The Conversation

What happens if Kevin Rudd wins the leadership spill?

2012-02-23T02:40:35Z

Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced this morning that she will hold a leadership ballot at 10am on Monday, to “settle once and for all” Labor’s escalating leadership crisis.

Kevin Rudd has not formally announced his leadership intentions, telling a Washington press conference he’ll do so on return to Australia. But the members of the Labor caucus will have to vote on Monday for their leader, and to back down from standing now would show weakness.

The Conversation spoke with constitutional expert Anne Twomey about the different parliamentary scenarios that could arise from a leadership spill on Monday.

Can you explain the different constitutional consequences in a hung parliament after a leadership spill?

If Julia Gillard wins, then from a constitutional point of view there are no further issues. She would remain Prime Minister. It becomes more complicated, however, if Kevin Rudd or someone else wins.

What will Julia Gillard do in that circumstance? There’s three possibilities open to her, she could a) do nothing b) advise the governor-general to hold an election or c) resign as Prime Minister.

Now all of those lead to interesting different complications but the Prime Minister has publicly stated that she will resign if she loses the ballot on Monday so the third is the most likely scenario.

What about that scenario where Rudd wins and Julia resigns?

This leads to interesting constitutional questions for the governor-general as to who to appoint as prime minister to replace her. It’s not a fait acomplit that she would appoint whoever won the leadership ballot. Constitutional convention requires her to appoint the person who is most likely to hold the support of a majority of the House of Representatives. Who that person is, will depend upon the independents.

If Rudd got the support of the independents, he could continue to govern without an election if the governor-general appointed him as Prime Minister. But he could also face a vote of no-confidence on the floor of parliament, which he would need to survive to keep on governing.

What if he can’t get the cross-benchers' support?

If the support of the cross-benchers is unknown or unclear, the governor-general could defer making a decision on a new Prime Minister and leave it to the floor of the parliament to decide in whom it has confidence.

A parliamentary vote is the clearest and most democratic evidence of the support of the House. It would avoid any suggestion of bias or the exercise of discretion on the part of the governor-general and maintain the independence of her office.

What about if the independents support Tony Abbott?

If the independents didn’t support the winner of the ballot and did show support for the leader of the opposition, then the governor-general could indeed choose the leader of the opposition to form a government. And then the most likely outcome would be for the leader of the opposition to advise the governor-general to call an election.

Really it’s up to the independents. If they decided that an election would be the best thing for the country, they could support Tony Abbott and once he became Prime Minister, he would most likely seek an election. However, the independents have a very strong self-interest in keeping the government going, because as soon as an election is held, some may well lose their seats, and those that survive will lose their importance if there is a new majority government.

On that basis, it’s fairly likely that they would want to retain the current government, whoever the leader is. On the other hand, the thing about independents is they are independently-minded and somewhat eccentric. That means predicting their behaviour, apart from self-interest, is rather difficult.

Can you recall a period in constitutional history in which we’ve seen similar circumstances arise?

It’s quite difficult to think of something exactly on par. There have been some examples of parliamentary leaders losing the support of their party before, but normally the party is in a clear majority, as was the case with Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government.

Probably the closer examples would have occurred during World War I, when the Labor party split over conscription. And in that circumstance, in NSW and at the national level, the Prime Minister and Premier lost the support of their party but still managed to continue in office.

But in those circumstances you had a war, and there was a very strong motive for parties to join together in a united government to support the war effort. That’s how Holman survived in NSW, and Billy Hughes jumped ship and joined with the opposition party at the national level.

Today we have a very different position with the dangerous combination of minority government, unpredictable independents and leadership instability.

It’s a potentially explosive situation.

Anne Twomey has received funding from the Australian Research Council and sometimes does consulting work for Commonwealth and State governments and inter-governmental bodies.

The messiah or a very naughty boy? Kevin and Julia's war of the words

2012-02-23T02:07:13Z

He’s not the messiah … or is he?

This morning Nicola Roxon went to the heart of the matter when she said of Kevin Rudd, “he’s not the messiah”. Most of us were hoping that she’d complete the statement with a tip of the hat to Monty Python by saying he was “a very naughty boy”. Nonetheless, her other comments made clear that he was very much this and more.

But at a rhetorical level, the messiah question is very much in the air. In this morning’s exchanges, Rudd declared himself “the one” to defeat Tony Abbott. He was the one with credentials and experience to steer us through the dark valley of a world financial crisis that was far from over, and the one to heal wounds between business and workers. (Was there even a hint of carpentry in his reminder that he insists on an Australia of manufacturing, where we “make things”?)

And his tale of what had happened since he stepped down as prime minister was a tale of what happens when you stray from the straight and narrow path that leadeth unto political success. Education reforms had been unravelled, Asian engagement neglected, health reforms had come unstuck, and the soul-searching that needed to continue for the spiritual health of the Labor party had been neglected.

By contrast, the key tones of Gillard’s press conference suggested less a messiah than an effective manager at the helm, with more worthy (but perhaps also dull?) aims of building a stronger, fairer Australia.

Gillard likes to focus on getting things done. AAP/Julian Smith

There was plenty to strike chords with a Labor heartland, but the other qualities on display went to strong management. Key words were “fortitude”, “courage”, “method”, and “stoicism”, as well as a sense of calm under pressure.

And, in answering questions, these qualities increasingly became the means by which she distinguished herself from Rudd, the former lord of “chaos”, “paralysis” and “mess”. Throughout the dysfunctional times of Rudd as prime minister, Gillard portrayed herself as a deputy who was the rock of stability, the “go to” person who steered the ship through stormy seas.

Senior politicians need to wield words effectively. Leaders, in particular, spend much of their time persuading different groups – key electorates, the party faithful, nervous members in marginal seats, and party colleagues – that their way is the right way.

We have two very different styles at work at the moment. Rudd is appealing over the head of the caucus, in a populist manner, with the promise of messianic deliverance.

Gillard, on the other hand, is speaking a language attuned to Labor roots, full of fairness, inclusion, families and lashings of reform. Good management is uppermost in order to realise these things and keep Abbott out.

She wants to avoid the clunkiness that can come from staying doggedly at this level (remember, in the Life of Brian, the troubles besetting the Judean Peoples’ Front, or was it the Peoples’ Front of Judea?).

Broad-based electoral appeal will remain one Rudd’s key considerations over the next few days, but Gillard’s rhetoric of effective management can also work effectively at this party level.

In effect, Gillard is happy to declare that she’s not the messiah, but nor is Rudd, and we are invited to complete that Pythonesque sentence on what, in fact, he really is.

David Lowe receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Politics trumps policy in Labor's leadership battle

2012-02-23T00:58:02Z

The leadership contest between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd is largely a clash of personalities and a raw struggle for power, and there is essentially little policy difference between them.

But should Kevin Rudd return to the position of Prime Minister, there is the potential for some changes to policy, given the occasional hints Rudd has indicated in some of his past and recent statements.

One of the most prominent recent policy spats has been over the proposed poker machine reforms. Independent MP Andrew Wilkie notably ended his pledged support for the Gillard Government over what he perceived was a weak compromise on tackling problem gambling. Rudd is keen to take stronger action on the pokies, and therefore shore up support from Wilkie. That said, this would cause some consternation among Labor MPs in marginal seats under pressure from the gaming industry.

Rudd has previously warned that Labor was moving too far to the right on asylum seekers, and so may seek a deal with the Greens to permanently return to onshore processing of asylum seekers. However, this will do little to defuse the issue, as this position will continue to be relentlessly attacked by the Opposition.

While the carbon tax legislation is set to be implemented from July, Rudd may face pressure from various industries, such as the coal, steel, power and mining industries for greater compensation. This could either come through a lower set price for carbon, or great tax credits or concessions.

There is potential that Rudd could fold under a concerted campaign to modify the carbon tax, as was the case with the mining tax. He may also increase support for the car industry, and potentially seek greater government subsidies or tax concessions for manufacturing as a whole.

Health reforms may be also subject to review, with Rudd possibly wanting to attempt to restart the negotiation process with the conservative state governments, in order to get greater coordination in allocating health funding.

Foreign and defence policy would likely see no substantial changes. Rudd would continue to take a strong personal influence over foreign affairs, as he did when Prime Minister.

Overall though, the major policy direction of Labor would remain much the same under either Rudd or Gillard.

Either leader would attempt to push the government’s main potential strength, which is the relatively successful performance of the Australian economy, with its comparatively low level of unemployment, inflation, and healthy economic growth, largely due to the Asian-driven mining boom. Bringing the budget back into surplus would remain a key policy goal, with the political strategy of attempting to expose the inconsistencies in the Opposition’s fiscal position.

The fundamental political failing of Labor has been its inability to sell this record of economic management, and translate this into wider political popularity, as has been reflected in its continually dire position in the opinion polls.

If Rudd is returned, there may be a brief “bounce” of support, which may lift Labor’s primary vote. It remains doubtful, though, that Labor’s leadership tensions and instability will fade, regardless of the outcome of Monday’s ballot.

Ultimately, personality and power seems set to override any substantial policy debate in Australian politics.

Craig Mark does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Decoding Kevin Rudd's leadership intentions

2012-02-22T23:25:01Z

Less than 12 hours after making his dramatic resignation in Washington, Rudd was back at the lectern. This time, however, his speech sounded more like a campaign pitch.

Watch part of Kevin Rudd’s conference this morning here

The well-crafted piece was a return of the classic Rudd. He sought to position himself as a prime ministerial statesman speaking in a controlled and deliberate tone. More than that, modesty took a back seat as he painted himself as a great leader. Rudd revealed that many believed that he could “save” the Labor Party and avoid the seemingly inevitable election loss that would occur with Julia Gillard at the helm.

Rudd also sought to claim the high moral ground by expressing his disdain for the chorus line of ministers bagging his leadership style over the last couple of days. He said that he was “shocked and disappointed by the tone and content of the personal attacks” and that he did not believe “these sort of attacks have a place in our political life”. In a move to try to cement his position as a somewhat powerful, yet merciful, political operator, Rudd urged his own supporters “not to retaliate”.

An interesting feature about the Gillard-Rudd battle thus far has been how opinion polls have been driving the debate. Indeed, it was a series of poor opinion polls that contributed to Rudd losing the prime ministership in the first place. It is therefore somewhat ironic that Rudd, and his supporters, have used the same polls to undermine Gillard’s prime ministership.

More coverage:

Rudd should not have been allowed to stay – now the ALP is paying for its mistake

Ambitions to lead Labor as Kevin Rudd resigns as Foreign Minister

Rudd’s Resignation moves Labor closer to the end game

Kevin Rudd resignation: experts reaction

Not only did Rudd spruik his leadership credentials, he also presented himself as a man of vision. Interestingly, Rudd chose to highlight policies that he would presumably pursue if he was to become prime minister again.

Rudd lamented the fact that the government had discontinued the halving of HECS fees for some university courses. He was also pushing for a greater emphasis on teaching Asian languages in Australian schools. He was presenting himself as a man of policy, not just personality.

Rudd was also eager to present his recent actions in a positive light. As he put it, the “question of the future of the leadership of our party and our country is not about personality”, rather it was “about trust and it’s also about policy and vision”. He ended the address with the famous “I’ve gotta zip” line.

Rudd’s speech would seem appealing to some backbenchers who have yet to commit to either camp Gillard or Rudd. With a leadership spill to occur next week, Rudd has given himself every chance to present a positive message to caucus.

No doubt part of Rudd’s allure for many in the government will be the “hope” he gives that the Labor Party may actually win the election with his leadership. But he faces an uphill battle and will be working his phone to melting point over the coming days to try to garner a credible level of support if he wishes to mount a challenge.

Zareh Ghazarian does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

The benefits of being in two minds

2012-02-22T19:08:45Z

Are you the “lazy” or the “deliberate” thinker? Why can’t we have a hybrid?

Something has been bugging me for quite a while – how difficult it is to strike a balance between thinking fast, albeit impulsively and intuitively, and the slower, more cautious and deliberated sort of thinking.

Pause for a moment and observe your surroundings.

Consider my friend, Mr W. He makes snap judgments and decisions, rattles off the first thing on his mind without bothering whether what he says makes any sense. Unfortunately, he often annoys the ones around him. This is what psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West refer to as System 1. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, and is effortless. This system likes to avoid choices as much as possible, and often select the default option. System 1 is also what we utilise when we are driving.

On the other extreme end, meet my other friend, Mr F. He pauses and deliberates on his choice of words before he talks and makes any decisions. This sometimes borders on overanalysing, especially when the decision can be as small as what to have for lunch. This is System 2 at work, often associated with deductive reasoning and is honestly an awful lot of work.

The differences in the thinking processes of System 1 and 2 are perhaps the most distinct and observable in the economics classes I have tutored. During class participation, there are always students who seemingly accept and offer a superficially plausible answer that comes readily to mind. Often, these answers are what we see as illogical and irrational in economics. System 1 is the greatest source of irrationality and appears to be the bad guy in this story.

However, System 1 is not irrational all the time. For example, System 1’s accomplishment includes the ability to provide “expert intuition”, in which with much practice, a trained expert such as a doctor of firefighter can unconsciously go with their gut feeling and produce the right response to complex emergencies.

Then, there is another group of students who would take a minute or two to think before offering a more rational and logical answer.

In Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he presents our thinking process as consisting of two systems: System 1 and 2. Kahneman claims that there is too much going on in our lives for System 2 to analyse everything. So, System 2 has to pick its moments with care, and is “lazy” out of necessity.

I am increasingly convinced that there exists a polarisation in the degree to which either system of thinking is utilised by people on a daily basis. Most of us seem to be either mainly a System 1 or a System 2 thinker.

Some people are closer to their system 1, like Mr W. I am always marvelled at the ease with which people such as Mr W are able to convince themselves that the first thing that comes to their mind is always right. At this point, I am tempted to jump the gun and categorise Mr W as a “lazy” thinker. But that would make me a “lazy” thinker as well.

There are others who are closer to their System 2 like Mr F, who possibly belongs to a small elite group of proficient System 2 people, far shrewder than System 1 people. These are the “engaged” thinkers; Stanovich would call them more rational, but not necessarily more intelligent.

gothick_matt

However, I would like to think that the degree in which we tend to favour either system of thinking is habitual and something that can be consciously changed – perhaps not totally, but in a manner that benefits us. Ideally, System 1 thinkers should start to observe and recognise the errors that originate from this system of thinking, and learn to pause and seek reinforcement from System 2 in appropriate situations. On the other hand, System 2 thinkers should know that it is unnecessary to think critically in all situations, although it can be disastrous in other situations. However, allowing our intuition and gut feeling to take over in some situations can be good.

