Redrawing the political map in Africa

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What is the largest country in Africa, geographically?

African continent-en

If you said Sudan, you would technically be correct, but not perhaps for very much longer. The results from a referendum vote held in Southern Sudan in early January are in, and close to an amazing 99% of participants voted for independence from the North. Clearly, unlike Australians, the Southern Sudanese know how to embrace national and constitutional change! Assuming that the formal declaration of independence for the South is made as planned on July 9th, and Sudan’s territory is formally divided, the often violent tensions that have existed for decades between the Northern and the Southern peoples of Sudan will have a new dynamic, Algeria will have a new claim to fame as Africa’s largest country, and Africa will have its 54th nation-state (as yet, unnamed).

The referendum has come in the midst of what has been a volatile but hopeful period for Northern Africa, what with the still unfolding demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the recent popular uprising in Tunisia. Human Rights Watch reports that recent reciprocal protests in Khartoum and other towns in the North of Sudan resulted in violent reprisals by security forces and the prolonged detention of numerous activists.

The referendum result and its aftermath may also figure as a turning point in the International Criminal Court’s efforts to indict Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes in the Darfur region; a warrant for al-Bashir’s arrest was issued way back in March 2009. Despite campaigning actively against the secession of the South, President al-Bashir has indicated that he will respect the referendum result; a decision that some will cynically attribute to his desire to release some of the international diplomatic pressure being brought to bear on his presidency. The African community and the West are already disinclined to force the issue politically and bring al-Bashir to justice; if al-Bashir facilitates the peaceful secession of a large chunk of his own country, they will be even less inclined to act.

Needless to say, the region looks set for political volatility for the months and years ahead, as the fledgling “South Sudan”, dominated by Christians and tribal groups, seeks to negotiate a lasting peace and oil-sharing agreements with the predominantly Sunni Muslim North. Sudan has been wracked by internal turmoil for decades, and this new development represents both a tremendous opportunity for the Sudanese and a geopolitical threat for the broader region; China’s continuing robust support of the al-Bashir regime and the recent political instability in North Africa are cases in point.

This referendum result may well come to mean a lot more to us than a mere redrawing of the maps.

ELSEWHERE: The Southern Sudan Centre for Census, Statistics and Evaluation has a shattering factsheet [PDF] outlining the profound sociological issues faced by this fledgling state. It’s worth reminding ourselves in this context of the apparent views of the Opposition Leader on the situation in Africa.

Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo.

God save your Queen?

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In honour of Australia Day, the 2011 NSW Australian of the Year, Larissa Behrendt, has had an opinion column full of heart-warming bonhomie about “national values” published in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s quite difficult to disagree with Behrendt’s sentiment and the positive prism through which she views our people and our sense of nation; particularly on a day like today. There are lots of objectively laudable things that Australians tend to do as a people and ideals that we represent through our actions that collectively, we should probably all be a bit prouder of. Our determination to reject the recent flood crises and our willingness to dip into our pockets to help out those affected are contemporary cases in point.

On the other hand, being a bit constructively critical now, our handling of the republic issue over the course of the last decade has been poor. Despite some dubious recent polling and some unhelpful dithering over timing, support (e.g. Newspoll [PDF]) for the constitutionalisation of an Australian Head of State is strong and has remained strong since the 1990’s. In what is beginning (after all these years) to seem like an Australia Day variation on Godwin’s Law, Behrendt issues a call for a move to a republic in her column, but she does so with philosophical kid gloves firmly on:

At the time Australia became a Federation, it was a very different country to the one it is now. It had different values, including its embrace of a White Australia Policy, women were excluded from public life and Aboriginal people from mainstream society. The national conversation about a republic is an opportunity to define ourselves by new values through a process of inclusive nation building.

While there is some fearsome juggling of issues going on at the moment on the front benches of the Gillard Government, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments of 2009 Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry; in this age of near-universal multi-tasking, the government damn well should be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time”. The rationale for delay is flimsy and unedifying. Waiting on the resignation or death of the Queen is a curiously morbid and cowardly way to approach a profound issue concerning our national identity. Must we meekly wait for the “mother country” to cut a few more emotional strings for us before we will deign to tackle the issue ourselves, as a proud and independent people?

