The Lower Darling: a government-made disaster

John Quiggin50 Comments

Federal Government last night released an independent interim assessment of the recent fish deaths. The report is damning, but you wouldn’t know that reading the press release from the relevant minister, David Littleproud.

Here’s my response, which I provided to the Australian Science Media Centre

The Report clearly describes the “antecedent conditions” which made the Lower Darling so vulnerable to large-scale fish deaths, all of which reflect policy failures of the current government: These include increased upstream extractive use of water, the decision to release water from Menindie Lakes in 2016 and the extreme climatic conditions which are the “new normal” as a result of climate change. The Minister’s statement ignores all of these factors, and focuses only on the immediate causes of the disaster.


The government has rejected water buybacks as a means of increasing flow, ignored environmental concerns in the management of the Menindie Lakes and rejected any action to mitigate climate change. This was a human-made disaster, for which the present government bears substantial responsibility.

SLAPP

John Quiggin12 Comments

Adani has been pretty quiet after the publication of a leaked memo from its newly hired law firm AJ & Co, named for its founder and managing partner, Andrew Johnson. AJ promised to act as an “attack dog” to silence opponents and sue them into bankruptcy, something Adani is already attempting in the case of indigenous leader Adrian Burragubba (I understand that funds have been raised to ensure that this doesn’t happen).

This is what is known= as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) and is illegal in many US jurisdictions though not (AFAICT) in Australia. The Environmental Defender’s Office, one of the targets of Adani/AJ action, has a useful guide. This kind of thing used to be covered by the common law offence of barratry (Dante consigned barrators to the Eighth Circle of Hell), but this offence has either been abolished or fallen into disuse.

This and other actions by Adani seem to have finally pushed the Labor Party off the fence. A minority (including the CFMMEU, its longtime enemy Joe Ludwig and Townsville local member Cathy O’Toole) have come out in support of Adani, but the majority correctly see Adani as an enemy to be resisted and defeated.

The right remedy here is political rather than (primarily) legal. Adani and AJ have declared war on the environment and anyone who wants to save it, and should expect no quarter in return. Hopefully, they will suffer the same fate as the most famous (until now) exponent of the SLAPP suit, Gunns in Tasmania and its chairman John Gay.


The Ramsay Centre is frightened of academic freedom

John Quiggin18 Comments

I just signed a petition opposing any agreement between the Ramsay Centre and the University of Queensland, where I work. I am disappointed that things have reached this point. The areas of the humanities that Ramsay would support have long been underfunded: they don’t fit into either the market-driven ideology of “reform”, or the more recent technocratic push for STEM.

The problem is that, quite evidently, the Ramsay Centre wants to control who teaches the courses and how they are taught. Tony Abbott let the cat out of the bag a while ago when he said the courses would be “not just about Western Civilization, but for it”, and made it clear that his version of Western Civilization is one that would have seemed hopelessly reactionary by the 19th Century.

Abbott has kept quiet since then, but he is still on the board. The demands made to universities for a role in appointments and for Ramsay to appoint inspectors who would monitor teaching make it clear that his stated position was representative.

The disappointing thing is that they need not have bothered. The kinds of academics and students who would teach and sign up for classical and medieval courses are unlikely to be eager followers of the latest developments in critical Theory. And if Abbott and the rest had any faith in the merits of their literary and intellectual position, they ought to expect a neutral presentation of the works in question to carry the day.

It’s such a lot of money, for such an underfunded area, that I hope Ramsay finds someone to take it, even if they have to go to one of the Catholic institutions or start up their own. But any university that pretends to value academic freedom should reject this Greek gift*

Update: Just after posting this, I read that, only yesterday, the Ramsay Centre agreed to include a commitment to the principles of academic freedom in its MOU with Wollongong. Readers can judge whether this belated move, after months of resistance, represents a change of views or a piece of lip-service.

  • My little nod to classical learning.

Scandal

John Quiggin19 Comments

I’m not a big fan of political scandals. Still, it has to mean something when there are too many simultaneous scandals going on for anyone to keep track. Rather than attempt a summary, I’ll list some of the government figures currently involved in one or more scandals that would normally be expected to produce a resignation from office or Parliament: Cash, Cormann, Dutton, Hockey, Keenan, Wilson, Price [feel free to challenge these names, or add others, in comments]. The only comparable situation I can think of is the dying days of the last NSW Labor government.

In these circumstances, policy catastrophes like banking, the Murray-Darling Basin and climate change barely get a look in.

Despite all of this, the government and their media cheer squad are convinced they can eke out a win by demonizing refugees. We shall see.

The financial sector: discredited but unchallengable

John Quiggin32 Comments

The Economic Society of Australia regularly polls a panel of members seeking responses to statement on policy issues. The most recent was unusual both for a low response rate (admittedly, it was run in January) and for the unanimity of the answers. This may be attributed to the strong formulation of the statement “There is no way to significantly increase the degree to which Australian retail banks act in the interests of consumers.”

None of the respondents accepted this, but the answers broke into two categories: those recommending reforms broadly in line with the recommendations of the Hayne Royal Commission and those (including Allan Fels, James Morley and me) who wanted radical reforms that remain outside the realm of political feasibility.

My response:

None of the options that have been proposed so far are likely to do much good. What is needed is a reversal of the massive expansion of the financial sector that began in the 1970s. In the banking context, this would entail a “narrow banking” model in which retail banking was separated from trading and investment banking and regulated as a public utility, along with the recreation of a publicly owned “no frills” bank, along the lines of Kiwibank in New Zealand. These proposals may be beyond the realm of political feasibility, which is why I have expressed only modest confidence in my view.

This isn’t just a problem in the Australian retail finance sector. The whole structure of financialised capitalism is a recipe for greed and dishonesty. Everyone knows this, but there’s no obvious way to tackle it, given the entrenched power of the financial sector.

The situation is reminiscent of the last decade of the Soviet Union. Those in charge are utterly discredited but apparently irremovable.

Al Capone was done for tax evasion

John Quiggin10 Comments

It now looks possible that the fate of the Adani Carmichael mine will be sealed by an adverse assessment of the mine’s impact on the black-throated finch.

That’s a far less satisfactory outcome than if the Queensland Land and Environment Court had accepted, as its NSW counterpart has done, that the climate (and health) damage from burning the coal produced by the mine was relevant in assessing the costs and benefits. That reasoning leads to the conclusion that no new mines should be started, let alone marginal projects like Carmichael.

But even disregarding the main issue, the Galilee Basin has all the problems associated with large mining projects, and on a huge scale: disturbance of a large land area, heavy demands for water use, and the problems of shipping through the Great Barrier Reef, and conflict with indigenous owners. Even if these aren’t the biggest reason to reject a project that would open the entire Basin to mining, they are big enough.

This is, of course, a fairly common pattern in political and legal decisionmaking. It may be impossible, for procedural reasons, to reach a determination on the central issues that are at stake, so some less central but more definite point ends up getting to the necessary outcome.


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