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Category: Accountability

06/09/2023

How is the Ukrainian Offensive Going?

6 September 2023

We heard a lot about how Ukraine was going to have a major offensive, which was expected to be hugely and quickly successful. It does not seem to have been, and it is well known that it takes at least 3 times as many attackers as defenders to be successful.

Russia was defending. Russia had air superiority. Russia has 3x Ukraine’s population (143 million to 43 million), and far more industrial and military production capacity. Ukraine had not enough weapons and lots of different types of weapons from many different donors.

The silence has been deafening. Here is a military historian with a very pessimistic view, but one that seems well supported by the evidence presented.

It seems hopeless that Ukraine can capture all its lost territory including the Crimea, so it will either fall into a war of attrition which it cannot win, or have a peace imposed on it by the West when they tire of supplying more weapons and/or Ukraine simply runs out of soldiers. The Chinese peace initiative?

https://bigserge.substack.com/p/escaping-attrition-ukraine-rolls

03/09/2023

Qantas- What a Tale!

3 September 2023

I used to fly Qantas. I used to go on holidays to Europe in winter, having saved my pennies from my casual student job. I went in winter because it was Uni holidays. (They were the days when students could actually save while at uni, if they were super frugal, worked enough hours and did not care if they did not get credits).

When the Aussie-accent welcome was spoken on Qantas, it felt like home. But Qantas became ever more expensive, and now is often double the budget carriers. I have remained frugal on air fares, as you can stay a week longer overseas on the difference. If you are on the same plane with the same departure and arrival times, why pay a thousand dollars for slightly more legroom, slightly more attention and a slightly better meal? And if it is a cheaper plane that does not crash, the flying times are also much the same.

I flew on Ryan Air around Europe when Alan Joyce was in charge. The tickets were cheap, but you paid to choose your seat, were encouraged to pay to go to the head of the queue, were hassled to buy lunch, duty-free and lottery tickets even when you got on board. There was talk of having to pay to go to the on board dunny; I don’t know if it ever happened. I was therefore worried when Joyce got control of Qantas. The Qantas’ safety record was based on maintenance well done in Australia. That was outsourced. The prices still rose, blamed on fuel prices of course. The staff were largely retrenched with COVID, but Qantas got a lot of jobseeker money that was not repaid. After COVID, many middle class folks have wanted to have overseas trips or see relatives (including me) and have paid top dollar for tickets. There is a shortage of flights, presumably due to a lack of staff returning to the industry, but record profits. Luckily I have never thought much of flight credits or bought tickets for non-existent flights; this last must be more luck than management.

Qatar did not get landing rights, almost certainly to protect Qantas profits, even though Qantas is no longer an Australian government airline and after various privatisations Australians own only 51% of it. But we will all be paying more for this denial of competition .

I was also interested to read Joyce’s background. He was a mathematician who is very good at maximising the profit from various aviation-related sales. I guess this explains the optional extras on RyanAir and the crazy price gyrations even while you are logged on trying to buy a ticket.

Australia is something of a haven for powerful industries seeking monopolies or oligopoly powers. Sydney Airport was privatised by John Howard and his chief of staff, Max (the Axe) Moore –Wilton left to manage the buying organisation, Macquarie Airport Corporation. Airport charges rose massively. Some airlines could not afford this and stopped flying their routes. At the time I was living in Dunedin and Sydney-Dunedin was one of the routes discontinued, so instead of a 3 hour flight from $200, I had to fly via either Christchurch or Brisbane at more than twice the cost with stopovers as long as 13 hrs. A huge benefit to an Aussie corporation at huge cost to the flying public, and this is totally ongoing. Airports should be a service run on a cost-recovery basis.

It is time Australia got a competition policy that stopped the supernormal profits of oligopolies, which has made Australian companies so profitable compared to overseas companies doing similar jobs, which is leading to huge number of takeovers by foreign companies and Australians further losing ownership and control of our national assets. This Qantas nonsense has to stop.

11/08/2023

Power in America

11 August 2023

A provocative article argues that the US is abandoning its tradition Blue (Democrat) v. Red (Republican), and instead voting on economic lines, with the Red which were traditionally seen as the party of the rich actually getting the poor vote.

The polling shows that the Republicans are ahead in the poorer states, and the Demicrats in the wealthier and better educated states. This is against what was assumed to be the normal situation.

