This opinion poll, reported in the Oz is encouraging, and supports my view that the upsurge in support for Howard over Tampa was the result of a temporary panic, stirred up by a combination of racial/religious prejudice and law-and-order politics. Of course, Howard’s success was enhanced by the total failure of leadership on the Labor side, epitomised by Kim Beazley, who is quoted in the story, as lame as ever.

The poll (taken before the latest news showing Howard knew the children overboard story was false), shows that more voters now disagree with the Howard Government’s handling of the Tampa issue than agree with it — 43 per cent versus 35 per cent, and that most favor allowing at least some boatpeople into Australia.

I think the reaction against the policy has been driven in part by the obvious nastiness of the government’s campaign against asylum seekers, amplified a thousandfold in some sections of the press, not to mention the blogosphere. It is hard to imagine any decent person reading some of the stuff that has been turned out by pro-government commentators on this issue and not reacting with disgust.

It is now clear that the vast majority of those on the Tampa and other boats were genuine refugees. Even those who were not were desperate people willing to risk everything to make a better life for their families. None[1] had committed a crime justifying the kind of treatment of they received.

fn1. No doubt I’ll get someone pointing out that some of these people might have been criminals, political or common. I wonder if the same people protested when Ruddock used his ministerial power to allow a large group of members of the South Lebanese Army, an outfit with plenty of crimes on its record, to jump the refugee queue.

Having posed the question directly here, and had a look around the blogosphere, the opinion pages and so on, I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a single person[1] in Australia who believes that John Howard is telling the truth[2] in regard to the children overboard story. Given that large percentages believe that Elvis lives, and a non-zero number believe themselves to be Elvis (or similar), I think this is an impressive level of unanimity.

fn1. Obviously, the relevant set includes Howard himself

fn2. That is, in the time-honored phrase, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Has anyone asked Costello about the PMs “children overboard” claims? Maybe he’d respond along the lines of John Anderson, saying Prime Minister John Howard is a trustworthy individual and most Australians know it. Or maybe we’d get one of the more equivocal formulas (perhaps a quote from Howard himself) of which Costello is so fond. Unless things get drastically worse for Howard, I can’t see Costello making a challenge (Chris Sheil discusses this further) but I also doubt that he’d be willing to tie his own credibility to Howard’s.

As the story keeps running, I’m beginning to think it possible, albeit remotely, that Howard might be forced to ‘fess up. There’s been a new development every day, and there’s at least one more to come – the Liberal Party dirt unit’s campaign against Scrafton for having porn on his computer here’s an old newspaper article [PDF], linked by Crikey which reports the dirt unit’s role (hat tip to Ron, commenting on Ken Parish) This story gets a blogospheric run from Bernie Slattery here. This may damage Scrafton, but it will also remind everyone of previous similar campaigns, against Mick Keelty, the “doddering daiquiri diplomats” and so on.

In addition Howard’s attempt to parse as supporting his own story a statement from the former head of the Defence Department public affairs unit, Jenny McKenry, confirming Scrafton’s story invites a clarification from her.

And so far, I have yet to see a single person, no matter how vehemently they support Howard, willing to say that they believe he is telling the truth[1].

fn1. To be clear here, I don’t mean something “morally true” or “true enough to satisfy the Australian people” or “true in the postmodern sense”, or “true, given appropriate rules of grammatical construction”. I mean that when Howard says something like “at no time during his telephone calls with Mr Scrafton had he discussed photos relating to the sinking of Siev4 on October 8, 2001”, this actually means that the photos were not mentioned by either party.

The Institute of Public Affairs has been an eager participant in History and Culture wars, vigorously assailing postmodernist notions of “multiple truths”. Plenty of people, including me, have made the obvious tu quoque pointing out that, in practise, truth for the IPA is whatever happens to be convenient at the time[1]. Now the embrace of postmodernism is official, or at least as official as it can be for such a slippery and ambiguous doctrine. In today’s Fin, IPA Fellow (and, I think, former Liberal apparatchik) John Roskam writes

One doesn’t necessarily have to believe in the post-modern idea that ‘there is no such thing as truth’, to appreciate the difficulty of establishing precisely what was said, or what was thought to have been said, three years ago

It sure helps, though.

