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Author: Arthur Chesterfield-Evans

21/07/2024

DVA Still Screwing Veterans

21 July 2021

A recent article shows that the Dept of Veteran Affairs is still making it hard for injured veterans to get redress.

This is entirely consistent with the way that governments try to minimise all welfare payments.

Centrelink is a bureaucratic nightmare. They will not pay until you have absolutely no resources, and the amounts are not enough even to pay rent in capital cities. Morrison claimed that he had cut the rate of people being granted the Disability Support Pension by two thirds. All the people refused have to keep sending off job applications as part of their ‘mutual obligations’. I see these people. They have virtually no hope of a job and are wasting their own and employers’ time.

I work in the State area of workers compensation and CTP injury. SIRA (State Insurance Regulatory Agency) is chiefly concerned that insurers do not pay out too much, so that the government can boast that premiums are low. There’s not much danger of insurers overpaying. They refuse a large number of investigations and treatments that are standard elsewhere.

Veterans Affairs used to be a special welfare system for returned service personnel and was set up after the world wars as a system to look after heroes. But wars lately have been neither popular, nor in Australia’s interest. The Vietnam war was unpopular, as were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam was a mistake, but the more recent ones were merely done to please the USA, who also should not have been there. Our troops have lots of PTSD and because negative media coverage was stopped after Vietnam, the veterans cannot really talk about what happened to anyone who understands. Their suicide rate has been high. But consistent with the lack of willingness for any sort of welfare, the veterans also have a bureaucratic nightmare, which delays payment as long as possible, often till their death by suicide.

The market-obsessed late capitalist system in which we live simply creates greater inequality, and the only way to maintain a harmonious social fabric will be to support disadvantaged people, whatever the cause of their disadvantage. It has been said that the Left tries to lessen inequality and the populist Right tries to defend privilege or finds scapegoats. As we watch the US unravel or see our government and opposition blame migrants for the housing shortage it is hard to argue with this proposition.

In the meantime, the veterans need help against the government’s lawyers. And the population should try to stop us being drawn into very silly wars. Taiwan looks like the next danger.

Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide confronts lawfare, cronyism and a bureaucratic nightmare

21/07/2024

Israeli Parliament votes down Two-State Solution 68-9

21 July 2024

Israel has been settling people, largely poorer folk from Eastern Europe on hilltops on former Palestinian occupied land since 1948. Because they did recognise land title before the declaration of the State of Israel, they can claim that no one owns this land, which is of course nonsense, as the Palestinians had been occupying and farming it.

They have continued to pretend that a peace could be negotiated as they gradually took more and more land, and built roads to all the settlements so that the army could come and help the occupiers if the Palestinians resisted. They called the Palestinians terrorists, basically to undermine their legitimacy.

Now there is no land that could be a Palestinian state- there are about 750,000 Jewish settlers in the West bank in fortified villages, and they are educated in Hebrew only, so they cannot go anywhere even if they agreed to.

Israel has pretended for years that there could be a two-state solution because it has been playing for time to make it impossible. Now, because the world is calling out for a peace solution, the Knesset has said that it will not have a two state solution. The Palestinians obviously have nowhere to go. Gaza is rubble and the land on the West Bank is largely Jewish-owned.

Jeff Halper in his book ‘An Israeli in Palestine’ recognised this problem more than a decade ago and said that there would have to be a one-state solution with and post-Apartheid type of reconciliation similar to South Africa’s. Good luck with that now!

It is hard not to believe that the hard right who control the Israeli Knesset wanted the Gazans either to die or to flee to the Sinai, but Egypt did not allow the latter, as they knew that they would be refugees there forever. The Gazans knew it too, though we might wonder what they would choose now as Israel bombs them and blockades them till their children starve.

This is colonialism and genocide more obvious than it has been in public memory, and the Knesset has just shut the door on the peace process that Australia and many other governments have been vainly clinging to.

https://johnmenadue.com/israeli-lawmakers-vote-against-palestinian-statehoodpic-zeev-elkin/

07/06/2024

Anglo Democracies- What a Mess. We need a New Constitution

7 June 2024

If a mob stormed Parliament, overcoming the security system, causing great fear, killing one person and injuring others, we would regard that country with suspicion; South American tin pot democracy? If a few of the rioters were charged, but the instigator was not charged 4 years later, we would regard that as a farce. If the instigator then got a fine for irregularity in the bookkeeping of his election funds 4 years later and got a fine that was a tiny fraction of his election budget, he might as well have had a parking ticket. If the instigator then with total impunity stood again for election we would say that the tin pot nature of a quasi-dictatorship was confirmed. Yet this is exactly what has happened in the USA, where Trump will get a non-custodial sentence, i.e. a fine or some charitable work. Photo-op in a soup kitchen perhaps?

