Wednesday 24 December 2014

influencing the future

In my previous blog entry "Malcolm Fraser: end the alliance" I suggested that the future needs greater engagement and collaboration of people younger than myself (aged 71) for the political health of the nation.

An eminent person who has had a major role in encouraging public debate and sensible policy development wrote privately, with exclamation marks: "But is our generation... not able to influence how we proceed."

I warmly endorse the idea that we should seek to influence how the nation proceeds... and I note that 'our generation' includes an Argentinian pope who seems influential. Gone are the days when policemen looked young and prime ministers looked young, now the pope is a contemporary. The pope has the advantage of being still in office.

I do not see MF's arguments about Australian strategic policy having much influence. There is a lack of connect. There are problems in that parts of the electorate do not forgive him for past events, but those people are not very much younger people. There is a problem, more importantly, in my view, that younger generations do not react well to lecturing from the ancient. We need to avoid the first disease mentioned by the pope in his team pep-talk on 22 December. The public, not least many of those who thought Abbott would bring deliverance, is being shocked away from the shockers who pronounce they've got the answers. So we have to offer something other than gold-plated opinion.

Noely of Yathink shoved me into resuming this kind of writing–starting this blog–a couple of months ago. Specifically she was concerned, in her rage against the betrayers of the present, that people like me, knowing the history and depth of issues, must not remain silent.

I think the answer is in there, in the ability, if willing, of our generation to speak not only of current opinion but with introspection and self-critically about the past. I note however Harold Nicholson's alleged observation that he had never, in the archives of any foreign ministry on the planet, read a record of conversation in which the person taking the record had not won. It's not easy to be frank about the past.

I suspect that having had my career mucked by illness I have had a longer space in which to become independent minded and feel a freedom and a need to speak publicly than some of my generation, with notable wonderful exceptions. Imagine if many more of those who used to argue policy within the walls of government or political apparatus were to bring minds into the open and demonstrate policy argument. Not to demand control of debate–we do not need a gerontocracy–but to show how to throw light on complex issues.
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What is the prospective political process that we seek to influence.

This week the print edition of Guardian Weekly led its front page with editorial beginning: "In 2014, people power took on the state in a battle for minds and the streets." Despite March in March, people 'in the streets' in Australia are those on the internet. There is a readiness for ideas but haste to conclusions, anxiety for answers and results. Somehow the 24 hour news cycle and the 24 second social media cycle have to mature. And in a wider view, looking at what has happened in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine, I have to say, um but... Taking to the streets is only the beginning of a process. If political stability as used to be a mantra of Australian policy towards Asia, depends, as we seldom realised, not on people staying in power but sensible regime change, we should also understand that taking to the streets–or indeed being a parliamentary opposition–is only really effective if there are good policy-making processes present or achievable.

Leonore Taylor's concluding comment in her roundup of 2014 in The Guardian is important:
... the electorate can barely remember a political leader who tried to level with them to conduct a bigger public conversation, an actual discussion of detailed policies and their consequences. The question for 2015 is, will either of the present major party leaders dare to try? 
Perhaps 'our generation' can contribute in some ways here if we bring our skills and habits of private policy out into the open. Openness has to start and influence is surely only going to be achieved via openness.

We are however, habituated in a distinctly British kind of process, in which the man on horseback commanded and told people what to do. That is still the main model of those who grab for power in our parliaments, also the historical expectation of serfly voters. That's not the future: the country has more diversity culturally and the young are declining to register to vote, see this and this. The anger of the young against older generations relates to power as well as money. For our generation to influence, why and to what should anyone listen? That's a serous question, not a rhetorical conclusion. And for the Asian, or Arab, or African, or other Australians of different background, do we show them anything to trust? Must they assimilate in coming into the tent or do they have new ways to offer?

