Government gives $240 million bribe to commercial TV stations

Channel Ten and Seven shares have soared in the wake of the Government’s cynical bribe of the free-to-air commercial channels yesterday. Ten Network Holdings gained 8.9 per cent to $1.65 and Seven Network rose 2.1 per cent to $6.86 after the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy gave hefty licence fee “rebates” to the three commercial stations.

Under the deal, the Government will cut licence fees paid by the networks, which calculated at 9 per cent of gross advertising revenues, by 33 per cent for the 2010 financial year and 50 per cent for the 2011 financial year. The move will significantly boost the earnings for media groups Ten Network, Seven Network and Nine (the latter is owned by private equity company CVC and not on the share market). Instead of paying $286 million in licence fees they will pay $192m in 2010 and just $143m in 2011.

The grubby deal has Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s hands all over it. He and Conroy and Rudd brokered it with industry group Free TV Australia chair Wayne Goss, a close friend of Rudd and his former boss as premier of Queensland. The Australian says the deal is part of the negotiation that will see the government earn a $1 billion when it sells the analogue spectrum after the digital cutover in 2013 to telecommunications companies to build high-speed fourth generation (4G) wireless networks.

But it is not hard to see a more immediate political agenda at work. As Glenn Dyer reminds us, this is an election year. Rudd has been toadying up to all the television networks of late in an effort to look good on what remains by far the more important communication medium available to him. It is unlikely the TV stations will be keen to give him bad coverage now that he has showered them in such largesse. Dyer said the deal is also a sweetener to keep the networks onside during the digital transition.

Fellow Crikey writer Bernard Keane (articled paywalled) is also deeply unimpressed. Keane says the free-to-air networks are already handsomely compensated for the transition to digital. These policies include a moratorium on competition until at least 2014, the award of free spectrum for digital take-up, the most restrictive sports anti-siphoning laws in the world, and a grant of $260m to regional broadcasters to offset digital transmission costs. There is also a 20 percent tax rebate for production costs. As Keane notes, “this is an absolutely wretched decision”.

However outrage has been relatively muted outside Crikey (with the honourable exception of Peter Martin). Needless to say, the television stations themselves are not going to badmouth the deal. On the contrary, the Free TV Australia consortium which represents all of Australia’s commercial free-to-air television licencees, welcomed the announcement. The body’s CEO Julie Flynn called it a recognition of the commercial’s key role in delivering Australian content. “Free TV broadcasters are the major underwriters of Australian content despite the challenge of competing media platforms and fragmenting audiences,” she said. ““But it is clear that as we moved to a converged media environment the basis for the old system of licence fees needs to be reviewed.

Conroy himself also sought to sell the decision as content protection even though there was no new initiative in that direction. He said the rebate recognised the importance of ensuring TV audiences have strong levels of Australian programs, problems with the digital cutover and also the fact that licence fees in Australia were more expensive compared with other countries such as the US, UK and Canada. Conroy said the Australian Content Standard required commercial television broadcasters to produce and screen 55 percent local content between 6am and midnight, 7 days per week, and provides for the production of Australian drama and children’s programming. “Broadcasters have a unique role in preserving our national culture and the commercial television sector invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year in the production of local content,” he said. “New media platforms are bringing a wealth of choice to Australian viewers, but the Government recognises that Australian television broadcasters have an important role in ensuring that Australian stories remain at the centre of our viewing experience.”

The Pay TV peak body Astra called the tax-breaks anti-competitive and against consumer interests. ASTRA’s Chief Executive Officer Petra Buchanan said taxpayers were subsidising foreign-owned broadcasters to meet existing broadcasting obligations. “It is couch potato policy that reduces their incentive to invest compete and innovate,” she said. “By using taxpayers’ money to prop up the old players, innovation and competition in the television space will continue to be curbed.” Buchanan is right to be outraged. This deal is bad as anything extracted during the Packer era and stinks to high heaven. Labour and the Opposition (which also supports the deal) ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Pew finds the young are deserting blogging for social media

A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life project has found blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults since 2006. The findings suggest that as blogging has matured as a practice, so has its practitioners. The survey was conducted as one of a series of reports undertaken by the Pew Research Center to highlight the attitudes and behaviours of American adults ages 18 to 29. The report brought together recent findings about internet and social media use among young adults and situated it within comparable data for adolescents and adults older than 30. Pew surveyed 800 adolescents and 2,253 adults in 2009 to get their data.

(photo:eurleif)

The report found the Internet is a crucial “central and indispensable element” of the lives of American teenagers and young adults. 93 percent of teens between the ages of 12 and 17 went online, a number that has remained stable for three years. Nearly two-thirds of teen internet users go online every day. Families with teenage children are also most like to have a broadband connection (76 percent and up 5 points since 2006). It will probably surprise no one that the older you get, the less likely you are to be connected to the net. 74 percent of adults use the internet. But that number is skewed because younger adults (18-29) go online at a rate equal to that of teens (at 93 percent).81 percent of adults aged 30-49 are online while just 38 percent (but still rising) of those over 65 are hooked up.

