Blind Carbon Copy

Are renewables challenging the electricity market?

2012-01-02T14:02:00.001+11:00

Continuing the two-part series cross-posted from yes2renewables.org

As discussed in the previous post about the merit order effect, renewables compete well on the spot market because they have low marginal cost, and (at least in the case of wind and solar photovoltaic) don’t have storage facility to hold off until the most opportune time to bid in.

The result of this effect is to displace the most expensive bidders on the spot market: generally, the gas peaker plants. Mostly this is being done by wind farms, as in the South Australian example, although the effect of the growing number of rooftop solar panels could be having a similar effect too.

This article will examine some of the implications of these effects for the electricity market and raise some questions that ought to be considered in advocating the transition to renewable energy.

The cost of wind farms

This is not the same as saying that wind farms are cheap: they still have an upfront cost to build them. So, having generated a certain amount of electricity, and possibly sold it at quite a low spot price, they then sell the Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) they have earned and in this way recoup costs.

This subsidy, operating under the Renewable Energy Target (RET), is currently coming under criticism, such as in the Energy White Paper just released (which I commented on here). If the RET were removed, it would not mean existing wind farm operators would bid higher in the spot market: they still would bid low in order to ensure they sell electricity when the wind blows.

But it would make their overall operation less profitable, and in a world of private electricity generators, that would make it very hard for wind developers to find finance to build new wind farms.
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The Merit Order Effect: renewable energy and electricity markets

2012-01-02T13:48:00.003+11:00

Recently the role of the “merit order effect” in the National Electricity Market (NEM) has been discussed in a number of articles about renewable energy.

Since most people know little about the electricity market, this article will explain how this effect works to the benefit of renewable energy in the current electricity market system.

It will be followed by an article discussing whether the electricity market as it currently exists is really working, and outline some of the strains that are being placed on it by the entrance of renewables. These articles first appeared at yes2renewables.org

Background: electricity privatisation

Author Sharon Beder, in her 2003 book Power Play, related the increased pollution resulting from the greater use of Victoria’s brown coal power stations, following privatisation in the 1990s and the setting up of the NEM.
Beder wrote:

“The amount of electricity generated by brown coal plants, the most polluting in terms of greenhouse gases and other emissions, has increased from about 23 per cent to 31 per cent of sources since 1992. The increasing dependence on brown coal is because deregulation causes companies to seek the cheapest source of electricity with no consideration for environmental impacts. Brown coal is cheap, and dirty, old brown coal plants that have paid off their loans can produce electricity at low marginal costs.

“A report commissioned by electricity distributor Origin Energy found that this meant that Victorian brown coal plants had, to a certain extent, displaced the cleaner NSW black coal plants and SA gas plants in electricity generation. Even outside Victoria baseload electricity tends to be generated by old coal plants rather than the newer gas-fired plants that emit less carbon dioxide. The latter tend to be used for peak loads because marginal costs are higher.”

“Low marginal costs” means that they don’t have large up-front costs when they generate electricity. Brown coal is very cheap to obtain, it does not (yet) trade on the international market.

But now, renewables are entering into the market and have virtually zero marginal cost, so they can bid into the market pretty well as low as they like. By entering into the spot market (“price pool”) at the low end, they displace generators who bid in at high prices, typically gas peaking plants.
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Energy white paper “climate and technology illiterate”

2011-12-14T18:23:00.001+11:00

Friends of the Earth Australia press release, 13/12/2011

Friends of the Earth renewable energy campaigner Ben Courtice says the draft Energy White Paper released today by the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism “suffers from a bad case of climate and technology illiteracy”.

“Its commitment to climate action makes frequent reference to the need to do something without reference to any targets or science other than the Australian government’s existing carbon price policy. An honest analysis of current climate science would have us on a crash course to 100% renewable energy”.

Instead, the paper promotes gas. It even abandons any notion of emissions standards for new coal and gas plants.

Courtice said, “This reliance solely on the carbon price gives us decades of gas dependency – and will fail to deliver on emissions reductions.

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Renewables; the potential and the backlash (video)

2011-11-16T09:04:00.001+11:00

This is the video of the speech I gave at the Climate Change/Social Change conference. The other presenter on the panel was Trent Hawkins whose speech you can watch here. I based this article on the speech.

Renewable Energy; The potential and the backlash against it from Jill Hickson on Vimeo.

Note: Vimeo videos have some problems with the Firefox browser. If you are using Firefox and can't see the video, try with a different web browser.

The political economy of renewable energy

2011-11-07T12:00:00.001+11:00

In response to my article What’s holding renewables back? fellow blogger Dave Riley posted some interesting discursive comments on FaceBook which I'm reproducing here with his blessing. Please add your own comments below!

In my original article, I wrote "In the competition to displace Old King Coal, gas is the preferred option of capital. Gas is highly profitable because it’s a commodity in its own right."

Dave leads off his discussion by responding to this:

Overseas that commodity reserve doesn't exist to the same degree so extensive investment in renewable energy has market traction. At least you can sell electricity. But the fact that fuel which is mined is a commodity in the way that wind or sun is not -- changes its nature.I'd suspect that THIS is the main handicap to renewables in Australia.

To which I responded, "If I understand you right, I think that is what I meant, yes."

Dave continues:

My point is that a commodity is something that is bought and sold. It has value, which represents a quantity of human labor invested in it. There is no human labor invested in 'sunshine' or 'wind'. After all, the air is free. But it has a use value because it can satisfy some human need --ie: breathing, warmth and energy. This is its social use value.

Understanding Queensland fruit fly: Science in its social and historical context

2011-11-03T10:07:00.001+11:00

My father's first book, Of Peaches and Maggots: The Story of Queensland Fruit Fly was written while I was growing up so my viewpoint on it is rather subjective. Nevertheless, my friends who have read it found it to be a fascinating book.

The story is not a simple entomological treatise on the subject - Queensland fruit fly - but an investigation of the farmers, government officials and scientists who have had to deal with the fruit fly, their varied responses, and ultimately, the author's own investigations.

Colonial and agricultural history are involved. Scientific history and biography are involved. Some of the author's autobiography is interpolated, as he is an actor in the story as well as its historian. And of course, there is inevitably entomology, although you can probably skip that if you find it uninteresting.

The conclusions and implications point to a particular interpretation or re-interpretation of Darwinian evolution; they point to the impacts of a foreign horticulture and colonial mentality on a new continent; and if (unlike me) you don't know in advance what is the crucial discovery that explains the fly's resilience as a pest, there is an element of a scientific mystery story here.

As a self-published book it's known less well than it deserves, but you can buy it online.

Sri Lanka's JVP: new biography uncovers forgotten lessons

2011-10-31T12:45:00.001+11:00

Review: The Lionel Bopage story: Rebellion, Repression and the Struggle for Justice in Sri Lanka by Michael Colin Cooke.
Agahas Publishers, Colombo, 2011.
Order at <michaelcolincooke.blogspot.com>

“The truth is the whole”
– Hegel, quoted in “The Ecological Rift” (Foster, York & Clark, Monthly Review Press 2011)

A lot of popular non-fiction literature seems very straightforward, to the point. The kind of writing you might expect from a journalist – easy to read, not too many tangents or complicating factors; usually nothing too far from the comfort zone of the average punter.

This book, while written well enough that it reads quite easily, does not generally match that description. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” Karl Marx wrote, and movements and ideas of rebellious movements of the oppressed are not written into the official histories and syllabus. Cooke brings to bear much analysis from a wide array of sources that are not necessarily fashionable, yet quite necessary to get a solid understanding of the subject. As in the quote, the truth is the whole – and the more of the whole the account can give us, the more truthful it will in general be, although it may prove quite a lot to digest.

Lionel Bopage was for over ten years a central leader of the Sri Lankan Janata Vimukthi Peramuna or People’s Liberation Front (JVP): a revolutionary, Marxist party that exploded onto the scene in 1971 with a failed attempt at armed insurrection. As Bopage gave so much of his time and energy to the party (including about six years in prison), a large part of the book functions as a history of the JVP and its ideas in those years.

For many English-speaking progressives, what we know of political conflict in Sri Lanka is the brutal war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, the Tamil Tigers) and the oppression of the Tamil minority. But in tandem with fostering virulent nationalist and ethnic-religious chauvinism among the Buddhist Sinhala majority, the Sri Lankan government imposed a rule of murderous terror against Sinhalese revolutionaries: the JVP rebellion in April 1971 saw up to 12,000 JVP members and supporters killed, while a more protracted JVP rebellion in the late 1980s had a death toll of perhaps as many as 60,000.
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Population pancakes

2011-10-31T12:35:00.000+11:00

The following is based on a comment I left on an article by James Bradfield Moody, which was excerpted from “The Sixth Wave: How to succeed in a resource limited world” by James Bradfield Moody and Bianca Nogrady (Random House, 2010).

Ian Angus and Simon Butler, in quoting one of my earlier articles in their excellent book "Too Many People?", also kindly pointed out that I=PAT is an identity not a formula. They didn't realise that pancakes are important for understanding I=PAT.

I=PAT is an "identity", that is, it's true by definition. As such, using it to understand the problem risks getting caught in circular logic. Why not measure P as dollars of profit, or unit of GDP, or something else, instead of unit of population?
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This is not what democracy looks like!

2011-10-22T18:32:00.000+11:00

Yesterday's police riot has drawn out the politics of the state government quite clearly. The Herald Sun, a reliable conservative mouthpiece for much of the time, summed it up with their first paragraphs in today's edition.

"The Battle of City Square wasn't quite over but the result was never in doubt when a quiet policeman dropped a comment that said it all.

"Now they know we mean it," he mused, munching on a sandwich after hours of riding herd on the rag-tag coalition of protesters camped in the square. "No more Christine Nixon stuff."

It's a bit too convenient to have an officer actually say what the Herald Sun (and their attack dog Andrew Bolt) have been imputing for some time: that the police were feminised and made soft while they had a woman commissioner. Now with her and her successor smeared and removed, and the Herald Sun's favourite conservative party in power, the police have given us a showing of what the conservatives like: jackboots stomping on the face of dissent - almost literally, yesterday.

Of course it's not a good look for the police force to have such political statements out there. I hope they are contacting the Herald Sun with complaints about the presentation of this comment that allegedly came from one of their officers. But it is no doubt an accurate description of what yesterday was about. We have conservatives in government. They want to crush unions, give free rein to the coal and gas industries, discriminate against gays, ban wind turbines, log ancient forests, and the list goes on. And they don't want anyone getting in their way.

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Peaceful protesters, violent cops

2011-10-22T17:53:00.000+11:00

So yesterday (Friday October 21) the inspiring Occupy Melbourne protest in City Square was violently evicted in what would best be described as a police riot.

I arrived at the protest after the main eviction had occurred. Nicola has a description of some of that earlier action up on Indymedia. That was the most violent part of the day.

When I returned late in the morning, many who had been dragged through the dirt and dumped on the kerb on their face were wandering around, a bit shocked. Supporters had gathered and witnessed the eviction, occupying the intersection of Collins and Swanston St.

Soon the police pushed us out of the intersection in a big line, shoving the protesters, who slowly gave ground and mainly converged in front of the town hall on Swanston St. Dave, a respected union veteran , was holding the protesters organised into a peaceful line, with the intent of moving slowly up Swanston St in front of the police, as they pushed us. "Do not contest - when the push, we move slowly" was the chant.

Dave was quickly dragged away in a headlock by about four police, and we didn't see him until he was released that evening. Happy 60th birthday, Dave! Right after this - thinking, probably, that they had removed our "leader" - the riot squad formed into a V and pushed right into the protest, apparently trying to drive us onto the footpath and up the street.

This great pic was borrowed from facebook

#Occupied Melbourne

2011-10-20T17:32:00.000+11:00

Having been away for the key days over the weekend, I missed a lot of Occupy Melbourne and being pretty well occupied with my environmental campaigning job I haven't spent heaps of time down there. But it sure looks like a great event from what I've seen and much kudos to those who have spent so much time there.

The talk now is of when the police are going to clear out the square. Their numbers have already increased today. Given that the Queen is going to be in Melbourne in less than 5 days, we can assume that the conservative Mayor and state government are going to want to move everyone on well before then.

It's great to see two things in particular about this protest: a whole lot of people who I can't count as the "usual suspects" that I see at left and progressive events all the time. And then all those people (plus many of the usual suspects like myself) working together to create a big public display of our dissatisfaction.

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What’s holding renewables back?

2011-10-17T14:20:00.002+11:00

This article is based on a talk I presented as part of a panel "Renewable energy: the potential and the backlash" at the Climate Change/Social Change conference in Melbourne on October 1, 2011

The barriers to renewable energy are many: it’s not just a matter of the draconian new Victorian laws against wind farms: the legacy of government support for fossil fuels also hangs heavily over the renewables sector.

The Australian conservation Foundation released a study in March which revealed that for the 2010-11 year, incentives to fossil fuels, such as the failure to index the fuel excise for a decade, total over $12 billion. By contrast, climate programs attracted just over $1 billion. And this ACF figure includes $100 million for clean coal – not a real climate expenditure in most people’s view.

The fossil fuel incentives are built into the economy in an ongoing way. They are a stable environment for investment. The climate expenditure tends to be sporadic, liable to change at the whim of government.

The other legacy hanging over renewables is the privatisation of the energy sector. Prior to privatisation of Victoria’s State Electricity Commission in the 1990s, its workshops in the Latrobe Valley began building wind turbines. The project was abandoned with privatisation.
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Arguments against wind energy don't match reality

2011-09-21T17:36:00.001+10:00

Wind power certainly has its detractors, but they rarely let facts get in the way of their criticisms. There have been a spate in the media in recent weeks, pushing the line that renewable energy costs too much, doesn’t work, destabilises the energy grid and so on.

Miranda Devine wrote a long rant which has been reprinted in several Murdoch tabloids, entitled “Turbine Hype is a costly myth“. She has been ably and concisely answered by the Clean Energy Council’s Kane Thornton.

Randall Bell of the Landscape Guardians made the case more bluntly in the Geelong Advertiser earlier, on September 20.

He mentions “three European studies” that claim every job in renewable energy (of all kinds) causes “nearly three” job losses elsewhere.

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New study: no evidence for "wind turbine syndrome"

2011-09-19T08:42:00.001+10:00

Continuing with my focus on wind energy, a new study “Health Effects and Wind Turbines: A Review of the Literature” has just been published in the academic journal Environmental Health (14 September 2011).

The study, by Loren D Knopper and Christopher A Ollson, reviews the peer-reviewed scientific literature, government agency reports, and the most prominent information found in popular literature on the subject. As the abstract notes, “People interested in this debate turn to two sources of information to make informed decisions: scientific peer-reviewed studies published in scientific journals and the popular literature and internet.”

In a classic understatement, the abstract notes that “conclusions of the peer reviewed literature differ in some ways from those in the popular literature.”

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Coalition wages war on clean energy

2011-09-16T15:52:00.000+10:00

Will NSW’s Liberal-National state government follow it’s Victorian colleagues and block the development of wind energy in the state?

Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu announced new planning laws on August 29 that ban wind farms from large areas of the state, and put so many hurdles in the way of new wind developments that most wind companies are now talking of abandoning further developments in the state.

“These arbitrary, draconian restrictions will cost Victoria billions of dollars and thousands of jobs,” Friends of the Earth campaign coordinator Cam Walker said in a press release.

“These strict planning restrictions do not apply to any other major developments, and make it easier to build a coal mine in rural Victoria than a wind farm,” he said.

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You can't apply the precautionary principle selectively

2011-09-10T08:04:00.001+10:00

Many wind farm opponents cite precautionary principles as a reason to halt the construction of wind farms. For example, Peter Mitchell of the Waubra Foundation wrote in the Ballarat Courier (August 29) that “no new projects should be approved and no project previously approved but as yet unbuilt should proceed” until there have been ” independent health and noise studies to identify safe siting of turbines.”

The precautionary principle is important to protecting health and the environment. But critics like Mitchell miss the point. They accidentally gets close when they ask (as another did who also wrote to the Courier) whether wind supporters would “be willing to live beside the wind energy facilities?”.

I'd live beside them - aren't they pretty! This is Challicum Hills
wind farm, opened in 2003, not a single complaint from a local...

Beazley's chickens come home to roost

2011-09-01T09:10:00.003+10:00

Kim Beazley, one-time Labor opposition leader, can take the blame for Labor's embarrassing court loss over their plan to deport refugees to Malaysia, on the tenth anniversary of the Tampa affair.

And for that matter, subsequent Labor leaders Rudd and most particularly Gillard, and all her parliamentary colleagues and hangers-on, can also take the blame. And no doubt more who played their part (or failed to) over the last ten years.

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Melbourne rallies for the Kimberley wilderness

2011-08-19T22:48:00.000+10:00

Nearly a thousand people turned out in Melbourne on Sunday August 15 for a rally to “Save the Kimberley”. Musicians entertained the crowd in between speakers from environment groups and indigenous communities.
The protest was called in support of the campaign to prevent a natural gas processing facility being built at James Price Point, called Walmadan by the indigenous people of the area, on the Dampier Peninsula near Broome, WA in the famous Kimberley wilderness region.

Kevin Blatchford, director of the Save the Kimberley group, traveled to Melbourne for the event. He told Green Left that the group was formed in early 2007 “to raise awareness about threats to the Kimberley, especially Browse Basin gas, as we believed it was the biggest threat as it would drive further industrialisation in the Kimberley.”

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Save Sylvia Creek forests!

2011-08-19T22:05:00.001+10:00

Toolangi, August 17 - Around 100 supporters rallied in persistent rain at Sylvia Creek, in the Toolangi State Forest, to protest logging operations by Vic Forests. The supporters joined locals and forest campaigners who have been blockading the 19-hectare “Gunbarrel” coupe for five weeks.

Vic Forests are clear-felling the Gunbarrel coupe, which is one of the few areas that was not burned in 2009’s catastrophic Black Saturday fire. Areas completely surrounding the Sylvia Creek area were burned, turning this zone into a “biodiversity refuge” as local campaigner Bernie Mace told those present at the rally.

According to the Wilderness Society, the trees from Sylvia Creek are to be woodchipped and sold to Australian Paper to make products like Reflex paper. The Wilderness Society is promoting a community boycott of Reflex paper until Australian Paper stops using native forests.

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The opportunity cost of cheap photovoltaic cells

2011-08-19T17:11:00.000+10:00

Climate Progress has just published a news story, "The World’s Largest Planned Solar Plant Switching 500 MW from Concentrated Solar Thermal to Photovoltaics".

The ever lower cost of photovoltaic solar cells is great news, in so many ways – but paradoxically, it could delay the transition to completely renewable electricity.