Basil Liddell-Hart, great British military strategist at the end of his life came to the view that it's not what you say you you want or say you are doing it's what you do that has lasting effect
: that the savagery of the Spanish Civil War could be related to the savagery of the Peninsular War with Napoleon from which the word guerrilla arose; and that the terrorist violence arising in the Middle East in the end of the 1960s could be connected to the violence of Lawrence of Arabia. My view, as expressed in writing to the then Australia Foreign Minister in 2003 (no reply) was that:
...it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension. [Shortly after going to war in Iraq the government had ironically launched an expensive media campaign against domestic violence, that is, against the presumption by anyone of the right to bash up others because they think they are right and have a right.]
Whether my generation can help get us into a better ethical dimension remains to be seen.

Thursday 18 December 2014

Malcolm Fraser: end the alliance

In the January-February 2015 edition of the American journal The National Interest, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser sets out his arguments for ending the Australia-United States alliance. The introduction of the argument is below. It is a vision statement deserving attention, but at the present time it seems unlikely to draw much political support in Australia. More the pity. It is a sensible case.

My own argument has tended to be that within the alliance we can be a better ally by having a more independent-minded voice and arguing sense to the United States. This is an concern I have expressed for a long time, and which I believe is very feasible. But even that kind of mature adjustment within the alliance seems elusive in a situation where the present Australian government is lame-brained and capable at best of marching up and down whinging its own importance and shaking its fists ridiculously at too many other governments, while the alternative government seems dedicated to simpering sniffling anxiety to hide behind this Prime Minister whose capacity and judgement they should vigorously question.

The question with Malcolm Fraser's vision statement is how on earth do we get to consider it?

At the core is the seeming inability of younger generations (I am 71, it really isn't my job) to collaborate to find new Australian national political identity. There is a modicum of support for The Greens, who offer the only existing institutional base around which new perspectives might coalesce, but The Greens have a somewhat self-isolating purist approach which limits their prospects.

A great deal of the problem of the future, of the Australia of younger generations, must rest with Fraser's successor as conservative prime minister, John Howard, who so thoroughly endorsed and encouraged perspectives of self interest and led the way now being followed vigorously by Howard's successor on the conservative side, Abbott, in destruction of the infrastructure of community.

I think it's here, back in here, inside national affairs, that the change process must begin and have wider effect. And it seems to me that change has to come relatively from the conservative side of politics. Certainly Labor on the notional left has more progressive policies which benefit community, but they are shy of articulating strategy, stuck in the madness of hoping to slip into government on the basis of Abbott's hopelessness, perhaps also hamstrung because the union movement at the party's core serves not only those on modest incomes, but also those whose incomes have become massive. Things may change as more and more jobs are shed in the construction and manufacturing industries in the next several years. There will not however then arise a mass of working class passion, but a rage among displaced affluent middle class. There is a timidity in the electorate at large, a timidity born of obsession with consumption, high mortgages and working and private lifestyles that gives people a very narrow focus on self-interest and notions of economic management. (Along with a simplicity of American(Hollywood)-oriented cultural values.) Even young people seem unthinkingly to say "the Liberals are better at economic management" when there is so much evidence that they are making a muck of it.

What is needed is a coalition of younger people, if they exist, of the kind of persuasion of the old 'wet' side of the Liberal Party, the party of Baume and Chaney and McPhee and the like, to come out of hiding and start spanking the madness of the domestic policies of the present government. So long as the arguments of Fraser and Burnside and the like speak mainly to international and refugee issues, the battle is not even engaged; rather, they are placed on the outer. The main battle is over economics and the place of community. Whether we serve the economy or the economy serves community.

The next debate must also embrace other cultures in Australia, which must be encouraged to enter the mainstream. Another book there...I note that Moslem men who bring their families to my seaside town on summer holidays articulate passionate and reasoned hostility towards the United States and the Australian alliance in private conversation. These arguments need to get to them too, so they see that there are sensible thinkers in the Anglo community.