The Republicans will win if Biden becomes unpopular because the economy turns down, or he supports Israel too much because of the power of the Jewish lobby, or if the scare campaign on his age is successful enough. This is because there are only two options, Democrat and Republican. The leaders in the Republican party do not want to criticise Trump because if he succeeds their fortunes will suffer and if he fails, they want to run in 4 years. In a Big Party, it is all about climbing up their hierarchy- tough luck about the country’s welfare. Even Nikki Haley, who criticised Trump in a desperate effort in the Republican primaries has endorsed him. So we have a President who is too old and should step down standing against Trump who has a criminal record and for some reason cannot be brought to book within 4 years; his past failures, ignorance and appalling policies almost irrelevant in the scheme of things.

In Britain, with First-Past-the-Post voting, the electoral system is similarly distorted to favour only two parties and the inequities are such that you can almost draw a line across the country. Conservative Blue in the South, Labour Red in the North. Other parties and opinions are a dot here and there, they get far more votes than seats. Post-Brexit the economy has tanked, which is what one might have expected since most their trade was with the EU. The Conservatives will get a caning, putting in the lack- lustre Labour party, the only alternative, of course.

Back, in Australia, Labor is criticised for doing so little and being Liberal-lite. They had agreed not to raise taxes and even to give tax cuts because Shorten had been defeated by scare tactics in 2019, so having no policies was a safer, small target option. The Conservatives rule from beyond the grave.

The problem is that the people have handed the power to a two party system. When Churchill wrote the post-WW2 German constitution he wrote it so that no party would ever get an absolute majority. There would have to be negotiation about forming government and about each piece of legislation; no ‘winner takes all’. The Swiss constitution has 3 levels of government, all but 7 politicians are part-time and limited to 2 terms, with their jobs protected so that when they leave they go back to them full time. This means there are no party hierarchies to climb up and no jobs for the boys and girls at the end. Also there are quarterly referenda where if citizens get enough signatures they can overthrow even Federal government decisions. This is what Australia did not copy when our constitution was written in 1900 (though it was considered). Our 1901 constitution was a heroic effort to stitch 6 squabbling colonies into a nation. It was not all wisdom for all time.

Anglo countries may have been early in creating democracy from autocratic kingdoms, but better things are now known and we need to move up and on.

02/06/2024

Science Starts to Respond to the Legal System

2 June 2024

Scientists and others, like doctors, who are of a scientific bent have for years despaired of the legal system whose practitioners seem to have little respect for knowledge other than their own and accept very poor scientific evidence. Now the high-profile head of the Australian Academy of Science, Prof Anna-Maria Arabia, who gave evidence in the Folbigg case has hit back. Kathleen Folbigg was accused of killing 3 of her children, but later scientific evidence showed that they had a genetic defect. Prof Arabia is looking at the relationship between science and the law and wants to put a bit more discipline into the science-law relationship. All power to her arm!

‘It could be any of us’: Top scientists sound alarm over unreliable evidence

By Michael Bachelard, Nick McKenzie and Ruby Schwartz

Sydney Morning Herald June 2, 2024 — 8.00pm

Australia’s peak science body has called the triple-murder conviction of Robert Farquharson for driving his sons into a dam in 2005 into question, saying it was partly based on unreliable scientific evidence and his case would be ripe for review if the nation had a mechanism to reconsider old convictions.

Farquharson is serving a 33-year prison sentence in the protection unit of Victoria’s Barwon Prison after being twice found guilty of murdering his three children by driving them into a dam on Father’s Day in 2005, and with an appeal court affirming his guilt. But a number of legal and scientific experts have questioned the evidence that convicted him.

Australian Academy of Science chief executive Anna-Maria Arabia said, speaking generally, that courts were susceptible to “junk science” being admitted and that cases such as Farquharson’s demonstrated the need for significant legal reforms to try to prevent the use of unreliable evidence.