Storing electricity is difficult and expensive. To do it with batteries in an isolated rural home is easy (and common) enough, but if you tried to roll out batteries on a large scale, the amount of materials needed would cause an ecological disaster in itself – if you don’t believe me, read this article by Tom Murphy, an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.

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We can "work our way out of the climate emergency"

2011-08-11T13:35:00.000+10:00

August 11: Over a hundred community supporters, environmentalists and trade unionists assembled on the steps of Trades Hall in Melbourne to launch the 100,ooo Australians campaign. A project of the Earthworker co-operative, the campaign is seeking to build a cooperatively owned solar hot water system factory in Morwell.

Everlast solar hot water system shown at Earthworker's Melbourne launch

The project is hoping for 100,000 Australians to join the Earthworker Cooperative at $20 per member to raise the $2 million needed for the “Eureka’s Future” factory machinery, fit-out and finish in Morwell. The factory is to produce the Everlast tank, solar collectors and associated components, a unit which Earthworker explains is already successful in the marketplace.

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Anti-wind lobby: Farming fear, uncertainty and doubt

2011-08-11T13:33:00.001+10:00

The ABC’s Four Corners on July 25 showcased the national debate around wind farms’ alleged negative health effects. It patiently allowed the anti-wind power Waubra Foundation to walk the audience through their case that wind farms are a health hazard. Many people I have met are curious to know if there is any truth to their allegations.

Though less emotive than the anti-wind campaigners, the scientists who were interviewed in the program put a far more authoritative case: there has still not been found any causal link between wind farms and ill health, and in the newest study revealed on the show, not even a statistical correlation in the population around wind farms.

Four Corners interviewed Randall Bell, the President of the Landscape Guardians, the community-mobilising anti-wind power campaign. Just for one second he let his guard slip and confirmed that his campaign is political and “you use any weapon you can to win that” in the reporter’s words.

I had the interesting experience of sitting through a recent Landscape Guardians meeting, with a panel of their “experts” including Randall Bell, in the small community of Barunah Park, west of Geelong. “Any weapon” is what they use, and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) tactics are their specialty.

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"Landscape Guardians" challenged

2011-07-25T10:37:00.002+10:00

From yes2renewables.org

On July 19, I attended the public meeting organised by the Barunah Park Landscape Guardians. Barunah Park is a community west of Geelong, straddling the border of the Golden Plains and Colac Otway shires.
As reported in the Colac Herald, wind developer NewEn is investigating the possibility of a wind farm in the area. A NewEn representative attended the meeting. WestWind Energy representatives also attended the meeting, but stressed they have no projects in the area at this stage (their nearest project is the Mt Mercer wind farm south of Ballarat).

The meeting had been expected to hear from the Waubra Foundation’s Dr Laurie, but she was an apology on the night. In the end, Landscape Guardians Australia President Randall Bell spoke and chaired (despite calls on the evening from long time residents for a local facilitator); other speakers were Reg Brownell, from the Landscape Guardians; a farmer who lives near the Waubra wind farm; and Kathy Russell from the Landscape Guardians and the Waubra Foundation.

It was very disappointing to hear the standard of information provided by these speakers. The content really followed that of the Sunbury Landscape Guardians meeting (reported on here).

Bell introduced the evening to explain that he doesn’t believe in climate change, and wind farms only exist because of the climate change lobby. He gave us the interesting figure that only 1% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is there due to human activities; the first of many bizarre and ridiculous “factoids” we were to hear on the night.

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Carbon price agreement: what’s in it for renewables?

2011-07-15T21:08:00.000+10:00

Climate campaigners have been most understandably happy about the funding bodies for renewable energy contained in the carbon price package. It seems that these measures are largely in place because of strong campaigning by the grassroots climate movement and the Greens MPs in negotiations.

The carbon price agreement will create a Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), an independent body that will have $10 billion funds to allocate as loans or equity investments. These are not grants, but will help renewable energy projects to get off the ground where they are unable to find finance.

Half the $10 billion will be for strictly renewable energy, while the other half will be available to renewables or “clean” gas/renewable hybrids, but not for “clean coal” carbon capture technology.

The other significant move is to create the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which will administer existing $3.2 billion of existing renewable energy projects.

The renewable energy industry has welcomed these new arrangements, as have renewable energy and climate campaigners. To understand why they represent a real step forward, it is important to understand the limitations faced by renewable energy in recent years.

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Power privatisation: how the climate lost out

2011-07-13T22:07:00.002+10:00

I can't recommend enough Sharon Beder's books for understanding contemporary capitalism. Currently I'm reading Power Play: the fight for control of the world's electricity (2003). This chronicles the sordid history of private power companies in the US, and the privatisation waves of Thatcher's Britain and Australia's privatisation and deregulation in the 1990s.

The following summary of Australia's creation of a deregulated electricity market seemed particularly pertinent.

Despite reams of consultants' advice to the contrary, prices went up after privatisation and deregulation. In general, the owners of the transmission and distribution networks have made very large profits, much higher than have been earned by most listed companies in Australia. This has been at the expense of consumers.

Ship of Fools

2011-07-05T17:30:00.004+10:00

Last night as I drifted off to sleep, I dreamt I was on a ship, sailing through a vast, unknown ocean.

It was a big vessel. I don't know where it was headed and I don't think the captain did either. There were many people aboard, all classes and decks.

The engines were running on big steam boilers, and the smokestacks poured sooty clouds skyward. It seemed to be turning the sky grey and in fact the sky was responding in kind, as the greyer it got, the worse the weather became. The swell was rising.

This David Eustace picture Ship of Fools captures it quite well

The captain instructed the engineers to stoke the boilers and ensure a good head of steam to weather the storm. The more smoke poured out of the smokestacks, the darker the sky became.

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Does renewable energy require subsidies?

2011-07-05T16:56:00.002+10:00

A common criticism of renewable energy is that it requires subsidies to be economically viable.
There are two main answers to that:

Most new technology needs some level of support to get off the ground, and in this case it’s well worth the cost of some subsidies until the technology is established. But the actual subsidies to renewables have been ineffective due to inconsistency and poor design.
Fossil fuels receive far more support in direct and indirect subsidies than renewable energy and climate programs ever have. This creates a serious economic distortion that operates against renewable energy.

The following which I prepared for yes2renewables.org explains some of the issues.

Sections:
What renewable subsidies are there in place?
Fossil fuel subsidies: $12.173 billion in 2010-11
Effects of fossil fuel subside vs renewables support
Renewable support mechanisms unreliable
Are subsidies unfair or inefficient in principle?
References

What's really causing electricity price rises?

2011-06-22T15:46:00.000+10:00

From the Yes2Renewables blog

Cheap shots at renewable energy often blame it for rising power bills.

The June 10 Australian published an article that reinforces this attitude:

“While business lobbies have pressed for a carbon price no higher than $10 a tonne, the Productivity Commission estimates that taxpayers have been subsidising the reduction of emissions at prices of up to $1000 a tonne through rooftop solar panels.”

Rooftop solar panels are accurately described as one of the most expensive renewable energy sources. Large scale renewable energy is far more efficient. But do solar panels actually rate as a cause of our much-touted rising energy costs?

A June 14 article published in the Climate Spectator gives some interesting background to electricity price rises. Many would assume it is simply a matter of renewing an ageing infrastructure, run down over years of cost-cutting. But that’s not the whole story.

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Support renewables, not gas-fracking

2011-06-11T17:39:00.001+10:00

The following is a press statement from Friends of the Earth:

Friends of the Earth (FoE) has strongly rejected the findings of yesterday’s Productivity Commission report which recommends ending subsidies to renewable energy.

The report states that “if subsidised renewable electricity sourced from wind or solar displaces gas-fired electricity, the abatement achieved will be far less than if coal-fired electricity generation were displaced.”

“All this apparent commonsense demonstrates is that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” said FoE renewable energy campaigner Ben Courtice.

“We all want to see the end of coal, but a detour into fossil gas is the wrong way to do it.

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Why an ETS won't decarbonise the economy

2011-06-06T13:44:00.003+10:00

A cap-and-trade ETS is inappropriate for decarbonising the economy. It is a measure suited to making smaller emissions cuts cheaply in a market economy; by its nature it is not suited to large or total cuts to emissions.

The following quote is from Sharon Beder, and illuminates this very clearly, using the example of Sulphur dioxide pollution that was causing acid rain in the US and Europe.

Economic instruments 'encourage change by those who can achieve the change most cheaply' (National Heritage Trust 2004), which is fine if only limited pollution reductions are required - that is, if reductions can be limited to what can be done cheaply. However, they tend not to work if substantial reductions are required.

Why I won't be saying "yes"

2011-06-04T16:34:00.000+10:00

Tomorrow, World Environment Day, will be the Say Yes Australia rally called by an alliance of unions and NGOs like GetUp.

A large number of environmentalists, including the Greens party, rightly rejected the last attempt of the government to set a carbon price, the 'Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme'. It was shonky, riddled with loopholes big enough for a diesel-spewing truck to drive through.

What's changed? The Greens make an agreement to support a minority Labor government and suddenly we have to accept anything Labor says because the threat is Tony Abbott's Liberal party if we block Labor?

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Victoria’s wind power becalmed?

2011-06-04T13:26:00.001+10:00

2011 marks the tenth anniversary of the Codrington wind farm in Victoria’s southwest, the state’s first. On May 18, Planning minister Matthew Guy announced approval for the latest, the three-turbine Chepstowe wind farm, near Ballarat.

Wind turbine at Cape Bridgewater, Victoria

But Victoria’s wind industry is threatened with a becalmed future due to the policies of the state’s new Liberal government.

The government came to power with promises to ensure no-go zones for wind farms in the Macedon ranges, Bellarine and Mornington peninsulas, and the Great Ocean Road. These are some of the best areas in the state for wind farms.

They promised to give residents within 2km of proposed wind farms the right of veto over development, and they promised to put planning applications into the hands of local councils.

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Wind energy in Victoria: talk on Youtube

2011-05-31T13:33:00.003+10:00

I was invited to speak at Deckchair Democracy, a month of protest and speakers on the steps of Parliament House organised by members of Melbourne environmental group LIVE. Here is a YouTube video of the speech I gave.

How far is 2km? Across the coalmine!

2011-05-28T12:24:00.001+10:00

If you stand on Fraser Avenue at the back of Anglesea, you can’t see the coal mine that is a few hundred metres to your north. It’s behind the low coastal scrublands and of course, a big hole in the ground is hard to notice until you stumble right upon it. But it’s undeniably there.

If you live in Anglesea, there might appear to be little you can do about the coal mine and power station. It has been there since 1961, and owner Alcoa is seeking a 50 year extension of it’s original lease and an extension of the mine. We hope that this course is averted.

As Cam Walker noted after spending some time around Anglesea, “most people aren’t too keen on the idea and are certainly grumpy when you explain that if it was a single wind turbine they would have a right of veto, yet the 2,000 residents that live within 2 km of the Alcoa coal mine don’t have this right.”

Anglesea, mine and power station - click to enlarge

The Philisteins: an early 90s memory

2011-05-11T11:15:00.000+10:00

To my delight, I recently found that one of my all time favourite (and now virtually forgotten) bands, The Philisteins, have a double CD out with their entire catalogue of wild garage rock songs. They played their last gig nearly 20 years ago, in 1992 at Hobart's Doghouse hotel - an impressive double set of more than two hours, playing a large number of the songs on this collection and thoroughly blowing 16-year-old me away.

Somehow the Philisteins never got the acclaim that I reckon they deserved. Adam Lucas writes in the notes that accompany the compilation, "the 'Steins had a genuine contempt for all things music industry and a knack for making enemies of potentially strategic allies." That may be true, but I think Australia's crap music industry can take some blame too. A lot of very talented Australian bands become famous abroad without ever succeeding at home. Well, the Philisteins moved "abroad" from Tasmania - to Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne!

Some Kind Of Philisteins EP (Greasy Pop records 1989)

Messaging and messagee: rethinking activist communication strategy

2011-05-10T15:05:00.003+10:00

In a recent planning meeting, during a discussion on campaign "messaging", I chipped in that I was somewhat agnostic about the "messaging". The response (I forget who from) was that "messaging is 80% of our communication" or words to that effect.

Grammar and etymology nuts can argue about the value of using "message" as a verb. It's not new, anyway, being also used to describe the action of sending a text message by mobile phone and possibly older than that.

But in politics-speak, "messaging" is the shorthand for our public relations discourse. Our explanation of ourselves and what we want. It encompasses - or conflates - the old lefty categories of propaganda, agitation and demands.

This new word that I keep hearing (and the news, to me, that getting it right it constitutes 80% of our communication success) has me slightly uneasy. Clive Hamilton articulates my feelings to a degree in his speech to the 2011 Climate Summit.

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Drawing lines in the carbon price debate

2011-05-01T09:23:00.007+10:00

This was written as a guest post for my friend Doug Evans' blog Earthsign while he's away.

The proponents of the carbon price framework are suggesting that we must support it, even if it’s only a first step, otherwise Labor won’t get any climate legislation through (again) and we’ll end up with Tea Party Tony as PM after the next election.

Many climate activists and supporters of the Greens agree with this analysis to some extent. I heard people castigating critics of the carbon price in these terms at the grassroots Climate Action Summit of which I was an organiser. Others say that supporting an unjust market mechanism will raise prices and give Abbott a free kick.

Nevertheless, Greens party loyalists and independent climate activists and the far left mostly agree that a carbon price alone isn’t going to do anything near enough (if anything at all) for climate, and we need other measures. We all marched together against the earlier version, the CPRS.

Melbourne Climate Emergency Rally, 2009. Photo borrowed from Takver

Beware of socialists bearing petitions

2011-04-16T19:00:00.005+10:00

While I'm posting critical thoughts about far left political practice, here's a guest contribution written by Em B.C. that also accords with my own views. The title has been altered from "why you should never sign a socialist petition" as it was originally posted here.

A member of the Lebanese Communist Party once told me that the reason he became a communist was that when he grew up the communists were the best people, the most decent, honest and generous. This is something I’ve thought a lot about since, because most Australian socialists don't seem to think in those terms.

Of course, most socialists are very decent people who are committed to making the world a better place. However, within the organisations there is often an attitude that because we are trying to make a revolution by any means necessary, little things like personal integrity just aren’t as important as politics. So if achieving your aims requires telling a little white lie every now and then, that’s acceptable, perhaps even your duty as a revolutionary socialist.

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Factionalism and "leadership"

2011-04-13T14:37:00.004+10:00

Chris Bambery, a long-term leader of the Socialist Workers' Party (a large UK far-left group) has resigned with a parting shot that claims that "relentless factionalism in the organisation, driven by the leading group on the CC [Central Committee], shows no sign of ceasing and is doing enormous damage to the party . It is a cancer eating away at its heart."

The official response from the SWP claims that Bambery was "spreading information about internal CC discussions to those outside the CC".

It's an interesting organisation where this is considered a crime! Yet it's pretty normal in far-left organisations from a Communist or Trotskyist background. The leadership are expected to be able to discuss in private so they can talk about the membership candidly. That is, behind the backs of the people who they are supposed to represent, er, I mean lead.

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Deniers aren't really about the science

2011-04-12T09:31:00.003+10:00

Global warming deniers are dime a dozen in comments posted on the web, probably second only to the rash of Zionist trolls trying to attack the Palestine solidarity movement. From the ignorant to the wilfully misleading, these deniers rarely manage to dent the confidence of someone with a good grasp of how the greenhouse effect works. But then, we aren't their target.

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How to manage your way out of email overload

2011-04-03T14:40:00.003+10:00

Do you suffer that feeling of dismay as you sit down after work and open up your email only to see the message "Downloading 1 of 87 new messages" ....day after day?

Do you find you can't read all your emails? You shudder at the thought of putting your name on a new e-list? You miss important information because you can't find it?

I know of people who simply delete their unread email when the inbox gets too full. This might get rid of the problem for now, but deleting important emails can cause bigger problems down the track!

I suffer those problems much less since I have instituted a series of filters and folders that automatically sorts my email. Bulk sources of email such as discussion lists and news lists go straight to their own dedicated folder as soon as they are downloaded. The folder is highlighted when a new message arrives, and I can go in and read it if I want. If I don't have time to follow that particular list today, I can leave it for later. I don't have to read all the messages, but I can easily see who has sent messages on what subject in case something piques my interest.

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Direct action Vs Mass action

2011-03-29T12:30:00.006+11:00

There's a bit of a flurry of comments on internet lists about the fringe actions at the enormous UK union march against the Conservative government's cuts. I'm really too busy to be writing this (hence why my blog is rather quiet lately) but I couldn't help myself.

After the huge March 26 march in London, there was a lot of news coverage of "riots". A witty comment that circulated parodied the coverage, with an allusion to Egypt, saying "Forces loyal to Cameron are reported to be clashing with demonstrators in Trafalgar Square."

As a survey of some of the attitudes, with links to the full articles if you have time to read them, here are some of the wildly contrasting assessments:

Libya: Why I'm against the no-fly zone

2011-03-18T11:51:00.002+11:00

I can't support the no-fly zone and bombing intervention.

For more in-depth analysis and discussion, I suggest readers go to Dr Tad at Left Flank, or Guy Rundle at Crikey for the other side. Jacinda Woodhead also responds to Rundle at Overland.

The easy (and largely correct) cynical response is to ask, why no western intervention to aid the rebels in Yemen, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia for that matter? Why not institute a no-fly zone against Israel over the occupied Palestinian territories?

But there are far more direct and specific problems with this intervention. What will the effects of the air strikes and no-fly zone be on the Libyan revolution?

Read more »

Melbourne gets up for climate action

2011-03-13T15:56:00.005+11:00

Around 7500 protesters (the organisers’ estimate) rallied at the state Treasury buildings on March 12 to call for strong government action on climate change. The rally completely overshadowed the simultaneous rally against a carbon tax organised by the Liberal Party outside PM Julia Gillard’s office in Werribee which reports put at between 200 and 400 protesters.

That is, it would have completely overshadowed the tiny rally of neoliberals and climate deniers, had not the media shone their spotlight on that benighted gathering! A few pictures of it that I found have are a bit lacking in whole-of-crowd shots, but this one gives some idea.

From http://jamesboard.wordpress.com

Renewable energy, Smara refugee camp

2011-03-08T16:50:00.002+11:00

The following photo essay is from Tony Iltis. I posted this just for a snapshot of a very different place to where most of us live, and to remind everyone that there are still refugees from colonial occupation in the modern world.

Smara is a refugee camp, named after a West Saharan town, near Tindouf in far Western Algeria. West Sahara was formerly a Spanish colony, but in 1975 Spain abandoned it and Morocco invaded. The exile government and many of the Saharawi people have lived in refugee camps for decades in the unforgiving desert of western Algeria. The Australian Western Sahara Association is a good place to go for more information.