....So I don't think that the laudable arguments below will not get traction until the debate front goes domestic too.
This is the opening of Malcolm Fraser's essay in the January-February 2015 edition of The National Interest:
IT IS time for Australia to end its strategic dependence on the United States. The relationship with America, which has long been regarded as beneficial, has now become dangerous to Australia’s future. We have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war. Even if America were the most perfect and benign power, this posture would still be incompatible with the integrity of Australia as a sovereign nation. It entails not simply deference but submission to Washington, an intolerable state of affairs for a country whose power and prosperity are increasing and whose national interests dictate that it enjoy amicable, not hostile, relations with its neighbors, including China.
As painful as a reassessment of relations may be for intellectual and policy elites, there are four principal reasons why one is long overdue. First, despite much blather about a supposed unanimity of national purpose, the truth is that the United States and Australia have substantially different values systems. The idea of American exceptionalism is contrary to Australia’s sense of egalitarianism. Second, we have seen the United States act in an arbitrary, imprudent and capricious fashion. It has made a number of ill-advised and ill-informed decisions concerning Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Third, at the moment, because of U.S. military installations in Australia, if America goes to war in the Pacific, it will take us to war as well—without an independent decision by Australia. Finally, under current circumstances, in any major contest in the Pacific, our relationship with America would make us a strategic target for America’s enemies. It is not in Australia’s interest to be in that position.

meanwhile in Syria... and Sydney



This is a valuable account of life among jihadis by Theo Padnos, American would-be journalist and student of Arabic and Islam, for 20 months a prisoner of the Al Nusra front, fighting ISIS on the ground. The realities of a 'normal' brutality, of expectation of martyrdom among young men who will preach or bully and then ask about meeting single European women.

While there is evidently no oeganisational link between this world and the tragic figure who took hostages in a Sydney cafe this week (variously described straightforwardly here, by New Matilda's Chris Graham here and incisively critically by Russell Brand here), his mind would seem cut from the same cloth as the jihadis described by Padnos.

We do well to step away from our conventional perspectives if we are to understand what this whole jihadi business is. Noting that too much of our perspectives in the west are from the remoteness of satellites, drones, fighter aircraft and wishful thinking and amateur ideological assertions of political leaders seeking to simplify and prance... or just fall into line. I commend Russell Brand for his lively interpretation of the way the issues are perverted and made more difficult by much government and media action and interpretation.


(Also see Russell Brand in this video on poverty and the virtue of spending money currently used for bombing the Middle East on building better societies)

Clint Watts, writing in Eurasia Review, offers interpretation of Padnos's story, in particular that given the fluidity of loyalty among jihadis, the bombing of one or the training of one to fight another has only destructive effects, especially in the absence of any plan of dealing with the Assad regime in Damascus. We stand, by current western policies, to inherit only wider and more dangerous jihadism, more savvy in attacking the west, better armed and skilled.

Again in Eurasia Review, this article by Nicola Nasser, an Arab journalist on the Palestine West Bank, describes or asserts Israeli support and sanctuary for Al Nusra and collaboration in attacks on the Syrian government. Israel's interest being in weakening and diverting the strength of its Syrian enemy away from Israel. I am reminded that several years ago in Sydney a Lebanese Moslem man asserted to me that Israel now pursued a policy of encouraging war between Moslems. There is more news of Israeli air strikes accessible with this search,... and about Israel and al Nusra here. See Haaretz for an Israeli perspective.

Friday 12 December 2014

The complex issues associated with Ukraine's nuclear energy industry and export of urainium from Australia to Ukraine

The Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said he wants to supply uranium to the Ukraine for its power industry. He said this in the same moment as expressing a desire to visit Ukraine to see established a memorial to the passengers of the downed Malaysian Airlines flight in eastern Ukraine. My initial reaction was towards the continuing absurdity of this prime minister in his obsession with issues he somehow thinks make him a hero, but which in reality make him look unsuitable for office to many Australians. Many people, I am sure, share my visceral reaction towards the notion of exporting uranium to the Ukraine. It seems desirable, however, to do some serious analysis.