Organisations and governments are also able to help by using behavioural economics in their policies and decision-making processes. In fact, this is exactly what the US government did. It recognised that many of us undoubtedly are more prone to System 1’s manner of thinking. To tackle the problem of inadequate retirement saving in defined contribution plans, under the sponsorship of the US congress, Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi of the Anderson School at UCLA have developed a plan called Save More Tomorrow (SMT). The SMT plan is a financial plan that firms can offer their employees. Those who sign on allow the employer to increase their contribution to their saving plan by a fixed proportion whenever they receive a raise. The increased saving rate is implemented automatically until the employee gives notice that she wants to opt out of it.

So why does this appeal to the System 1 thinker? In developing the plan, the authors addressed the issue of procrastination, which economists refer to as inertia. For example, the authors recognise that most workers may never bother to increase their savings rate over time. By making future increases in savings rate automatic, the plan eliminates the need for additional actions on the part of the participant. Besides, inertia is often so powerful that few will ever get round to opting out once enrolled in the plan. This plan has managed to align the laziness of System 2 with the long-term interests of the workers, recognising that System 1 likes the default option.

It is difficult to come to a consensus on which system of thinking is more superior than the other, particularly when both systems are essential in our everyday lives. The ability to combine elements of both System 1 and 2 thinking into a hybrid system of thinking for everyday lives will present ongoing challenges and implications for policymaking. This goes to re-emphasise a long-known fact that policies built on the concept of Homo economicus are inappropriate. The ability for governments and institutions to tailor policies to the needs of “hybrid” human beings will be important – and perhaps it will make a crucial difference for society.

Jasmine Zheng does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Despair not, blokes, there’s hope for the Y chromosome yet

2012-02-22T19:07:56Z

There’s something degenerate in every male (no, seriously). We members of the facial-hair-bearing sex carry, among the 23 pairs of chromosomes in every one of our cells, an odd pair of sex-chromosomes – a large X chromosome and its diminutive partner, the Y. And this embarrassingly tiny blot of chromatin is what makes a man a man.

But size doesn’t matter, because the Y contains the genes that set the male embryo on the glorious path to developing facial hair, antisocial behaviour, and all the rest.

More worryingly (to some geneticists, at least), the Y degenerates over time, losing the genes it once shared with its partner, the X. The Y and X are derived from the same ancestral chromosome, but over millions of years of evolution they have gradually ceased to exchange genetic material (to recombine, in technical terms), as other homologous pairs of chromosomes are wont to do.

This genetic divorce is not much of a problem for the X, because Xs recombine whenever they are paired in a female’s (XX) genome. But the poor Y – quite literally the odd-man-out among mammalian chromosomes – has no-one at all to recombine with, and this results in a so-called ratchet effect that’s thought to lead invariably to degeneration.

Why should the Ys lonely state lead to degeneration? Consider what happens when a mutation – and mutations are usually bad – occurs on an ordinary chromosome. Recombination provides an efficient mechanism for separating that mutation from the good parts of the chromosome, because some lucky offspring will, just by chance, get a healthy chromosome and pass lots of copies of it to the next generation.

The offspring that inherit the bad mutation will probably shrivel and die without issue, and the mutation will be discarded on natural selection’s refuse heap.

But for the Y there is no such luck. Every bad thing that happens, as long as it’s not bad enough to actually kill or sterilise its bearer, will tend to stick around, and get added on to previous bad things (hence, the ratchet analogy). And, eventually, the Y acquires so many bad bits it hardly matters for fitness when it actually loses a piece, and then another, and another … Over many generations, in other words, the Y degenerates and shrinks.

Now, the big question keeping some evolutionary geneticists awake at night is this: if the Y keeps shrinking, will it eventually disappear?

Indeed, some animals, such as the Transcaucasian mole vole, have already lost their Y chromosome. Could the same happen to us?

Don’t worry. Even if the human Y were to vanish some day, purged from our genomes like a bad memory, the male-determining factor would presumably just relocate to some other chromosome (and set in motion the evolution of a new Y, which would eventually degenerate like the old …)

But, still, the nagging question: is our Y slowly fading into oblivion?

Jennifer Hughes, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in the USA, and colleagues set out to answer this question by comparing the human Y chromosome to the Y of the rhesus monkey – a bad-tempered, hirsute cousin from which out lineage split about 25 million years ago. And they discovered something surprising.

It’s been known for a while that the genetic divorce between the X and Y happened in five stages over the course of our evolution. At each stage, a section of the Y ceased to recombine with the X, and thus began to evolve independently and acquire differences in the DNA-sequence.

By comparing the degree of differentiation with the X in different sections of the Y, it’s possible to identify the regions (“strata”) affected at each stage of the genetic divorce, and estimate how long ago recombination ceased.

Such genomic analysis has revealed that the first stage occurred over 240 million years ago, while the most recent stage occurred just before our ape lineage split off from old-world monkeys such as the rhesus.

Hughes and colleagues report in Nature today that, since our split with the rhesus monkey, our Y chromosome has indeed lost many genes from the youngest stratum (layer), testifying to ongoing degeneration. Intriguingly, though, not a single gene has been lost from the four older strata. In both humans and rhesus monkeys, these strata contain the very same 18 ancestral genes.

This is good evidence that parts of the Y are just too important to lose. Within each stratum, degeneration eventually slows, and perhaps stops, because powerful natural selection continually cleanses these chromosomal regions of deleterious mutations.

After all, genes on the Y control some crucial male functions, such as the formation of testes. And, evolutionarily speaking, a male without testes may as well be pushing up daisies.

So rest assured. The human Y chromosome looks to be a survivor after all.

Russell Bonduriansky receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

The Antarctica Diaries: the final instalment

2012-02-22T19:07:49Z

Professor Michael Ashley recently returned from Antarctica where he deployed a telescope to one of the most remote locations on Earth – a place known as Ridge A, 850km from the South Pole.

This is the seventh and final instalment of Professor Ashley’s Antarctica Diaries. To read the previous instalments, follow the links at the bottom of this article.

January 23 – Camp pull-out

With the deployment of our PLATO-R telescope largely completed at Ridge A overnight, today is the planned pull-out day.

However, the weather puts a spanner in the works, with a prediction of insufficient visibility for a landing at the South Pole for the return flight. The decision is made to hold until the next weather update at 10am.

I inform the guys at Ridge A of the delay via email to the PLATO-R computer (I have stayed at the South Pole). An hour later, in an Iridium call from Campbell [a UNSW colleague], I detect an unmistakable eagerness to return to civilisation. In principle, weather delays could extend for many days, and leave the team living on freeze-dried food and spending most of their days in sleeping bags trying to stay warm.

Fortunately, the 10am forecast looks more favourable, and the Twin Otter crew here at the South Pale race off to ready the airplane for take-off. With almost no load, they will be able to fly non-stop to Ridge A, with an ETA of 2:20pm.

With the knowledge that “rescue” is imminent, the team completes last-minute checks of the experiment and then swings into action to pack up the campsite for a quick and efficient departure.

The welcome Twin Otter coming to take the team home, flying over the PLATO-A Engine Module. Luke Bycroft

When Campbell tries to roll up his sleeping mat, it simply snaps into several pieces due to the cold (about -44ºC). Later, when the pilots try to load the bulky and misshapen sleeping mats into the plane, they are dismayed to find that chunks just break off in their hands. This is one useful lesson for future trips to Ridge A: standard sleeping mats, previously found to be adequate at -30ºC, fail catastrophically at -44º.

The completed observatory at Ridge A showing the HEAT telescope (at left) nestling under its fibreglass cover, with the Instrument Module and solar panels. The flag is that of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. The Engine Module is out of the field of view. Craig Kulesa

At 7:15pm I head out to the skiway to await the arrival of the Twin Otter bringing the team home. At 7:20pm the airplane appears as a dot just above the horizon, and at 7:25pm it has landed. I rush over to welcome the adventurers back to civilisation.

The Ridge A deployment team – Craig, Campbell, Luke and Loomy – having just returned to the Pole. Michael Ashley

Crucial configuration information for PLATO-R was written by Luke on a piece of cardboard. Michael Ashley

Our Canadian Twin Otter pilots have now almost completed their Antarctic season, and will be flying back to northern Canada shortly via Chile and the US.

Me on the roof of the elevated building at South Pole, having just removed the Iridium aerial that I was using for communication with PLATO-R. I can confidently conclude that I am the southernmost human at this time. Michael Ashley

January 24 – Leaving the South Pole

We all meet at 9am for breakfast to discuss the state of the experiment, and for me to listen to the stories of the deployment at Ridge A. I hear first-hand about the feeling the team had when the Twin Otter took off after dropping them at Ridge A.

It was certainly an unnerving moment to be isolated at almost the highest point on the Antarctic plateau, and having to rely entirely on the resources of the camp. Keeping warm was the main concern, with temperatures as low as -44ºC one has to be very mindful of conserving body heat. And, unlike at the Pole, there wasn’t a warm building the team could retreat to.

The main method everyone used to stay warm was to go on a vigorous hike up and down the skiway.

One obvious effect we hadn’t thought about was that the sun’s elevation changes during the day at Ridge A, resulting in temperature differences of about 10ºC between local “noon” and local “midnight”. The longitude of Ridge A is about the same as India, but our team were on New Zealand time – the time zone used at the Pole.

As a result, they were trying to work outside during the coldest part of the day. With more foresight we should have moved our sleeping schedule to the new time zone.

The extreme cold also had some interesting consequences at meal breaks. The piping-hot, hearty soups that our mountaineer guide Loomy made for dinner would begin to freeze rapidly from the outside in. The centre would remain warm (for at least a few minutes), while ice would start forming on the periphery. The metal spoon would be warm where it touched the soup, but the handle acted as such an efficient heatsink that the team’s fingers were in danger of frostbite.

Loomy cooking up a storm in the kitchen at Ridge A. The tarpaulin stops the gentle, but exceedingly cold, wind. Luke Bycroft

Fortunately the tents were very effective, and the sleeping bags were toasty warm.

Everyone is very buoyed that PLATO-R is communicating via Iridium and working well. There is a general feeling of disbelief that we have actually pulled this off, and pretty much according to plan. The challenge now is to keep the observatory functioning throughout the winter, and to command the telescope to take data that will lead to a better understanding of star formation. With luck, we will be presenting data from HEAT [High Altitude Antarctic Telescope] at the International Astronomical Union Annual General Meeting in Beijing in August.

An all-sky fish-eye image from HRCAM3, taken after the team had left Ridge A. Michael Ashley

But before then there are two crucial time periods we have to be concerned with:

the next days to weeks where we need to ensure nothing unexpected happens to PLATO-R that could cause us to lose control of it
the period in a couple of months when the sun sets and we transition from solar power to diesel engines.

If the engines stop and the batteries cool below -25ºC, we won’t be able to restart the engines until October. With winter temperatures hitting -75ºC, we require careful thermal management.

To make it easier for me to control PLATO-R (and PLATO-A – my Chinese colleagues left Dome A this morning, and I’m now responsible for running this observatory too) I was very keen to leave the South Pole and get to somewhere with a decent internet connection.

With this in mind I requested to leave on the afternoon’s flight to McMurdo Station. I left the Pole at 4pm, left McMurdo at 12:30am, and arrived at Christchurch at 9am. Within 25 hours of leaving the South Pole I was back at home in warm, wet Sydney.

Quite a contrast.

Final words

That just about wraps up my Antarctic adventure for 2011-12. It all worked out about as well as I could have hoped. I am still somewhat stunned that in three days we managed to install a completely remote astronomical observatory at Ridge A, and we will now be observing stars being formed in the Galactic Plane for the rest of the year.

In a month or so you should be able to google “PLATO-R” and see our new website with the latest data and photos from the new observatory.

The cavernous interior of the C-17 taking us back to Christchurch. Michael Ashley

I hope these diaries have given you some insight into what it is like to be a scientist working in Antarctica. It is certainly a privileged position to be in, and I am very grateful for the opportunity.

For those that are interested, I will be giving a talk on the PLATO-R/HEAT deployment during UNSW’s Orientation Week. It is currently scheduled for 2pm on Thursday, February 23, in QUAD Room 1001 off the Basser Steps.

This is the final instalment in Michael Ashley’s Antarctica Diaries. Follow the links below to read the previous instalments:

Michael Ashley receives funding from the ARC and other government funding agencies for his research on astrophysics.

Why the TGA banned painkillers that aren't good at relieving pain (clue: they're dangerous)

2012-02-22T19:07:14Z

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal has granted pharmaceutical company Aspen Pharmacare a legal stay against the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) ban on some of its products.

The company took the action after the TGA ordered the deregistration of a group of drugs with the base ingredient dextropropoxyphene (DPP): Di-Gesic, Doloxene, Paradex and Capadex.

Professor and hospital pharmacist Andrew Somogyi spoke to us about dextropropoxyphene and the broader implications the legal proceedings.

What is dextropropoxyphene (DPP)?

Dextropropoxyphene is an opioid drug chemically similar to methadone, but dissimilar to morphine. It’s a lot less potent than morphine and so is classed as being a relatively weak opioid drug.

Who is the drug for?

The TGA had approved it for mild-to-moderate pain, which is usually the result of acute pain from surgery. It’s also used to treat chronic pain.

I’m a pharmacist and I was dispensing huge amounts of it in the early 1970s. So, I suspect it was approved mid to late 1960s.

In Australia, DPP can be prescribed by itself (DDP only) but in the majority of prescriptions, it’s combined with paracetamol (DPP and paracetamol).

Figures from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) show that there were something like 500,000 prescriptions written in 2009 for the combination of DPP and paracetamol. And there were 21,000 prescriptions of DPP only, costing almost A$500,000 through the PBS.

Is it an effective pain reliever?

From a pharmacology perspective, which means examining how tightly the drug binds to the pain target (the receptor in the brain where opioid drugs act to relieve pain), it’s very poor.

DPP binds to the receptor (pain target) less than 10% of what morphine does, which means it’s a weak opioid compared with morphine.

Clinical studies on effectiveness have basically shown that DPP together with paracetamol are no more effective than paracetamol alone for acute pain. So the evidence about its effectiveness is basically that it’s not any more effective than paracetamol and it’s considerably more toxic.

