Back to the blog...and on to Paul Krugman

As you can see, Dear Reader, it has been a long time between posts. Life has been full, to say the least. Firstly, because I am part of a new environmental organisation, GreenFaith Australia. This is a multi-faith organisation - and Miss Eagle is the Secretary. Secondly, our friendly landlords need their house back for pressing family reasons so we are househunting - no success yet - and I am organising my garden by potting up all that is not in puts. Won't be able to take the blooming broad beans, and the sugar loaf cabbages, and the cauliflowers but, gee whiz, silver beet and beetroot look quite decorative in individual pots. Thirdly, I have been very ill. Six days in the Angliss Hospital with cellulitis in my face and left ear on high-powered antibiotics. I was the tourist attraction of the Short Stay Unit for doctors and nurses who came to look at the monstrosity on the side of my head. Now I just feel like I have had the stuffing knocked right out of me.

So in all this what has brought me back to the blog................

PAUL KRUGMAN, 2008 NOBEL LAUREATE FOR ECONOMICS

for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity

The copyright of this photo belongs to Princeton University which, I hope, is forgiving to a Krugman fan and to whom Miss Eagle sends congratulations on yet another Nobel winner.

Joy! Sheer unadulterated joy! And self-congratulations too in the fact that your correspondent, Dear Reader, really does know a great economist when she sees one. Her favouritest economist - who is the only reason she continues to read The New York Times - has just received the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics. Miss Eagle presents to you the one, the only......PAUL KRUGMAN.

Krugman is a great and innovative economic theoretician but - and this is of vital importance to folks like me - he is a great communicator. Here is an economist who speaks our language, an economist who hangs his politics honestly on his sleeve. John Kenneth Galbraith long ago captured my heart. Krugman, in my view, is a worthy successor. For even more, go here.

If you, too, wish to congratulate Paul Krugman please email him here.

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When you can do nothing else: bear witness.

When will we ever learn...to listen?

Makinti Minutjukur

Today the Indigenous Affairs Minister makes a flying first-time visit to the Pukatja Community in South Australia's APY lands. This is an open letter to the Minister from Anangu woman

12 August, 2008

Dear Minister

We welcome you on your first visit to our community at Ernabella/Pukatja.

We are happy to hear that the Government will pay for the repair of the Ernabella Church. That church is part of our present day heritage. Our fathers and grandfathers built it with their own hands. It is a place that helped to keep our community strong.

We are also happy to hear that the Commonwealth and State Governments will help the Amata community to have a new art centre building for Tjala Arts. Community art centres are like the hub of a wheel. They are a fixed point where people work and make money to feed their families; pass on their knowledge to young people; get training in art skills and business skills; and have a quiet safe place to be where they make beautiful things that make them feel proud and happy, as well as giving pleasure to the people who buy their work.

We are also pleased to hear that both your Government and the South Australian Government will do something to help with more houses in our communities.

We appreciate the help the governments are giving with these things. We believe that you know that they are the tip of the iceberg. Hiding under the water are the same old problems - bigger than ever.

First though, step back 30 years. In those days we had a community garden supervised by Ungakini's husband, and which supplied our fresh fruit and vegetables. The community bakery run by Peter Nyaningu supplied all our bread. Rodney Brumby ran the building projects, supervising the brick making for houses and community buildings in which my father also worked, just one of several of his community jobs. My mother worked in the women's learning centre where she and other women made clothes, home furnishings, and all sorts of practical goods which people bought with the money they earned from their employment in the community.

I worked in the clinic and was trained there by Robert Stephens and others. Many Anangu received health worker training then; few do today. We had the responsibility of doing the jobs that made our community. We earned our living and we did work that was interesting and worthwhile. We were learning in a good way how to be together in one place all the time, and how to start making so many changes in our lives. All this was new, since as you know, only 30 years before that most of us were still living in the bush and living from the land.

I believe the reason why all our lives out here have become so difficult and painful over the last 30 years is that governments, who have the power over us because they have the money we need to make the changes from old ways to new ways, have stopped listening to us. Listening properly. Taking the time. Working with us. Trusting us to be responsible for our own lives - since we know them best.

It's true that many people have come from government for visits: politicians like yourself, very senior and important public servants from Canberra and Adelaide, and all sorts of other experts and advisers. That's good of course - but not one of them has ever stayed long enough, or come back often enough so that they can really understand, and so that we can help them understand what is the reality here - and the other way, so that they can help us understand what the government can do.

You know and I know what some of the problems are: not enough money for people to live and eat properly, and so an increasing health crisis because of bad diet; no proper work for most adults and so a rising sense of hopelessness from young people who can see no future; a terrifying marijuana problem (since Opal fuel it has replaced petrol as the substance abuse of choice) which is a main factor in most suicides among its many other destructive effects; many old "slum" like houses, and not enough houses anyway, so babies, children, everyone gets sick.

The strength of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara is in our relationships with each other. That is how our society and our communities work - through our relatedness. Our communities can remain strong only as long as our relationships can be strong, instead of melting away because of no work and no meaning, sickness and sadness. We need to build up those relationships again and we need a different relationship with governments.

I want to ask you, for all Anangu: will you listen to us? As a participant in the 2020 Summit I felt very hopeful that your Government might listen to us.

