates show how the "refugee problem" was gradually but speedily labelled a security problem.

The military rule in the villages hunted down those who succeeded in returning. Until it was dismantled in 1967, this rule ensured the massive land confiscation and effectively prevented the return. In fact, not all of the state's leadership during the war realized that the army and David Ben-Gurion intended to "cleanse" the land. So some leaders had no idea from where to deport people and from where not to deport them, and whether to allow them to return or not.

Later in the piece:

… to understand how extreme Benjamin Netanyahu is, and how much he is part of the radical nucleus of the rejectionist front, you must listen to his cliches about "we're willing to cede parts of homeland." What exactly is he ceding in the West Bank? What chapter from the Book of Joshua is he living in?

He concludes that the matter will not end until the Israeli public understands that it's in its own interest, and essential for its survival, to reconcile and withdraw from all the territories.

Read the full piece here.

No racism in Israel

2011-05-18T20:53:00.000+10:00

It is highly politically incorrect to suggest that there is, or ever has been, a hint of a suggestion of a bat’s squeak of racism in Israel, so I won’t do that.

I will however refer you to this very interesting article from the 6 August 1979 Time magazine, a link to which was posted on by Ben White on the Mondoweiss blog. It concerns the treatment of Bedouins whose traditional lands seemed to be just exactly where the Israeli Air Force needed to build an air strip.

The part I like best is the response of a senior Israeli official to a request by the Bedouin that they be permitted to set up a model agricultural cooperative:

I’m not giving up good Jewish land and water to Arabs.

Read Ben White’s post here, and the original Time article here. When you read the Time piece, see whether you can detect anything that smacks of forced labour, or indeed, of “how the West was won”.

Israel's skunk truck

2011-05-18T20:35:00.000+10:00

Demonstrating against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is a hazardous occupation at the best of times. The Israelis enforce their occupation very forcefully, some would day heavy handedly, and Palestinians are regularly killed by IDF troops – including in the course of the IDF’s use of supposedly non-lethal crowd control options like tear gas. Several Palestinians have been killed by being struck by a tear gas canister fired at close range – always a regrettable accident of course.

According to a 3 May 2011 article in The Seattle Times (see here), the emerging weapon of choice for crowd control is the so-called Skunk truck, a vehicle fitted to spray a nauseatingly offensive liquid all over the protesters, and, Palestinians allege, into homes, making them uninhabitable.

All part of the Israeli quest for peace, I guess.

The “dodgy dossier”: truth will out

2011-05-15T11:49:00.000+10:00

At last someone in a position to know has told the Chilcot Inquiry in the United Kingdom something we all already knew: that the Blair Government’s so-called “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was cooked up to make the case for war – a flagrant misuse of intelligence processes.

An article published in The Guardian on Thursday 12 May (Iraq document drawn up to make the case for war – intelligence officer by Richard Norton-Taylor) begins:

A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme was drawn up "to make the case for war", flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister's chief spin doctor.

In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: "We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."

His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government's claims about the dossier – and, perhaps more significantly, what Tony Blair and Campbell said when it was released seven months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Laurie, who was director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff, responsible for commanding and delivering raw and analysed intelligence, said: "I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given."

He continued: "Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not 'to make a case for war'. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used."

The article concludes that:

Laurie's memo raises questions about the role of Sir John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who later became head of MI6.

Indeed it does. When I first heard that Sir John Scarlett was in the habit of meeting Campbell regularly over lunch I wondered to myself under what circumstances the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee could possibly have a valid reason for ever meeting the Prime Minister’s spin doctor, even on a single occasion.

I still wonder about that.

Access the Guardian piece here.

Turning away refugees

2011-05-15T11:16:00.000+10:00

Australia is now in the business of turning away refugees.

Consider the opening paragraphs of Melissa Fyfe’s news item, Times up: latest boat arrivals to be diverted, in today’s (15 May 2011) edition of The Age – see here:

The Gillard government’s tougher refugee policy came into full force yesterday, with the Immigration Minister saying the latest boatload of asylum seekers will be refused processing and sent away to a yet-to-be determined country.

The government has flatly rejected the asylum seekers before finalising two of its major new options for refugee processing: the so-called Malaysian ‘‘swap’’ and a new assessment centre on Papua New Guinea.

The 33 asylum seekers, picked up early yesterday morning in the Timor Sea, will undergo basic checks and be temporarily held in detention on Christmas Island before removal to a ‘‘third country’’.

…

…yesterday he said Australia would not accept any asylum seekers who arrive by boat. ‘‘The people aboard the boat will be processed not for refugee assessment but for removal from Australia.’’

Be in no doubt that this means we are turning away refugees. The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the accompanying 1967 Protocol (see here) defines a refugee as a person who:

owing to wellfounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

Note that under this definition the state of being a refugee is intrinsic to the person concerned: they are a refugee the moment they take flight “owing to wellfounded fear of being persecuted ...”, not because some government official in a far-off land taps them on the shoulder with his sword and says, “I dub thee a refugee. Arise, Sir Refugee”.

This means that the process of “processing” refugees is conceptually, and in any decent practice, not a matter of establishing which people are refugees, it is a matter of identifying any who are making a false claim and hence are not entitled to the benefits that refugee status confers as of right.

To illustrate by an analogy that is not too strained, you are not ill because a doctor says you are, you present yourself for medical assistance because you have a well-founded fear that you are ill.

This raises an issue akin to the presumption of innocence. Since the state of being a refugee is intrinsic to the individual(s) concerned, it is important to assume that everyone who makes a claim for asylum be treated as such unless and until the contrary is established.

