An apple a day

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by Economics, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

Another Melbourne Cup to be run and won next week. The winner, in spite of media narratives about battlers and hard luck stories, will almost certainly be a billionaire, or a syndicate of billionaires. And it is increasingly likely that the billionaires concerned will come from overseas (an astonishing one third of runners in this year’s cup are from overseas). That is not a sentence that could have been written, or even imagined, a few years ago. We had a quarantine service, and a resulting freedom from serious animal and plant diseases, that was the envy of the world. And then it was decided, money to be made, that the racing industry could start importing racehorses for big events. Fly them in, fly them out, a bit of nominal quarantine and testing, but all self-regulation and privatised, being, of course, so much more efficient than people merely trying to perform a public service without fear or favour. And, surprise, equine influenza appears and costs the horse industry, mostly the parts that didn’t benefit from the few who brought in racing champions from overseas, hundreds of millions of dollars. Just a glitch though, really, and we continued on with the privatised self-regulated ideologically inspired model. But still, just horses, no impact on serious agriculture, as we reassured ourselves as yet another wave of foot and mouth hits somewhere in the world.

And then along came “Free Trade Agreements”, as we raced to allow other countries total and complete freedom to send anything they wanted to Australia while still restricting anything from us that might annoy their own farmers. Turns out, who knew, that FTAs (and the over-arching WTO) don’t just open your country up to floods of cheap merchandise which wreck your secondary industry, but can be used to eliminate any attempt you were making to keep out pests and diseases.

And before you can say “fire blight” our supermarket shelves are filling up with all kinds of fruit and vegetables, as well as beef, and pig meat and salmon, from all over the world from countries with all kinds of diseases not found in Australia previously. How long, do you think, before the equivalent of equine flu is going to strike the pig industry, or beef producers, or fruit and vegetable growers? And for what? Seems to me that just as the Melbourne Cup was just as good a race when restricted to the best racehorses in Australia, so our food supply was just as good when largely restricted to items grown or raised in the country. Indeed I can’t see why our agricultural imports are not restricted purely to items we can’t produce here (rice and cotton for example, perhaps one or two tropical fruits) – would help balance of trade, help our farmers, eliminate the chances of disease introduction.

But big agribusiness overseas, big importers and retailers here, apparently stand to make a lot of money by bringing in cheap food imports with little let or hindrance. The effects on this country of racing to be the first to bring in some new item that can undercut local producers seems of little, sorry, no concern to the people involved. “Free Trade” it seems is the magic spell which strikes critics dumb.

And the winner is? “Not Australian Agriculture” by “Greed” out of “Ignorance”.

Last edition

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by Climate Change • Tags: , , ,

Got a catalogue the other day from an antique book and print shop I very occasionally buy something from. Same day as the Australian dollar and American dollar were running neck and neck, and the only question about the gold price was when it would hit $1500. I don’t buy old prints and books as investments, but just for the pleasure of having something unique, or very old, or unusual, or interesting, or simply beautiful. I love re-reading my first edition of Pickwick Papers for example, knowing that 170 years ago another pair of eyes was reading the same pages and discovering Mr Pickwick, and Sam Weller, and the Fat Boy for the first time.

But there are people who do buy such things as investments – stamps, coins, art works, vintage cars, dolls, clocks, furniture, you name it, somebody will have a collection which they hope to use for their retirement income or to hand down to their grandchildren for untold riches. Stockmarkets go up and down, but a collection of objects can only appreciate in value, or so the theory goes. Well, except that there is also a whole industry based on creating pseudo “collectables”, trying to convince people that commemorative plates or coins or imitation antique dolls, made in their thousands, will one day be worth a lot of money, just buy them now. It is all a bit like the Nigerian internet scams where you just send some money, and of course bank details, in order to receive millions of dollars.

