Author: John Quiggin

A minor gloat

John Quiggin15 Comments

I hope readers will indulge me in a minor gloat regarding the defeat of Michael Lee, the Labor candidate for Lord Mayor of Sydney, despite rule changes designed by his mates in Sussex Street[1] to guarantee his success. Fortunately, the voters didn’t feel like being dictated to and went for Independent Clover Moore instead.

Lee wasn’t the worst Communications Minister in Australian history (no prizes for guessing who was), but he certainty didn’t cover himself with glory in this or any of the other ministerial positions he held. I crossed swords with him in the early 1990s over his claim that it was a good thing for Australian to have two (incomplete, but almost exactly duplicate) optical fibre cable networks, rather than one network with proper coverage – perhaps the high point of microeconomic reform-related stupidity in Australia. As far as I can tell his only qualification for public life is that he looks good in a suit, but that seems to be enough to ensure that his patrons keep on promoting him.

fn1. NSW Labor state headquarters and base of the rightwing machine ( the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ have little ideological significance in the ALP these days, so the word to focus on here is ‘machine’).

Birthday bash

John Quiggin

The (slightly apocryphal) tradition in our dojo is that the birthday boy or girl gets to spar with everyone else in succession. Fortunately, this didn’t happen. In deference to my advanced years, however, we all did 48 squats at the end of the training session last night,

The Zarqawi scandal

John Quiggin20 Comments

As Richard Clarke’s unsurprising revelations continue to receive blanket coverage[1] around the blogosphere and elsewhere, I’ve been increasingly puzzled by the failure of the Zarqawi scandal to make a bigger stir. As far as I can determine, the following facts are undisputed

* Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the group Ansar al-Islam is one of the most dangerous Islamist terrorists currently active. He is the prime suspect for both the Karbala and Madrid atrocities and the alleged author of a letter setting out al Qaeda’s strategy for jihad in Iraq. Although he has become increasingly prominent in the past year, he has been well-known as a terrorist for many years
* For some years, until March 2003, Ansar al-Islam was based primarily at Kirma in Northern Iraq, in part of the region of Iraq generally controlled by the Kurds and included in the no-fly zone enforced by the US and UK. In other words, the group was an easy target for either a US air attack, a land attack by some special forces and/or Kurdish militia or a combination of the two
* Nothing was done until the invasion of Iraq proper, by which time the group had fled

These facts alone would indicate a failure comparable in every way to the missed opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden before S11. But the reality appears to be far worse.
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What I’m reading, and more

John Quiggin3 Comments

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. It doesn’t quite match Bridget Jones Diary but it’s a good read. Notable for adhering to the romantic convention that the heroine should remain chaste throughout the novel even though it’s made clear this was not the case before the action began.

I also went to see Goodbye Lenin which I thoroughly enjoyed. This charming film says more about the social construction of reality than a shelfload of postmodernist tomes. For those who’ve missed it, the hero’s mother, a devout Communist has a stroke/heart attack and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes from her coma, her son maintains the pretence that the German Democratic Republic is still in existence, eventually fabricating for it an ending far nobler than the one that actually took place.

What I'm reading, and more

John Quiggin3 Comments

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. It doesn’t quite match Bridget Jones Diary but it’s a good read. Notable for adhering to the romantic convention that the heroine should remain chaste throughout the novel even though it’s made clear this was not the case before the action began.

I also went to see Goodbye Lenin which I thoroughly enjoyed. This charming film says more about the social construction of reality than a shelfload of postmodernist tomes. For those who’ve missed it, the hero’s mother, a devout Communist has a stroke/heart attack and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes from her coma, her son maintains the pretence that the German Democratic Republic is still in existence, eventually fabricating for it an ending far nobler than the one that actually took place.

Blogroll update

John Quiggin21 Comments

I’ve been putting off updating my blogroll, but I’ve finally had a first go at the task. I’ve finally accepted that the “hiatus” of some of my favorite sites is permanent, and removed them. I also deleted a few blogs that I can no longer be bothered with, and updated lots of broken links. I’ve added a number of new ones, but I’ve been fairly lazy about this, so I’m inviting anyone (particularly in Oz/NZ) who thinks a link would make sense to email me. In addition, if anyone reading this still has links to my old blog(s), this is the time to update them.

Fame?

John Quiggin14 Comments

I had my first blogging brush with fame today. I was presenting some lectures to a very interested/interesting group of students at the Australia-NZ School of Government , held at the College of Art which is part of Griffith Uni’s Southbank campus. Not only had several of the students (senior public sector people) read the blog, but someone came up to me in the cafe, asked “Are you John Quiggin?” and introduced himself as a reader.

It’s puzzling to me that, although the stats say the blog has far fewer readers than the Fin Review (where I’ve been writing for ten years) my daily experience is the opposite. Far more people in my circle of friends and acquaintances seem to be aware of the blog than have read the column.

Time to pull out

John Quiggin16 Comments

In a recent comments thread, Derrida Derider asks about views on Latham’s proposal to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq. Like DD, I’ve been an advocate of the “you broke it, you own it” view, that, having invaded Iraq, the members of the Coalition had an obligation to stay and restore order. However, in the light of US plans to maintain the status of an occupying power indefinitely, I think the time has come to pull out, unless some more legitimate basis for the presence of our troops can be fashioned.

The central requirement is that the Coalition forces in Iraq (including US forces) would be answerable to some combination of an Iraqi government and the United Nations. Since I see no prospect that the US would even contemplate such a possibility, I think it’s time for our troops to leave.

Is Elvis hiding in Iraq ?

John Quiggin14 Comments

Although there’s been a fair bit of discussion about the Newspoll showing that 65 per cent of people thought the war in Iraq had increased the danger of a terrorist attack in Australia[1], the really striking result was ignored. This concerned the proportion of people who accepted the government’s stated belief that the invasion of Iraq had reduced the danger of terrorist attack. Only 1 per cent of respondents said that the invasion had made a terrorist attack less likely, and less than 0.5 per cent said it made an attack a lot less likely. You can read the details here (PDF file). This is substantially less than the proportion of people who are reported (in other surveys) to believe that Elvis is alive or that aliens are controlling government policy.

fn1. The question doesn’t distinguish between the interpretations “the Iraq war has raised Australia’s profile as a target” and “the Iraq war has increased the risk of terrorism everywhere”. I have previously argued that the latter view is the right one.

Update By complete coincidence, this story in the Oz reports that, in polls for the mayoral election in the Gold Coast, an Elvis ‘tribute artist’ has 8 per cent support. OK, it’s in Queensland, but 8 per cent is still a lot more than 0.5.