Sherman on war

John Quiggin14 Comments

Not so long ago, in a discussion on Iraq the question came up of what various people would have predicted at the outset of the US Civil War. It seemed to me that all with the possible exception of Sherman, would have grossly underestimated the length and bloodiness of the war, and that all would have predicted easy victory for their side. Of course, rather than speculate, I should have checked Wikipedia. Fortunately, William Tecumseh Sherman was the featured article yesterday, and includes Sherman’s judgement.

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!

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Two weeks behind the Zeitgeist

John Quiggin67 Comments

I’ve been following the Peak Oil debate with a mildly sceptical eye for some time, and it struck me a while ago that despite high prices, global oil output hadn’t grown much, but hadn’t declined either. I came up with the innovative description of our current position as “Plateau Oil“. If I had bothered with Google, I would have noticed that the International Energy Agency had offered the same description two weeks earlier. And if I’d thought about for more than a couple of seconds, I would have realised that the supply of topographical metaphors is so limited as to make this a forced move (We Australians use “Tableland” to describe the same landform and there’s also “mesa”, but Mesa Oil is taken, and “Tableland Oil” sounds silly)

Anyway, why are we (apparently) observing Plateau Oil and what does it mean?
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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin15 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

Double or nothing on Haneef

John Quiggin20 Comments

Having made a comprehensive mess of the Haneef case while he was in Australia, and having paid for his flight to India, the government and the AFP, might reasonably have sought to turn the page, and given a “No comment” or other non-response to further questions on the subject. Given the Minister’s broad latitude under the law, it seems most unlikely that Haneef’s appeal against the visa cancellation can succeed, so they had a chance to get the story off the front page.

Instead, they’ve decided to go double or nothing. Andrews won a round of the media cycle with his carefully timed and staged release of allegedly secret information on Tuesday. With no time for any real response, he got a perfect run on the TV news and the morning editions. It took a day or so for some of the problems to emerge, of which the most significant were:
* The information wasn’t secret and had been put to Haneef by the police in interviews (for which the transcripts have apparently not been made available)
* The apparently damning quotes (mostly from Haneef’s brother) were tightly edited extracts from a translation of a conversation in Urdu
* Andrew’s presentation ignored the fact that Haneef had called the British police four times without success in an attempt to resolve the SIM card question

Not content with this, Mick Keelty suggested that further charges “might” be laid against Haneef, managing in the process to misspeak yet again regarding the location of the SIM card. Then there was the convenient leaking of an Indian police dossier (apparently just a summary of material provided by the Oz and UK forces).

Perhaps all this will succeed in political terms. But most people must be aware by now that seemingly clearcut evidence presented by this government has a habit of turning out to be flimsy at best. Having made the latest claims, the government should either lay charges against Haneef or agree to Rudd’s call for an inquiry in which the whole issue can be examined by someone credible.

Federalism at its worst

John Quiggin53 Comments

If there has ever been a worse contribution to Australian federalism than this decision by the Howard government to provide special funding to a hospital in Tasmania (naturally located in a marginal electorate) I don’t recall it. I say this as someone who has repeatedly called for the Commonwealth to take over hospitals.

Interfering in the funding for one hospital is worse than useless, and the transparent political opportunism of this decision makes it worse still. Why not have the Federal Health Minister review waiting lists, and push swinging voters up the queue?

This is part of a pattern with the Howard government, in which it funds or mandates politically appealing extras while leaving the states with the responsibility for providing the basics. We’ve seen this in schools (chaplains, values education, compulsory history and so on), TAFE (the Commonwealth’s new colleges) the Murray (where the states are still stuck with managing land use), Aboriginal communities and a whole host of other areas. The result is even more duplication and waste than we had before. Howard is now more centralist than Whitlam, who at least encouraged the states to join his efforts.
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How much does it cost to save the planet?

John Quiggin61 Comments

There’s been quite a bit of discussion here and elsewhere about the cost of large (60 per cent or more) reductions in CO2 emissions. A lot of people are intuitively convinced that since everything we do uses energy, large reductions in energy use can only be achieved at the cost of large reductions in living standards. Economic analysis says the opposite. Typical estimates of the cost of such reductions are in the range 1-3 per cent of income for the world as a whole. Australia is more energy intensive, and ABARE (by no means biased low on this kind of thing) gives a range from 1.7 to 3.4 per cent for plausible scenarios. Only by rigging the game could ABARE get the high estimate of 10 per cent, quoted by Howard a while back. And even a 10 per cent reduction in income, by 2050, would not actually be noticeable against the background noise of macroeconomic and individual income fluctuations. On plausible projections, it would mean average income would increase by 110 per cent instead of 120 per cent.

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