Scrutiny needed of Doyle's Queen Vic proposals

Those who read Saturday's coverage in The Age of Lord Mayor Robert Doyle's proposals to revamp Queen Victoria Market might be interested in my response in today's letters in the paper:

We are entitled to scepticism of Lord Mayor Robert Doyle's grand plans to revamp the Queen Vic Market. Coming hot on the heels of Doyle exempting himself from a Council planning decision due to developer support for his re-election campaign, any Queen Vic proposal from the Lord Mayor should be subject to the closest scrutiny.

In what appears to be a top-down process in developing the proposal, we need to ask who stands to gain, and that includes if it's any of the big developers who bankrolled some candidates in the City of Melbourne Council elections.

I agree with Shane Green that any plan for change should seek the engagement of the market stall holders, who you report as refusing to participate in a Council promotional video due to their uncertainty about the detail of the proposal. It would also be a great idea to ask the ordinary people who visit the market, the observers of the worn steps and history of the place of which Green thoughtfully writes.

Doyle has a track-record of objecting to the occupation of public spaces by ordinary people, including the disadvantaged - witness his strident opposition to Occupy Melbourne and his ham-fisted anti-begging proposals. He ought not to arrogantly occupy the debate over this city's history, its future directions, and its identity.

When laws silence critics of a system failing children

On Saturday, The Age published a strong piece about a mother with a disability whose child was removed and placed in alternative custody by a court order despite the mother's clear capacity as a good parent.

Laws to prevent people speaking out about individual cases are found in a number of areas relating to children - including (as in this case) in family law, as well as in child protection. However, such laws are too often misused by governments not to protect the best interests of children, but to avoid scrutiny of a system that too often harms them.

Here's the unedited version of my letter published in The Age today responding to Mark Baker's story:

To make worse the removal of a child from a good mother with a disability, and the consequent violation of their human rights, a veil of silence has been cast over "Rebecca" in this sad case of seemingly lawful injustice.

Yet who benefits from this silence? In too many cases it is not children, but the system that is thereby allowed to escape proper scrutiny.

There are often good reasons why the identity of children should be protected, but there is little doubt that laws to achieve this are also misused to veil circumstances where children are harmed by the system itself.

Whether children are taken from good parents with a disability, harmed by a child protection system that fails, or even placed in an adult prison while subject to a child protection order, the law must allow appropriate public scrutiny that can offer a vital path to upholding children's best interests.

Laws that hide the effective abuse of children by the system cannot go unchallenged, and the voices of challenge must not be silenced.

ANZ sheds 1000 jobs to fuel yet bigger profits

In the relative calm of the Australian economy, banks such as the ANZ are imposing the austerity of unemployment on thousands of workers to boost their multi-billion-dollar profits.

Yesterday The Age reported that, in addition to the 1000 jobs being shed by the ANZ, up to 10,000 jobs could go from the financial services sector in Australia within the next two years.

Today the paper ran my letter ("Blameless pay for global greed") responding to this coverage. Here's the unedited version:

So the banks, with their obscene profits, executive salaries and bonuses, and to protect their profitability and competitiveness from unfavourable circumstances, are set to impose the austerity of unemployment on perhaps 10,000 workers over the next two years. For the job cuts - beginning with Westpac and the ANZ - are indeed austerity measures, imposed on those blameless for the profligacy, greed and recklessness of global financial institutions.

Yet, with Australia riding the economic storm better than most, austerity does indeed imply blame on those who must bear its burden here. Workers unable to find jobs will be forced to rely on a welfare safety-net that the conservative champions of austerity seek at every turn to unpick. They will be forced into a job market competing against their peers in a sector-wide downturn, their options in public employment diminished - especially in Victoria, where the State Government will shed 3600 jobs.

On these happy tidings the ANZ share price increased yesterday [Tuesday], the numbers looking good for a corporation set to shed so much of its unnecessary human freight. If you are an ANZ shareholder - indeed a shareholder in any bank trading on the human misery of joblessness - please turn away from those who, without any semblance of genuine regret, or indeed emotion, can announce on television that this mass loss of livelihoods is merely "regrettable".

