Posts by Neil Morrison
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the only work is in... you guessed it, mining and farming.
I'm wondering if mining and farming could provide enough employment in remote areas. I know mining doesn't provide many jobs.
Work creates wealth, and a sense of purpose, and of a better future. Which creates communities. Who set and enforce norms. By themselves.
I had a quick look at Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute conference goals and it seems mostly about restructuring welfare payments which is a bit depressing. Not much about creating industry and business. But that might just reflect the difficulty of doing that in the outback.
...it's about relieving the people of their land for their own good
or it could be about providing women and children with protection. A bit overlooked here is that in a large number of commiunities law and order have broken down and the powerless are paying the price. There are of course reasons why that's come about but the first thing to do re-esablish order. Then one can look at the long term solutions.
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And yet, it seems clear enough that something big had to be done. Whether Howard's government is doing the right something, and with what motivation, remains to be seen.
I agree. Howard deserves critical/sceptical/conditional support at present rather than falling back on all too easy demonisation. These issues do run deep and have been brewing under Labour administrations as well. Both Labour govts of NSW and Queensland have poor records on aboriginal issues.
Rudd has voiced cautious support which is the most constructive thing to do.
Australian Human Rights Commission’s view linked to above is well reasoned, and more Federal money for social infrastructure has to be part of the solution, but I can’t help but think that there’s an element of criticising any action to the point of inaction.
From Noel Pearson’s interview -
…I hear people saying in the commentary, that this abuse has been known about for a long time. People say in defence of, in objection to what the Government is doing. people say, "oh, the Government should have known, we've known about this problem for 20 years." Geez, if we've known about it for that long, why is it not that we've come up with any kind of effective solution to the problem?
There’s a lot of blame to go round for everyone if that’s the objective.
And the 'solution' to that problem is to come down hard on brown people
To channel Allan Duff for a moment, this solution is about comming down on MEN who exploit children.
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Maybe the 16 yr olds will vote to have pies reinstated in tuck shops. If they can choose a government surely they are mature enough to choose what they can eat all by themselves.
The Labour Party even paid for me to fly to Wellington and get drunk there.
Two reasons to get drunk, if reasons were needed.
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Any 16 yr old spending time thinking about national politics doesn't deserve to be 16.
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No-one but the US has the logistical capacity to pull something like a Darfur intervention off, and they would seem to be rather busy right now...
Damn that GWB for not sending the troops in and using diplomacy instead.
But seriously, the current UN proposal is for a mainly African force to go into the Sudan. The US along with other countries will provide other forms of support. Iraq is not the reason for the inaction on Darfur. But even if it were I don't see how that is good reason for other countries to do nothing.
If we look at say Germany...
I don't know much about the military capabilities of European countries but it has been observed that if Europe wants to act as any sort of counter-weight to the US then it has to have something to do that with and at present that's not the case.
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Yeah, really.
No, really.
You're talking in hypotheticals. Show me some examples.
Let's look at some post invasion situations.
Lebanon - the international community were pretty quick to insert a beefed up UN force in south Lebanon after the Israel-Hezbollah war. France played a large role in that. Chirac did not sit on his hands saying "you didn't listen to me on Iraq, why should I send troops to Lebanon?".
The Sudan - the problem there is not a lack of willingness on the part of African nations to send troops because of Iraq, the problem is the Sudanese govt and China.
I haven't noticed the NZ govt, another war opponent, saying they will bring the troops home from East Timor or Afghanistan.
International interventionism is still alive and sadly very much needed.
Anyway, just who exactly would be making the case that they would not support intervention in situations like Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia on the basis that the Iraq war occurred? I suspect people like Mugabe - people whose opinions one wouldn't consider.
Even in purely practical terms, where will the US find the resources to lead any new internevtion when it's deeply over-committed in Iraq?
That's a reasonable point but why shouldn't those countries that so virtuously refrained from taking part in the Iraq war now not step up to the plate? The NATO countries have shown a marked lack of enthusiasm for increasing their military presence in Afghanistan.
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The casualties of war are to be found not just in Iraq. The deaths will also be counted in Darfur and future Darfurs, Rwandas and Bosnias, where murderous regimes will put people to the slaughter with much less to fear from western intervention. That is the most rending victim of Iraq.
I've read this sort of thing on numerous occasions - one of the lasting legacies of the Iraq war will be the death of Liberal Interventionism, no more stopping Milosevic etc etc.
Really?
It's been the US and Britain that have been pushing for UN military intervention in Darfur and one of those countries that opposed the Iraq war, China, that has been doing the most to stymie international action.
Or is that those opposed to the war are now going around saying "we would really like to do something about Darfur, but now we couldn't possibly"?
It's important to note first that the international community did not need such an excuse as Iraq not to intervene in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur - those conflicts and the lack of international response all predate Iraq.
The only people who need Iraq as an excuse not to do anything about such conflicts as Darfur are the sort of people who would be not doing anything had that war not occurred.
By all means criticise the war but ringing the death knell of liberal interventionism is a long bow that only benefits the likes of the present Sudanese government.
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I must get O’Farrell's book. The bit about Thatcher was well observed and very funny -
“Why did she have to go to war with a fascist dictatorship? Why couldn’t we have a straightforward goodies and baddies war, where Thatcher was the baddie and the People’s Socialist Republic of Narnia were the goodies?”
Sadly Blair has come in for the the same sort of bloodimindedness.
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A great piece of writing.
I'm not sure how exactly much Blair was involved in the show down with Labour's socialist dinosaurs (but he did campaign successfully against Claus IV - the policy of socialisation of industry) but he, with the help of Brown and others, did make Labour electable.
I read the editor of The Independent's reply to Blair. I'm not too sure what to make of Blair's statements but in my opinion The Independent, although having some fine writers, has turned into a very shouty crusading tabloid with lots of stridently opinionated comment and very little dispassionate analysis. The Guardian does better.
What I noticed about all this was the "won't Brown be sooo much better than Blair" theme. I can't see how Brown is all that different from Blair (which is good in my opinion) and it's also setting Brown up for the same complaints of selling out all those “hopes and dreams”.
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Can anyone reference any books which focus on the colonising nature of 'Science'? Neil's more recent post above struck me as being particularly of that nature - the all powerful all encompassing nature of the word science in the modern world - for something to be 'OK' it needs to be done so scientifically, and once something is OK it must therefore be scientifically so.
There was much talk in certain academic circles for awhile about how Science was a Western construct used to disempower the colonised and that there were as many equally legitimate ways of understanding the universe as there were societies. With the corollary that the only illegitimate way of understanding the universe was of course Science since that lead to so many bad things.
This view ignored the long history of scientific thought in places like China and the Middle East. The West did pick up science and ran with it, for reasons that Jared Diamond makes clear, which gave the West a dominance for a while.
It's not really a matter of science colonising but rather of some societies re-establishing connections with a lost scientific heritage. That reconnection has been resisted by some in various indigenous movements who believe that one has to vigorously support tradition over new knowledge as a way of combating colonialism.
Up thread a bit it was suggested that my views on science were based on "faith". It's not at all - it's a matter of following logical arguments. I'm more inclined to accept that a treatment is effective if it has been put to the test of clinical trials than on the basis of anecdotal evidence.