The Howard Years: why am I not surprised?

The Australian yesterday:

THREE of the biggest decisions of the Howard years - the GST, the intervention in East Timor and the Pacific solution - were decided with virtually no consultation with cabinet, it can be revealed for the first time.

A new television documentary, which is based on more than 20 hours of interviews with John Howard and 180 hours of interviews with key players in Australia and overseas, confirms how dominant the former prime minister was in running the affairs of the nation for almost 12 years.

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer reveals how one of the most controversial policies of the Howard years - the so-called Pacific solution under which asylum-seekers from Australia were moved to neighbouring island nations - was devised.

Mr Howard had told him: "Go and find someone who will take them."

Mr Downer said: "So I went back up to my office and got my staff together there and said: 'Well, now we are literally going to have to think up a country to send these people, that'll take them.'

Let us hope that the Australian Broadcasting Commission really has solidly tackled its subject. Time is well overdue for Australian citizens to hear more of the details of what was done in their name (though it is a certainty that all the usual suspects kept very quiet when in front of the cameras about their parts in the AWB scandal, just in case any documentary viewer actually recalls details of previous 'evidence' presented to Commissioner Cole).

Given that Howard stacked the ABC board with neo-con sympathizers during his almost eleven years in office, I expect that a genuine exposé is out of the question and what we will be treated to is a watered down version of events and reams of self-serving footage of the former prime minister.

When is national security public information not public information?

When is public information not public information?
Why, when it's posted on the Attorney-General's website of course.
This site would make Sir Humphrey Appleby proud.
After declaring the National Security Public Information Guideline as being "not publicly available" it goes on to provide a helpful link to a pdf of this document.

"The Branch also has responsibility for reviewing and updating the National Counter-Terrorism Plan (www.nationalsecurity.gov.au), National Counter-Terrorism Handbook and oversees (with Public Affairs) the National Security Public Information Guidelines. The National Counter-Terrorism Handbook and National Security Public Information Guideline are not publicly available documents." (my bolding)

What is interesting in all this is just how determined the Prime Minister is to keep national security in his own bailiwick - four of the five committees dealing with national security and terrorism are chaired either by Kevin Rudd, the Secretary of the Dept. of Prime Minister and Cabinet or a senior official from that department.
It appears that our Kev just can't bear the thought of some other pollie taking credit for any work done on these matters.

National Security Public Information Guideline here.
National Counter-Terrorism Plan (with October 2008 amendments) here.

Just for fun here's a few updates on Australia's own terrorist watch list:
DFAT consolidated list of 540 individuals and terrorist groups here. Interestingly it notes that Osama Bin Laden is now an Afghan citizen and (although many convicted individuals are listed) the much maligned David Hicks is nowhere to be found.
ANS terrorist group list here.

Best short obits for the Bush Presidency seen so far

Bush poster from Chuckman's Cartoon Comments

Bush is pure poison, the most unpopular president in the history of opinion polling.
He will leave office on January 20 with a record of presiding over two recessions, and starting two wars that he could not finish. This amounts to a record of failure unmatched by any president.

Peter Hartcher writing in The Canberra Times on Saturday 1 November 2008

GEORGE BUSH is constitutionally barred from running for office next week, but you might be pleased to hear that his name will still appear on the ballot in at least one part of the United States. The people of San Francisco will be asked to approve an initiative to rename a city landmark. Proposition R proposes giving the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant a new title: the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

Gerard Baker writing in The Times online 1 November 2008

"Bring them on."

George W. Bush recklessly responding to the beginnings of the Iraqi insurgency in the Orlando Sentinel 1 November 2003

"This nation has always gone to war reluctantly."

George Dubbya having a revisionist moment on CNN 11 November 2003

Northern Rivers artist's water themes

Gone fishing by Lyn Hope

Water cycle by Colin

Long Neck Turtles by Chris

Displayed at TNN Gallery

Welcome to Senator Conroy's World Wide Wait

The Age on Thursday last:

THE Federal Government is planning to make internet censorship compulsory for all Australians and could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

Australia's level of net censorship will put it in the same league as countries including China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and the Government will not let users opt out of the proposed national internet filter when it is introduced.

Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government's $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers - one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a "clean feed", censoring adult material.

and in The Australian IT section:

INTERNET speeds could slow by 30 per cent under the Government's proposed web filtering scheme, even though it will do little to block illegal content.

That's the warning from technical experts, who also say the plan could expose users' financial details during online banking sessions and see popular websites including Facebook and YouTube banned.

The warnings came after Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy confirmed the Federal Government planned to introduce a mandatory internet filter, shelving plans to allow Australians to opt out of the scheme.

Internet service providers, who would administer the filter, have been asked to conduct live trials of the filter before the end of the year.

But System Administrators Guild of Australia president Donna Ashelford said the plan was deeply flawed and would slow internet access down by about 30 per cent according to the Government's own laboratory trials.

Despite this, the national web filter would only censor web content, Ms Ashelford said, and could not deal with the remaining 60 per cent of internet traffic, much of which occurred over peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent and LimeWire.

"The bulk of internet traffic is over peer-to-peer networks and the bulk of illegal content is trafficked is over peer-to-peer networks," she said. "There is no choke point at which they can block that material. I do not believe this is an issue that has a technical solution."

Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Colin Jacobs warned the web filter could also unwittingly make the internet unsafe for financial transactions by breaking the secure encryption used by banks online.

Five of the six web filters tested by the Australian Media and Communications Authority this year were able to filter websites using the secure protocol HTTPS, which would leave financial details exposed to the internet service provider in charge of operating the filter.

"If they sit in the middle and get between your web browser and the bank's server it really breaks open the security and leaves the details open to attack," he said.

