This regular feature is back again. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.
Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
I’ve noticed numerous statements lately to the effect that the number of asylum-seekers dropped to zero after the Tampa incident, usually with the implication that the associated policies were tough but effective. Those who want to use this argument should be honest about their history. The Tampa was seized in August 2001. There were plenty of boats after that, including SIEV-4, which was at the centre of the “children overboard” incident. The event that brought the whole process to a halt was the sinking of SIEV-X in October 2001, with the loss of 353 lives.
Most of the Tampa asylum-seekers were eventually recognised as refugees, and many made it to Australia in the end. It wasn’t the use of Pacific islands as detention camps, but the willingness of the government to turn back unseaworthy boats, reaffirmed after the SIEV-X tragedy, that ended the flow of asylum seekers. This policy, reinforced by the lesson of SIEV-X, had the desired effect. That doesn’t make it any less shameful.
More on asylum-seekers from Andrew Bartlett, Tim Dunlop, Nicholas Gruen and Ken Parish
I worked more on the Industrial Relations reform issue last night and I have written a draft paper, which you can read and, hopefully, comment on.
IR is a very complex topic, and for that reason I’ve tended to shy away from detailed analysis in the past. But with major changes inevitable, there’s no alternative but to get immersed in the details. This is going to be a slow process, but at least I’ve now made a start. I’m pretty much flat-out at present, so progress on this is likely to be slow.
Anyway, you can read my analysis, for what it’s worth (PDF file over the fold).
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Rob Corr sent me this music meme. I’ve done my own list, over the fold. Showing my age, again!
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There seems to be a renewed interest in blogs among the mainstream media. Here’s one from the SMH, on blogs and influence. Not long ago, The Age Media Blog ran a piece on When are bloggers journalists?.
In both stories, I get referred to as an “elder statesman”. To quote The Bill, it’s a fair cop, guv.
The National Tertiary Education Union, of which I’m a member, has nominated today as a day of protest against the government’s Industrial Relations reforms, but has left it up to members how to make their protest. For me, the obvious thing to do is to get to work on my long-promised analysis. I’ve written most of a draft, and I hope to get the rest done this evening, but in the meantime, I thought I’d give a short statement of how I see the relationship between industrial relations institutions and inequality, which is my central concern.
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There’s a lot happening and plenty I don’t have time and/or expertise to cover. A few selections. Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell looks at the rejection of the proposed EU constitution by a referendum vote in France. Mark Bahnisch looks at welfare and unemployment. And Gary Sauer-Thompson covers DIMIA’s (mis)handling of detention.
While I’m on the topic, my Fin column last week was about the National Water Initiative, which is in danger of becoming collateral damage in the fights between the Federal government and the states. It’s over the page.
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A couple of people have suggested that I should comment on some stories in the Australian about water and the rice industry. Since I’m busy, along with the RSMG team, working on models of this very topic (for all irrigated industries, not just rice), I’m happy to oblige.
The first, by Amanda Hodge and Matthew Denholm, presents a fairly negative view of the rice industry as a profligate user of water, and the second, by Laurie Arthur, is a response from the industry. A lot of interest focuses on the amount of water used to produce a kilogram of rice. In the original article, this was erroneously reported as 21 000 litres: the correct figure is about 2000 litres/kg, or 2Ml/tonne which is still a lot of water[1].
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Another huge current account deficit, coming in at around 7.2 per cent of GDP. And that’s with high commodity prices and low world interest rates, thanks to the ‘global savings glut’. Put commodity prices back to normal, and interest rates up by a couple of percentage points, and we could easily be running a deficit in excess of 10 per cent of GDP. At that rate, net overseas obligations would be in excess of 100 per cent of GDP within five years.
Australia has been called a miracle economy on the strength of an impressively long, but by no means unique, economic expansion. But if we manage sustain this kind of imbalance for another five years it really will be a miracle. As far as I know, no economy has ever managed anything like it.