Use of gadgets is on the rise as the Internet increasingly moves away from the desktop and onto mobile and wireless platforms. But again the growth is skewed towards the young. In September 2009, Pew asked adults about seven gadgets: (however they listed just six: mobile phones, laptops and desktops, mp3 players, gaming devices and ebook readers). On average, adults owned just under three gadgets. Young adults of age 18-29 averaged nearly 4 gadgets while adults ages 30 to 64 average 3 gadgets. But adults 65 and older on average owned roughly 1.5 gadgets out of the 7.

While the desktop or laptop remains the dominant way of getting online, newer ways of connecting are making headway. More than a quarter of teen mobile phone users use their cell phone to go online. A similar number of teens with a game console (PS3, Xbox or Wii) use it to go online. One in five owners of portable gaming devices uses it for Internet access. Perhaps surprisingly white adults are less likely than African Americans and Hispanics to use the internet wirelessly. African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet, and their use is growing at a faster pace than mobile internet use among whites or Hispanics.

Less of a surprise is the fact that teens are avid users of social networks. Three quarters of online American teens ages 12 to 17 used an online social network website, a statistic that has been growing at 7 percent each year since 2006. Teenagers are also more likely to use it as they get older. While more than 4 in 5 online teens ages 14-17 use online social networks, just a bit more than half of online teens ages 12-13 say they use the sites. Pew says this may be due to age restrictions on social networking sites that request that 12 year olds refrain from registering or posting profiles, but do not actively prevent it. The other notable statistic is that differences in gender are evening out ending the previous dominance of girls on social networks.

Usage of social networks stays constant in the 18-29 age group but then drops off rapidly for those over 40. Adults are also more likely to have profiles on multiple sites. Among adult profile owners, Facebook is currently the social network of choice; 73 percent of adults now maintain a profile on Facebook, 48 percent are on MySpace and 14 percent use LinkedIn. Analysis by education and household income show that support for Facebook and LinkedIn rises with both factors validating Danah Boyd’s research into the subject.

The news is not so good for Twitter. Pew’s September 2009 data suggest teens do not use the microblogging platform in large numbers. While one in five adult internet users ages 18 and older use Twitter or update their status online, teen data collected at a similar time show that only 8 percent of online American teens ages 12-17 use Twitter. Pew did add a rider to say the question for teens was worded quite differently from how the question was posed to adults so the results are not strictly comparable. With adults there was a sliding scale of Twitter usage with age. 37 percent of online 18-24 year olds use the platform compared to just 4 percent of over 65s.

But while use of all other web2.0 platforms was on the rise among the young, the striking exception was blogging. Teenage blogging has dropped from 28 percent to 14 percent of all users in the last three years. The decline spreads to commenting on other blogs. 52 percent of social network-using teens report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from 76 percent commenting in 2006. Young adults show a similar decline. However blog as a whole had not declined as there has been a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults. The hard work involved in blogging is increasingly becoming an old person’s game.

Nagorno-Karabakh: Tensions escalate in the Black Garden

A senior US government official has described the unresolved conflicts of the Caucasus including Nagorno-Karabakh as one of the “most likely flashpoints in the Eurasia region”. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair was speaking to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the open Hearing on “Current and Projected Threats to the United States when he made the statement. But while events in Abkhazia and South Ossetia have gotten plenty of media attention in recent times, the “frozen war” between Armenia and Azerbaijan has fallen off the radar.

(photo: Matthew Collin)

Blair said the war (dormant since 1994) may heat up again due to the complications of local international relations. There has been some progress in the past year toward Turkey-Armenia rapprochement, however this has affected the delicate relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and increases the risk of a renewed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Blair said. There was hope that the Turkey-Armenia border would be opened for the first time since 1993. But Turkey is baulking at Armenian calls to recognise the 1915 genocide and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has boxed himself in by proclaiming that the protocols for reconciliation will not be implemented until Armenia withdraws from occupied Azerbaijani territory.

That prospect seems extremely unlikely. Just how far away the sides are, was exposed in the somewhat surreal announcement this week from The Moscow Times that Armenia and Azerbaijan have “agreed on a preamble to an agreement” on the conflict. The principles of the agreement, first proposed in 2007, would see Armenia returning territories occupied by its troops that lie outside Karabakh proper to Azerbaijan but leaving a corridor linking Armenia with the disputed enclave on Azeri soil.

It is appropriate the Russians try to fix the problem as they caused the mess in the first place. The original name for the area in both Armenian and Azerbaijani was Karabakh (or Garabag) which meant “black garden”. Long a melting pot of Turkic, Armenian, Persian and Azeri influences, the area was subsumed into the Russian Empire in 1828. Under Russian influence the Muslim population declined as more Armenians moved into the province. After the Russian Revolution, the region descended into a series of wars that involved the Armenians, Azerbaijanis and British (who had defeated the Ottomans). Eventually the Red Army took over. Despite initial promises to give the province to Armenia, Stalin awarded it to Azerbaijan to placate a hostile Turkey. Under Soviet rule the appellation “Nagorno” meaning highland or mountainous was added to the name.