The bloodless headline of the ANZ's media release read, "ANZ announces changes in Australia to respond to emerging business environment". The Financial Services Union release spoke more plainly with "ANZ announces massive job cuts".

Detailed coverage aired on ABC News and the ABC's 7.30 Report.

Comments welcome.

Ferguson claims "neutrality" as he shores up HRL brown coal

Updated 14/2/12

In a move to "shore up" brown coal rather than properly support genuine clean energy alternatives, resources and energy minister Martin Ferguson yesterday announced that HRL has yet a further six months to get its long-flailing Latrobe Valley brown coal power plant together and meet funding conditions before it loses a $100m Federal Government grant. Ferguson also announced $100m for CarbonNet, a carbon capture and storage project, also in the Latrobe Valley and part of the $1.68b CCS Flagships Program.

The HRL announcement follows concerted community action to stop the polluting brown coal power plant, the tabling in Federal Parliament of a petition of nearly 13,000 signatures opposing it, and a recent public rally at which Labor's Federal Member for Wills, Kelvin Thomson MP, spoke against the project, on which he also addressed the Parliament in tabling the petition.

The announcement has been met with dismay and a commitment to sustained action by community campaigners opposing the project because of its dangerously high carbon emissions, the availability of abundant and genuinely clean alternatives such as solar, and a promise by Prime Minister Julia Gillard not to build more dirty coal-fired power stations in Australia.

Here's the unedited version of my letter published in today's edition of The Age responding to Katharine Murphy and David Wroe's report of the HRL project extension.

In throwing a "lifeline" to HRL's brown coal power project and more money at carbon capture and storage in the Latrobe Valley, Martin Ferguson comes clean in at least one respect - he's aiming at "shoring up the value of Victoria's brown coal resource".

Ferguson can imagine no low-emissions solution that leaves coal in the ground. Unfortunately exploiting coal and lowering emissions are essentially contradictory aims.

Ferguson claims a "technology neutral" approach to clean energy solutions, but those he favours with so-called neutrality in fact serve private coal interests and escalate dangerous carbon emissions despite empty claims of technological advancement.

If Australia is to contribute to a safer global climate, the selection of clean energy solutions cannot be neutral in assessing projected emissions.

Ferguson knows there are jobs in genuine clean energy, but prefers coal at the bidding of coal interests who have no monopoly over energy from the sun and the wind.

He should also know that the public campaign to stop his climate destruction - a broad-based campaign driven not only by Greens - will only grow stronger.

 The published version can be read in today's letters (scroll to "Minister shores up coal").

See also the ABC's investigation of clean coal, Cloud hangs over Rudd's clean coal vision, for which Ferguson refused to be interviewed.


Comments welcome.

Strange freedoms of information

With all the controversy and plans for action in response to Martin Ferguson's spy-on-the-protesters campaign, I was slightly surprised to see my letter ("Keep us informed") in today's edition of The Sunday Age responding to Farrah Tomazin's excellent report last week, Baillieu's FOI watchdog more like a toothless tiger.

Purely coincidentally, of course, the two issues are strangely linked.

While citizens face great difficulties getting their hands on public interest information to critique government and inform their participation in civil society, our politicians and governments - "influenced" by vested corporate interests - rent private firms and use their own formidable intelligence-gathering machinery to unaccountably gather all kinds of information about citizens against the public interest.

Hence "strange freedoms of information" - we're not free to get the information we need to be good citizens; politicians and government are excessively free in collecting information about us to meet ends too often at odds with the common good.

My letter doesn't appear to be online yet, but here it is as submitted:

I welcome the continuing focus by The Sunday Age on freedom of information under successive Victorian governments (Baillieu's FOI watchdog more like a toothless tiger, Opinion, 1/1).

A functioning society in which government can be held accountable for its actions demands an efficient, independent and transparent gateway to public interest information, not needless barriers to its access. Farrah Tomazin nails the claimed aspirations of the Baillieu government on the former, and paints a damning picture of the latter - a toothless system little improved by the mere appearance of reform.