Why could this be. The Democrats are in control and supported the status quo, when they rigged their last candidate, making sure that Bernie Sanders lost preselection- twice. He would almost certainly have beaten Hilary Clinton and then probably Trump, as he called for change in the same way that Trump did. He may then have beaten Biden, but the Democrat establishment put up Biden, who was effectively the status quo.

Trump’s policies, if they can be called such, seemed mainly to tell the Establishment to go to hell and promise to send it there. It was populist nonsense in that no serious policies underwrote it in terms of real benefits to poorer people. But if you think that governments are voted out, rather than oppositions being voted in, Trump’s demagoguery has a certain logic.

Trump is, to many people inside and outside the USA, a proven crook, and many US Democrats hope that the legal process will make him ineligible to stand again, assuming he wins the Republican nomination, which looks likely. One might even wonder if there would be revolutionary forces who might try to rescue him from goal. If they can storm Congress, why not a gaol?

The fact that the Republicans can have a majority in poorer areas, despite having an anti-welfare agenda seems to show the pre-eminence of populism, the Democrats being the Established Order. The fact that Biden is the figurehead, and the Democrats seem unable to find anyone to replace him is a worry. The Republicans will target his health if he stands again. The Democrats will say that he is very healthy, and the rest of us will cross our fingers and hope his cerebral arteries last until the election at least.

The middle class is hollowed out and it is the 1% v the 99%. This is what Marx predicted, but more this is the logic of every Monopoly game- in an unregulated market the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We have been playing Monopoly since the end of WW2 and small government and deregulation has been the dominant neo-liberal paradigm.

What happens in the US will hugely affect the world, both directly, but also in the way it sets trends. It is not even a new trend. Populist right wing governments are rising in many countries, Poland, Italy, Hungary, India and Turkey. France and Germany have seen a strengthening of the Right. Military dictators have seized power in a number of African states. There does not seem much evidence that these populist strong men have made much progress in solving the problems that led to their rise to power, but having a real argument about this statement would require a lot of research.

But the US is in real trouble, and the lack of discussion of the rising inequality and what is to be done about it may well be at the core of the problem.

07/08/2023

Reasons for the Rise of Ignorance

7 August 2023

I have spent some time wondering why ignorance seems to be growing. Decisions seem to be made without regard to the facts. This seems particularly bad when some sort of scientific knowledge is required.

Years ago it was assumed that if knowledge was readily available all decision making would improve, but it seems that the opposite is the case. Some years, following the lack of implementation of policy in response to the knowledge of the harm of tobacco, I was inclined to blame disinformation from vested interests and the fact that media courses were arts-based, so that the vast bulk of journalists knew little science. Then there was the significant effect that advertising had on the contents of the media.

Vested interests do a great job. First they blatantly deny the facts. Then it is reported as ‘controversial’ (‘cos they made the ‘controversy’). Then it is portrayed as uncertain or unproven because it is controversial.

But I think there are other elements:

The specialisation of knowledge, so that students can choose or not choose their subjects very early as part of ‘freedom’ so can have an apparently full education with complete unawareness of what they do not know.
The internet and social media have allowed people to meet people who think as they do, and divide them from those who do not, in order to keep them on the program, so they can market to them. So people are helped in their choice to restrict their knowledge input.
There has been an increasing gap between those who have money and power and those who have knowledge. This is partly due to the idea that you do not have to know about something to ‘manage’ it (a 1980s Harvard idea that persists as it is convenient to managers), and partly because of the egos of those who make a lot of money and therefore think that they are exceptional and that scientists are not important because they have not made money.
It may also be that the drop in equality of opportunity has led to people who have worked only in the political realm rising to power without an understanding of science (or indeed social issues).

Here is an article from the NY Times and SMH on this issue.

Opinion

The paranoia of the tech plutocrats

By Paul Krugman

Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine scientist and a frequent target of anti-vaxxer harassment, recently expressed some puzzlement in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. He noted that many of those taunting him were also “big time into bitcoin or cryptocurrency” and declared that “I can’t quite connect the dots on that one.”

OK, I can help with that. Also, welcome to my world.

If you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong correlation among the three Cs: climate denial, COVID-19 vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.

There’s a strong correlation among the three Cs: climate denial, COVID-19 vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.

I’ve written about some of these things before, in the context of Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Robert F Kennedy Jr. But in the light of Dr Hotez’s puzzlement — and also the rise of Vivek Ramaswamy, another crank, who won’t get the GOP nomination but could conceivably become Donald Trump’s running mate — I want to say more about what these various forms of crankdom have in common and why they appeal to so many wealthy men.

