WikiLeaks: Strange Bedfellows

Julian Assange’s Australian WikiLeaks Party has some strange ideas about how to pursue freedom.

In a recent story published in the US, he extolls the US Right interpretation of libertarianism as the “only hope” and representing non-violence. Reading the whole article is interesting, and worth taking the time to do so, especially if you are an Australian voter.

Where does he get that the hardcore antigovernment right is about nonviolence (including as regards abortion)? They are happy to endorse murder when it suits their agenda. To me libertarianism starts with maximising freedom of choice for the individual. The American right version of libertarianism goes off the rails when it aligns itself with extremist religion (which opposes free choice) and big business (which can undermine the individual as much as or even more than government). Ask Russians concerned about oligarchs if excessive concentration of power in big business is a problem.

Meanwhile, in Australia, parties contesting the Senate election need to rank all candidates so any votes that don’t go to elect them are reassigned according to the order the party specifies. The purpose of this exercise to create a group voting ticket is so voters who don’t want to number every candidate can just tick one box, and the order preset by the party they select is used to fill in the ballot. The WikiLeaks Party has preferenced minor parties with views in line with the US right ahead of the Greens, their ally in anti-war and transparency causes. Even more bizarrely, they have put the Nationals ahead of the Greens in Western Australia, reducing the chances of reelection for Greens senator Scott Ludlum, one of the most consistent campaigners for freedom of information. The Nationals are not libertarians by any stretch of the imagination The WikiLeaks Party claims this happened as result of an “administrative error”.

The Australian Electoral Commission’s web site right now is in meltdown so I can’t check the details, but there is enough reporting of this stuff that it seems unlikely to be wrong.

You can read more about similar strange deals here. If parties were doing this the way you’d expect a voter to, they would number candidates in the order of nearest to their position to furthest. Instead, many take the approach of numbering the candidate closest to them last to try to eliminate their most obvious competition. Just to make things more interesting, the big parties tend to use the opposite tactic, favouring each other over smaller parties who offer a real alternative. This way, the two-party duopoly is maintained. This is nothing new. In the past, the Greens were criticized for dodgy deals, and don’t do that anymore. Everyone else still does, apparently. One more reason to support the Greens.

As a consequence of this weirdness, anyone wanting to express support for WikiLeaks has to either accept that they are undermining the chances of the Greens to be elected, or number all the candidates themselves. With about 100 in NSW, that takes some commitment.

In the interests of transparency, the WikiLeaks Party should publish a full and complete record of how they arrived at their preferences for the Senate vote in New South Wales.

What was it that WikiLeaks stands for?

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Update

The WikiLeaks Party has imploded spectacularly, with one of Julian Assange’s oldest associates Daniel Mathews quitting, and providing explicit detail of how the preferences fiasco happened. In summary, “administrative error”, my arse. What is particularly disappointing about this is how Assange appears to see his voters as cattle who can be herded to the slaughter, without concern about how and where they are being led. The very notion that you can negotiate a dodgy preferences deal on the basis that no one cares about that sort of detail is contrary to the core principles of a whistleblower organization. The details do matter, and everyone is not only entitled to know, but ought to check.

Here are some articles from WLP (GVT means group voting ticket, a specification of preference flows if a voter votes only for that party’s ticket rather than number all candidates):

• The WikiLeaks Party Announces Independent Review – most notably, it mentions “ errors made in some GVTs” – an acknowledgement of more than one error
• Statement on the appointment of Binoy Kampmark as Julian Assange’s primary running-mate – this one says “… misinformation from Christine Milne, leader of the Greens, who has stated incorrectly that we made ‘administrative errors’ in ‘three states’. We did not. The ‘administrative error’ occurred only in NSW”

Possibly. But we don’t know what their preference negotiators told the Greens during negotiations, and the inconsistency between the two statements does not add to their credibility.

Much of the Assange story revolves around his personality, which is unfortunate. The ideal of real governmental transparency is a great one. If you really care about this, vote for the Greens because they not only are on the right side of this issue, but are a principled party that doesn’t revolve around personalities.

Australia and Xenophobia

In Australia, whenever a new leaky boat full of desperate asylum seekers shows up, it’s treated with hysteria in the media. If the government of the day doesn’t react with cruelty, it’s considered to be weak on border security. And every time the approach to dealing with asylum seekers wanders further from humanitarian norms, it’s lauded as a solution to he problem.

Well, is it? As former prime minister Malcolm Fraser put it:

no democratic Australia could ever impose penalties or hardships on refugees which could match the terror from which most of them flee

So even if deterrence could work, should Australia attempt that?

And, anyway, is the view that numbers spike when the policy softens and go down when it gets harsher valid?

