Month: May 2012
Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report – part 1
Surat Cumulative Management Area |
Manne bites Australian
National daily newspaper The Australian has been wasting scarce journalist resources on a vendetta yet again. The latest victim is media writer Margaret Simons whose 2007 book The Content Makers remains the definitive account of the geography of Australian media (though needs to be updated for the last five years). In recent weeks The Aus unleashed its attack dogs over claims Simons has somehow caused a breach of practice by her actions in the recent Finkelstein Review into media which was inspired by the serious criminal behaviour of one of The Australian’s sister publications in the UK. The risible attack on Simons is brilliantly exposed in Robert Manne’s new Monthly essay.
Manne makes two points about the tactics of the newspaper. Firstly, it doesn’t matter if your allegations are true; you just have to make enough of them and some mud will stick. Secondly, it is another shot across the bows of anyone critical of the newspaper with treatment similar to Julie Posetti and Larissa Behrendt (women are the overwhelming targets).
The newspaper fulfils a crucial function in our democracy as one of the few media outlets with a truly national outlook. But the power conferred by being one of the central squares of Australia’s public sphere has gone to the broadsheet’s head. In its efforts to defend itself against critics, it has become warped and has forgotten its purpose: to give Australians a useful national perspective on the important news of the day.
The Australian does not learn from its mistakes. It never admits it is wrong. Under Chris Mitchell in particular (editor in chief since 2003) it has been central to a culture war. The newspaper and its Saturday companion’s armada of columnists recite the party line in their sleep and trot out the house rules.
There are enough good writers at the paper to provide the news function. They cover politics, business, law and international affairs in detail (with the help of Murdoch papers such as the Wall St Journal and The Times). But their opinion pages are barren wastelands of News groupthink where Greg Sheridan, Chris Kenny, Dennis Shanahan and Christopher Pearson flourish. Even when turning to unorthodox opinion it favour those who unorthodoxy is mostly directed against the left and the greens (eg Brendan O’Neill, Frank Furedi, Bjorn Lomborg).
As Manne said and as I know from discussions with News journalists there are many in the organisation appalled by the blatant and biased political tone set by the editor and his inner team. Manne reckons they should speak up which would be a better way of dealing with issues than any outside body Finkelstein could recommend. There is a precedent when journalists at the Australian went on strike in 1975 in protest as Murdoch’s open support of Malcolm Fraser in the lead up to the election.
But it is unlikely any uprising will come from within. News is one of the last 20th century media empires and most employees fear for their future. It is not making a graceful transition to the digital age though it remains an extraordinary wealthy company and very powerful in the local market. The Australian, often described as a Murdoch vanity project, is not driving this wealth. But it is influential with its high demographic readership and its access to power. Politicians of both major parties are wary of criticising it though the Greens have dubbed it hate media.
This is unsurprising as much of Mitchell’s vitriol is reserved for the party which his paper has openly called to be destroyed at the ballot box. Why The Australian even feels it has a right to make such a recommendation is a revealing aspect of its DNA. “We know best,” it screams and we will punish anyone who has the temerity to think otherwise. No wonder it cannot deal with the social media tools of 21st century when its views are steeped in 20th century paternalism. Intimidation, not trust, maintains its authority. The Australian is on borrowed time and not just because Murdoch will die sooner or later. Its thrashed brand is a tragedy as much of Chris Mitchell’s making as Rupert’s and one which must not be repeated by whatever colonises its habitat when it is gone.
Ireland set to vote a grudging yes on Fiscal Treaty
Ireland is set to vote in its ninth European referendum next week. As they have done in the previous eight, the major two parties are supporting the yes vote. But as in the past, there is no guarantee the ayes will have it. This is because like many of the previous ones the issue on the table is obscure and austere Ireland has long since lost its romance with Europe. Those supporting the treaty have issued dire warnings of a “no” vote.
Arthur Moore, oil man
On October 10, 1931 it was the Western Star’s solemn duty to report sad news. Word had reached Roma from Longreach that Mr Arthur Moore, superintendent of Longreach’s Oil Bore had been killed in an explosion. Known as a careful man who rarely took a drink and who was intimate with the science of boring for oil, his death was a mystery.
From reading Moore’s log books, the coroner deduced he was making a third attempt to shoot the bore and had a consignment of caps newly arrived from Brisbane and a metre-long torpedo with six plugs of gelignite. The mixture exploded prematurely as he tried to place a battery cap. It was likely a faulty explosives timer concocted with a pocket watch brought an end to the life of one of Roma’s great but unheralded oil men.
Arthur Moore was an Englishman, born in Lime Regis, Dorset in 1876. How he spent his early years is not known but he arrived in Australia in 1910 thirsting for adventure in a new land. He entered into the service of the International Boring Company and was posted across Queensland boring artesian water for the state’s growing demands. Aged 40, he signed up in 1916 for the AIF and went off to Europe with the newly formed Australian Flying Corps.