I understand that governments change, that politicians come and go and so do public servants. We've been here all along, and long before that. Our lives were much better 30 years ago. In the years since there have been many changes, some big, some little. Our money has gone up but mostly down; the places we could work in the community changed, and/or disappeared - that is, they weren't funded any more (such as Wali K which only two years ago employed young men making building products). This is just one example of all the changes that are imposed on us in which we have no part, and no choice. Part of the reason is that the various groups, committees and individuals who make the decisions that affect us all are not properly representative of Anangu tjuta - all Anangu. This is a serious problem and needs urgent attention with full Anangu participation and understanding every step of the way.

Surely we can work together to understand each other properly, to make good plans together that will last, and not change every few years when governments change and officials change. I don't believe it has to be like that. We are a very patient people but none of us has much more time to wait before our communities disappear under the sea, with the rest of the iceberg.

Yours sincerely
Makinti Minutjukur

Disability Support Worker,

DFS Pukatja Community (formerly Ernabella Mission)

Source from New Matilda: http://newmatilda.com/2008/08/13/open-letter-jenny-macklin via Dale Hess's Newsletter

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When you can do nothing else: bear witness.

They have been referring to Australia as having a two-speed economy for quite some time now.

Perhaps it is about time we focussed on a society for us all.
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When you can do nothing else: bear witness.

Another piece of the pie?

Photo: The Age

The Wall Street Journal now dedicates a full-time beat reporter, Robert Frank, to cover what he calls Richistan. Richistan did not suddenly appear on the American scene. Our top-heavy era has evolved from a heavily bankrolled effort by conservatives and corporations to instill blind faith in the market as the magic elixir that can solve any problem. This three-decade war against common sense has preached that tax cuts for the rich help the poor, that labor unions keep workers from prospering, that regulations protecting consumers attack freedom. Duly inspired, our elected officials have rewritten the rules that run our economy--on taxes and trade, on wage policies and public spending--to benefit wealthy asset owners and global corporations.

From The Rich and The Rest of Us in The Nation

That's the view from the USA. Meanwhile back in the Land of Oz, The Age has begun to-day a five part series titled The Sum of Us.

Like Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the UK, Australia - under both Liberal and Labor Governments - took on Milton Friedman's monetarism as the western world moved away from Keynesian economics. Never no mind that the work of John Keynes had real runs on the board: extricating the world from the Great Depression as well as bringing post-World War II prosperity.



And where has it got us? More wars and less peace in spite of the end of the Cold War. More rich and more poor in the world - in spite of more nations getting autonomy across the world. Solutions to the chronic problems of our society have been consigned to the so called "trickle down effect" where the wealthy try to convince us that their wealth and their getting richer would be better for everybody because it would all magically "trickle down". Instead, the dollars moved another way.



What has really happened - and it is there for us all to see - is that there has been a "trickle up" effect as money is syphoned away from the poor and the slightly less poor and the not quite middle class to build a constituency of wealth supported by sufficient numbers of middle class people to provide a constituency within democracies for all this to happen. Please note that this does not take into account the state-sanctioned robbery of public assets, the massive social change, and the mass corruption in Russia and China.



And so to the picture of the pie. Paul Keating used to tell us that the solution to all this was to build a bigger pie: trying to tell us that as we built a bigger pie there would be enough for the rich and the rest of us to benefit. But pendulums have a habit of swinging. Balloons inflate and deflate. At the moment, pendulums are swinging enough to give one motion sickness and balloons are popping or about to pop across multiple sectors of the economy.



Don't let any one pull the wool over your eyes again. Too many politicians over the last thirty years have spoken as if economic laws are immutable. They are as sure and as certain as the sun coming up each morning. That is not true. Human beings make the economic laws as we know and experience them to-day. Human beings can make bad decisions and they can make good decisions. They can make decisions for sectional interests and in a corrupt manner and they can make decisions for the common wealth and the common good in a clear, unfettered and unbought manner.



So let's keep watch. Let's not allow all those hood-winkers to get away with it again. Let's hold them accountable: for their lies, their corruption, their kow-towing to the wealthy, and - above all - their incompetence against the common good. Let's build a society for all of us.

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When you can do nothing else: bear witness.

Missionary elites: born of ignorance, deafness and confusion

Let's call this for what it is. Hypocrisy. A brazen display of utter, craven hypocrisy. Tony Abbott was a minister in the failed Howard Government: the Howard Government which ignored - until a losing election was looming in its rear vision - Aboriginal Australia and, not to mention, the needs and aspirations of remote white Australia. And this sanctimonious ignorance was delivered at that centre for hypocrisy and we-know-what's-best-for-you, the Centre for Independent Studies. How long will we have to wait to hear this drivel reprised on Counterpoint - the mouthpiece for the CIS on the ABC?

Six years ago, Miss Eagle was working in Walgett in north-western NSW. The local whitefellas there had organised themselves to provide a scholarship for rural doctors. Medical personnel in private practice are in short supply in mainstream communities in remote Australia. People want to bring doctors to their communities and want to work hard to give them a good lifestyle and so retain them as long as possible. Whitefellas in the bush realise that their best chances are:

1. Train doctors who have grown up in the bush and are likely to want to return to the bush - or at least have a good think about it.
2. Encourage new doctors to the bush by doing part of their practical training in bush hospitals and situations and further encouraging them with a purpose-built bush scholarship.

In a difficult situation, this is reasonable thinking - but it does not absolve governments of their responsibilities - and it expresses the commitment of a local community.

Unfortunately, Aboriginal communities are not able to get together to raise the great wads of cash needed for medical scholarship funding. Even if those concerned gave up their grog and their drugs, the money would have to go to families first.

However, the best bet of getting medicos out into remote Australia is the same two points that have swung white remote communities into action.