This perhaps notionally simple question brings together a complex of difficult issues.

Here are key background factors:

Ukraine was for a very long time a republic within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR] which disintegrated in 1991. At that time there were some four and a half thousand Soviet missiles aimed at the United States located in the Ukraine. Almost two thousand of these were transferred to the USSR in 1991-2, and the remainder became the subject initially of trilateral agreement between the US, Russia and Ukraine in January 1994 and then the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994 between those three plus the adherance of other nuclear weapon states notably United Kingdom. This declaration gave assurances of the territorial integrity of Ukraine, in a context of the remaining nuclear weapons on Ukraine's territory being transferred to Russia and being dismantled, and Ukraine acceding to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state (NNWS). It is a political statement, not a treaty. In addition to the Memorandum there was annexed to it a declaration: Annex II - see the text here. I encourage you to read that. Russia argues that the continuing recruitment of former Soviet allies into NATO and placement of new defence systems in such countries was contrary to the spirit of the declaration. Please also read former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's appeal for sanity on this subject

The NPT recognised as nuclear weapon states those states which at the time the treaty was signed already possessed nuclear weapons: the USA, USSR, UK, France and the People's Republic of China. These countries undertook not to transfer control or capacity to develop nuclear weapons technology to NNWS. A new nuclear safeguards regime was established under the treaty to prevent diversion of nuclear materials to non-peaceful purposes. There was then, in the text of the NPT a great emphasis on the right of NNWS to have access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. To enable which NNWS had to enter into safeguards arrangements of a new kind as set out in the IAEA's InfCirc 153.

PARENTHESIS: When I returned to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs from an overseas posting  in January 1970 I found a great deal of agitation among my colleagues about whether Australia, having signed the NPT, would ratify. The treaty was to come into force (see Article IX in text at link above) when forty countries had ratified it. Signature is a step governments take when they put their name on a new treaty. Ratification of treaties takes place under constitutional processes of different countries. This is a debated issue in Australia (see this paper) but in 1970 all it required was the will of the executive government to do the job, no consultation with the parliament. There were substantial lobbies in Australia for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The decision to ratify was taken at the last moment in March 1970. Someone else can research how the US brought pressure on Australia then, or what security guarantees Australia sought. 
Had we not signed before ratification we could have acceded later, but that would have a smell of recalcitrance and leave the farm gate open for the raging advocates of Australian possession of nuclear weapons. A space had been cleared in the commonwealth owned Jervis Bay Territory for a Canadian designed CANDU reactor, which was easier to operate as it did not require enrichment of uranium (a difficult and expensive process of increasing the proportion of the isotope U235 over the predominant U238), reaction being developed by using heavy water rather than light water, meaning a need to separate the rare deuterium, H20 with an extra neutron on, easier than the separation of the heavy and toxic uranium isotopes. The nuclear advocates within and around the government would also have known that this reactor could provide a sneaky route to acquisition of weapons usable plutonium, something that only entered political consciousness in the USA in the mid-1970s and especially with the arrival of the Carter Administration and the appointment of Joe Nye as Deputy Undersecretary of State for Nuclear Non-Proliferation. When urgent steps were taken to stop Pakistan, Iran and South Korea getting CANDU reactors and plutonium separation facilities.
Few people using the car park at the end of the Jervis Bay Road
know that it was the site cleared for a nuclear power station
END PARENTHETICAL BIT... (another book)

Ukraine (in parallel with Kazakhstan, also former soviet republic) was only the second country to abandon nuclear weapons, after South Africa.

Australia's uranium export policies have, since the 1970s, with their slow evolution, maintained focus on nuclear safeguards rather than nuclear safety. This reflecting our obligations under the NPT. (Another book needed to discuss safety, but my general position is that while the technology is not bad, the problem is the absence of any evidence that any human society can be durable enough to handle operation and waste management issues for as long as needed.)