Correlation isn’t causation. You have to look at the push factors as well, and those definitely are causation. More refugees at source = more arriving at destination. Nothing could be simpler.

Even with the latest increases the numbers are not that high by world standards. If you look at UNHCR stats, 2012 had the highest number of new refugees since 1999. Australian stats for boat arrivals peak in 1999-2000 when numbers at source previously peaked, and they shoot up again over the last year when the number of new refugees shot up.

Some refugee stats here show that Australia does not have a serious problem, and treating a relatively small number of arrivals as a huge crisis for national security is not warranted.

Why is it impossible for any party besides the Greens to be rational on this? Could it be because anything but xenophobic hysteria results in a media beat-up?

Here in South Africa, genuine illegal immigrants (mostly economic migrants from Zimbabwe) amount to 10% of the population, yet all sides of politics condemn xenophobia when it flares up. Australia only leads the world in one respect as far as refugees go: mainstreaming of xenophobia.

Anyway numbers don’t lie so let’s check them. The graph here shows the difference for each year between reported numbers for that year and the year before of refugees (I use the UNHCR’s refugee count, excluding categories like internally displaced persons and Palestinians who are less likely to arrive in a distant country) and boat arrivals in Australia. The UN numbers are for a calendar year, while the Australian reporting period is a financial year (1 July–30 June). This is not a bad thing however as a 6-month delay takes into account the time between a push factor and a boat arrival.

The graph illustrates that upticks in numbers arriving correspond closely to upticks in the number of refugees over the previous year. The green line is the difference between boat arrivals in Australia and the number the previous year, and the blue line is the difference between UNHCR reported numbers of refugees versus the previous year. The lines mostly correspond pretty well, with just the major uptick in refugees in 2006 failing to result in major change in boat arrivals. The 2006 increase may however have arisen from a reporting anomaly (see UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2006, Chapter 2, p  pp 25–26) rather than a major change in real refugee numbers.

Eyeballing data is risky: we should really do the stats. So let’s look at whether the data correlates. The correlation coefficient is statistically significant: r=0.56, and if we do a t-test for significance, the p-value is 0.006. So yes, this is a real correlation that explains the data well. And we can assign a cause to it, so we are not guilty of assigning causality to a coincidence.

So couldn’t the John Howard “Pacific Solution” actually be the cause of the decline in boat arrivals? That started in 2001 when the number of boat people hit a peak. So let’s mark that on the graph. The red arrow points to the 2001 data point where we can see that the push factors were already declining. And the number of boat arrivals also declined. Given that the correlation is also also strong before 2001 (0.60, though we don’t have enough data points for statistical significance, p=0.057), it is unlikely that being tough on asylum seekers actually had a significant chilling effect on boat arrivals. The only data point that lends comfort to xenophobia is the apparent 2006 increase in refugees but as we have seen that is not a real increase (mostly Iraqi refugees of the 2003 war in Syria and Jordan who had not previously been counted).

Anyway I present the data for you to make up your own mind. To me it looks pretty clear that being harsh on asylum seekers is nothing more than bad politics, dragging the political discourse down to the gutter. Mainstream politics, it seems is presented with no alternative but to go this route for fear of vilification by the commercial media. The Greens are the only party of significance that has resisted the politics of fear and xenophobia. Good on them. I hope they do well this election.

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Further Reading

The Guardian has some useful stats on refugees here.

Lying with the truth: the state of Australian Labor

What on earth is Labor doing to itself? I thought the idea of a long lead time to the next federal election was to give Tony Abbott, whose approval ratings and preferred prime minister score remain a real obstacle to electoral success, lots of rope. And here they are tearing themselves apart with this bizarre attempt by former leader Simon Crean to unseat the prime minister in favour of former unseated prime minister Kevin Rudd.

Then again, is it purely Labor pushing in this direction?

Don’t you love the Murdoch media spin on this where they routinely do not report the bit where Rudd says he would not contest the leadership unless it’s vacant and focus on the bit where he says he will only contest it with overwhelming support, making him look cowardly rather than principled? Of course it’s not terribly hard when their competition supports their spin.

And there’s the routine Newspoll (also a Murdoch company) strategy of asking Labor supporters for preferred prime minister options including Rudd, whereas for the Liberals, they only ask about Abbott, no matter how low his positives.

Lying with the truth. Why didn’t us academics think of this? Imagine how many more papers we could write.

I don’t much like the Labor Party. What they stand for is not too bad, but they have become a party of expediency rather than principle. The opposing Coalition has this in a big way too: both will do whatever it takes to win, which is why I generally support the Greens when I get involved in Australian politics. But what I really dislike is dishonest news media that play the game rather than report it and deliberately misinform the public.