After the war finished he stayed on in England to train in oil development. On his return he came to Queensland’s growing oil capital: Roma. He was placed in charge of the government oil bore on Hospital Hill in 1920 as the first non American to hold this position. Moore released a big flow of oil at QG Number 4 well while removing casing and this was the first oil to be condensed in Roma.
He met local woman Esther “Essie” Nind, the only daughter of two well-known Roma residents. Moore married Essie in 1921 aged 45 (she was 27) and they had one daughter. After visiting America, Moore was convinced there was oil in commercial quantities in Roma. “Prospecting in Queensland,” he said in 1923, “should be carried out on the same type of plant used for drilling artesian water.”
In 1924, the Western Star reported Moore was made manager of the newly formed Queensland Petroleum Limited who secured prospecting permits over Forest Vale and Mitchell Downs. Moore was hired to be superintendent for three years Moore also went to Texas to learn more about drilling and later took charge of drilling operations in New Guinea. Roma’s booming oil business lured him back in 1928 to become manager of Roma Cornwall Dome oil operation until it went bust.
Moore went back to England where he was accepted into the Institute of Petroleum Technologists of London. He would also drill in New Zealand before heading to Longreach. He was remembered as one of the first non Americans to be feted in the field of drilling and someone who kept meticulous notes on all aspects of oil exploration.
The extinction of Pityus Mancityus
Manchester City’s stunning Premier League triumph was achieved in typically Madchester style. As someone wrote in the aftermath, the second half of their final game at home against Queens Park Rangers was a microcosm of their season. Comfortably winning the league, then almost throwing it away before finally snatching it back at the end. It was an astonishing climax to a wild ride and probably just as well they won as the alternative would have been one calamity too far for a side renowned for its ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Releasing Ranjini: Why ASIO is wrong
Getup’s latest cause is the detention without trial of a Sri Lankan woman and her two small children. The webpage “No Detention without appeal” says Ranjini and her sons, eight and six, have been detained indefinitely without charges for four days.
Ranjini survived the Sri Lankan war but her husband was killed in 2006. She travelled with her children on a boat to Christmas Island in 2010. From there they were moved to Leonora in WA, then Inverbrackie, SA in 2011, and finally to community detention in Brisbane.
Ranjini met Melbourne man Ganesh while he was in Brisbane on holiday late last year, and she moved to Melbourne with the children to wed him this year. The Department of Immigration verified her and the boys as refugees in September last year pending Australian Security Intelligence Organisation security clearance. If they could convince ASIO they could then obtain visas to enable them to stay in Australia.
After months of agonising wait, they fell at the last hurdle. On Thursday, Ranjini was told to pick up her kids from school in Melbourne and meet Immigration officials. ASIO’s security assessment came up negative. They put Ranjini and the children on a plane to Sydney and on to Villawood detention centre. They are there indefinitely with no right of appeal.
Media have not reported the surname of Ganesh or Ranjini. The Age said they married last month with the approval of the Department of Immigration. The boys were enrolled at Mill Park Primary School. Ganesh told The Age he was allowed only five minutes to chat with them before they were taken away. “We were happy and the kids were even happier … we wanted to start new life with hope. But now we are shocked…We are separated. There has been too much pain before. Are we going to be put through the same pain in Australia as well?”
On Friday Ganesh flew to Sydney and sent a text back to a family friend in Melbourne they were okay but he didn’t understand why they were detained. ABC Lateline says Ranjini and her family face a bleak future. “They and 46 other refugees with negative ASIO assessments are locked up indefinitely with no right of appeal,” Lateline said on Friday. “This morning one of the refugees attempted suicide at a detention facility in Melbourne.”
The program quoted the Refugee Action Coalition who spoke of detainee Kumar in detention for 35 months and was turned down by ASIO a year ago. With no legal recourse to end his incarceration and return to Sri Lanka impossible, the 36-year-old Kumar attempted suicide by hanging at the Melbourne immigration transit accommodation centre. He was found by fellow refugees around 1.30am this morning. He was the second inmate in a month to attempt suicide at the same centre.
There is no right of review or appeal against ASIO findings. The indefinite detention of ASIO negative refugees is the subject of a complaint by Australian refugees to the Geneva UN High Commission for Human Rights. The Australian government has until July to respond to a complaint. A Parliamentary Committee has recommended there should be an appeal process in a damning report on mandatory detention. Getup called it a basic principle of justice.