Increasingly though, in my gloomier moments, I suspect that even the collections of real antiques and art works are no longer a good investment. Even at the best of times such things are a long term investment – 20, 30, 40 years before you are likely to make significantly more than you paid for it, and then only if you got the combination of rarity, condition, attractiveness, and fashion just right. Dunno about you, but I suspect the next 20, 30, 40 years are not going to be the best of times.

What with terrorism, loss of biodiversity, decline in marine food resources, “peak oil” and other declining essential minerals, the push for nuclear power, the rise and rise of fundamentalist religions, the continuing use of warfare with nastier and nastier weapons, the rejection of science and rationalism, and the ever-growing over-population of the world, I think the future doesn’t look rosy. And looming over all the others, indeed contributing to most of them, is the certainty that the climate of the world which sustained the rise of human civilisation over the last 10,000 years, is changing too rapidly for adaptation, and is heading for an endpoint beyond our wildest nightmares.

Given all that, I have serious doubts that if I buy a first edition of a Dickens novel today, it is going to have any more value than as a fire starter in 30 years. Can’t see that anyone is going to be in the position of buying any of the things that we are collecting today.

And you can’t eat gold.

Start here

by Climate Change, Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There is a punchline to an old joke “You can’t get there from here” (or “If you are going there I wouldn’t start from here”), said to a tourist seeking directions to an out of the way destination. I was reminded of it when I saw the instant reaction (actually a preemptive strike – made before a draft report even appeared) by Barnaby Joyce and various farmer’s and irrigator’s organisations to the apparently outrageous suggestion that if the Murray Darling basin was going to have rivers in the future we needed to stop removing so much water from it on the way from Queensland to SA.

The reaction was so consistent it almost seemed coordinated – civilisation as we knew it in the Murray-Darling Basin was going to end with massive job losses, businesses going bust, farmers walking off their land, Australians starving for lack of food, pensioners losing their houses, and, in one memorable phrase – “rioting in the streets” of country towns. You had to pinch yourself to be reminded that the massive over-allocation of water on which these people and towns apparently utterly depended was only a few decades old, and that for nearly 200 years before that this region had managed to function perfectly well without sucking the Murray River dry.

Every suggestion for repairing or reversing environmental damage is met with the same chorus these days, and if you start from the point that Barnaby did, that any change will lead to the destruction of regional towns, then there is no way to save the Murray River or indeed anything else. A better starting point, and this is just a hint Barnaby, would be to say – “hey, Blind Freddie knows we have to reduce water extraction in order not to have a filthy, muddy and biologically dead ditch of algae ridden ponds in towns that used to have one of the world’s great rivers flowing through them. How much reduction? Well, the best scientific advice says this amount at least (and it should be noted that these are minimums, sadly no way to fully restore a proper river now it seems), especially in the face of climate change, so that’s what we need to do. Now, what effect will this have on economy and society in the region, and how can we best support people as the transition occurs?” That’s Barnaby’s job, get the best deal for regional people and towns, not simply say “no, there will be no change of any kind, we’d rather have a stinking ditch thank you”. If it is a comfort to him, he should think about it in terms of companies laying off staff, or outsourcing overseas, for no reason other than to squeeze greater profits out. “Just good business” Barnaby’s mates would say, “can’t argue with it, job losses a bit unfortunate, but hey, got to be profitable.” Never a hint that we should resist change in business to save jobs or communities in exactly their present form.

So get with it Barnaby, your starting point is that this is obviously what needs to be done, and you will support it all the way (could rename it the Joyce River perhaps, in his honour). But you also let it be known that while it is being done you expect and demand funding for retraining, re-skilling, change in agricultural enterprises, more efficient use of what water is available, better infrastructure, tourism promotion, new industries, and so on. And we will finish up with a decent river system again.

Can finish up there if you only start in the right place.

