Month: May 2005

Bagaric and refugees

John Quiggin16 Comments

The Age reports that torture advocate Mirko Bagaric will no longer be assessing refugee cases

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone confirmed that Professor Bagaric would no longer hear appeals to the Refugee Review Tribunal, which deals with many asylum seekers who have suffered torture overseas. However, Professor Bagaric will continue to serve on the Migration Review Tribunal, which deals with non-refugee immigration cases.

But Bagaric presumably didn’t arrive at his repugnant views overnight. From his own writing, it appears he’s a member of the “September 11, 2001 changed everything” school. Given that he held views so radically different from official public policy on this central issue, he ought to have disqualified himself from RRT appeals, or at least advised the Minister of his position. As it is, I would say that any rejection of an appeal by an RRT panel on which Bagaric served is morally, and perhaps legally, suspect.

Marohasy on cod

John Quiggin18 Comments

I’ve had an interesting discussion over at the new blog of Jennifer Marohasy, who runs the environment unit at the Institute of Public Affairs. Marohasy has criticised virtually all the main scientific groups working on the Murray-Darling Basin, and in this post, she nominates The NSW Rivers Survey by the CRC for Freshwater Ecology and NSW Fisheries. as the “worst ever”. She says

The report’s principal conclusions include that “A telling indication of the condition of rivers in the Murray region was the fact that, despite intensive fishing with the most efficient types of sampling gear for a total of 220 person-days over a two-year period in 20 randomly chosen Murray-region sites, not a single Murray cod or freshwater catfish was caught.”

Most remarkably at the same time, in the same years and regions, that the scientists were undertaking their now much-quoted survey that found no Murray cod, commercial fishermen harvested 26 tonnes of Murray cod!

Criticism of the report’s findings from a local fisherman goes something along the lines “The scientists, although having letters behind their name, spending some $2million on gear, and 2 years trying, evidently still can’t fish.”

Zing! Those egghead scientists are conclusively nailed! Well, not quite.
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Australians for torture ?

John Quiggin64 Comments

According to this SMH report, two Australian academics are advocating the legalisation of torture, including the torture of innocent people who [their interrogators believe] might have useful information. If the SMH report is to be believed, the supporting ‘argument’ is just our old (and multiply-refuted) friend, the ‘ticking-bomb’ scenario. (Here’s my response, and here’s a fairly typical instance of the way the ticking-bomb scenario is used in practice to justify routine and prolonged torture[1].

I find it difficult to believe that this report can be accurate and I certainly hope it isn’t. The views of Bagaric and Clarke are spelt out in this opinion piece, which is as lame and morally obtuse as you might expect. A quick Google reveals that Bagaric is a Part-time member, Refugee Review Tribunal and Migration Review Tribunal, which is certainly inappropriate for someone who apparently advocates sticking needles under the fingernails of innocent suspects. At least, that was what this Age report said when I checked it an hour ago, but the relevant passage has now disappeared.

Update More from Ken Parish, Tim Dunlop and Benambra. I haven’t seen any comment yet from pro-war bloggers, but I hope at least some of them will repudiate this terrible proposal.

fn1. This was a case in Israel, but I don’t want to discuss the Israel-Palestine issue here. Any comments on this issue, or on the fact that there are other countries that do far worse, and don’t have courts to appeal to, will be deleted.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin5 Comments

“Changing Planes” (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Some great stories, with the starting premise being the sense of alienation from the world all sentient beings feel in airports.

I’m also reading “Rise of the Creative Class” (Richard Florida), as background for Florida’s latest, “The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent” which I’ll probably review. I’m only halfway through, but so far the book seems much more sensible than the potted summaries I read a few years back. It’s much more about work and autonomy than about metrosexual urban hipsters.

I also dug out my copy of Raymond Williams’ “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society” reviving my long-moribund Word for Wednesday feature.