The difference is important. It means that we should not withhold the benefits of refugee status from every asylum seeker until the merits of their claims are established. It means that, in a preliminary and precautionary way at least, we extend them to everyone and subsequently withdraw them from those found not to qualify. This approach does not preclude a preliminary period of detention to enable identity and health checks to be carried out, not does it preclude requiring asylum claimants remaining in touch with the authorities until all procedures have been completed and a right of permanent residency is granted.

I would go on to argue that our obligations under the Convention and Protocol, and on the basis of human decency (the old-fashioned notion of doing what is right, which rarely enters into our political discourse these days) are engaged the moment an asylum seeker comes face to face with an Australian naval or customs craft and says “I am a refugee”.

Forget all the fancy legal cleverness about excising bits of Australian sovereign territory (parts of our far-flung oceanic and island territory which we regard as fine for claiming fishing and mineral rights but are less enthusiastic about acknowledging as the basis for the various responsibilities that go with sovereignty), and about offshore processing as a way of deeming people not to have arrived in Australia. An Australian warship is a floating piece of Australian sovereignty, and a person who communicates with it is communicating with the Australian state. John Howard seems to understood that – that is presumably why in a notorious incident he would not let an Australian frigate take refugees on board until their boat had actually sunk and the people on board had to be rescued from the water.

Sadly, in the race to the bottom that characterises the politics of immigration generally these days, we are no longer saying to refugees “You are not welcome here” – we have been saying that ever since Paul Keating introduced mandatory detention, contrary to one of the fundamental provisions of the Convention, under which detention is a last resort. We are now saying, “You may not come here” (unless of course your circumstances are such that you can purchase a ticket on an aeroplane).

We should hang our collective heads in shame that we have allowed matters to come to this.

George Megalogenis on the state of Australian politics

2011-05-14T18:01:00.000+10:00

In his column in today’s edition of The Weekend Australian , entitled Just keep digging, George Megalogenis writes with his characteristic insightfulness about the state of Australian politics and political leadership as demonstrated by the way in which budget week played out.

He begins:

Wayne Swan delivered a predictably safe budget. Tony Abbott delivered a more than predictably contemptuous reply speech.

If there was nothing at stake but the right to captain Australia on autopilot, the policy timidity of Labor and Liberal, perversely, might serve the national interest.

Politicians are at their most dangerous when they insist on fiddling with every little thing a government does to prove they are in charge.

But the world is changing in ways that demand a more active government.

Later in the piece:

The Australian people hung their federal parliament last August as a form of bipartisan punishment. They stripped a first-term Labor government of its majority but didn't want an Abbott-led Coalition in its place.

Any lingering hope that a none-of-the-above election result would force one or both main parties to grow up vanished with this week's budget debate. Labor couldn't afford to pick a fight so it took baby steps back to surplus.

…

Abbott and his shadow treasurer Joe Hockey betrayed an almost comic lack of seriousness in their budget response this week.

They didn't seem to mind the contradiction of demanding hard-ball cuts while insisting that no family be worse off, including those on the top rung of the income ladder.

He concludes:

The Gillard and Abbott generation will repeat [the mistake of the Fraser years] if they imagine the the quarry will keep bailing us out.

The quarry is, in fact, sending an early warning that government by middle-class welfare cannot protect living standards any more than tariffs and centralised wage-fixing did in the past.

The role of government remains what it always was: to build things that the market won't; to regulate business without pricing it out of business; and to educate a workforce that is nimble enough to catch the next wave of prosperity when the world asks us to do something other than dig.

But that requires sacrifice at the kitchen table to help government prepare us for the future.

This is George Megalogenis at his best. Access the article in full here.

Soraj Ghulam Habib

2011-05-12T22:47:00.000+10:00

Visiting Australia at the moment is an Afghan teenager named Soraj Ghulam Habib.

Ten years ago, while playing with friends in his home city of Herat, he kicked a bright yellow box that was lying on the ground. As a result he lost his cousin and his legs, and four of his friends were injured.

The bright yellow object was an unexploded cluster bomb. There are millions of unexploded cluster munitions in countries like Afghanistan, Laos and Lebanon,a constant hazard to people going about their daily activities long after the fighting has stopped.

Habib, 19, is visiting Australia as part of the campaign for a worldwide ban on cluster bombs, and to draw attention to the plight of the disabled in Afghanistan.

Read more about him and why his visit is timely in this item from the 9 May edition of The Age, accessible here.

For previous posts on the cluster munitions issue see Malcolm Fraser on our cluster munitions legislation, Laos and the Convention on Cluster Munitions and Strengthen our cluster munitions legislation

Strengthen our cluster munitions legislation

2011-05-12T22:34:00.000+10:00

The following opinion piece written by me appeared in the Monday 2 May edition of The Age:

We must do more to help rid the world of these foul weapons

Paul Barratt

May 2, 2011-05-12

Legislation on cluster bombs puts our troops in an ambiguous position.

The Senate is about to consider legislation to ratify Australia's accession to the United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions. Regrettably, the legislation is far too weak.

Cluster munitions are weapons that open in midair and disperse smaller bomblets - anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds - into the target area. They are valued militarily because one munition can kill or destroy many targets within its impact area, and fewer weapons systems are needed to deliver fewer munitions to attack multiple targets.

The fundamental criticisms of cluster munitions are that they disperse large numbers of submunitions imprecisely over an extended area, and that they frequently fail to detonate.

Bomb disposal experts have found that the failure rate can be as high as 30 per cent of the bomblets in the cluster. The unexploded bomblets are difficult to detect, and can remain widely dispersed explosive hazards for decades.