Under the Communist ideology, issues of nationalism rarely floated to the surface but tensions remained through the 20th century. As the union began to break up in the late 1980s the Azeri government took advantage by beginning ethic cleansing in the town of Askeran. But when the local legislative body voted for a union with Armenia, the area erupted in all out conflict. Over the next five years, more than a million Azerbaijanis and Armenians were driven from their homes and 30,000 people died.

The Russians negotiated a ceasefire in 1994 which holds tenuously to the present day. As a result of the conflict, Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts (which represents 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory) remain occupied by Armenian armed forces. The capital Stepanakert has been rebuilt, with financial support from Armenia and the huge Armenian diaspora. Peace talks have been the responsibility of the so-called OSCE Minsk Group co-chaired by Russia, US and France. The Group has been attempting to broker an end to the dispute for over a decade. In 1997 they tabled settlement proposals seen as a starting point for negotiations by Azerbaijan and Armenia but not by the de facto authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh itself. When Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrosyan tried to encourage the enclave to join the talks he was forced to resign amid cries of betrayal.

In 2006 Nagorno-Karabakh held a referendum which voted for the approval a new constitution and referred to itself as a sovereign state. Azerbaijan declared the poll illegitimate but continued to talk peace. However tensions have risen in recent months after a series of tough statements from Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s long-term dictatorial president. Aliyev has been growing in confidence as energy-rich Azerbaijan has been using some of its huge revenues from oil and gas sales to fund massive increases in defence expenditure. He had now warned that if peace talks don’t deliver results, he could order a new offensive to retake Nagorno-Karabakh and the areas around it. Aliyev told euronews.net military action was “a fundamental right of Azerbaijan”.

Flooding in Roma

The area of Roma I’m living in is doing a passable imitation of Venice at the moment. At around 5pm yesterday evening the normally trickling Bungil Creek peaked at 7 meters. It was enough to burst the banks and flood over the two bridges near my house. The roads around me became rivers and the gardens turned into swimming pools. So far, it is hasn’t been high enough to get into the houses but the Bureau of Meteorology is saying we are not finished with the rain.

The speed was a bit of a shock to me though the warning signs had been growing all week. We’ve had several decent falls during the week and the creek had been steadily getting higher. The cyclepath along the creek has been impassable since Monday but I still wasn’t expecting the water to get to the road level.

There was another huge downpour late on Thursday night and it was starting to wreak havoc Friday morning. I got up to go to work and had to cross the creek to get to Roma’s town centre. The waters had burst the banks and the bridge was under water. That was what the sign said ‘road under water’ not ‘road closed’. Nevertheless I wasn’t keen to drive across in my 2WD car until I saw someone else do it safely. I cagily followed the car across the bridge without incident.

When I got to the office, it was clear the town had suffered storm water drain damage during the night. The waters had gone down but they left the pavements caked with mud and very slippery. In the height of the downpour, some of the drains started to overflow and spilled water onto the lower side of the street. It was the second time this week that had happened. To be on the safe side I parked on the higher side in case it should happen again.

In the office the news soon came through from the SES they were expecting the floods to be bigger than 1997’s version. I knew immediately it was going to be a big day. A few weeks ago I’d done a retrospective in the paper about Roma floods of the past and the 1997 pics were impressive. As were the ones from the several flood events of the 1980s. Much of inland Australia is on a floodplain and Roma is no different. It has been flooded often enough that it caused a 19th century move of the town centre away from the creek.

I figured I would be taking lots of photos for the 2010 flood event so decided I needed to be dressed appropriately and drove home for a change of clothes. The bridge over the creek was now closed but there was a back way via a second higher bridge. I got past a couple of places where the road was “under water” but it was just safe enough to get through. When I got home, the waters were approaching the gate and my landlady was moving everything upstairs that needed to be kept dry. I grabbed a t-shirt, pair of shorts and thongs (footwear, just in case anyone is wondering) and headed back to town the way I came.

On Bungil St just south of where I lived the creek had also flooded the road. The problem here was that there was no other passable road in for those who lived on this street east of the creek. There was one other way in on foot via the Big Rig and I decided to check that out. The Big Rig celebrates Roma’s oil heritage and there is a kiddie train that goes over a footbridge on the creek. The waters had not risen that high and I crossed the footbridge to get to the east side of Bungil Road. I also had to cross the waterlogged sports grounds but it was easy enough barefoot.

The locals I met all looked happy and seemingly unfazed by the rising waters that were starting to get into their gardens. One owner admitted he did not have flood insurance but the atmosphere was almost party-like as they gathered around to admire the novelty of the rising waters. Only once was my own equanimity challenged when some kid casually asked me (perhaps hoping for a reaction) “had I seen a snake?” I said I hadn’t and he told me he’d only seen a baby one. I guess the waters would be flushing them out a bit.

