Tuesday 18 November 2014

The rage against Chinese ownership of agricultural land in Australia

When the rednecked populist radio jock Alan Jones attacked the Prime Minister on the subject of the free trade agreement with China, The Guardian reported this exchange:
The conservative 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones told Abbott he did not have a mandate for the new trade deal and repeatedly raised concerns over the sale of Australian dairy farms to Chinese entities. A Tasmanian investor, Troy Harper, said last month Chinese interests would be among investors in 50 dairy farms in Victoria as part of a deal reported to be worth $400m. 
After listing other prospective sales involvingChina, Jones told Abbott: “By this time next week who’s going to own little Tasmania? The public are very, very angry about this prime minister, I can tell you.” 
Abbott said he understood people were “always anxious at what’s often referred to as selling off the farm” but “no one can buy land unless the person who currently owns the land wants to sell”. 
“Presumably you only want to sell to an overseas buyer because the overseas buyer is offering you a better price than any Australian. That’s the first point,” Abbott said. 
Jones replied: “Of course … but can Tony Abbott go and buy a farm in China? The answer’s no, prime minister … nor can he buy a coal mine, nor can he buy a steel mill.” 
Abbott said: “Well, Alan, I’m no expert on land ownership arrangements in China but China is still run by the Communist party. I’m not sure that anyone is that able to own land in China on an individual basis.”
With seeming rattled aplomb Abbott had allowed the discussion to take him into territory where he could as usual 'make it up' with the assurance of the dunderhead who just doesn't know but does not fear to say. One of his ministers once famously used Wikipedia to refute official advice on climate change, it's a shame Abbott had not read Wikipedia on property ownership in China.

But it's a greater shame he didn't bother to clarify the situation of actual foreign ownership of agriculture in Australia, to do something to push back against the racist hysteria arising with Chinese interest in Australian agriculture.

The ABC's Rural Department has this excellent article on the subject of foreign ownership of agriculture.

In which, regarding the selling off of 'little Tasmania' we find such information as:

Foreign investment double-standard in Tasmanian dairying
Tasmania's dairy industry is heavily reliant on foreign investment. Its oldest dairy processor, Van Diemen's Land Company (VDL), has been in foreign hands for close to 200 years and the Tamar Valley Dairy recently sold to New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra.Cows on the way for milkingPHOTO: A line of cows, on their way for milking (Supplied)While international ownership is nothing new, the story of these two processors highlights the mixed messages sent to some global businesses.
A recent Van Diemen's Land Company (VDL) tender for a multi-million dollar equity investment, sparked community and media concern about a possible Chinese takeover. At least one Chinese company dropped out of the process as a result of the negative press.
Yet last month Tamar Valley Dairy, a wholly-Australian owned dairy processor, was sold to a New Zealand agribusiness giant, without a murmur about foreign takeovers.
It's bigotry, ignorance, racism... and the Prime Minister has no way from his own cubby house at the end of that street to come out and help clarify the situation. He has risen to office on the tide of his fomented madnesses of populist hysteria. Who knows where he will go now to get it back behind him..

 Before you wander off to weep a bit, consider this:
...just under 99 per cent of Australian farm businesses are fully Australian owned and just under 90 per cent of farmland is fully Australian owned. 
But of course that's the work of public servants and this government knows what it thinks of public servants as it knows what it thinks of the ABC, with its evil propensity to deliver facts to refute government wisdom.

The federal parliament's own research organisation prepared this detailed study early in 2014. So the facts are knowable in the parliament. Here is  table from that paper:



That staid old farmers' paper The Land tried to get a few facts out in this article.

The author of this comment has tongue in cheek, click on name for other irreverent fun:
Dickytiger
20/06/2014 9:45:57 AM
You can't fool us with statistics. We know there are foreigners under the bed. They are right beside the reds. 


Sunday 16 November 2014

an extraordinary reprimand of Australia by the United States

Let the record state: never has a United States president reprimanded Australia on Australian soil and never has an American president so bluntly and firmly as a positive ally told Australia it is strategically in the wrong.***

We are a country in which the major parties fervently support the alliance with the United States, for reasons positive, obtuse, opportunist, cringely, take your pick, pick your moment.