As even the Barmy Army have realised, an Australian republic is laughably beyond due. Its time (surely? please??) to exhume the models, dust-off the arguments and restart the process anew, starting with a plebiscite reaffirming the nation’s desire to have its own Head of State.

The alternative, well… doesn’t speak too highly of us really, does it?

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Be kind, rewind, rollback, dissemble….

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In the years immediately after the 1998 Federal Election, at which John Howard’s Coalition successfully won a mandate for introducing the GST, Federal Labor got stuck in a real policy communication rut. Sure, there was quite a bit of popular opposition to the new tax, and there were some very good reasons for Labor to continue to fight against it. Unfortunately for Labor supporters and indeed Kim Beazley’s political aspirations, as the years ticked by and Australia headed towards the 2001 election, the catch-cry of “rollback” started sounding regressive, tired, and somewhat unappealing to the average punter. One started to get the sense that the core premise of Labor’s economic platform was to take the country back in time three years, chronologically if not literally. Not really a good look, unless you’re Marty McFly.

And so it seems to be with Tony Abbott and the NBN. His mumblings are starting to sound like his policy on our telecommunications future is “rollback”; to regress, to move backwards. His latest hysterical suggestion to drop the NBN like a hot potato because of the floods seems patronising and misguided; a cry and a gasp for a headline. What right-minded government, having secured a mandate for an infrastructure project at two separate federal elections, and having already signed numerous contracts binding the nation to agreements to the tune of billions of dollars, would dump the project at the first sign of unexpected external financial issues, or at the suggestion of their political opponents?

One wonders what Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull really thinks about the National Broadband Network, and his leader’s cock-eyed approach to opposing it. What one doesn’t wonder is what Julia Gillard thinks about the Coalition’s “duh….rollBACK!?!!” broadband policy for the years heading toward 2013. Two thumbs up?

Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Towards conservative oligopoly; east and west

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State political journalists in New South Wales are doing it tough just at the moment. Generating vaguely interesting material from a government that most people have written off and an Opposition that assumes (correctly) that it will dawdle into government in March 2011 must be pretty challenging. Even the disturbing developments surrounding Premier Keneally’s proroguing of parliament seem like a footnote to a book that was published and swiftly remaindered a year or two back. Most ordinary folks one talks to apropos of nothing are weary of politics, but when it comes to politics in New South Wales, they are livid. The trail of disappointments, petty infighting, incredulous scandals and broken promises has not just served to damage the Labor brand, but smashed the democracy brand altogether. The credibility of democracy in New South Wales is pretty much sub-zero; democracy as a celebration of mediocrity.

The most recent [PDF] bi-monthly Newspoll from early December painted a frankly disastrous picture for Premier Keneally and NSW Labor; Labor is sitting on just 39% of the two-party preferred vote – and a primary vote of just 24%. The pain that Labor feels is undoubtedly going to be sharpened by the optional preferential voting system that we have in New South Wales, whereby electors are able to exhaust their preferences in the lower house if they wish. One gets the feeling that there are going to be quite a few voters out there who cast a vote for a independent or minor party and neglect to preference either Labor or Barry O’Farrell’s evidently vision-free Opposition. Given the general ill-feeling out there in the electorate, it is difficult not to see this mentality strengthening O’Farrell’s hand and his grip on a massive parliamentary majority.

Interestingly enough, it is not just New South Wales where it seems that the conservatives have a whip hand in state politics. Anna Bligh’s team is struggling in Queensland. Ted Baillieu has of course recently lead the Coalition into power in Victoria, slightly surprisingly. A recent Newspoll [PDF] in Western Australia has Eric Ripper’s Opposition on the ropes, with Labor commanding just 29% of the primary vote and 42% on two-party preferred. Western Australia is arguably a unique case; although we always like to assume that people treat state and federal politics separately, it is difficult not to view politics in the West through the prism of the great mining tax kerfuffle that Federal Labor have yet to find a wholly decisive resolution to. I don’t think there is much doubt that some of the unseemly scuffles that Rudd and Gillard have been trying to fight through during the last couple of years have oozed into the consciousness of people weighing up their vote at a state level.

In New South Wales, of course, we will have a resolution first. In my view, the best argument for a vote or preference for Labor is that democracy in the state stands to be damaged further if the O’Farrell Opposition are gifted a monstrous majority by political circumstances. I’m not sure its in the interest of people in any state for a government to be crushingly controlled by any one party or coalition. The mandate that Barry O’Farrell will have, presuming his team takes power in March 2011, will be a mandate borne out of the chaos of the previous government, and hardly an ounce of his Coalition’s political ingenuity or vision. This hardly augurs well.