Why was it banned?

It was banned because its benefit-to-harm balance was not in favour of the drug. It’s no more beneficial than paracetamol and its harms were substantial because of certain effects on the heart. The body breaks down DPP in the liver and one of its major breakdown by-products has adverse effects on the heart. It causes abnormal rhythms that can, in fact, lead to death.

The drug was a lot more toxic to the heart in the elderly because they were not able to remove the drug and its breakdown product as rapidly as younger people, so it would accumulate in their bodies. And in the United Kingdom, in particular, the drug was the major cause of drug-induced overdoses in the 1980s.

Aside from these kinds of harms, the drug can also interact with many other medications by blocking their breakdown. These interactions with other medications patients are on (such as antidepressants) can also cause harm.

The drug is banned in the United States, Europe and New Zealand. Do you think it was a sensible decision by the TGA to ban it?

Yes, because we have much more effective and safer analgesic drugs.

There are some people who have been on this medication for many years and may be dependent on it. Getting them off it may be a problem but we now have very good drug addiction and drug dependence units in hospitals and elsewhere that can deal with those types of issues.

Should the TGA’s decision be allowed to be overturned?

Certainly, the scientific evidence for deregistration can’t be argued against. I think the TGA is on pretty good grounds to convince the tribunal that this is a public health issue and there are much better and safer medicines for the indications that the drug was initially approved on.

Andrew Somogyi receives funding from NHMRC and ANZCA

Ask the locals: a new way to tell if dingoes are native

2012-02-22T19:06:25Z

Native status is a big deal. It affects where conservation dollars are spent, and our inherent reaction to a species. Most people believe that native equals good and alien equals bad, but in some cases, the distinction between a native and an alien species isn’t so clear-cut.

Dingoes, for example, arrived on the Australian mainland some 4-5000 years ago – they were here when Europeans arrived – yet we know that they were introduced by people (albeit a long time ago). How can we decide if they have been here long enough to be considered a native species?

The impacts of new arrivals

When they first arrive in a new ecosystem, alien species (if they establish) can have big impacts. For example, dingoes probably sent the Thylacine, the Tasmanian native hen, and the Tasmanian devil extinct on the Australian mainland soon after they arrived. More recent arrivals include cats and foxes which are thought to have severely affected populations of many native mammals – such as woylies and numbats – as they spread across the country.

Such impacts often happen because a native species fails to recognise a new enemy, and to defend itself effectively. This occurs when introductions mismatch competitors, plants and herbivores, or in this case, native prey and an alien predator, as likely happened when dingoes first arrived in Australia.

But is this still occurring?

Just ask the locals

Given enough time, local species that don’t go extinct will “learn their lesson” and begin to recognise and respond to their new predator. This happens through learning, adaptation, or both. Eventually, local prey should treat the new predator in much the same way as any native predator.

Bandicoots will put up with rain, but how do they feel about dingoes? AAP

This process has been repeated throughout history, as ecological communities exchanged members through natural means or human trade. Many species considered native in their communities today were in fact simply introduced to those communities a very long time ago.

As an island nation with a very recent history of multiple invasions of alien species, Australia has a distinctive perspective on this. In other countries and cultures, the lines aren’t so clear cut.

How can we tell if enough time has passed for this process to happen, and an alien to become a native species? We can ask the local species that interact with it.

A ready-made study system

We decided to test this idea out on a ready-made experimental system in the northern suburbs of Sydney. In this area, bandicoots (a medium-sized native mammal) love to come out of the bush at night to dig up residential gardens in search of food. The diggings they leave behind in lawns are well known to residents, who are often less-than-pleased with the mess left behind by a foraging bandicoot.

Many residents also own pet dogs or cats, and we thought that bandicoots might choose to avoid these yards when deciding where to forage. If so, it would imply that they recognise the danger posed by these pets.

To find out, we asked people who lived next door to Kuringai Chase and Sydney Harbour national parks to tell us about the quantity and frequency of bandicoot diggings that typically appear in their yards.

Dingoes are old news to bandicoots

We found that bandicoots avoided back yards with resident pet dogs. They showed no such aversion to yards with cats, and dug happily in the lawns of backyards without pets.

Dingoes and dogs seem much the same to bandicoots. AAP

So it seems that bandicoots do avoid dogs when looking for food. As domestic dogs are very closely related to dingoes, this suggests that thousands of years experience with dingoes has enabled the bandicoots to recognise the risk of dogs, but not cats, which have only been killing bandicoots for about 150 years.

In short, then, the predation risk of dingoes is old news to a bandicoot.

What does this mean for dingoes?

Before making any important decisions we need to “ask” many more local species about their response to dingoes. Importantly though, simple recognition of a predator is not enough – prey also need to effectively defend themselves.

While it has been suggested that dingoes suppress foxes and cats with a net benefit for native small mammal biodiversity, we believe that the finer scale behavioural interactions between predator and prey are a critical part of this equation.

If most native mammals remain naive towards cats and foxes, but defend themselves against dingoes, it would suggest that dingoes do have an important role to play in Australian ecosystems.

This work was funded by an Ethel Mary Read Grant from the Royal Zoological Society of NSW (http://www.rzsnsw.org.au/), and by the Hermon Slade Foundation (Grant HSF 10/10 http://www.hermonslade.org.au/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Peter Banks receives funding from the ARC and the Hermon Slade Foundation.

Rudd should not have been allowed to stay – now the ALP is paying for its mistake

2012-02-22T11:04:19Z

From the time Julia Gillard succeeded Kevin Rudd as prime minister there was a ticking time bomb that no one thought to defuse.

His promised inclusion in a cabinet whose membership was instrumental in deposing him was bizarre in itself, especially given very detailed knowledge of how Rudd had ruthlessly undermined his Labor predecessor, Kim Beazley, and his known penchant for vindictiveness. And why did the ALP hierarchy not seek to dissuade him from recontesting his seat after he was ousted?

The fact the party kept Rudd within the tent was a major mistake. Those who had worked closely with him and who had deserted him well knew that he was incapable of working as part of a team, which was precisely why he had been deposed.

One has only to go back to the widely disseminated image of an ashen-faced Rudd, wallowing in visual self pity as he sat on the backbench after being deposed, to see that this was trouble in the making.

The last time a deposed prime minister accepted office under a successor was in 1971 when Billy McMahon toppled John Gorton in a party room vote which then inexplicably elected Gorton as deputy leader, guaranteeing him portfolio of his choice. Gorton opted for defence in which he used his position to settle scores, five months later forcing McMahon to sack him for disloyalty.

The main reasons for replacing Rudd – which Gillard has never been able to articulate to the Australian people, to her continuing disadvantage – were first, doubts about his ability to win the next election after a spectacular decline in the opinion polls, and, second, Rudd’s inability to work as part of a team.

As long as he remained in parliament, and more importantly, as a member of a cabinet the majority of whose members would rather not have him there, there was always a focal point for trouble, whether it was from Rudd’s own ambition or from discontent from Gillard’s leadership.

And that trouble has materialised as the government’s fortunes have declined. Rudd has become, almost inevitably, the lightning rod for internal dissent from demoted ministers such as Robert McClelland and Kim Carr, and ministers frustrated with their portfolios, such as Chris Bowen in immigration. Other members in marginal seats, such as NSW members Janelle Saffin and Mike Kelly, have been targeted by the gambling industry over Gillard’s now abandoned gaming reforms.

There is little doubt Rudd has worked to destabilise the government, and his Washington resignation speech, so full of unctuous self promotion, was nothing if not a job application, addressed to the same people who decided less than two years ago that he was not up to it.

Next week, it now seems, will determine whether Rudd gets another chance, without any sign of change from what he was, or whether Gillard can rid herself of the shadow that has continued to dog her prime ministership.

Either way – or even with a compromise candidate such as Simon Crean emerging – the best Labor can hope for is to stem the bleeding rather than avert the looming train wreck, whenever the election is fought.

Norman Abjorensen does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Kevin Rudd resignation: expert reaction

2012-02-22T08:58:50Z

Kevin Rudd’s dramatic decision to resign in the early hours of the morning in Washington has caught Prime Minister Julia Gillard on the hop.

In response, Prime Minister Gillard has issued a brief statement expressing “disappointment” that Kevin Rudd never personally raised his concerns with her, and promising to address a press conference tomorrow.

Leading academics discuss the implications of the move, and analyse the strategy behind Rudd’s appeal to end the reign of Labor’s “faceless men”.

More coverage:

Rudd should not have been allowed to stay – now the ALP is paying for its mistake

Ambitions to lead Labor as Kevin Rudd resigns as Foreign Minister

Rudd’s Resignation moves Labor closer to the end game

Dr Norman Abjorensen, ANU

Kevin Rudd has pre-empted any possibility of a pre-emptive strike by Julia Gillard – he’s the first one out the blocks. Now it depends where he goes after he comes back and does what he’s talking about: consulting. Is he going to challenge for the leadership? Is he going to quit his seat?

If we had what’s been described as a phony war until now, this is really game on. The contenders have identified themselves. This is it.

What happens next? It’s how the numbers play out. I’ve had two conversations in the last half hour with MPs. One of them tells me Rudd’s got no more than 25 [MPs backing him], another assures me he’s got 40. There are going to be a lot of phone calls made over the next few days, a lot of heavying. It’s very hard to predict how things are going to play out.

Everything is in a great state of flux. There’s the very strong possibility that Rudd’s surprise announcement in Washington is going to create a bit of a backlash. It was well after midnight over there, there were very few Australian journalists there, he didn’t take any questions.

He’s talking about a “stealth attack” on the prime minister in reference to himself, but this is very much a stealth attack on his own prime minister.

In the long term Labor’s in very, very real trouble. The primary vote is at a very flat line. It’s very hard to come back from here 18 months out. The most they could hope for would be to try to minimise losses at the next election, but that might be the uppermost thought in their minds when the meet on Tuesday to try to resolve this issue.

Something like that will probably result in Julia Gillard standing aside, possibly a very safe pair of hands like Simon Crean being entrusted with the task losing the election but not losing it by as much as some people might fear.

I don’t think we should ever underestimate Kevin Rudd. This has been quite a remarkable counterstrike.

Dr Mark Rolfe, University of New South Wales

This is the umpteenth round of Rudd’s mind games, aka guerrilla warfare. His main strategy all along has been to, of course, deny he’s involved in any sort of leadership challenge and [say] he’s just been getting on with the job of foreign minister. All along, therefore, he’s just been playing mind games, which was his strategy with Howard during the 2007 election.

Now he can return to Australia as the injured party and flounce back on Friday trailing his coat, saying “I’ve been a good boy”, which is essentially what he was saying in that resignation speech, and aiming for high moral ground. You can see from his very careful arguments that Gillard must be agreeing with Crean because she’s not criticising him for doing anything untoward.

Rudd’s got the luxury of really dictating the moves in this game because she’s in a quandary. Now, he may return, she may call a leaderships spill on Monday and he may just sit back and not contest, especially if knows he hasn’t got the numbers. He’s got the luxury of time and his guerrilla warfare on side. And in guerrilla warfare you never come straight out on the battlefield if you haven’t got the numbers with you. And she’s got no assurance that he will join battle with her on Monday.

So she’s stuck with him. Let’s say a leadership spill is called, he doesn’t contest, he sits on the backbench the mind games continue, she continues to bleed. Time, relatively speaking, is still on his side.

Rudd’s waiting for enough numbers to come his way. Part of the mind games over the past week or so has been [saying] “Rudd’s got 30 to 40”. That’s talking up. He’s got below 30, and with a caucus of 103, obviously that’s not enough.

So the game, therefore, is for him to just appear to the Australian public as if he’s been a good boy all along, when in fact we know he’s a sneak. He’d been sneaking behind Beazley’s back, which is how he got the leadership in the first place. He’s been sneaking around since 2010 if not before. He was the one who was responsible for those leaks in the middle of the 2010 election, which drained Gillard and the Labor party.

The interesting thing may be that Gillard may in fact think, “Well, there’s no way to recover this situation, I might resign for the good of the party.” It’s a suggestion that’s really out there, but she’s a person who’s more concerned with the good of the party than Rudd, because his overblown ego is just so manic.

Some may wonder about his resignation overseas in the middle of doing his job representing the country. But in his resignation speech he’s harping on about these “faceless men”, even though his faceless men have been stirring the numbers against Gillard. Nevertheless, his faceless men are not identified [as such], all the faceless men are associated with Gillard, and you can see in Tony Abbott’s statement tonight that it’s an easy rhetorical device to pick up on. Everybody’s been able to lambast these awful faceless men, but there are faction leaders on all sides in every party, and yet at the moment these so called “faceless men” are identified with Gillard, and the dominating people around her within the party.

And of course there’s this whole Queensland election thing. If he was so concerned about the effect on the Queensland Labor party and his good friend Anna Bligh, he’d come out with a clear statement saying, “I’m not going to seek the prime ministership”. But you know he’s not going to do that, and in fact this puts pressure on the Labor Party about the Queensland election, rather diminish any damage, which is his claim.

Dr Paul Strangio, Monash University

There was always a level of unsustainability having a former Prime Minister on the front bench with someone who actually deposed that person. In fact, there’s a great historical note here that the last time this happened in Australia was 1971 with John Gorton, who was rolled by Billy McMahon. Similar sort of situation, it lasted for a time but proved to be unsustainable. It was always an extremely difficult situation.

What’s happened today, we see again elements of the disconnect between the public image of Kevin Rudd in that media performance, which was very carefully crafted. He’s appealed to the Australian people, he’s attacked the faceless men, and so on. It’s a very strategic, tactical message that he is sending out.

But the majority in caucus see Kevin Rudd through a very different prism. So much of what has been going on recently with leadership speculation, where Rudd has been running a carefully crafted campaign of destabilisation of Julia Gillard through the media, this has been entrenching views within the party and Rudd and his supporters. The problem for Gillard is there’s this disjunction between how the majority of caucus see Rudd and how the public still tends to perceive him. And that’s an ongoing problem for Labor.

Now the Gillard camp is sending all the signals out that they’re very confident on the numbers but there is still that hurdle that the public still sees Rudd through a different light.

This also goes to the bigger problem that with the overthrowing of Rudd, yes there was the polls but there was always the problem of his leadership style. That was enormously significant. But you still hear members of the public say, “we don’t understand why Kevin Rudd was deposed,” and this is an ongoing millstone for Gillard.