Second-Chance elections

South Africa has a purely proportional representation (PR) election system at all levels, except for town councils, which have a mix of PR and ward councillors. A ward is essentially the same thing as a geographic electoral district (US terminology), constituency (UK and old South Africa) or electorate (Australia). To standardise the terminology, I choose the shortest term for the concept of voting for a representative in a given region: district, and MP for representative, since “member of parliament” is very common terminology.

A pure PR system as we have in South Africa, in which each voter chooses a party, and the party decides how to order its party list, puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the party. How high you are on the party list determines your chances of election: the higher you are on the list, the fewer votes the party needs to win for you to make it. Yet your position on the party list is not in any way influenced by how you perform in the election. A party can reward a stalwart, or worse, corruption, by placing a candidate high on the list, while making sure they do no public campaigning that might reveal their weaknesses. Also, you have no concept of your own MP, so the line of accountability is very indirect.

It would be desirable to fix these problems without losing the benefits of PR system. But first, let’s examine the disadvantages of the alternatives.

A pure district system has the problem that it can skew representation relative to the popular vote. If a party has concentrated regional support, for example, it may score a low fraction of the vote nationally yet win several seats. A party with wide appeal but not quite enough to win anywhere may score significantly more votes than this regionally-based party. In Australia, we see this effect with the Greens, who win typically 10–15% nationally, yet only hold one seat in the lower house of parliament. By contrast, the Nationals poll about a third of the votes the Greens win, and have 7 seats. The Australian system, even so, is not as unfair as the lower house systems in the US and UK, which use a first past the post system (FPP).

The Australian system requires that voters rank candidates in order of preference. If your first-preference candidate has the lowest number of votes in a first-round count where no one has over 50% of the vote, that candidate drops out, and your ballot is reallocated to your second-preference candidate, and this continues until one candidate has over 50% of the vote. The advantage of the Australian system is that it doesn’t “waste” the vote of someone who votes for a small party or an independent. The disadvantage is it’s complicated to understand and difficult to audit results in a close race. And it can still result in unfair outcomes, as I explain above with the skewed representation of the Nationals versus the Greens in Australia.

To illustrate the point, I constructed a scenario for a 400-seat parliament, with each seat (to keep things simple) contested by one each of a small left party, a bigger left party, a bigger right party, a small right party and an independent. I didn’t do the distribution of preferences accurately, but the results represent a plausible outcome:

system small L big L big R small R Ind PR 80 112 124 49 35 Australian 6 276 90 14 14 FPP 15 14 339 22 10

What we have is three very different outcomes (based on the way I chose to allocate votes geographically). In a PR election, the two left parties have 192 seats, enough to form a coalition if they can win over a bit over 20% of the independents. The right parties have 173, and need almost all the independents to form a ruling coalition. In the Australian system (based on plausible assumptions about preferences), the bigger left party has enough seats to rule in its own right. In the FPP system, the bigger right party has enough votes to rule in its own right.

Of these variations, arguably the PR outcome most accurately reflects voters’ intentions: they are reasonably evenly divided between left and right, with a slight preference for the left, but with a significant minority disenchanted with the parties, and who want an independent voice in government. In practice, in an FPP system, small parties lose because a bigger party tries to frighten voters of a smaller party of their side of politics into supporting them (think Ralph Nader’s Green votes being blamed for Al Gore losing in Florida), so an outcome like this FPP example is not too likely – but the stifling of the growth of smaller parties is bad for democracy.

How, then could you achieve the fairness of a PR system without the disconnect between voters and MPs resulting from a party-list system as in South Africa? There are various hybrid systems including the municipal election system in South Africa, where some candidates are elected from a party list, and others directly (on a first past the post district system). However that hybrid system still puts significant power in the hands of the party, and still has the risk that the party becomes a source of unaccountable patronage.

My proposal, which I call a second-chance election (2CV for second-chance vote, not the venerable Citroën car, illustrated), is to have two MPs per constituency. The first is elected on a first past the post basis, and the second on a party list system with the wrinkle that the party list is formed out of the candidates who ran and didn’t win in the first round, ranked within party by how well they did. If for example a party wins 70% of the vote in a constituency, 20% of their vote there is in effect wasted since they only need 50%+1 to win, and their second candidate should probably be in parliament. If on the other hand the first past the post candidate won with 30% in a highly split race, the second candidate from that party should end up a lot lower down the party list. The tricky part is working out exactly how to do the voting; I work through one approach here, and don’t prescribe it as the only option.