I would suggest, however, that scrutiny of FOI should not prevent us calling for a significant expansion of the scant information government is obliged to release without citizens needing to request it and then being diverted to a bureaucratic process. To gauge government performance, we shouldn't need to piece together a jigsaw of information variously delayed, fragmented, mediated, obscured or denied.

Instead, government should be called on to develop with civil and public institutions - including unions, not-for-profits and universities - indicators that show how effectively outcomes are being achieved. I mean by this not evidence of bureaucratic outcomes based on economic rationalism, but of the effects policies and programs have on real people, whose voices must also be heard in this process.

At the federal level we have MySchool purporting to represent the performance of schools. At state and federal level might we not call on governments to show their own performance in real time on transparent and collaboratively developed websites that could include, for example, MyHealth, MyJobSecurity, MyCommunity and MyClimate?

We then might better hope for our collective well-being.

Comments welcome.

Teachers among many voices stifled by job insecurity

Recent coverage in The Age (No job security for new teachers; School success depends on a secure workforce) has highlighted the impact of job insecurity in Victoria's public education system, and its implications for the State's young people.

Letters yesterday and today have offered further perspectives. Mine focused on the stifling effect of job insecurity on workers in teaching and other vital community services speaking out in the public interest on serious problems in the critical services they deliver.

Here's the unedited version ("A revealing angle" following "Disillusionment then departure" in The Age):

The recent coverage and letters about declining job security for teachers should give pause to every parent who has noticed the surprising end-of-year departure of one or more teachers they may well have had the pleasure of meeting at parent-teacher interviews earlier in the year. That was the case for me, and your focus on the issue has provided a new lens through which to view this unacceptable phenomenon.

Unfortunately, it is a lens with a panoramic view, given that the very same strategy is employed by the Victorian Government across a range of important community services.

Strangely, we are supposed to be reassured that the 3600 jobs slated to disappear from the public service by the December budget update will be found through cuts not only from voluntary redundancies, but also, tellingly, via the failure to renew existing fixed-term contracts.

As well as the barriers to sustainable lives and a high quality workforce this "flexible" job insecurity threatens, there's another side to precarious employment in areas where the government is very sensitive to media criticism. Insecure workers are fearful, their ability to mobilise is fragmented, and the voicing of concern about serious public interest matters within vital service areas is stifled - think teachers, nurses and child protection workers, to name just three examples.

As the late French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, noted in 1997, job insecurity is everywhere now [1]. However, he saw its origins not only in economic rationalism, but also in political calculation. We should resist both if we wish to see the lives of workers valued, and to benefit from the stronger services they can offer with secure employment in which they are at liberty to speak out on problems in the system.

[1] Pierre Bourdieu, "Job insecurity is everywhere now",
Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New Press 1998

Comments welcome.

"Carbon Party" undermines Gillard on carbon price

John Brumby made a good case for carbon pricing and low-emissions economic opportunities in his Saturday opinion piece in The Age. In it he makes an admission that State and Federal Labor need to act on, not just acknowledge. Standing in the way is the "Carbon Party". Here's my letter, published today (scroll to "Green initiatives are totally cancelled out").

It's good to hear former Victorian Premier John Brumby acknowledge that "Australia won't always be able to rely on what we dig out of the ground". That's true not because of the exhaustion of our large fossil fuel reserves, but because under the inevitable global pricing of carbon, the market for fossil fuels will disappear, and products we produce from emissions-intensive energy sources will become very expensive, and therefore uncompetitive.

Given the greed of large corporations and the short-sightedness of our less reflective investors and shareholders, it is understandable they will seek to capitalise on fossil fuels to the maximum possible extent before this happens. Understandable, but not acceptable.

As they rush to squeeze value out of their dinosaur powerplants and fossil fuel reserves, they push Australia and the world towards or even across the boundary of dangerous climate change. Their misleading campaigns foretelling economic ruin and energy insecurity place dollars above disaster.

While John Brumby argues well for the economic benefits of low-emissions investment and development, the timeframe in which too many Labor governments see the transition would allow the exploitation of fossil fuels and their climate impacts to substantially play out. We are, in fact, expanding our search for oil, coal and gas, and we operate in a deluded two-climate economy - one where we invest in green initiatives, and one where we cancel these out through the headlong pursuit of fossil fuels.