How it’s going to play out? It seems very unpredictable in the longer term. In the short term, it seems the Gillard camp is very confident of the numbers. What will happen from here is more difficult to know because whatever has happened, the leadership might be, for the time-being, resolved early next week.

But we can only assume that there has been tremendous damage to the Government and to the Labor brand. The average member of the public sees this as a very unedifying leadership squabble. So there’s terrible dynamics being played out but it needed to be resolved, and now, at least for the short term, there will be some sort of denouement next week. But longer term the government is badly, badly winged by this.

Professor Carol Johnson, University of Adelaide

I can’t remember a foreign minister specifically quitting while overseas, but it’s certainly not unusual while a leadership challenge is being prepared for people to basically resign. Keating challenged Hawke from the backbench eventually, and also remember of course that Tony Abbott and a number of others resigned from the Liberal shadow cabinet to challenge Malcolm Turnbull over the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

I think it’s a bit rich for him to depict himself as a victim, because there has been a long period of destabilisation of the Gillard government, and after all Rudd himself has quite a history, according to journalists' reports, of destabilising Labor leaders.

In terms of “faceless men”, I think specifically he’s talking about (Simon) Crean, but he clearly isn’t faceless, but presumably he’s also referring to the likes of Mark Arbib, Bill Shorten and so on. But Rudd’s problem in caucus was not just the factional leaders. He lost the prime ministership because he had virtually no support in caucus. The factional leaders by themselves would not have been able to remove him. It was only because he had so little support that he wasn’t even prepared to stand against Gillard that he lost the position of Prime Minister.

Julia Gillard: in a "terrible position". AAP

If Rudd retired from politics, he’d risk bringing the government down and he’d be considered one of those eternally disloyal Labor members of parliament. That would be a huge step to take, to resign, especially given there do not seem to be sufficient grounds to this.

The more he does this, the more he risks that some of the people who has reportedly been talking to will come out of the woodwork and say, “No, hang on, there were good reasons why Gillard and Simon Crean were concerned”. It’s a risky strategy for him to take if he’s going to depict himself as a victim.

Gillard is obviously in a terrible position, and so are Labor members of parliament. The problem they have now is to work out is, has Kevin Rudd changed? Has he really changed? Holding press conferences in the small hours of the morning might suggest he hasn’t. Even if he hasn’t changed, does he have sufficient popularity to save far more seats than Gillard would even if Labor loses? That’s very hard to charge, because at present he has the sympathy vote, and it’s not entirely sure what his public support will be if he actually becomes prime minister, and then faces the same policy dilemmas that Gillard had. Will he be able to keep delivering in a minority government situation if the Greens and the cross-benchers agree to support him, because one of his previous problems was getting policy through and implemented?

But the Gillard government is obviously in extremely dire straits. This is one of the lowest points historically for the Labor party, and even if you allow for combined support of the Labor and the Greens, you’re still looking at a Liberal victory. So these are really desperate times for Labor, and the members of parliament have an incredible dilemma about what decision to make. Of course, a third candidate could still emerge.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh answers questions following the resignation of fellow Queenslander and "good friend" Kevin Rudd as Foreign Minister. AAP

William Bowe, University of Western Australia

I’m a bit surprised. I think the drill was supposed to be that Gillard was weighing up whether or not to fire Kevin Rudd. I can’t presume to know the in and outs of what’s going on here, but presumably Rudd has been hearing things about what’s been planned. Possibly he anticipated that he would be going out one way or the other, and it was better to seize the initiative and do it on his own terms.

I would be very surprised if we don’t see some sort of leadership spill next week. I suppose it’s always possible that Rudd’s going to weigh up the numbers and decide that it’s more in his interest to keep his powder dry but that would be a big defeat for him if it happened. So he has probably taken the calculation that we’ll be getting a very exciting opinion poll coming out on Monday. I think Rudd may have calculated that that will put a little more momentum behind his push and perhaps in the wake of that bring him up to a level where he has at least enough support to emerge from it looking credible, even if he can’t win.

In terms of the Queensland election, I don’t actually think this is in prospect, but if this was all resolved in Kevin Rudd’s favour next week I think the Queensland Labor Party would be doing a little jig. But given that’s not likely to be what’s happening it’s probably yet another disaster for the Labor campaign in Queensland, which is beyond redemption under any circumstances.

Federally, if you want to look at the big picture, the whole thing is a great human tragedy. All of these personal conflicts and rivalries as best we can tell have resulted in what’s going to be a quite short-lived Labor government after a decade in the wilderness.

Julia Gillard kisses Kevin Rudd after the carbon tax passes. AAP

Dr Craig Mark, Macquarie University

Kevin Rudd is very much trying to make the case that he’s been treated unfairly. It’s very ironic, given he’s been using his own backers, his own so-called faceless men, to canvass the numbers for his own leadership spill. Today he was very much speaking to the public, rather than his own majority caucus colleagues. He has the biggest public appeal, more than Julia Gillard and other potential Labor leaders, and it seems he’s trying to resort to that, a public image that is his biggest political weapon, to try to get his caucus colleagues to switch to him from Gillard, but it remains to be seen whether they could be convinced.

His performance today certainly adds to the drama and surprise of the whole thing. It’s certainly unique. I can’t recall a foreign minister resigning overseas before. It’s pre-empting any possibility that Gillard would have sacked him upon his return, so if the rumblings were that Gillard was going to sack Rudd for disloyalty, this attempts to pre-empt that and put him on the moral high ground and puts him in a better position for a leadership challenge, should that emerge next week.

Gillard is going to have to build on what she’s been doing for the past week, which is essentially shoring up her position in the caucus, in the cabinet, and reinforcing to her caucus colleagues that changing leaders would only add to the instability. She’s got a challenge on, so she’s going to have to come and meet it.

This makes it a bit more likely that he could get up. Ultimately it’s going to be the waverers in the caucus, particularly those on very thin margins, out in marginal seats, ultimately they’re going to be driven by who is much more likely to limit the damage from an election loss next year. Which leader is more likely to improve their electoral chances? Possibly, enough of them will decide that the polls have been so dire under Julia Gillard, that Kevin Rudd, even though he’s been so autocratic and, as his critics say, a psychopathic control freak, that he’s more likely to get them over the line. It’s still unlikely at this stage. But the number crunching will be going on feverishly as we speak. I don’t think he’ll get up at this stage.

If he challenges, the most likely outcome is that he’ll lose, bide his time, and challenge again later. We could be looking at a repeat, to some extent, of 1991, when Keating challenged Hawke, lost, went on the backbench, continued his lobbying and instability, weakening Hawke further and further, then coming in later in the year. So history could repeat itself. You never know in politics.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

Rudd’s resignation moves Labor closer to the end game

2012-02-22T08:48:29Z

If nothing else, Australian politics has been full of surprises since the 2010 election. The hung parliament, the introduction of controversial policies and the recent manoeuvrings over the role of parliamentary speaker have all provided sources of intrigue and debate.

But all of these issues have occurred under the shadow cast by the seemingly incessant leadership battle bubbling along in the Labor Party. Kevin Rudd’s resignation as Australia’s Foreign Minister starts the latest chapter in the ongoing saga.

This battle started as soon as Julia Gillard deposed Rudd as prime minister before the 2010 election. After losing a swathe of seats, Gillard was able to return Labor to the government benches, albeit in a minority government situation.

Perhaps this was a poisoned chalice for Gillard. Not only are hung parliaments rare in Australian federal politics, they are also notoriously difficult to manage as compromise becomes an even bigger part of government decision-making.

This would, in some part, explain why one of the first policies pursued by the Gillard government was the carbon tax – something that key independents and the Australian Greens supported. The problem here was that Gillard was accused of having broken an election promise which fanned debates about her “trustworthiness”. When coupled with the way in which Gillard initially took the prime ministership from Rudd in the first place, the prime minister’s character became a topic of intense debate.

Indeed, public opinion polls highlight how the government’s support dived from the moment the carbon tax was proposed by Gillard in 2011. Ever since then, the government, and Gillard in particular, have struggled to reconnect with voters. The sense has been that voters stopped listening to the government.

The barrage of opinion polls have also clearly played a role in stoking the debate about the leadership of the Labor Party with Kevin Rudd often outpolling Julia Gillard as preferred leader. With constant speculation about the leadership, the government simply could not shift attention to the policy debate. It needed a circuit breaker and Rudd’s resignation may be just that.

In his speech, delivered in a most dramatic way while in Washington, Rudd was openly critical of the power factions wield in the Labor Party. Indeed, Gillard is a product of the party’s factions while Rudd is still a relative outsider when it comes to factional links.

Rudd’s initially high public opinion results served as a substitute for his lack of factional backing. When the polls turned, so too did support for his prime ministership. Other issues, such as those covered by his critics in a recent episode of Four Corners also contributed to his down fall.

With speculation about the party leadership reaching a high point last week, Rudd’s absence from the country appeared to have quelled some of his support. Senior Labor figures, such as Simon Crean, castigated Rudd’s actions in public and the pro-Gillard supporters seemed to have reclaimed the ascendency. Rudd clearly needed to take back the initiative and he’s done so by resigning from the ministry.

Rudd’s resignation has opened up a number of paths for his political future, with none looking like it holds a happy ending for Prime Minister Gillard.

Now without a portfolio, Rudd has much more time to indulge in writing opinion pieces and speak with the media without the constraints of being responsible for a government department. But he may become a liability for the government in this capacity and his presence would constantly haunt Gillard in parliament.

If he decides to resign from parliament, a by-election will be triggered in his Queensland seat of Griffith. The problem for Labor is that it is polling very poorly in Queensland and would probably lose the contest. This could spell the end of the Labor government as its majority in parliament is already wafer thin. If Rudd was to take this option, he risks being branded a “rat” by the party.

The third path Rudd may take is to challenge for the leadership, but on current reports it seems unlikely he would have the numbers. He could decide to bide his time and plan for another go at the prime ministership at a later date. This would involve doing something he opposed in his resignation speech – attacking by stealth. This approach was used to great effect by Paul Keating against Bob Hawke in 1991. After “doing the numbers” as a backbencher, Keating launched a second and ultimately successful bid to topple Hawke.

Rudd’s political future will be clearer in a few days when he returns to Australia but it looks like there is still much to go in the Gillard vs Rudd battle.

Zareh Ghazarian does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

'Ambitions to lead Labor' as Kevin Rudd quits as Foreign Minister

2012-02-22T08:24:00Z

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has announced he will step down from his post, sparking immediate speculation about his next move and whether he will challenge Julia Gillard as Prime Minister.

In a press conference convened at 1am in Washington DC during an official visit, Mr Rudd said he believed he had lost the confidence of Ms Gillard and had no option but to resign.

The move comes after weeks of leadership speculation, and amid the first week of Queensland Premier Anna Bligh’s re-election campaign.

Bella Counihan spoke with Monash University’s political expert, Nick Economou.

Rudd has said he has resigned because he did not have support of the Prime Minister. What do you think his motivation is for quitting?

Presumably there is a bit of an ulterior motive here. I imagine Mr Rudd still harbours ambitions to lead Labor and perhaps then regain the Prime Ministership. But there’s a more fundamental issue and that’s the tenure of his position during this time. While he’s been away, he has been attacked by the Prime Minister’s supporters, Simon Crean in particular, who has been saying, in political terms, some pretty bad things about Rudd which really made Rudd’s position as a minister untenable.

The heavyhanded approach of the Gillard backers forced Rudd to resign and in the process, Gillard’s backers have made a tactical error, as they always do. There’s something consistent about Julia Gillard and her people is that they just never get it right, and they’ve not got it right this time either.

Will Kevin Rudd challenge Julia Gillard? AAP

So this is in no way a positive for Gillard, Rudd stepping down? Will it help to move on from speculation about the leadership?

Oh no. This is an unmitigated disaster for Gillard, as if things weren’t bad enough. I mean it just brings the electorate’s attention back again to the events that led to Rudd’s dismissal as Prime Minister, and he’s made sure of that by reference to that in his speech.

The other thing too is that while Mr Rudd was a minister he was tied in by Westminster convention to the policy positions held by the Gillard government and it would have also had severe constraints on Mr Rudd’s ability to comment on policy areas outside his own portfolio.

Now that he’s no longer a minister he’s able to comment on anything, presumably if he wanted to he could criticise some of the more unpopular aspects of the Gillard government’s policy including things like its carbon tax. But the first thing of course, is that by coming out of the ministry, Mr Rudd will have to go to the backbench, which is of course is precisely what Mr Rudd wants to do.

At the moment his problem is not one of popular appeal, he’s very popular amongst the voters according to the opinion polls, what he lacks at the moment is support on the backbench – and guess what? That’s now exactly where he’s going to go thanks to the efforts of Mr Crean, Ms Gillard and others. It’s a tactical blunder by Gillard of quite severe proportions.

If Rudd moving to the backbench is a tactical move, is this similar to Paul Keating’s attempt at leadership from the backbench in the early 90s?

Yes, each one of these incidents have their own historical dimensions. But yes, you’re basically right. Again as I say, we know there’s a problem in the backbench. There wouldn’t have been this ramping up of the leadership crisis if there weren’t sufficient numbers of Labor backbenchers who are looking at the polls, looking at Gillard’s leadership and concluding that not only will the government be defeated, but they will lose their seat.

Now, it was clear that the message of how unpopular Gillard and her government is was getting through to these MPs when they were with their constituents over the summer. When they got back to Canberra, there was a sense of how Gillard and her team managed to bring the panic back under control and this feeling of the inexorability of the leadership change started to recede. And in that circumstance, there wasn’t really much option for Rudd to manoeuvre the way he was manoeuvring.

But I still maintain, that the kind of panic that was starting to appear at that stage could come up again at any time. The most dangerous period for Gillard is actually not now, it will be in August this year, after the carbon tax comes in and the opinion polls I’m sure will go into a nosedive. And by that stage Rudd will have had a number of months working with the backbenchers reminding them that he’s popular in the eyes of the electorate, reminding them that he’s no longer apart of a government that has these unpopular policies. And then he has a very good chance of toppling her as leader.

Labor wasn’t exactly on track to do well at an election, but how do you think their electoral chances are now? Does it damage the Labor brand even more?

Well, let’s just get things clear from the start. Labor is on track for a huge electoral defeat, a defeat probably of the dimensions similar to that suffered by Keating in 1996 and Whitlam suffered in 1975 and 1977 and it’s not turning around.