The link between climate and vaccine denial is clear. In both cases, you have a scientific consensus based on models and statistical analysis. But the evidence supporting that consensus isn’t staring people in the face every day. You say the planet is warming? Hah! It snowed this morning! You say that vaccination protects against COVID? Well, I know unvaccinated people who are doing fine, and I’ve heard (misleading) stories about people who had cardiac arrests after their shots.

Anti-vax agitation and crypto enthusiasm are both aspects of a broader rise of know-nothingism, one whose greatest strength lies in an intellectually inbred community of very wealthy men.

To value the scientific consensus, in other words, you have to have some respect for the whole enterprise of research and understand how scientists reach the conclusions they do. This doesn’t mean that the experts are always right and never change their minds. They aren’t, and they do. For example, in the early stages of the COVID pandemic, top health officials opposed widespread masking, but they reversed course in the face of persuasive evidence because that’s what serious scientists do.

You can understand how the person in the street might not get what scientific research is all about. But you might think that businesspeople, especially those who’ve made money in technology, would appreciate the value of research and technical expertise. And many do.

But there are forces working in the opposite direction. Success all too easily feeds the belief that you’re smarter than anyone else, so you can master any subject without working hard to understand the issues or consulting people who have; this kind of arrogance may be especially rife among tech types who got rich by defying conventional wisdom.

The wealthy also tend to surround themselves with people who tell them how brilliant they are or with other wealthy people who join them in mutual affirmation of their superiority to mere technical drones.

So, where does cryptocurrency come in? Underlying the whole crypto phenomenon is the belief by some tech types that they can invent a better monetary system than the one we currently have, all without talking to any monetary experts or learning any monetary history. Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the generations-old system of fiat money issued by governments is a Ponzi scheme that will collapse into hyperinflation any day now. Hence, for example, Jack Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that “hyperinflation will change everything. It’s happening.”

Now, I’m quite willing to admit that monetary economics isn’t as solid a science as epidemiology or climatology. And yes, even noncrank economists argue about some big issues much more than their hard-science counterparts.

But economics nonetheless is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, “a technical and difficult subject” — one on which you shouldn’t make pronouncements without studying quite a lot of theory and history — although “no one will believe it.”

Certainly, people who think they understand climate better than climatologists and vaccines better than public health researchers are also likely to think they understand money better than economists and to believe in each case that experts telling them that the world doesn’t work the way they think it does are engaged in some kind of hoax or conspiracy.

Sure enough, much of the recent turmoil in the crypto industry has had economists wondering: Didn’t these people look into the theory and history of bank runs? And the answer, of course, is that they didn’t think they needed to.

True, there have always been wealthy cranks. Has it gotten any worse?

I think it has. Thanks to the tech boom, there are probably more wealthy cranks than there used to be, and they’re wealthier than ever, too. They also have a more receptive audience in America in the form of a Republican Party whose confidence in the scientific community has collapsed since the mid-2000s.

So, in answer to Hotez, the dots are indeed connected. Anti-vax agitation and crypto enthusiasm are both aspects of a broader rise of know-nothingism, one whose greatest strength lies in an intellectually inbred community of very wealthy men.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, then the SMH September 1, 2023

08/07/2023

Corruption and the Law

8 July 2023

I am no fan of our legal system. My view is that is a money-making talkfest, a debating plaything with justice when it is achieved, in no way cost effective. It is hugely stacked towards the rich and powerful, cumbersome and petty pedantic and it leaves huge issues of justice unacknowledged and unaddressed.

Many years ago the Non-Smokers Movement tried to stop tobacco sponsorship advertising on TV. It was perfectly obvious that Marlboro was a major sponsor of the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, that all the cars and signs were set up for a TV extravaganza of Marlboro exposure on Channel 9. Non-Smokers Movement had been going about 20 years trying to get rid of tobacco and smoking. We presented all the evidence with photos of what had been set up the livery of the cars. The judge ruled that we did not have ‘standing’ to bring the case as we would not lose money from the telecast, because we did not have an ‘interest’. An ‘interest’ equalled money, and we were considered lucky that the judge allowed us to present the case as he knew we did not have an ‘interest’ or ‘standing’. Be grateful for crumbs- we got the publicity, though of course the telecast went ahead, and they were awarded their costs (which in fairness Kerry Packer did not demand).