There was an SES boat on hand to ferry people back to the “mainland” west of the creek but that was only being used by a few people to get to the shops or pick up kids from school. No-one was evacuating here just yet. One guy in his 80s was glued to his radio and swore loudly at the council who “couldn’t effin well tell him when the waters would peak”.

In this little field trip I had a camera but left the note pad in the car. I waded back to the footbridge (now extremely wary for snakes) and decided to go back to the office to download the photos. But before that I decided to check out the creek crossing on the main Brisbane road into town. Here the waters were flowing rapidly but just below the bridge so traffic wasn’t affected. While taking photos from the bridge, another 80 year old man joined me. I’d met him before and he sat down on the barrier next to me and chatted about floods past.

He had a cane which he twirled around to add dramatic effect to the stories he told. However I was worried because the shoulder on the bridge was narrow and I thought he would wave it into oncoming traffic which he had his back turned to. This was particularly dangerous whenever the occasional massive road train would shudder past us at 70kph barely a metre away. When I warned him of the impending danger, he pointed his cane imperiously at the dividing line on the ground and said “they can’t come past that”. True, but I was more worried about his cane in the air than on the ground.

Anyway, neither of us came to harm and I went back to the office. The other journalist had been out taking photos too and we compared notes before I headed back to the Creek. Again I went over the footbridge at the Big Rig and waded across the waterlogged grounds. Immediately I noticed the road had been become more flooded in the hour or so I was away and nearly every garden was inundated. Still the mood was optimistic and no house was yet flooded as far as I could tell. One owner on a side street pointed to the brackish water outside his house and said that meant it had peaked. But a few minutes later the SES guys with the boat told me the waters were still rising.

As the rain returned, I went back to the western side of the creek for some more photos. The Emergency guys there told me the creek was now up to 7m and still rising. As if the sight of roads resembling rivers wasn’t surreal enough, a rainbow rose above the scene. It was another picture to add to a great collection today. Finally around 6pm I decided to get back home on foot. I went over the creek bridge that was not overflowing but by now all the access roads to my house were closed. I had to walk back barefoot on the centre of the road as the water rose to waist level in parts.
At my house the waters had crossed the gate and waterlogged the entire garden. The water level had risen to the first of three steps into the house. Although the waters receded again overnight, they are still predicting rain for the next three days and it won’t take much for the inundation to rise further. One thing I’ve learned over the last few days is to not be surprised what water can do.

Rajapaksa consolidates power after Sri Lankan election win

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa chose the nation’s first independence day since the end of the civil war to call on the Tamils to work with the government but he ruled out self-determination. Rajapaksa spoke in Tamil in Kandy today where he appealed to the ethnic minority to “solve our problems ourselves through discussions”. He said independence day had assumed greater significance as it was the first since the defeat of Tamil Tiger rebels last year.”The freedom from colonial rule that we gained 62 years ago is now more meaningful because we have been liberated from the forces of separatist terror that marred our freedom for nearly half that period,” he said. The speech was his first public address to the nation since his re-election as president last month. (photo credit: AP/Eranga Jayawardena)

But the international Tamil community is no mood to quickly forgive the Singhalese leader after his brutal suppression of the 25-year uprising last year. The Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations said the Tamil Diaspora continues to mourn Independence Day as it marks the beginning of national oppression. It says when Britain granted independence to Sri Lanka in 1948, it failed to provide a federal arrangement for Tamils and Singhalese to share political power. They say this paved the way for the majority to systematically and consistently discriminate and brutally oppress the Tamils and led to the struggle that followed. “The Sri Lankan state’s genocidal attack on the Tamil people in 1983 lead to a 26 year long armed conflict that ended on 18 May 2009 with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,” they said.

Similarly the British Tamils Forum dismissed Rajapaksa’s claim to want to resolve ethnic tensions. Suren Surendiran, a senior member of the Forum told Al Jazeera Rajapaksa has been saying that forever. “Mr Rajapaksa has proven to be a very oppressive and discriminating president. The Tamils are not celebrating today as an independence day,” he said. “Rajapaksa was not voted in the north and east, where the Tamils are – it’s their land.”

And while Rajapaksa was probably appealing in vain to the Tamils in the centre of the country, back in the capital 5,000 supporters of his defeated opponent, former army chief General Sarath Fonseka, took to the streets to protest the results. Rajapaksa has sacked a dozen senior military officers in the aftermath of the election. He accused the officers of breaching military discipline and siding with Fonseka. He also said they were plotting to stage a coup and assassinate him. Some of the officers were arrested after troops surrounded a hotel in Colombo last week claiming there were army deserters inside. Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama said it was a pre-emptive action by Fonseka. “[They were] trying to occupy premises in the city,” he said. “These are not done in a democracy.”

At a news conference on Saturday Fonseka strongly denied the claims of a coup but said a number of army officers had given him inside information during his campaign. “The information given by these officers pertained to efforts by the campaign managers of Mr. Rajapaksa to defame and assassinate me,” he said. Most of the officers forced to resign were closely aligned to him. In the election on 26 January, Rajapaksa defeated him by a large margin 58 to 40 percent.