Far from, as she promised, from improving the situation and making 2012 the year that the government would be back on top, in fact all she’s done so far is making Labor’s situation worse. Which brings us to the second part of the question, what’s the voter response going to be to [the resignation]? It will be that they will continue to defect from Labor and tell pollsters that the coalition and Mr Abbott are on track to a landslide election victory.

Industry Minister Greg Combet earlier today was talking at the National Press Club saying this had to be resolved. Is this a resolution? Could it have gone any other way?

Gillard’s backers have miscalculated. They thought that Rudd was so vain that he would not surrender the foreign ministership and that they would then be able to sack him and have a show of strength by the Prime Minister.

Once caucus has reconvened next week, in fact Rudd has outflanked them because rather than be sacked and being seen as having done something wrong, being dismissed by the Prime Minister gives an impression to voters that the charges of disloyalty were true. In fact Rudd has now managed to beat his adversaries to the punch. He’s the one now holding the moral ground and he’s able now to go back to making references to the dynamics which saw him lose the Prime Ministership in the first place. So it’s just been an absolute unmitigated disaster.

Nick Economou does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Bagram riots expose Afghanistan's shifting allegiances to the masters of war

2012-02-22T04:13:59Z

The only thing surprising about yesterday’s riots outside of Afghanistan’s Bagram air base is that these things don’t happen more often.

What is fascinating about Afghanistan is how its infrastructural capacities – hardware, pools of unskilled labour, airports, marketplaces – add to the country’s tacit support for each new game-player on its territory: be it Britain, Soviet Russia, the US or the Taliban.

These are the unaligned skilled economies that develop around wars; economies that up until now have seemingly shifted from side to side irrespective of outcome and eventual master.

But with each shift, tensions between the local population and occupying forces inevitably arise. This time, residents were furious over reports US troops had burned a Qur'an in the air base.

Bagram and the base

The village of Bagram sits the main entry gate to the the airfield, on the road that runs to Kabul. In 2001, this village had a population of approximately 5000 people. Today it would be significantly larger, in line with the radical expansion of the airfield under U.S administration post-surge.

The village emerged during the time of the Soviet occupation to house unskilled labourers and merchants and their families who both survive off, and profit from, the presence of the base. Currently there are thousands of Afghani civilians living there who, as they did for the Soviets before, work as as cleaners, janitors and construction workers for the international civilian contractors tasked with servicing the airbase and supporting the US military.

Legend has it that when there are VIPs on the base, such as Dick Cheney, this minor army of support staff is kept off the base for the duration of the visit. Within hours, it is said, things start to slow down. The toilets and mess halls don’t get cleaned, construction on the multi-storey concrete accommodation blocks stops.

View Bagram riots in a larger map

The mechanics of war

Bagram airbase was built by the Soviets as early as the 1960s and was used throughout their occupation from 1979 to 1989. Contested by the Taliban and Northern Alliance throughout the civil war era, the air-traffic control tower reportedly served as a media-briefing site by a Northern Alliance general.

The airfield is now one of the key military installations for the US, housing civilian and military medical facilities as well as the notorious Bagram prison with its 750 mostly Taliban inmates. Around 30 other prisoners, many with Al-Qaeda links, were brought to Afghanistan from outside the country. Bagram airfield sits along side Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison on an international itinerary of questionable US correctional facilities.

An abandoned Soviet tank rusts outside Bagram air base. US Air Force

Under US administration, the airfield has been expanding since 2001 leveraging off of its Soviet-built core. It is now a 2,100-hectare compound that includes shops, restaurants, three kilometres of aircraft runway, offices and barracks.

It is a key component of the 16,093km aerobridge that runs between Afghanistan and the US mainland: from the concrete runways of Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina, to the airfields of Bagram, Kandahar and Shin, this aerobridge has operated as part of the latest surge. More than 30,000 troops and up to 60,000 tonnes of cargo and supplies have been moved via the only secure route between these two places – direct flight.

Hardware fetishists might like to note that up to 20 times a day, C-5A Galaxies and C-17 aircraft, each able to carry the equivalent contents of four 18-wheeled trucks, fly between the US mainland and these Soviet-built air bases of southern and central Afghanistan.

Shifting allegiances

The aircraft used to resupply the growing US military presence in Afghanistan in the later months of 2001 were commercial Russian-made IL76s and AN12s, manned by crew from the ex-Soviet Union working for civilian supply companies contracted to the US military.

These aircraft and the individuals crewing them gained direct and invaluable knowledge of Afghanistan via involvement in the preceding Soviet occupation of the late 1970s and 1980s, a conflict, which involved a CIA-backed Mujahideen, galvanised against the Russians.

Afghans throw rocks at the air base at Bagram. EPA/S. Sabawoon

In 2001, these planes operated from the United Arab Emirates, the key transport hub for US and European airfreight. The IL76, with its internal crane and capacity to drop a six-metre container directly onto a runway, thereby doing away with ground support, was ideal for the job in Afghanistan. And critically, in the early days of U.S and allied invasion, to have a non-US flagged aircraft go down was not newsworthy to a voracious media focused on US losses for an anxious public back home, unlike the loss of an American-registered plane.

Whose side are you on?

Servicing both the airfield and the village of Bagram is a market. Just as the unaligned skilled economies of invasion logistics shift from side to side irrespective of master. The base bleeds information with a porosity that challenges traditional notions of “taking sides”.

The Afghan population of Bagram is too easily forgotten. USACEPublications

In this market it is possible to buy almost anything that is available on the base: electrical goods, furniture, food, sporting equipment. How it gets there no one seems to know, or be prepared to tell. There are reports that at certain times it has even been possible to buy bags of USB sticks containing random information regarding life and the workings of the military at the base.

It is unclear from the reports as to whether these USB sticks were stolen or thrown out with information already in place, or if they were smuggled in and used as repositories for information downloaded. Either way, the social security details of all four of the highest-ranking officers on the base have to be worth something to someone.

So much of our attention is directed towards both US and Australian troops in Afghanistan that we forget about the communities of Afghans that support, or at least surround, the foreign presence there.

But as the population finds its voice over issues such as Qu'ran burning, it may not be so easy to ignore.

Tarsha Finney does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Evergreening patents: playing monopoly with solar fuels and medicine innovations

2012-02-22T03:05:16Z

IDEAS AND OWNERSHIP: The concept of protecting ideas and innovation by legal means dates back to antiquity. But many of our existing laws are under strain, their suitability and ultimate purpose called into question.

Here, Thomas Faunce explains that when energy and pharmaceutical companies attempt to acquire or hold on to patents for the sake of extra profits by reducing competition, innovation suffers.

There has long been controversy over the balance between protecting patents to facilitate innovation and addressing the great social and environmental needs of our times.

Inventors need patents to protect their ideas. But often those patents are bought out by companies with no direct role in the invention and no plan to improve it. At some point, such excessive patent rights begin to impede the process whereby innovations are refined and improved. Patents then become mechanisms for freezing out competition simply for the sake of prolonging profits.

Patents haven’t prompted the develop of new antibiotics, for example, or new medicines for many diseases in the developing world. Likewise, patents in the “old photosynthesis” (coal, gas and oil) energy field may be acquired chiefly to inhibit the globalisation of new molecular solar fuel technologies that positively address our energy security and climate change problems.

Patents are sometimes inaccurately treated as a corporation’s “natural” intellectual property right (IPR). Instead, they are more accurately depicted as an intellectual monopoly privilege (IMP). A consequence of policy focus on the former view is that companies may be encouraged to replace genuine product innovation with innovation in lobbying, collusion and regulatory shenanigans to freeze out competition from the market place.

Such strategies can include the use of trade agreements and memorandums of understanding with governments, and freedom of information legislation.

In the context of pharmaceutical patents, these tactics are often called “evergreening”.

In the context of renewable energy, they can involve the use of companies pejoratively referred to as “patent trolls”. These take up patents in expanding and potentially lucrative fields simply to enhance profits.

Renewable energy patent tactics

One of the most exciting areas of renewable energy research is the development of molecular solar fuels. Such technology uses sunlight to power the splitting of water as a source of hydrogen fuel which, when burnt, produces fresh water.

Debates in this area have focussed on whether patents should cover solar fuels processes and functions such as nanotechnology components for light capture, electron transport and water catalysis.

If patent ownership in the solar fuels area becomes fragmented, researchers may find their “follow-on” research hampered by the high cost and difficulty of negotiating contracts with large numbers of IMP owners.

Without some prior licensing and sharing arrangement, each individual solar fuels patent owner will have an incentive to overcharge other researchers requiring access. The research and development of critical innovations for energy security and environmental sustainability could thereby be inhibited.

To develop new renewable energies, researchers need access to patented technologies. International Rivers

Pharmaceutical patent evergreening tactics

The case of the Department of Health and Ageing v iNova Pharmaceuticals (2010) illustrates how pharmaceutical companies employ evergreening tactics to hold on to their patents.

The Federal Court overturned a decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) that would have compelled the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) to reveal, under a Freedom of Information request, to a corporate pharmaceutical patent holder (iNova Pharmaceuticals) whether the TGA had received an application to register a generic version of the patented drug.

The AAT’s determination would have compromised the listing of a generic drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. And it would have breached the 2006 amendments to the Patents Act 1990 (Cth) which protect the right of generic manufacturers to get products ready so they can immediately “springboard” or rapidly launch into the market when the patent, on which their drug is based, expires.

Another evergreening tactic is to undercut and then take over the generic market. The patented pharmaceutical industry (comprised of companies that hold patents) has lobbied successive Australian governments to drop the price it pays for generic drugs. Prices have fallen between 12% and 25% and have undercut the profit margins of once-Australian generic companies so much that they have shed their research arms and jobs. In the end, most of these generic companies have either closed or been purchased by supranational patent-holding drug companies.

In another recent evergreening or patent-perpetualising tactic, US pharmaceutical companies are seeking to use negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) to create an appeals mechanism for the decisions of the expert committee that lists drugs on the PBS. This would would allow patented drug companies to challenge decisions to compare their price to that of a cheaper generic drug that has the same level of safety and efficacy.

Other US-sought clauses seek to sway the PBS listing system towards processes that require the PBS to accept whatever price a patented drug company offers, without the capacity to check whether those prices are fair and based on market competition.

Genetic drug manufacturers want to 'springboard' their products onto the market as soon as the patent expires. melloveschallah

Raising the bar

To overcome the use of patents to inhibit community and environmental benefit in areas such as solar fuels and pharmaceuticals, law reform should focus on what patent experts call “raising the bar of patentability”.

Patents should not be granted simply to allow companies to profit from, and potentially impede, an area of expanding research that is important to the national interest.

When a patent expires, competition should be rapidly allowed to enter the market. If a public health crisis evolves, patents should be able to be discarded and, after reasonable compensation is paid, mass production commenced.

Processes for civil society objections to patents should be strengthened through legislation. There should also be stronger anti-trust and anti-fraud provisions against the misuse of patents. Such provisions could be based on the US false claims laws that financially compensate private sector informants about fraud.

In relation to solar fuels, measures could include more stringent interpretations on what qualifies as a patent, adopting robust experimental-use exceptions, enhancing licensing powers for both government funded and privately owned patented technologies and expanding the grounds for public “march‐in” rights over government-funded inventions.

Many of these suggestions have been picked up in Australia’s Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Raising the Bar) Bill 2011 (Cth).

The Bill proposes changes to the Patents Act 1990 (Cth) that will remove current restrictions on the type of information patent examiners consider when determining whether an application discloses an “inventive step”.

The Bill also creates a more stringent test for the usefulness of a patent and increases the standard and amount of information applicants are required to disclose to satisfy a provisional application. It also imposes a stricter “on the balance of probabilities” standard for the granting of patents.

This important bill was introduced to the Senate last year and is expected to pass early this year.

This is the fourth part of Ideas and Ownership. To read the other instalments, click on the links below:

Part One: IP, patents, copyright, you

Part Two: Do patents promote innovation?

Part Three: The art of war: know your enemy’s patents, and your own

Thomas Faunce receives funding from the Australian Research Council under a Future Fellowship focused on nanotechnology and public health and a Discovery Grant focused on developing US False Claims type encouragements to private sector informants about pharmaceutical fraud in Australia

Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Google, that’s who

2012-02-22T03:00:51Z

We all know Google has a history of privacy-related misdemeanors but a report in the Wall Street Journal last week suggests the search giant hasn’t learn from its mistakes.

The report, about the findings of Stanford researcher, Jonathan Mayer, showed Google was circumventing users’ privacy settings in Apple’s Safari internet browser.

Apple blocks cookies from third parties and advertisers by default. This should mean that if you use Safari, advertisers shouldn’t be able to track you as you move from site to site on the web.

Google discovered a way to get around this. A technical glitch in the Safari application could be used to allow Google (and others) to get around the restriction. This in turn allowed advertisers to install their cookies and track them from site to site.

Google claimed that if users had signed into Google then they were implicitly asking for features that Apple was blocking – in this case, the ability to click the +1 button that Google has added to advertising on websites. In the company’s opinion, this overrode Apple’s attempts to block such features.

In good company?

For all Google’s posturing about being justified in circumventing Apple’s restrictions, it has reacted quickly, disabling its code. It has also changed statements on its site advising how people can opt out of having advertisers track users.

The site previously claimed Safari users were already protected from advertising tracking. This statement has been removed.

Since the discovery that Google was circumventing users' privacy settings in Safari, a similar claim has been made about Google getting around the default privacy settings in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

While this claims seems to be true, Microsoft is using a privacy protection standard called P3P that is yet to be widely accepted or adopted.

There is software people can use to permanently stop tracking from advertisers on Google’s networks. But this software is not available for Safari and wouldn’t be available for Safari on the iPhone or iPad in any case.

Lest we think it’s only Google that has been caught with its fingers in the “cookie jar”, Facebook removed a page this weekend (cached version) that also highlighted how to circumvent Safari’s restrictions. Ironically, this was on a page called Developer Best Practices.

Not that long ago, Facebook sparked outrage when it was found to be still tracking users after they had logged out of the service. It seems that, despite such lessons, companies such as Google are still willing to risk public anger rather than jeopardise profits from advertising.

Privacy and ethics

There is also the perception by Google, Facebook and others that, just because the public is sharing more things with more people, there is a corresponding decrease in concern about privacy. Obviously this is a convenient belief to hold and possibly explains why these companies are not setting themselves higher ethical standards.