“Every member of the public should be concerned about a justice system that is not adequately informed by science. Any one of us could be Robert Farquharson,” she told this masthead and 60 Minutes.

Arabia said cases such as Farquharson’s, and the recent release of Kathleen Folbigg, who spent 20 years in prison for murdering her three children and manslaughter of the fourth, showed that expert scientific witnesses should be independently selected based on their expertise, and that the evidence they give should be proved reliable before a jury could hear it.

She also called for a review mechanism that sits alongside the court system to look at possible miscarriages of justice.

“The system ought to be more robust than it is. And it can be. It can be reformed. It takes some political will; it takes some courage,” she said.

Arabia said she had serious concerns about a number of the “strands” of the scientific and circumstantial evidence used to convict Farquharson. Among her concerns were the quality of the medical and traffic reconstruction evidence that convinced two juries and an appeal court of his guilt.

Farquharson told police he coughed and passed out in the lead up to the crash – a condition called cough syncope – which meant he was unconscious when his car drove into the dam.

Lawyers for Farquharson have flagged a new appeal later this year, under a Victorian law introduced in 2019 that allows prisoners to present “fresh and compelling evidence” to the court where a conviction constitutes a substantial miscarriage of justice.

Farquharson’s lawyer, Luke McMahon, said this was a high legal bar which “places the onus back on the accused”, and was “not really an examination of how things unfolded”. Since the convicted person is often in prison, the appeal mechanism also often requires lawyers to work pro bono, or without pay, to take on cases.

Arabia said that “in the vast majority of cases, that is not enough” to address problematic cases.

The Academy of Science has called for a standing tribunal like those in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Norway, which employ dedicated staff to identify and investigate possible miscarriages of justice. Known as a Criminal Cases Review Commission in the UK and New Zealand, these bodies can examine cases where there are developments in scientific or other evidence, then refer them, with advice, back to the courts or the government.

Asked if the Farquharson case would be a lead candidate for such a tribunal, Arabia said the medical evidence of cough syncope “would be considered new evidence that should be assessed by something like a Criminal Cases Review Commission to see if it meets a threshold to reopen and re-examine this case.

“It should not be beyond the realm of possibilities to establish a criminal case review commission in Australia and to resource it adequately. After all, this enables the delivery of justice to the Australian people. It should be a bare minimum requirement as part of our justice system,” she said. “Australia really is an outlier in this area.”

Police involved in the Farquharson case declined interviews, but Assistant Commissioner Glenn Weir said in a statement that Victoria Police “stands behind the rigorous investigation which led to the 2010 conviction of Robert Farquharson”.

“We consider this matter finalised and will not be commenting further. In the event of any appeal by Farquharson, we will respond as required,” he said.

A recent book by Stephen Cordner, the head of international programs at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, and retired physician Kerry Breen, said the UK case review commission had referred 657 cases to the court of appeal over 22 years, with 441 convictions quashed.

Translated to Australia, that would mean eight or nine wrongful convictions a year, they wrote in their book, Wrongful Convictions in Australia.

In the United States, the Innocence Project had overturned more than 350 cases. False confessions, inaccurate eyewitness evidence, misleading forensic evidence, police misconduct and bad defence were key errors, they wrote.

Arabia has also called for changes to the treatment of expert evidence. Currently, people accepted as experts can give their opinions in court based on their knowledge, but they are selected by the parties – prosecution and defence – and are not always the most qualified people, Arabia said.

“How do we get the right experts before our judges and juries, selected for the right reasons, not … because they’re good presenters in court, but because they are the best possible expert who has the best available knowledge?” Arabia said.

The Academy of Science also wants a “reliability standard”, so that courts do not admit expert evidence unless it can be demonstrated that it is reliable.

In the absence of such a standard, Arabia said, “pseudoscience and junk science can be admitted into court, and juries and judges will consider that as part of their deliberations. I think most people would … be shocked by that.”

Arabia said accomplished scientific experts often did not want to give evidence in courts because “it is such a hyper-adversarial situation, and what ends up happening is that those experts are asked about matters that are well beyond their area of expertise.

“We have scientists who come to the Australian Academy of Science, having been expert witnesses in a case, thinking they’re doing the right thing, who have felt so cornered or manipulated in that process that they will never do it again,” she said.