Going back to our example, if we only elect 200 MPs on a first past the post basis, assuming the votes split the same way as in the above example, on the first pass, the elected members will look as follows (with deficit indicating how many seats each party is short of its entitlement):

2CV steps small L big L big R small R Ind FPP half 8 7 169 11 5 deficit 72 105 – 38 30 correction 59 86 – 31 24 final 72 93 169 42 29 error vs. PR -13 -19 45 -7 -6

We can’t completely fix the deficit, because one party, the bigger right party (big R), already has more seats than it’s entitled to in a pure PR system, so it gets no more seats. The other parties’ deficits have to be scaled to a correction that adds up to 200 (each proportionate to the number of seats they are short of the PR total), so we get 400 MPs in total. The bottom row of the table shows the error versus a pure PR election (a minus value means a party has too few seats).

Compare the revised chart with the original. The 2CV system ranks the parties in the same order as PR, which is an improvement, though the result is not exactly the same. The two right parties can form a ruling coalition, which is not an exact reflection of the electorate’s intent, but the result is not as skewed as the FPP result, or as inaccurate as the Australian system, for this example. This is however a fairly extreme outcome, as it requires that one party be able to win nearly 85% of the seats in an FPP election, with only 31% of the national vote.

You could reduce the probability of an inaccurate outcome such as this by having more MPs per district, or by converting the entire election into a party list system after voting in districts. Working through such detail is a secondary concern once the principle is accepted.

Finally, two issues are worth considering: how independents are handled, and how switching parties is handled.

Independents may be of extremely diverse views but treating them collectively as a party list after voting in districts ensures that those with strong enough support are elected. If their support base is diverse, this will be reflected in a diverse independent “party list” being elected.

Since representatives are directly elected, unlike with a party list, they should have a right to switch parties, and this creates a clear division of accountability between the party (which can provide resources for re-election) and the voter (who may reject a candidate who abandons their principles or fails to deliver). In a pure party list, switching parties (or “crossing the floor” as it is described in South Africa, though that technically only applies to joining or abandoning the ruling party) is less defensible because representatives are not elected in their own right – though they can argue that their party has deviated from its principles or platform).

Where does this all take us?

What I have here is a basis for discussion. There are many details to work out. To create a direct line of accountability, if there are two representatives per district, that implies you have 2 votes. Do you have a different ballot for a different slate of candidates, or are all candidates on one ballot, that has to be marked twice? If a party exceeds its quota in the FPP stage, is there a good way to correct for this? For example, you could have an upper house that absorbs some of the excess MPs – though typically an upper house is elected on a different basis to provide some sort of checks and balances.

There has to be a better way: pure PR has served South Africa badly. The Australian system has too many imperfections to be a good alternative, and a pure FPP system is too unfair and locks out small parties. I don’t like a mixed-member PR and representative system like the South African municipal system (with variations in other countries like Germany and New Zealand) because it retains a party list as a component. The party role should end at nominating and supporting the candidate; if the party chooses badly, they deserve to lose.

Election, the sequel

As the final results of the Australian federal election trickle in, I marvel at how close I came to calling it.

I sent this letter to The Australian the day before the election:

John Howard and Paul Keeting agreed on one thing: change the government, you change the country.

Never has this been more true that this election.

Every scorecard I’ve seen from pro-environment, pro-justice and pro-labour organisations has given top marks to the Greens, placed Labor at a distant second, and rated the Coalition last by a long way. Although this campaign has blurred the differences between the major parties, those differences are very real. The irony is that the Coalition, had it followed Malcolm Turnbull’s lead, could easily have outscored Labor on many issues. The Liberal party room by 1 vote has changed the centre of gravity of Australian politics from a forward-looking discourse to a race to the bottom with no thought for where it takes this country.

Fortunately the preferential voting system allows us to rank the parties on election day, and I hope a lot of people will take the trouble to understand the issues that are not being aired in the sound-bites that pass for campaigning. The best outcome we can hope for is a close result with a big enough swing to the Greens to shake up the major parties.

In the pursuit of brevity, the paper cut it to this:

HAD the Coalition followed Malcolm Turnbull’s lead, it could easily have outscored Labor on many issues.

The Liberals have, by one vote, changed the centre of gravity of politics from a forward-looking discourse to a race to the bottom.

The best we can now hope for is a close result with a big enough swing to the Greens to shake up the majors.

That maintained the essence but stripped the message that voters should be looking beyond the garbage that passed as reporting. The Oz letters page occasionally lets that sort of comment slip through if you hide it well, but not this time.

In truth, the coverage of the election by the mainstream media was abysmal. I was managing the Greens Ryan campaign, and the coverage of Ryan mainly was around the ejection of Michael Johnson from the LNP (an issue, but report it once and move on, not repeatedly) and anything but the Greens campaign. LNP candidate Jane Prentice’s husband’s finances were dragged into the media, with absolutely no relevance to the campaign. The ABC’s election information on the race lifted trivia about the Greens candidate, Dr Sandra Bayley, from the party’s site, while giving the Family First candidate who did not run a campaign of any significance more than twice as much text outlining his background. Another ABC online article had it as a three-way race between Johnson, the ALP’s Steven Miles and the LNP’s Jane Prentice and didn’t even mention the Greens. This is supposed to be our unbiased national broadcaster.