I think what I like best in this passage is the ironic use of ‘necessarily’, a fine appeal to the postmodern sensibility. It adds eloquently to the ambiguity of Roskam’s position, with the hint that his adoption of postmodernism is the result of aesthetic choice rather than necessity. Roskam goes on to articulate the postmodern notion of “socially determined truth”, arguing that the election outcome will retrospectively make Howard’s position true in the only snese that matters.

To take him seriously, if we suppose that it’s impossible to determine the truth of clearly-defined events three years ago, with multiple witnesses, and plenty of additional evidence (for example, as regards the truthfulness or otherwise of one of the key witnesses), we might as well admit that no historical fact can ever be known.

As I’ve said previously, it would be much more sensible for the government and its defenders to come straight out and say “We lied, everyone knew it, and we still won. Get over it”.

fn1. For example, the IPA assails anti-science opponents of GM foods, but denounces the scientific establishment as a left-wing conspiracy when it comes up with the “wrong” answers on global warming and the Murray-Darling.

The WashPost runs an Op-Ed piece byPradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman, claiming that the failure of third parties to do well in the US is due, not to plurality voting or other institutional factors but to excessive political centralisation. The claim is that since third parties

once competed successfully in congressional elections, winning significant portions of the popular vote and often gaining seats in Congress. This was true for most of the 19th century and even the early part of the 20th

the cause of their subsequent failure must be something new – political centralisation[1].

Chhibber and Kollman seem to be well-regarded political scientists. But their argument here is riddled with errors, or at least large logical gaps.
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There seems to be a kiteflying campaign from commentators with connections to the government, suggesting that the US might reject, or threaten to reject, the Free Trade Agreement on the basis of Labor’s amendments regarding patenting. Howard raised the possibility when he agreed to the amendments, and the US Trade Representative spokesman Richard Mills, kept it alive, with the ominously worded observation

We have chosen not to intervene in the internal debate within Australia about the FTA implementing legislation and amendments at this point.

(emphasis added).
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Since the topic of elites seems to be popping up a bit, I thought I’d link to a piece I wrote a couple of years ago. Here are some extracts

Of course there is an Australian elite. In fact, there is more than one. Business wealth commands one sort of power, central position in political machines commands another, and senior office in the public service yet another.

The recent discussion of elites in Australia has focused on the ‘opinion elite’. Many of the assertions that have been made about the opinion elite in recent months, particularly by supporters of the Howard government, have been self-serving nonsense. Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that some Australians have more influence than others in determining the ideas that are taken seriously in formulating public policy, and that, on many occasions the views of this influential group are not representative of the population as a whole

…

With the election of John Howard, and his advocacy (punctuated by occasional backflips) of the social agenda represented by Pauline Hanson, positions hardened. Today, the Australian elite is divided in much the same way as the population as a whole, between a right-wing group which favours both free markets and a conservative or reactionary social[1] agenda, and a left-wing group which supports republicanism and reconciliation, and opposes free-market reform.

The main difference between the elite and the population as a whole is the absence of any group corresponding to the One Nation support base, opposing both free-market policies and social liberalism. Because of this absence, the Australian elite is both more ‘economically rationalist’ and more ‘socially progressive’ than the population as a whole. However, it is increasingly uncommon to find both traits in the same person.

This is slightly less true of the blogosphere than of the opinion elite, but still not far off the mark.

fn1. In this context, I don’t regard attitudes towards sex and drugs as being significant markers of social views. In Australia, these issues are pretty much separate from views on broader social and economic issues.