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The day they banned nature

2011-03-07T23:00:00.006+11:00

Banned?

New laws being introduced in Australia are set to make illegal thousands of plant species, including many native plants, endangered plants, and even the nation's floral emblem, the wattle.

The Minister for Justice, Brendan O’Connor, is taking submissions on the proposed legislation, which is on "issues relating to the implementation of model drug, plant and precursor schedules for Commonwealth serious drug offences." Submissions close on March 11.

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Testing the carbon price against reality

2011-03-06T20:59:00.001+11:00

The casual observer might easily conclude that there are just two clear sides in the current debate over the Labor/Greens carbon price deal.

Clearly the Greens are in favour, and appear to have won Gillard’s government over to some version of it. (Although BHP Billiton CEO Marius Kloppers could also take some credit).

On the other hand, Tony Abbott has promised a Tea Party-style uprising against it. Abbott will push to rouse his fascistic “people’s” movement to try to bury the deal.

Meanwhile, Labor expects environmentalists will support its proposal. But it can’t take the support of the grassroots climate movement for granted, as it found with the failed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

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Papua New Guinea: two viewpoints on poverty

2011-02-25T17:21:00.003+11:00

Recently I heard two very different takes on Papua New Guinea, Australia's northern neighbour (and former colony). The most recent was in the book Overloading Australia: how governments and media dither and deny on population (Mark O'Connor and William J. Lines, 2010).

In Chapter 6 "Snapshots: nation by nation" the first snapshot is of PNG.

Population growth takes place within nations and therefore over-population is primarily a national problem. Below are a series of snapshots of ways in which some nations are dealing, or not dealing, with their population-related problems.

Papua New Guinea: From about 660 000 people at the start of the twentieth century, PNG now has 6 million, and expects over 7 million by 2025. The capital, Port Moresby, sucks in population and is dominated by squatter settlements. 'Raskol' gangs roam the streets, raping and stealing with impunity. Guards and barbed wire protect houses. Back in 2003 the Treasurer, Bart Philemon called Port Moresby 'the dump of every city in PNG'. Outside the capital, it is often worse. In much of the southern highlands the government has lost control, teachers and officials have fled, and services have been withdrawn. Without doctors and nurses, deaths in childbirth have risen almost to what they are in a state of nature.

I will write a broader review of this book (which I don't agree with), but this contrast was too stark to ignore. What happened in between the start of the twentieth century and the chaos that the authors describe currently? Recently a glimpse of that history was afforded by my interview with John Tully about his book, a social history of rubber. Here's an excerpt, discussing Australia's colonial role in PNG's history:

What we did there was quite horrific, not just in the rubber plantations but in the mines. We basically disrupted the indigenous culture to an enormous degree, I don’t think it’s ever recovered from that – we displaced whole populations, we depopulated villages. Up until the early 1960s when the United Nations told us that the Australian government had to do something about it, we had an enormous battery of legislation or regulation which I think fully warrants the title of apartheid.

While the contrast between these two viewpoints is not explicit, it is still obvious.

Green Left Weekly turns 20

2011-02-18T10:18:00.004+11:00

Today...

It's nearly 20 years since I first read Green Left Weekly, and almost 19 since I started distributing and occasionally writing for it, although it doesn't feel like that long ago.

So congratulations to GLW, you make me feel old!

In this era of a myriad of web based news feeds and blogs and wikileaks and all the rest, Green Left still manages to publish original and vital news that we can use to change the world for the better.


...and yesterday (1992)

Climate change is making the world change for the worst, inexorably, slowly, with every season and every new coal mine or oil well. Any countervailing tendency that we can use to steer back the other direction is vital and we would be much worse off without Green Left.

Happy birthday to you!

Rubber: colonial holocausts and industrial class struggle

2011-02-16T17:06:00.004+11:00

The Devil’s Milk: A social history of rubber
By John Tully
Monthly Review Press, 2011

This new book from Monthly Review Press documents the history of rubber as it has played its role in the development of capitalism. Rubber is an essential industrial material, although underappreciated by most of us even as we are surrounded by it.

Since its industrial uses began to be fully appreciated in the 1800s, the quest for rubber has been in Tully’s words “a paradigm of imperialism”. The story covers ghastly colonial holocausts: the murderous exploitation of the Belgian Congo starting with King Leopold’s dominion (1885-1908), slave-like conditions for rubber tapping workers along Amazonian rivers such as the Putumayo where whole tribes were decimated, and Australian-administered apartheid in colonial Papua and New Guinea.

Equally it talks of the environmental destruction of rainforest clearing and plantations. The Nazi holocaust returns the story to slave labour once again, this time of the predominantly Jewish inmates of the concentration camps.

But there is also a tale of resistance as rubber plantation workers and rubber factory workers have unionised and fought against the rapacious transnational corporations that have dominated the rubber industry since the early 20th Century.

John Tully is a socialist and a member of the "Generation of '68". He became politically active in the movement against the Vietnam War and conscription. Today he teaches Politics and History at Victoria University in Melbourne although "in another life" he worked as a rigger in construction and heavy industry. During that time saw the inside of rubber factories, cement works, steel works, smelters, shipyards, mines and building sites.

John Tully

I interviewed John at his home in Melbourne on February 14, 2011 for Links journal (where you can also read an excerpt from the book)

BC: Your book suggests that rubber extraction combines a very primitive, even slave labour economy, in some cases, in an international division of labour with modern industry and transnational corporations. How does understanding this history help us to understand the development of the imperialist world economy?

JT: Maybe what I should talk about is how I became interested in rubber and how useful is it as a paradigm of imperialism.

30 years ago I was sent into the Goodyear plant in Melbourne. It no longer exists because there are no longer any tire manufacturers in Australia, they’ve all gone offshore, to China predominantly.

I became interested in rubber, being sent into this plant, and I realised that I knew nothing about rubber, I knew nothing about where it came from. It was one of those sort of invisible things that we take for granted. It’s ubiquitous, it’s everywhere, we can’t do without it. So I started to think about it: where does this stuff come from?

I was also quite affected by the lousy conditions of the production workers in the dirty part of the factory. They were, surprise surprise, southern and eastern Europeans with a smattering of Vietnamese by that time.

So I started to think about it. I went back there some time later to do another job in that plant, and then I did some work in archives in Cambodia and France on the rubber plantations in Cambodia which were run by companies such as Michelin. The penny sort of dropped that I could not just write a chapter of a book on Cambodia and history about the plantations but I could write a social history of rubber on a world scale.

As I say, it increasingly became a paradigm for capitalist production and the division of labour on a world scale, and just showed how crucially important it was for the world capitalist economy. I think you can say steel, oil and rubber are absolutely essential, without those the world economy would grind to a halt. That was underlined in world war one and world war two when the protagonists suffered a severe rubber famine.

But you’re quite right, rubber – wild rubber collection – was produced in slave labour conditions, certainly on the Putumayo [river, in the Peruvian Amazon], an extremely primitive method of production. This was in enormous contrast to the hi-tech industries of the capitalist heartlands.

But of course the plantations which took over from wild rubber collection were on industrial scale, run according to industrial methods. They created a proletariat, which in the case of Vietnam was a strong component of the liberation struggle. So right up to what we might call the American war the plantations were a hotbed of the so-called Viet Cong, or Viet Minh as we should maybe talk of them. I don’t think there’s any co-incidence in that.

The other thing that it highlights is that internationalism is not a luxury. As early as 1848 Marx and Engels were talking about globalisation, the globalisation of the world economy under imperialism, and rubber fits into that, increasingly.

One thing that it underlines, at least for me, is the need for international trade unions, which people have talked about a little bit in the past. Companies such as Goodyear and Firestone, BF Goodrich (which is no longer in the industry) and Michelin, etcetera can just move factories offshore at the drop of a hat, and they’ve always behaved in that sort of manner.

So they’re international, yet we’re trying to counter them by unions based on a national scale. Basically, I don’t think it’s going to work. It hasn’t worked, there’s no rubber industry left in Australia, it’s all gone to China where of course tires are now produced in conditions which would have Marx and Engels rolling over in their graves – which is a bit of a paradox seeing as the government claims the mantle of communism. It doesn’t deserve it, of course, but it still does.

BC: The other material in this history is gutta-percha. What role did it play?

JT: Gutta-percha is a close cousin of rubber. It’s another natural product. It’s not used much today, dentists use it for fillings, and there are a few specialist uses like that, but in the time of the heyday of colonialism it was absolutely essential for telegraphic communication.

There were hundreds of thousands of miles of submarine telegraph cables laid – to Australia, to Africa, all around the world. They were absolutely essential to string those empires together.

Gutta-percha is sometimes called a “gum inelastic”. It was a natural insulator, so it’s been superseded by plastics of course since that time. But the telegraph clearly revolutionised communications. For the first time human beings weren’t reliant on how fast they could travel, terrestrially, whether that was on foot, horse, car or whatever it may be, or ship. They were in instant communication.

The thing which really sent shockwaves through the colonial capitals was the Indian Mutiny, because they didn’t know that this was happening for some time afterwards. Also I suppose the example would be the Dutch didn’t really know what was going on in Java during the Java Wars.

But with the rise of telegraph communication, that was instantaneous communication, they could despatch troops, warships and things straight away. So that was a step forward for humanity, but it also wasn’t, because it was contradictory for the colonial peoples. Marx did say, and I quote him on that, basically that colonialism was a double-edged sword. It brought with it oppression, but it also brought with it the possibility of actually being able to supersede colonialism and go beyond that.

He said that the sine qua non [essential prerequisite] of the regeneration of India was the creation of an Indian army, which was trained by the British, and also telegraph technology, which he remarked on right back in that time.

BC: Some may know a little of King Leopold and the destruction in the Congo, a holocaust of sorts, and the Jewish holocaust is mentioned in your book as well, slave labour in the concentration camps. Not to compare different holocausts with each other, but if Jewish holocaust victims have got compensation in many cases from German industrialists, what have the indigenous peoples of the Congo, of the Putumayo got?

JT: Basically they’ve got nothing as a result of it, and today the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a hell-hole in many ways, and I think we can trace a lot of that back to the time of Leopold. The depradations of the Belgians – which didn’t stop after Leopold had been exposed –were toned down to some extent, but the oppression continued. There was meddling at the time of the state becoming independent and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

Today the same sort of thing goes on: the big product the west’s interested in is coltan these days, which is used in mobile phones. It is extracted in primitive conditions, it’s mildly radioactive, but if you work with it for long enough it has very bad effects on the health. In fact there is a remarkable symmetry between the primitive 'mode of extraction' of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo today and the methods used to collect rubber and ivory in Leopold's Congo Free State.

So yes, whereas Jewish people – they weren’t all Jewish slave labourers, but most of them were – well, people who are dead aren’t going to get compensation, but there has been some compensation from the German state for what was done those people. But very little has been done if anything for the people of the Congo.

And the Puutumayo indigenous people retreated into the rainforests, some of them were only recently found by anthropologists, and I don’t think they were very happy about it. Certainly nothing was done. What was done on the Putumayo I think fully warrants the term genocide. There is a debate about whethere it was genocide in the Congo, certainly it was mass murder on a colossal scale. It’s a legal quibble as to whether it was. but it’s certainly horrific. But no compensation.

I recall that when the king of the Belgians was at the independence ceremony he launched into a great speech about the wonderful things, the mission civilisatrice [civilising mission] that the Belgians had carried out. People such as Lumumba couldn’t believe that any person could say that sort of thing after the history of the Congo.

BC: And on a domestic note, what does the history of rubber reveal about Australia’s colonial history in places like PNG?

JT: That’s something that not many Australians know about. In fact we didn’t even used to refer to Papua and New Guinea as colonies of Australia, they were always “external territories” or “overseas territories” – all sorts of circumlocutions so that we wouldn’t call a spade a spade.

What we did there was quite horrific, not just in the rubber plantations but in the mines. We basically disrupted the indigenous culture to an enormous degree, I don’t think it’s ever recovered from that – we displaced whole populations, we depopulated villages. Up until the early 1960s when the United Nations told us that the Australian government had to do something about it, we had an enormous battery of legislation or regulation which I think fully warrants the title of apartheid.

The rubber plantations were part of the centre of that. So Australia was a rapacious colonial country, if not as rapacious as the Belgians, that’s perhaps on the end of a spectrum of horror, but nevertheless we’ve got a lot to account for. And we basically walked away from that too, washed our hands of it and we say “tut, tut tut, look what the natives are doing there today”.

And of course Australian mining companies have been involved in all sorts of dubious practices, ecological and social, since the independence in 1975.

BC: For many progressive people the mention of the rubber industry brings to mind the 1980s Brazilian rubber tappers’ union leader, and forest conservationist, Chico Mendes. How representative of the history of the rubber industry is his story?

JT: As I was researching the book I got very depressed about the horrible things that have been carried out by people in pursuit of profit through rubber. But then I also became quite inspired at times by the history of struggle by people working inside the rubber industry, whether that be people in plantations or wild rubber collection like Chico Mendes, or in the manufacturing industry in the developed world.

His story is inspirational, and not just to Brazilians but to the world. He falls into a long tradition of people fighting back, and what is terrific to me is that he was both a socialist and an environmentalist, and I think that’s an important combination.

But if you look at the history of struggle, even of the Congolese people at the time of Leopold. In his depradations in the Congo, up to ten million people died – nevertheless they did fight back as best they could. It was a bit of an unequal struggle, spears against rifles and gatling guns, and in the end often the best form of resistance was flight into the jungle or over the nearest border, but they fought back.

As did planation workers with huge strike struggles in places such as Vietnam and Malaya against the rubber companies and also against the colonial governments. On the eve of world war two there was even a factory occupation at Firestone in Singapore, so the first world and the third world shared common elements of struggle too.

One of the most inspiring things, I think, was the story of Akron, Ohio, where I spent a bit of time. It’s a different place today of course, because the rubber industry has practically gone. Goodyear hangs on with a few thousand employees but it used to be the rubber centre of the world – rubber’s home town, as they called it. It was one of the bastions of the CIO [Committee of Industrial Unionism], it was a bastion of industrial unionism even before the CIO was founded. It was also a citadel of the Farmer-Labor Party, and that in itself is an interesting story.

So yes: Mendes was one of the latest people in struggle and it still goes on today. I don’t know how much people know about Liberia today, it’s been a US neo-colony since way back, but very recently the Firestone-Bridgestone workers gained control of what had been a company union. There were terrible working conditions – child labour and so forth – and they turned it into a genuine workers’ trade union.

BC: Not everyone’s aware of it, but a lot of modern rubber is actually synthetic. What has this meant for the old rubber tapping industries and the plantations on the one hand, and the ecological footprint of rubber overall?

JT: It’s maybe 50-50 synthetic and natural rubber production in the world now, and I don’t think natural rubber is ever going to die out. In fact the Chinese are busily creating enormous rubber plantations in Laos, what the Americans didn’t bomb to pieces, they’re taking over.

Of course natural rubber plantations do impinge on the natural environment because the plantations are on a colossal scale. They superseded wild rubber. There was some wild rubber production, as we know from Chico Mendes, in Brazil, but mainly the natural stuff is produced on plantations, and of course that has an enormous effect on the environment. It means cutting down huge swathes of mainly tropical rainforest, which is something we shouldn’t be doing today.

On the other hand we have the example of what synthetic rubber production does, because it uses pretty polluting technology: petroleum wastes, coal. You can use grains, but should we be doing that with foodstuffs when we’ve got a food crisis in the world? I don’t think we can. It’s the same as ethanol being produced as fuel.

There are enormous problems and it’s something that isn’t going to go away. Conservation? We waste colossal amounts of rubber, we just throw it away, burn it even, on huge pyres. There are alternatives that we could use even in the temperate countries. The Nazis were aware of one of them, the Kok-Saghyz, the Russian dandelion, that has about ten percent of it’s dry weight rubber. That could be used, we could do a lot better than we do at the present time.

BC: Peak oil and climate change, these two intertwined crises impact on the availability of petrochemicals and raw materials and energy, but also a lot of people expect them to cause a decline in the auto industry. This would presumably lessen the quantity of rubber needed. So what future do you see for the rubber industry?

JT: There will always be a need for rubber. If you think of cars, for instance. Even if we – lets hope – use alternative technologies, we’ll still need rubber. Not just for the tires, which is the first thing people think about, but I think the average car has about 200 other components in it which are composed of rubber. Electrical insulation, whatever industry you look at you see rubber crops up.

That’s one of the things that I began to think about when I worked in the factory, just realising that I don’t even notice this stuff, so we’re always going to have to use it. Synthetic or naturally produced.

But peak oil – well that means that synthetics aren’t going to be as available, also coal – do we really want to keep burning coal? I don’t think so because of climate change. So I think that conservation and natural rubber, but also rubber that we can produce in temperate climates, would be the way forward.

BC: Gutta-percha is not well known now, but perhaps if petrochemicals become more scarce, it could make a comeback?

JT: It was once a household name, everyone knew it, but hardly anyone knows about it now.

It could, yes, but it’s produced on plantations, and it came at an absolutely colossal cost. Again it was an example of a wild product. It came from southeast Asia, from the mainland and the archipelagoes, and it caused colossal destruction of the rainforest.

I wrote that it was an ecological holocaust because that was the size and scale –millions of trees being cut down. A tree would yield maybe a kilogram of gutta-percha, and the whole thing would be chopped down. So if we do go back to it, it would have to be on a plantation basis, a sustainable basis. But certainly it would be preferable, I suppose, to oil wastes and such like, and coal wastes.

BC: The main body of your book goes up to the end of the second world war, with just the epilogue on the postwar world. Why did you choose that as a concluding point? Is that where the modern, mature structure of the rubber industry was settled?

JT: I think it was by that stage. As I pointed out before, some of the first transnational corporations of the world were the rubber giants, and by the second world war they were well and truly entrenched.

They were entrenched in a sort of synergistic relation with the state, even a form of state capitalism in a way in the United states. It wasn’t pure state capitalism, but it was nevertheless that close relationship.

That continued after the war, with further monopolisation of the industry. I think by then it was set in place, and basically what we had seen up to then was repeated and repeated on a colossal scale.

So the struggles of the workers were decentralised away from Akron. They started that in the 1930s, there was the threat, if you go on strike and get militant we’ll move to the deep south. They did that, but they’ve moved right out of there now, they’ve moved offshore to low-wage areas.

But it’s the same sort of thing again, you’ve got appalling health and safety, low wages, a struggle to even have trade unions recognised. It was all done before by the same culprits basically in the United States. But the factories have gone off shore to China, Vietnam, those sort of countries. Where it’s the same thing – no free trade unions, shithouse conditions.