This sort of drivel is absolutely typical of campaign reporting in this country. The media pack follows the party leaders, and ignores all else besides scandal. Voters can be excused for finding it hard to tell the parties apart, or to discern their local candidate as anything but another echo in a bigger echo chamber of spin and negativity.

Let’s look at the provisional results (as at 22 August 2010, the day after the election):

Candidate	Party	Votes	%	Swing (%)
MILES, Steven	Australian Labor Party	18,220	25.06	-13.50
BAYLEY, Sandra	The Greens	13,872	19.08	+9.20
VINCENT, Allan	Family First	1,253	1.72	+0.19
PRENTICE, Jane	Liberal National Party of Queensland	33,018	45.42	-1.47
JOHNSON, Michael	Independent	6,331	8.71	+8.71

Tell me this reflects the general tenor of the reporting on the campaign, that the Greens were insignificant, and Johnson was a real contender. Someone could only have reported that if they were not actually paying attention to events on the ground. It’s not that there was no advance hint of this possibility: WWF did two polls in Ryan in June and July, showing Greens support to be 18% in the first, and 17% in the second. These were reported in the mainstream media, and swiftly forgotten. The Greens vote generally drops off towards election day, so I took these polls as indicating that a 15% result was achievable; we took this as a target, with 20% as an aspirational number. 19% was a very pleasant surprise.

For our vote to increase from these early polls is very unusual; let’s look at a bit more detail of how we did versus the more favoured competition.

The Greens achieved a swing of over 9%, nearly doubling primary vote over last time. Johnson’s result was respectable for an independent without a coherent platform, but nothing spectacular, and the level of media coverage he achieved obviously did not help him much. Nor did Labor gain from being taken more seriously than we were.  In at least one booth, the Greens above the line senate vote hit 30%, and we beat Labor in a few booths on lower house vote. How did we do this with no significant media? We certainly did not match the torrent of paper showered on the electorate by Johnson and the major parties. We sent out two fliers, one delivered as unaddressed mail (a lot cheaper than addressed mail), and the other hand-delivered by volunteers.

Having run for the state seat of Moggill in the last Queensland election, I knew what to expect, and from the start, aimed to make the mainstream media irrelevant. We set up a campaign site long before the official Greens Ryan site was ready, and not only kept it up to date, but made sure the best of it was echoed on the official site after once that was ready, and used personal networks to spread the word. We also participated in every forum that candidates were invited to attend, the only campaign to do so. While some of these may have had small audiences, we counted on those who attended to talk to others.

Beyond the obvious campaign, we also aimed in the inter-election period to offer as much of an incumbent service as we could without holding office. In one example, we had knowledgeable speakers address a protest meeting against a development, with a factual presentation on the community’s rights, and a no-nonsense assessment of their chances of stopping the development. I won’t itemise all such events but each time we did something like that, our presence in the community increased.

Once the election was called, we used various innovations in street signage to get our message out, all only at the cost of cheap materials and a few hours of person time to meet Brisbane regulations for having signs in public places attended. By election day, few voters wouldn’t have seen at least some of our key ideas – and in a context where they were an interesting surprise and therefore memorable.

All in all the main focus of the campaign was to get people talking about us, so they would take a closer look and be impressed when they checked the detail. By contrast, the major parties in Ryan mostly repeated their party’s prepackaged message. The ALP candidate Steven Miles did some of his own messaging on climate change and local issues, but obviously failed to cut through the general swing against Labor. The Johnson factor was a complication in that it’s unclear how much of his vote would have gone straight to the LNP in his absence; we await publication of full distribution of preferences to understand that fully.

To me the main lesson of all this is that a grass-roots campaign can trump professional marketing. In the end, the main thing you are selling to voters is trust. If they get to meet you close up and personal, and you empathise with their problems and offer real solutions, they will stick with you no matter how good the marketing of the other side. The integrity the Greens have established over time paid off in a largely negative campaign by the two major parties: we didn’t have to shout to be heard. Many voters tuned out the major parties and wanted to hear from us. In one example, I had a call from a retied stockman and Vietnam vet who was profoundly impressed with Bob Brown. This from someone who used to live in a community that voted solidly Nationals.

So why did I title this article “Election, the sequel”? Watch this space. We’ve learnt some useful lessons and will do even better next time.