According to the BBC there were a number of factors that helped Rajapaksa win so easily. They cited his “fiery rhetoric and sure popular touch” as well as his emphasis on the primacy of his role in last year’s war victory. There is also little doubt that ordinary people’s sense that their streets are safer than they have been for the past 30 years played a major role. But the Tamil minority voted in the main for Fonseka and ethnic tensions remain as strong as ever despite the end of the war.

There are also fears of a crackdown on democracy now that Rajapaksa has the best part of another seven years to rule the country. Media and human rights groups accuse him of closing and blocking news outlets and harassing, assaulting and detaining journalists who it claims were biased towards Fonseka. Human Rights Watch say that since the election authorities have detained and questioned several journalists, blocked news websites, and expelled a foreign journalist. At least one journalist has been assaulted and several have been threatened. HRW Asia Director Brad Adams said he feared the crackdown was just the beginning of a campaign to get rid of critical voices before the parliamentary elections due on 22 April. “Sri Lanka’s friends should tell the government that any crackdown on civil society will harm future relations,” he said.

Mad Monckton and the media

Christopher Monckton’s mad-stare eyes should be a giveaway. As they rotate maniacally on high spin cycle, they present to the world a mirror of a tortured soul hell-bent on washing peculiarly dirty demons in public. Monckton is on a mission to show he is right and thousands of scientists are wrong. And the public and media hacks he is speaking to on his current Australian tour are desperate to hear what the “Lord” has to say.

It is no accident that those who flock to hear Monckton are white, elderly and wealthy. They like their life as it is and don’t want any inconvenient truths disturbing their repose. Nor will they be around long enough to face up to the consequences. Monckton’s shtick is a grab-bag of half-truths, innuendo and hints of world government that his troubled audience lap up. The trouble about climate change is once you know it to be true; you are compelled to act on it. Hence the importance of the soothing balm telling people “don’t worry, it doesn’t exist and there is no reason to change what you are currently doing”. Monckton is an expert in this field of reassurance towards inertia. The 3rd viscount Monckton of Benchley in Kent is a slick audience operator imbued with the confidence that comes with his deep upper-class pedigree and a colourful history of his own showmanship to back it up.

Appropriately for such a quixotic character, Christopher Walter Monckton was born on St Valentine’s Day in 1952, the first son of Major-General Gilbert Walter Riversdale Monckton 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, CB, OBE, MC, MA, DL. Christopher’s grandfather was a lawyer and politician born plain old Walter Monckton but was wealthy enough to be educated at Harrow and Oxford. After advising Edward VIII in the abdication crisis, and putting out propaganda for Churchill in the war, he was elected to Westminster as a Tory MP in 1951. After serving as a senior government minister for six years he blundered by opposing Eden on Suez and was put out to pasture. His reward was the viscountcy Monckton of Benchley which he held till his death in 1965.

His war hero son Gilbert inherited the honour which entitled him to a seat in the House of Lords. There he spoke up for rural and military interests and left the Tory Party when they started cutting back on military spending. When he lost his lifetime seat in Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms during the Hunting Bill, his manifesto for election to the House supported the muzzling of cats to stop the torture of mice. But Gilbert failed to live up to the mad peer stereotype other than occasionally flaunting his habit of wearing Arab dress and preparing his own brew of Arab coffee.

When Gilbert died in 2006, eldest son Christopher became the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. Like both his forebears he was educated at Harrow but follow his father to Cambridge. Also like his father Christopher failed in his bid to be elected to the House of Lords and did not pick up a single vote in the 2007 by-election he contested. But this was not his first brush with politics. After he left Cambridge in 1974 with an MA he became a journalist and joined the pro-Conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies. His paper on the privatisation of council housing attracted the attention of the Thatcher Government and he worked for the Downing St policy unit for four years.

In 1986 he returned to journalism, first at Today then at the Evening Standard. In 1999 Monckton became briefly prominent for his board game called the Eternity Puzzle. 209 irregularly shaped pieces were required to fill the 12-sided puzzle and Monckton offered a prize of £1m to solve it. Although Monckton said he had to sell his £1.5m Aberdeenshire mansion to the eventual winners, he more than recouped this amount thanks to his clever marketing of the game and its reward.

Since he got his peerage in 2006, Monckton has been most closely associated with pushing the line about a global warming conspiracy. He took issue with the Stern Report, the IPCC and the British Labour government all of whom he accused of “creating world government”. He claimed the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels and said the UN ignored the medieval warm period. He said the Antarctic has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years. He said the sun caused what little global warming there was. Although there was not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper that backed any of this up, newspapers like the Daily Telegraph lapped it up and gave Monckton credibility and a wider audience.

Monckton is slowly getting the gravitas he has craved despite having a head full of crackpot ideas. Among these is that upon reading Rachel Carson’s A Silent Spring Jackie Kennedy forced her then husband President John F Kennedy to ban DDT which Monckton said “caused the death of 40 million people”. He also got away with telling many hopelessly underprepared Australian journalists he won a Nobel Peace in 2007, a lie he later laughed off as a joke.