“What a great loss for our justice system, that some of the most reliable and best minds in our country feel that that is a forum where they can’t present their best, their knowledge.”

Arabia said reform would require attorneys-general at the state and federal levels to “roll up their sleeves and commit to looking at improving the systems so that they can deliver justice for everyone equally”.

Victorian Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes declined requests for an interview on the academy’s proposals. In a statement, a departmental spokesperson said: “Victoria’s justice system has processes in place to ensure the quality and reliability of forensic evidence presented in court.”

The government was monitoring the effectiveness of these processes, the statement said, and was “reviewing any opportunities for improvement, including discussions with other states and jurisdictions”.

NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley’s spokesperson said there were “existing mechanisms in place” to allow the state’s courts to consider scientific evidence and also for “ad hoc inquiries into convictions, as occurred with the 2022 Folbigg Inquiry”. The state’s experts code of conduct said their “paramount duty is to assist the court impartially”.

Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus declined to comment.

Arabia said courts were doing their best, but advances in science made it difficult to be across all the detail.

In the Farquharson case, Arabia said she was concerned by medical evidence about cough syncope which painted the condition as “extremely rare”, and the traffic reconstruction evidence, in which police experts said the car was subject to three conscious steering inputs by the driver, who therefore could not have been unconscious.

She said there were also questions about the memory evidence of two key witnesses. One, Dawn Waite, did not come forward until four years after Farquharson drove into the dam. Another witness, Greg King, told how his memory of a conversation incorporated more features over time of events that had subsequently occurred.

“We know scientifically that memory evidence is quite unreliable. And memory can be open to change based on external stimuli, things like media reporting, things like discussion, things like looking at photos, dreams,” Arabia said.

Victorian Criminal Bar Association vice chairman Jason Gullaci, SC, said most lawyers would welcome another layer of review from a criminal cases review commission.

“It’s an excellent idea. And I think it’s got real merit,” Gullaci said. “Where there are advances in science that then call into question previous expertise and opinions that were thought to be valid, but that if it has had a significant impact on a trial and conviction and is likely [to have] caused a miscarriage of justice, I think the criminal lawyers would want that rectified, whichever side of the fence they stand on.”

This article was at www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/it-could-be-any-of-us-top-scientists-sound-alarm-over-unreliable-evidence-20240528-p5jh7q.html

Watch the 60 Minutes special episode here. https://www.9now.com.au/60-minutes/season-2024/episode-18

02/06/2024

Religious Update: 2 items from Secular Australia

2 June 2024

Wording of the Census

A battle is brewing between Catholic Church leaders and secular groups over the religion question in the Australian census. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is currently testing whether it would be better to ask “Does the person have a religion?” rather than “What is the person’s religion?”, after 9.8 million people (approximately 40% of responses) indicated in the 2021 count that they had no faith. The new question would have a mark box for both “No” and “Yes (specify religion)”. The bureau is also testing the use of a write-in box for respondents who wish to indicate more detail on their faith, rather than simply picking from a small list of common religions.

The Lord’s Prayer in Parliament House, Victoria

Liberal upper house member Evan Mulholland has placed a motion on the Notice Paper in support of faith leaders who wrote to all members of parliament earlier this month demanding that the parliament continue to observe prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer, at the opening of each sitting day.

It has been 1034 days since the state Labor government promised to replace prayers with something more reflective and appropriate for Victoria’s diverse community.

Victorian Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes has acknowledged the government’s “unmet commitment”.

The flurry of activity – the letter from faith leaders and motions on the Notice Paper – may be a sign that the government is ready to deal with the matter.

Earlier in the year, Mr Mulholland declared that the Liberal Party would “fiercely oppose” any attempt to remove prayer.

Census data show that Christianity has plummeted from 85 per cent of the Victorian population in the 1970s to 41 per cent in 2021. The percentage of people who identified as having no religion at the 2021 Census was 39 per cent.

https://secularism.au/

23/05/2024

EV Batteries are the Answer to Australia’s Electricity Storage Problem

23 May 2024

Everyday we hear about Australia’s energy problem. The government wants to be re-elected because it gave the electricity companies $300 for each of us to offset our power bills.