In this they are helped by the public’s still-limited understanding about privacy on the internet and, more importantly, people’s lack of knowledge of what they can do to protect their privacy.

Software manufacturers are not helping very much. The help file for Safari’s private browsing mode, for instance, says Safari does not keep information about “pages you visit, your search history, or your AutoFill information”.

Safari’s private browsing mode, Apple’s web site informs us, “also stops storing your searches, cookies, and the data in online forms you fill out".

In fact, it does delete cookies, as do the privacy modes of Firefox, Internet Explorer 9 and yes, Google’s Chrome, although cookies are only deleted after the browser session is closed.

Sharing cookies

Another little-known fact is that Google shares cookies across all of its different sites. This occurs even if you are not logged into Google. A particular identifier (“NID”) is set in a cookie as soon as you visit one of Google’s sites, such as www.google.com and then is passed to other sites, such as YouTube.

In this way, Google is still able to collect information from visitors when they are not logged in. Cookies that are installed on your machine when you visit a Google site are created to last at least six months.

US representatives Edward J. Markey, Joe Barton and Cliff Stearns have called on the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Google’s evasion of Safari’s privacy settings.

We will wait and see what the FTC does. In Google’s case, it seems clear only legislation will make it change its behaviour.

David Glance does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

More than just money: differing morals at the heart of US economic divide

2012-02-22T02:58:41Z

Herbert Hoover was wrong about America. During a press conference in February 1931 – amid the depths of the Great Depression – he famously warned that the American values of “rugged individualism” risked being diluted by “European-styled socialism”.

Hoover suggested that the Depression presented a dilemma as to “whether the American people, on one hand, will maintain the spirit of charity and mutual self-help through voluntary giving and the responsibility of local government, as distinguished on the other hand, from appropriations out of the Federal Treasury for such purposes”.

In short, his fear was that too much federal involvement would weaken the bonds of local connection and civil society, displacing religious and charitable organisations and undermining American ideals.

Hoover was wrong because – as Franklin Roosevelt showed in the New Deal – American values were not exclusively individualist. Instead, they also contained an important egalitarian, if not communitarian, commitment to fairness.

In recent weeks, Hoover’s arguments have been resuscitated by conservative intellectual Charles Murray. In a widely commented-upon new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Murray advances the thesis that a decline in basic individual values – most importantly, of industriousness – explains an erosion of social mobility and America’s exceptionalist identity.

To be sure, in describing the fragmented nature of American society, there is much to commend in Murray’s account. He describes a society in which elites and the general public have equally withdrawn from community engagement. However, his view is fundamentally flawed as he emphasises the pervasive effects of excessive statism to explain societal trends over a period in which the state has been in more or less continual retreat from its postwar peak of influence.

Indeed, that his argument kicks off in November 1963, with the premature end of the Kennedy administration, is somewhat telling, as it was Kennedy who – as Ronald Reagan later stressed – inaugurated the current trend to cutting taxes.

To be sure, no single variable explains the social, economic and demographic shifts that have characterised the past half-century. Yet a lack of individualism is not the problem. Murray would have seen this, had he offered a more encompassing view. Contrary to free-market nostrums, post-Depression era America was marked by the extensive use of wage and price controls, which derived considerable popular legitimacy from a commitment to fairness.

Indeed, Republican President Eisenhower advanced a doctrine of “shared responsibility” for economic stability. Such appeals in turn succeeded only by virtue of the existence of a postwar trust in government: in 1958, 73% of Americans stated that they could trust the government either “just about always” or “most of the time”. Moreover, this trust was paralleled by a mass scepticism in markets, as only 14% of Americans blamed government for economic instability.

What explains the demise of these controls, and the broader sense of fairness upon which they relied? Over the 1960s and 1970s, the experiences of Vietnam and Watergate would undermine faith in government, giving rise to a much more libertarian ethos. By 1978, only 25% of Americans would assert that they could trust the government “just about always” or “most of the time” by 1980. Paralleling these general shifts, the percent of the public blaming government for inflation would rise from 14% in 1959 to 51% in 1978.

As scepticism in government assumed the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy, successive inflationary crises – in the “great stagflations” of the 1970s – and financial crises – from the savings and loan crises of the late 1980s to the global financial crisis of recent years – wracked the US economy. Yet with each crisis, the wave of deregulation has been advanced in tandem.

In this light, Murray may be underrating the importance of a communitarian ethos, as his Tea Party-styled libertarian values might be juxtaposed against the Occupy Wall Street-styled view on display in say, the revived communitarianism of Elizabeth Warren.

In a widely-circulated clip, Warren recently asserted the case for an alternative view of American exceptionalism, arguing that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate … God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Wesley Widmaier receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Party time! How Carnaval does not paint an accurate picture of modern Brazil

2012-02-22T02:54:55Z

A television on the wall of a Swanston Street café plays footage from Rio de Janeiro’s famous Carnaval. Across the screen swan spectacular drum queens and passistas, their muscular bodies gleaming with sweat, adorned with jewels and plumage.

In the imagination of global audiences, such images have come to represent the quintessential Brazil.

Yet carnaval is arguably the one week of the Brazilian year that least represents life in Brazil. With its roots in European pre-Lent celebrations – and a 400 year history of creolisation into a uniquely Brazilian phenomenon – carnaval is in fact seen as a reversal of every day life in Brazil.

A social release and a momentary abandonment of all the usual conventions, hierarchies and pressures, it is the one week when everybody has permission to be anybody or anything, with the help of wild disguises and costumes (“fantasias”).

Perception meets reality

Carnaval is also the one time of year when Brazil is guaranteed a news slot on televisions across the globe, and the ironic effect is that images of the moment when “normal” life is abandoned have come to be interpreted as a reflection of what life must be like in Brazil and what all Brazilians must be like: flamboyant, unwaveringly joyful and scantily clad.

This incongruity between global and local perceptions of Brazil was clearly highlighted by the worldwide coverage of a 20-year-old student’s expulsion from a São Paulo university in 2009 for wearing a short skirt. The student’s mini skirt incited the violent ridicule of her classmates, and the Universidade Bandeirante (Uniban) that expelled her cited “flagrant disrespect of ethical principles, academic dignity and morality.”

The case was not so surprising within the conservative Catholic context of São Paulo, but that subtlety was lost on foreign news desks, with reports contrasting the university’s action against Brazil’s fame for “tiny bikinis and carefree attitude”.

In a global spotlight

The story also highlighted another emerging reality for Brazil – the growing influence of external scrutiny in a globalised world. Amid the international media flurry, the university took less than 24 hours to reverse its decision and reinstate the student, showing how global perceptions (even if naive or culturally uninformed) can provoke very real transformations at the local level, and sometimes very quickly.

During the last carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, I found myself seated at the far end of the sambadrome stadium at its final stretch where the performers spill out onto the street. What would usually be considered the worst spot in the stadium turned out to be offer the best view of a place where two realities of Brazil collide. In the dark street behind the luminous sambadrome stage, workmen in orange suits soared into the air with cranes to rescue feathered dancers from the tops of the extravagant floats.

Luciene Oliviera, an official passista for Rio de Janeiro's winning samba school of 2012 (Unidos da Tijuca), tries on her costume. Elizabeth Kath

On the street below, exhausted paraders milled around stripping off their regalia and throwing it onto growing mountains of discarded costumes, raggedly dressed foragers rummaged through the piles to retrieve resaleable feathers and fabrics while city garbage collectors loaded piles of costume debris into trucks. I could not help marveling at the richness and metaphoric significance of this backstage scene that audiences of the televised carnaval might never see.

What you don’t see

Watching the televised spectacle from a faraway lounge room, who could know that the dazzling passista girl dancing across the screen goes home at night to a tiny delapidated room with a dirt floor in a favela (shantytown) where a drug war rages outside her door? Like a modern-day Cinderella, when the night is over she disappears again into anonymity; into the invisibility, marginality and insignificance of her quotidian life.

Who could know that a few steps in any direction from this gleaming sambadrome sprawl dark and sometimes dangerous streets, where crowds of spectators and half-costumed dancers tread cautiously through pools of dirt and urine and debris?

Many of the sambadrome show’s stars crowd into buses that carry them home to favelas, while visiting tourists hail taxis that whisk them in the opposite direction to the airconditioned safety of their hotels at Ipanema or Copacabana beach. And beyond the sambadrome those two worlds rarely meet, thus reproducing the same global stereotypes even in the minds of many who travel to Rio.

Who tells Brazil’s story?

Adding to this, it is not unusual for local Brazilians, with whom tourists might typically mix in these wealthier zones, to have never set foot in a favela in their lifetimes.

Over the next five years, more of the world’s eyes than ever will turn to Brazil, the economic superstar of the moment and the next host of both the Fifa World Cup and Olympic Games. International visitors will pour into Brazil from every direction. What is certain is that these “outside observers”, whether visiting the country physically or virtually, are not passive observers as is often imagined.

Through the very act of turning their eyes in Brazil’s direction they become participants in her future. For Brazil, an intensified dialogue with the global audience over the coming years is inevitable; how this translates into the lives of ordinary Brazilians is a story yet to unfold, and one that will be written by each person who takes part in this dialogue.

Elizabeth Kath does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

The morality of unmasking Heartland

2012-02-22T01:07:36Z

“Truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

Winston Churchill’s famous words were uttered during the war against the Nazis and referred to Operation Bodyguard, a deception that was intended to mislead the German high command about the date and location of the invasion of Normandy. Given the context, few would criticise Churchill’s statement.

Now imagine Bernie Madoff uttering the same words in defense of his acrobatic Ponzi schemes. Few would accept such glaring sophistry.

Where does Dr Peter Gleick’s revelation that he lied to a conservative think tank to access climate change documents fit on this spectrum?

This question gets us right to the heart of a central issue in moral cognition and philosophy: Are there immutable moral rules — such as “thou shall not lie” — or does morality legitimately involve a trade-off between competing ethical imperatives that includes consideration of the ultimate outcomes of one’s actions?

If there are immutable moral rules then there is little daylight between Churchill and the hypothetical Madoff — both violated a moral axiom by admitting the possibility that lying may be justifiable.

By contrast, if morality involves a balancing of ethical costs and benefits, then Churchill’s deception of the German high command quite plausibly was a moral act that quickened the pace of battle, thus hastening the defeat of the Nazis and the liberation of Dachau.

The Allies’ deception paled in comparison to the lives saved.

History is full of such moral balancing acts.

When Daniel Ellsberg released the classified Pentagon Papers in 1971 he undoubtedly broke the law. However, when the papers revealed that four consecutive Presidents, from Truman to Johnson, had consistently misled the American public about their actions in Vietnam, the illegality of Ellsberg’s action paled in comparison to the good that arose from informing the public of their leaders’ deceptions.

Ultimately, all charges against Ellsberg were dismissed, and the Pentagon Papers arguably helped accelerate the move towards peace in Vietnam.

What are we to make of the latest moral balancing act involving the leaked Heartland documents?

On Valentine’s Day an anonymous source emailed documents to various journalists that were leaked from the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank.

According to its 2010 Prospectus, Heartland opposes “… junk science and the use of scare tactics in the areas of environmental protection and public health”.

Opposition to “junk science”? What junk science?

According to the Heartland Institute, “junk science” is the research that has linked tobacco to lung cancer and junk food to obesity. It is also, of course, the “junk science” known as climate research.

The leaked documents put names and dollar figures to Heartland’s opposition to “junk science” and revealed that it funded climate denial in at least three countries — the US, New Zealand and Australia. Well-known so-called “sceptics” were found to have been pay-rolled by the Institute, often contrary to those individuals’ earlier denials of funding by vested interests.

George Monbiot summed up the implications of the leaked information succinctly: “This is plutocracy, pure and simple.”

Then yesterday, another revelation.

Climate scientist Dr Peter Gleick wrote on the Huffington Post that he obtained the documents from Heartland by using someone else’s name, and then passed them on to journalists, thereby triggering an avalanche of exposure of the Heartland denial machine.

Is Gleick another Churchill or Ellsberg?

Legal issues aside, how does his subterfuge compare to the potential public good that has resulted from the documents’ release?

Many philosophers who study ethics agree that it is important to consider the consequences of one’s actions in a moral dilemma to come to an acceptable judgment. Rather than relying on moral strictures, this “consequentialist” approach argues that the morality of an action is evaluated by whether it brings about the greatest total well-being.

This reasoning is mirrored in the cognitive laboratory, where people’s responses are also often informed by the consequences associated with competing paths of action (the data are quite complex but it seems safe to conclude that most people are sensitive to weighting the outcomes of competing actions rather than being exclusively entrenched in immutable moral rules).

Does this mean there is an ethical imperative to consider Gleick to be another Daniel Ellsberg?

No. But it does mean that one’s ethical concerns should consider competing actions and outcomes rather than focusing on an individual’s chosen action in isolation.

Gleick has apologised for his use of subterfuge. His actions have violated the confidentiality of a think tank but they have also given the public a glimpse into the inner workings of the climate denial machine.

Had he not done so, no one’s confidentiality would have been violated, but then the public would have been kept guessing about the internal workings of one of the world’s most notorious serial impersonators of science. The Heartland Institute takes pride in its chimerical pseudo-“scientific” conferences and it is allied with “scientific” work that denies that mercury is poisonous.

In the real world, mercury is poisonous. In the real world, the number of weather-related natural disasters has tripled in the last 30 years, and the World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people are already dying annually from the effects of climate change. In reality, many of the IPCC’s 2007 predictions have been found to be overly conservative rather than alarmist. And the latest IPCC report has reiterated the risks we are facing in the all-too-near future if we delay action on climate change.

Revealing to the public the active, vicious, and well-funded campaign of denial that seeks to delay action against climate change likely constitutes a classic public good.

It is a matter of personal moral judgment whether that public good justifies Gleick’s sting operation to obtain those revelations.

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from various federal agencies, such as the Australian Research Council, to conduct research in the public interest. He has no commercial interests or affiliations of any kind.

Smoke-free outdoor laws herald better community health

2012-02-21T23:36:53Z

The NSW government will introduce a smoke-free outdoors law this year, making it the sixth state or territory to have some variation of this kind of legislation. The announcement shows that community health and common sense can override the vested interests and powerful lobbying of Big Tobacco.

While New South Wales has been late in introducing these laws compared with other states, the legislation will be one of the most comprehensive.

NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner said the legislation – covering smoke-free children’s playgrounds, sporting fields when sports are being played, and covered bus shelters and taxi ranks – will be introduced in the spring session of parliament. The bans for smoking in commercial outdoor dining areas will come into effect in 2015.

Legislating for smoke-free outdoor areas is an important advance in reducing society’s entanglement with tobacco. As we have come to understand more about cancer, tobacco and the effects of second-hand smoke, there’s been a gradual shift in how society has viewed smoking. We have gone from a cigarette love affair in the 20th century, where Australia resembled a scene out of the heavy-smoking television show Mad Men, to viewing it as a potentially deadly habit with no benefits.

Thirty years ago, smoking in the workplace or on public transport was fine. Now, we wouldn’t even consider it.

The change in New South Wales started at the grassroots level. Some local councils took the initiative (even before smoke-free laws were introduced in other states) to go smoke-free in outdoor areas, such as parks and bus shelters, demonstrating its feasibility. Similar moves have been made in Victoria by local councils that have banned smoking in public places, such as playgrounds and outdoor eating areas.

Following the example set by local councils, some New South Wales café owners decided to ban smoking in alfresco dining areas, prioritising the health of their customers. In fact, a survey commissioned by the Cancer Council NSW showed eight out of ten café and restaurant owners believed that the smoke-free dining decision should not be left to councils, but should be legislated by state government.

The rest of the community also wants this type of legislation; a Newspoll survey conducted in New South Wales in February 2011 found four out of five people support smoke-free outdoor dining and more than nine out of ten adults believe playgrounds should be smoke-free.

So the New South Wales government is merely reflecting community sentiment with its announcement about the legislation, and there are strong grounds for other governments to do the same.

For those wanting to give smoking up, it’s much more difficult to quit when surrounded by smokers. lanier/Flickr

No doubt there will be the usual cries about the nanny state from those with a vested interest in perpetuating tobacco use. But let’s consider some of facts.

Smoking is a known carcinogen that, to put it bluntly, kills. Breathing second-hand smoke is not just an unpleasant experience, it can also lead to serious life-threatening health problems, including cancer, heart disease and asthma. So it makes sense to not expose our kids to second-hand smoke when, for instance, they’re playing in parks or playgrounds.

And for those wanting to give smoking up, it’s that much more difficult to quit when surrounded by smokers in playgrounds or while enjoying an alfresco meal.

Businesses can be reassured that the announcement will be good for them; the 2008 New South Wales population health survey showed that for every person who objects to smoke-free dining, seven people favour the move. This means smoke-free dining is good for health, good for dining and good for business.

Soon smoke-free outdoor areas will be a normal part of life. Cigarettes will be out of sight and hopefully out of mind. Kids can play in a smoke-free environment and meals can be enjoyed without a side order of smoke. And that’s a cause for celebration.

Andrew Penman is the CEO of Cancer Council NSW, which advocates for smoke-free outdoor areas.

From campus to a Gaza flotilla: the experiences of an activist academic

2012-02-21T19:41:38Z

Canadian academic David Heap last year took part in an activist mission to challenge the Israeli military blockade of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

The Israeli government claims the blockade is necessary to maintain security for its citizens and prevent terrorism. Palestinians, their supporters and human rights experts say the policy amounts to collective punishment that is damaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

After a previous aid flotilla to Gaza was raided by Israeli special forces in 2010, leaving nine activists dead, more attempts to send boats carrying supplies to Gaza were launched, including the Canadian Boat to Gaza, carrying Heap.

Here Heap explains why he risked his own safety to stand up for an issue he passionately supports.

Last year, at the University of Western Ontario campus where I work, a student group called Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights joined with other community groups in London, Ontario to help raise tens of thousands of dollars in support of the Canadian Boat to Gaza, a civil society campaign to challenge the blockade of Gaza.

The illegal blockade of course affects students and university staff along with everyone else in what has aptly been called the world’s largest open-air prison.

The security justification

Despite marginal improvements following the pressure arising from the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, aid deliveries to Gaza still supply a fraction of what the population needed before the current blockade was imposed in 2007.

As the Israeli NGO Gisha documents extensively, the Palestinians of Gaza have been deliberately “put on a diet” by the continuing military blockade which allows in only a calculated minimum of restricted supplies: a form of collective punishment. The situation in Gaza is recognised as dire by international humanitarian NGOs, and the blockade has been characterised as a serious violation of international law by experts at the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR) as recently as September 2011.

As my colleague, Dr. Ziad Medoukh (head of French and coordinator of the Peace Studies Centre at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza) notes: schools supplies, computer equipment and books are still among the goods that are severely restricted and only sporadically available in blockaded Gaza.

The hopes and aspirations of a whole generation in Gaza are being needlessly stunted due to senseless restrictions which have nothing to do with anyone’s “security”.

Complete blockade

Those who finish their studies and earn scholarships abroad are often caught by restrictions on human movement (a freedom which should be enjoyed by everyone under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) which cruelly curtail travel for academic, medical, commercial or family purposes.

While the occasional partial opening of the Rafah border with Egypt for some people (though few goods) is a positive development, Palestinians also have the right to free shipping traffic through the port of Gaza — the only Mediterranean port closed to shipping — and to the peaceful use of their own territorial waters, which they are currently denied.

They cannot depend on the whims of a neighbouring country to keep goods and people flowing in and out of Gaza.

The Canadian Boat to Gaza

These are some of the reasons why I was aboard the Tahrir, the Canadian Boat to Gaza which was part of the Freedom Flotilla II in July 2011, when we attempted to sail from Greece but were prevented by Greek authorities under international pressure.

A Google Maps screenshot showing the Tahrir was in international waters when confronted by Israeli naval forces. Lina Attalah, Almasy Alyoum, Cairo

The Israeli blockade of Gaza had been effectively outsourced to Greek ports, but our campaign continued undaunted. When the Tahrir, together with the Irish boat to Gaza (MV Saoirse), sailed from the southern Turkish port of Fethiye on November 2, 2011, I was again on board.

Though fewer in numbers than in July, the volunteers on the Tahrir were united in our determination to challenge the blockade of Gaza peacefully, through non-violent direct action. Apart from our Greek captain and five international journalists, our numbers included three Canadians, a U.S. citizen, Michael Coleman of Free Gaza Australia, and Palestinian student Majd Kayyal who has never been able to travel to Gaza directly, a mere 135 kilometres from his home in Haifa.

After about 50 hours at sea with almost continuous media coverage, our satellite communications were cut by the Israeli navy shortly after noon on Friday November 4, in stark contrast to the Greek authorities, who never interfered with communications or with media professionals when they stopped the Tahrir last July. Our last recorded GPS position was some 45 nautical miles from the port of Gaza, in international waters with a course set towards Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza. At no time did we set a course for Israel or Israeli waters.

Israel’s overwhelming use of force

In July, Greek authorities managed to take control of the Tahrir and more than 40 people on board, using only one small cutter and two Zodiacs carrying a total of six coastguard officers; in contrast, the Israeli navy deployed overwhelming force against our two small vessels.

The Tahrir, now with just 12 people on board, and the Saoirse, with 15, faced hundreds of heavily armed Israeli troops on at least three warships and between 15 and 20 assault boats equipped with water cannons and mechanical lifts.

Despite recognising that we were unarmed and would present no active resistance, the Israeli navy sent about two dozen heavily armed commandos to storm our vessel. I was tasered during the assault, and later bruised while being forcibly removed from the Tahrir.

Detention in Israel

Ironically, after being illegally kidnapped on the high seas, we were told we had illegally entered a country we never had any intention of visiting. Our six-day detention was marked throughout by manipulation and misinformation on the part of the Israeli authorities.

For example, we were told that if we signed a document waiving our right to appeal before a judge we would be deported home within 24 hours: Ehab Lotayef of Montreal signed such a waiver twice within the first 48 hours, and was nonetheless detained for six days, just like those of us who signed nothing.

Although cut short, the voyage of the Tahrir served to draw attention to the injustice of the blockade of Gaza, as well as to educate and mobilise Canadians and others against the blockade.

An ongoing campaign

Pulitzer Prize winner and civil rights activist Alice Walker from the US Boat to Gaza says challenges to the blockade of Gaza are the Freedom Rides of our time – and like the 1960s civil rights movement in the U.S. South, we must keep up the struggle despite attempts to intimidate us.

As my colleague Ziad notes, the Palestinians of Gaza are left with “a hope in international civil society solidarity which is organising throughout the world in order to try, through peaceful actions, to break this blockade.” (author’s translation)

He observes that though we did not reach the shores of Gaza this time, our message of solidarity was received throughout Palestine.

That is why we have to keep on challenging this blockade.

David Heap is active with both Faculty for Palestine and Labour for Palestine, as well as the national steering committee of the Canadian Boat to Gaza.

The art of war: know your enemy's patents, and your own

2012-02-21T19:39:43Z

Here, Kimberlee Weatherall unpacks the ways in which patents are being acquired by companies in an escalating battle for offensive and defensive dominance.

Justice Nicholas in the Federal Court in Sydney is currently hearing a patent case in which Cancer Voices Australia is challenging a patent owned by Myriad Genetics relating to gene mutations that cause women to be more susceptible to breast cancer.

The case is related to some similar litigation that has been going on in the US, and raises some fundamental questions about what kinds of things can be patented. In many ways, though, this is a very “classic” patent case.

Myriad uses its patent to assert exclusive rights to undertake activities covered in the patent: namely, testing for the gene mutations. The patent ensures that no-one else can perform such tests without Myriad’s permission.

This is how we think of patent working – whether or not we like the fact that genes and methods for identifying them in a patient can be “owned” by someone.

But you might be surprised to know that many, perhaps even most, patents today are not used this way. In fact, patents are used in a whole range of different, strategic ways that raise interesting questions about the patent system and whether it is doing what we think it is doing – that is, providing incentives for inventors.

One way we see patents used these days is in the accumulation of large patent portfolios. Economists have tracked the rise of such portfolios, but in a way, all you have to do is look at the yearly patent league tables, which will tell you, for example, that IBM was granted more than 6,000 patents in the US in 2011, and Samsung more than 4,800.

In fact, most patent offices around the world have been experiencing sustained rises in the number of applications for patents, and in patents granted, including in Australia.

Alternatively, you could follow the tech news, which over the last year or so has been full of stories about large-scale patent acquisitions as companies try to build up their position. Google, for example, acquired Motorola Mobility, paying US$12.5 billion for its 17,000 patents and 7,500 patent applications – after failing to acquire Nortel’s 6,000 patents (which was acquired by an Apple-led consortium for US$4.5 billion).

Staking territory

Why would a company need masses and masses of patents? There are a few reasons. One is to stake out a technological “territory” and deter or block potential competitors. Evidence from research suggests that smaller firms do avoid working in areas of technology that are heavily patented already.

Another reason would be for offensive use: a company with a large number of patents can overwhelm a competitor they allege is infringing on their technology with a barrage of different patents. The more patents that are alleged to be infringed, the more costly the option of litigation becomes for the alleged infringer.

In theory the alleged infringer can challenge the validity of the patents, but patent litigation is expensive at the best of times, and challenging multiple patents is a very daunting prospect. In these situations, the company with multiple patents may be able to force a settlement – perhaps including the alleged infringer paying royalties or changing their product.

The best defence is …

The flipside of offensive use of a patent portfolio is defensive use: a company might try to build up a strong patent portfolio so that, if it’s threatened with litigation, it can bring its own countersuit, using its own patent battalion – perhaps forcing a cross-licensing deal on much better terms than it would get without its own patents.

We’ve recently seen inklings of all of this in Australia, in the Apple/Samsung patent battle. The lawsuit delayed the launch of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 for some four months – until a mere couple of weeks before Christmas.

In that case, Apple – which has spent the last five years or so building up quite the patent portfolio in Australia – has asserted a record number of 22 patents against Samsung devices including the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Each of Apple’s patents has multiple “claims” (statements of the scope of the monopoly), meaning that, in fact, Samsung is fighting 278 separate battles, relating to ten different devices.

Samsung, which is also a significant patent holder in its own right, has launched its own countersuit against Apple’s iPhone 4S, and other 3G devices.

Both cases look likely to be heard this year. The case is unprecedented in its size for Australia, and even that litigation is only part of the whole picture of the battle. There have been other cases in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France, Italy, and South Korea.

You’d expect, in the end, to see some kind of global deal being done here. In the meantime, the patent missiles fly and the lawyers get paid. And that’s without mentioning Apple is also fighting with HTC and with Nokia.

Bring on the trolls

Patent portfolios, Apple and Samsung style, are not an end to the patent strategies that have developed in recent times. We have also seen the rise of the non-practising entity (NPE) – sometimes perjoratively referred to as the patent troll.

An NPE amasses a patent portfolio, not to defend its own product territory or to attack competitors, but solely for the purpose of licensing. In other words, a non-practising entity is just that: it doesn’t itself make or sell products.

Some argue NPEs are a great way for small inventors, for whom litigation is not an option, to get paid. Others argue that NPEs are “trolls” exacting tolls on invention.

Very recent research suggests these companies are more often involved as repeat patent litigators than other kinds of patent holders, although they often lose.

They too are contributing to the increase in patent litigation. They may, according to some research, also be deterring some innovation. What is more, there are plenty of patents for NPEs to acquire.

Some come onto the market when companies with large offensive/defensive portfolios fold; others when a company decides to offload some assets.

In other words, all these new patent strategies are related. The build up of patent portfolios by some companies has made it imperative for others to join in, meaning an overall rise in the numbers of patents being granted, and an increase in costs for firms, especially in some of these high-tech fields.

Some of these patents are making their way into the portfolios of non-practising entities. In this world, it seems that many companies are locked into playing the patent game, even if it is increasingly expensive and, in at least some cases, a distraction from the work of innovating and selling new products.

All these strategies are a long way from classical thinking about the way patents work. Where patents are acquired defensively, end up being sold to an NPE, and are asserted against an inventive firm, you have to wonder where along that line those patents provided any incentive for investment in research and development – and whether that incentive outweighs the cost to innovation when the final inventive firm targeted by the NPE is forced to license or fold.

You have to wonder, in the great patent wars between Apple and Samsung and others, whether we have lost sight of the patent system’s goals.

And you have to wonder whether patents have become so abstracted from the realities of research and invention that they have started to bear some resemblance to the complex financial products that now seem to plague our financial system: complex, impossible for the ordinary person to understand, and no longer doing their job.