Not The Greens Ad

This Australian federal election has been characterised by an even higher than usual amount of mudslinging. Let’s look at three examples: Liberal attacks on the government’s broadband plan, Labor attacks on Tony Abbott’s attitude to labour relations, and the attack by both sides on asylum seekers who, when I last checked, were not one of the parties running for office.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott appears to think it sufficient to attack the government’s broadband plan on the basis of not trusting Labor to get it right, rather than any attack on the specifics. Much of the Liberal opposition attack on Labor is on the theme of alleged bungles in office, especially around spending their stimulus package. There were serious errors, but there is a big difference between a considered multi-year plan and emergency stimulus spending to stave off a major recession.

On the other side, Labor harps on Tony Abbott’s history of supporting the Howard government’s unpopular “Work Choices” labour relations package. While there is good reason to suspect that Abbott would bring those measures back if he could, it’s not an unreasonable line from him that he would not do so without going to another election.

On the issue of asylum seekers, both sides of politics have gone to the gutter, labelling asylum seekers as a “border protection” problem. Excuse me. These miserable people are not an invading army. In fact many are heading here because we invaded their country. Fully a third of refugees on the UN’s books are from two countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. We invaded Afghanistan for the reasonably justified cause of stopping further atrocities like 9/11. But we didn’t finish the job. We left Afghanistan with an unpopular, incompetent government that could only survive with foreign military support, and launched a war on Iraq, a country that has never been shown to have any kind of link to Al Qaeda or 9/11. We bungled that one too, resulting in a civil war and ongoing violence. These two conflicts alone have resulted in about 5-million refugees.

In any case, whatever the source, asylum seekers – anyone who asks for recognition as a refugee, and who is at risk if they return home – are entitled to seek refuge in Australia. We have signed international conventions that oblige us to take them. Here’s a surprising fact: the vast majority of boat arrivals (up to 97%, depending when you count) have their refugee status approved and end up staying in Australia. But they are a tiny fraction of total asylum seekers. Far more arrive by plane, with legitimate passports and visas. But most of those who arrive “legally” end up having their applications for asylum denied. Let’s summarise this:

• boat people – tiny fraction of all asylum seekers, almost all legitimate: demonised
• plane arrivals – most asylum seekers, very few legitimate: not a political issue

Add to that around 50,000 real illegal immigrants – backpackers and the like who overstay visas – and you should realise that the whole attack on boat people is a con.

When Tony Abbott and Julie Gillard talk about stopping the boats, and Tony Abbott talks about sending back people without proper passports, they are talking drivel. Luckily for them, the people most affected are a tiny constituency who can’t swing an election.

So going back to the examples, we have once each of an attack from either side that lacks substance, and an attack by both sides on an innocent third party (not in the sense of a political “party”).

By this stage in an election, with so much heavy-weight advertising by the major parties with so much investment put into focus groups and polling, the Greens poll numbers start to sag. Not this time. Instead, the Greens numbers are holding up remarkably well. The latest (at time of writing) Roy Morgan poll on senate voting intentions shows the Greens vote holding up well enough to double their senate representation from 5 to 10 senators. Yet the Greens have had little or no TV advertising, certainly none I’ve seen.

Could it be that the major parties have reduced TV advertising to an echo chamber of negativity, that has voters so turned off that they don’t pay attention any more?

Meanwhile on the ABC’s Gruen Nation on Wednesday night 11 August 2010, one of the ad agencies asked to pitch for alternative messages came up with this:



That’s certainly a positive message, even if the ABC won’t allow the agency to sell it to the Greens. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. This way, anyone who likes it can embed it in their own web page, because it’s not a political ad, it’s just an example of the TV advertiser’s craft.

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Further reading
There are many sources of information on asylum seekers and refugees, including the UNHCR. For a quick summary, try GetUp’s fact sheet – but I urge you to research the issue yourself.

The Heart and Soul Election

If this Australian federal election is the election where the Liberals lost their mind, it’s also the election where the Labor Party lost its soul.

The ALP last election stood for an evidence-based approach on climate change. Ross Garnaut was tasked with summarising the best science, and producing an economic response. The plan was that the government would go with what he recommended. If anyone spotted the flaw in the plan – the then opposition was committing to a course of action where they had not sold the detail politically – this was lost in the “it’s time” mood that swept John Howard into the dustbin of history.

Now that we know the best science, and have an economic basis on which to proceed, what’s Labor’s position? The logical progression from the Rudd campaign would be to win political support in the form of a renewed mandate to implement the Garnaut recommendations. Instead, Julia Gillard plans to set up something that is an odd mixture of focus group and jury, a Citizen’s Assembly to decide where to go next. This is rank cowardice. It only puts off the hard decisions, and leave us exactly where we were before the Garnaut Report, except this time we are allowing public opinion to shape policy, instead of expert advice.