Newspeak

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by Economics, Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I hold these truths to be self-evident:
We live on a small not very distinguished planet, circling a small not very distinguished star on the edge of nowhere in particular.
The surface of the planet has developed over billions of years.
The present day plant and animal species have evolved over tens of millions of years.
The present day ecosystems have developed over tens of thousands of years.
The life support systems – air, water, soil – for these ecosystems have been modified by the organisms themselves to create and maintain their own favourable environments.
One animal species, one of the thousands of mammal species, Homo sapiens, evolved in the last million years or so, and like all other species, relied for survival on the life support systems of the planet.
Homo sapiens, like a few other species (rabbits, beavers, termites, army ants, swallows, galahs, corals, tapeworms, pine trees, gum trees, blow flies), extensively modifies its own habitat in ways that are detrimental to other species (and itself).
Seven billion members of the species Homo sapiens have found ways to modify the environment so extensively that they are not only damaging the habitats of all species, including their own, but are degrading the fundamental life support systems of all species.
As a result many species have already gone extinct in the last few hundred years, each loss with a feedback effect causing more damage to the ecosystems they came from.
A continuation of this trend will result in a massive loss of species, and, at the very least, a massive reduction in numbers of the Homo sapiens population.
Ultimately this trend will result in the loss of all life on this small planet on the edge of nowhere.

Now all of that chain of logic seems to be rejected by conservative politicians, big business, and the shock jocks of print and radio. As best I can tell (because they never pause to examine their own assumptions) the truths they hold to be self-evident are as follows:
We live on an infinitely big planet in the centre of the universe.
The planet is a kind of terraformed billiard ball, a round and if need be empty stage on which humans strut their stuff.
Humans are not an animal species.
The planet is infested with plant and animal species, which are either domesticated for human use or are weeds and ferals.
Humans were put on the planet by an invisible supernatural being who told us to do with the plants and animals what we will.
Any plants and animals not domesticated are best got rid of because they are a waste of space (except for any which can be used for entertainment in zoos and circuses).
Humans have no need to rely on any so-called environmental life support systems, we make our own.
We can make any modifications to the soil that suit us, and add any chemicals in any amounts that suit economic objectives, to the air and water, with no negative effects of any kind.
If we clear all those unwanted life forms from the planet there will be much more room for people, whose population potential is then absolutely unlimited. Ten billion, twenty billion, you name it.
Never ending exponential growth in human numbers is good, indeed essential, because it allows exponential growth in corporate profits, and therefore the fortunes of rich people.
Those who turn the environment into profit by destroying it are heroes. Those who try to slow down the destruction should be strung up from lamp posts because they hate humans.

So where does this irrational train of thought come from? Well, some is from the old “you can’t teach a man something if his livelihood depends on his not knowing it” observation, and this, in large part, explains the anti-conservation ethos of the union movement. An ethos, incidentally, in which the workers once again, unknowingly, act for the benefit of the bosses and against their own interests. And some is from the new “you can’t teach a man something if his massive profit levels depend on his not knowing it” observation which I just made. Some of course comes from the religious self-serving proposition that man was given “dominion” over the animals. And I think religion plays a role even beyond that. Most obviously in the case of American fundamentalists who believe that any moment now they will be whisked away to heaven so who cares what, if anything is left behind, and indeed, destroying the Earth will hasten the day when “The Lord” takes us away from all this. While the rational among us can laugh, through the tears, at this kind of nonsense, I suspect that among many ordinary religious people there are variations on this belief, hidden away, perhaps unknowingly.

A new technique has recently been developed by conservatives as part of the camouflage net under which all kinds of antisocial activities can occur. Anyone who points out the growing and deliberately nurtured gap in economic status between rich and poor, or who points out, say, the disparity of government funding to public and private schools, or the different access to good health care enjoyed by different socio-economic groups, is accused of “class envy” and engaging in “class warfare”. The rich, you understand, are not engaging in class warfare as they set about massively increasing their share of the economic pie, it is the poor, those ungrateful wretches, unwilling to tug the forelock, properly, as the lord rides by on his white charger, in his red porsche. Giving words totally opposite meanings to those they once enjoyed, has the desired effect of so debasing language that we no longer have words for real concepts like “class warfare” and therefore can no longer discuss them or be aware of the process in action, as Orwell knew (“In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”).

