The letter and the spirit

John Quiggin7 Comments

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!

Republicans voting sensibly

John Quiggin26 Comments

The most plausible argument against a directly elected president is that a nominee of one of the major parties would almost certainly get up. If the President and Prime Minister were of the same party, the President would be even more a rubber stamp than the GG. If they were of opposite parties, there would be an increased risk of partisan deadlock. This is certainly undesirable, but is it a likely outcome?

This argument depends on the assumption that a large majority of Australians would vote for the candidate of their preferred party. How large a majority is needed? The evidence suggests that no more than 30 per cent of voters are ‘rusted-on’ Labor voters who would vote a straight Labor ticket in all elections, and similarly for the Liberals/Nationals[1]. That leaves 40 per cent who can be swayed either way.

This means

* An appealing independent candidate could win in a three-sided contest

* If one party chooses not to run a candidate, the other party’s candidate would almost certainly lose

So, given a widespread belief that the President ought not to be a partisan, I think it is unlikely that the major parties would run candidates and win the first time around. Once the norm of an independent presidency was established, it would be almost impossible for either major party, acting alone, to break it.

Ken Parish has more, repeating the point that we can, if we choose, have direct election without, or prior to, a Republic. He also has some nice points about experimentation in a Federal system. It’s fair to say we’ve been experimenting with different gubernatorial models lately, and not having a very high success rate.

fn1. In the last Senate election Labor got 34 per cent of primary votes, and at least some of these must have been swinging voters. Similarly for the coalition in 1998.

Republicans behaving badly

John Quiggin19 Comments

The recent departure of Tasmanian Governor Richard Butler has let the monarchists, long embarrassed by the antics of our hereditary ruling family, get a bit of their own back. Lots of people see prominent republican Butler’s (alleged, I should observe) arrogant and erratic behavior as a prototype for a Malcolm Turnbull presidency.

I’d suggest that the real lesson here is Churchill’s – democracy is the worst system apart from all the others. Perhaps if a President were selected by popular vote, the office might occasionally be filled by popstars or sporting heroes. But does anyone suggest that Butler or Turnbull, or, for that matter, Prince Charles, would ever win a popular vote?

Only good news, please

John Quiggin7 Comments

The Allawi government’s decision to ban Al-Jazeera has received a lot of attention. Rather less has been paid to a subsequent announcement of a wide range of rules to be applied by the new Higher Media Commission. Prominent among them is a prohibition of “unwarranted criticism” of Allawi himself. This was reported in Australia’s Financial Review and also in the Financial Times (both subscription only) and also in a number of Arab and antiwar papers, but not in any of the general mainstream press.

For those inclined to a “slippery slope” view of censorship, this is certainly a case study.

Here’s a protest letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

How many times do we have to hear this ?

John Quiggin42 Comments

John Howard’s attack on General Peter Gration reproduces yet again one of the silliest argument made by supporters of the Iraq war. He points out that Gration, like many other opponents of the war , made statements in the course of 2002 accepting the presumption that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The same point has been made with respect to Bill Clinton and many others.

Those making this claim seem to have erased from their historical memory banks the period from December 2002 to March 2003. During this period, UN inspectors went all over Iraq, inspecting all the sites where Bush, Blair and Howard had claimed to have evidence of weapons programs. They found nothing[1], for the very good reason that there was nothing to find. They interviewed scientists, inside and outside Iraq and got the same (correct) story every time – the weapons programs had been abandoned years ago.

By the time the war broke out, it was clear to any reasonable observer that Saddam had no nuclear program, no large-scale programs for producing chemical and biological weapons, and, in all probability no biological weapons at all. More intensive searching would have been required to determine that there were no carefully hidden stockpiles of chemical weapons, and if Bush had not gone to war, followed by Blair and Howard, these searches would have taken place and (as we know now) found nothing.

This is glaringly obvious, and yet supporters of the war, almost without exception, keep parroting the same line, or some variant, such as the claim that, in the light of the evidence, the UNSC was unreasonable in not passing a second resolution favoring war.

Given the gross mismanagement of the situation in Iraq after the war, explicable only by a willingness to ignore obvious facts in favor of political fantasies, I lean more and more to the view that support for the war required a degree of detachment from reality that guaranteed subsequent failure.

fn1. More precisely, they found some missiles that had a range marginally longer than that permitted, and had begun their destruction when Bush declared war. They also found a handful of leftover chemical shells, of the kind that have turned up on a couple of occasions since.

War crimes

John Quiggin17 Comments

It’s been argued at length whether the Iraq war as a whole was morally justified, given that many thousands of people died in the process of removing Saddam’s regime. I don’t think so, but if you suppose that Saddam would otherwise have stayed in power for decades, and make some optimistic assumptions about future prospects, it’s possible to come to the opposite conclusion. But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr? If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.

These people weren’t Al Qaeda or Baathists, they were (apart from the inevitable innocent bystanders) young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Sadr’s militia is one of a dozen or so similar outfits in Iraq, and there are hundreds more around the world, quite a few of which have received US support despite having a worse record than Sadr’s. Moreover, there was no cause at stake that justified a war – the first started when Bremer shut down Sadr’s newspaper and the Sadrists retaliated by taking control of some police stations and mosques. The current outbreak seems to have had even more trivial causes. It’s the willingness of the US government to send in the Marines that’s turned what would normally be noisy disturbances into bloodbaths.

Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.