A UNHCR policy document on Australia’s mandatory detention policy and reluctance to release asylum seekers to alternative measures has nothing to do with national security concerns either. On 22 August 2002, the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade asked the ASIO Director-General about the security screening of asylum seekers and learned that out of 5986 screenings conducted since 2000, not one posed a national security risk. The Committee also heard there was no evidence of a statistical linkage between asylum seekers and criminality (other than immigration violations).
Ranjini, Kumar and the others have few political supporters in an era where a crude call to “stop the boats” is an electable mantra. Governments from Howard onwards have demonised asylum seekers and maintain a wall between refugees and public sympathy. Getup has photos of Ranjini and the boys to humanise this campaign. The test for Attorney-General Nicola Roxon will be to humanely deal with these cases without creating an electoral wedge for Labor. “No matter what,” Getup said. “We mustn’t allow anyone – let alone children – to be detained indefinitely without charge, trial or appeal.”
Reaching back to Ryan to secure Labor’s future
Queensland Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk has reached far back into the party’s past to conjure up a vision for its future. Palaszczuk used a Labor Day dinner in Brisbane to announce a new not-for-profit organisation to debate and discuss new policies funded by the party and the unions. The new entity is called the T.J. Ryan Foundation after the former state Labor premier. Palaszczuk called Ryan one of the Labor movement’s shining lights. “It was Thomas Joseph Ryan’s government from 1915 to 1919 that is regarded as having laid the groundwork for the Labor governments that dominated Queensland politics in following decades,” she said.
But the foundation link to the union would not have entirely pleased the wily lawyer who was the state’s greatest Labor premier and possibly the greatest of either party. As D.J. Murphy notes in a 1978 study of Ryan, Labor never aspired to be purely a trade union party in Queensland. From its foundation until the maritime strikes of 1890, it saw itself as a reforming party based on urban and rural unions and supported farmers who wanted a more equitable sharing of wealth. In 1904 the first Commonwealth Labor Government of John Watson entered into a coalition with dissident Liberals. (T.J. Ryan photo: National Library of Australia)
Among the Liberals attracted to the reforming zeal of early Labor was Thomas Joseph Ryan. He was just 39 when he led the first Labor Government with a clear majority into power in Queensland on June 1, 1915. Ryan was the son of an itinerant Irish farm labourer who arrived in Victoria in 1860 and became a stone fence builder in Geelong. Thomas Joseph was the fifth of his six children to Jane Cullen who died when he was just seven. Eldest daughter Mary, 11, brought up the family. Young Tom was a gifted student and got a scholarship to St Francis Xavier College in Kew. He graduated in law in 1899 and he moved to Queensland as a teacher at Rockhampton Grammar School. He was admitted to the Queensland Bar in 1901.
Ryan’s politics were shaped in Victoria by the liberalism of the 1890s which saw a big role for the state. He was also an avid federationist and both views shaped his thinking in power. At Maryborough and Rockhampton, Ryan was marked out as a great public speaker. His speciality was constitutional law and he argued for the vote for women, “one person, one vote” and fair elections.
In 1903 he nominated as a Deakinite but he soon became aware he had more in common with Labor. A year later he switched sides and established himself as a leading Labor spokesman in Rockhampton. He was inspired by Prime Minister Watson who ruled responsibly in office. He remained Labor in 1907 after William Kidston left the party but was defeated in that year’s election. In 1909 Ryan moved west to stand for the seat of Barcoo and was elected. He was respected as a lawyer who had mastery of labour laws and could reduce complex legal questions into arguments anyone could understand.
In parliament he was seen as a rising star and established himself as a formidable adversary of the government. Aware of the power of the press he bought the Rockhampton Daily Record in 1910 which while supportive never became a mere propaganda tool for Ryan. These were exciting times for Labor as Andrew Fisher gained a majority in both houses at federal level.
Ryan was a nationalist who supported referendums to give the Federal Government more power over monopolies and labour issues. Labor had hoped to win the Queensland election of 1912 until a Brisbane general strike allowed Liberal premier Digby Denham to play the law and order card in a snap election. Ryan was elected leader of the new opposition with E.G. Theodore installed as his deputy. It would prove one of the great partnerships of Australian politics.
In 1913 Ryan outlined where he wanted Labor to go. “There was no other party which had a policy formed at the instance of the people themselves,” he said. He appealed to professionals, farmers, clerks and labourers. With Ryan at the helm, Labor won easily in 1915 with a broad appeal to workers and farmers who supported his push to end the monopoly power of Colonial Sugar Refinery. As Ryan became premier and Attorney-General, Australia was sucked deep into the European War which he fully supported. What Ryan hated was the way the big companies grew fat on war profits with CSR and the pastoralists overcharging the Imperial Army for its supplies. Ryan established a cane price board and negotiated a sugar labour agreement.