In terms of the NPT and the general drift of Australian uranium export policy, Ukraine gets a tick.

But the situation is much more complicated than that and it would, to use technical terms, be bone-headed crazy to approve uranium export on just that basis.

As another legacy from the USSR, Ukraine produces half its power needs from nuclear power stations. Ukraine consumes twice as much energy as Germany per capita. The other half of Ukraine's energy needs come from oil and gas supplied by Russia. Pipelines for supply of Russian oil and gas to western Europe run through Ukraine.

Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant whose accident in 1986 was the worst ever nuclear power station disaster, is in Ukraine. Other nuclear power stations in Ukraine are of similar age and similar design quality and maintainability as Chernobyl #4.

The political history of Ukraine since the collapse of the USSR has been to say the least complex. In the course of this, Russia has a number of times exerted pressure on Ukraine through oil supply and cut-off, usually in circumstances where Ukraine is not paying its bills.

The current agreement on continued oil and gas supplies from Russia to Ukraine also tangles with agreement to continue Russian supplies to western Europe. This is the soft underbelly to all the talk of sanctions against Russia. There may be a point when substitution may be possible away from Russian supply of western Europe, indeed, the United States has recently become an oil exporter and would enjoy that. As noted in an earlier blog entry however, the driving down of the international oil price recently by Saudi Arabia and the United States not only weakens Russia and its efforts in Ukraine and Syria, it also has grave consequences for the United States and world economy: world price now around $70 a barrel, break even for junk bond financed shale oil producers in the US around $90.

Supplying uranium to Ukraine would solve no issues, the idea is adequately described in The Australian's headline "Uranium talks thumb nose at Vladimir Putin" ... perhaps a linguistic step upwards from shirtfronting, but a very very bad approach to international relations. Yes, it's elementally of the same cloth as Abbott's conflict-promoting approach the national politics, but it's very dangerous and frivolous internationally.

It would seem likely that any sale of uranium to Ukraine would mean delivery to a United States entity most likely Westinghouse, who have been selling fuel rods to Ukraine. So the income stream from any sale of Australian uranium to Ukraine would mainly be to the enricher and fuel rod fabricators in the United States. Note this in reading any advocacy for this sale.

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So, to cut this short (it really needs a book or two, submit any questions in comment section) how should we score Ukraine as a customer for uranium?

  1. NPT and nuclear safeguards compliance — 10/10
  2. Nuclear industry safety history — 1/10
  3. Current state of nuclear plant — 1/10
  4. Stability of regime, assurance of viable state control, war risks — 1/10
  5. Contribution to general arms control and conflict resolution — 0/10
  6. Solution of an energy problem — 2/10
  7. Prospect of being paid — 4/10
  8. Australian national interest — 0/10











Thursday 11 December 2014

Whedon on Romney, so relevant to the present Australian Government

I had forgotten about this wonderful commercial by Buffy (and more) creator Jos Whedon for Zomney for President. It does seem apposite for our present moment in which our Prime Minister is reinventing himself, offering coal and uranium to the Ukraine, planning to visit and place a memorial in the war zone of eastern Ukraine — and surely then should make a memorial visit to Chernobyl, though he might have a lurking suspicion that his security czar Morrison might move on from banning visits from any country known to have experienced Ebola to banning any person known to have become brighter or perhaps luminescent as a result of visiting Chernobyl.

Anyway, apply this locally:


Thursday 4 December 2014

the world is complex: US, Russia, Ukraine, oil, global economy

Salon has published an article asserting that the crisis in Ukraine and the civil war are substantially the fault of the United States. Skip through the argy bargy slanging off and consider the merits of the arguments, including in the articles to which links are provided. Such as this:


One of the side issues in this has to be the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight flying above the civil war zone. On a path which the Ukraine government left open. You can limit the discussion to who fired the shot, who owned and supplied the weapon, who controlled the use of the weapon... but if you take the steps further and think about the wider issues of the origins and provocation of cicil war, the puff-chested macho displays towards the Russians become things of dress-up belligerency, the boy with the trumpet following the flag, the antithesis of problem solving.