When I was in Parliament a whistle-blower nurse, Nola Fraser was on 4 Corners making allegations that there was a big problem with health care in Campbelltown and Camden Hospitals. She was relatively senior nurse, who was sometimes night supervisor at Camden. I contacted her and she told me about the corruption in the hospital. She had over a hundred reports, some details on about 70, the names of about 35, reasonable detail of about 15, and a lot of information on about 7 cases. Her stories were credible. The patients were dying because doctors were not available, trying to cover both the ED and the wards at the same time, or in theory on call at two hospitals at the same time, and ambulance protocols had resulted in at least one death, as inter-hospital transfers were low priority, but resulted in a lessening of interest at Camden, as the patient was ‘about to go’. She had tried to speak to senior management as the ‘case conference’ meetings produced no results, and management had referred her to an officer who could not do anything but refer her back to the senior management in a sort of endless fob-off merry-go-round. She used the word ‘corrupt’. I asked her if she meant a corrupt process or if some of the hospital staff were on the take. ‘No’, she assured me, ‘they are not making any money, it’s a corrupt process; they are supposed to be helping people, but they are killing them and covering it up’. Clear enough.

I initiated a process which led to an inquiry on the complaints system within NSW Health and concentrated on Campbelltown and Camden Hospitals. She was a major witness; a lot of problems were found and South Western Sydney Area Health Service got an extra $360 million in the following year’s budget. But it went further. NSW ICAC initiated an inquiry to look at Nola’s allegation of corruption. Unfortunately I did not follow the mechanics of this closely enough. After an inquiry for some time at a cost of $1.3 million, Nola Fraser was excoriated as a person of no credibility as she had not proved her allegation of ‘corruption’ against the senior staff. But no one had asked the obvious question; what did she mean by corruption? She was talking about process; they could only think of money- the legal definition. After the sanctimonious verdict, her life was largely destroyed. What use was the legal system in getting justice? Nil.

Now we have findings of corruption against Gladys Berejeklian, who had been brought up in a rather sexually sheltered domestic environment and then chose a dodgy boyfriend and protected him. (SMH 30/6/23) No corruption there as she did not personally gain any money? It is up to NSW ICAC.

Of course the other big news this week is the Robo-debt Royal Commission. (SMH 8/7/23) Morrison started it; Attorney-General Christian Porter knew about it, and Ministers Alan Tudge (alleged sexual harasser) and Stuart Robert (Morrison loyalist, corporate enabler and generally recognised incompetent) were also responsible. Presumably none of them made any money from the Robo-debt scheme, so they were not corrupt and cannot be prosecuted? We will see. The sealed section of the report apparently makes recommendations to the NACC, but can they act on this in the legal system we have? It is said that there are 4 to be referred to NACC, and the Commissioner waited until NACC was established to release her report, which means that she wants some consequences. But we have National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) chief Paul Brereton saying ‘It is possible for conduct to be corrupt but not criminal’. Sure is. But does this mean that there is no prosecution no matter how dodgy the politicians allocating the money are? Looks like it. Endless ‘discretion’?

One other tricky little question will come out in all this- will the public servants be prosecuted? They did not give ‘frank and fearless’ advice and at least some of them knew it was not legal, or might not be. Probably they knew that it was going to happen anyway, and their own careers would be adversely affected if they made a fuss. It is very likely that they were correct in this last opinion. Does the Public Service Act compel them to be honest when there is no such compulsion for politicians? I note the article in The Saturday Paper speaks about public servants being ‘sanctioned’ for breaching the ‘code of conduct’. Sounds like being hit by a wet lettuce- possibly bad for your career in the short term.

The relationship between the public service and political system is interesting. The British comedy series ‘Yes Minister’ showed the public service as foolish. The more relevant Australian series ‘Utopia’ shows it the other way around. Who should have the power and how much?

Years ago the NSW Electricity Commission decided that NSW needed to commission a number of new coal-fired power stations to open every few years to meet projected energy demand. They were engineers and would obviously have work for their working lives implementing this project. Electricity demand did not rise as anticipated and at one time, NSW had generating capacity of 76% greater than peak load. No accountability, no transparency, no discussion.