Australia played an active role in the negotiation of the UN Convention, and signed it on December 3, 2008, the day it was opened for signature. The convention became binding international law for states parties on August 1 last year. The legislation now before the Parliament is designed to give effect to our obligations by creating new criminal offences for Australians who behave in ways at odds with the convention.

The United States regards cluster munitions as militarily useful, has no intention of eliminating them from its arsenals, and has no intention of joining the convention. This creates a balancing act for the Australian government. We want to ratify the convention, but we want also to continue to engage in joint military operations with our non-signatory major ally.

The convention tackles this issue with inter-operability provisions that enable states parties to continue to operate with non-signatories to which they are allied.

Those provisions, however, are heavily restricted by the convention's categorical prohibitions not to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, transfer, use or expressly request the use of cluster munitions. They are restricted also by the positive obligations to promote the norms the convention establishes, to notify non-signatories of our obligations under the convention, to encourage them to join the convention, and to make best efforts to discourage them from using cluster munitions.

Regrettably, the bill before the Senate is at odds with these obligations. It permits us to facilitate continued use of cluster bombs by non-signatories. It specifically permits foreign forces to base their cluster bombs here or to transit them through Australian territory.

It also permits members of the Australian Defence Force to assist in the use of cluster bombs in joint operations with foreign forces.

Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic told the Senate committee inquiring into the legislation that it could be interpreted to ''allow Australian military personnel to load and aim the gun, so long as they did not pull the trigger''.

Remarkably, the legislation also flies in the face of a recommendation of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and permits Australian entities to invest in the companies that produce these munitions.

Legislation in these terms is clearly at odds with a convention whose central purpose is to prevent the use of cluster munitions and ensure the destruction of all national stockpiles, and which imposes on all parties obligations both to encourage non-signatories to join and to discourage them from using cluster munitions.

Eliminating the use of cluster munitions is a vital humanitarian concern. The scourge they represent is illustrated by Laos, the most bombed country in history on a per capita basis. From 1964 to 1973, about 270 million cluster submunitions were dropped on Laos.

Estimates of the numbers of bomblets remaining in Laos vary. The relevant Laotian government agency estimates the country is host to 80 million as yet undetected bomblets. They are in every province, and 25 per cent of Laotian villages are contaminated by unexploded ordnance, 37 years after the end of the fighting. Three hundred Laotians a year are killed or maimed by them. Forty per cent of the victims are children, usually performing livelihood activities such as tending animals.

At the current rate of clean-up of these munitions it will take another 3000 years to render Laos safe. More than half the population of this at-risk country was born after the conflict ended, but they must still endure its consequences.

In signing the convention on cluster munitions, Australia has agreed with a proposition in the preamble that we are ''determined to work strenuously towards the promotion of its universalisation and its full implementation''.

If we are serious about that, we will need to do much better than the bill now before the Senate, and will need to pursue much more active diplomacy to bring about the worldwide elimination of cluster munitions.

Paul Barratt is a former secretary of the Department of Defence and deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Read the article online at: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/we-must-do-more-to-help-rid-the-world-of-these-foul-weapons-20110501-1e2t6.html#ixzz1M8mO29ou

Israel: covert cancellation of Palestinian residency

2011-05-11T22:03:00.000+10:00

In an article published in today’s 11 May 2011 online edition of Ha’aretz (see here) Akiva Eldar, the paper’s chief political columnist and editorial writer, relates how, between 1967 and 1994, many Palestinians traveling abroad were stripped of residency status, allegedly without warning.

He begins:

Israel has used a covert procedure to cancel the residency status of 140,000 West Bank Palestinians between 1967 and 1994, the legal advisor for the Judea and Samaria Justice Ministry's office admits, in a new document obtained by Haaretz. The document was written after the Center for the Defense of the Individual filed a request under the Freedom of Information Law.

The document states that the procedure was used on Palestinian residents of the West Bank who traveled abroad between 1967 and 1994. From the occupation of the West Bank until the signing of the Oslo Accords, Palestinians who wished to travel abroad via Jordan were ordered to leave their ID cards at the Allenby Bridge border crossing.

He goes on to describe how this came about, and how the situation was discovered by the Center for the Defense of the Individual by pure chance, while it was looking into the case of a West Bank resident imprisoned in Israel.

The Center for the Defense of the Individual says that an unknown number of Gaza residents had lost residency rights in a similar manner, but that the exact number is still a secret which the Center is working to uncover.

Read Akiva Eldar’s article in full here.

Andrew Catsaras on asylum seekers and political courage

2011-05-11T21:37:00.001+10:00

On Monday 28 February 2011 fellow blogger Andrew Catsaras put up a fine post The courage of NO! on the subject of asylum seekers and the need for political leaders to have the courage to speak out against what they know to be wrong.

He says

The continual refusal by the vast majority of our politicians to deal with this issue, because they either don't want to give away an "electoral advantage" (as it is seen by the Coalition) or don't want to confront an "electoral liability" (as it is seen by the ALP) is a dereliction of their public duty and does nothing to rid the nation of this stain on its character. In fact, their inaction makes the stain much worse and is in danger of making it indelible and permanent.

Worse, this focus solely on the electoral consequences of taking anything other than a "tough" stance on this issue not only reflects poorly on those politicians who can see the hypocrisy of this position yet refuse to do anything about it, but by legimitising the unfounded and irrational fears of the public these politicians are deliberately and wilfully directing the Australian people away from expressing what is a natural tendency for them - that is, to be compassionate and generous towards others in need.