More Aboriginal health professionals are coming through our universities. There has been good work done with the training of Aboriginal Health Workers (the original idea came from that of the Barefoot Doctors in Mao's China). A generation further on what are we doing to fund and build on the professionalism of Aboriginal Health Workers so that that from these ranks more Aboriginal health professionals can be put through universities and back into the areas of highest need?

The thing that has always sickened me in the language and actions of Howard and his lackeys is they carry on as if no one prior to their military intervention was doing anything of any value. They had turned their backs years before - meanwhile other parts of humanity, black and white and brindle, were carrying on through thick and thin, funding cuts, isolation, deaf ears and everything that the Howard lot found politically on the outer, politically incorrect. The deaf ears and detachment of the Howard crew cost lives and cost progress.

And Abbott says that self-determination breeds detachment!

WHAT! If self-determination breeds detachment, the only evidence of it is that Aboriginal self-determination was abhorred by the Howard Government and its lackeys and, as a consequence, THEY detached themselves from any interest in Aboriginal people, their situation, their communities.

Sure pay people good money - but pay Aboriginal people already in place and on the ground good money too. And money is not everything. If someone does not have the right spirit and attitude, money won't keep them there long and it certainly won't keep them there through the hard yards.

Will government provide professional development on the ground for all professionals: health, education, justice irrespective of whether of whether they are university or TAFE qualified? You see, governments are very good at doing the flashy stuff like toys and technology and the flash-in-the-pan stuff of big budget announcements. It is not good at the incremental building of solid foundations and structures which will last and which will deliver. Whitefellas lose interest and head back to their capital cities - and blame everyone else for any failures.

And, finally, how will government help to build and revive economies in inland Australia. The mining companies fly in and fly out and do not contribute to community building and localised economies as once they did. Corporate agriculture does not always contribute to local communities in meaningful and substantial ways - but then family owned farming enterprises don't always either. I always remember the quote from western Queensland "..as long as there's a post office to pick up the mail." But may be, in these days of email and digital phones and faxes, he can live without the post office. And then there's the shopping. Woolworths and Coles don't sprout in much of inland Australia. You go to major cities or regional centres for that and the dollar goes away from local communities and economies.

But this nation has made millionaires (including a Labor Prime Minister's wife) out of employment programs for unemployed people, so why can't the same fertile minds turn their attentions to the building of economies in remote Australia for both black and white communities. They would benefit. We would all benefit. Communities would be stronger and more cohesive. Tax coffers could get some additional input. Let's do some real nation building in the inland for black and white communities.

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When you can do nothing else: bear witness.

Productive capacity

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When you can do nothing else: bear witness.

Of floods, potholes, and infrastructure

For the story that goes with the picture above, click here.

The Big Wet continues in North Queensland as the flooding moves north. Mackay is mopping up from its biggest wet. I have posted on the Don River and associated flooding in Bowen. Now Townsville is having its problems. Miss Eagle is a banana-bender. She lives in Victoria now - but cannot yet say that she is a Victorian. Most of her life has been spent in North Queensland. Before coming to Melbourne and Upper Gully, Miss E lived at Bluewater only 15 minutes away from where the flooding, pictured below, has occurred.

But there is one thing that bugs Miss Eagle - and that is the fact that there is not a flood-free four-lane highway in North Queensland from Sarina to Mossman. When I visit Brisbane I see all the money that is spent just to keep pace with congestion. In North Queensland, however, the necessary road spending is not a matter of congestion. It is a matter of being able to move around in The Wet. Of being able to keep industry going, of being able to transport people needing medical attention.

When Miss E was a whipper-snapper in North Queensland and went on the annual road-trip to the Brisbane rellies for Christmas, January was not quite the same if one was not stuck beside a flooded creek or river on the way home. That has been more or less in the past as high level bridges have been constructed. However, all that bridge-building has still left the north with flood-prone pot-holed "highways", some quite narrow and curvaceous and dangerous. This is not a wishlist. This is a demand for necessary infrastructure.

It is high time that governments of every hue and classification - local, state, territory, federal - woke up to themselves on infrastructure spending. We have talked a lot of garbage for over two decades now about how Australia believes in a level playing field and does not subsidise business and agriculture. However, just as a lack of investment in the family home means it goes to rack and ruin and loses its value in the market-place, so does lack of investment in our nation. Investment in infrastructure such as road and rail provides jobs for the community, necessary business inputs, lifelines to health, education, and economic access. In short, investment in infrastructure is an economic subsidy which benefits the whole community - not just vested interest.

If we are to remain a truly cohesive and equitable nation, then investment in infrastructure is necessary. We have apologised to Aboriginal people this week and talked about health and education and employment inputs. But one of the most vital things you can do for Aboriginal communities is to provide them with all-weather road access. Without good road access, Aboriginal communities cannot begin to build any form of local economy. Without good road access, it is difficult for them to access services the rest of us take for granted. Without good road access, it is difficult for Aboriginal people to access medical services or for medical services to access Aboriginal communities.

And, dear Reader, guess what the problem is? It is the out of sight, out of mind syndrome. In Queensland, Brisbane is at the very bottom of the state, far far away from Mackay, Bowen, Townsville, Cairns. And let's not mention Mount Isa and the Gulf country - the Gulf country which can remain immersed in and cut off by floods for three months of the year because the country is so close to sea level.

People are hearing horror stories of children in Aboriginal communities on Cape York. Now that is even further out of sight and out of mind from Brisbane. To the extent that political leadership has almost certainly never had anything to do with the Aboriginal communities of the Cape and their traditions. How different from the Northern Territory where representation of Aboriginal people in the Parliament of the NT almost exactly matches the proportion of Aboriginal people in the Territory population.