Less than a fortnight ago, the Government announced a new gas strategy. Gas had to be a ‘transition fuel’ because we could not transition to renewables fast enough. Fracking with its associated damage to the rock strata, environment and greenhouse gas targets notwithstanding Last week the Liberals announced a nuclear future. This week Erarang coal fired power station closure has to be delayed. And, hey rooftop solar is too much in the day time, so owners will have to pay to have the power taken off their hands as grid prices go negative.

Meanwhile it costs $50,000 to buy an EV in Australia, despite the fact that China has an EV overproduction problem and BYD can produce a model called a Seagull for $US10,000 (about $A15,000). An EV has a battery that stores about 50 kilowatt hours, whereas the average home battery is less than 10kWh. The spot price of electricity varies and it would be easy to charge the EVs on solar in the daytime and use their batteries to power the houses in the evenings. Why does this not happen? It does require standard plugs and meters that would allow electricity to move from the car to the grid. Electricity already goes from the grid to the cars- it just has to be able to be reversed.

Why has this not happened? The small number of electricity suppliers, who are arguably gaming the system by withholding supply at critical times to raise prices, do not want supply diversified. They are building solar as fast as they can and wanting to control the solar input. They even offer to put solar on your roof as long as they can control when it is used. If individual households could store solar in their EVs, and either use it or sell it into the grid at peak times, this would directly cut into their oligopoly profits. Why does the government not have the courage to take them on? Probably because solar owners and people who want to profit from the EV batteries in their cars have not made enough noise to make it a political issue.

So lets shout:

‘We want cheap EVs and we want to be able to use their batteries to store power for Australia, lessen greenhouse gases and make some money at the same tim.

When do we want it- NOW!’

23/05/2024

Building Regulator Toughens Up- Joke?

House collapses, the builder is charged with 9 offences and flees. When he turns up, is tried and convicted he is fined a total of $5,450. He calls it minor and continues working for a friend. None of the convictions were for the collapse.

May 23 2024

A house collapses, the builder is charged with 9 offences and flees. When he turns up, he is tried and convicted and fined a total of $5,450. He calls it minor and continues working for a friend. None of the convictions were for the house collapse.

Is this some sort of joke? No. It is another example of our legal system in action- in this case the ‘beefed up’ NSW Building Regulator. Building Minister Anoulack Chanthivong says the charges reflected the new powers of the Building Commission.

See SMH article below:

On the run for months, builder of collapsed home convicted of fraud

By Anthony Segaert and Olivia Ireland

May 23, 2024

The man whose company built a Condell Park home that collapsed in the dead of night last year has been found guilty of a string of fraud-related charges.

Thirty-five-year-old George Khouzame, director of Hemisphere Constructions, was on the run from authorities for nearly two months at the beginning of the year, before he handed himself in to NSW Police in March.

Khouzame, from South Hurstville, pleaded guilty to nine offences relating to using an unlicensed contractor and the fraudulent lodging of insurance applications on three different worksites, but Building Commission NSW and the state’s police failed to secure any prosecutions relating to the Condell Park home collapse.

When asked about the charges, Khouzame told the Herald that, after having his building licence cancelled shortly after the collapse, he had paid out “every single home owner” who had contracted him for work and his fraudulent insurance claims were “just negligence from my office”.

“It was a very, very, very, very low-end fraud. It was literally an honest mistake from my staff in the office,” he said of the nine convictions: three charges of publishing misleading material to obtain financial advantage, two charges of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception, three charges of making false or misleading statements in an insurance application, and one charge of engaging an unlicensed contractor.

Investigation began before the collapse

Attention turned to Khouzame and his company on Good Friday last year, when a young family renting the home built less than 12 months earlier was woken at 4.30am by the sound of the ceiling collapsing.

Neighbours described hearing what sounded like an explosion as a portion of the house in Sydney’s south-west fell down, hitting several cars parked underneath. A previous tenant of the property said one room had earlier “completely flooded”.

But the collapse was less surprising to authorities, who had launched an urgent investigation into Hemisphere Constructions a month earlier. Only a day before, NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler had made an unannounced visit to a worksite in Concord operated by Hemisphere Constructions and found what he described as “pretty obvious” unsafe work practices.

“There is a strong correlation between unsafe worksites and the potential for serious defects to be incorporated in the project,” he told the ABC.