In the 1980s I worked at Sydney Water and one morning, when in the foyer waiting for a lift, the man standing next to me said, ‘This is the time of day I hate’. I asked why and he said, ‘When I get to the office I will have to look at the fax machine and see what the Minister has thought of overnight and what I will have to deal with.’ (The Minister was Tim Moore, who was a relatively environmentally active in the Greiner government). Gradually engineers who had come up the ranks were replaced by politically active managers, who knew nothing about water or sewerage, and staff numbers were cut from 17,500 to about 3,000 staff. The new managers supervised private contractors, the infrastructure upgrades ceased, no apprentice training was done, no unemployment programs ran, and people with lifetime expertise in niche areas were made redundant. Large ‘dividends’ from the ‘State owned enterprise’ were put in state coffers. Politicisation was complete by the early 1990s. This happened all over the public service, Federal and State. We have gone from one extreme to the other.

An article on the ABC asked if economists were to blame for Robo-debt, having decided that a certain level of unemployment was necessary to stop inflation. The obligation for governments to achieve full employment was lost, and as government got smaller and welfare was seen as an evil, those who could not get jobs are demonised. I have written before about the 8 ‘apartheid buses’ that take children from our wealthy suburb to private schools. They make it possible for wealthy kids to avoid contact with much of society. From private schools to universities to political jobs- where is the reality contact? Religion may play a part too. The world is full of sinners who will be judged and rewarded of punished in the end, so there are ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. Just as God has all wisdom, so does the neo-liberal market. The system that allocates resources in a medieval market model, where the townsfolk choose which vegetables to buy, is now assumed to optimally distribute resources with any interference to the model being seen as a disturbance of the natural order of things. Those who can accept that God must decide whatever the consequences seem to find it easy to believe that the market will sort out jobs and income distribution, and they judge the deserving and undeserving.

I am postulating an out of touch, judgemental government exercising its discretion, creating Robo-debt as the implementation of a philosophy. Now, what is the crime in this crass stupidity, and what remedy does the legal system or other system in our society have for this folly? I am not hopeful that there will be significant sanction on either politicians or public servants, though I think the former are far more guilty. I fear that after a lot of tut-tutting and few resignations from powerful positions, there will be assurances that it can never happen again, but there will be no preventive program for next time either. The only hope is for greater transparency, though Labor’s Liberal-lite policy seems against even that.

NACC at least exists now, so we will see what can be done. Helen Haines, the Independent for Indi who pressed for the NACC has an article in the Saturday Paper of 8/7/23 that urges continual vigilance and effort.

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2023/07/06/robo-debt-breaking-news

30/06/2023

Putin, Prigozhin and Ukraine

30 June 2023

We hear about the NATO-supported Ukraine counteroffensive, but it seems to have taken very little actual territory. It is well-known that it is easier to defend than to attack, and the Russians key objective that may be seen as ‘existential’ for them is to have a land bridge to the naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea.

There has been a lot of commentary about Putin appearing weak, and thus having an inevitable fall. This may or may not be true, but the Ukrainian advance seems minimal.

Seymour Hersh is a highly respected US journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war and more recently had highly credible story about how the US blew up the Russia to Germany gas pipeline in the North Sea.

He has a website. Here is his article on what happened in Russia. It is sobering reading

PRIGOZHIN’S FOLLY

The Russian ‘revolt’ that wasn’t strengthens Putin’s hand

Seymour Hersh Jun 29

The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.

The focus slipped from Ukraine’s failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin’s threat to Putin’s control. As one headline in the Times put it, “Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power?” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posed this assessment: “Putin looked into the abyss Saturday—and blinked.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine—appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality: “Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. . . . It shows real cracks.”

Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be—why else would he appear on the show?—went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke. “To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at—sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”

At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?

We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule.

Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.

So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:

“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by anti-Russian extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible. Most importantly, they control logistics. special forces see themselves as the premier offensive asset. When the overall strategy is offensive, big army tolerates their hubris and public chest thumping because SF are willing to take high risk and pay a high price. Successful offense requires a large expenditure of men and equipment. Successful defense, on the other hand, requires husbanding these assets.

“Wagner members were the spearhead of the original Russian Ukraine offensive. They were the ‘little green men’. When the offensive grew into an all-out attack by the regular army, Wagner continued to assist but reluctantly had to take a back seat in the period of instability and readjustment that followed. Prigo, no shy violet, took the initiative to grow his forces and stabilize his sector.

“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.

“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.

“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy. All without raising a sweat militarily or causing Putin to face a political standoff with the fundamentalists, who were ardent Prigo admirers. Pretty shrewd.”

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive. I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country. of Russian occupation.

The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.

Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia—that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin. He could simply stop where he is, and see if the military reality will be accepted by the White House and whether a ceasefire will be sought, with formal end-of-war talks initiated. There will be a presidential election next April in Ukraine, and the Russian leader may stay put and wait for that—if it takes place. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said there will be no elections while the country is under martial law.

Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute—and obvious. On June 20 the Washington Post published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump—but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.

The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive. Democratic support for the war is another example of the party’s growing disengagement from the working class. It’s their children who have been fighting the wars of the recent past and may be fighting in any future war. These voters have turned away in increasing numbers as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes.

If there is any doubt about the continuing seismic shift in current politics, I recommend a good dose of Thomas Frank, the acclaimed author of the 2004 best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that explained why the voters of that state turned away from the Democratic party and voted against their economic interests. Frank did it again in 2016 in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? In an afterword to the paperback edition he depicted how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party repeated—make that amplified—the mistakes made in Kansas en route to losing a sure-thing election to Donald Trump.

It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America—and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment.

03/06/2023

Private Schools- part of entrenching inequality

31 May 2023

In the 1960s State Aid for Church schools was initiated in NSW. Then there became an emphasis on ‘choice’ of school and subsidies for children to catch a bus away from where the child lived to the school that they wanted to go to.

Governments, particularly conservative ones want more children in private schools as this lessens total government expenditure, though private schools have successfully demanded closer to the amount of money per student that the public schools get. The subsidies also favour their conservative voters.

Private school parents, seeking advantage for their students pay high fees so the government funding seems to be spent along with the other money on swimming pools and ‘luxury items’.

Meanwhile Australia is slipping down the world education ratings, because public schools are neglected. The sociology also needs to be considered. The ‘choice’ is only for some. The parents who do not have the financial means for a private school, nor the grades to get into a selective school have to take what they can get. I visited a school in a disadvantaged area in Sydney, and looked at the school photos in the foyer. There was not a white face in the last 15 years- all the students were either of Pacific Islander or Middle Eastern origin. The Principal said to me that she just wished she had a few Anglo students to model what the majority of Australians do. There had been a stabbing in the playground about 30 years ago, and this had led to ‘white flight’. There were also a considerable number of children with disabilities, which may be related to marriages within ethnic family or religious groups. With poorer facilities, disadvantaged students a lack of role models and teachers with lower pay, the Principal said it was very difficult to get her graduates good results and able to compete for jobs.

I live in a relatively good suburb near a place where buses can turn around. Each day 8 busses leave from close to me to go to 8 different private schools, 4 single sex male, and 4 single sex female. I think of them as Apartheid busses. The buses are all branded and new. The students getting on board can go in relative luxury from the civilised suburb to the well-endowed schools. They need have no contact with poorer folk, even on public transport. These advantaged students will go to universities, into top jobs and make decisions for us all.

I am reminded that in the US in the Johnson era there was ‘bussing’ which took more wealthy students to schools in poorer areas to make richer students aware of how the poorer student lived and to increase equality of opportunity. Australia, supposedly the land of the ‘fair go’, is now quite the opposite, subsidising inequality as we become the country with the most privatised (and unequal) education systems in the world. Now, just to emphasis the point, ‘for profit’ schools are coming in. ‘Hey, what is wrong with making a profit?’ we hear them cry.

When I went to school in Port Kembla, half the school were children of post-WW2 migrants from Europe, ‘displaced persons’, or what we would now call refugees. Half the children arrived at kindergarten unable to speak a word of English. There were 46 in my class. All this was ‘normal’. There was no anti-discrimination legislation. But the over-riding unifying factors were that all the kids in the school had the same experience, all the parents had jobs and the Housing Commission was building whole suburbs of houses as fast as they could to settle the new migrants. By the end of 3^rd class there was really no difference between migrants and Anglo-born. It was equality of opportunity, a ‘fair go’. This is what is being lost. We see the example of the US where the gap between rich and poor keeps growing and we are subsidising the same process!

We forgot about the first Gonski report on educational inequality as the politicans did not want to offend the middle class by lessening their education subsidies. Gonski was pressured to do a weaker second report and inequality of opportunity keeps growing.

The politicians tell us that their education funding has never been higher. Perhaps this is so, but while the money is spent on luxuries for some and there is not enough financially or sociologically to help disadvantaged areas, Australia will continue to slide down the international education rankings and the entrenched disadvantage that continues from generation to generation will continue.

Selling out our school system to profit multinationals

03/06/2023

Labor and Liberals Unite to Continue Opacity and Pork-Barrelling

25 May 2023

Labor has opposed a Teal move to have infrastructure proposals publically available. The lack of transparency has allowed the pork-barrelling that was rife in the Liberal administration, but it has also continued under Labor.

