Larry

John QuigginLeave a comment

Cyclone Larry has just passed over the Atherton Tablelands, where quite a few members of my family live, having earlier crossed the coast near Innisfail, with winds up to 290 km/h. Cyclones weaken as they go inland, so hopefully there won’t be too much damage and destruction on the Tablelands, but the speed with which this one has moved means its still very strong.

No real news from Innisfail yet, but it sounds as though there have been quite a few houses destroyed or damaged and that the the banana crop has probably been wiped out. Best wishes to any readers in the region, and to everyone else there as well.

Is Howard defensible ?

John Quiggin35 Comments

The few commentators who were suggesting that the Howard government did not (at the least) know the general facts about Australia’s collusion with Saddam Hussein in stealing $300 million from the Oil-For-Food fund, and encourage the AWB quango to do ‘whatever it takes’ to push the deal through, have gone quiet after the latest revelation that our intelligence agencies knew all about the racket.

Is there a coherent defence of the Howard government’s actions in helping Saddam fund his regime, including its military, while calling for, and eventually participating in, war against him? I think there is, though not one we’re likely to see avowed openly.
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What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin21 Comments

What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy by Clive Hamilton. The latest Quarterly Essay is a restatement of arguments Clive’s presented a number of times before. The central argument is that, since widespread poverty is no longer a problem, social democracy is irrelevant and what is needed is a postmaterialist politics of wellbeing.

Not surprisingly, I have a lot of problems with this.
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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin24 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.

Communications reform

John Quiggin14 Comments

My piece in yesterday’s Fin is over the fold. I go into full free-market mode attacking the government’s deal with the monopolists. Ken Davidson in the Age goes the other way, arguing for tight regulation in the public interest, but I can’t see this ever happening to Murdoch or even Packer jnr. On the other hand, I guess we’re not going to see their spectrum taken away and auctioned off either. On the whole, though, I think the only useful intervention here is support for a strong public broadcasting sector. As far as the commercial networks go, the best hope is to encourage the kind of outside competition made possible by digital technology.

The point on which Ken and I agree, I think, is that we now have the worst of both worlds: lots of intervention, but in the interests of monopolists, not the public.
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The traditionality of modernity (crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin18 Comments

As was pointed out in the comments to my karate post, the observation that most traditions are invented is getting somewhat traditional itself, going back as it does to the exposure of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.

So maybe it’s time to turn all this around, and make the point that we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.
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TV time

John Quiggin29 Comments

I don’t watch a lot of commercial TV these days. Apart from the news, Futurama is pretty much it. But I’ve noticed that programs no longer seem to start and end at the advertised time. I heard somewhere that this is a deliberate strategy to stop people changing channels. If correct, this is both deplorable and self-defeating. Deplorable because the TV networks have been given a monopoly by the government: if they want to keep it, they should at least act responsibly.

Self-defeating because there are so many alternatives, including DVDs and the internets, not to mention good old-fashioned books. The collective effect of this kind of gaming is that commercial TV as a whole is even less attractive.

BTW, I’ll be in tomorrow’s (thursdays) Fin, responding to Coonan’s media package. Shorter JQ: It s*x.