So it can be very difficult to make yourself heard in the Parliament of Queensland if you are from the North and it gets more difficult the more remote you are from the east coast.

This problem of the lack of decent road infrastructure has always been there. We are only now starting to understand the La Nina effect and old hands look back to the floods of the forties and fifties and say "Ahah - that's what is was all about, eh!" But now there is another addition to our knowledge - Climate Change. And, if governments don't bite the bullet and do something about all-weather highway access and all-weather access to remote communities, matters will only get worse.

As any North Queenslander knows, Brisbane loves the money that flows from the North from mining, grazing, sugar, horticulture, tourism. But getting money out of Brisbane for necessary infrastructure and services is, all too often, like getting blood out of a stone. Or if funds are given they are not given with the same largesse as the funding given within the Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast axis.

So, North Queensland, when the mopping up is over and you see all those local authority and bitumen people patching up the potholes to make some new bumps in your patchwork quilt of a road, get your act together and start kicking up a fuss. The squeaky wheel not only gets the most grease, it is frequently the only wheel to get any grease at all. Demand a fair share + catch up on road spending. And all you southern tourists who love to winter in the tropical sun, please get right behind them.

A photographic instance of the lack of a flood-free four-lane highway.

Please note: To the left is the high bridge over the Bohle River, just north of the twin cities of Townsville and Thuringowa. To the right is the low bridge. The high bridge carries two lanes of traffic. In dry times it is one-way traffic. In flood times, it is two-way traffic. Townsville is the industrial hub and de facto capital of North Queensland. It deserves better than this. Local Authority elections for an amalgamation of the two cities are coming up. Who is going to push this infrastructure barrow?

Any interest?

Usury: the greed that dares not speak its name

Last night, Paul Barry on Four Corners did a program on the Mortgage Meltdown in the USA. Scary, dreadful stuff in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Miss Eagle was very struck by the comment by a black female interlocutor who pointed out that urban decay had been evident in black communities for a very long time but now there is some attention being received because, with the collapse of sub-prime mortgages, urban and sub-urban collapse now invades white communities.

To date, Australia has seen only small tidal effects from the tsunami swamping the USA. However, the Land of Oz has problems of its own with low-doc and no-doc home loans. Home loan defaults are on the rise.

A few years ago, Australia had a Productivity Commission inquiry into gambling. This probably came about because of representations by Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision, to his brother, Peter Costello, Australia's Treasurer.

Miss Eagle asks if we could see a Productivity Commission Inquiry into usury and its impediment in the market place and its role in the dysfunctionality of human relationships, individual lives, and dysfunctional communities. Such an inquiry should take into account:

1. The level of interest rates on housing, credit, credit cards, and all forms of lending of money.
2. Fees charged in relation to accounts held in and by financial institutions and in relation to the lending of money.
3. Pay day lending
4. Predatory Lending
5. Pricing in all financial institutions
6. The true cost of Private/Public Partnerships in the provision of public infrastructure
7. Commissions, fees, and other forms of remuneration in and by financial institutions
8. Trading in and financing of debt
9. The social implications and adversities related to money and credit lending
10. Innovative financial practices of social utility and benefit

Usury is an ancient human and communal problem. The Abrahamic religions - namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have always found usury problematic. Perhaps, Islam has held out longest against usury and has institutionally made provision in response to Qur'anic prohibitions. However, life moves on and people, times, and situations change. Now, in Australia, we are seeing changes within the Islamic community. See here and here.

Of course, it takes a great naivete to imagine that the upper echelons of oil-rich Islamic societies have had nothing to do with usury in some form or another. Instance the connection of the House of Saud with the Carlyle Group. The Papacy no longer rails against usury and has its own bank. And did Frank Lowy look to Old Testament injunctions against usury on his way to taking the Westfield Group to its premier position as the world's largest retail property group by equity market capitalization?

So our ancient wisdom stories have warned against usury, warned against the actions of the rich against the poor. 21st century people, communities, and nation states have not become any smarter, any more moral than their 8th century BCE, 30CE, or 500CE counterparts.

We need to call usury for what it is. We need to name greed for what it is. We need to put people before money, and the community ahead of the corporation. If the predatory lending tsunami continues as the forecasts tell us it will, it can be as devastating as - and possibly more devastating than - World War II. The social fall-out over time will be horrific. As individuals were are not prepared for this. As communities we are not prepared for this. And the world is certainly not prepared for a diminution in the power and strength of the USA and its economy.

Supersizing me where I live - Part 2

I - as I am sure you do, dear Reader - sometimes daydream about living in another period of human history. For Miss Eagle, her daydream is about time travelling to live as an Edwardian. Not a poor Edwardian mind you - probably an upper middle class Edwardian. So many things were happening then. New ideas, a new century and clothes were s-o-o elegant. But my daydream is tempered by the quote from John Rawls: The best measure of a just society is whether you’d be willing to be thrown into it at random.

That, dear Reader, is the crunch - is it not? I certainly would not want to be thrown at random and willy-nilly into Edwardian society. Would you, dear Reader, wish to be thrown random and willy-nilly into the first decade of 21st century Australian society? Before you give an unthinking yes to that question or reply that if you could come back as a miner in the Pilbara, let's pause for thought. Perhaps randomness and willy-nillyness would see you come back as a traditional Aboriginal person in a remote community in the Northern Territory. Or you might come back as a woman of Islamic faith who wears a hajib speaking with a broad Australian westie accent. Or a young man of middle-eastern appearance in Lakemba with a similar accent. Are you still willing to subject yourself to such randomness and willy-nillyness?