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

On philosophies of giving

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It’s that time of year again. A time when we commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ, embark on a consumerist frenzy, get together with family and friends, set out milk and cookies for the patron saint of Coca-Cola, or at least some of the above. It’s probably a good time of year to reflect on giving; how we like to give, how much we give, and whether or not we’re each individually giving enough back to society.

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Inequality: what price a banker?

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As a public policy issue of note in mainstream Australian politics, inequality has exited (stage right!) in recent years. It remains one of those elephants in the room that is seemingly too big, too controversial, and just plain too difficult to tackle head on.

Consider the hectic Rudd and Gillard years since 2007. Amidst a period of uncomfortable vacillation on climate change, the cutthroat machinations surrounding the leadership of Federal Labor, and of course the formation of Julia Gillard’s minority government, I guess we really shouldn’t be that surprised that inequality has not figured prominently on Labor’s agenda-setting radar. It’s obviously not an issue that Abbott’s retrograde Coalition are concerned by, and while its probably fair to conclude that Labor is concerned about it, Team Gillard are still wrestling with much of the same sack of policy vipers that they were when they were called Team Rudd earlier this year.

Perhaps it is a function of the Con-Dem(n) age of austerity here in the UK or the sharp contrast that exists between “the City” and the rest of the economy, but inequality is getting some serious mileage in the British media at the moment. In Britain, inequality even has a public visage; a target. In case you didn’t know, inequality personified is a middle-aged, preferably portly (but jackal-like will suffice) man in a business suit, who works in management or in the financial sector in London. We might well call him “Inequality Man”. He is just the sort of person who not only has a football star salary, but can credit the loosely regulated, now part-nationalised banking sector for the lion’s share of his wealth. It is this “cross-over” that makes “Inequality Man” such a potentially effective pawn in the fight against economic unfairness.

Those unfortunate people who were hit hard by the GFC, or have a friend or a family member who was, may not care too much about inequality, but it’s a sure bet they can see the economic justice inherent in the sorts of salaries that management and financial sector professionals are still pulling. Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at Sheffield University, provided a timely reminder in The Observer a week ago of just how the average salaries of different professions has changed in the UK between 1980 and 2009. The evidence suggests that the pie is getting bigger, with (for example) the average salaries of cleaners rising from £4,503 in 1980 to £31,807 in 2010 (~706% increase), nurses from £5,044 to £29,431 (~583% increase), and teachers from £6,505 to £35,121 (~539% increase). Most people who would consider themselves “of the left” would contend that these salaries should be higher still, but when it comes to inequality, the real problem is the comparative increase in salary for corporate executives. The average salary of a FTSE 100 CEO is £4.9 million, up from £85,000 in 1980, which represents a somewhat extraordinary 5765% increase.

Dorling, also author of Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, asks the obvious question about value for money for society:

Why should an excellent brain surgeon receive “only” 0.5% of a top banker’s income? At the peak of excess a top banking boss can receive £40 million in renumeration. 0.5% of that income is a salary of £200,000 a year, which is just about the possible range of top surgeons’ salaries. You can have 200 excellent brain surgeons, and quite a few more average ones, all for the cost of a single man in a suit running a large bank in Britain.

It remains to be seen whether or not Labour leader Ed Miliband will take the bait on this issue – but its hard to believe that the majority of people would not agree that some form of action is warranted. To what extent can we say the same about the situation in Australia?

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Nick Clegg, progressivism, and New, New Labour

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Nick Clegg, latter-day UK Deputy Prime Minister and the parliamentary leader of the Liberal Democrats, is in the thick of some truly interesting times in British politics. Coalition life has been generally smooth for him and his party since the May 6th election, but it is also proving politically disfiguring, particularly if recent polls are to be believed.. He and the Liberal Democrats are at grave risk of being cast betwixt and between the fashionable, small-l liberalism of their philosophical cloth and the considerably less fashionable fiscal brutality being spearheaded by Chancellor George Osborne. In recent months, whatever it is that the Liberal Democrats believe seems to have been subsumed by this war that their senior Coalition partners are waging on the national debt. Are the billions of dollars of mooted public sector cuts really a function of necessity given the fiscal climate, or are they more just an expression of the Conservative Party’s base political wants after a decade in the political wilderness? It would be naive to suggest that there is not a bit of both in play.