He gives three case studies of real political courage, political leaders taking a stand even though the cause seemed hopeless. To quote from his concluding summary:

The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. understood injustice all too well and when he came to realise that the Vietnam War was another injustice, he rose to the challenge and took a stand.

Ioannis Metaxas, when he was given an ultimatum by a much more powerful nation in Fascist Italy that he surrender or else, gave a clear and unequivocal NO! And the Greeks' defiance played a crucial role in helping to defeat Nazi Germany.

Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, when he was confronted with what he saw as a draconian attempt to isolate and vilify a particular group (The Communist Party) fought the attempt, first in the High Court and won, and then in the court of public opinion, and won again.

Andrew then disposes of the key dangerous and damaging myths concerning asylum seekers – myths that politicians on both sides of the house should make it their business to demolish – the myths that asylum seekers are acting illegally in coming here; that they are rorting the system; that “we are being over-run with these people”; that they are “queue jumpers”; that they get access to benefits that ordinary Australians cannot get; that they do not fit into our society; and that they are terrorists.

This is a fine piece of research and advocacy.

Read Andrew’s complete post here.

Australians for Palestine: Letter to AFR

2011-05-11T15:35:00.000+10:00

There is a letter to the editor in today’s edition of The Australian Financial Review from Moammar Mashni of the Melbourne based Australians for Palestine advocacy group, in response to a letter by Yosi Tal (“Protection not on list for support”, Letters, 6 May).

Unfortunately in the course of editing the letter for publication on a rather space-limited letters page, a couple of very significant points were omitted, but Moammar has provided me with a copy of his letter as submitted, which appears below:

The tenets of the BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions) are simple:

1. Recognise the inalienable rights of the Palestinian refugees;

2. End the illegal military occupation;

3. End the systematic discrimination of Palestinian citizens within Israel.

Mr Tal (letters, 06/05) deliberately misrepresents the facts and would have us believe that Israel bears no responsibility whatsoever.

Israel’s own intelligence services, Shin Bet, stated that it was better intelligence gathering and cooperation with the PA security forces that stopped suicide bombers, not the apartheid wall.

When Israel strengthened the Islamists that went on to form Hamas in the 1980’s in an attempt to topple then Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, I do not recall Tal and his ilk making scurrilous remarks about Gaza.

The Right of Return is enshrined in international law. Those who deny this fundamental human right, deny the very freedoms that embolden civilised society.

Moammar Mashni

Australians for Palestine

Hawthorn Vic.

People smuggling: let’s be honest about who’s under attack

2011-05-10T23:10:00.002+10:00

When he was Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd let it be known that he did not have a high opinion of people smugglers; following an explosion on 16 April 2009 in which several asylum seekers were killed and others badly injured on board an apprehended boat, he said (see here):

People smugglers are engaged in the world's most evil trade and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth.

People smugglers are the vilest form of human life. They trade on the tragedy of others and that's why they should rot in jail and in my own view, rot in hell.

We see this lowest form of human life at work in what we saw on the high seas yesterday.

That's why this Government maintains its hardline, tough, targeted approach to maintaining border protection for Australia.

Julia Gillard shares Rudd’s view; in her remarkable address to the Lowy Institute on 6 July 2010 (downloadable from here) she said that one of the organising principles for developing asylum seeker policy upon which she felt we could all agree was:

That people smuggling is an evil trade to be punished.

I say this was a remarkable speech because in this, an address to one of the nation’s leading foreign policy institutes, and her first major opportunity after becoming Prime Minister to present her views on foreign policy, she chose to address the matter of asylum seekers and little else.

If Rudd and Gillard were speaking only of the people traffickers who lure young girls into sexual slavery on the fraudulent promise of employment as household help or nannies I would be with them, but as an all-encompassing statement I think the proposition needs to be tested. Like John Passant in his 10 July blog post immediately following Gillard’s address (see here), I think that as well as having a dark side, people smuggling has a long and honourable history, and that Gillard’s attack on people smugglers is a crude dog whistle. Her real target is the asylum seekers themselves.

I am not suggesting for a moment that the people smugglers who organise the boats on which asylum seekers make the perilous voyage to Australia are all admirable people. Clearly some of them are not. But we should not fall for the implied message that the people smugglers are the cause of the asylum seeker “problem”. People smugglers exist because there are people fleeing persecution in their homelands, and a huge unmet wish on the part of people stranded in countries not party to the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees to get themselves and their families out of unsafe, unsavoury and unsanitary conditions in the camps in which they languish forever – with the ever-present danger of being bashed, caned, raped or robbed – even after being found by UNHCR to qualify for refugee status.

Solve the resettlement problem and there will be no people smugglers.

So let us not fall for the blandishments of the politicians on both sides of the house who rail against people smugglers as a dog-whistle proxy for attacking those seeking asylum.

Grog’s Gamut on the “Malaysian Solution”

2011-05-10T22:00:00.000+10:00

In case you are inclined to think that Julia Gillard has found an elegant solution to what she regards as an asylum-seeker problem, read yesterday’s post, The Asylum Debate: No edification, but lots of soul destruction by much-read Canberra-based blogger Grog’s Gamut (Greg Jericho). It’s a cracker, and right on the money as far as I am concerned.

In due course I will add a few thoughts of my own.

More on the US-Pakistan relationship

2011-05-10T13:11:00.000+10:00

Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine who has ben reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan for the past decade, has a must-read essay on the US-Pakistan relationship, dated 6 May, in the Blog section of the New York Review of Books (see here).

Osama bin Laden’s death in a mansion in exclusive club house territory of retired Pakistani officers has exposed the terrible paradox at the heart of our war in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s hypocrisy and our acquiescence.