It is this duality within Labor at state and federal levels that is undermining the argument for carbon pricing. With federal Labor MPs like Martin Ferguson, it is almost as if there's an implicit Carbon Party at work in Australia, drawing its members in lesser or greater numbers from Labor and the Coalition respectively. If we're not to lose the race - the human race - that has to stop.

Comments welcome

Climate sensitivity over jobs shows double-standard

Two letter-writers in yesterday's edition of The Age wrote about the "invisibility" of workers affected by a carbon price, despite many projections - including by the ACTU - of projected gains in green jobs in the shift to a low-emissions economy.

Today's edition carries my letter in reply, which questions why those opposing a carbon price are so concerned about selective estimates of job losses claimed as likely to result from action on climate, while they are less so to the business-as-usual job losses in the marketplace in pursuit of "efficiencies" and profit. Here's the unedited version:

It is unrealistic to suggest that the transition to a low-emissions economy will be without disruptions that will certainly impact on individuals and families. That's why a principled approach to implementing an environmentally necessary carbon price must take care of those in our communities who will be most affected - workers in the Latrobe Valley, but also in other areas where employment is currently carbon-intensive.

What Damien Cremean and Ben Dziekan fail to acknowledge is that we are routinely impacted by large-scale job losses through the quest of powerful corporates for cost-cutting and market efficiencies that in general have no climate benefits as their goal. It is perverse that many of those corporations, including the big polluters, now project undoubtedly exaggerated job losses from a carbon tax when their usual approach is to strive to cut their workforce to the bone.

Those who will be affected by job losses through pricing carbon should never be "invisible" as these writers claim, but the right to fair compensation would never be denied by the highly visible thousands who demonstrated for a strong carbon price on Sunday. We also know that if we do not act on climate the impacts will be felt by billions.

 Comments welcome.

Labor survival runs second to sustaining the planet

Today's edition of The Age carries my letter, "Bigger issues than an ailing ALP", responding to Michael Pearce's excellent opinion piece on the future of Australian Labor ("Should the ALP labour on, or is the party over?"), which questions the ultimate survival of the party.

There follows my edit of the longer version I submitted, which makes my point more clearly - that sustainability is a common theme among the issues Pearce considers in his search for a Whitlamesque "crusade" that might unify the ALP. It is also one with a strong basis in fairness and social justice - the traditional values of Labor.

I argue, however, that it is more important to consider sustainability as an imperative for the planet than for its potential contribution as a narrative for the renewal of the Labor Party. Sustainability is also a cause being progressed more urgently by social movements, independents and Greens than by a party that has lost its way.

Michael Pearce has written an eloquent and fascinating big-picture analysis of the Labor Party. We should, however, care less for the survival of the party than for the progress of the growing social movements concerning the vital issues it has so badly failed to capture.

Our federal minority government shows that in an era of converging major political parties, minor parties and independents can help steer the course of government back towards the public good. They may be maligned for doing so, but their measure is not the esteem of so-called "mainstream" politicians, but the degree to which their actions are informed by the values that no longer enliven Labor - and certainly not the Coalition - at state or federal level.

Nor is their measure, as Pearce observes, their position inside or outside the "economic paradigm". Increasingly, that paradigm is being recognised as uneconomic in a far deeper sense than questions of surplus or deficit.

One clue lies in what is common between the issues Pearce considers as potential sparks for renewed "crusades" - the national broadband network, the processing of asylum seekers and the carbon tax.

As Melbourne University's Voice supplement [in the same edition] announces a new research centre to "green" the internet, it is also projected that many more asylum seekers will need to be "processed" by Australia as they flee the impacts of dangerous climate change imposed on them by the spiralling emissions of developed and developing nations.

Yet the effective denial of Labor's weak climate action - with its looming capitulation to the big polluters over the carbon tax - is little better than the Coalition's denial outright. We can sustain civilization fairly and with humanity only if we work to sustain the planet on which we live. Shouldn't that be the business of politics across the trivial divisions of party power?