On Tuesday last week, Clegg delivered the Hugo Young lecture at Kings Place in London, at the invitation of The Guardian. In the lecture, Clegg grapples with the question of what it means to be “progressive” in today’s political environment. We can hardly be surprised that he has spent some time considering this topic; this is a question that threatens the very identity of the Liberal Democrats as a party. Can the Liberal Democrats really still be thought of as “progressive”, locked as they are in a kind of Faustian pact with the Tories?

It is an important question for Clegg and indeed the broader party and their supporters, and it will only become more important as the electoral cycle plods inexorably towards 2015. Clegg’s intellectual mechanism for dealing with the question and to defend his left flank is to divide “progressives” into two lumpen camps; “old progressives” and “new progressives”. Labour, of course, are cast off as embodying the “old progressive” cause, and the righteous Liberal Democrats hailed as the future of progressive politics in Britain:

The need to make choices is revealing an important divide between old progressives, who emphasise the power and spending of the central state, and new progressives, who focus on the power and freedom of citizens.

There’s some clear sleight of hand and over-simplification being employed here, particularly as Clegg goes on to define exactly what he perceives the differences between old and new progressives to be:

Old progressives are straightforwardly in favour of more state spending and activity.

…

Old and new progressives also take a different approach to tackling poverty and promoting fairness. Old progressives see a fair society as one in which households with income currently less than 60% of the median were to be, in Labour’s telling verb, “lifted” out of poverty.

…

For old progressives, reducing snapshot income inequality is the ultimate goal. For new progressives, reducing the barriers to mobility is.

…

New progressives want to reshape the tax base fundamentally, towards greater taxation of unearned wealth and pollution, rather than of people.

In essence, “old progressivism” just happens to be all the stereotypical centre-left viewpoints that one tends to associate with social democratic parties in the 1980’s. which Clegg projects onto modern Labour. “New progressivism” (in case you didn’t know), just happens to be all the middling, individual-centric rhetoric that Clegg no doubt perceives his party as uniformly believing in and Labour as uniformly opposing. “Political pluralism”? Why that’s conveniently a “new progressive” concept, exemplified, of course, by Clegg’s conservative coalition. Distilling this even further, we might well conclude that the Deputy Prime Minister is trying to cast himself as a Blairite, and position his party as a kind of “New, New Labour”, in league with the old enemy.

This theme is reflected by Clegg’s willingness in his speech to agree with Ed Miliband and Labour on values, but not on policy mechanisms for implementation. On the one hand, he expresses his agreement with Miliband’s recent observations that the United Kingdom is a “fundamentally unequal society” and that “for some people, the gap between the dreams that seem to be on offer and their ability to realize them is wider than it’s ever been before.” He goes on to scoff at Miliband’s attachment to the top 50p income tax rate, conveying all the while that he thinks that Labour’s heart is in the right place but its head is trapped in the past. It is a bold, but ultimately defensive stretch to the left, and a futile one while Clegg still has his stronger leg planted in David Cameron’s hack and slash Conservative camp.

Just where do these Liberal Democrats stand? If the Deputy Prime Minister is to be believed, they are sticking to the middle of the road come what may, and stand to be slowly crushed between the hulking semi-trailers of the major parties during the next five years. It is not good enough for Clegg to stand with the Tories whilst proffering the occasional olive branch to the left. The voters that matter to Clegg and his party are going to want to see something in the Lib Dems that distinguishes them from the Tories as this term rolls on; gentlemanly argreements with Ed Miliband on a few philosophical debating points aren’t going to cut it.

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Whither a comprehensive green product rating system?

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Being “green” is not always completely straightforward. I was reminded of this recently upon reading the following message, thoughtfully printed on the outside of my polystyrene foam coffee cup:


Carbon footprint fact: an average weight paper hot cup with a cardboard sleeve requires 47% more energy to produce than a comparable foam cup. www.dart.biz

Apart from inspiring guilt pangs about the rather excellent hookTURN reusable coffee silicone cup I really need to start using again, this little message exemplifies a rather common modern dilemma. Sometimes, in that instant of decision, it’s hard to be as informed as we would like to be about the particular production and energy characteristics of everyday products, services and activities. Just been to a public bathroom? Is it more environmentally friendly to dry your hands using an electric dryer or to use a paper towel? Is recycling that heavy duty plastic container really going to be “greener” than consigning it to landfill, or finding a way to re-use it? In the coffee cup example, conventional wisdom implies that “styrofoam” is one of those ugly, ubiquitous, mass-produced products that is difficult to dispose of and bad for the environment. Clearly in some respects, however, it still may be “greener” than other more fashionable materials.

