Howard channels Whitlam

John Quiggin14 Comments

John Howard is a well-known admirer of Gough Whitlam,so it’s not surprising to see him returning to one of Gough’s favourite centralist themes

Mr Howard said this week that the federal system was being undermined by bickering between the states and Canberra.

He was angered by repeated claims by the states that they were being underfunded when they were receiving more money courtesy of the goods and services tax.

“I don’t think our present system, federal system, is working all that well,” he said.

“I think if we were starting a country all over again we’d have a national government and a whole series of regional governments – we wouldn’t have states if we were starting all over again; but we’re not, so that’s quite academic.”

Unfortunately, Gough and John are both wrong on this one. If we started completely from scratch, we might have some different state boundaries, or perhaps an extra state in North Queensland, but with these modest qualifications, the Australian states are natural political units. I’ll try and do a longer post on this.

That said, I’m glad to see that the government is once again floating the idea that the Commonwealth should take over the entire health system. If, in return, the Feds got out of the school sector, we’d have a much more manageable division of responsibilities. buy zyvox

Australia and Abu Ghraib

John Quiggin5 Comments

Although Australia, as part of the Coalition that invaded Iraq, has a general responsibility for the actions of the occupying forces, it’s been generally assumed that we don’t have any direct involvement with the Abu Ghraib prison/interrogation centre/torture chamber. So it’s disturbing, to put it mildly, to find that the front man for the Abu Ghraib operation appears to be Captain Mark Doggett, an Australian army officer and press officer for the Coalition forces.

Doggett is quoted here, for example, in a piece by Deroy Murdock in the National Review Online, the general tenor of which is that we need more and better torture if we’re going to win the war on terror. Doggett doesn’t say this, or anything like it, himself, but he clearly has the job of defending the operations of Abu Ghraib and minimising the crimes committed there, thereby providing ammunition for the likes of Murdock. As another example, he’s quoted here , defending a decision to exclude human rights groups from the first of the Abu Ghraib trial.

I’d like to know something about the conditions under which Doggett holds this job. To whom is he answerable? In particular, are his statements endorsed by the Australian government? If so, is not Australia just as responsible as the US for conditions at Abu Ghraib? If not, how does it come about that an Australian army officer is a spokesman for a foreign government? buy sinequan

Two envelopes

John Quiggin7 Comments

Via Juan at Philosophy617 (who doesn’t think much of the proffered solutions, and probably won’t like this one) I came back to this version of the two-envelope problem put forward by Brian over at Crooked Timber last year.

In this case, once you observe that Brian’s angel is giving you faulty theology, it’s easy to show that you should reject his[1] mathematics, and his offer. At the end of the problem, the angel says “It’s purgatory,” says the angel, “take all the time you want.” But the whole point of Purgatory is that it’s finite – you purge off your sins one at a time until they’re all paid off. Since we now have a finite problem, the solution is straightforward.
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The Shanahan spin

John Quiggin4 Comments

As Crikey points out, Dennis Shanahan does his best to find the good news in the Newspolls showing general public rejection of the Budget. I was particularly struck by this bit

After last year’s budget, which included a $5-a-week across-the-board tax cut, 15per cent of people said they would be personally better off and 32per cent said they would be worse off.

This year, almost twice as many people said they would be better off and only 22per cent said they believed they would be worse off.

This is all true. The only problem is that last year, Shanahan reported on the results of the same poll, and also found it to be good news for the government. How did he manage this, given the awful results? Simple. He reported that 53 per cent of voters thought the Budget would make them better off or no worse off .(emphasis added)

Can wars be won ?

John Quiggin19 Comments

I’m reading How Democracies Lose Small Wars by Gil Merom. The main thesis is that domestic unwillingness to countenance brutality has caused democracies to lose small wars against militarily inferior insurgent movements since 1945. To make the argument, it’s necessary to show that, when these pressures weren’t so severe, victory in war generally went to the stronger party.

Merom presents a number of examples including the Athenian destruction of Melos, Cromwell’s war in Ireland, the Roman suppression of the Jewish revolt, German operations in SW Africa, Saddam vs the Kurds and Shiites, China and Tibet, Indonesia and East Timor and the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Merom argues that, in all these cases, unscrupulous brutality proved successful.

Yet in every case cited by Merom, a long-term view yields the opposite outcome. The Athenians lost the war and their hegemonic power, as of course did the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Ireland, East Timor and Israel are independent states, identifying in each case with the side described by Merom as the losers – Tibet isn’t yet, but I’m happy to predict it will become so. And then, of course, there’s Saddam.
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What I'm reading

John Quiggin1 Comment

The Small House at Allington

by Trollope. I’ve always found this the least satisfying of the Barsetshire novels, defying the conventions of the “happy-ending” romantic novel, but without the Romantic desperation of, say, the Brontes. When her fiancee, Adolphus Crosbie dumps her, as a result of the discovery that her expected inheritance will not be forthcoming, the heroine, Lily Dale, does not, as would be expected in a romantic novel, accept the man who truly loves her, but abandons all hope of marriage. But the introduction to the Folio edition, by Margaret Markwick, supplies the missing motivation, arguing that the real meaning of the text is that Lily had a full sexual relationship with Crosbie, regarding herself as his wife from the moment of their engagement. Hence, in line with romantic convention, she can never marry again.

Of course, Trollope couldn’t say this explicitly, or even in a generally-accepted code, but Markwick suggests that at least some of his Victorian readers would have got the point. By contrast, we expect, nowadays, to have such things spelt out for us.

What I'm reading

John Quiggin1 Comment

The Small House at Allington

by Trollope. I’ve always found this the least satisfying of the Barsetshire novels, defying the conventions of the “happy-ending” romantic novel, but without the Romantic desperation of, say, the Brontes. When her fiancee, Adolphus Crosbie dumps her, as a result of the discovery that her expected inheritance will not be forthcoming, the heroine, Lily Dale, does not, as would be expected in a romantic novel, accept the man who truly loves her, but abandons all hope of marriage. But the introduction to the Folio edition, by Margaret Markwick, supplies the missing motivation, arguing that the real meaning of the text is that Lily had a full sexual relationship with Crosbie, regarding herself as his wife from the moment of their engagement. Hence, in line with romantic convention, she can never marry again.

Of course, Trollope couldn’t say this explicitly, or even in a generally-accepted code, but Markwick suggests that at least some of his Victorian readers would have got the point. By contrast, we expect, nowadays, to have such things spelt out for us.

The Voice of Yoof, Part 2

John Quiggin3 Comments

Optimization Prime is a new group blog. The pun in the title, presumably due to Justin Gundlach should be self-explanatory to members of Gen Y and their parents- the members of the group are all in the former category, I think. My biggest criticism is that comments don’t appear to have been implemented yet, though this should be easy in what looks like a Movable Type set.

Among some interesting posts, Maggie McConnell cites a report that Hallmark is developing a line of greeting cards for gay weddings. This raises a more general point about capitalism as a solvent of traditional social order, going back at least to Schumpeter, which I’ll try to develop some other time.