At present, Labor is masquerading as a climate progressive party to hold on to power by attempting to capture the green vote while placating conservative free-marketeers and the big polluters with weak climate action. Prime minister Gillard instead needs to recognise that a vital object of power is not its own preservation, but sustaining civilization itself.

Comments welcome.

Gillard's sleight-of-hand on extremism

Friday's edition of The Age carried my letter responding to Julia Gillard's opinion piece the day before calling for the rejection of "extremists" following Wednesday's rally in Canberra against the proposed carbon tax.

The rally, attended by federal Coalition leader, Tony Abbott, featured offensive placards attacking the prime minister. Abbott has drawn much deserved criticism for his attendance, including Friday's Age editorial.  However, Julia Gillard used the opportunity to label as extreme not only those who attended the rally, but those opposing them who are urging stronger, science-based action than is currently being proposed by the Australian Government. Here's my letter:

Gillard lumps all in the extreme basket

IN CALLING for the rejection of extremists, Julia Gillard tries to create a single negative category including not only the ilk of Wednesday's ignorant and offensive rally against a carbon tax, but also those who urge stronger science-based action to achieve a safe climate (Comment, 24/3).

A valid critique of Australia's present weak emissions reduction targets does not render the holders of such a view extreme. They base their case on the same science referenced by Professor Garnaut in his climate review for the federal government. Perhaps Ms Gillard would like to explain her government's more than $12 billion in annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, or the recent approval of the largest open-cut coal mine in the southern hemisphere at Wandoan in Queensland?

It is just those kinds of actions that will work against household and industry assistance to choose low-emissions alternatives. This debate shouldn't be about some "fine Australian" calling the Prime Minister a "witch", or worse.

 Comments welcome!

Combet must unite the science and economics of warming

Today's edition of The Age carries my letter ("Unity on warming") responding to an opinion piece by Barry Jones in yesterday's edition of the paper.

Jones made an important point about the need to link the separate economic and scientific approaches to climate change - something that, despite its progress on the climate issue, the federal government is still failing to do, including in a recent speech by climate minister Geg Combet in the week before the latest international climate talks in Cancun.

My letter makes the additional point that the two-degree "guardrail" limit to additional global warming to which Combet refers in the speech is increasingly thought unsafe by the latest research, which also considers that the measures proposed by developed nations are unlikely to achieve it anyway.

First, the published version:

Unity on warming

IT'S hard to agree with Barry Jones that it's probably too late for Australia to lead in setting stronger greenhouse targets (Comment, 7/12). But we still need him on the new federal climate committee.

His most urgent message for government is the perils of the ''two-cultures approach that separates scientists and economists''.

Climate Minister Greg Combet showed remarkable bias to economists and blindness to science in an address on November 30.

First, he claimed our weak 2020 target was comparable with international efforts on a per capita basis and given our dependence on fossil fuels. He missed the point that action needs to be distributed according to a scientifically determined global carbon budget, not by futile promises by recalcitrant nations.

Second, Combet continued to claim that Australia was committed to working towards an agreement to keep average global warming within 2 degrees of pre-industrial levels. Not only will our proposals fail as a contribution to that goal, it is a level of warming increasingly deemed unsafe.

The two cultures must come together: there can be no economic solution to climate change that is not fundamentally calibrated against the science of ''what needs to be done''.

Now, the version submitted:

It's hard to agree with Barry Jones that it's "probably too late" for Australia to lead in setting stronger greenhouse targets, but we still need him on the new federal climate committee.

His most urgent message for government is the perils of the "'two cultures' approach that separates scientists and economists" in framing climate action.

Set to depart for the latest climate talks in Cancun, climate minister Greg Combet showed remarkable bias to the economists and blindness to the science in a 30 November address at the Australian National University.

Firstly, there was his economic sleight of hand in "justifying" Australia's climate stance. Our weak 2020 target was comparable with international efforts on a per capita basis and given our dependence on fossil fuels, he claimed - missing the vital point that action needs to be fairly distributed according to a scientifically determined global carbon budget, not on the lowest common denominator of futile promises by recalcitrant nations.

Secondly, he continued to claim that Australia was committed to working towards an agreement to keep average global warming within two degrees of pre-industrial levels. Not only will our current proposals fail as a contribution to that goal, it is a level of warming increasingly deemed unsafe by the latest findings of the UK's Royal Society.

