The increasingly centralist tendencies of the Howard government have been obvious for a while. Howard’s latest statement that Australia would be better off without state governments is only a bit stronger than what he said last year. As I pointed out at the time, both Whitlam and Howard are wrong on this, and the whole idea of regional governments won’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny.

What makes the statements more significant now is the fact that Howard has control of the Senate and can therefore repudiate the GST deal had, more generally, do whatever he likes. It will be interesting to see whether professed defenders of federalism, like the National Party, stand up to him on this.

Tenix always seems to be in the news for the wrong reasons, so I wasn’t too surprised to get this message from Eric Lee at Labourstart, with the title above. Eric writes

That’s the question posed by a strike which recently broke out at a Melbourne, Australia-based company called Tenix. After six years of individual contracts and no union, six years which delivered only tiny wage increases, a court-ordered ballot showed that 83% of Tenix workers had decided they wanted union representation. The employer’s reaction was to try to force workers to sign individual contracts — and to refuse to recognize the union. The workers reacted by going out on strike.

We’ve been asked by the Australian Services Union to send a strong message to the management of Tenix, saying that when 83% of your workers tell you they want a union, you really should respect that choice. Please support the campaign by clicking on this link

And spread the word!

I just got off the phone from an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Of course, you’ll all be agog to read my views on bankruptcy reform, social security, the trade deficit, the impending crisis of capitalism, and so on. You’ll have to wait a little while, however. The topic of the interview was bunnies vs bilbies.

I’ve been sitting on this great post about reforms to US bankruptcy laws and how they fit into the general pattern of risk being shifted from business to workers and to ordinary people in general. But I waited too long and Paul Krugman’s already written it. So go and read his piece, and then, if you want, you can look at the things I was going to write that Krugman hasn’t said already.
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John Howard’s suggestion that young people should drop out of school in Year 10 and get a trade is both bad advice and an indication that, on this as on many other issues, Howard hasn’t updated his world view since the 1950s[1]. As Tim Dunlop says, it’s unlikely anyone in the government is giving this advice to their own kids.

Howard’s advice is exactly that given by many working class parents to their sons in the 1950s and, at the time it worked pretty well. It is only since the 1980s that the problems have emerged for older workers with limited education and obsolete skills. Parents in the 1950s can scarcely be blamed for failing to foresee this, but Howard has no such excuse.

In today’s world, car mechanics are increasingly required to debug computer programs[2], and virtually everyone with a job[3] has to deal with substantial volumes of (literal or digital) paperwork. This is one reason why the “sitting next to Sally” apprenticeships Howard is so fond of have increasingly been replaced by TAFE courses. For practical purposes, the skills of a Year 10 dropout are not adequate for these courses.

Even if, in the current labour market, it would be possible to get a trade with a Year 10 education, it would still be a bad idea in the long run. Skills become obsolete and replacing them requires the kind of flexibility acquired from education.

These 1950s attitudes have translated into disastrous policies regarding post-secondary education. The number of Australian students starting undergraduate degrees has barely changed since 1996 (I think it may actually have declined in the last few years). And despite a lot of rhetoric, the TAFE system is in a dreadful mess, which can be traced back, in the end, to inadequate funding.

There’s a lot of justified concern about inadequate investment in infrastructure. But an even bigger problem under this government has been declining investment in human capital.

fn1. In saying this, I don’t mean to adopt the Keating sneer about the 1950s. There were a lot of positive features of the 1950s, in particular full employment, and the associated fact that someone with a Year 10 education could leave school and walk into a reasonably well-paid job. But wishing won’t bring these things back.

fn2. Although I was aware of this in theory, I still got a mild surprise when I was talking to a guy at the service desk and he mentioned that some problem with my engine would probably go away by itself when they ran the software upgrade that went with my routine service.

fn3. Admittedly, there are plenty of casual jobs (for example, in the fast-food industries) that are designed not to require this kind of thing. But, with rare exceptions they don’t provide any real route to permanent jobs on decent pay.

The Monday Message Board has a lively discussion of the Habib case, and I thought I’d make my own observations. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, I’m fairly confident of three things

* Habib was up to something connected with Islamic militants in Afghanistan

* After his arrest he was tortured (in Pakistan and Egypt) and subject to cruel and degrading treatment (in Guantanamo Bay)

* The Australian government knew about and approved Habib’s treatment[1].

A lot of participants in the debate seem to assume that, if you accept the first point, the second and third don’t really matter. I would have hoped that this kind of position didn’t need to be refuted, but that’s apparently not the case, so I’ll try.

Update A lengthy comments thread already, but it’s interesting that no-one, as far as I can see has disagreed with my factual conclusions. If there are people out there who think that Habib is an innocent bystander they haven’t shown up here. And, although there are plenty of commenters willing to defend torture, no-one, it seems, is willing to put their name (or handle) to a claim that the government is telling the truth.
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Having seen Mamdouh Habib’s 60 Minutes interview the other night, I’m keener than ever that he should have his day in court. I think it’s clear enough that Habib’s allegations that he was tortured in detention are true in general (why else would he have been shipped to Egypt?) and that the Australian government either knew or, in its Children Overboard mode, chose not to know about it – most likely some mixture of the two.

That said, Habib said nothing[1] to refute the government’s allegation that he’s a terrorist, claiming that he would give his answers in court. I certainly hope that this takes place. Both Habib and the government have a lot of explaining to do, in my view.

At this distance in time, I find it hard to believe that there’s much in the mooted excuse that producing the government’s evidence would compromise intelligence sources. Habib’s alleged crimes took place in 2001, when the Taliban was still in power, and Al Qaeda was operating more or less openly. The failure to detect the S11 attacks [on the government’s own account, a matter of common gossip for Habib] suggests that there can’t have been much in the way of intelligence penetration of AQ at the time and the destruction of the Taliban government must have rendered most such sources obsolete.

fn1. To be clear, he denied the allegation, but did not respond any questions about the details.

The government’s position on the Rau case seems pretty clear. Ms Rau was an ‘illegal’, that is, a person found to be in Australia and unable to satisfy the authorities that she had a legitimate right to be here. As was established in apartheid South Africa, where the term originated, illegals have no human or civil rights. They can be locked up in atrocious conditions, denied contact with the outside world and so on. Now the authorities are satisfied about her status, and she has been duly released.

Many commentators, including bloggers, have insisted upon both the term ‘illegal’ and the fact that such people have no human rights. All that is new is the discovery that an ‘illegal’ is anyone the government chooses to detain.