The general stridency of anti-Russian policy may undo us all...

Four weeks ago, The Guardian argued that the United States and Saudi Arabia were driving the price of oil down as a strategic weapon against Russia.

A month later the situation is much more dangerous for the world economy, as oil prices fall further... More in this here. If indeed there was such an American effort to use oil as a weapon against Russia, it would seem very likely that the weapon will shoot the Americans in the foot, given the risky loan basis of much new oil venturing in the USA, unsustainable at present prices. A dual shock possible: a shock failure of the US to maintain its recent self-sufficiency in oil production and a new shock to the international economy more serious than the last one. Or a triple shock if and as and when oil prices go north again in economically difficult times... Consider also what other damaged countries may do. Russia will depend more on its energy exports to China.

Hello, China. How many countries can you save this month? They expect it of you, you know, but only if you stay meek. An Indian perspective here.

I observed in a news commentary in 1989, actually thoughts offered privately by a Chinese official at the time, that the Chinese leadership did not have the maturity and sensitivity to handle the crisis arising then in Tiananmen Square. How easy it is to hammer the Chinese Government for mishandling that.

By comparison, capacity to handle a coming economic crisis is ... where? This wasn't even on the agenda at the G20 meeting last month and there seems little willingness in political quarters to focus on the situation now. Alarm at the prospects for the Australian economy is constrained by very insular thinking: the general narrowness of the government's perspective, with just a small concession now that contractionary policy is unwise (as it has been throughout the time they imposed it and told everyone to be afraid) and with the financial markets in the hands of people who have no knowledge of history and precious little understanding of strategic matters beyond short-term money-shoving.

power and stubbornness, power and willingness, 'power' and blindness

Four months into the internationally declared Ebola emergency, in December 2014, who leads the world in direct medical support to fight the epidemic?

The answer to this question as discussed in The Guardian today is illuminating, as the country concerned is truly in a situation exemplifying the futility of long term superpower grudges. And illustrates how difficult it is to turn around big battleships, even when they don't work, or should be going somewhere else.



While The Guardian's discussion focuses on that country and the United States, we should note that the United States has committed massively to the Ebola challenge on the ground. Which brings us to consider just how limited the Australian 'contribution' is. And to note again another new moment in United States criticism of the Australian Government... also to note that the also-conservative Labor Party feels safe to use the US view to criticise the poverty of the government's response.

Senator-Dr Richard di Natale, in Liberia at his own expense and informed by the Australian Government that he will have no consular assistance if in trouble, reports also that the decision of the government to close the door to anyone from an Ebola-affected country has done us considerable political damage and impaired the Ebola response more widely


Life follows consistent patterns at many levels. I argued years ago that the willingness of the government to go and act with violence in another country in a sense of righteousness fed down to increase community and domestic violence. In my garden blog this week I talked about the permaculture concept of edge and realised what I was writing was very relevant to the incessant clang of this government shutting its mind and doors to people and ideas. Tragically it strengthens an old an negative door-closing quality of Australian community fearful thinking... to break which requires political leadership of a positive kind.

Edge is productive, overlaps are productive, edge is the basis of creativity, not only for plant life but also for human life in community. No edge, no connection – no multiculturalism – no new life, limited creativity and imagination. Perhaps I should also write about this in my strategic directions blog, my country seems increasingly anxious about shoulders that come to rub it in this complex world. Seize the day, not shut the door... Which leads back to Michael [Pollan]'s comment about peoples' concerns about his lawn. The dominant meme being that gardening is about plonking in and then maintaining the barricades with weapons various, to keep permanent all those arrangements you stubbornly want unchanged.
But actually, can't.