The aim of those who accuse people trying to conserve the world environment which six billion human beings absolutely require for survival of being “misanthropic” is similarly to remove our ability to discuss and recognise what is really going on. No coincidence in the identical semantic tricks being employed. For the richness of the rich to keep exponentially expanding at the expense of the poor three things need to happen. The pay and conditions of the working class need to be reduced by removing their protections; the share of the economy devoted to the public good (schools, hospitals, infrastructure, communications) needs to be reduced, preferably to zero; and both the parts of the environment being protected (national parks, wilderness), and the real environmental costs of development (greenhouse gases, oil spills), need to be reduced, again, preferably to zero.

By calling those who both recognise and object to these things class warriors and misanthropes, when the opposite is true, is an attempt to silence us by a perversion of the English language. Call them on it every time it happens, reclaim the language for the real world on the small planet.

Oldie but goodie

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by Economics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

There was, you may remember, in one of the kerfuffles during the election campaign, yet another dust up over population growth in Australia. Dick Smith, bless him, had made a documentary pointing out that the “Big Australia” beloved of developers, house builders, mining magnates, John Elliott, and Kevin Rudd, might, just might, present one or two problems, not least of which was the ruining of the Australian quality of life. Those in favour of endlessly increasing our numbers always just keep muttering “infrastructure, infrastructure” as a charm to ward off the likes of Dick and me, as if building ever more freeways was going to make life that much better for the 100 million people crammed on the coastal strip of the Greater Gold Coast.

But as the clincher, when “infrastructure” fails to convince the doubters, the Biggies always start talking about the old people, with a kind of feigned concern as to how Australia’s elderly (which includes both Dick and me) were going to manage in the future unless each of us had a dozen or so young people to fan us with punkahs and feed us with grapes as we lolled on couches like so many aging Indian or Roman emperors. Questions as to who was going to bring gin and tonics to those 12 young people when they in turn reached the age of water cress sandwiches and a version of croquet played with soft rubber balls always remained unanswered.

Well, turns out, and I doubt you will be surprised by this, that according to a recent study us Oldies are so far managing ok. What with the benefits of school milk and clean living and rock and roll music we generally seem to have reached the age of sixty something with most of our faculties, if not our joints, intact. Are in fact capable of doing stuff, earning the odd dollar, contributing to our community, looking after grandchildren. When you read this I will be, once again, in the throes of lambing, and can probably manage another season or two of that worthwhile activity. As well as editing our community magazine, and of course, writing bits and pieces to entertain and enlighten the public, young and old alike.

All around me I see other sixty somethings who, while they may or may not want to go back to full time work, are nevertheless capable of making things and building things and repairing things and teaching about things. In fact there are seventy somethings and eighty somethings, joints willing, who are also keen to be active and contribute to the society in which they live. And for those who aren’t able to do much because of fading eyesight or hearing or bad backs or any of the other symptoms that give us all moments of realising that, like Mick Jagger, we aren’t, after all, quite as young as we once were, why then, the contributions they have made to fairly advancing Australia over the previous three quarters of a century should be worth the occasional supply of lotus for eating.

So you want an ever increasing population to make billions of dollars from building houses or freeways then fine, admit that, and we can take the discussion from there. But don’t use us Oldies as an alibi for your greed. Dick and I don’t like it. And we still have the mental facility to say so.

Desperately seeking readers

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by Media • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Increasingly the graph of readership stats for the Watermelon Blog looks like the one that measures extent of Arctic sea ice, but worse.

Obviously the Watermelon Blog is not exciting the public imagination, and what is worse I can’t even get outed by the Murdoch Press (difficult, but not impossible, when you use your real name – Mr Watermelon). So I have decided we need a readership boost, a story so exciting that it will go viral around the world faster than a cat playing a piano. And I seek your advice. Five possible stories have come in from intrepid watermelon journalists around the world, and now you, the original watermelon readers, get to decide which story is most likely to attract dozens of new readers. Please vote as often as you can.