If your answer is no then Australian society in the first decade of the 21st century is not living up to the best measure of a just society as defined by John Rawls, the great moral philosopher of the 20th century.

As Australia heads for an election and the possibility of electing John Howard (who is in his sixty-ninth year) as Prime Minister for a fifth term heading for twelve years in office (the President of the USA can only have two terms of four years each), the question we should ask - as we should always ask of our nation - is: is Australia a just and fair society?

And, Miss Eagle has discovered, we give ourselves away on the justice issue in one crucial and historically verifiable way: our height. Now I am not clear where Australians are on the height table in relation to other nations but take a look at this article about the height of Americans vis-a-vis Northern Europeans. It appears that we write our communal and national history in our bodies and we can transcribe that history through our measurements, our personal vital statistics. We can match those vital statistics to historical events, to economic data like GDP and we can see what we are doing and have done to ourselves and to others.

Similar measures are outlined in the WHO Issues New Healthy Life Expectancy Rankings. Japan is top of the list and Australia is No. 2. The USA is not in the top ten. It rates 24th. Miss Eagle wonders if Australia might have topped Japan if mainstream Australia had been as concerned for Aboriginal health and well-being as it is for its own. Certainly, in the USA, efforts are poor at having an inclusive attitude to national health and well-being. Let's take a look:

1. You die earlier and spend more time disabled if you’re an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries.
2. Some groups, such as Native Americans, rural African Americans and the inner city poor, have extremely poor health, more characteristic of a poor developing country rather than a rich industrialized one.
3. The HIV epidemic causes a higher proportion of death and disability to U.S. young and middle-aged than in most other advanced countries. HIV-AIDS cut three months from the healthy life expectancy of male American babies born in 1999, and one month from female lives.
4. The U.S. is one of the leading countries for cancers relating to tobacco, especially lung cancer. Tobacco use also causes chronic lung disease.
5. A high coronary heart disease rate, which has dropped in recent years but remains high.
6. Fairly high levels of violence, especially of homicides, when compared to other industrial countries.
7. Lack of universal access to medical insurance thus limiting access to health care.
8. Eight million Americans are without a job.
9. Forty million Americans are without health insurance.
10. Thirty-five million Americans live below the poverty line.

So, dear Reader, next time rich, famous, and infamous Americans catch your attention and life looks great over there, please remember these ten points. Next time an American celebrity gives away lots of money and looks good doing it, remember the unfairness of those ten points.

Ask yourself, dear Reader: if you were one of those people in the statistics quoted in these ten points, would you rather have fairness and equity brought to you by public policy voted on by every citizen entitled to vote or would you rather be one of the deserving poor dependent on the selectivity of a rich person?

Now look at the Australian picture:

1. 1.05 million households have been classified as having "low economic resources" by the Bureau of Statistics. To fall into that category households had to have low levels of both income and wealth.
2. More than 820,000 children aged under 14 live in the 1.05 million households that have been classified as having "low economic resources"
3. After adjustment for family size and composition, the disposable income for low economic resources households was $262, less than half that of middle-expenditure households.
4. One in every eight of people living in "low economic resources" households are saying they gone without meals in the previous 12 months because of a shortage of money.
5. Almost one-third of the households said they spent more than they earned, suggesting they were either running up debt or drawing on meagre savings to make ends meet.
6. The number of sole parents who receive a pension is on the decline for the first time since 1997.
7. The proportion of lone mothers in the labour force - either in work or looking for work - grew from 49 per cent in 1997 to 60 per cent last year

The last two items need to be look at more closely in relation to income, child care costs, who is looking after the kids and in what circumstances?

Our national government has neglected Aboriginal voices for more than a decade. State and Territory Governments records are not good either. And the Australian voter has not given a sufficiently high priority to Aboriginal health and well-being - instead focussing on its own income and tax-cuts - to impress politicians with a demand for urgent attention. There is a lot of goodwill out there towards Aboriginal people and their concerns but mainstream Australia is not prepared to forego its own financial well-being or do without a tax cut to bring others, black or white, into a position of equity. Please read this speech by Lieutenant General John Sanderson and have a big think.

And what evidence do I have that mainstream Australians are prepared to put themselves and their own well-being ahead of other citizens? I give you the saga of the Merseyside Hospital in Devonport, Tasmania. This is a town with a population of just over 20,000 souls which has access to two nearby hospitals within a half hour and an hour's drive yet has demanded that its own hospital be kept open to the tune of at least $45 million in spite of the difficulty of attracting highly skilled staff and maintaining their skills, in spite of the fact that the hospital itself may not be able to operate in a manner in which safety is guaranteed.

A venal Prime Minister desperate to advance his election prospects has met these demands and thus encouraged a queue of similar demands to form.

It is not only our bodies that are getting fatter and taller, our minds are becoming sloppy and unreasonable and more grandiose.

Supersize me, Prime Minister, some citizens are saying - and do it right where I live.