The two cultures must come together: there can be no economic solution to climate change that is not fundamentally calibrated against the science of "what needs to be done".

 Comments welcome

Brumby better than Feds, but lags behind climate science

Today The Age published my letter responding to yesterday's page one article, "Brumby plan exposes Gillard", and the paper's editorial, "State reclaims leadership role on climate". It seems the Premier has turned greener in the lead-up to the Victorian State election in November, but at the moment he's mainly looking good compared to dismal federal climate proposals by Labor and the Coalition, not in terms of the true benchmark of the climate science. The risk of his new policy is that International Power will be paid far too much to close Hazelwood, if that eventuates.

As usual, here's the letter as published, followed by the submitted version.

JOHN Brumby's 2020 emissions target (The Age, 27/7) looks good relative to the appalling federal proposals but not compared with what the science demands to achieve a safe climate. In the meantime, the danger lies in caving in to International Power on compensation for a staged closure of Hazelwood, Australia's dirtiest coal-fired power station. We should not pay a massive corporation hundreds of millions of dollars not to pollute when there is the capacity identified in Brumby's policy to regulate emissions from Hazelwood to render it unprofitable if a reasonable deal to close is not achieved.

Money spent paying off International Power would not be available to invest in renewable energy, cushion the economically disadvantaged in the transition to a green economy or shield workers affected by the phasing out of fossil fuels. International Power stranded itself through an unwise investment when the threat of climate change was already well known.

Now, as submitted.

John Brumby's 2020 emissions target looks good mainly relative to appalling federal proposals, not when compared to what the science demands to achieve a safe climate. His new climate policy, while an overdue step in the right direction, will ultimately need to match the science to be truly effective and credible - an outcome that cannot be judged by a citizens' assembly convened by his federal Labor colleagues.

In the meantime, the danger lies in caving in to International Power regarding the level of compensation for any staged closure of Hazelwood, Australia's dirtiest coal-fired power station. We should not be paying a massive corporation hundreds of millions of dollars not to pollute when there is the capacity identified in the Brumby policy to strictly regulate emissions from the power station to render it unprofitable if a reasonable deal to close it cannot be achieved.

Money spent paying off International Power would be money not available to invest in renewable energy, cushion the economically disadvantaged in the transition to a green economy, or shield workers affected by the necessary phasing out of fossil fuels. International Power deserves no such treatment. It stranded itself through an unwise investment in doomed emissions-intensive power generation when the threat of climate change was already well known.

Comments welcome!

Roskam plain wrong on Howard loss

The Institute of Public Affairs' John Roskam was pushing his skewed take on national affairs in the opinion pages of The Age yesterday in a piece entitled, 'It wasn't because they weren't "liberal" enough that the Libs lost'. It was part confused rationalisation of the Howard loss, part prescription of where to from here for the Liberal Party.

To me the piece was badly argued, and I responded in a letter to the editor that was somewhat shortened in the published version ('A vote on values'). Here's the full version:

John Roskam is clearly bewildered by the Coalition's deserved loss of the election – he's also confused. While Kevin Rudd did play small-target politics and the charge of me-tooism was not unjustified, his strategy highlighted significant differences between his alternative government and the Howard Coalition. These differences were of policy and value.

If, as Roskam suggests, values can guide the Coalition's future policy formulation, it is also true that the policies it took to the election reflected underlying values that voters emphatically rejected.

WorkChoices was both an abhorrent policy and indicative of a Coalition that valued an exploitative inequality favouring employers over workers. The failure to endorse Kyoto was again symptomatic of valuing a narrow, big-business construction of economic prosperity over the health of an environment shared by us all.

Unfortunately, calls by Roskam and others for the Liberals to be the party that 'defends and extends personal freedoms' are too often code for removing constraints from corporations (so-called 'legal persons') to the detriment of the public interest – the Coalition's WorkChoices and climate change policies were just two, electorally disastrous, examples.

That's why Howard lost, John, and why, in terms of policy and value, Rudd's election brings a promise of fresh, carbon-free air.