I’ve seen some studies and I quote some of them, on cancers among rubber workers in China, and they’re significantly higher than the general population, particularly bladder cancer. This was also something which was the case when rubber manufacturing was in places like Akron, Ohio.

The Devil’s Milk is available from Monthly Review Press. John Tully will be launching the book in Melbourne on Thursday February 17th, 6:30 PM at Readings Books, Carlton (309 Lygon St); and in New York on Tuesday February 22nd, 7:30 PM at The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street.

Queensland Fruit Fly in Victoria

2011-02-13T20:24:00.003+11:00

With the wild wet, warm weather and record floods of early 2011, northern Victorian fruit growers have suffered a serious outbreak of Queensland fruit fly. This pest infests many kinds of fruit with its destructive maggots, spoiling crops, and has been a perennial problem in Australia for over a century.

Read more »

Weather goes off the charts: is it climate change?

2011-02-10T18:51:00.001+11:00

In the space of a few weeks Australia and the world have been rocked by devastating weather events from huge snowstorms across the USA to flash flooding and cyclones in Australia. Many of these events have not just been catastophic, but setting new records for weather.

In Australia, let’s stop to list the extreme weather events recently:

Serious and long-lasting floods in QLD around Rockhampton
Unprecedented flash flooding in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley
The biggest floods on record in western Victoria
A 100-year record flood in Brisbane
The warmest spring on record in Perth
Sydney has just had a record heatwave, including its hottest February night on record
South Australia and western Queensland had a severe heatwave in late January
And of course, Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi, the worst cyclone in living memory in northern Australia

One picture of the terrifying Toowoomba flash floods

What’s Mine Is Yours

2011-02-08T14:10:00.001+11:00

What’s Mine Is Yours - The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
By Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Harper Collins 2010

I don’t write many negative reviews. Normally, I try to write reviews to tell people about a great book I have just read, or to get them to read it themselves. In this case, I wouldn’t say "don’t read this book". There’s some interesting material here, not least an account of some really interesting schemes for real non-commercial community building and sharing activities. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to track it down, either.

A new economy or a new hype?

Any book that quotes the xenophobic neo-con, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, as some kind of measure of progress raises my suspicions.

In February 2008, the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, commissioned a report on alternative methods for measuring growth. “We’re living in one of those epochs where certitudes have vanished… we have to reinvent, to reconstruct everything,” Sarkozy announced. “So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP.”

The statement isn’t objectionable in itself. GDP measures expenditure, so as the authors point out, an ecological disaster can increase GDP by requiring increased use of services to clean it up. Certainly, the world could do with measuring progress in terms other than bank balances. The authors criticise mindless consumerism, and the waste associated with it manifest in disasters like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

“Collaborative Consumerism” is what the authors identify as a new paradigm that is growing within the old consumerism, fuelled by peer-to-peer information sharing technology on the internet.

The authors recount an array of different web-based collaborative consumption communities. Some are highly familiar, like eBay. Others aren’t (yet) but deserve to be. Couchsurfing, which a friend of mine used while travelling around the world, for example: a free service where you advertise your couch (or spare room) for travellers to stay at free of charge, or look up potential hosts for your backpacking trip. There are similar services for giving away unused second-hand household goods (Freeshare, Freecycle), sharing rides, swapping kids’ toys, and all manner of stuff. There are also many versions that are not free, like eBay, or airbnb.com which is like a payment-based version of couchsurfing; or rental services for kids' toys.

Selling second hand stuff is hardly new. Junk shops and the Trading Post and classifieds have been around for ages. What is it that makes businesses like eBay so different? The authors identify that these kinds of businesses and services, when powered by the web, are so much more accessible and flexible. For example, three-way swaps are easy on swapping sites like SwapTree, whereas teeing up that kind of thing by printed advertisements and phone calls would just take too long.

There is a powerful argument that instead of discarding last year’s unwanted clothing items or kitchen gizmo we could pass it on to others who might appreciate it – without just dumping it in a charity bin and hoping they find a use for it. It certainly could avoid a lot of waste. There is also great potential for building community in these “collaborative consumption” methods – for example, using online bulletin boards to start a street-level “commune” that can help residents share resources with each other.

But there are problems with the discourse: the authors seem to get carried away with their own hype. For starters, they talk a lot about profit-making corporations like eBay, or the online video rental NetFlix that delivers your order to you; yet at the same time they are talking of things like Freecycle which enable people to give away items they no longer need. Surely there is a difference between online rentals and shopping (even online second-hand shopping) and swapping or giving away items for free? But there is little analysis of this difference presented.

Secondly, the authors talk a lot about the potential for avoiding waste as companies redesign products to have replaceable or upgradable parts. They even name a couple of examples – Timberland market a pair of shoes that can be repaired or modified by replacing parts if you send them back for the work to be done. Extended product responsibility, whereby a company is responsible for taking back worn out products and repairing or recycling the materials is a great idea. But one or two examples don’t make a revolution. Inbuilt obsolescence is criminal when you think about it, but the huge profits it creates mean not too many businesses are likely to move to more labour intensive, less profit-intensive practices like building things to last. I want to evidence that this is not just niche marketing before I attribute any great significance to one brand of shoes.

The authors even stray into Big Brother land with their notion that we will all get a centralised “reputation bank” for our online collaborative consumption. You may be aware that if you use an online market like eBay, your peers can rate the reliability of your performance (for example, did you provide the goods you sold in a timely fashion and in the condition advertised). Peer ratings make these services work: you can trust that most sellers are fairly genuine, because they won’t last long if they accumulate bad peer ratings. The authors want an aggregate of your peer ratings from various services.

But peer ratings are not infallible. What review mechanisms will we have? What if you couch-surf with a household that have a profound political disagreement with you? Imagine it’s midnight, you’ve had a couple of drinks with your hosts, and without thinking you curse the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians in response to a TV report that comes on. Unknown to you, your hosts are ardent Zionists, who throw you out and rate you with the service as being a racist anti-semite! (I don’t know if that is actually possible with the couch-surfing platform, but you get the idea). Suddenly you are tarnished, virtually as though you’ve earned a criminal record, without really doing anything wrong. And suddenly you're stranded in a strange place with all your planned accomodation thrown into doubt!

It may not matter too much if it were just your eBay account – you can buy second hand stuff elsewhere if you need it – but what if it affected a lot of your necessary daily transactions? Consider what happened to the guy who is suing FaceBook for suspending his account without explanation or warning: he apparently lost a whole lot of important personal contacts, for reasons quite unknown to him. Perhaps he accidentally offended someone or had his account hijacked by a spam service, Facebook aren't telling.

How radical a challenge to consumerism is this “collaborative consumption” anyway? The book admits “eBay has now grown into a gigantic online store, with a significant percentage of exchanges involving new products.” Explaining the breadth of appeal of this new way of doing things, the book says

…from the masses of baby boomers addicted to eBay (21 per cent of all users are over 50 years old) to the Gen Xers increasingly using bartering services, people are participating in different types of Colaborative Consumption from a diverse array of subcultures and socioeconomic and demographic groups.

There’s a revealing turn of phrase here. Having people addicted to purchasing things is not really a mark of any kind of liberation or progress that I can identify with. It’s entirely within the framework of consumerism. Sure it’s a bit smarter and more customisable to the individual, but that’s just part of the charm that keeps you buying, right?

The authors probably reveal more about their own ideological prejudices than their subject matter when they write that

For the most part, the people participating in Collaborative Consumption are not Pollyannish do-gooders and still very much believe in the principles of capitalist markets and self-interest. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner envisioned that these citizens desire a world in which “Each individual could act in his or her own self-interest and at the same time produce a unified social sphere, in which we’re ‘all one.’”

This is a common theme throughout the book: they aren't talking about hippies but savvy entrepreneurs, such comments are repeatedly thrown in.

This regurgitation of free-market dogma is not more convincing because it’s written about people connected by the internet. It is a profound fallacy of liberal economics that self-interest brings about some kind of greater good; the “invisible hand of the market” invests the “market” with the will to act of its own accord, as though it were a discreet entity capable of independent action. Really, the market is just a collection of people, and if they are all acting in their own self-interest it would be truly remarkable for this to turn out for the greater good.

Ideologically, this book seems to promote a kind of market utopianism, marked by a slightly naïve technological optimism. I’m all for using new technology and I’m not the kind of socialist who thinks all commodity markets can be abolished overnight, but I think that the daydreaming vision of the future presented in the last paragraphs of the book might have blinded the authors to some of the real power relations that prevent their utopia from coming to pass (like with the inbuilt obsolescency issue).

Alistair Davidson has an interesting article at Links magazine which outlines the rise of the free software movement, leading to wikileaks. Digital information “wants to be free” as they say. Botsman and Rogers are trying to make the case that information technology is not just transforming how we use information, but how the physical economy works (something Davidson clearly did not argue, by the way). I am not convinced, as you can tell from this review.

And back to Sarkozy, recently notorious for deporting Romany (gypsies) from France to Romania. The war between the rich world and the poor world hasn’t stopped all of a sudden. How many poor Pakistani or Bolivian peasants are going to be availing themselves of a couchsurfing host in Melbourne? Even if they tried, I doubt the Australian government would give them a visa, due to the “risk” that they might illegally overstay it. (European backpackers never overstay their visas, right folks?). Relatively speaking, even poor people in countries like Australia have a degree of privilege over vast numbers of poor people elsewhere. Nifty arrangements like Freeshare might help us to get by, or provide some kind of outlet, but I can’t see them solving many of the poor world’s problems. I'm convinced they amount to any profound change in the economy of consumerism and third world exclusion, despite some genuinely interesting, innovative and useful ideas that could be of real benefit to many communities.

The Social and Economic Impact of Rural Wind Farms

2011-02-08T13:31:00.001+11:00

For the first time, I just wrote a submission to a parliamentary inquiry, the Senate Inquiry into the Social and Economic Impact of Rural Wind Farms. It's not a comprehensive treatment of the matter, just some points on a couple of key matters - jobs and climate. I have my reservations whether community submissions to these inquiries are really taken seriously, but at the very least sitting down to write a submission is a good way to collect one's thoughts.

The inquiry was set up at the behest of Steve Fielding, a well-known climate denialist and the only MP for the arch-conservative Family First party. If you want to make a submission, Cam Walker from Friends of the Earth has outlined some ideas for how to go about it from an environmental viewpoint at the Yes to Renewable Energy blog. I also recommend this blog, in particular the comments discussions on some posts, to peek into the interesting world of the anti-wind farm lobby.

Following are the notes that I scribbled down which I based my submission on.

15 authors

2010-12-23T19:20:00.002+11:00

I've been too busy to write much lately, but in the occasional bout of obsessive facebok (sic) procrastination I came up with the following. Of course it's too late to think of buying presents based on this, but then Christmas is more about giving to Coles-Myer and Woolworths and your credit card balance than anything else I think. And teaching children that happiness comes from acquiring stuff (not doing stuff).

The premise for the list is as follows:

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

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Time to sacrifice consumerism

2010-12-08T18:24:00.002+11:00

This abridged version of my article Consumerism or Liberation has just been published in Green Left Weekly (edited to be somewhat shorter than the text below).

Many liberal environmentalists say that people must sacrifice some of their luxuries to save the environment and/or help the world’s poor. More equitable sharing of the world means some have to give up a bit.

For the well-off, sacrifice is like charity: giving up a little of their privileges to make themselves feel better. For such people, talk of sacrifice only reinforces an elitist mentality.

But for poorer, working-class people, sacrifice has another connotation. It’s the sacrifices made for the boss and the government, sacrifices that are never repaid to those making them. It is the mantra of the last three decades of decreasing standards of living: longer work hours, lower wages and less social services.

British socialist Jonathan Neale argues against the idea of “sacrifice” at the outset of his 2008 book “Stop Global Warming: change the world”. In particular, Neale points out that the majority of the world’s population do not have much to sacrifice, and actually want more not less as part of a just solution.

But what about “giving up” some of the unpaid overtime that people work? What about “giving up” some of the menial call centre or production line jobs for less repetitive, monotonous work? What about “giving up” the time spent in traffic jams to take public transport instead? Sustainable socialist society is necessarily about better living standards and individual empowerment. “Sacrifice” may mean much more than giving up SUVs and flatscreen TVs and airconditioned McMansions.

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Replace ALL of Hazelwood

2010-11-07T18:18:00.004+11:00

Report and pictures submitted to Green Left Weekly

Close to 5000 protesters took to Melbourne's streets on November 6 demanding the next state government replace the Hazelwood power station with genuinely clean energy during the next term of office. Victoria goes to the polls on November 27.

Rally organisers pointed out that Hazelwood is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases per unit of electricity of any power station in Australia. It is responsible for 3% of the nation’s entire carbon emissions by itself. It is also the nation’s largest emitter of dioxin, the most toxic known chemical compound.

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Have your thoughts been inoculated?

2010-11-07T17:40:00.003+11:00

One of the insidious methods of unprincipled politics is that of inoculating one’s supporters against even listening to alternative points of view.

I suspect that may have been the effect, even if we can't ascertain exact intent, of the Labor spinsters who launched a botched smear campaign against Brian Walters, the Greens candidate for the seat of Melbourne in the state election.

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Consumerism or liberation?

2010-10-31T19:11:00.007+11:00

A slightly edited version of this article was published at Links magazine. An abridged version is available here and as published by Green Left Weekly, here.

In a recent seminar on trade unions and the climate movement, I observed a surprising disagreement between some of the socialists present. It was started by a comment from Melbourne University academic (and Socialist Alliance activist) Hans Baer, who suggested that the “treadmill of production and consumption” had to be challenged, that we need to challenge consumerism and the alienation of work that makes people buy things to feel better.

Liz Ross of Socialist Alternative took umbrage and declared that this was against the idea that workers could create and enjoy wonderful technological products, tearing down a straw figure that Hans was supposedly arguing to stultify the creativity of the working class.

A more nuanced response came from a member of Solidarity, Chris Breen, who suggested he was fine with rich people giving up their second house but against the idea that ordinary people should be asked to sacrifice.

The disagreement over consumerism highlights a strategic debate among environmentalists, but also an important debate on the left.

How high's the water?

2010-10-03T11:08:00.000+11:00

This short video was made as part of the 2010 Federal Election campaign, but is also a summary of some of the climate change impacts that will affect my area, Melbourne's western suburbs.

Coal rules, OK

2010-09-18T10:28:00.003+10:00

Coal rules. That is the message delivered this week by the new ALP government.

Freshly appointed Federal Climate Minister, Greg Combet, began his ministership telling The Australian on 13 September that “The coal industry is a very vibrant industry with a strong future. What you've got to do is look to how we can achieve in the longer term things like carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power stations.”

Regular readers of my articles will probably already be aware that “carbon capture and storage” is a theoretical technology that is not at the stage of implementation (and is unlikely to get there any time soon).

Read more »

Suburban garden dreaming

2010-09-04T11:38:00.003+10:00

Billy Wharton, editor of the Socialist Party USA's Socialist WebZine, has an article (reprinted at Links) about daydreaming. “A recent study featured in the Los Angeles Times suggests that daydreaming or other such unstructured mental activities might play a key role in mental well being. Unknowingly, this study promotes a prime potential of a democratic socialist society – the right to free time.”

The idea that unstructured daydreaming might be good for your health has interesting implications for the modern consumer leisure ideal: every waking non-working hour one is encouraged to consume leisure products - principally through the media: music, radio, TV, internet.

Radio is also present at many workplaces, not just outside work. It can provide some relief from boredom and a sense of company listening to the chatter and music. It also crowds out the kind of thinking (not really reducible to "daydreaming" I think) that Billy Wharton is talking about. I am no scientist but I wouldn't be surprised if there were links to many common disorders like depression and ADHD in this lack of mental quiet.

TV is a modern substitute for the ancient passtime of sitting around the fire in the evening - talking, partying or just staring into the flames. But it's mostly an inferior substitute! Passive recreation that crowds your brain with other people’s thoughts and ideas is not conducive to "unstructured mental activities" at all.

One of my hobbies is gardening. The media plug gardening in conventional marketing terms: garden makeover blitzes, oxymoronic DIY kits from home hardware superstores, gardening catalogues that promise the biggest, tastiest, no-dig, pest-free experience.

Sadly, many organic gardening specialists tend to use the same marketing method. They say their product is superior in the same terms as the other variety – bigger crops, tastier, easier to grow, etc. Many people have bought the wrong idea about organics. My father sells his organically grown apples at the local markets and says occasionally someone comes back to complain of a grub they found in their apple, or refuses to buy because of the blemishes on the outside of the apples.

Some organic produce marketing could be a little more honest, but marketing it still would be. You can't market the actual experience of gardening, which is contemplative and observational. It can't be bought: it can only be practiced and learned. And the more work required (up to a point) the more enjoyment you get. To rush out and buy a pile of stuff then frantically spend the weekend digging and planting and pruning and trying to finish your plan is not how to get into gardening.

The best way to garden is to wander around the garden watching. Soon enough you will see something that sparks off a memory or idea and you can spontaneously go from there, in the process developing a deeper sense of what is happening in your garden and your relation to it. You may not win garden design awards (or you may!) but you will have a much richer experience. Your frantic weekend plans, if you ever hatch them, will then be informed by a deeper understanding of what may work.

Connection to the environment, even the partly artificial environment of a suburban garden, is not just good for mental health. It also fosters ecological consciousness and it can bring together community when you do it in a group (as in a community garden, or a friends-of-the-local-creek/wetland/bush-type-society). Re-connecting people to nature and each other is going to be the key to surviving the climate change crisis and peak oil and to create a sustainable, participative and democratic society. That’s why gardening is a part of the social change we need, not just my private hobby.

Melbourne at 175: City of the White Elephant

2010-08-30T21:40:00.001+10:00

August 30 marks Melbourne's 175th birthday. It's as good a time as any to note what a mess this place is getting into. If you've ever been here you would know about the slow-moving disaster that is our public transport over the last five or eight years. That's not strictly a white elephant; it's at least intended to perform a useful task.

But somehow Melbourne people just don't notice when an insultingly ridiculous and expensive public engineering cock-up is stuck in front of them. Take the Southern Star Observation Wheel. onlymelbourne.com.au says:

The Observation Wheel is a stunning addition to the Melbourne landscape that boasts some of the most spectacular views over Melbourne and beyond.

The $40 million ferris wheel based on the London Eye is almost 120m, around 38 storeys into the air featuring 21 airconditioned glass cabins that showcase views stretching as far as Geelong.

No trip to Melbourne is complete until you have seen the views from the Southern Star Observation Wheel.