Make Indigenous Poverty History - and the Anglicans

St Paul's Anglican Cathedral, Melbourne

Scrapping CDEP is dumb says Jon Altman

Scrapping CDEP is just dumb, dumb, dumb
Professor Jon Altman from the Australian National University writes in Crikey:

Ministers Joe Hockey and Mal Brough's decision to abolish the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme in remote Indigenous communities in the NT will have marked impacts on the arts industry, the management of Indigenous Protected Areas, and community based Caring for Country ranger projects. And it's not just these success stories that will suffer; it's likely that there will be wider local, regional and national costs from this myopic, ill-considered, policy shift. Hockey and Brough should have taken a history lesson before they made the announcement yesterday. If they'd bothered to look back, they would have learnt that unemployment was created in remote and very remote regions of Australia in the early 1970s when below-award training allowances were replaced by award wages. This unemployment in turn led to the establishment of the CDEP scheme by the Fraser government in 1977.

CDEP was first introduced to remote Indigenous communities as a progressive and mixed community development, employment creation and income support scheme. I noted then that its part-time characteristics might suit Indigenous people who may want flexible employment with the capacity to enhance income through additional market engagement like arts production and sale; or through participation in the customary (non-market) wildlife harvesting sector to generate livelihood benefits. In reality, most of the 5,000 Indigenous artists in the NT, as well as 400 community-based rangers in the Top End, are all CDEP participants. The beauty of the scheme is that it maximizes individual choice, participants could work part-time for a minimum income or work full-time and overtime if they were income maximisers. Now, as in the early 1970s, Indigenous people’s choice is being unilaterally and heavily circumscribed: they can participate in the mainstream ‘real’ economy or be welfare recipients.

The Hockey/Brough focus on award-based ‘real jobs’ at the expense of CDEP jobs and CDEP organizational support could have the perverse effect of increasing unemployment at these communities. This is partly because those on CDEP are classified as employed. But it is also because National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey (NATSISS) data collected in 2002 by the ABS shows that one in five CDEP participants already get full-time work through the efforts of their organizations. Altogether, between 85 and 90% work more than the funded CDEP hours in remote and very remote Australia according to NATSISS 2002.

Brough and Hockey should also have looked at the ABS publication Labour Force Characteristics of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians 2006. The ABS figures for the NT for 2006 show that the NT unemployment rate for Indigenous people was estimated at 15.7%, more than three times the Australian rate of 4.9%.

But this rate includes an estimated 8,000 CDEP participants as employed. If the total number of Indigenous people employed in the NT (15,300) is reduced by 8,000 and between 1,655 and 2,000 ‘real jobs’ are created (there is some inconsistency here between the Joint Media Release and data in the attached CDEP in the Northern Territory Emergency Response documentation) by replacing all non-Indigenous employment with Indigenous workers, then the unemployment rate will still increase to at least 50%. The ABS itself notes the labour force participation rate (at 44.8% in the NT) is particularly low in remote areas as these are regions ‘which generally have an underdeveloped labour market and this is reflected in the low number of Indigenous people actively looking for work and therefore not in the labour force’. The employment to population ratio in the NT is the lowest by far in Australia at 37.8% (and 61.8% for all Australians).

Economy where, employment when??

It comes as no surprise - the Minister's announcement regarding the abolition of the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP). CDEP schemes operating in Aboriginal communities in various regions across Australia were precursors of Work for the Dole schemes in mainstream communities.

Miss Eagle has made her suggestions previously on economic participation in and by Aboriginal communties:

1. All weather roads to Aboriginal communities. Without this basic lifeline of transport and communication no community, black or white, can begin to build an economy.
2. Air strips - for similar reasons.
3. Building communities which specialise in the delivery of community services. Employment classifications for Tennant Creek are dominated by the number of people employed in community services. This is duplicated across the nation in rural Australia. With investment, intentionality, mentoring and direction, Aboriginal communities - just like white communities - can build themselves up economically as a service centre. Services can be commercial, health, educational, or tourism.
4. Such participation should go far beyond the Work for the Dole schemes. Work for the Dole schemes should be seen as transition schemes of basic economic participation - not as ends in themselves

The Minister says the CDEP will be progressively replaced by real jobs, training and mainstream employment programmes, complementing the work already in train to lift remote area exemptions.

Radio interviews with the Minister earlier this evening indicate that the Government plans have an initial focus on local indigenous replacement in local positions where outsiders (can one read hear non-indigenous outsiders rather than indigenous outsiders?) are presently employed.

This, in principle, is a reasonable idea - but it is clearly one that has been implemented as far as possible by local indigenous organisations. Aboriginal organisations have been active in or actively managing and sponsoring training schemes for many,many years. Is the minister merely re-branding previous ATSIC-funded programs? Is he going to stand up and take credit for operational modes currently in place with strong indigenous organisations?

But, the question to be asked above all is this:

Is the Howard Government going to fund basic economic infrastructure such as transport and public utilities as well as the buildings and staffing levels for public service provision regarded as the norm in mainstream communities?

The Howard Government has been a poor steward in provisioning infrastructure replacement and development in mainstream communities preferring to fund endless tax rebates and refunds to individuals for personal spending rather than stewarding (or should one say quarantining?) the money and channelling it into economically productive infrastructure.

Governments, Federal and State, seem to be establishing public projects which can be built by Thiess and privatised by Macquarie Bank.

If the Howard Government does not come to the party with funding for economic and service infrastructure will it turn to the Mac Bank and the BOO (build-own-operate) schemes to establish infrastructure in regional and remote Australia?

But if none of this happens and people who cannot be placed in meaningful work end up on Work for the Dole schemes rather than the abolished CDEP schemes (as the Minister's media release seems to indicate) what will all this mean? Just more venal grandstanding by Howard and Brough?