I just heard Howard being quoted on the ABC News with a very lame denial of the claim, detailed in today’s Oz, that he had been advised by Mike Scrafton, at the time senior adviser to then defence minister Peter Reith of the falsity of the “children overboard” allegations, the day before he went to the National Press Club and repeated those allegations. The PMs spokesman admits that the conversation took place, and doesn’t deny Scrafton’s account of why it took place, which I quote

“I rang Reith straight away and said to him that the best spin you could put on the tape was that it was inconclusive,” he told The Australian yesterday.

“It certainly didn’t support anything like children being thrown overboard. Nor, in my view, that threats had been made to throw children overboard. None of these claims were confirmed by the video.

“Reith said: ‘The PM will probably want to hear this.’ He rang me back about 20 minutes later and said: ‘I have given your mobile number to the PM and he will give you a ring back at some point during the evening’.”

but wants us to believe that Howard somehow still wasn’t told that the evidence was bogus. I expect they spent a lot of time discussing the prospects for the Ashes series.

Looking at the political implications, continuing lame denials will, I think pose a big problem for Howard and those who want to defend him on this. The line they really want to push is

Yes, he lied, get over it. Everyone knew he was lying and most people wanted to be lied to

But it will be hard to push this openly while Howard is still saying the opposite.
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Yesterday, I was at a conference put on by the Foundation for Development Cooperation. I was talking about Tobin taxes and emissions trading, but the really interesting development for me was one that came up after the speech given by Kevin Rudd, and was also mentioned at the Pacific Forum last week.

This was the idea that the only way to resolve the problems of the Pacific is to allow access for citizens of Pacific island states to the Australian and New Zealand labour markets. Howard said something along these lines last week, and Rudd promised a more substantial review, which would of course, involve negotiation with the ACTU.

I’ve long held the view that traditional models of economic development were unlikely to work in the islands. If we disregard the fact that these are sovereign countries, and look at the actual economics, they look a lot like Australian country towns. In the absence of barriers to migration, you’d expect to see young people going to the city to work, though perhaps returning home at some later point. In this context, for “the city” read Australia and New Zealand.

There’s a sense in which this is the Pacific solution, operating in reverse. Having bribed and bullied our neighbours into acting as detention centres for our unwanted visitors, we’re now in a much weaker position to put them outside the fence that says “We will decide who comes here, and under what circumstances”. So perhaps some good will come of the whole sorry process.

An asideAlthough it’s not strictly relevant, I thought I’d observe that the family reunion category of migration, much criticised in commentary on migration policy, now consists primarily of the spouses of Australian citizens (at least, this is what Deirdre Macken said in Saturday’s Fin). Certainly there are quite a few cases of this kind among my immediate acquaintance and extended family, and they give the lie to the “mail-order bride” stereotype that will undoubtedly be invoked. This is worth thinking about, and I will have some more to say about it sometime.

John Howard finally let the cat out of the bag, with his suggestion that Labor’s amendments aimed at preventing evergreening of patents might ‘violate the spirit’ of the Free Trade Agreement with the US. As I pointed out last week

The letter of the FTA gives a fair bit of room to move, allowing for interpretations more or less favorable to the pharmaceutical lobby on the one hand and the PBS on the other.The government has tried to have it both ways, assuring the Australian public that the FTA clauses relating to PBS are meaningless words inserted to placate the Americans, while promising their (very close) friends in the pharmaceutical lobby that they can expect more favorable treatment, consistent with Wooldridge’s efforts to stack the PBAC and so forth. Passage of the FTA without amendment would have made it easy for the government to deliver to its friends when the elections were out of the way and the electors conveniently on the sidelines. Adding amendments directed at specific possible abuses implies, more generally, that Australia is committed to ensuring that the drug lobby gets nothing more than its minimum legal entitlement under the FTA – a nonbinding review, and observation of patent law.

Howard even raised the prospect that the Americans might walk away from the deal. If only!