There must be a lot of unfulfilled tourists because it doesn't work. Currently it looks a bit like this:

Southern Star Observation Wheel... sans observation wheel

After being built up and launched at the beginning of 2009, it failed the first test a month later: the (admittedly record-breaking) heatwave that preceded Black Saturday caused the metal to warp. Now it has been taken down and although it is supposedly going to be rebuilt, there is no sign yet.

$40 million dollars. As I was saying, we have serious problems with our public transport. $40 million would help fix some of that. Or any other number of problems like homelessness and public housing waiting lists, hospital bed shortages, the list goes on...

And another big fat white elephant: Southern Cross station. Not the station, the new(ish) roof. Confessions of a Graphic Designer has a handy couple of pictures of it and some commentary which I'll borrow:

"On the 22nd of June, Grimshaw architects won the 2007 Lubetkin Prize for the most outstanding building outside of the European Union. The undulating wave-like roof to me is its most interesting creative point because it creates the impression of movement and continuance that relates to the usage of the building. As well as being striking it is also functional, Keith Brews of the Grimshaw team explains: "It's difficult to extract diesel fumes, but if you create a dome, they can move laterally. As the wind speen increases across the roof, the wind goes up the side of the domes and across the Venturi caps, which either allow some air through, or suck it (and the diesel fumes) up." (2007)."

I don't know if Grimshaw got to keep that prestigious prize, because they clearly forgot to model what would happen when it rains:

Southern Cross Station in downpour (image linked from The Age)

Not to mention that the supposedly self-ventilating roof didn't work and they had to put fans in. And the whole enclosed station area echoes with diesel locomotive engine noises and incomprehensible (or inaudible) announcements. The old Spencer St Station (which became Southern Cross) was not real flash, but you didn't cop diesel fumes and noise pollution. And the roofs, modest though they were, worked!

What else? We could talk roads, freeways, the Domain Tunnel (try using it on an afternoon... traffic banked up to Toorak Rd). I could mention the channel deepening: to let in a handful of superlarge container ships, the bay was dredged and the heads blown open. Now beaches around the bay are getting washed away by the increased currents. I could mention the ecological disasters of our carbon-intensive water factory (desalination plant) at Wonthaggi and the pipeline that brings water from the drought-stricken north to wash driveways in Melbourne.

But those are more political and ecological concerns (although if you ask anyone directly affected, you'll get an answer as brisk as asking a stranded commuter at the station what they think of the train operators!).

The waste of public money on these big public show-off projects is insulting. Melbourne was already pretty without big shiny toy buildings and meccano toys scattered across the cityscape. What is needed is more public infrastructure, not the answer to the London Eye. If they could at least get these things right it might be bearable but I'm not holding my breath. And what will be their next bright idea for a big monument? I dare not speculate. If everyone thought like me, it might be a giant guillotine.

Rehabilitating utopia and saving the future

2010-08-28T22:33:00.002+10:00

Socialism was conceived as a creative and idealistic movement, but lost its way for most of the 20th century. Recapturing this imaginative energy can help find solutions to such huge threats as climate change. This article started from a short impromptu speech I gave to launch the third edition of the Socialist Alliance's Climate Charter.

Socialism used to be a rallying point for idealists, utopians, dreamers and those who were simply hopeful. It carried an almost millenarian promise of redemption and salvation. More importantly, it allowed its advocates to exercise their imagination. If socialism was to democratically realise the wishes of the common working people, why should they be restrained in their wishes?

There are pitfalls in utopian imaginings. George Orwell once said that “ 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Inevitably, some utopian visions have been codified (and ossified) into cult dogma.

When the left banished utopia
But the 20th century left did not in the main succumb to utopian cults. Rather, it lost most of its creative imagination. The state socialist countries of the Eastern bloc as much as the social-democratic and labour movements in the West all succumbed to (or promoted) a grey economic reduction of the socialist vision.

Admittedly, even among the most authoritarian of the Stalinist parties, they never truly killed off creativity. The Communist Party of Australia had workers’ theatre. The USSR had Shostakovich and the Bolshoi Ballet and more. But the creative urge was de-coupled from the political project: it became a pressure relief valve for the masses. In the west, union campaigns for shorter work hours were probably the most creative movement, but the liberatory potential of freeing people from work was largely negated by the greater focus on wage rises and the related growth of consumerism.

The culture and dreams of working people have thus been privatised by the old, official “left”. State socialism and social democracy sought to out-compete the capitalists in economic growth and consumerism - without success. Clearly, if the aim was to enable working class people to be overweight, bored couch potatoes in front of a very big TV, capitalism won that competition.

Read more »

People before Prophets!

2010-08-23T22:59:00.001+10:00

The local newspaper rang during the election campaign to ask some “questions without notice.” I stumbled a bit when they asked “What is your party’s policy on paid maternity leave and how much would it cost?”

The journalist transcribed my clumsy answer thus: “I don’t have a cost figure but I can get it. We do support paid maternity leave for both parents. Substantial leave.”

(For the record, the exact Socialist Alliance policy is “12 months’ parenting leave fully paid by employer contributions to a publicly managed scheme; the right to return to the same job; and generous paid leave to allow parents to take time off work to care for sick children and attend school activities.”)

I thought I was caught off guard forgetting the details of that important policy. But how’s this for the other socialist candidate, Tania Baptist of the Socialist Equality Party:

“Well we, hang on. We don’t have policies as such. Essentially what we are aiming for is a transformation of society so production is not used for profit but need. What was the question? There would be high quality child care and parental leave at full pay for as long as a mother thinks she needs it.”

Socialist Alliance say: No Freeway!

2010-07-31T11:23:00.002+10:00

Leaflet for my election campaign

Melbourne's west needs its transport fixed, but you won't hear any solutions from the Labor government. They don't care that no-one wants their quick-fix freeway.

Socialist Alliance wants Federal government to block funding for the WestLink freeway. Even if state government is determined to build this white elephant, it can be stopped.

Real solutions to road congestion and run-down public transport don't mean new freeways. One rail track can carry as many people as six lanes of freeway. It is energy efficient, quiet and non-polluting. It takes up a fraction of the land area, it costs less to maintain, and it reduces congestion on the roads.

If we are to have tunnels, it should be for the regional rail link so that it does not demolish homes.

Building more roads leads to more reliance on cars, more traffic, and soon the new roads get jammed up as well. Look at the West Gate and Ring Road. Melbourne has had no new railway lines since 1930, but the freeways just keep rolling out. They haven't fixed the problem.

Cleaner, effective transport is a federal priority for Socialist Alliance. Our policies include:
No new freeways, in Footscray or elsewhere;
Freight on rail, trucks off suburban roads;
Free, fast and frequent urban public transport extended to all urban areas.

Federal government can stop this freeway. Melbourne needs a world class train system for commuters like cities in Europe. Vote to send a message to Labor: don't let them get away with this anymore.

150 words on the elections

2010-07-30T17:36:00.001+10:00

The local newspaper asked for 150 words. This is what I boiled my campaign down to!

Urgent action on climate change was one thing the Labor government was explicitly voted in to do. They have done nothing. Australia is now coming last internationally in carbon emissions per capita. The recent Zero Carbon Australia report shows we could go zero emissions by 2020, but Labor’s baby steps in renewable energy are dwarfed by their assistance to the coal industry.

Labor promised to “tear up” WorkChoices, but kept much of the worst of it. Construction workers can still be jailed just for refusing attend a secret interrogation by the ABCC.

We are seeing a rerun of Howard’s scapegoating of refugees as well, with children still in detention and growing numbers of genuine refugees imprisoned.

I’m running with the Socialist Alliance because both Labor and Liberal are serving big corporate interests, and its time to put a voice for ordinary, working people into parliament.

Tanuro and Invernizzi get Cochabamba wrong

2010-06-28T21:43:00.002+10:00

This is a response to the article World People's Conference on Climate Change: Some critical comments on the People's Agreement by Daniel Tanuro and Sandra Invernizzi. The article was published in International Viewpoint and republished by Links.

In their article World People's Conference on Climate Change: Some critical comments on the People's Agreement Daniel Tanuro and Sandra Invernizzi have missed the main usefulness of this document.

They note that “The words “coal” and “natural gas” are simply not mentioned. The expression “renewable energies” is also absent” and that the document “overlooks the struggle against the capitalist energy lobbies and the sectors linked to it (cars, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, the aeronautics industry, transport …), whereas this is obviously the key question in the framework of an anti-capitalist strategy of stabilisation of the climate.”

It is true the conference did not target the hydrocarbon industries. The Bolivian Hydrocarbon ministry in fact had a stall at the conference.

Hydrocarbons and Energy Ministry stall at Cochabamba conference

The conference was very Bolivian: 26000 out of 35000 participants were from Bolivia. It is true that it reflected many of the weaknesses and strengths of the Bolivian government and movement, but Tanuro and Invernizzi overestimate the weaknesses relative to the strengths.

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Greens could win seat of Melbourne

2010-06-26T18:54:00.002+10:00

Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner announced his intention to quit politics at the next election on June 24, in a move that has been seen as giving the Greens an even better chance at winning his seat, the electorate of Melbourne.

Greens candidate for Melbourne Adam Bandt is running a serious campaign in the seat and is tipped as even more likely to win now with Tanner stepping down. The Greens say that only one in 10 people who voted Labor last time need to change to Green in order for Bandt to win the seat.

I interviewed Adam for Green Left Weekly. This is the full transcript of the interview (the published version was cut for space reasons).

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Edgewater: Underwater (who will be the first to suffer?)

2010-06-12T13:39:00.000+10:00

Small Pacific nations like Tuvalu and Kiribas, and island states around the world, will feel the pain of climate change most severely. Indeed, they already are feeling it. Many nations will feel the pain of water shortages; indeed they already are feeling it. Bolivia, for example, as I've written about after recently visiting.

Ordinary people in rich countries are insulated a little from these effects. We can turn up the aircon, our governments can build desalination plants. But inevitably someone is going to be suffering. This protest just over the other side of my suburb (Footscray) is about educating people on these dangers. The rationale for the protest can be read in more detail here. To join the organising, register with the group online at WeCAN.

Just click on the image for the full size picture.

Fighting and uniting

2010-06-12T11:52:00.006+10:00

The road that led to the Socialist Alliance

The Socialist Alliance was founded in 2001 when six smaller socialist groups joined with the International Socialist Organisation and the Democratic Socialist Party and a significant number of individuals from none of the organised groups and grouplets.

The way that this remarkable unity came about was somewhat odd and symptomatic of the rivalry that existed between the small socialist groups. A leaked document from the ISO (see first appendix) suggested that they were going to drop their traditional support for the ALP at election times. They intended instead to explore left electoral alliances, like the Socialist Alliance in the UK.

This was something that the DSP had long been in favour of, at least in theory. According to one story I heard, the ISO was not originally intending to make an overture to the DSP, but rather to develop more locally centred alliances with other, independent left activists. The DSP had in recent years adopted a position of only building itself and no longer actively calling for any such alliances (see second appendix).

Nevertheless, the DSP quickly pitched to ISO the idea of launching an a broader and nationally organised alliance, the ISO agreed, and the process rapidly developed its own momentum.

This sudden outbreak of unity did not come from nowhere. Several years of participation side by side in militant struggles had created a certain amount of good will, not simply between the various little groups but mediated through much broader networks of activists.

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Natural gas and the climate movement

2010-06-07T17:16:00.001+10:00

The most serious controversy that has emerged in the climate movement this year is probably about the role of natural gas in a transition to a zero-emissions society.

The national climate summit in March did not debate gas, but decisions taken there have influenced the debate. A decision of that summit was to campaign to “replace Australia's dirtiest coal-fired power station, Hazelwood, with clean energy by 2012”.

At the vote, there was dissent, including the argument that the 2012 deadline “suggests that a gas station would replace it”. Rather, the “focus should be on what will replace Hazelwood”, some said. In the end the proposition was passed with 84% of the vote, despite the objection.

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Cynical Unity Mongering

2010-05-26T22:51:00.003+10:00

(If you were bigger, we would enter you)

I have been in favour of greater left unity for a long time. But occasionally one sees a side of the left that one would rather not see. I ask myself: could I seriously join in a common political organisation with someone who can use the phrase “cynical unity mongering” with a straight face?

I have no sensible answer to that question! A Socialist Alternative member recently commented on a blog that Socialist Alliance “is probably the clearest single example internationally of the utterly destructive impact that cynical unity mongering can have on the left.”

The Socialist Alliance is the outcome of three decades (give or take a bit) of the former Democratic Socialist Party’s left unity attempts. I joined the DSP in the early 1990s when there were no such left unity attempts being made, despite several very serious projects during the 1980s.

In fact, in the 1990s, I think the DSP’s approach to left unity was quite rhetorical and defensive. The left unity experiments of the 1980s had all ended badly (as had the party’s mistaken support for Gorbachev, and as had the Nicaraguan revolution that the DSP had been a strong supporter of). “Cynical” – probably not, not most of the members at any rate. But the history of the left’s battles in 1990s Victoria (where I was involved for some of the time) provides a few lessons in failing to take unity seriously enough.

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The Watermotor: renewable energy for poor rural areas

2010-05-17T14:01:00.004+10:00

This interview I conducted with Ron Davis, designer of Campo Nuevo's watermotor: a small scale hydro motor that he designed to help with development in poor rural areas that lack access to the electricity grid.

Ben Courtice This is Ben Courtice and I’m here at the World Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba in Bolivia, so here I’m talking to Ron Davis who has designed a water motor which he is advocating as an appropraite technology for sustainable development. So Ron, if you could introduce yourself.

Ron Davis I’m Ron Davis and I designed a small turbine that can be used to directly power machines.

BC So in history we’ve seen a lot of water wheels and hydraulic power used. It’s not necessarily the newest technology around. But certainly this one looks promising. Could you explain how the history of the water wheel has influenced your design?

RD The water wheel was humanity’s first natural energy and the source of most modern technology, mechanical technology, comes from the use of the water wheel. Over a period of at least 2000-2500 years.

BC How far across the world has the water wheel, the ancient, traditional water wheel technology been used?

RD The most common ancient design water wheel spread almost around the entire world. Even today there’s examples of the ancient water wheel still in use here in south america.

An ancient water wheel

BC So you have designed this water wheel that you call the water motor, or hidromotor, and what have you changed from traditional designs or other industrial modern designs of water wheels to make yours?

RD Basically I’ve gone back to the traditional design. I’ve sort of, you might say I’ve re-invented the wheel. Or the water-wheel. And what I’ve done mostly is adapt modern technology to use the water power directly rather than to make electricity.

BC In terms of the construction of the models you’ve got here on display, the Pelton, what’s the name of the more common water wheel we see?

RD The most widely known small hydro wheel is the Pelton. I’m using an improved version of that called the Turgo wheel, but actually it’s not a new design, it goes back at least 500 years. There’s examples, and drawings of examples, going back to before the year 1600.

BC So the Pelton has limitations in it’s capacity based on the direction of the water flow against the blades of the wheel, is this correct?

RD The Pelton tends to … well, we’re getting into technical things here, but this is an improved version of the Pelton wheel. It can use far more water than the Pelton can. So the same size wheel will produce more power.

Campo Nuevo's small watermotor

BC The two you have on display here – you’ve got one smaller and one larger – would you like to tell us the size and the power output for our listeners to get an understanding?

RD The small one is capable of running most machines that are driven by mid-sized electric motors. This turbine that I’ve built can be used in place of electric motors – stationary electric motors – in most machines.

BC The larger one I think is 150mm diameter wheel, is that correct?

RD That one, my basic model, is capable of producing twenty horsepower, which is far larger than most electric motors.

BC And because you don’t try to go to electricity, you directly drive the machine, it’s actually very efficient. Do you know what sort of efficiency loss you have in this motor?

RD These turbines are 80-85% efficient. And that’s a big advantage, because the efficiency, when you’re using direct drive, you maximise the use of the available water and water power that you have. And so you don’t waste a lot of the energy in converting to electricity and then re-converting back to motor power. Though also it has limitations, that you have to drive the machine from a location, well basically where the turbine is located.

BC If you were to use this to generate electricity, what sort of output, how many watts output would you get from it?

Larger watermotor

RD From the larger turbine you would get around 12Kw of electricity.

BC You’ve successfully marketed these to some customers, they’re in use around the place, maybe you could just give us a run-down on some of the applications that your wheels have been used for?

RD Well, some of them are used to generate electricity, because the watermotor does that as well as any other turbine. What I’ve done is invent a power control system, and as far as I know it’s the only turbine that has an instant power control system so that the turbine can be switched on and off just as an electric motor. As far as the uses go, they range from peeling coffee in Nicaragua to plucking chickens in Ecuador.

BC To make one of these wheels, Turgo wheels, part of the idea is it’s appropriate technology for development that can be used in poor countries, what sort of industrial resources does someone need if they were to start building their own, if the idea was taken up?

RD Well, I designed this turbine to be made in a small shop with locally available materials, with common technical ability.

BC You need a basic small foundry, a small machine shop, a bit of welding capability, is that roughly it?

RD Yes. You need a small amount of lathe work and to make the actual turbine wheel you need to be able to cast aluminium or bronze, in small pieces, of aluminium or bronze for each of the blades of the turbine, and then the turbine is assembled from these castings.

BC And the control system looks like it might need something a little more complicated like a milling machine, is that correct?

RD No, the control system needs to simply be carefully made, it doesn’t require any special tools, a hacksaw and a file.

BC That’s pretty easy for most people to get hold of I suppose! Are there any other applications that this could be taken up for, or that you would like to see it considered for?

RD The idea of this, the reason that we launched into this project, was that especially here in Bolivia, people that live away from the electricity grid, which is almost probably 85% of the country or more, they have no way to produce things they need locally, because they don’t have machine power, and the lack of machine power is one of the chief causes of rural poverty. So with the watermotor, if they happen to have a small fast-flowing stream nearby, they’re able to use the watermotor to produce items that you normally need an electric motor to produce. And then, besides that, there’s crop processing, like peeling coffee, chopping fodder, various agricultural products.

BC Using a fast flowing stream, you’re not actually polluting the water or the air or anything, this is very renewable technology isn’t it?

RD That’s right, it actually improves the quality of the water because it’s aerated as it goes through the turbine, oxygen from the air is introduced so the water is actually improved somewhat, and as it turns it uses no water, in reality it uses no water at all, it uses merely the energy from the water and the water is returned to the stream.

BC Roughly what sort of water flow do you borrow from the stream, how many litres per minute, and how many metres of drop do you typically use in these applications?

RD We usually talk about 15 meters of pressure, that is the water enters the pressure pipe 15 metres above where the turbine is situated, and the quantity of water can be thought of as enough to fill a four-inch pipe or 100mm pipe, and the volume being from 200 litres a minute on up, to a thousand litres a minute.