The overturning of the mean spirited and stupid policy perspectives of the Abbott government on several issues at the G20, the pigheaded and fantastically misguided imagination that they could change the world by being their stubborn ideological selves, as hosts who insist that guests eat old pig and drink plonk, has come a cropper.

Read and admire:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/15/g20-obama-puts-climate-change-in-spotlight-as-australian-agenda-sidelined

Of course, of course, Abbott and his team will say this is just a passing moment in American president, this president will be washed away by the tea party in the Congress now and the presidential elections in two years time. But this is to fail to understand history and become entangled with US politics as not before. I wrote in an earlier entry that a very important thing for any new government is to understand the feasible and know how to get it. They have not learned from the bitter lessons of their budget, and indeed Abbott, playing anti-statesman, has whined to the G20 about his failures. And will be scoffed here and abroad. If I were there I would leave early like Putin may or may not.

*** Nixon and Kissinger despised the Whitlam Government but did not make it a centre point of any speech. Nor did they take the opportunity to address a receptive Australian audience in Australia to lay it all out and get swooning support for things the Australian government hates.

Monday 10 November 2014

Casting ourselves like the old South Africa, against the world

Climate policy is where our current leaders demonstrate the determined qualities shown by the leaders of old apartheid South Africa. See in this report how we resist pressure to be constructive about the future.

There is an entrenched cultural tendency in Australia to sneer at thoughtfulness, which combines with a tendency to make up arguments to suit prejudice. As is the case with the Prime Minister's business adviser as he argues among other things about climate change.

It's depressing then also that the Labor party in opposition is too timid, too burned, to carry the case that the government is wrong.

This week APEC in Beijing and then the hosting by Australia of the G20 in Brisbane. Another international burden thrust upon this conservative government by the previous Labor government along with membership of the Security Council which the conservatives so disparaged in opposition but which has with war and plane crashes given them so much space in which to march up and down and whip chauvinist sentiment in this centenary of the beginning of the First World War, without focus on the fact that the world fell into WWI through pigheaded focus on hard, old, military mindedness.

When you are at a turning point in history only the twisted remain steadfast against change. 

Thursday 6 November 2014

Cate Blanchette at the Whitlam memorial service

A wonderful intelligent speech by Cate Blanchette reflecting on the Whitlam initiatives, as they made possible her life path at various stages, as they changed the nature of Australia, as the placed women where they should have been, in equality and the placing of the arts at the centre of national life.

Where Pearson's speech contains an important catalogue of the rolling back of legislation and attitude discriminatory to indigenous people, Blanchette weaves the history of removal of discrimination against women.

Transcript at SMH

ABC News video, as uploaded to YouTube.


Excerpts:

"The loss I felt came down to something very deep and very simple. I am the beneficiary of free, tertiary education. When I went to university I could explore different courses and engage with the student union in extracurricular activity. It was through that that I discovered acting.I am the product of an Australia that wanted, and was encouraged, to explore its voice culturally.I am the beneficiary of good, free healthcare, and that meant the little I earned after tax and rent could go towards seeing shows, bands, and living inside my generation's expression. I am a product of the Australia Council.I am the beneficiary of a foreign policy that put us on the world stage and on the front foot in our region. I am the product of an Australia that engages with the globe and engages honestly with its history and its indigenous peoples.I am a small part of Australia's coming of age, and so many of those initiatives were enacted when I was three... 


... Women were probably the main beneficiaries of free tertiary education. So here today I may stand as an exemplar, but if you combine the modernising and enabling capacity afforded women by his legislation you can begin to see that the nation was truly changed by him through the arts and through gender, thereby leading us towards an inclusive, compassionate maturity. So much of this achievement is directly attributable to policy initiatives Gough Whitlam began with a series of reforms to extend the degree and quality of social opportunities to women in Australia."