...

We give billions in aid to Pakistan’s military and civilian government. Yet Pakistan is harboring our enemies and even the enemies, one could argue, of its own healthy survival. Portions of our money are being funneled into the variety of insurgent networks whose fighters are killing American soldiers, Afghan soldiers, American civilians, Afghan civilians, European civilians, Pakistani civilians—mothers, fathers, children on multiple continents.

She gives first hand evidence of Taliban who would like to make a deal with the Afghan Government to get back to a life without fighting, and describes the interests that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and the Pakistan Army have in perpetuation of the conflict.

Towards the end of the piece:

Or as an advisor to Ambassador Holbrooke told me not long before Holbrooke died: “We see Pakistan as a flawed ally and the Afghan Taliban as our enemy. The truth is the reverse.” It is the Taliban, the advisor suggested, who can be worked with; they who distrust—and in many cases despise—the ISI overlords they depend on for safe havens and support. All along they’ve let it be known through different channels that they want to talk directly to the Americans. The question is how?

Read Rubin’s report in full here.

US funding of Pakistan: the double game

2011-05-08T22:52:00.000+10:00

The latest online edition of The New Yorker, datelined 16 May, contains an analysis of American funding of Pakistan since it began in 1954, and its unintended consequences – see The Double Game: The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan by Lawrence Wright, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992, and whose previous work includes The Man Behind Bin Laden, about Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Wright observes that in the 1950s the United States made a strategic choice – India having “tilted” toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Pakistan became America’s protégé – its ally in the fight against Commmunism. He continues that fifty years after the start of this social experiment:

India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism. Politically and economically, it verges on being a failed state. And, despite Pakistani avowals to the contrary, America’s worst enemy, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding there for years—in strikingly comfortable circumstances—before U.S. commandos finally tracked him down and killed him, on May 2nd.

American aid is hardly the only factor that led these two countries to such disparate outcomes. But, at this pivotal moment, it would be a mistake not to examine the degree to which U.S. dollars have undermined our strategic relationship with Pakistan—and created monstrous contradictions within Pakistan itself.

The article is worth reading in full; access it here.

Gillard’s Malaysia solution

2011-05-08T18:17:00.000+10:00

In this Joint Statement with the Prime Minister of Malaysia, issued Saturday 7 May 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that 800 “irregular maritime arrivals”, who arrive in Australia after the date of effect of the arrangement, will be transferred to Malaysia for refugee status determination, and in return, over four years, Australia will resettle 4000 refugees already currently residing in Malaysia.

This is a grim prospect for any asylum seeker. Malaysia has a poor human rights record when it comes to the treatment of refugees. Being a non-signatory to the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, it regards refugees as illegal immigrants and treats them as such.

A selection of asylum seeker advocate opinion on the treatment of asylum seekers in Malaysia may be seen here in the 8 May 2011 online edition of The Sydney Morning Herald:

The executive director of the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre, David Manne, said: "Malaysia has a long-standing record as one of the worst in the world when it comes to the treatment of refugees in its country. At times they have made no bones about their willingness to expel refugees to situations where they may face persecution.

"What we are looking at essentially is a refugee swap. It is difficult to see how this deal will in any way provide a solution to the complex challenges in our region."

Pamela Curr, from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said people in Malaysian detention centres have been "flogged and raped".

"They are well known human rights abusers," she said.

Ian Rintoul, of the Refugee Action Coalition, said it was no better than John Howard's Pacific Solution.

An Amnesty International report last year described Malaysia's detention centres as "filthy and overcrowded". It said: "Once in the centres, detainees lack proper health care, sufficient food and clean drinking water. Children under 18 are held with adults, and abuse by detention staff is rife. Poor detention conditions have led to serious illness, which in some cases have been fatal."

We will be paying $300 million over four years for this, just so that we can say that 800 asylum seekers did not arrive on our shores. That is $375,000 per asylum seeker, which doesn’t sound like value for money to me.

We can do better than this, we can do much, much better than this.

Ray McGovern on bin Laden’s killing

2011-05-08T17:21:00.000+10:00

In an article entitled What has bin Laden’s Killing Wrought? in the 6-8 May Weekend Edition of the American political newsletter Counterpunch, Ray McGovern addresses the politics of assassination.

Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 years. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

McGovern’s article commences:

As America's morbid celebrations over the killing of Osama bin Laden begin to fade, we are left with a new landscape of risks – and opportunities – created by his slaying at the hands of a U.S. Special Forces team at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The range of those future prospects could be found in Wednesday's Washington Post. On the hopeful side, a front-page article reported that the Obama administration was following up bin Laden's death with accelerated peace talks in Afghanistan. On a darker note, a Post editorial hailed bin Laden's slaying as a model for "targeting" Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and his sons.

So, while there is the possibility that the United States might finally begin to wind down a near-decade-long war in Afghanistan, there is the countervailing prospect of the United States consolidating an official policy of assassination and violence as the way to impose Washington's will on the Muslim world.

McGovern discusses in turn the issues raised by targeted killings, the problematical situation that emerges from the revised accounts of the assassination (clearly bin Laden was to be killed rather than captured), the dangers that lie ahead for the United States in Pakistan as a result of the killing, and the consequences of the United States passing up the prospects of questioning bin Laden about al-Qaeda in favour of killing him.