In a situation where expert advice points in a direction that will require some hard adjustments, you do not need some sort of populist leading from behind strategy that procrastinates decision-making. Political leaders need to do the hard yards of selling the tough steps that we have to take. They also need to cut through the dishonest propaganda of lobbyists who see their agenda as more important than the overall welfare of humanity.

Add to this Labor’s abject surrender on defending refugees against unfair attack (including straight-out lies), and Labor’s craven cave-in to the big mining houses over the mining tax, and you have to wonder what Labor stands for.

And the Liberals? They elected Tony Abbott as their leader. If you don’t get why this is crazy, read this. No wonder all the polls are showing a big swing to the Greens.

The Refugees World Cup

Talk about treating a vulnerable group as political football... there’s a World Cup on for the real thing. Is that not enough?

The announcement by the new Australian prime minister Julia Gillard that she is going to be “tough” (in politics, a synonym for stupid) on refugees and it’s unfair to call harsh attitudes to refugees “redneck politics” has to be challenged. Harsh attitudes to refugees are almost always based on racism, and are generally not factually based.

One example is the claim that refugees receive more benefits than pensioners. I haven’t seen a detailed version of this claim recently, but it appears to be based on a Canadian email hoax that has been translated to Australian circumstances. The Canadian version was full of errors, and the Australian version is no better. In fact, refugees in Australia do not receive the same entitlement to benefits as permanent residents, and become net contributors to the economy once they have adapted to their new home.

Another claim is that we get a disproportionate number of Islamic refugees, as if Islamic countries are not doing their share. Let’s let the numbers speak for themselves.

There are 2.9-million refugees from Afghanistan alone, and 96% of these are in Pakistan and Iran. There are over 1.7 million refugees in Pakistan, and the top three countries hosting refugees, Pakistan, Iran and Syria, host 3.8-million refugees between them. These numbers don’t include Palestinians, who are accounted for under a different system, totalling 4.8-million. So the total refugees arising out of Middle East and Afghan conflicts add up to nearly 9-million. We are quibbling in Australia over a few thousand. In the graph on the left of the page, I illustrate the scale of Australia’s annual refugee intake (about 13,000 per year currently) against Afghan refugees alone. If I were to compare our annual intake with all refugees worldwide, it would be too small to show on the scale of a graph like this.

What I find particularly ironic is that the people most keen on wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are at the forefront of demonising the tiny trickle of the consequential refugees that arrive on our shores. Have you ever wondered why people from these parts of the world hate us?

Back to the main point: is it fair to call these factually inaccurate attacks on refugees redneck politics? Julia Gillard’s claim is that this is an insulting attack on those holding these views. The facts I’ve quoted are very easy to find. Discovering the email hoax took me seconds. Finding the UNHCR’s 2009 Global Trends report, from which I quote statistics showing how tiny a fraction of refugees we see in Australia, was just as easy.

The people indulging in redneck politics are not ordinary people in the street who are misinformed about these issues, though a racist outlook helps them accept convenient myths without checking further. The people who do deserve the label of redneck politics are the people who know better and do nothing to correct the myths.

That means you, Julia.

Proof of Climate Change

If you want an example of the reality of rapid human-induced climate change, you only need to look at the change in tone of reporting after Labor won the Australian federal election. In barely a week after the win, reporting on Kyoto changed in the Australian (mostly Murdoch's News Limited -- strictly limited) press from "we can do more by staying outside an imperfect system" to "Australia joining the club makes it so much stronger".

It was always a mystery to me in any case why refusing to join the club somehow gave us a stronger voice. All the weaknesses of Kyoto were extremely well known – indeed some were engineered in deliberately to make it an easy starting point. How, therefore, being outside would make those weaknesses clearer escaped me.

No doubt all of this made sense in the cloud-cuckoo land of a losing election campaign.

Now, we can turn to hard reality: gearing up for post-Kyoto.

The fact is that the Kyoto targets were more symbolic than real. Yet being in the system has focused effort on renewables and other approaches to emission reduction. Germany, with about half the rate of solar radiation we have with only about a twentieth of the land area, generates more than ten times the solar power per capita that we do. Why? Because Germany has stratagems like an aggressive policy for rewarding feed-in (when you generate solar power, and sell the excess to the grid).

The next piece of hard reality is short-term targets.

Labor has committed to committing to short term targets only after receiving a report from Professor Ross Garneau in 2008. That’s a start, but you have to worry about the commitment Labor has made to tax cuts without considering potential costs of emissions reduction targets. Here are a few examples of potential costs. Hot dry rock geothermal power is a promising technology that looks nearly ready to go, but significant commercial risks remain before the first plant can be operational. If hot rocks become part of the plan, is the government willing and able to stump up capital, if the private sector balks at the risk? What if the oil price continues to rise, making fast trains a desirable alternative for inter-city travel? Does the government have funds stashed somewhere to get new infrastructure costing tens of billions of dollars built?