Noel Pearson at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam


Noel Pearson delivered an extraordinary speech-of-a-generation or more at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam yesterday. It began from his own experience of the massive changes to the situation and opportunities of Aboriginal and Islander people made possible by the Whitlam program. It went on to deal more broadly with issues for Australia, the transformation of Australia. Speaking before positive people and also in front of those who would corrupt it all again.

The transcript is here. The ABC News video-audio as uploaded to YouTube is embedded below.



Here are some excerpts:

"Of course recalling the Whitlam Government's legacy has been, for the past four decades since the dismissal, a fraught and partisan business.Assessments of those three highly charged years and their aftermath divide between the nostalgia and fierce pride of the faithful, and the equally vociferous opinion that the Whitlam years represented the nadir of national government in Australia. 
Let me venture a perspective.
The Whitlam government is the textbook case of reform trumping management."
 ...
"...In less than three years an astonishing reform agenda leapt off the policy platform and into legislation and the machinery and programs of government.The country would change forever. The modern cosmopolitan Australia finally emerged like a technicolour butterfly from its long dormant chrysalis.And 38 years later we are like John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin's Jewish insurgents ranting against the despotic rule of Rome, defiantly demanding "and what did the Romans ever do for us anyway?"Apart from Medibank and the Trade Practices Act, cutting tariff protections and no-fault divorce in the Family Law Act, the Australia Council, the Federal Court, the Order of Australia, federal legal aid, the Racial Discrimination Act, needs-based schools funding, the recognition of China, the abolition of conscription, the law reform commission, student financial assistance, the Heritage Commission, non-discriminatory immigration rules, community health clinics, Aboriginal land rights, paid maternity leave for public servants, lowering the minimum voting age to 18 years and fair electoral boundaries and Senate representation for the territories. Apart from all of this, what did this Roman ever do for us?"
...
 "I don't know why someone with this old man's upper middle class background could carry such a burning conviction that the barriers of class and race of the Australia of his upbringing and maturation should be torn down and replaced with the unapologetic principle of equality. I can scarcely point to any white Australian political leader of his vintage and of generations following of whom it could be said without a shadow of doubt, he harboured not a bone of racial, ethnic or gender prejudice in his body. This was more than urbane liberalism disguising human equivocation and private failings; it was a modernity that was so before its time as to be utterly anachronistic. For people like me who had no chance if left to the means of our families we could not be more indebted to this old man's foresight and moral vision for universal opportunity. Only those born bereft truly know the power of opportunity. Only those accustomed to its consolations can deprecate a public life dedicated to its furtherance and renewal. 
"This old man never wanted opportunity himself but he possessed the keenest conviction in its importance.For it behoves the good society through its government to ensure everyone has chance and opportunity.This is where the policy convictions of Prime Minister Whitlam were so germane to the uplift of many millions of Australians."
Thank you Mr Pearson.


Tuesday 4 November 2014

Understanding the Moslem world

The Brookings Brief email yesterday contained a link to an article providing valuable insight into Moslem perceptions of religion and state, and the appeal of Islamic State, pointing out how much western policy is ill founded, or founded on misperceptions. The article is here. It points to the necessity of understanding the complex, not to any simple solutions.

ISIS draws on, and draws strength from, ideas that have broad resonance among Muslim-majority populations. They may not agree with ISIS’s interpretation of the caliphate, but the notion of a caliphate—the historical political entity governed by Islamic law and tradition—is a powerful one, even among more secular-minded Muslims. The caliphate, something that hasn’t existed since 1924, is a reminder of how one of the world’s great civilizations endured one of the more precipitous declines in human history. The gap between what Muslims once were and where they now find themselves is at the center of the anger and humiliation that drive political violence in the Middle East. But there is also a sense of loss and longing for an organic legal and political order that succeeded for centuries before its slow but decisive dismantling. Ever since, Muslims, and particularly Arab Muslims, have been struggling to define the contours of an appropriate post-caliphate political model.


originally posted in The Atlantic.

See also this earlier thoughtful piece in the Boston Globe.