BC You hold a patent on this technology in Bolivia, but what’s your attitude to other people using it? They can order from you can’t they, but are you happy for people to build this sort of thing themselves?

RD Well, this is an appropriate technology design, and so by definition I built it to be in public domain. The only part of it that is patented, here in Bolivia, is the control system and that was patented primarily to prevent other people from taking it over and claiming it as their own, which unfortunately happens all too often in this world. The rest of the machine, the basic turbine and turbine wheel and so on, it was designed to be copied. Each one of them I offer as an encouragement to be copied.

BC And can people get the design plan to build their own from your website?

RD Well the design itself is not on the website. I would suggest that they buy one and then copy the one that they buy. I think that would be a good idea because I’m trying to make a living also!

BC That’s fair enough! We’ve given a bit of an overview of this technology and people can look at the website as well, do you just want to tell people the web address?

RD OK, the website to see the watermotor, and information about the watermotor, is simply www.watermotor.net – that’s the website. They can see the watermotor in action, actually the very first watermotor, is shown in action on YouTube, at an address of watermotorturbine, one word.

BC Is there anything else you want to add to the interview?

RD I want to send my regards to the people of Australia, and I hope that somehow this can be of use to someone there.

BC Thanks a lot for that, Ron.

Climate, jobs and immigration: my election campaign

2010-05-09T11:38:00.001+10:00

I have been selected as the Socialist Alliance candidate for the Federal seat of Gellibrand in Melbourne’s western suburbs. I have spent much of the last 13 years as a union activist here, working in the manufacturing industry. This is the “rust belt” – the old industrial heartland, and also one of the most ethnically diverse, immigrant areas of the country.

Workplace rights, industrial decline, and the treatment of immigrants are issues that have all affected me here. But world events have returned me to the first political interest of my life: protecting the environment. In particular, stopping climate change.

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Paying the climate debt

2010-05-05T12:20:00.004+10:00

Continuing reporting and reflections on the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

The main business of the conference was done in 17 official working groups that drafted documents for adoption by the conference. Bolivia has now submitted these documents to the UN. Here I want to highlight the importance of these documents for the world's climate movement.

The conference was called to support the rights of Mother Earth, Pachamama in the local indigenous languages. The proposed Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth opens with the statement that “Mother Earth is a living being.” This is straight out of the indigenous Andean world view, an idea apparently accepted widely in Bolivia (and Bolivians were 26000 out of 35000 participants at this conference). In his speech at the opening ceremony, Evo Morales said that Pachamama is what the scientists call “planet earth”. Personally I think it’s better to stick to that term and leave religious terms to religious gatherings, but the ideas following that first point in the final document are quite ecologically sound.

A second key idea at the conference was vivir bien – living well. This is similar to the common idea expressed in the west, “live simply so that others may simply live”. It is the eco-socialist and counter-cultural idea that you don’t need to live an extravagant consumer lifestyle to be happy; in fact, it is less likely to make you happy. It is an argument against the idea that third world development must follow the road to wasteful consumerism that the West has followed. It is a call to action against the foundations of capitalism in the west: what Fred Magdoff referred to at the conference as the "cycle of production and consumption".

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La Cumbre en Cochabamba: initial reflections

2010-04-25T06:23:00.002+10:00

This is just a first reflection on the monumental World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which just finished in Cochabamba. I will post more on particular aspects of the summit soon.

Cordillera view from Tiquipaya

The event was huge, with at least 20 000 (I’ve heard over 30 000) attending at the university Univalle in Tiquipaya, a municipality on the northwest edge of Cochabamba. There was a huge attendance from Bolivians, who are very much engaged in the political process of their country, and generally very supportive of their charismatic President Evo Morales. Delegations came, many in their traditional costume (which they still wear every day), from indigenous tribal people in the Amazon, from the Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Andes, from a plethora of unions, peasant and indigenous associations and NGOs, from all of what is called the “plurinational state of Bolivia.”

There were also big delegations from pretty much all the countries of Latin America. There was a fair scattering of North Americans, a few from Central America, and a pretty sparse representation from the rest of the world. Europe, Asia and Africa were under-represented partly because any flights going through Europe were cancelled after the volcanic eruption in Iceland. It was a clearly left gathering: the conservative NGO and aid milieu were keeping a low profile if they were there.

The summit had 17 working groups to write a document each for adoption by the summit. Topics of these ranged from the somewhat esoteric “shared vision” to concrete discussions such as on forests, and on a world referendum on climate action proposed by the Bolivian government.

In many ways the summit was driven by the radical agenda of the Latin American socialist governments – Bolivia of course, and Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador. The discourse from the Bolivians, in particular, was largely based on an indigenous philosophy of vivir bien – living well – in harmony with Pachamama – mother earth.

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CMPCC: the opening ceremony

2010-04-21T21:50:00.002+10:00

The opening ceremony of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was held with much fanfare, a military parade and band, many indigenous peoples and a huge international delegation - mostly South American. Here are some pictures to give a little flavour.

The multicoloured flag of the plurinational state of Bolivia is everywhere, as seen in the first picture.

Wipala flag of the indigenous movement

The military parade is something we don't usually get at our rallies in Australia.


Bolivian Army parade at conference opening

The indigenous people with the feather headdress come from out in the Amazon region.

Indigenous group from Bolivian Amazonia

The "Christ: first revolutionary" banner was the first thing that greeted me at the conference venue. Another thing you wouldn't see in Australia!

Christian revolutionary banner

The politics of the event are strongly anti-capitalist, anti-consumerism and pro-indigenous. While it's radical in Australia to say "business-as-usual economics can't fix the problem", here most are calling for an end to capitalism. Can't say I disagree!

More posts will follow over the next few days.

Public transport: the weakest link?

2010-04-15T09:15:00.003+10:00

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains - and a world to win!

If a chain can be said to break at it's weakest link, then those of us in the business of breaking the chains ought to think about what that link might be.

The chains of consumerism may be gold plated, but they are chains nevertheless. The alienation of depressing work is ameliorated by spending the weekly pay cheque on gadgets and distractions.

The biggest consumer item can be said to be the home, but this is not so clear because a home is also a genuine necessity. Transport is also a necessity, but cars on the other hand are simply a consumer item. After housing (if you count it), cars are about the biggest single consumer item there is.

Convincing people to quit using their cars is pretty difficult. Rising petrol prices has done the job to an extent, but an absolute limit is hit as the trains become too full to fit more people, and all the people who can reasonably use public transport for commuting get onto it. The rest, who don't have public transport access, are stuck with higher transport costs.

Expanding public transport access is an obvious measure of social justice. Everyone living in a city ought to have access to what Melbourne commuters call "PT".

Traditionally, PT has filled a niche in getting people to work where using cars would simply be unrealistic. If everyone in the CBD tried to drive to work in the morning all on the same day, they would probably still be stuck in traffic jams trying to get there at midnight. A basic level of PT is therefore a necessity for the economic system.

Trying to expand PT beyond that, however, is a political struggle. Many urban planners will advise that a reliable, frequent public transport system that is accessible to large numbers of people will generate increasing patronage for its services. A minimal, let alone unreliable, CBD-commuter system is unlikely to inspire most people to use it other than when they have to.

So the evidence from comparing different cities' approaches to public transport (Toronto vs LA, for example) bears this analysis out. It is possible to get a growing percentage of the public using PT.

If we made public transport truly reliable it could significantly displace car use. The question is, are we just trying to get people to work on time, or to make their lives better all round? PT can do both.

A visionary approach to PT would have everyone able to use it (or cycling/walking) for all their regular commuting - work/school, shopping, regular leisure activities. This would require something like the Melbourne Public Transport Users' Association policy of "every ten minutes to everywhere".The Socialist Alliance also campaigns for "free, frequent and expanded" public transport as seen in this short video.

So far we're talking sensible urban planning policy that probably wouldn't raise too many eyebrows in a room of progressive urban planners.

Let's consider what this would mean more broadly. If people no longer need to drive a car for most of their commuting, why own one? We could expect that, over time, less and less people would buy cars. Bad news for the car companies and the oil industry, but good news for the environment!

Of course, this would also spell big difficulties for an economy that is so centred on the car - production, fuel, service, road provision, insurance - cars are an enormous part of our economy. How would the economy survive a decline in such a central industry?

We can leave that one to the economists, for now. Let's just think about all the hours people currently spend on their cars. How many hours a week do you have to work to pay off your car loan? How many hours a week do you work to pay for petrol, for registration and insurance, for mechanical services? What fraction of your mortgage is going to pay for the driveway and garage? How much of your taxes go to pay for road building and repair?

Add all this to the amount of time you spend actually gripping the steering wheel (which can easily reach 10 hours a week for many commuters in a big city) and think about what it would mean not to own a car!

The pressure to work all that overtime to pay for the car could dissipate. The road rage and traffic jams - a hazy memory. The garage could be a greenhouse, or a workshop, or a granny flat, or whatever. The driveway could be a cricket pitch for the kids' practice. Let your imagination run riot.

If large numbers of people stopped buying and driving cars - perhaps also with the impetus of rising petrol prices once more - it could have an effect rippling through the whole consumer economy. It could reduce the overall amount of work, giving people more leisure time.

A progressive government would introduce legislation to shorten the working week, ensuring that reduced work could be shared around equally as liesure time, not concentrated in unemployment misery for a few. The scale of spending on cars, and their centrality to the modern industrial economy, is belied by their vulnerability to rational urban planning and oil price rises.

Campaigning for better public transport is a key priority for all progressives. It attacks greenhouse emissions, it attacks consumerism, and it challenges the foundations of the current economy. Is it the "weakest link"? Let's try it and find out!

Immigration: Australia’s favourite scapegoat

2010-04-11T20:06:00.000+10:00

Australian PM Kevin Rudd’s appointment of Tony Burke as population minister continues the Australian tradition of playing political football with immigration. His appointment came after Treasury estimates predicted that Australia’s population will grow from 22 million to 36 million by 2050.

Australia’s population growth in 2007-08 was made up of 145,500 people through natural increase (births minus deaths), and 213,500 from immigration. Increasing life expectancy pushes up the natural increase: the birth rate is barely at a level to keep the population levels steady.

On the other hand, a big part of the immigration increase is driven by temporary arrivals, especially international students and contract workers. Australia’s immigration rate is one of the highest in the developed world, but the influx of temporary workers and students is volatile and may not last for the next 40 years.

A March survey by the Lowy Institute said 72% support a rise in Australia's population, but 69% want it to remain below 30 million. Australia’s population reached 22 million in September last year.

The Lowy Institute’s Michael Wesley said: "Some of the concerns about overcrowding, about house prices, about the environmental strain that 36 million Australians would cause, are also starting to bite."

Burke told the April 6 7.30 Report that population growth is a concern for “water infrastructure… transport infrastructure and service delivery, including health". He said: "If you provided the immigration answer without dealing with all of the infrastructure challenges that you need to do you actually wouldn't fix anything.”.

Burke may not mean it, but this is almost a tacit acknowledgement that there are serious problems with infrastructure as it is. Any user of hospitals or public transport knows that, of course, but we don’t expect the government to admit it.

What will the new minister do? Is the federal government going to suddenly provide funding to fix housing, transport and health? Is it going to address Australia’s unsustainably high water use? Or will it take the much cheaper option of blaming immigration, and fiddle with intake levels to appear to be doing something?

The position may simply be a move to cover the government from the fearmongering of the Coalition opposition, as it prepares another anti-refugee binge.

But it may also further the government’s agenda on immigration. Temporary immigrants now drive immigration: students and workers.

Employers have been given free rein to import workers on temporary visas (often on substandard wages and conditions) and foreign students in Australia are contributing enormous wealth to the country in course fees. Yet authorities have denied that a spate of physical attacks on Indian and other international students have been motivated by racism.

Without even mentioning the refugees languishing in mandatory detention, it is clear that student and worker migrants — often from poor countries — are being exploited for all they are worth. At the same time they face a racist backlash.

Any new changes to immigration in the current climate risk making life even harder for these vulnerable people.

In past discussions on immigration, migrants have been presented as both the solution to, and the cause of, Australia’s problems. But either way, the real problems get swept under the carpet of immigration panic.

Burke’s appointment marks another stage in the government’s surrender to this vicious Australian tradition, an attempt to ride the wave of xenophobia rather than be swamped by it.

It follows opposition leader Tony Abbott’s claim that his party would be more effective in government at stemming the tide of “illegal” refugee entries. The xenophobia of One Nation and the 2005 Cronulla Riots has not gone away, even if Pauline Hanson and John Howard have.

What does Evo's 1° target mean?

2010-04-11T19:59:00.001+10:00

At the Copenhagen climate conference, Bolivian President Evo Morales proposed that, given the lack of an accord among governments, the people should be consulted in a referendum of global scale. He put forth the following five questions for that referendum, which will be discussed at the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

Do you agree with re-establishing harmony with nature while recognizing the rights of the Mother Earth?
Do you agree with changing this model of over-consumption and waste that represents capitalist system?
Do you agree that developed countries reduce and reabsorb their domestic greenhouse gas emissions for temperature not to rise more than 1° Celsius?
Do you agree with transferring all that is spent in wars and for allocating a budget bigger than used for defense to climate change?
Do you agree with a Climate Justice Tribunal to judge those who destroy Mother Earth?

Marxism 2010: Old Left Revival

2010-04-01T17:07:00.004+11:00

Socialist Alternative are hosting this event in Melbourne over Easter. Looking at the agenda online it is amazing to see such a history-heavy agenda – yet only one workshop (out of nearly 60 different advertised sessions) that looks at environmental issues. “Stopping global warming: the need for anti-capitalist politics” is the one workshop. Socialist Alternative are capable of some analysis of the issues. Yet it is just not a priority for them (as I have complained before).

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Mildura solar power plant rescued – “potentially”

2010-03-28T12:16:00.006+11:00

Leading solar energy company Solar Systems was sold on March 16 to Silex – a small Australian company specialising in uranium enrichment and manufacturing of solar panels.

Silex said in a media release on March 16 that it will spend the next 12 to 18 months on technology development and commercialization, business development and marketing, “with the aim of commencing commercial project activities in 2011.”

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Eritrea: "Our people are passing a very dark time"

2010-03-27T13:52:00.010+11:00

The small African nation of Eritrea had the United Nations Security Council impose sanctions against it in December 2009 for allegedly funding and arming the al-Shabaab islamic militia group in neighbouring Somalia.

Eritrean government supporters abroad rallied to protest against the sanctions, with co-ordinated rallies in Australia, Switzerland and the US.

However, not all Eritreans abroad support their government. Many are refugees from what they describe as a regime of arbitrary arrest, disappearances and inhuman treatment of political prisoners.

One opposition group is the Eritrean People’s Movement (EPM). I interviewed Habtemariam Berhe, provisional chair of the EPM, who is in exile in Italy.

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I=PAT proves nothing

2010-03-17T18:02:00.001+11:00

I=P×A×T (commonly pronounced “eye-pat”) is a formula, often cited, describing the factors that cause environmental degradation. In this formula, I stands for impact; P stands for Population; A stands for Affluence (or amount consumed); T stands for Technology.

The population, multiplied by the “affluence” (or amount of stuff consumed), multiplied by the technology used to produce the stuff that is consumed, gives the impact of humans.

At first glance this is an indisputable description of the overall impact of humanity taken as a whole. It’s use lies in this division of impact into different factors: having done so, we can consider how each separate factor works in our further inquiry.

But by itself, eye-pat is really not a useful description of the problem. It is almost mathematically meaningless, because A and T simply describe averages, per capita. Taken together, they add up to the average ecological footprint of each unit of population (each person, that is). So the total impact equals the average impact multiplied by the number of people. The mathematics of this is as profound as saying that a number equals half of itself multiplied by two.

The formula is also based on, and biased toward a population focus. It divides impact by person, not by income bracket, nation, bio-region, or any of the other possible ways of dividing up society’s overall impact. This predisposes the formula to an individualist and consumerist approach to solving environmental impact and it predisposes the formula to suggesting population control measures. Yet population is just one arbitrary factor among many that could have been chosen, and our impact as individuals is only caused by our interactions with others, through work as much as through consumption.

To take apart the formula some more, it is commonly (and fairly) criticised that “affluence” takes no account of the vast differences between rich and poor, or the consumption and technology in which we have no direct say – like the resources used to maintain the world’s war machinery and armies for example.

To really examine how an increase in the amount of consumption (or what is consumed) can impact, you have to look at who is doing the consuming and why – not a statistical average of the whole world or whole nation. Population, equally, has to be analysed as an independent factor with its own dynamic of change driven by social and environmental factors to gain any real insight.

But more profoundly, the formula says nothing about how pollution/impact grows in relation to the three factors: each is given an equal weight, independent of way they interact with each other, which is only measured in the end figure of “I”.

Population grows incrementally, generation after generation, at various rates around the world. In Australia, it is only growing due to immigration, as the birth rate is currently below the rate of replacement. Growth due to immigration is not growth in population overall, because population is a global phenomenon. The whole world’s population is projected to peak this century, and its rate of growth has already begun to slow.

Changes in technology and consumption, however, can leap in rapid bounds. Any changes in consumer items or production practices are multiplied through the social mechanism of the market economy. Imagine a newly released consumer item is put on the market and rapidly taken up by consumers. This addition of one technologically produced consumer item results in an impact that is rapidly multiplied by that part of the population that buys it. Markets tend to expand because capitalism is a system that requires economic growth to survive, so if an item is successful in a part of the market it is sold fairly quickly to the whole population, or large parts of the population. This applies to SUVs or McMansions as much as iPods or fresh produce imported by fast refrigerated air-freight.

So an increase in technology is rapidly multiplied by the whole population. Yet an increase in population does not multiply by the whole ecological footprint of everyone else added up: it only multiplies by the average of their footprints. (Here I am taking ecological footprint as equivalent to A×T). So population growth only adds incrementally to overall impact, whereas changes in technology and production for the market multiply the impact.

Taken on a regional or national level, many factors are quite unrelated to population. Coal for export will continue to be mined and shipped, whether Australia’s population doubles or halves, unless political measures entirely independent of the individualist I=P×A×T paradigm are taken.

A simplistic reliance on eye-pat to “prove” the importance of population controls for environmental protection is very wrong. Population cannot be reduced to one of only three factors that determine ecological impact. Quoting a mathematical formula might look smart, but algebra is only meaningful when it is given a meaningful content. I=PAT does not impart much meaning.

Earth Hour: tokenism and the burning planet

2010-03-11T12:43:00.001+11:00

“Earth Hour” will be held around the world on March 27. The event is organised by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and involves participants switching off their lights for the hour as a symbolic declaration of support for environmental action.

The Earth Hour website is sponsored by, among others, Woolworths Limited, the giant supermarket and retail corporation. With the amount of waste and pollution associated with the retail industry in frivolous consumption, built-in obsolescence and so on, this would seem an odd choice for sponsor.