He observes that the killing of bin Laden might offer the United States the opportunity to retrace its steps from the “dark side” of the wholesale assault on its own civil liberties, “enhanced interrogation” and pre-emptive war, but concludes:

Only with strong grass roots pressure, including nonviolent civil disobedience when appropriate, will there be any real hope that the demon of "terrorism" periodically resurrected by the politicians can be exorcised. That, in turn, could bring an early end to the squandering of $2 billion a week into the stalemate in Afghanistan; the allocation of those resources to job creation and educational opportunity for tens of millions of Americans; and stanching the alarming erosion of the liberties the Constitution was carefully crafted to guarantee and the President solemnly sworn to enforce.

Read McGovern’s full article here.

No way to win a war

2011-05-07T17:56:00.000+10:00

An article in the 10 April 2011 edition of the Los Angeles Times tells step by step the tragic tale of how an American Predator drone crew working out of an air force base in Nevada managed to convince itself that a convoy of three Afghan vehicles and a pickup truck heading along a dirt road in a remote region 200 miles southwest of Kabul was a group of insurgents, deploy Kiowa helicopters onto the convoy, and carry out a lethal assault on the vehicles.

It is a tale of a disastrous lack of cultural awareness: when the convoy stopped at dawn for the participants to disembark for prayer, this was taken as a key indicator that the members were Taliban. It is also, to mind, a tale of a desperate desire for this to be a Taliban convoy, born perhaps of the sheer boredom of driving a surveillance drone day after day, looking for something out of the ordinary that might be a legitimate target.

After some preliminary observations the story begins:

At 6:22 a.m., the drone pilot radioed an update: "All … are finishing up praying and rallying up near all three vehicles at this time."

The camera operator watched the men climb back into the vehicles.

"Oh, sweet target," he said.

---

None of those Afghans was an insurgent. They were men, women and children going about their business, unaware that a unit of U.S. soldiers was just a few miles away, and that teams of U.S. military pilots, camera operators and video screeners had taken them for a group of Taliban fighters.

The Americans were using some of the most sophisticated tools in the history of war, technological marvels of surveillance and intelligence gathering that allowed them to see into once-inaccessible corners of the battlefield. But the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe.

This is the story of that episode. It is based on hundreds of pages of previously unreleased military documents, including transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the results of two Pentagon investigations and interviews with the officers involved as well as Afghans who were on the ground that day.

The Afghan travelers had set out early on the cold morning of Feb. 21, 2010, from three mountain villages in southern Daikundi province, a remote central region 200 miles southwest of Kabul.

More than two dozen people were wedged into the three vehicles. Many were Hazaras, an ethnic minority that for years has been treated harshly by the Taliban. They included shopkeepers going for supplies, students returning to school, people seeking medical treatment and families with children off to visit relatives. There were several women and as many as four children younger than 6.

They had agreed to meet before dawn for the long drive to Highway 1, the country's main paved road. From there, some planned to go north to Kabul while others were headed south. To reach the highway, they had to drive through Oruzgan province, an insurgent stronghold.

"We traveled together, so that if one vehicle broke down the others would help," said Sayed Qudratullah, 30, who was bound for Kabul in hope of obtaining a license to open a pharmacy.

Another passenger, Nasim, an auto mechanic who like many Afghans uses one name, said that he was going to buy tools and parts.

"We weren't worried when we set out. We were a little scared of the Taliban, but not of government forces," he said referring to the Afghan national army and its U.S. allies. "Why would they attack us?"

Why indeed? The US Air Force and the Army conducted their own investigations into the disaster, in which the US estimates that 16 were killed and 12 wounded, and village elders say 23 were killed, including two boys, Daoud, 3, and Murtaza, 4.

The Army said evidence that the convoy was not a hostile force was "ignored or downplayed by the Predator crew," and the A-Team captain's decision to authorize an airstrike was based on a misreading of the threat when, in fact, "there was no urgent need to engage the vehicles."

The Air Force concluded that confusion over whether children were present was a "causal factor" in the decision to attack and, in an internal document last year, said drone crews had not been trained to notice the subtle differences between combatants and suspicious persons who may appear to be combatants.

The episode ended with General Stanley McChrystal, then the top US commander in Afghanistan, apologizing to President Hamid Karzai and issuing letters of reprimand to four senior and two junior officers in Afghanistan, and the Air Force visiting undisclosed punishment on the Predator crew.

None of that brings the dead back to life, of course, and tragedies like this seriously undermine the chances of the US achieving whatever objectives it might have in Afghanistan. Perhaps the key lesson is that over-reliance on technology is counter-productive when success depends upon winning the hearts and minds of the people.

Read the full Los Angeles Times account here.

The way we flew, ca. 1958

2011-05-06T22:58:00.002+10:00

This is a photo of a scheduled passenger aircraft arriving in Armidale in about 1958, evidently for the start of term.

Note the NEGS uniforms of the day. Note the Akubra on the TAS boy just to the right of the fuselage – we were never to be seen outside the school grounds without it.

Note the tight security.

Pakistan’s policy on apprehending Osama bin Laden, 1998

2011-05-06T21:52:00.006+10:00

The following text is taken from an email bulletin from George Washington University’s National Security Archive:

National Security Archive Update, May 5, 2011

PAKISTAN'S BIN LADEN POLICY

Declassified Documents Show Pakistani Refusal to Help Apprehend Terrorist before 9/11

For more information contact:
Barbara Elias - 202/994-7000
belias@gwu.edu

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., May 5, 2011 - As the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, raises fresh questions about U.S.-Pakistan relations, newly released documents show that as early as 1998 U.S. officials concluded the Government of Pakistan "is not disposed to be especially helpful on the matter of terrorist Usama bin Ladin." According to previously secret U.S. documents, Pakistani officials repeatedly refused to act on the Bin Laden problem, despite mounting pressure from American authorities. Instead, in the words of a U.S. Embassy cable, Pakistani sources "all took the line that the issue of bin Ladin is a problem the U.S. has with the Taliban, not with Pakistan."