One would have hoped that Labor would support the move, as most of the Labor electorates, being less well-off are more likely to justify more spending. But they have teamed up with the Liberals to defeat the move. Very disappointing. Labor seems happy just to clear the Liberals very low bar.

Dutton and PM unite to block teal demands

DAVID CROWE

Chief political correspondent SMH 25 May 2023

A bid to tighten safeguards on major road and rail projects has been blocked in federal parliament after Labor and the Coalition joined forces against moves by teal independents to reveal more about the $120 billion cost.

Calling for more scrutiny of the mammoth spending, the independent MPs sought changes to stamp out pork barrelling and force governments to reveal the costs and benefits of new proposals before sinking taxpayer funds into the projects.

But their bid was lost when the major parties used their numbers to defeat the moves, which included an amendment copied from a proposal from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when he was in opposition nine years ago.

The debate heightened tensions between Labor and the crossbench over integrity in government and the priority for vast projects including the rail line to the Western Sydney Airport, the Melbourne Airport Rail, the Inland Rail and competing road-building proposals in every state.

Independent MP Allegra Spender wanted the government to accept changes that would prevent the peak agency for big projects, Infrastructure Australia, approving proposals that could not show the benefits outweighed the cost.

‘‘This is, you would think, an uncontroversial amendment, one which simply requires public money be used prudently and one which was previously proposed by the Prime Minister himself,’’ Spender said.

‘‘It is only controversial because it takes away the power of the government to make investment decisions which are positive politically but negative economically.’’

Another amendment put to parliament yesterday would require Infrastructure Australia to release its regular audits of the priority list so the public could learn more about costs and benefits of projects.

Spender gained support from Greens leader Adam Bandt and his fellow MPs as well as all other crossbenchers in the lower house

But the amendments were defeated when Infrastructure Minister Catherine King gained Coalition support, sending a signal that the government would also have the numbers in the Senate to defeat any similar amendments. The government passed its draft law in its original form.

King defended the decision to reject the amendments because some information was too sensitive to be released.

Coalition infrastructure spokeswoman Bridget McKenzie wanted an amendment to increase rural representation at the peak agency but did not support the push from the teals.

‘‘Other proposals would have increased costs, decreased investment, and reduced the ability of governments to initiate projects – which is surely fundamental to a democracy,’’ she said.

Kylea Tink, the member for North Sydney, warned that defeating the amendments would mean the Labor government was ‘‘no less likely’’ than the Coalition to engage in pork-barrelling.

Dai Le, who represents Fowler in western Sydney, said voters should not be surprised that Labor promised greater transparency before the election but voted against it after gaining power.

‘‘The two parties are the same – they go to an election, make a promise to make a change, and when they’re in government they don’t do it. They keep the status quo,’’ she said. ‘‘As a result of that, our society, our communities, pay the price for the lack of infrastructure planning.’’

24/05/2023

Modi’s Melbourne Rally has Australia Kow-Towing Again.

24 May 2023

The spectacle on tonight’s ABC news of visiting Indian Prime Minister addressing a rally in Melbourne sent shivers up my spine.

I had realised that Modi was acting as a Hindu nationalist, and doing quite bad things to Muslims Sikhs and other minority groups. He was and is using religion as a way of increasing his vote as over 80% of Indians are Hindu. But in a country of 1.3 billion people are lot are not Hindu, and areas in the North of the country have been suppressed, with the historic separation of Pakistan and Bangldesh (formers called East Pakistan), as well as problems in Sikh Kashmir, where the people actually want independence from both Hindu India who controls them and Muslim Pakistan who wants to.

Modi has used very authoritarian tactics, but has got away with it because the Indian economy has done well.

Australia is very pro-India at present as the China trade embargos have meant that we are looking to diversify our markets and a rising nation with 1.3 billion people looks just the ideal partner. Not to mention defence ties, though India has traditionally tried to create a group of non-aligned nations to cool whichever Cold War is going on at the time.

But the rally in Melbourne as shown on ABC News tonight had a huge stadium shouting with Modi in the centre like a rock star. Our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, said that the last time he saw this was a Bruce Springsteen Concert and the crowd were more adoring of Modi than they had been of the Boss, Springsteen. They also hugged, like footballers after scoring. But it went on. Modi stood alone in the centre and addressed the crowd in their own language. It was doubtless staged for the Indian elections which are next year. It seems that our government was complicit. It is very hard to think that they were unaware of what was being organised, and their part was as direct an endorsement of Modi personally as could have been done.