This problem is particularly apparent in the supermarket, where one is confronted with an often bewildering array of options for even the simplest of product purchases. The three strongest purchase decision determinants for the average supermarket shopper are probably price, branding and for food, the nutritional information printed on the packaging – but I am sure a lot of modern shoppers also consider “green” metrics like the amount and type of product packaging, where the product came from, and the amount of energy they think was used to produce the product. The reckoning process can quite obviously end up being maniacally complex. Even assuming the perceived quality of the actual products are the same (which it often isn’t), our poor average shopper is inevitably forced into making a “least worst” decision. Should we buy the cheap tin of tuna from fish farmed in the other side of the world, the expensive one farmed locally and sustainably, or a mid-range option that just happens to be excessively packaged or produced by a company renowned for dubious ecological practices?

Here in the United Kingdom a rather handy “stoplight” nutritional label tends to be printed on food packaging, indicating what proportion of an adult’s recommended intake of calories, fat, salt, sugar and saturates the product has.


Each pudding contains calories (315, 16%), sugar (40g, 44%), fat (6.1g, 9%), saturates (1.7g, 9%), salt (0.3g, 5%).

I don’t see why an analogous “ecological” label system shouldn’t be developed, indicating (for example) the estimated amount of carbon used to produce the product, a packaging rating indicating the type and amount of packaging the product has, and a sustainability rating indicating to what extent sustainable practices were used in production. One could argue that this would create a bureaucratic nightmare for businesses, especially small and boutique producers. On the other hand, it would also place more power in the hands of consumers, and create a natural market incentive for businesses to keep searching for ways to produce their goods and services in an ultimately “greener” way. And wouldn’t that be a good thing?

The main problem of the twentieth century

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that great documenter of the twentieth century’s “other Holocaust” in Soviet Russia, was born the year after the Bolshevik Revolution, in December 1918. Somehow he lived to the ripe old age of ninety, despite enduring the travails that he described with such vim in his three volumes of the The Gulag Archipelago. Having just finished wading through an abridged version, I can’t really say that its easy going, even in this shorter format. Of course, one can hardly blame Solzhenitsyn for that; as he admits in the afterword, at no stage did the whole work ever lie on the same editing desk or in the same place at the same time – it really is a “true mark of our [Russian] persecuted literature”, as he describes it.

Mixed in with all the horrors and the anecdotes, there are little bursts of broader insight that bear some musing. Take this cut, for example (p.385):

This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century; is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one’s conscience to someone else’s keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! These solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend the people against evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of evildoers and against the people!

There’s certainly something to that observation. Which leads us to an obvious question along the same lines: what will the “main problem” of the twenty-first century be?

It’s early days at this stage, but in the developed world at least, it seems to me as though the triumph of egocentrism (“me-ism”) and the implied supremacy of the individual as actor in the global political economy will pose some serious questions of our civilisation. The wealthy individual today is powerful – in several senses more powerful than governments; in the developed world, even the moderately wealthy individual today is relatively comfortable. Information is more freely available to individuals everywhere than ever before, and yet in some respects, it has a greater level of paucity than it did prior to the Internet, when serious newspapers were king. Our greater access to information means we tend to take less time to digest individual pieces of information, meaning there is less reason for information producers to publish information of any significant intellectual depth. This trend has also of course spread to the communication technology space, through technologies like SMS and Twitter. It seems likely that the great philosophical dialogues of the future will be a rapid-fire succession of brainfarts. Erm… LOL?

More broadly, today’s implied equivalences between wealth and achievement and hedonism and success leave something to be desired of human society, I would have thought. Particularly if some peculiarly global problems (e.g. climate change, the ethics of inequality) prove to dominate the political discourse of this century. In embracing the power of “me”, I really hope we don’t all forget that people can do some fairly amazing things when they work together.