But Monckton has turned himself into a walking joke. He revels in the role of poster boy for the far right which cannot accept the truth of global warming because that would mean accepting political opponents were correct. Monckton and his coterie are on an apparent roll. A pessimistic George Monbiot wrote in November: “There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease.” But as his Australian trip is proving, Monckton’s contagion is limited to fellow-travellers among the media and the self-funded retirees. Not a single scientist has emerged to back him up. As even the conservative pro-farmer Fairfax publication The Land has realised, he is only preaching to the converted.

Rudd Government issues Intergenerational Report

The Rudd Federal Government has issued its first Intergenerational Report since taking power in 2007. The report assesses the fiscal and economic challenges of an ageing population as well as discussing associated environmental challenges and social sustainability. The tone of the document is set by its first sentence “Australia faces significant intergenerational challenges”. Bernard Keane called it a political document in an election year showing Labor’s long-term economic reform agenda and how much of a threat the Coalition is to Australia.

Treasurer Wayne Swan launched the report today with a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra. Swan said the government was deliberately beginning “a big national conversation” on the topic of ageing. “When you’re a baby boomer like me – and like many of you in this room – you never read a document with the year 2050 in it without some sober reflection on your own place (more likely, your lack of a place) in it,” Swan said. But Swan would not be alone in his swansong. By 2050 23 percent of all Australians will be over 65 – doubled the current number and 6 percent will be over 85 –quadruple the current number. The author of this blog is chastened to note he will just about fall into the latter category if still alive in 2050.

One in four over 65 means fewer workers to support retirees and young dependants with obvious effects to economic growth and increased demand for government services. The report overview says that a growing population will help manage this problem but at the cost of pressure on our infrastructure, services and environment. It also acknowledges climate change is one of the most significant challenges to long-term economic sustainability and says Australia’s ability to meet these future challenges depends on “adjustments” taken now. These include increasing productivity and participation in the workforce, restraining unsustainable spending growth, planning for demographic change and tackling climate change.

The key mantra of the report is “responsible economic management” which at first glance is one of those terribly meaningless statements. After all, who would admit to following irresponsible economic management? But this particular version is informed by the three Ps: productivity, participation and population. Productivity is a walking Labor election platform based on “nation building infrastructure, skills and education” but it is astutely complemented by the traditional Liberal values of “sound monetary and fiscal policies and the microeconomic reform agenda”.

Fiscally that means capping real growth in spending to 2 per cent until the budget returns to surplus. The last budget estimated that it would be at least 2016 before surplus returned so it effectively caps real growth for the foreseeable future. The document blithely says this will “bring structural improvements to the budget, reducing the fiscal pressures of ageing and escalating health costs.” What the document does not say is what will happen to spending if the economy does not grow or there is another recession.

Health Reform and the CPRS were another two key planks of the report. The government said it has set up the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission to assist with reforming the health and hospitals system. However the NHHRC recommendations have not yet been taken to COAG and there is some doubt they will fix the problems of public hospitals if a large central agency continues to tell hospitals how to treat their patients. The CPRS is also problematic not least because the Rudd Government is no closer to getting its legislation through the parliament.

The document forecasts a total population of 36 million in 2050 (currently 22 million). While the increased numbers will benefit the economy, it puts pressure on infrastructure, services and the environment. The report cites the CPRS and water reform as critical success factors in managing this problem. It says that without climate change action there will be an increase in extreme weather events, irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin would cease, water supplies will decrease to dangerous levels and national icons such as the Great Barrier Reef will probably be destroyed. This is all true, but it is difficult to see how the Government’s weak CPRS will have much affect despite the backup of the Renewable Energy Target and the $4.5 billion Clean Energy Initiative.

Tax reform is another intriguing aspect of the report. The government plans to release the Australia’s Future Tax System Review (commonly known as the Henry Review) early this year which it says “will lay out further steps for reforming the tax and transfer system to make it fairer, simpler and more competitive.” It says tax reform will be a 10-year project “likely to come in waves and will be conducted with extensive consultation.” It also notes drily “reform will not be easy.” Especially with a watching media determined to extract maximum value from judging winners and losers.

The report serves many sometimes conflicting ambitions. On the one side there is the need to continue economic growth but there is no acceptance that economic growth is a leading indicator of global warning. Similarly the difficulties of a rapidly growing population are touched on but it never really explains how the infrastructure challenges are going to be met – again without acknowledging the likely environmental impact. This is not to denigrate the report too much, it is a worthy document demanding of some respect and debate. Writing at the ABC, Stephen Long quoted one economist saying the report was “Thomas Malthus meets John Maynard Keynes.” But perhaps they both should meet James Hansen. Neither Malthus nor Keynes had to worry about living in a world where carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly approaching 400 ppm. That fact is the elephant in the Intergenerational Report.