After cancelling Hemisphere’s building licence the following month, Fair Trading, the predecessor to Building Commission NSW, and investigators from Bankstown Police spent the year looking into the company. By January, they were ready to arrest Khouzame.

On visiting multiple homes connected to him, they encountered a problem: Khouzame was nowhere to be found.

After another month of searching, NSW Police obtained an arrest warrant and appealed to the public to find the wanted man.

“George Khouzame, aged 34, is wanted on an outstanding warrant in relation to fraud offences,” NSW Police posted on social media. “Anyone with information into his whereabouts is urged to not … approach him but to call triple zero (000) immediately.”

He handed himself in at Bankstown Police Station at 5.30am on March 6, and was arrested on the spot.

‘You should be saying thank you’

The builder in May pleaded guilty to the offences relating to his management of homes in Punchbowl, Macquarie Fields and Chester Hill.

At two of the three sites, Khouzame significantly understated how much his building projects were worth on insurance applications.

For a Macquarie Fields dual occupancy construction project worth $900,000, Khouzame was accused of writing in his Home Building Warranty Insurance that it was worth $520,000.

“Had the correct value of construction been stated on both insurance applications the value of the insurance premiums would have totalled $14,799.00 creating a deficit of $7517.94,” the facts tendered to the court read.

For a home renovation in Punchbowl, Khouzame listed the construction value to the insurance provider as $150,000 instead of $400,000.

He also pleaded guilty to engaging an unlicensed contractor to install windows and doors at a site he was renovating in Chester Hill.

Khouzame, who called the Herald on Wednesday from a private phone number after numerous attempts to contact him for comment, said the offences were “all they [the investigators] could come up with over a 10-year investigation and 350 homes”.

“The charges were dismissed in relation to the fraud and I pled guilty to only one charge for the home warranty application,” he said. “OK buddy?”

But after the Herald read out his nine offences, to which he pleaded guilty and was fined a total of $5450, Khouzame repeated his claim that it was “very minor fraud”.

“We failed, our staff failed, to update the home warranty to reflect the variations [in project costs] … It was just negligence from my office, and I did accept it, and I apologised.

“So we had existing 24 open projects when the house collapse happened and the licence was cancelled, and we paid out every single home owner and every single client.

“I didn’t run away from the problem. I approached the problem head on and I [had] done what I had to do to make sure that every client and every home owner has been supported by me personally.

“You should be saying, ‘Thank you, good work’.”

In its first six months, Building Commission NSW has cancelled, suspended or disqualified 136 construction licences.

“We’re starting to see the dividends of the expansion of powers the NSW government provided to the Building Commission,” Building Minister Anoulack Chanthivong said.

“It now has an expanded tool kit to improve build quality and weed out those who don’t play by the rules.

“Already this year, we’ve had a nearly 100 per cent increase in the number of building work rectification orders issued, helping to deliver compliant, safe and trustworthy homes.”

Chanthivong did not respond to questions about why charges had not been laid over the house collapse.

With his licence suspended, Khouzame is now working as a labourer for a friend’s food company.

20/04/2024

Cheaper EVs?

20 April 2024

Here is an article praising China’s Electric Vehicle industry and noting that Apple gave up trying to do EVs and China has successfully taken up the slack.

It also boasts that Chinese EV technology is excellent and that they have not lowered prices, and it warns that trade tariffs to stop Chinese exports will be counterproductive.

More conventional views are that China has a glut of EVs and a coming economic crisis due to their property bubble.

Australia has no tariffs on EVs and is currently paying too much for them. Despite the tone of this article, China must want to dump EVs somewhere.

I am still not sure that EVs are good for the environment in that the carbon footprint from mining and processing their components is much greater than the simpler components of internal combustion engines, and the factories that manufacture them are mainly powered by coal-generated power. It takes many km of petrol saved to overcome this initial deficit. Hopefully this situation will gradually improve in time, but in the shorter term, will Chinese EVs be cheaper here?

What does China’s electric vehicle rise mean for the global market?

20/04/2024

Labor’s Policy Drift

20 April 2024

Albanese won the Federal election 2 years ago, but he has been very disappointing.

Australia wanted real change after a decade of Liberals doing nothing except giving money to their mates, offending China and pursuing the dubious AUKUS strategy, (a $360 billion photo op for Scott Morrison).