With firms locked into the cycle of patent or perish, it is evident, to me at least, that we need more serious thinking about just what these government monopolies are about, and whether the complexity and abstraction of the system can be tamed.

I don’t have the answers, but I do have a lot of questions.

This is the third part of Ideas and Ownership. To read the other instalments, click on the links below:

Part One: IP, patents, copyright, you

Part Two: Do patents promote innovation?

Kimberlee Weatherall receives research funding from the Australian Research Council.

Means testing passes but do we even need health insurance?

2012-02-21T19:39:41Z

When the government finally succeeded in its third attempt to remove the 30% subsidy for high-income earners holding private health insurance, the opposition’s response was a promise to restore it should the coalition be voted into office. Tony Abbott said the rebate “is an article of faith for the Coalition. Private health insurance is in our DNA."

He was speaking for his own party, but there was the same sentiment in the government’s defence of its initiative.

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek was at pains to point out, correctly in the view of independent analysts, that any small reduction in membership resulting from withdrawing the subsidy would be more than offset by normal membership growth and by the penalties set by the higher Medicare Levy Surcharge. Private health insurance seems now to be an article of faith for the Labor Party as well.

The changes will save the government about A$0.7 billion a year. But even after the subsidies for private health insurance are trimmed, they will still take A$3.8 billion a year out of the health budget. This subsidy dwarfs the amounts being discussed for the automobile and aluminium industries, which have rightly been the subject of public debate. There has been no such debate about the virtues of private health insurance.

The government’s modest private health insurance reforms were driven by its fiscal objectives of a 2012-13 balanced budget and its desire to wind back what many call “middle class welfare”. The reforms were certainly not about withdrawing industry assistance.

So, what is the economic justification for health insurance to be put in such a privileged position, without having to explain its raison d’etre, or to justify its subsidies?

And why have we used subsidies and penalties to encourage the private health insurance industry – a financial intermediary that costs A$2.8 billion a year – to interpose itself between health-care consumers and providers?

The US spends twice as much as other developed countries on health care but has poorer patient outcomes. Flickr/foshydog

Why subsidise the private health insurance industry?

If the function of private health insurance is to fund private hospitals, there are better ways of doing so without churning funds through the finance sector – there was a time when the Hawke Government paid a 30% subsidy direct to private hospitals.

If it’s about relieving pressure on public hospitals, it has failed abysmally. While some patient load has shifted from public to private hospitals, there has been a corresponding shift in resources from public to private hospitals. The result has been a re-shuffling of the queues for limited resources.

If the purpose of the subsidy is to compensate those who don’t draw on publicly-funded programs, it is very indirect. And it leaves unsupported those who pay for private hospital care and dental care without relying on private insurance. Contrary to partisan rhetoric, taking out private insurance does not ensure self-reliance.

If it’s to save budgetary outlays, it may do so in the short term, but in reality it simply substitutes official taxes (with their safeguards of accountability, equity and cost-control) with more opaque privatised taxes collected by health insurers.

Research shows countries that rely on private insurance to fund health care get no better health outcomes – but they spend much more than the countries that rely on the power of a single national insurer and market competition.

The stand-out example is the United States, where, as a proportion of GDP, health-care costs are almost twice the level of those in other developed countries, while by most indicators their health outcomes are worse.

If it’s to help patients choose their doctor in hospital, there are less costly ways to provide choice, particularly in cases where continuity of care is important, such as maternity services. There is little benefit in the choice of look-alike private health policies.

Support for private health insurance hasn't alleviated pressure on the public hospital system. Jason L. Parks

A fairer health system

These shortcomings in private insurance, particularly the clumsy way it is supported in Australia, are explained in more depth in a paper John Menadue and I wrote last month and which is published by the Centre for Policy Development.

Contrary to some emotive claims, we are not calling for some form of “socialised medicine”. Private hospitals are an important part of our health services, and they should not be separated by financial barriers from public hospitals. Nor are we calling for “free” health care.

Rather, our point is that to the extent we wish share our health-care costs with one another, a strong single national insurer is the most efficient and fair means of doing so. Individual payments from those with the means to contribute, without the backing of private insurance, have an important role to play in allocating health-care resources and in relieving pressure on public budgets.

Almost a half-century has lapsed since the Commonwealth last subjected this industry to policy scrutiny, in the 1969 Nimmo Report. There was an Industry Commission Inquiry in 1996, but that was only about how to support private insurance, not whether it should be supported.

Policy makers need to ask not only whether private insurance adds value to health care – and our analysis finds it does not – but also whether it could serve a useful role under any circumstances.

Just as other sectors have had to do, the private health insurance industry should be required to show that in return for budgetary and regulatory support, it can achieve outcomes that could not be gained through other, less expensive means.

Ian McAuley writes for the Centre for Policy Development.

First job for the new Queensland government: fix coal seam gas

2012-02-21T19:39:39Z

Three little words strike fear into the heart of at least 40% of Queenslanders: coal seam gas. These three seemingly innocuous words have managed to divide a state, and become the hottest topic in the Queensland election.

A poll published by the Australian earlier this week articulated what many have been thinking: 40% of Queenslanders don’t support coal seam gas (CSG) extraction (while 33% do).

As for the rest… well the jury is still out with the remaining 27%. Should even half of those decide they’re not in favour, then over half of the Queensland population won’t support the extraction of CSG.

These statistics have an important message for Queensland politicians – the election may very well be decided on issues related to this highly controversial industry, worth $60 billion.

So what should the incoming Queensland government, whichever party that might be, do to increase community confidence in this energy source?

The community is up in arms because the Queensland government has granted petroleum leases over land owned by the community, especially farmers. Legally the Queensland government can do that because it owns the petroleum under the ground. But this ownership brings a responsibility to all Queenslanders, not just the business sector.

Here is how the government can take charge and take responsibility if it wants to make CSG more palatable.

Use the resource to benefit the people

CSG is touted as an important energy source and a way of securing our energy future, but the incoming government needs to take stock of the use of this resource.

CSG belongs to all Queenslanders: not only companies should profit. AAP

Is it really for domestic consumption by Australians, or is the vast majority of it going overseas, sold by companies at a profit? And where profit is being made, how much of that money comes back to Queensland for the benefit of Queensland?

The incoming government needs to remind itself that it owns these gas resources on behalf of the Queensland people, and therefore the resource should be used for the benefit of the Queensland people.

Protect water resources

It does not take a rocket scientist to realise that extracting CSG has a huge impact on water resources. An enormous amount of water is required to extract CSG. At present much of this water is coming from the Great Artesian Basin, at a cost to all users of the Basin. The incoming government has to fairly and equitably allocate water use between farmers and gas producers.

Perhaps companies should get water allocations in the same way farmers do. Farmers are asking for fairness in the use of water. This is not an unreasonable request: we need to eat food, but it is difficult to eat gas.

Water use is only half the problem. The community is very concerned about the briny, chemical water that is produced by CSG fracking. The concern is that the water will not be properly disposed of, and will contaminate ground water and surface water.

The government needs to lead the management of water contamination and disposal. Studies by the United States Environmental Protection Authority on ground water contamination should be considered. Certainly, the government should fund independent research so that the community has evidence from independent experts, not just from CSG extractors.

Don’t let wells leak

Wells can’t leak: not now, not ever. This is a tough issue for the government, since well integrity is geared toward ensuring that the wells don’t leak during CSG production (and we have seen how sometimes we can’t even get that right).

Queenslanders are sensitive about water. AAP

But as demonstrated in the United States, abandoned wells are leaking hydrocarbon into groundwater. This issue is not going to go away.

The government needs to ask CSG companies some difficult questions. How long are the wells guaranteed to not leak? If the wells do leak into the ground water, who will fix them, and how?

The government could set up a well liability fund, similar to the Asbestos Fund established by James Hardie. The companies reaping the economic benefits of gas would deposit money into a fund for the future care and repair of the wells and rehabilitation of any lands affected by leaks.

With over 40,000 wells to be drilled in Queensland in the next 10 years, future planning and management of abandoned wells is an important issue for the government to consider. If people know the government has planned how to deal with leaks, they may have more confidence in the industry.

Don’t rely on industry self regulation

If an organisation might harm the community, we don’t usually let it regulate itself. In the United States we allowed bankers to self regulate. We saw the results of that: GFC.

Many in the community, including myself, believe that self-regulation of CSG extraction is ludicrous. I cannot fathom why a government that owns a resource would rely on those extracting that resource for profit to regulate themselves.

There is a legal framework that regulates CSG activities. The company submits a Well Operations Management Plan (WOMP) which is approved by the government, and then implemented by the company at the site. But companies do not always adhere to these plans, and sometimes wells are drilled by inexperienced companies who cannot comprehend the consequences of deviating from the plans.

The last time a company didn’t adhere to their WOMP, we ended up with an oil spill in the Timor Sea, spewing over 25,000 barrels of oil into the sea for over 10 weeks.

Governments need to take the lead. They need on-site inspectors, lots of them, inspecting well activities at critical times such as when a well is being fracked, and when a well is being abandoned.

The incoming government will decry this suggestion with the old call of “how will we pay for it?”. Offshore petroleum safety is regulated on a cost-recovery basis: levies on the companies pay to regulate offshore petroleum safety. A similar levy for onshore well integrity would give the community more confidence in CSG extractors because the government would take a strong oversight role. Governments who undertake such inspections are to be applauded.

We are not desperate for this energy. The incoming Queensland government has the opportunity to take a leading role in regulating CSG activities. It will need to do so if it wants to capture the confidence of the 40% who are opposed to CSG activities, and the 27% who are undecided. Until water management, well safety and landholder use issues are addressed in a fair and sensible manner, the government will face increased opposition. And rightly so.

Tina Hunter consults for several governments in Australia, including the Western Australian and the Northern Territory Goverments

Financial advice reform: have we learned enough from Storm?

2012-02-21T19:39:37Z

When financial planning firm Storm Financial collapsed with $3 billion in investment losses, many of its investors were left destitute. A parliamentary joint committee inquiry into the company’s demise was conducted in response and, in 2010, then Financial Services Minister Chris Bowen announced a series of sweeping reforms aimed at giving greater protection to retail investors.

The Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms are due to come into force on July 1, 2012. The proposals are intended to minimise conflicts of interest and restore confidence in the financial advisory sector. The proposals include: a ban on commissions and rebates on a prospective basis; a requirement for clients to opt in for advice every two years; a duty for financial advisers to act in their client’s best interests; a ban on percentage-based fees on geared products and portfolios; allowing superannuation funds to provide simple intra-fund advice at minimal or no cost to members; and further powers for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to act against unscrupulous advisers.

The fundamental purpose of the proposals is to prevent consumers from suffering investment loss arising from inappropriate advice. The most devastating example is attributed to Storm, where about 4000 clients suffered losses estimated to be $3 billion. The advice was based around “double gearing” – by borrowing against the client’s house and then using margin lending to invest heavily in the sharemarket. The undoing of this strategy was the global financial crisis when share values fell heavily and the lenders called in loans – both against the shares and against the client’s house. Yet Storm had complied with procedural requirements of the law at the time. The model used by Storm could exist in the future for some clients, except for a modification to the remuneration method.

Where Storm’s advice model came unstuck was when they applied a similar strategy to a large number of clients, where it was argued that the advice was not appropriate in many sets of circumstances. The proposed “best interests” provision is a change from the current law as the adviser will be required to put the client’s interests first and above the adviser’s own interests. This is a laudable and ethical move, but can this be enforced? Under the best interest duty, an adviser is required to only give advice that is appropriate for the client. This will replace the current rule, which states that an adviser must provide a “reasonable basis for the advice”. In describing the best interest provision, the term “reasonable” is used a number of times, which indicates that subjectivity of what is reasonable will be the order of the day.

The current rules would have ruled out the Storm advice for a number of clients as the advice would have been deemed not to have been reasonable given the circumstances of each client. This matter is currently before the court under existing legislation. However, it may have been appropriate for some clients and under the new rules the same strategy could be appropriate for some particular clients as well. The Storm disaster is seen as the reason behind the changes to the laws governing investment advice.

Under the proposals, a financial adviser that charges fees for ongoing advice will be required to send a notice to the client requesting the client to agree to renewal of the service contract, otherwise the adviser must cease invoicing the client. Such a proposal adds costs to the operations of a financial planning practice, yet is designed to ensure that clients do not pay for any services that they do not receive. It is a worthy addition to the objective of consumer protection.

However, the FOFA reforms reinforce an inconsistency in the intent of the proposals. The proposal to allow intra-fund advice by institutions and superannuation funds reflects a conflict of interest, as the advice can hardly be seen as independent. When a member of a fund seeks advice from the fund in which they are a member, it is extremely unlikely that the member will be advised to invest elsewhere, other than in the same fund. With intra-fund advice encouraged by the proposals, this is likely to result in limited advice provided to consumers, which is not focused on the whole of the client’s needs but solely on their superannuation fund interest pertinent to that particular superannuation fund. This proposal is likely to push consumers more towards limited and conflict-ridden advice than that which existed before.

Furthermore, the advice offered by intra-fund means is generally paid for by the fund out of charges levied for the administration of the fund. Yet the banning of an alternate form of remuneration for advice in the form of commission is also seen as inconsistent. The allocation of payment for advice offered by superannuation funds is not declaredm yet the commission paid by retail investors is declared to the consumer. So, on the one hand, the proposals are aimed at seeking independence and objectivity; on the other, the institutions – banks and industry superannuation funds – control much of the product manufacture, distribution and the associated advice offered to consumers.

The enhancement of ASIC’s powers will capture all financial advisers (including those who are salaried employees), whereas at present, only those who are known as “authorised representatives” are known to ASIC. This will enable ASIC to ban employed advisers who can move from employer to employer under the current arrangements.

It might be said that the government has missed an opportunity to break the nexus between the manufacturers, distributors and advisers, but instead has provided a means of reinforcing the integration of product and advice and conflict of interest. It may be argued that this reinforcement of a conflict of interest scenario is a trade-off with the breaking of the up-front and trail commission element of the current situation, eliminating many independent advisers under the argument that a reduction of costs to retail consumers will benefit their superannuation balances in the long run. Overall, it is seen as a win for the institutions and the industry superannuation funds.

Warren McKeown is a Certified Financial Planner who advises clients on investment and superannuation matters. The licensee is not associated with any bank or industry superannuation fund.