Tens of thousands

John Quiggin37 Comments

In January 2004, Tim Blair linked to Martin Roth, demanding a retraction from Australian teachers unions, which had said in an advertisement before the war “War on Iraq will kill tens of thousands of innocent children and their families. Many more Iraqis will suffer disease, hunger and homelessness.” (Roth cited an estimate of “only” 5000 deaths.)

But now Tim is reporting favorably on a study which estimates 24000 civilian deaths in the first year of the war. The Tims Tim[1] likes this number because it’s so much less than the widely cited estimate of 100 000 excess deaths published in the Lancet last year[2].

Still, given that Tim B. now agrees that the teachers unions were right to predict tens of thousands of deaths (and in fact it seems likely that tens of thousands of deaths had already occurred when he wrote his post), it’s time for a retraction of his own criticism. Self-correcting blogosphere and all that.

These fights about numbers are unedifying, but necessary. Supporters of war as a policy instrument need to be reminded that the policy they advocate will cause the deaths of many innocent people. Sometimes this is necessary to prevent even worse calamities, but war ought always to be a last resort.

fn1. This seems to a be a Tim-magnetic topic. There’s some further comment from Tim Worstall who wonders why the report hasn’t received more attention.

fn2. I’ll leave to Tim Lambert to explain in more detail the differences in time periods covered and concepts of “excess death”.

Massacre in Uzbekistan (Crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin19 Comments

The news on the massacre in Uzbekistan is sketchy, but it seems clear that troops fired on a protest meeting, killing dozens.

The massacre followed violent protests in which government buildings were taken over, and prisoners, including alleged members of Islamist groups, were set free, but it appears that the protestors were simply listening to speeches when the troops attacked them .

The best information seems to be at Registan, which I found through the relatively new system of Technorati tags

The US currently has an air base and around 1000 troops in Uzbekistan. They can’t be regarded as neutral, and their presence clearly supports the mass murdering and torturing dictator Karimov, someone who appears indistinguishable from Saddam circa 1980. A literal reading of Administration rhetoric would suggest that the US should use its power to overthrow Karimov , but there’s zero possibility that this will happen (the official US response is an appeal for restraint, directed mainly at the protestors). But the troops should be withdrawn immediately, and all ties with this evil regime broken.

Another request for help

John Quiggin22 Comments

I’ve been working through the Budget and trying to look at developments since the present government came to office. As shown in previous posts, the income tax scale has become significantly less progressive over this period, so, for single taxpayers we can safely conclude that the poor are paying more and the rich are paying less.

The picture is much more complex for families. It’s clear that the value of Family Tax Benefits has increased significantly in real terms, and the rate of clawback has been lowered from 50 cents in the dollar to 20 cents in most cases. This reduces effective marginal rates of taxation in the relevant ranges, and is definitely a good thing.

But it’s obviously a huge job to work out the aggregate impact, and there are so many variations of family size and income structure that it’s easy to pick and choose (consciously or otherwise) a misleading example. Can anyone point me to some good work on this topic?

Tax tables

John Quiggin5 Comments

I’ve now got the tax tables working reasonably well, with some useful assistance from “Down and Out in Sài Gòn”. The first column of the table gives a multiple of average weekly earnings, the second the associated money income (for 1996 in the first table and 2006 in the second), the third is the tax paid and the fourth is the average rate. As you can see, the tax burden has risen for those below the average and fallen for those above.
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A cheer for Beazley

John Quiggin14 Comments

I’ve repeatedly criticised Kim Beazley for adopting a small target strategy aimed at peeling off marginal voters from the government while not upsetting anrybody. But his response to the Budget has been as strong as you could hope for. Of course, the press gallery sports commentators are almost uniformly convinced that it’s a bad move, though, as far as I can see none of them denied the point that the tax cuts give a lot to the well-off and hardly anything to the great majority of Australians.

Anyway, well done Kim!

More from Tim Dunlop, Ken Parish and Mark Bahnisch