Then there’s the clean coal story – an even more unproven technology than hot rocks. The fact that parts of the technology have been tested in different ways and on smaller scales doesn’t mean it will work. Again, there are significant risks that could prevent private capital from touching the technology. Either the government will have to support it with substantial capital – or face up to more likely scenario of the costs of a substantial decline in coal usage, both domestically and internationally.

On top of these straightforward risks is the question of how steep a carbon tax needs to be imposed to make cleaner technologies competitive. The carbon tax needs to be high enough to make the new technologies viable, but not so high as to cause major economic damage. It also needs to be calibrated to similar measures overseas.

On the subject of economic damage, the risks are somewhat overstated because a reconfiguration of an economy seldom results in pure cost. No doubt when the first Model-T hit the showrooms, the horse industry predicted doom and gloom. And, indeed, farriers and horse manure shovellers were put out of work in large numbers... and no doubt still populate the dole queues in large numbers. A significant factor in a post-Kyoto economy will be improved efficiencies, which should have a knock-on effect. In the process of reducing energy needs, an organization may find and eliminate other inefficiencies. Why? Once a culture of R&D has been established, the scientists and engineers engaged to reduce energy consumption will need to justify their jobs by discovering other useful innovations. (And of course it will be harder to fire them under a Labor government when the job is done, but I digress…)

The indirect cost of recalibrating the economy is rebuilding capacity for R&D in areas long neglected under the previous government: alternative energy, business process efficiency, science, engineering and mathematics.

Australia is well below the OECD average for R&D expenditure measured as a fraction of GDP (1.64 in Australia, versus an average of 2.26 – 2005 figures). Providing an incentive to spend more on R&D, in the long run, will advantage our economy not disadvantage it as apologists for doing nothing claim. Being stuck in a fossil fuel economy when the rest of the world starts imposing carbon taxes certainly will not be a good place to be.

With some of the recent announcements of findings that indicate that climate change science up to now has been understating the risks, we need to be on side, and taking part constructively, not carping from the sidelines.

To misquote LBJ: we can surely do more by being inside the tent pissing out than by being outside the tent pissing in.

Cargo Cult Education

Australia has just elected a new Labor government; the new leader, Kevin Rudd, in most respects appears to be a distinct improvement on his predecessor, Liberal (= conservative in Australia) prime minister John Howard.

One area where I am not convinced is Rudd's obsession with putting technology in the classroom.

Somewhere in the various newspaper articles about the Rudd transition, I saw the phrase "evidence-based".

I am curious what sort of evidence is behind the drive to put a computer on every high school desk. A computer is only a tool, not some kind of magic. I have seen plenty of evidence that dumping computers into a situation without a definite plan for their use is a waste. Consider for example the article in the New York Times (4 May 2007), "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops". This article reports on wide experience with excessive computers in the classroom getting in the way of learning – as well as bad experiences with the high cost of maintaining the computers.

All of this is quite predictable. Any organization in which technology is introduced with no strategy, and no plans for long-term costs like maintenance and support, is bound to run into trouble.

On a recent trip to Denmark, I put these views to academics, and they agreed with me. Since computers have become common in schools there, mathematics scores have declined, and the perceptions that computers are boys' toys has dramatically reduced the fraction of female students studying computer science. This specific evidence is anecdotal, but the fact that it is repeated in multiple parts of the world lends it some credibility.

What kind of evidence, in any case, is there to support putting computers in classrooms? I've been publishing in computer science education for 20 years, and have yet to find a convincing study showing that computers transform learning positively – outside of very specific contexts, with carefully planned use.

The notion that putting technology into classrooms will somehow magically transform learning is nothing more than cargo cultism.

The one variable which most consistently affects educational performance is the teacher. If the Rudd government is serious about transforming education, it should be looking at scarcity pay in areas like maths and science – a far better investment.

Postscript: A report (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, PIRLS) showing that England has top or near-top scores on two fronts is interesting reading. On the one front, computer gaming, 37% of English school kids play computer games for 3 or more hours a day (22% of these reportedly play games for 5 hours or more). The other? The biggest drop in reading skills between 2001 and 2006 in any developed country included in the report...

This bit is worth quoting:

There is a negative association between the amount of time spent reading stories and articles on the internet and reading achievement in most countries. The data ... suggests that 9–10 year-olds were considerably more likely to use computers for playing games than for reading on the internet and that spending three or more hours doing either was associated with lower reading attainment.

So there you have it: not only is spending time on the net not good for reading skills, but kids in any case prefer to play games. Will this be any different in Australia? Time will tell. But we have a proud tradition to uphold: waiting for the rest of the world to try something, then copying the mistakes ...

A view on the Australian federal election 2007