Labor was very dejected after a bold policy platform from Bill Shorten fell to a characteristic Liberal scare campaign from Scott Morrison in the 2019 Federal election, so they pursued a ‘small target’ strategy (i.e. minimal policies) in the 2022 election.

But when they won the 2022 election, they have still been scared to do anything, behaving like Liberal-lite, as if they are still scared of any Liberal criticism. It seems that they believe that negative political campaigning is so much more successful than actual policies that they are best served by giving the Liberal little to criticise, i.e doing very little. The Liberals are ruling from beyond the grave.

Labor did not undo the Liberal follies of the AUKUS pact, the kow-towing to the US with their bases here and silly behaviour in the South China sea. (How would the US feel if China took a few aircraft carriers for trips around the Caribbean just to emphasise freedom of navigation?) They even kept the Stage 3 tax cuts, which were a desperate Liberal measure; a future promise to win a present election. Labor promised no tax increases, so Medicare remains doomed, and the long-term privatisation contracts that the Liberal installed in Centrelink remain, with our welfare system behaving like a suspicious private insurer as jobs and job security become more tenuous. They were petty with the Teals, taking their staff when they should have supported them both because they are more aligned to Labor in many policy areas, and because they are all from Liberal seats and it is in Labor’s interest that the Teals have them rather than the Liberals.

Now we have dubious rumblings about subsidies to Australian manufacturing with lots of patriotic tub-thumping.

My own view is that Albanese is quite safe in his job until at least after the 2025 election, but Labor may lose seats to Greens or independents if he does not do more of what is needed.

Dutton plays to his base while Albanese neglects his

18/04/2024

Gaza- Where Next?

10 April 2024

The world has watched in horror and amazement as Israel has systematically bombed Gaza.

Gaza was an open-air prison in the sense that its people could not move without permission, could not trade, except via Israel so had no industry and even their food supply was controlled. This led to the rise of Hamas, which was seen as at least willing to stand up to Israel rather than being the patsies of the Palestinian Authority (more on that later). Hamas was a result of the situation, not the cause.

As I have posted before, Israel was making friends with most of the countries around it. Jordan was too weak to stand up to it, as was Egypt. Qatar and UAE were mainly interested in trade, and Saudi Arabia, despite being strongly Sunni Muslims were about to sign a treaty. Netanyahu was captive of his religious Right and talking about a ‘Regional Solution’ for the Palestinians. This was probably code for them ‘going elsewhere’.

The State of Israel was ‘declared’ by Ben Gurion in 1948. The slogan had been ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. Palestine had been a colonial state, part of the Ottoman Empire and then, after WW1, a British Protectorate and. But this did not mean that it did not have people occupying it. The state of Israel set about populating it by putting ‘settlers’ on the West Bank. The myth was that this land was not owned, which was only legally correct because Israel did not recognise land title prior to the declaration of the State of Israel. So Palestinians did not ‘own’ the land that they had occupied for decades. The ‘settlers’ were given land on the hilltops that the Palestinians were driven off, and the Israeli defence force guaranteed them support if the Palestinians, now defined as terrorists, attacked. A network of roads was built so that the army could come quickly to quell any Palestinian ‘aggression’. Many of the settlers came from Eastern Europe and had been marginalised in their previous countries so defending their Jewish status and new homes was not a huge conceptual step.

This went on for years with unsuccessful negotiations for a ‘two state’ solution with Yasser Arafat. The Palestinians were portrayed as terrorists while Israel gradually made the two state solution impossible on the ground. The settlers were educated principally in Hebrew which reinforced their Jewishness, but also limited their information input and their options to go elsewhere. There are now about 750,000 of them, so the West Bank is effectively ‘occupied’ and the settlers will not move any more than the Palestinians want to.

Israel also created Ramullah as the so-called capital of the supposedly-coming Palestinian state. The international aid agencies moved there, naturally wanting good premises for their staff to live and work and the price of rents and real estate there meant that the Palestinians, on minimal income, had trouble living there. The Palestinian Authority, now actually having a place to rule, could approve land developments, a handy source of income and also of corruption. So the Palestinian Authority was no longer seen as the legitimate rulers, but as compromised by Israel, which is why Hamas won the Gaza elections. Palestinians are generally not a particularly religious people.