No investment - nor roads: No intentionality - no direction in Aboriginal Australia

Geoff Robinson, political historian and lecturer in Australian Studies and Politics at Deakin University, has chipped in at Crikey to-day with some words of wisdom. Geoff says:-
Who would be surprised by the problems in remote indigenous communities?
Back in 1970 Charles Rowley predicted the emergence of endemic pauperism if rural and regional indigenous people did not gain a foothold in the real economy.
What have Australian governments done to assist economic activity in rural and regional Australia? Plenty for white farmers; rural adjustment schemes are set to persist longer than the agrarian socialism that they were supposed to bury and we have drought relief designed to compensate for the surprising fact of drought in Australia.
According to the 2007 budget papers the Commonwealth has spent $1.4b in drought relief since 2001. For 2007-11 the adjustment scheme Agriculture Advancing Australia is planned to cost over $360m. The 2004 sugar industry support program promised $444m. What is there for the support of economic activity by indigenous people to support economic activity, as distinct from making it harder for them to access welfare in the hope this will encourage them to find jobs somewhere or somehow?

The 2007-08 budget offered $23m to apply activity tests to welfare recipients. More jobs for white public servants here. There was only $0.6m for an actual jobs program for indigenous rangers to detect illegal fishing. There is a program to build an indigenous workforce in government services delivery but it amounts only to an increased funding of $31.3m over four years and most of these will just be shifted from existing work for the dole programs.

The recent Northern Territory crisis package offers community cleanups on a work for the dole basis. Will struggling storekeepers in country towns have to sweep streets to get drought assistance? The government has established a taskforce to investigate options for irrigation agriculture in northern Australia but is it addressing indigenous employment? Isn’t it time that indigenous Australians and white farmers received equal concern?

Miss Eagle's suggestion for economic participation are:

1. All weather roads to Aboriginal communities. Without this basic lifeline of transport and communication no community, black or white, can begin to build an economy.
2. Air strips - for similar reasons.
3. Building communities which specialise in the delivery of community services. Employment classifications for Tennant Creek are dominated by the number of people employed in community services. This is duplicated across the nation in rural Australia. With investment, intentionality, mentoring and direction, Aboriginal communities - just like white communities - can build themselves up economically as a service centre. Services can be commercial, health, educational, or tourism.

Such participation should go far beyond the Work for the Dole schemes. Work for the Dole schemes should be seen as transition schemes of basic economic participation - not as ends in themselves.

Casinos, Pokies, Governments: a smart card?

Miss Eagle has received a comment to this post from DizzieLizzie. DL's points are so well made, in the view of Miss Eagle, that they deserve greater prominence than a comments link gives so they are posted here below. Miss Eagle would welcome further comment.

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Reality is that the one sure method of tracing and recording the spending of pokies players, that also would give poker machine consumers the protective tools to better regulate their own spending, is 'smart cards'.....and these have been consistently and conveniently rejected by govts and the gaming industry alike!

No wonder!

Using mandatory 'smart cards', pokies players could keep accurate spending records, thus could more readily quantify (and claim) their recorded 'losses' on poker machines. The government etc does NOT want that information to be so readily available!

Loss on pokies is already causing the govt. huge embarrassment.

The last measure it would willingly introduce is a card that empowers pokies consumers to limit their lossses...and that may also provide a spending receipt that incidentally is required in our consumer law! (Refer Fair Trading Act 1999 161a) So not only are pokies being operated illegally....our govt. is irresponsibly allowing this to occur, even though a 'smart card' would also stop self-excluded or under-aged players from playing.

For that benefit alone the card is worth introducing. It may also protect innocent families by providing a warning of over-spending, so that homes and businesses and family security are not lost!

Crown Casino is at huge fault for misleading the public about dangers of poker machines....and so is the 'puppet' government who is over-protecting the gaming industry, instead of acting to protect all citizens, who deserve greater 'duty of care'.

The pokies problem is NOT the 'too hard basket' at all Denis. It is easy to fix.

Ban poker machines OR make them safer to use! Simple!

The government AND the gaming industry MUST tell citizens the full truth...and that is that many more people are harmed by pokies than is reported. ALL citizens will be paying for the huge rise in public health and legal costs caused by pokies addiction for far longer than the government who now ignores effective reform will remain in power, at least!

Right now the govt. is desperately trying to hide the fact that the majority of people surveyed by local councils want pokies gone from the suburbs ....or banned completely!

So much news contains the 'good' that pokies supposedly do for communities....but we are not fully told of the business collapses, loss of employment, divorces, thefts, suicides, mental illness that has occurred. They are glossed over and our Victorin communities for instance, simply cannot handle losing billions each year to two businesses, Tatts and Tabcorp....while the govt. does not get enough of the pie to ever cover its losses. Taxpayers cover THAT!!

We are also led to believe that pokies addicts are a tiny group of irresponsible social misfits...they are 99% NOT. The machines are designed to addict. NORMAL people get addicted to these insidiously dangerous machines, that use subliminal, hypnotic and 'conditioning' techniques to put NORMAL people unknowingly into a trance. The machines are also 'rigged' to have purposeful 'near misses' etc...to promote over-spending.

It is too easy to say that individuals are to blame if they lose control on poker machines. As humans we have been seduced and exploited by these machines, that purposely hook in to our normal hard-wiring...to addle our brains....by design!If we allow dangerous products into our communities...WE as a WHOLE population are to blame!! Would we allow a car with no brakes to be on our roads? Most likely we would not...Perhaps we may though if we misguidedly believed that by doing so, we may be gaining from another's loss! Hence our failing and irresponsible govt. allows the myth to continue...that pokies addicts are in a minority....that individuals are to blame here...and our courts STILL blame the human victims...those who were told that pokies would be FUN!!