The documents in this compilation -- part of the National Security Archive's developing Osama Bin Laden File -- were obtained by the Archive through the Freedom of Information Act. They reveal a history of "disappointment that Pakistan ... a good friend of the U.S., was not taking steps to help with Usama bin Ladin (UBL)."

As an ally to both the Taliban and the United States, Pakistan was balancing conflicting policies towards the Bin Laden question. Islamabad continued to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, an organization protecting the al-Qaeda leader, while simultaneously promising U.S. leaders it was "taking the bin Laden matter very seriously" and would cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Portending momentous events to come, U.S. officials in 1998 lamented that getting Pakistani help in apprehending bin Laden would be "an uphill slog."

See the complete posting on the Archive's web site http://www.nsarchive.org

The direct link to the post and six declassified US Embassy cables is

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB344/index.htm

How different history might have been if bin Laden had been apprehended in 1998.

Pamela Burton’s defence of her father

2011-05-01T15:07:00.000+10:00

In an article in the 30 April – 1 May 2011 edition of The Weekend Australian, John Burton’s daughter Pamela Burton writes to defend her father, a former private secretary to Labor Party leader H.V. Evatt and Secretary to the Department of External Affairs during the post-war Labor Government, against charges by ANU academic Des Ball that her father (and indeed Evatt) were “probably” agents of Soviet intelligence (see her Burton was a patriotic public servant, not a traitor here).

In an article in The Weekend Australian the previous week (see The moles at the very heart of government here), Ball had written:

IN the mid-1990s, in the course of researching and writing a book on Soviet intelligence operations in Australia in the 1940s, entitled Breaking the Codes, I became persuaded that H. V. Evatt, the attorney-general and minister for external affairs in the Curtin and Chifley Labor governments, and John W. Burton, the secretary of the department of external affairs, were probably agents of Soviet intelligence.

Ball goes on to outline a highly circumstantial case for this remarkable conclusion, a conclusion which sparked two or three letters to the editor and other rebuttals (see for example former Western Australian Premier Peter Dowding’s ‘Red Evatt’ claims don’t stand up here, also published in this weekend’s Weekend Australian).

In her piece, Pamela Burton outlines her reasons for finding that Ball’s conclusions are “wrong, self-serving and ill-founded”.

I have a distant social connection to John Burton and met him on just one occasion. Pamela Burton’s mother Cecily was the eldest of three sisters, of whom the second, Eleanor, a Sydney medical practitioner, was the wife of my godfather, Frank Hughes, also a GP. Frank and Eleanor were very close to me, like a second family – throughout my school and university days I would have spent some part of one of the holiday periods with them in most years, and they encouraged my interest in history, politics, art, archaeology, music and a range of other things.

At some stage early in my career my wife and I were staying with them, and John Burton, who happened to be in Sydney, came to dinner. Given his background and my interest in matters international we conversed long into the evening about what was going on in the world. I found him very thoughtful and interesting, and there was nothing about that conversation that gave me either at the time or in retrospect at any period since a moment of doubt that he was other than a very senior practitioner reflecting on his time in government, senior international figures he had met, and the work in which he was involved at the time.

Those who wish to believe ill of Burton will insist that a former Soviet agent would of course present himself in that light to an impressionable young man, but for what it is worth, on the basis of that extended encounter, and the odd references made to him within that family on other occasions, I find that Pamela Burton’s account of her father is vastly more convincing than the circumstantial case put forward by Des Ball.

I would take a lot of convincing, supported by hard evidence, that John Burton was other than a loyal servant of the Australian Government and public.

New records from overseas

2011-04-30T14:46:00.000+10:00

New Records from Overseas was the title of a Sunday morning ABC radio program hosted by Ralph Collins, a former ABC music librarian with an enormous knowledge of music, who hosted his own program for about thirty years from the 1960s. In the days that we were establishing a garden at our first house in Macquarie in the ACT, we listened to it without fail on the large portable radio that my parents had given me for my 21^st birthday.

The title of this program comes into my head whenever a parcel arrives from my CD supplier of choice, Presto Classical.

A particularly content-rich package was awaiting me when I arrived home on Thursday evening. It contained three Sony boxed sets which are currently available at a discount and which seemed too good to pass up:

- The Budapest String Quartet plays Beethoven (8 CDs)

The complete cycle of Beethoven’s sixteen quartets

- Arthur Rubinstein Plays Brahms (9 CDs)

The two piano concerti (No. 1 with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, No. 2 with Josef Krips and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra)

The three piano sonatas

The three violin sonatas, with Henryk Szeryng

The two cello sonatas, with Gregor Piatagorsky

The three piano trios with Henryk Szeryng and Pierre Fournier

The three piano quartets and the marvellous Piano Quintet in F minor with the Guarneri Quartet

Shorter solo pieces – the ballades, intermezzi etc.

- Robert Casadesus plays Mozart (5 CDs)

Piano concerti nos. 15,17 and 21-27, all with Gerge Szell and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra

Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major K. 332

Concerto for Two Pianos in E-flat major K. 365 (with wife Gaby Casadesus)

Concerto for Three Pianos in F major K. 242 (with Gaby Casadesus and son Jean)

(both of the above with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra)

Quintet for Piano & Winds in E-flat major K. 452 (with the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet)

The above 22 CDs delivered to my doorstep for a mere $A75.59. It will take me a while to play through that lot.