Having kow-towed to the US on defence last week, and mumbled a few platitudes about Julian Assange, this was another example of the Albanese government being very weak on human rights, or even standing up for anything. We should have been friends with India without such a party-political statement.

www.themonthly.com.au/the-politics/rachel-withers/2023/05/24/yes-boss?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The Politics%20 Wednesday 24 May 2023&utm_content=The Politics%20 Wednesday 24 May 2023+CID_646eeca792ac1e467a7fad04b06e163a&utm_source=EDM&utm_term=Read on free&cid=646eeca792ac1e467a7fad04b06e163a

17/05/2023

Our government is being privatised by stealth.

SMH 17 May 2023

Geoffrey Watson

The PwC scandal is serious, but it seems to have been lost in the background noise of a coronation and a federal budget. Yet the scandal raises some very big questions about how we are being governed.

The facts are simple enough: in 2013, Australia was engaged in an international effort to crack down on multinationals avoiding corporate tax through cross-border income and asset transfers. Specialists from PwC were brought in as consultants and given access to highly secret materials, subject to confidentiality agreements.

PwC’s top international tax partner, Peter Collins, took the information and shared it widely inside the firm. It was then sold to the targets of the crackdown, teaching them how to sidestep the same anti-avoidance measures PwC was helping to draft. The misuse of the highly confidential material was given a name reflecting the targeted market – ‘‘Project North America’’. PwC probably made many millions of dollars.

Disgraceful conduct, but highly lucrative for the partners at PwC.

So how do we know about this? Well, we did not hear it from PwC. In fact, PwC was obstructive: when the Australian Taxation Office sought information, PwC declined to cooperate, claiming legal professional privilege – a tactic commonly deployed by those clients of PwC. Instead, we only know about this from the outstanding work of two journalists at the Australian Financial Review digging into the reasons why the Tax Practitioners Board was resisting the reregistration of Peter Collins as a tax agent. If not for them, this sorry tale would not have come to light.

As usual, there seem to have been few adverse consequences for those involved. Collins and the chief executive of PwC, Tom Seymour, have left PwC, but we don’t know upon what terms – they may have received handsome payouts. We don’t know how much money PwC made from its Project North America because the partners won’t say – and they have not made an offer to disgorge their wrongful profits. PwC has not told us to whom they sold the information, so we have no idea how much tax has been avoided. PwC has announced it will commission an internal inquiry, but that is obviously insufficient.

But this is much more than a story about misconduct by a Commonwealth contractor; it is far darker than just that. There are many questions, all unanswered.

The first question: Why on earth was PwC – a substantial contributor to the global problem of crossborder tax minimisation – involved in designing Australia’s response to that very problem? Anyone could see this was going to be a problem.

That raises the second and even larger question: Why is Australia outsourcing so much of its governing to private enterprise? Policy development and implementation are now routinely taken from the public service and turned over to private ‘‘consultants’’. Some will say this is because the most highly skilled and experienced people are in the private sector and, you know, this is probably true – but it is only true because the private firms have poached the most skilled and experienced public servants from the public service. This makes good economic sense for the big firms who can charge those services back to the Commonwealth at high rates.

I am not exaggerating. Look at the audit results published by the APS for 2021-22. The Commonwealth paid $21 billion for external labour – i.e. consultants, contractors and labour-hire contracts – in a single year. To give some perspective, that is roughly the same as the federal government spent on secondary education that year. This spending was not made public. The Coalition had boasted of massive costs savings through cuts and caps on public service employment without telling us the holes were filled by payments to private enterprise. Our government was being privatised by stealth.

It may be a coincidence but, over the last decade, the major beneficiaries of mass privatisation were donating heavily to both sides of political power – Labor and the Coalition. PwC was one of the largest donors. It is another sad story of inadequate federal election funding laws and the pernicious role of big money in our election cycle.

Will Labor be better? So far, the new government’s response to this debacle has been strangely muted. Existing contracts with PwC must be investigated. Negotiations with PwC for further contracts must be frozen. Heads must roll. We need an inquiry – surely we should not be outsourcing that to PwC.

We need to take a deeper look at the way in which we have been outsourcing government. It seems we have been going down the wrong path. It is time for change.

Geoffrey Watson SC is a director at the Centre for Public Integrity.