Pokies addicts did not expect to be harmed by a recreation that was presented as being harmless for all but 1-2%!! Being normal people they did not think that they were in such a 'misfit' category....prior to their addictions taking hold...waking up too late to make up for their debilitating loss!

Our courts should be blaming the true criminals...the government, the rapacious gaming industry and those who KNEW full well the real dangers of these machines BEFORE they were released on an unsuspecting population.

We were told that poker machines would save our economy. What rot!!Now we have ALL seen the real tragedy and cost of poker machines....and people who allow these defective products to remain are just as greedy and culpable as the government who is now hooked on them...OR the gaming industry who bleeds us dry!!

So when our communities are financially destroyed....who will we blame then? Just 1-2% of 'irresponsible' people?? C'mon.

Wake up Australians!! This is OUR problem!!

Look at Western Australia...the only Australian state who resisted the lure of these poker machines. NOW it is booming! That is NOT just due to mining! It also results from keeping billions of dollars that eastern states lose...away from the gaming industry!!....to be placed in the hands of greengrocers, butchers, hairdressers, dentists, clothing retailers, restauranteurs....and all of the other tradespeople who LOSE business over in the east.

And WHY would we want poker machines BANNED or gone from our neighbourhoods...if we felt their benefits rather than their pain???

Archbishop and Anglicans : Policy and Prayer

We keep hearing that our economy is booming, and we saw clear evidence of that in the federal Budget. But the sad reality is that inequality is increasing. Housing affordability is at a record low, rents are rising rapidly, and homelessness is increasing.

Words of warning from Philip Freier, Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne. Read more of what he has to say here.

Philip Freier is taking the Christian voice to the frontline of the public policy debate in Melbourne.

New to Melbourne, the Archbishop has established a prayer quest, Prayer4Melbourne. This gets Archbishop Philip out and about into all sorts of places in the city and the suburbs to talk to all sorts of people. Read about this stuff on the Archbishop's blog.

Then there are his Conversations. Held in the centre of Melbourne at BMW Edge at Federation Square, there have been two so far. The first one focussed on stem cell research under the title Send in the Clones; the second one was Is a 'fair go' a 'no go' in Australia today?

Decency in the valley of decision?

Ross Honeywill says that decency is the key to the 2007 Federal Election. He describes a demographic group called NEOs who support the Neo Power: how the new economic order is changing the way we live, work, and play.

Miss Eagle has some empathy/sympathy with the NEO description but will wait to see: to see if there is an intrinsic decency within, to see if decency becomes the decisive factor in the 2007 Federal Election, and whether decency can change a government.

A Palestinian economy? Israel ensures there is little hope

Israeli Separation Barrier

It seems to surprise those of the Jewish Diaspora who support Israel through thick and thin that some of us just get sick of them and sick of Israel. The one consolation is that Miss Eagle knows that many of her views are supported by people in Israel and people within the Diaspora.

Miss Eagle, in times gone by, has been an ardent supporter of Israel. Until the intifada. When Miss Eagle saw the might of the Israeli army destroying the homes of those involved in the uprising and leaving women and children homeless, it was the beginning of an awareness that the state of Israel was doing to others what had been done to them by the Nazis.

This psychopathology of a nation has continued, escalated and become more extensive. The web of victims it encompasses is continually enlarged.

Israel, since its inception as a nation state (and in events leading up to its foundation), has instituted actions which could only bring hatred upon itself, could only build up tension and frustration which eventually had to break out in violence.

No one could accuse Palestinian political groups of silent victimhood. They too, through unmitigated use of violence, have upped the ante and provoked escalated response.

But where does it stop? - and there have been so many attempts by outside peace brokers to assist in breaking the cycle.

The latest comment to bring a shafted light of reality into the madness of Israeli-Palestinian conflict and relationships is this report from the World Bank.

The gist of the report is that sustainable Palestinian economic recovery is impossible under the West Bank restriction system brought about by Israel. The Arabic Media Internet Network has comment here.

Currently, freedom of movement and access for Palestinians within the West Bank is the exception rather than the norm contrary to the commitments undertaken in a number of Agreements between GOI and the PA. In particular, both the Oslo Accords and the Road Map were based on the principle that normal Palestinian economic and social life would be unimpeded by restrictions. In economic terms, the restrictions arising from closure not only increase transaction costs, but create such a high level of uncertainty and inefficiency that the normal conduct of business becomes exceedingly difficult and stymies the growth and investment which is necessary to fuel economic revival.

No man, no kids, no low-income: nothing in the Budget

Jody Ekert reckons she's missing out in the Budget and has some suggestions how the money should be spent.

Aboriginal issues: no mention, no money?

Miss Eagle is indebted to Crikey for tagging the Budget speech. Now, dear Reader, Miss E has perused this with a visual text search with her own two eyes. She Eyeballed Aborigines, Aboriginal, Indigenous. No result.

Aboriginal issues frequently headline, even frontpage headlines, in the metro media. Much breast-beating, blame-shifting, bleeding of hearts. Mmmmmm...

Not only not a headline - it appears, if our Crikey is to be believed with their tagging effort, no mention. What the heck! Who gives a fig for overcrowding which leads to sexual abuse of children, dislocation, and just a plain rotten childhood? Who gives a cent for economic participation and economic infrastructure in Aboriginal communities?


Don't think there will be a decent all weather road for Wadeye or any other Aboriginal community in the NT just yet.