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The climate movement in 2010

2010-03-08T10:05:00.001+11:00

Last year’s national Climate Action Summit was groundbreaking. It set a national grassroots movement on its feet, something I haven’t seen on such a scale in my two decades of activism. A new ongoing network has been set up, with more than 100 groups now signed onto the initial structure.

The strengths of the first summit carried on through 2009 and helped activists proceed with a clear set of priorities. We had nationally co-ordinated actions, an agreed message and a sense of confidence to step forward when others held back.

Not everything worked as well as hoped, but we have a common body of experience to discuss at the 2010 summit, on March 13-15, and draw lessons from. We also have some much stronger backing with Beyond Zero Emissions and the Safe Climate Australia institute beginning to release their strategic planning studies to back up the ambitious project of 100% renewable energy in 10 years.

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Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women write political ecology

2010-03-07T15:45:00.004+11:00

Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women write political ecology
Ariel Salleh (editor), Pluto Press/ Spinifex Press, 2009

Eco-feminism meets eco-socialism

What material basis could women have that might make them an objectively environmentalist constituency? This theme is an important part of Ariel Salleh’s essays in her 2009 collection of women’s writing on the environment, which tries to bring together eco-feminist and eco-socialist ideas into a synthesis. The essays examine and take the side of the third world poor, and especially of indigenous people, peasants, and the women in those communities.

Salleh distances her materialist eco-feminism from “what ancient woman-nature mythologies say – that women have a fixed, innate, identity or essence, which is ‘closer to nature’ than the essence of men is.” She rejects this characterisation of eco-feminism, but also rejects the liberal feminists who see all eco-feminism as mysticism. She looks for what it is in women’s experience in the global division of labour that makes them a force for change. “The global majority of women do labour hands-on with nature and cope with the matter/energy transformations of their own gestational bodies.”

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Vegetarian cooking for sustainability

2010-02-28T18:36:00.002+11:00

If the western world is going to find its way to sustainability, learning to eat much less meat is going to be important. Intensive livestock farming uses huge amounts of resources in water, animal feed, land, and waste disposal. Ruminants (like cattle and sheep) also turn carbon in their food into the super-greenhouse-gas methane at an alarming rate. This is quite unsustainable.

I'm not arguing that all livestock are unsustainable (and I'm not a vegetarian). Permaculture farming is well suited to integrating livestock and fowl with plant crops. But we will have to stop the intensive feedlot and extensive pasturing monocultures that currently do so much damage. The end result will probably be that the amount of meat in our diet will decrease, even if we keep farming some sheep and cattle.

Fortunately with a few lessons, vegetarian cooking can come up with some very tasty dishes. Here's two of my own invention.

An introductory note on tofu
Both these dishes use tofu (although you could leave it out without changing the flavour noticeably). tofu is a good source of protein, but often detested by people who have never had it cooked properly. You need to fry it first for most recipes, or it is bland and gross! But after frying it absorbs much more flavour. While it is not particularly cheap at most supermarket chains (often costing as much per kilo as cheap cuts of meat) you should be able to get tofu much cheaper (and often better quality) at chinese and vietnamese grocers -- as little as $3 per kilo (or thereabouts) around where I live. If you buy it in a tub with water, tip out any water and cover it with fresh water as soon as you get home (and every day or so until you have used the tofu). This keeps it fresh much longer.

Spiced eggplant and tomato

Ingredients:
1 large black eggplant (aubergine)
250g medium soft tofu (not silken soft)
shrimp paste (or for vegetarians: black beans or hot bean paste)
1 onion
2cm cube (roughly) of ginger, sliced and chopped finely
Fresh chilli – amount and heat to taste (suggest 2-4 birdseye chillies, chopped)
Rice cooking wine
5 fresh tomatoes, chopped (or 1 can chopped tomatoes)
4 cloves
1 cinnamon quill
2cm cube of tamarind pulp softened in 1 cup hot water (or 2 tbsp tamarind concentrate)
Kecap Manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce)
Salt
Fresh coriander leaves, chopped roughly (optional)

Pre-preparation:
Chop the eggplant into cubes (about 2cm), place in a bowl and mix with 3 teaspoons of salt. Leave for about half an hour before rinsing salt off and adding in recipe.
Tofu should be soft but still firm enough not to fall apart. Cut the tofu into 2cm squares about 1cm thick. Fry in generous quantity of vegetable oil until both sides are browned. Set aside on a plate.

Method:
Dice the onion. Heat 3 tbsp vegetable oil in a deep pan or large pot. Add 1tsp shrimp paste or hot bean paste if using, fry and stir into oil on high heat for 1 minute. Add onion, ginger and chilli (and 1 tbsp black beans if you're using them), and stir for another minute or two. Add eggplant as prepared above, splash in 1-2 tbsp cooking wine, stir for 1-2 minutes and then add tomatoes, cinnamon, and cloves. Stir and add tamarind with enough hot water to almost cover contents. Bring to boil then turn heat down and simmer with lid off for ten minutes. You can prepare tofu in this time if you like. Add tofu, salt (suggest 1-2 tsp) and 2tbsp kecap manis. Simmer until eggplant is soft and disintegrating and amount of liquid has reduced. If you want to add thickener (see tip below) stir it in just before you turn the heat off. Garnish with fresh coriander and serve with steamed rice.

Steamed rice thickener tip
There are many ways to cook steamed rice. I cook basmati rice with plenty of water (more than is needed). I don't rinse first. A general rule of thumb is 1 cup rice to 2 cups water (and 1 cup of rice is enough for about 2 people). So I add extra - say 2.5 or 3 cups water to 1 cup rice.

When the rice is done you can tell because holes start to appear in the surface where steam is bubbling up; try a little rice on a fork to see if it’s soft enough to eat, and keep cooking until you’re satisfied it's soft enough. When it’s done, there should still be some water left in the pot – if you put in way too much, the water level will still be over the rice, but ideally it will be lower than the rice. A bit of trial and error might be needed based on your pot and the type of rice you are using, you want to end up with about half a cup of water left over.

I tip the water off by holding the lid of the pot open just a crack so the water can pour out but not the rice. You have to be careful or you’ll lose the rice too! The water poured off has a lot of starch from the rice and is great to add straight to the main dish as a thickener at the end; you can also keep it as rice milk – or just drink it hot as a tea.

Sweet pumpkin curry

Ingredients:
Half a pumpkin, peeled and diced
One onion, diced
2cm (approx) ginger, sliced and chopped finely
Finely chopped chilli if you want it hot (or chilli powder)
Spice mix: 1 tsp each of whole seeds of fenugreek, Kalonji (nigella), mustard, cumin and fennel (panch phoron mix)
Half cup of red lentils
1 tsp turmeric
250g medium-soft tofu
salt

Pre-preparation: prepare tofu as for dish above

Method:
Heat 3 tbsp oil in a large pot on medium heat. Add the spice mix and leave on heat until you hear mustard seeds just starting to “pop”. Add diced onion, chilli and ginger and stir in for a minute. Add lentils and stir in, for about a minute. add pumpkin and hot water to cover.

Bring to boil then reduce heat and simmer. If you like a runny consistency, cook with lid on. If you prefer it to be thick, leave lid off to reduce (boil off) water. Add turmeric and stir when you reduce the heat (and chilli powder if you're using it).

When lentils have softened and pumpkin is soft, add tofu and salt to taste (1-3 teaspoons). Add thickener if you want at this stage (1-2 tsp flour mixed into a thin paste with cold water, if you don't want to use the rice method above). Stir and simmer for another 5 minutes or until pumpkin is starting to disintegrate. Serve with rice.

Avatar and District 9

2010-02-28T11:48:00.001+11:00

I've seen all sorts of critical comments about the politics of these two films and while many of those comments may have some validity, I think both were great in many ways and definitely very entertaining -- an important consideration not always taken into account by reviewers!

Avatar was great because the good guys and the Earth Mother won, the evil corporations were defeated, and it was a very transparent criticism of the real-life way that corporations destroy the environment and indigenous cultures.

One criticism I read was that, by making the main human character (Jake Sully) the saviour of the indigenous people, it reinforces the notion that the "noble savages" need the white saviours, in the end. There may be an element of that, but I thought Sully's evolution from an economic conscript to rebel leader actually was a plot device to bring the audience from the mentality of the conquerors over to the other side.

Not that we, the audience, needed much encouragement. The Na'vi indigenous peoples were so clearly cooler and nicer than the cartoon supervillains who ran the invaders' mining operation. Another criticism could be that the characters were so superficial, and that the Na'vi rarely did anything to transcend the old "noble savage" archetype. Fair enough. But it wasn't a character-driven movie, it was an action movie with a couple of very political themes. And some brilliant scenery!

The Na'vi were kind of like a cooler, more sophisticated version of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Actually, the Ewoks were a lot more fun, but it may not have been possible to sustain a whole movie based on them. Nevertheless the overall feel of the film was similar to Star Wars (but once again, much better politics).

The Earth-mother worship and the extreme "otherness" of the Na'vi (they are symbiotically and empathically linked with other species) was probably unnecessary. They are just a bit too cool for their own good, really. But that's not a major detraction. The film was great fun, slightly predictable, but for any fans of space opera and fantasy-action movies a must watch. Especially in 3-D.

But the next movie I watched, District 9, remedied many of the weaknesses of Avatar. The aliens were not noble savages, they were dirty and disshevelled refugees who have drug addictions (cat food!) and trade their weapons for it with the local (Nigerian) mafia.

A criticism of this movie was that the Nigerian thugs were the personification of all that old Apartheid South Africa thought of black Africans: brutal, stupid, thugs. This criticism is way off mark. The Nigerians' actions were a direct parallel of the other gang of thugs -- the MNU corporation. Their portrayal only highlights the crude evil of the Mengele-like MNU scientists and weapons researchers.

Meanwhile, the journey of the main character, Wikus van de Merwe, provides a lot of laughs. The aliens are not focused on as characters very much, the incredibly brutal racism of the MNU officials and the mercenaries is the real focus. And the hypocrisy and cowardice of van de Merwe as he evolves through the film. The semi-documentary style as van de Merwe cheerfully evicts aliens is a grotesque and horrific as it is a vicious satire on bureaucratic brutalising of vulnerable people.

Politically, I think it's not really a film about racism and apartheid (although the South African setting might cause you to think of that). I think it's more about the brutal way that modern governments deal with refugees and foreign populations in trouble. Think of Haiti now with US troops invading and spreading propaganda stories about voodoo-practicing savages who riot and burn rather than rebuilding.

The racism in the film is vivid and definitely lifted from the apartheid template, but the circumstances of the alien refugees are more a parallel with modern boat people than blacks under Apartheid. The bad guys are more believable than in Avatar, although the brutal, unashamed racism of the mercenaries in particular may be unfamiliar to many (but I doubt it's really that unrealistic).

Of course the film is an action extravaganza like Avatar, albeit with lots more splatter and vomit. It gets a bit predictable, and it's not all that deep, but it's a lot of fun. It was a blast.

Two films that were definitely worth seeing!

"Sustainable population" as panacea

2010-02-21T21:35:00.004+11:00

My least favourite shonky climate panacea is probably the populationist idea. Not because it's intrinsically more dangerous or less do-able than nuclear power or "clean coal" carbon sequestration. Simply because in my experience it appeals to so many people with a smug, dogmatic sense of superiority, and is more common among racists than genuine environmentalists (The group pictured, Sustainable Population Australia, do not promote racism as far as I can tell, but other "green" populationists are not so discerning).

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Bolt Shock: socialists oppose climate change!

2010-02-20T11:49:00.001+11:00

Andrew Bolt of Melbourne’s Herald Sun published a mind-blowing scoop on his blog on February 6: there are socialists in the movement against climate change.

The piece, “The Governor becomes a far-left activist”, was a fearless expose targeting Victorian governor David de Kretser. It said de Krester was abandoning his non-partisan official role and “playing his politics overtly in a ‘civil campaign’ with activists from the radical green Left”.

De Kretser was advertised as a speaker at the “T10” Transition Decade campaign launch held on February 14 at Melbourne Town Hall. The event was sponsored by (among others) Friends of the Earth (FoE — “an anti-corporate activist group of the far Left”) and the Climate Emergency Network (CEN), whose members, Bolt wrote, “include Marxist and revolutionary Left parties”.

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Australia shows how not to stop climate change

2010-01-30T19:08:00.001+11:00

Australia’s Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, has announced a target of a 5% cut in Australia’s carbon emissions by 2020, relative to emissions in 2000.

A January 27 statement from Wong’s office says this unconditional target will not be increased above 5% until the rest of the world’s commitments become clearer. Wong said that targets may be increased to “up to 15 per cent and 25 per cent both conditional on the extent of action by others”.

Action that Wong is expecting from the rest of the world includes “specific targets of advanced economies and the verifiable emissions reduction actions of China and India.” India’s emissions per person were 1.3 tonnes in 2006, in the most recent data from the United Nations (Millenium Development Goals Indicators). China’s were 4.6 tonnes. Australia’s 2006 emissions per person were 19 tonnes. That’s per person, per year. It doesn’t include emissions from the coal and natural gas that is exported from Australia.

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Carbon Tax, climate emergency and climate justice

2010-01-28T11:49:00.001+11:00

The Greens have just released a carbon tax policy. Ross Garnaut is spruiking for a carbon tax. It could easily become the mainstream alternative to the carbon trading scheme that Rudd’s government is trying to push through.

For activists oriented to a climate emergency and climate justice program, carbon tax is a difficult area. A carbon tax is advocated for many reasons, one of them being that it can cut out the possibility of scam offsets, financial speculation in carbon credits, and all the other jiggery-pokery of carbon trading. All this is certainly a plus for carbon tax. But it has to do more than be better than carbon trading. It has to provide an overall positive shift toward a zero-emissions economy, and at emergency speed. I argue that this includes the necessity of ensuring its outcome enhances social equality rather than the opposite.

With these considerations in mind, the idea of a carbon tax is subjected to criticism below to investigate in what ways, if any, it could be a useful tool. I have tried to include pragmatic criticism that will make sense to people who are not socialists, as well as some considerations for how carbon tax could sit within the policy of the Socialist Alliance.

Tote: totalled

2010-01-22T13:04:00.000+11:00

Over a thousand gathered on January 17 to protest the enforced closure of The Tote hotel, a victim of changes to Victoria’s liquor licencing laws that have seen the popular inner-city music venue upgraded to a “high risk” venue.

The change in licencing from January 1 meant that the owner, Bruce Milne, felt he could no longer afford to keep the venue open. "The high-risk conditions they have placed on the Tote’s licence make it impossible to trade profitably," he said in a statement. The new state laws, supported by the ALP and Greens, are ostensibly to reduce alcohol-fuelled violence on the city’s streets.

Local councillor Stephen Jolly of The Socialist Party ridiculed the new laws, speaking to the rally. “The Tote is a safe place and has iconic status in this area,” he said. “If you wanna get beaten up, you go to King Street or Crown Casino and not The Tote.” The venue does not have a history of violence.

The Age reported on January 20 that local ALP MP Richard Wynne had met with the venue’s landlord, and was lobbying for changes to the licencing laws, in a bid to save the venue. There is a possibility that a new consortium of local bar owners may step in to save the venue, but nothing certain at this stage.

The Tote was one of the few remaining venues where up and coming rock and alternative bands could secure public gigs. Another venue, the Arthouse in north Melbourne, has also announced it will not renew its licence and will close in May.

The closure of The Tote echoes the 2002 closure of the Punters’ Club, in nearby Fitzroy, which was due to rising rent. Gentrification and licencing laws are not the only villains of course. Veteran Melbourne musician Dave Graney reminds us that “The hoteliers kicked the bands out of the big rooms as soon as they could see that poker machines were more lucrative.”

Even if The Tote receives a last minute stay of execution, Milne still has a message for live music fans. “It’s too late to save the Tote but not too late to try and save other inner city venues that are feeling the same pressures” he said.

Sea Shepherd: against the left critics

2010-01-15T12:06:00.002+11:00

After my earlier post on this topic, I have rewritten my argument for Green Left Weekly

When the Sea Shepherd vessel Ady Gil sank following a collision with a ship in the Japanese whaling fleet, snap protests were called outside Japanese embassy offices in Australia. For some this has become a political football to kick their own goals, but the cause of marine conservation deserves better.

New Zealand foreign minister Murray McCully accused the protesters of “behaving in a manner that has put life at risk” - after they themselves were nearly killed in the collision! Japanese representatives have gone further to insinuate the Ady Gil left a fuel spill, although Sea Shepherd suggest this may have been staged by the whalers. Australia’s environment minister Peter Garrett has emphasised in a letter to Sea Shepherd that his government’s “opposition to commercial and so-called “scientific” whaling” is best expressed by diplomatic means.

Left critic

From the left, some attack Sea Shepherd for alleged racism and nationalism. One socialist, blog author John Passant, provocatively begins his article with the statement “There is nothing about whales that means humanity shouldn’t eat them.” He goes on to explain that Sea Shepherd have utilised racist, colonialist arguments against indigenous subsistence whaling such as that practiced by the Makah people of northern USA.

The Australian government’s opposition to whaling, he says, supports its “imperialist claims to the Australian Antarctic Territory,” claims only recognised by the other four countries with similar claims.

Passant asserts that “the Antarctic minke whale is not under threat of extinction” and cites a 1989 figure for minke whale population. According to Greenpeace, the International Whaling Commission’s 1990 estimate of the Antarctic minke population as 760,000 “was withdrawn by the IWC in 2000 because recent surveys found far fewer minkes … new estimates are half the old in every area that has been resurveyed. The IWC’s scientists do not understand the reasons for this and so far have not been able to agree a new estimate.”

Heroics

Passant attacks Sea Shepherd for elitism. “Their activity does not extend to agitating among Japanese or Australian workers as workers, in particular those in the ports and on the boats. They have contempt for workers… Their approach involves substituting themselves for the mass of people.”

The history of direct action activism is full of debates about elitism. The dichotomy of small bands of heroes doing the direct action, funded by passive supporters’ direct-debit activism, does not necessarily build a bigger movement, and can reinforce passivity.

But a better solution than attacking Sea Shepherd – who at least keep the issue on people’s minds – would be to try and mobilise their supporters for more participatory protests (such as at the Japanese embassy).

Racist or nationalist?

Evidence for racism from Sea Shepherd is scant since their campaign against the Makah whaling in 1999. This was undertaken in alliance with a right-wing anti-indigenous Republican Senator, Jack Metcalf. Sea Shepherd deserve condemnation for their attack on an endangered culture like the Makah, who do not engage in industrial whale slaughter like the Japanese fleet. But the Japanese fleet are what they are protesting against right now.