APT6 at Brisbane GOMA

I took in the APT6 at the Gallery of Modern Art on a whistlestop visit to Brisbane this weekend. APT6 is shorthand for the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and having been greatly impressed by the last three triennial incarnations (in my ten years or so living in Brisbane), I was looking forward to seeing the latest version. I was not alone in my excitement. The exhibition has attracted 200,000 visitors in the opening six weeks since it began on 5 December.

This level of patronage is not unprecedented. 1.3 million have visited the six exhibitions but numbers really took off with APT5 in 2006 when it moved into the gleaming new GOMA building on Kurilpa Point. First established in 1993, the APT is the Queensland Art Gallery’s flagship international contemporary art event. It is the only major series of exhibitions in the world to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia.

The 2009 exhibition shows the work of over 100 artists from 25 countries, including a number of artists and artist collaborations never seen in Australia including works by artists from Tibet, North Korea, Turkey, Iran, Cambodia and Burma. According to Queensland Art Gallery director Tony Ellwood, APT6 looks at a number of thematic links, including “the dynamism of collaboration, the power of popular culture to articulate perspectives on contemporary life, the impact of rapid social change on local communities and cultures, and the practice of drawing”. The exhibition continues until 5 April 2009.

Here are some of my favourites from this year’s collection.

I was expecting the North Korean art to be showy in a Stalinist way and while they do promote Dear Leader’s Juche they are surprisingly touching and endearing. The work from the Mansudae art studio display a heart and affection for their subjects I simply wasn’t expecting.

Chen Qiulin’s enormous installation is a poignant reminder of what rural life along the Yangtze River was like before Three Gorges Dam hydro-electric project flooded the entire region. If the house is the ghost of Three Gorges past, his video Garden 2007 is a equally fascinating walk through the towns that now exist in the area.

The Funky Buddhas is a work by London-based Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso. This work is supposedly for the kids as you get the chance to place colourful stickers all over the buddhas. But although there were no stickers available to put on the Buddhas when I was there, I still enjoyed the humour of the piece and its fantastic location looking out to the new Kurilpa footbridge.

Ah yes, the elk. Impossible to walk past and deservedly gets a room all to itself. The 2.5m taxidermied elk, or to be precise Pixcell Elk#2 is by Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa. It is covered in glass, acrylic and crystal baubles of varying sizes which magnify and distort the object’s form in different parts to various degrees.

Called “People Holding Flowers” this installation by Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu is the signature piece for APT6. The work is made of synthetic polymer paint on resin; velour, steel wire, dacron, lodestone and cotton. There are 400 figures all holding flowers in a deliberate memory of Mao’s short-lived 1950s mantra of “let a hundred flowers bloom“. An overwhelming response to the Hundred Flowers Campaign led to serious crackdowns on dissent. Arguably nothing much has changed in 50 years in China.

I loved Rudi Mantofani’s collection of unplayable guitars. Mantofani is an Indonesian sculptor and painter whose work transforms ordinary objects into strange or absurd “visual parables”. Mantofani’s guitar sculptures were inspired by a benefit concert he saw in New York. He said, the gap between American philanthropic rhetoric and the harsh effects of its foreign policies in the Muslim world led him to “create a series of distorted guitars, as a means to express such ethical contradictions.” I’m not sure I saw those contradictions in the works but I couldn’t help loving the guitars.

Sebastian Pinera leads Chile’s loaded tilt to the right

Chile’s new billionaire leader has just gotten substantially wealthier after the value of shares soared in the wake of his election victory. Sebastian Pinera won the country’s run-off election last weekend and since then his 25 percent shareholding in Chile’s LAN Airlines SA have increased in value by two fifths giving the company a value of over $1.5 billion. Stock market officials halted trade and triggered an automatic investigation which happens whenever share prices increases by more than 20 per cent in one day’s trading. Pinera refused calls to sell the shares before the election.

Outgoing president Michelle Bachelet, who was constitutionally barred from seeking re-election, had raised conflict-of-interest questions over Pinera’s LAN stake during the presidential campaign. He did however promise he would divest the shares after the election and he reaffirmed that promise last week. He has also set up a blind trust to manage $500m of his fortune including ownership of the country’s four television networks and Chile’s biggest football club Colo-Colo.

The obvious comparison for Pinera is with Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi. Both are right-wing wealthy businessmen who won their countries’ elections with the help of their media empires and soccer teams. However Andres Oppenheimer says the comparisons are facile and notes five significant differences. Pinera has a PhD and taught economics at Harvard, he has been a senator for 20 years, his business record is free from scandal, he is a family man married for 36 years and he may be less of a right-winger than many think. Oppenheimer said Pinera opposed Pinochet in the 1980s (though others dispute this) and is liberal on social issues.

But there is no doubting his huge war chest helped him win the election. By last week’s runoff election with former president Eduardo Frei, Pinera had spent at least $13.6 million on the campaign. His victory marked a political shift as candidates of the governing Concertacion coalition had won all four presidential elections since 1989 on pledges of eradicating all traces of Pinochet’s leadership. Although 73 percent of Chileans still despise the former dictator, Pinera won because the coalition was split between two presidential candidates.