The Palestinains are forced out of their accommodation in Jerusalem by the fact that increasingly Israelis use imported labour from Sri Lanka to do the menial jobs that the Palestinians used to do. So they had no work and could not pay the rents. If they left the house, under Israeli law an unoccupied house belongs to the State and can be gifted to a settler, so there has been a constant house by house clearing of Palestinians from Jerusalem, both the old walled (holy) city and the new part where traditionally Palestinians have lived on the East Side. So the Palesitinaisn were gradually getting to a situation where they had no land and no jobs. They were portrayed as terrorists and there was no negotiation towards any sort of lasting settlement.

Hamas probably launched the October 7 attack because if it did not do so, the Palestinian people had no future.

Israel, with Netanyahu having to stay in power at a personal level because of corruption charges and hostage to the religious Right first bombed the north of Gaza, and now, 35,000 or more deaths later, is intending to invade the last part where 1 million refugees have gathered. It may be that the religious Right simply want all the Palestinians dead. In Biblical times whole cities were massacred,so it is hard to know their frame of reference. It seems quite probable that the Israelis assumed that the border would be opened, the Palestinians would flee to a refugee area in the Sinai and they would never be allowed to return, creating a ‘refugee crisis’ which would be a UN rather than an Israeli problem. Israel would have solved its problem, and the precedent would let the West Bank Palestinains follow the Gazans. Unpopular in the short-term, but a ‘regional solution’.

The Israelis were keen to maximise harm to the Gazans, not allowing food trucks in, and the West talked about building ports to get food to Gazans rather than try to stop the Israeli blockade. It is hard to believe that the food trucks that were negotiating directly with the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) were hit accidentally; rather it was part of the overall strategy to discourage the aid, stop the Gazans getting fed, worsen their plight and get them to go elsewhere.

The idea that hunting Hamas militants is a serious strategy must be dismissed as nonsense. This will not be won as a military campaign. The hate sown by this action will last for generations. But why should Israel be believed when it says that this is its strategy? They took the West Bank by stealth as they claimed that they wanted to negotiate peace. It was simply a lie. They have worked for 40 years to make a ‘two state solution’ impossible. Now, amazingly even the Australian government thinks this can be achieved. There are $750,000 settlers making it impossible. Jeff Halper, an American Jewish anthropologist who moved to Israel wrote an excellent book in 2010, ‘An Israeli in Palestine’ in which he advocated a ‘One State solution’ on the assumption that the apartheid situation that exists has to be undone as it was in South Africa. This looks a very dismal prospect now. When I visited in 2012 the average Israeli was in a state of denial about what was happening, regarding it as the army and the police’s job to keep the peace so that they could continue ‘normal life’. It was strikingly similar to the situation when I had visited apartheid South Africa in 1985. Now the Israeli population is very scared and arming themselves. It will end up like the US with a large number of gun-related deaths and the problems ongoing. In the end a society has to be built on consensus and a degree of trust between individuals and strangers.

So what of the Gaza war? I have drifted off topic. The actual fighting has had very little attention. Do the Israelis merely bomb the city systematically and then walk in over the rubble with few casualties? Is Hamas actually fighting? There seems to be no attention to this in the mainstream press. And what of the Israelis? A million people are demonstrating for a change of government, but it seems unclear what they want. Their hostages back? A cease fire? A reasonable long term peace? On what terms?

Netanyahu has said that a date is set to invade the rest of Gaza. Does this mean even more casualties than before to force the world to take the Gazans as there is nowhere else for them to go? It looks that way.

Even if the world stops supplying weapons, will the Israelis have enough stockpiled to complete the job?

And if the Israelis stop, either now or after even more carnage, how will Gaza be rebuilt or there be any sort of just solution for the Palestinians?

The world sees Israel as the last and most brutal of the colonial powers, simply taking a land and killing inhabitants who resist. The developed West with all its talk of international law is seen in the global South as hypocrites, unwilling even to condemn a more recent colonial aggressor. It is hard not to see their point. Countries are judged by what their governments do, not by what their people may think. Australia’s late foray into arms manufacture with the Israeli partnership can be seen for the stupidity it was. We are all losers here. Recognition of a Palestinian state will at least elevate the status of any Palestinian negotiators. It is too little too late, but what are the alternatives?

https://theconversation.com/penny-wong-floats-recognising-palestine-ahead-of-two-state-solution-to-help-path-to-peace-227456