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is reported:

"I will accept some debate around what should and should not be on the internet — I am not a wowser," Senator Conroy told The Age. "I am not looking to blanket-ban some of the material that it is being claimed I want to blanket-ban, but some material online, such as child pornography, is illegal."

In response to arguments that the proposal would affect basic civil liberties and the principle that households should be able to be their own internet policeman, he said: "We are not trying to build the Great Wall of China.

"We are not trying to be Saudi Arabia, and to say that is to simply misrepresent the Government's position." [my emphasis]

What a pity that Senator Conroy has already been exposed for lying to the Australian people on the matter of his national ISP-level filtering plans.

His present assurances are not worth a penny and, this can be confirmed by his evidence before the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communication and the Arts this month, where he and his department finally admit that nowhere in the free world has mandatory ISP-level filtering been legislated.

However, even before Conroy imposes the Great Wall of Australia we will have to endure his national pilot scheme which will censor as laid out in evidence to the same Senate estimates committee:

Senator LUDLAM—So within the constraints of not having briefed your minister yet, how much can you tell us about how you see that project rolling out in terms of timetables for the live trial and then what happens after that?
Mr Rizvi—At a very broad level, the purpose of the pilot is to look at two streams of potential filtering.
The first stream of filtering is in terms of just filtering the ACMA black list and different methodologies for filtering the ACMA black list. What we will seek to test is the impact of that type of filtering in terms of a range of criteria. We will also test more sophisticated types of filtering that go beyond just simply testing the ACMA black list through to filtering larger black lists and also looking at other types of filtering including dynamic filtering, filtering using key words—those sorts of methodologies—to see what the impact of that type of filtering is in terms of both the ISP and the customer.

Oh lucky, lucky Australians with Internet connections - every possible form of censorship (including it seems 'little black box' hardware) will be tried on hundreds of thousands of unwilling guinea pigs whose very livelihoods and businesses may grind to a snail's pace because the Internet servers involved are likely to have a collective technical nervous breakdown.

Australians are so impressed with Conroy's plan for a little digital bookburning that Courier Mail readers responded to Thursday's poll in this way by 4pm yesterday:

Poll Results

Q. Do you support the planned internet filter?

Yes 9% (452 votes)
No 90% (4493 votes)

Sum votes:
Total votes: 4945 votes so far **Poll was still open at time of time of writing**

** Thankyou to Michael Meloni at Somebody Think of the Children for posting the above new 'portrait' of the Minister which I cheerfully filched for this entry.

Some of the saddest words uttered this year

Yesterday, Harry Nelson, former Yuendumu Council President, presented Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin with a statement signed by 236 residents in a meeting of the community before the Minister opened the new Yuendumu pool, funding of which predates the intervention.

The statement read:

We, the residents of Yuendumu, want you to listen to the following statement and take our message back to the Federal and NT Governments:

When John Howard and Mal Brough lost their seats, we were happy. But now you are doing the same thing to us, piggybacking Howard and Brough's policies, and we feel upset, betrayed and disappointed.

We don't want this intervention!

We talked to the Review board, and now the Government is not even listening to the report, and is keeping this intervention going almost unchanged. It is an insult to us.

This is our land. We want the Government to give it back to us. We want the Government to stop blackmailing us. We want houses, but we will not sign any leases over our land, because we want to keep control of our country, our houses, and our property.

We say NO to income management. We can look after our own money.

We want the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 reinstated now, not in 12 months.

The Government Business Manager is useless, expensive, and we don't need them. We want our community councils back instead. We want community control, not Shires. We don't want more police, we don't want more contractors, we don't want more government people.

Everything is coming from the outside, from the top down. The government is abusing us with this intervention. We want to be re-empowered to make our own decisions and control our own affairs. We want self-determination. We want support, funding and resources for things coming from our community, from the inside.

Yuendumu has a lot of things to be proud of. Our community programs, like the Mt Theo program, the bilingual education program, Warlpiri media, the Old People's program, Warlukurlunga arts centre, childcare, the youth program, should be supported, celebrated, and used as a model for other communities.

We want to keep our bilingual education program and use our own language to teach English, maths, and other things in schools.

We want you to give us respect and dignity, and stop telling lies about our people.

We want the Government to listen to us, talk with us, consult with us, and do things proper way.

[Crikey.com.au,28 October 2008]

*

I know money matters, but........

The global financial crisis appears to be dominating the media recently.
While this is understandable to a degree, the fact remains that Australia is not in financial dire peril right at this moment.

However the Murray-Darling Basin is in dire peril and its crisis directly affects the cost of meat, dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables for us all and its long-term prognosis will have a direct effect on the national economy.

So it was more than disappointing to see this Media Monitors break down of the media-led focus on issues last week:

Click to enlarge

Media Monitors has also looked at the media response to climate change in Making Sense of the Climate Change Debate 2008 report and found that less than a third of Australian media reports over the period assessed are solution focused (including blogs of which only about 6% mention solutions), with a small 7.25% of all media reports mentioning reducing oil and coal consumption.

What was apparent though is that overall (when compared to the rest of the world) the Australian debate was very focused on what to do, how to do it and when to do it.

That was then and this is now.

With governments across this country having the attention span of gnats and seemingly glued to populist politics garnered by daily perusal of the media, there is a danger that the plight of the Murray-Darling Basin, greenhouse emission reduction plans and climate change solutions generally will slip further to the edge of political radars.

The real crisis is current and looming climate change impacts as well as ongoing water sustainability.

It is time to remind domestic media of this fact and insist that a brief journalistic flurry in response to yesterday's release of Treasury modelling of the proposed national carbon pollution reduction scheme does not mitigate the need to keep global warming high on the national issues list and so reflect ongoing national concern.