In the first vote on 13 December, Pinera took 44 percent of the vote with Frei second on 29 percent. Frei might have expected to pick up the remaining left-wing vote in the second ballot. After all, Concertacion had succeeded in reducing Chile’s poverty rate from over 40 percent to approximately 15 percent, while boasting the region’s most impressive growth rate since 1990. Former president Bachelet left office with an approval rate of over 80 percent. Yet Frei could not galvanise that support and his campaign slogan of “a vote for Pinera is a vote for Pinochet” fell flat. Frei did succeed in closing the gap as the run-off date came closer. But when Chile’s voters went to the polls on 17 January just enough of them decided they wanted to see change. Pinera won by 52 percent to 48.

There is at least one leftwing leader in the region who is unperturbed by Pinera’s win. Bolivian president Evo Morales, who himself was recently re-elected president (after changing the country’s constitution to allow him to stand), saluted the new Chilean leader and said he hopes he can continue the improvement in Bolivian-Chilean relations. Morales said he hoped Pinera will continue the bi-national dialogue started by “compañera” Michelle Bachelet. Relations between the two nations has been historically frosty since Chile won the War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia in the late 1800s, taking control of nitrate and mineral-rich lands and forcing Bolivia to lose its access to the Pacific Ocean. Bachelet was the first Chilean leader willing to discuss the issue with Bolivia and Morales hopes Pinera will continue the dialogue.

Fatma Riahi on frontline of Tunisia’s war on bloggers and journalists

Blogger Fatma Arabicca has resumed blogging two months after authorities arrested her but the blog remains censored. Fatma joins another high profile Tunisian blogger journalist Sofiene Chourabi on the censorship list in recent times. Fatma’s original blog was deleted in November just before she attracted the unwelcome notice of authorities but a new version (in Arabic) has been posting since 17 January.

Arabicca is the nom de blog of college theatre professor, Fatma Riahi. On 2 November, the 34-year-old Riahi was summoned to appear before a Tunis criminal court where she was questioned about her online activities. The authorities wanted to know whether Riahi was hiding behind the pen-name of Blog de Z, a Tunisian cartoonist blogger whose political satire enraged the government. They released her and summoned her again the next day. Three security officers escorted her to her house in Monastir 160 km from Tunis, to confiscate her PC and conduct a search for evidence. A day later, they escorted her again to Monastir to get her passwords and access her facebook account.

Riahi was detained for a week and denied permission to speak to her lawyer for longing than a few minutes. She was charged with criminal libel that potentially carries a prison term to up to three years in prison. A Free Arabicca campaign blog was been launched by fellow Tunisian bloggers in support for Fatma (though it hasn’t posted since mid November), and there is also a Facebook support page.

While it is not clear what Riahi’s perceived offence was, it didn’t need to be much to rile the sensitive Tunisian government. President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s government is one of the most repressive in the world as regards Internet usage. Social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook are often blocked because of content criticising the president’s policies and the government also filters emails of human rights activists. The 2008 Reporters Without Borders freedom of the press index ranked Tunisia 143rd out of 173 countries. When the Journaliste Tunisien blog posted the index a day after it was issued, it was blocked by authorities.

Just last week the Committee to Protect Journalists reported an appeals court in Nabeul refused to release Tunisian journalist Zuhair Makhlouf despite his completion of a three-month prison term imposed in October. Makhlouf is a contributor to news Web site Assabil Online and the opposition weekly Al-Mawkif. He was sentenced in October on the charge of “harming and disturbing others through the public communication network.” The sentence ended on January 18 but Tunisian penal code provisions say a prisoner cannot be released before all appeals have been considered. The court designated February 3 as the date for Makhlouf’s initial appeals hearing.

The decision came days before an appeal hearing for Taoufik Ben Brik, a journalist sentenced to six months in prison. Last year Reporters Without Borders (RSF) criticised the detention of Ben Brik and a violent attack on another journalist. In October 2009 Ben Brik was detained on a trumped-up charge of harassing a woman on the street. Reporters Without Borders said the arrest was an effort to muzzle him for his fierce criticism of President Ben Ali. Around the same time, independent journalist Slim Boukhdhir was attacked by a group of men just hours after he gave a critical interview to the BBC. RSF said the behaviour was “befitting of a mafia regime.”

The regime is showing no signs of changing its hostile attitude to journalists. Ben Ali has ruled Tunisia since taking over in a bloodless coup in 1987. In 2009 Ben Ali was re-elected for a fifth term with 89 percent of the vote in a rigged election. Although he promised to promote media diversity in 2004, the regime retains a tight control of news and information. According to the RSF, journalists and human rights activists are the target of bureaucratic harassment, police violence and constant surveillance by the intelligence services. The Internet is strictly controlled and foreign journalists are not allowed anywhere without the presence of government officials. But despite a total lack of regard for democratic institutions, RSF says Ben Ali is treated very leniently by international organisation all because he is “an ally of the west in its fight against terrorism.” No one seems to care about the terrorism he inflicts on his own subjects.