Ryan’s biggest problem wasn’t industrialists but the upper house of his own parliament. As early as 1908 Ryan called the Legislative Council an ‘excrescence on the Constitution”. In 1915, the chamber was stacked with the previous government’s appointees with only five of 45 members supporting Labor. Ryan wanted the Council abolished with the Governor unwilling to appoint new Labor members. In 1917, Ryan had charmed a new Governor into appointing 13 Labor members and set the course for the Upper House’s abolition. He supported abolition in a 1917 referendum but it was comprehensively defeated.
The other major referendum issue was conscription. Australia was the only volunteer army in the war and Ryan could see it emerging as a divisive issue. He delayed a party decision to avoid a split. But once the referendum was called, he was the only premier to take a stand against it. Because of his role in helping to defeat the first conscription referendum, Ryan became the defacto leader of the second campaign, a battle he relished. Prime Minister Billy Hughes brought in wide-ranging censorship to gag anti-conscriptionists. On 19 November 1917 Ryan made a speech in parliament which the censors refused to allow printed though the same arguments he made a day earlier had been faithfully recorded by the pro-conscriptionist Brisbane Courier. Ryan quoted war office figures that showed there were already 100,000 men available for reinforcements making conscription unnecessary.
The censor’s report made it appear Ryan supported conscription and refused requests to correct the record. Ryan insisted Hansard print the censored portion of the speech and Theodore took advantage of this to include two other censored pamphlets with the removed text highlighted in bold print. Theodore also arranged to have the Hansard circulated throughout Queensland.
Hughes arrived in Brisbane and authorised a raid on the Queensland Government Printer’s Office to stop the publication. He challenged Theodore to repeat the pamphlets outside the privilege of parliament and he would “have him in 48 hours.” But the press interpreted this as a direct challenge to Ryan as Theodore’s boss. Ryan accepted the challenge and repeated the speech in front of thousands at two public meetings. He and Theodore were prosecuted but the magistrate dismissed the case.
Because of his strong anti-big business stance, Ryan was hated by the media. In October 1917, the Brisbane Courier editor threw his own remarks into the report of a Ryan speech against the “intolerable” Legislative Council saying it was Ryan who made it intolerable. “He wishes to retain power in the hands of the union s to create these intolerable situations whenever they choose,” the editor said. The Melbourne Argus called his anti-conscription campaign a “paltry and contemptible conspiracy with Germans and other disloyalists.”
But more people believed Ryan than the Argus and the second referendum was lost by a bigger margin than the first. By 1918, Ryan was a national figure feted by large audiences in Sydney. He was easily re-elected as Premier of Queensland in a personal triumph. He had shown it was possible to achieve in parliament what many socialists believed was only possible through revolution. But his growing stature meant he was increasingly consumed by national issues.
He still found time to pursue his attack on Queensland’s Legislative Council. When the upper house softened his taxation laws, he threatened them with a large influx of Labor members and worked on a second referendum to curb its powers. In 1918, he left for England for a Privy Council case and arranged for loans with the Bank of England. Ryan’s urbane demeanour allayed the fears of the British moneymen that Queensland was in the hands of the Bolsheviks or the Wobblies.
Ryan and his wife caught the dreaded influenza in England and they lay stricken in their hotel, their doctors expecting both to die at any moment. He recovered to win his case but years of political struggle were starting to take their toll. When he came home to Queensland, he was escorted by hundreds of soldiers carrying lighted torches crammed by cheering spectators.
A federal conference in October 1919 formally asked him to become campaign director of the federal campaign. When his friend Jim Page died in 1921, the seat of Maranoa opened up and Ryan went there to campaign. He had a heavy cold and was physically exhausted. In Barcaldine, he collapsed and was placed in hospital. He died on Monday, August 1, 1921 aged just 46. His legacy was immense and his successor Theodore completed many projects including the abolition of the upper house. Thanks to Ryan and Theodore, Labor would rule from 1915 to 1929 and again from 1932 to 1957. As long time Queensland parliament clerk C.A. Berneys wrote, Ryan was the best he’d seen: “He stood pre-eminent as a leader; as an earnest exponent of the faith that was in him and as a generous big hearted fighter.”
Today’s Queensland Labor leader Palaszczuk looks to Ryan as the party emerges from the wreckage of their worst ever election loss. She said the Ryan Foundation would show Labor was something beyond a mere brand. Channelling Ryan she said Labor always been “a living, breathing party” focused on equality, fairness and opportunity. “Labor’s policies and principles should always be about people,” she said.
Hard currency: the state of the Australian economy
I was at the Roma Show today where I listened to a Rabobank expert talk about the macro state of the world economy. It was a rural show so the focus was on agricultural matters. We heard about the price of soy beans, Western Australian wheat, the link between corn and oil, and why there were smiles on the faces of cattle producers.