Sea Shepherd’s current campaign is called “Operation Waltzing Matilda” which may constitute nationalism (certainly it’s embarrassingly twee). But there is no evidence of anti-Japanese racism in it. There are a myriad of ignorant and racist supporters on the internet if one looks for comments on discussion forums, but not from Sea Shepherd. It is not mandatory to embrace all their past actions or statements in order to give some support to this campaign against whaling.

Marine conservation

The whole industrial fish harvesting industry is unsustainable. Driftnetting, bottom trawling, and overfishing is destroying the world's "fish stocks". The fact that we call them "stocks" underlies the problem: they are not some inert resource, or a commodified flock in a pen. They are part of an ecosystem. Industrial fishing is causing one of the world's worst ecological/food crises.

Whaling as practiced by the Japanese fleet ought to be considered in the industrial fishing category, and leftists should not be afraid to condemn it. It is not feeding the world, it is feeding a luxury niche market for a small elite of consumers.

Sea Shepherd’s own reason for their actions is given clearly: “Japanese whalers are operating illegally by targeting endangered and protected whales in an established international whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on commercial whaling, in violation of the Antarctic Treaty and in contempt of an Australian Federal Court order.”

While a broad movement against all industrial fish harvesting is needed, Australia is not even living up to its promises to halt Japan’s whaling. For an example of what action could be taken, the Venezuelan government in March 2009 banned industrial trawl-fishing within Venezuela’s territorial waters. The law has the double effect of empowering small scale and subsistence fishing activities, while destroying the big business fishing industry. If only Garrett had as much spine.

Sea Shepherd: Heroics, racism, and conservation

2010-01-10T19:04:00.006+11:00

On Facebook I announced a protest in support of the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling protesters, who had their ship Ady Gil rammed by a Japanese whaling ship the other day. One unexpected comment I got was that "their politics are anti-working class and racist" and "totally gross". John Passant has put a more nuanced version of this line on his blog. Well I've got a friend on the Sea Shepherd ship who I'm pretty sure is neither racist nor anti-working-class, so I did a bit of a google search for "Sea Shepherd" and "racist".

It turns out that many of the comments in "support" of Sea Shepherd on many internet news blogs, discussion forums and so on are quite racist against the Japanese. Of course, Sea Shepherd don't only target Japanese whalers, and they can't necessarily be held responsible for the idiots who choose to support them.

You can read some of Sea Shepherd founder/leader Paul Watson's responses to previous accusations of racism on the Sea Shepherd website. For balance, Green Left ran a critical piece on Sea Shepherd in 1998 that seems to present a fairly genuine case of Sea Shepherd stupidly aligning with a far-right racist. Make up your own mind whether this fundamentally tars them as racist; I would tend to say say short-sighted, even foolish, probably, but not necessarily racist.

But why are Sea Shepherd anti-working class? Apparently it's because they are protesting/attacking the whaling fleet workers in their workplace according to the commentator on Facebook. In this line of argument, only the whaling workers themselves can stop the slaughter by the power of industrial action, and by taking direct action to protest against them we are driving them into the arms of their bosses, so to speak.

I do suspect that the Japanese people are the main force that can stop Japanese whaling and I hope the population there does come around to understand that they should. In the meantime though, I doubt that anyone would even know about whaling if it weren't for the protests by groups like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd. Their spectacular actions do keep the issue on the agenda, if nothing else.

I find it odd to hear that the argument that protesting outside workplaces is off limits for lefties. If it's an important political issue, you have to raise it somehow. And the interests of the working class (let alone all humanity) cannot be reduced to the sum of the individual interests of each workplace added together. The whole is greater (and more complicated) than the sum of its parts.

It's true that protests which are portrayed by the corporate media as "anti-worker" are often perceived that way by the workers themselves. It doesn't help build bridges and that's something that must be considered in a rounded political strategy. I don't know whether Sea Shepherd are particularly useful in this respect, but I doubt the whaling ship workers were about to join the anti-whaling camp any time soon, so it's a pretty academic point. Their actions use a huge sum of money. It probably wouldn't be donated without the spectacular actions they undertake, but such actions also reinforce an elitist concept of environmental action - it's not participatory, it's for the trained commando activists. This is unfortunate, but it's not the end of the world.

On the other hand, simply waiting for everyone to be peacefully and logically convinced of the superior logic or morals of socialism to take action is a recipe for inaction and irrelevance. Interacting with mass consciousness needs bold action; I would not rule out protesting against workers engaged in their work. If no-one protests, they may never realise there is a problem.

Sea Shepherd have also protested against other unsustainable fishing practices like shark fin harvesting.I don't know how "unustainable" whale hunting is, per se, in small enough numbers and of the no-longer-endangered whale species. But that's missing the point. The whole corporate fish harvesting industry is unsustainable. Driftnetting, bottom trawling, plain overfishing, and all the rest is destroying the world's "fish stocks". The fact that we call them "stocks" underlies the problem: they are not some inert resource, or a commodified flock in a pen. They are part of an ecosystem. Overfishing is one of the world's worst ecological/food crises - and while some industrial fishing techniques are particularly bad, like bottom trawling, the whole commercial fishing industry is unsustainable.

The Venezuelan government, as it happens, has taken good actions against unsustainable fishing. In 2001 they enacted a law which prohibited trawling less than 10 kilometres from the mainland (or less than 16 kilometres from island shores). In March 2009 they shored up this law. To quote from Green Left's Federico Fuentes:

On March 14, Chavez decreed a new fishing law, banning industrial trawl-fishing within Venezuela’s territorial waters.

“Trawling fishing destroys the sea, destroys marine species and benefits a minority. This is destructive capitalism”, explained Chavez on his weekly TV show, Alo Presidente the following day.

Venezuelanalysis.com reported on March 17 that the government will invest US$32 million to convert or decommission trawling boats, as well as to development fish-processing plants.

“Thirty trawling ships will be expropriated, Chavez said, due to the refusal of their owners to cooperate with the plans to adapt the boats to uses compliant with the new fishing regulations.”

Small-scale fisherpeople will have access to the converted boats.

The law has the double effect of empowering small scale and subsistence fisher folk, while destroying the big business fishing industry. Concerted action like this on a world scale might have a huge effect on conserving marine ecosystems. Current commercial fishing is destroying the ocean food chain from the bottom up. I'm all for conservation of marine ecosystems. I'm OK with Sea Shepherd insofar as they have kept some of the issues on the boil, whatever other criticisms can be made of them - and I hope this posting makes clear I'm not an uncritical apologist. But I do hope we see a resurgence of broader marine conservation movements, which is far more important in my humble opinion.

Discussionocracy

2010-01-08T11:34:00.003+11:00

Leadership is a complex phenomenon. On the one hand, it involves initiative and leading by example, and the authority earned in the process. On the other hand, it requires accountability, and the diligence of a loyal employee, from the leaders in question. On an organisational level, we have to find structures to facilitate both sides of the coin. Leadership is a two-edged sword, but sadly this is rarely acknowledged by those who are cutting themselves on it.

At its worst, leadership becomes an end in itself. Given that the left has been mostly unsuccessful at providing the broad community (working class) leadership role I defined above for most of the last 20 years that I’ve been in it, there is an inevitable tendency to look inward. The necessary task of organising study and education for members becomes the central tactic in the propaganda-circle style of organising. “Leadership” becomes the inertial force maintaining the inward looking status quo.

In a group that has just overturned its status quo – the Socialist Alliance, post the winding up/total merger of the DSP, its largest affiliate – I have some concerns that the best intentions may not be enough to avoid the pitfalls of faulty leadership mechanisms. I generally agree with the concerns raised by David White in Alliance Voices. However, I have broader political views on problems of leadership in socialist groups which I want to explain here. Having argued and voted (quite unsuccessfully) against the changes to leadership structures at the latest Socialist Alliance conference I will also suggest some alternative ideas in a future post.

Left unity: seize the time!

2010-01-08T00:08:00.007+11:00

Karl Marx famously said that the past weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. This is how one fellow ex-member explained to me why he was so happy the DSP (Democratic Socialist Perspective) was winding up its organisation in favour of the Socialist Alliance of which it was a founder.

After 17 years of DSP membership I share the sentiment. I don’t regret having been a member, but nor do I regret no longer being one. If there’s one thing I do regret, the DSP didn’t fully merge its activity into the Socialist Alliance much earlier, a direction I have been arguing for some time.

The conference of the Alliance that I just attended was a positive, politically charged event. There were inspiring guests such as Robert Downs (pictured speaking, photo by Alex Bainbridge), representing the Ampilatwatja walk-off. But the debate on the conference resolutions was directly engaging in the sense that it brought to our attention the multitude of struggles that are occurring. What appeared to be motions over policy and campaign directions in fact reflected the membership who are battling to advance progressive ideas and campaigns, and the potential for the Alliance to grow as a part of these campaigns.

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GLW: time for an overhaul

2009-12-17T11:39:00.003+11:00

Published in Alliance Voices, the internal bulletin of the Socialist Alliance, in the leadup to the January 2010 national conference.

Green Left Weekly is a great newspaper, but its lack of rivals can blind us to its faults, for lack of anything to judge it against. The format of GLW has barely changed over the nearly 20 years since it began publishing. In this time the internet has arrived and changed news presentation dramatically. Print media are struggling everywhere, as people go online for information.

GLW’s sales have declined immensely over the last 20 years. In 1992 I recall we had a weekly “campaign 4000”, which was rarely met, but aspired to sell 4000 print copies of the paper. Now we sell somewhere around 1000. Our subscription base has held up better but is now dipping below 1000.

A dispute may be raised that the sales rate (per hour of effort) hasn’t changed much. But this is not a useful figure unless we also analyse where the sales are coming from: has the sales rate on street corners, or on campus changed? Is the current sales rate being held up by a higher proportion sold at rallies and movement events?

Despite all this, our internet publication is very successful, with around 13 000 hits per day last I heard.

It is time to re-evaluate how we publish GLW. As the practical backer of GLW, the Socialist Alliance needs to discuss it. I am in general agreement with Bernie Rosen’s comments already made in Alliance Voices, but want to add some suggestions of my own for a radical change in how we publish, based on my observations of the paper’s impact and readership.

1. Maximise our net potential

Currently it’s hard to sell the paper to other activists because they already get more information than you can poke a stick at (let alone read) from the net. Some of this includes GLW articles, when they are on topic and have something useful to say. (A lot of younger people also get their information from the net, and are unlikely to buy a left newspaper except as a novelty or if it’s relevant to a special interest.)

Our net presence basically functions as a weekly upload of our print edition. This is behind the times. There is space for so much more: we could run a news updates section for any latest that comes in, independent of the print edition. We could also make better use of the Links webzine style longer articles that are normally only run in abridged form in GLW, making them the norm for the site and just posting abridged or excerpted articles in the print edition.

The print edition then would evolve into a weekly download of the most pertinent information from the online news and opinion, suitable for subscribers and others who don’t get their info all online, and as an introduction to the green and left movement for those who meet us for the first time on the street.

Most people who are already activists are, I find, likely to have sorted out their information sources already from the net. We should make GLW their news website, rather than trying to push the print edition too heavily. On the other hand, people who are not activists but interested in left politics, or less active supporters, are much more likely to read the paper. The content of the print edition should reflect this.

2. Improve the readability of the print edition

Often we reprint articles from the US Socialist Worker. This is fine, except frequently I’ve noticed that what we run as one long article in GLW was originally two separate (linked) articles in SW.

GLW is weakened by too many long, specialist articles (especially on Latin American and generally on international affairs). On the other hand, we struggle to get all the necessary news about local campaigns and issues into the paper.

The most common complaint I hear from regular readers and ex-readers is that they never finish reading it. While it’s not imperative to finish reading it, I think this is another way of saying, it’s hard to read GLW. Bear in mind that the average reading level of the English-speaking community is probably about year 8 level, not Arts-graduate level.

Making it more readable is partly to do with language and writing style. Here I can’t pass over the words of Jose Rebelo, from FRELIMO (the 1970s anti-colonial liberation front in Mozambique):

Forge simple words that even the children
can understand;
Words that will enter every house
Like the wind
and fall like red hot embers
On our people’s souls.

If that’s not clear enough, go to here to use a tool that can help to tell you if your article is too wordy and here to see if you use too many specialist or uncommon words.

Readability is also a lot about presentation. Recently I wrote a long article on climate change and natural disasters (available h ere ) which was the week’s feature story. I managed to break off one topic – an appeal for aid from Philippine socialists – into a separate article. Re-reading the piece now, it could easily have been broken into four articles, which is roughly how I have sub-headed it on my blog: 1, the details of the floods in the Philippines and India; 2, the link between extreme weather and climate change; 3, remedies and relevance for Australia; and 4 (incorporating the article on the relief appeal) on the impact on poor communities. The final paragraph of my article was covered in more depth in another article that issue by Simon Butler, so could have been cut entirely.

I guess this sort of break-up would mean more work for the layout staff at GLW but it would make the pages much, much more readable. Short articles are less daunting and many people decide to read something based on the headline alone. In fact, “action updates” and news briefs are some of the best-read sections, so we should pay special attention to how they are written and presented.

We could also cut a lot of the long analytical content, especially in our international coverage. International coverage should focus on news more than analysis, which can be highlighted and advertised in the print edition but published more online. This would help to take our international coverage out of the field of experts and scholars, into the field of everyday discussion of readers who would find the articles more accessible.

GLW currently functions as a mostly in-depth (“propaganda”) paper, but with simple slogans (“agitation”) for covers. This often doesn’t work: an agitational slogan on the cover leads a new buyer to a lengthy and often very detailed article on the inside.

There are other problems. Surveying how regular readers see the paper would help. One common comment I hear is that GLW is too repetitive. This needs more investigation, but I think it’s to do with the introductory nature of many articles that go over the same background information each time, for the new reader. Perhaps a little text box over one side to give some dot points for background info would help separate out this information. We shouldn’t force regular readers to sift through paragraphs and columns of background they already know to find a few new snippets of news and analysis. We should also refer readers more explicitly to our website and to Resistance Books pamphlets for background info. The paper still does reach an audience who need introductory information to issues and we should maintain this aspect while considering ways to improve it.

3. Shorten it to free up resources

We put a huge amount of effort into distributing GLW and raising the funds to keep it afloat. While this has kept the paper afloat which is a good thing, it has become a point of honour that we must maintain our flagship publication without a step backward. Actually, I think retreating to a shorter publication would help us make steps forward.

As I’ve already argued for shorter, more readable articles and more content to be moved to the Internet edition, this would seem obvious anyway, but there are better reasons still.

We struggle to run election campaigns that go beyond empty-bucket campaigns. This is partly due to the lack of time our members have but also lack of funds hampers our ability to produce decent publicity material. There is often a groan when election fundraising comes up because it means substantial work on top of the already stretched fundraising schedule we carry. We should not put these two essential areas of work in competition with each other.

Other fundraising is also important. We almost never organise fundraisers for other community or political groups and campaigns. I can remember only one such fundraiser in Melbourne in the last decade, for a Koori childcare centre that was in trouble. Such solidarity, if we can provide it, is invaluable to build up goodwill and support for our paper and for SA. But we almost never do it because we are so stretched raising funds for ourselves. Really it should be a regular part of our repertoire. A joint 50/50 GLW fundraiser with another cause is often very successful also at attracting people we don’t usually see or get donations from.

Whether it is election campaigns, rally organising, or printing leaflets for our next fundraiser, we are always scrounging for money or handouts, and often complaining that it eats into GLW fundraising if we have to spend time finding money for other costs.

We face not just unrelenting opportunities to be involved in political campaigns, but a situation where frequently we are the leading/most experienced activist group involved. Yet we still look for other organisations to play host in terms of guaranteeing finances and resources for events. Our lack of funds is not entirely credible when you consider our inner city office buildings which are worth a mint. Once again this points to the need for re-examining priorities.

4. Budget proposals

We need to be shown the figures for GLW publishing and distribution to have an informed discussion about the paper. How much would we save by cutting 4 or 8 pages from the print run? What if the print run increased, how much would unit cost go down? What are the other overheads (roughly) for production: offices, staff, computers? These have to be extracted from the general costs for offices and staff as much as possible, so we can see what we are fundraising just for the paper.

The cover price of the paper is quite low at $2, but could we make it lower? In poor areas, the price is a disincentive for many to buy the paper. Would sales increase if it was for sale by “gold coin donation”? Could we re-jig production to make it cheap enough that $2 per issue represented a profit, and $1 was break-even? Branches could raise money simply by selling the paper this way.

I am making a request for GLW staff to make available what figures are available on these issues so the SA membership can consider what other possibilities might exist and how we can improve. They should be published in Alliance Voices, or if too sensitive, made available to each branch for discussion in an appropriate way.

5. Sales culture must go

We must eradicate the “sales culture” that permeates the current GLW distribution methods. “Sales” has infected our campaigning such that we measure success by GLW sales and push this as a primary aim of our “interventions”.

To paraphrase an argument Dave Kerin has put to Melbourne SA meetings, our “sales culture” reflects the all-pervasive consumerism that afflicts people’s lives outside of politics. If the first contact (or most frequent contact) we make with someone is trying to sell them something, they will in many cases be repulsed – not by our politics, but because they are trying to find something more than consumerism when they come to the left. Of course we want to distribute the paper and of course we need to get money back to keep printing it, but we need to be more sensitive in how we do this.

“Hi, would you like to buy a paper” is not a great way to introduce ourselves. A more sophisticated sales pitch than that just looks even more suss, because blind Freddy can see that “have you heard of Australia’s best independent news source” still just has that one aim in mind: a financial transaction.

Our sales culture has infected our rally presence most negatively, where a substantial part of our effort goes into setting up merchandise stalls and carrying piles of T-shirts and badge boards. We risk making ourselves into some kind of merchandising side-show.

6. Building up distribution

Too much of our branch organising is consumed by responding to the urgent, such that we often don’t find time to do the “merely” necessary. Green Left subscriptions renewals is one example. But our whole approach to subscriptions is often overlooked. Every introductory subscription is worth 7 papers. A year’s subscription is worth over 40. But they usually only take a few minutes to sell. For those worried about their “sales rate” that is a lot better than the rate at most rallies and street corners!

We need to look at other options for selling subscriptions. Make it the first thing we ask to someone who approaches a stall, not an afterthought. Initiate a special subscription for The Flame that only sends out the monthly edition with the Arabic supplement (and likewise the new Spanish supplement). Try door knocking and bundles for sale in local shops even. One of the main ways to ease the burden of our “sales effort” and fundraising is to build up the subscriber base. I am confident that with improvements like the ones I discuss above in readability, subscriptions would be much easier to sell.