Presto Classical’s discount offer on Sony boxed sets lasts until 4 May. See the full range here.

IISS on Europe’s confused response to the war in Libya

2011-04-28T23:00:00.000+10:00

In an April 2011 “Strategic Comment”, the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies has a hard-hitting must-read article, War in Libya: Europe’s confused response. It begins:

Although European countries have been prominent in the military operation in Libya, the crisis has exposed sharp disagreements between them. Many of the 26 European members of NATO are not taking part in the operation, while others are contributing to widely differing degrees. As the military conflict moves into what could prove to be a long-running impasse, there is little sign that divisions over how to approach the Libyan uprising are being bridged. The fragmented European responses to the Libyan war show once again how difficult it is for Europe to forge a common foreign policy and to respond as one to crises through multilateral frameworks. In particular, they have exposed the shortcomings of the defence structures that the European Union (EU) has been painstakingly crafting for two decades. They have shown the emptiness of claims that the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 would make the EU better fitted to take action than it was during the crises of the Balkans.

After an analysis of the changes brought about by the Lisbon Treaty, diplomatic and institutional factors, and political and military factors, the article concludes:

The Libyan crisis has thus once again opened wide divisions on foreign policy among European countries. It demonstrates that, 20 years after the Balkan conflicts broke out, the EU remains far from ready to assume a role as a regional power. But it also calls into question the unity and functioning of the Atlantic Alliance, which is looking increasingly like a vehicle for the generation of ad-hoc coalitions of the willing.

Read the full piece here.

Iran: Update on Mir-Hossain Mousavi and his wife

2011-04-28T22:37:00.000+10:00

In a 19 April 2011 post on the Iranian website RoozOnline, Fereshteh Ghazi provides an update on the state of play with former Presidential candidate and leader of the reformist Green Movement, Mir-Hossain Mousavi, and his wife Zahra Rahnavard, who effectively disappeared from public view a few weeks ago. The last time Mousavi and his wife were seen in public was during the burial ceremony for Mousavi’s father, who died on March 30, 2011.

Ghazi’s sources were, in separate conversations, Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s sister, Khadijeh Mousavi Khamene, and her husband Mir-Hassan Habibi Mousavi, both of whom had had telephone conversations with the detainees.

Mir-Hassan Habibi Mousavi, whose son was killed in December 2009 during a public protest over the disputed 2009 presidential election, and who had himself been beaten and arrested during the burial ceremony of Mousavi’s father, said:

“Mr. Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard called yesterday (Monday) and both spoke with us ... The conversation was limited to health and generalities about their sister and family members. ... The morale of both of them is excellent and as far as we know they are in good health.”

Speaking about their condition, Habibi Mousavi said it remained the same as before and that as far as he knew they were in their own house.

Read Ghazi’s full post here.

Haleh Esfandiari on Iran

2011-04-28T22:02:00.001+10:00

In the Review section of the 15 April edition of The Australian Financial Review there is a fine article, Could Iran be next: Haleh Esfandiari says the voice of the people is being ignored in Tehran, reprinted from the New York Review of Books.

Haleh Esfandiari is the director of the Woodrow Wilson Internation Centre for Scholars in Washington DC, and the author of My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran, Harper Collins, 2009. She was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison in Iran for 105 days in 2007.

Esfandiari begins:

As the Libyan uprising was gathering force last week, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, criticized Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi, for using violence against his own people and advised him and other Middle Eastern heads of state to listen to their publics. The irony was not lost on anyone. Only two weeks earlier, on February 14, Ahmadinejad had sent hundreds of riot police, paramilitary basijis, and baton-wielding goons in plainclothes to disrupt demonstrations in Tehran and other Iranian cities called by Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, leaders of the opposition, in solidarity with the people of Tunisia and Egypt. By the end of the day, 1,500 protesters had been arrested; two had been killed.

The next day, 222 of the 290 deputies of the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, approved a resolution to put Mousavi and Karroubi on trial for sedition. Several dozen of the deputies, raising clenched fists, then began to shout out calls to execute the two men. The supposedly “moderate” Speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, quietly joined in. Karroubi and Mousavi, already under house arrest to prevent them from attending the rallies they had hoped to lead, were held incommunicado, denied visits even from their children and families, and then taken away to an unknown detention center.

Here was another irony, in view of the recent pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East that Ahmadenijad purported to support. Karroubi, a senior cleric, is a former Speaker of Parliament; Mousavi was prime minister and guided the country through the difficult years of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Their “crime” was to have posed a serious challenge to Ahmadinejad as candidates in the 2009 presidential elections, which many Iranians believed were blatantly rigged. Millions of Iranians poured out into the streets to protest when Ahmadinejad’s victory was announced. “Where is my vote,” became the slogan of the protesters, and some even cried “death to the dictator”— meaning Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei—an almost unprecedented attack on the regime itself.

But then the security forces and Basijis cracked down with brutal force; according to the government’s own figures, some six thousand were arrested during the election protests. That crackdown, and the mass show trial of protesters broadcast on state television that followed, muted but did not silence the opposition Green Movement. Protests have been attempted periodically since and invariably suppressed by government forces, as they were again last week.

Read Esfandiari’s article in full here.

In the run-up to the June 2009 Iranian Presidential election I posted brief profiles, with photographs, of Mousavi, who was widely expected to win the election (see Iran election watch: Mir-Hossein Mousavi), and Karroubi (see Iran election watch: Mehdi Karroubi). How different Iran and its relations with the world might have been had either of these men won.

My reflections on this historic tragedy, posted shortly after the event, may be seen at Reflections on events in Iran. I think they hold up pretty well to this day.