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Tag: Governance

04/01/2022

The Chinese Way

4 January 2022

Everyone want to criticise China as an authoritarian state, but if you stand back and look at how they tackle challenges that we have, there may be lessons to be learned.

There was an interesting show on ABC TV last night hosted by Hamish Macdonald ‘The China Century’, Part 1 of 5. It looked at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and their ruthless repression. But next week it will look at how they have combined capitalism and strong state control.

Competition increase efficiency when it lowers prices, but note in the late stage of ‘laissez faire’ monopolies allow supernormal profits and their political influence puts them above the law. Sometimes the loss of central control may also mean that a fragmented industry cannot produce state of the art products. I read some time ago that the US is having a problem producing good fighter planes because the intellectual property is now spread over a number of competing companies, so no one company can be state of the art on all aspects. A single body controlling the situation would not have this problem.

The other aspect is that the Chinese can write the rules for its industries and not simply assume that whatever makes the most profit in the immediate term is the best place to consume resources.

In Australia, our economy is totally out of whack because the tax concession of negative gearing has meant that everyone has simply invested in real estate as a ‘no brainer’ way of making money. But the rise in prices is in a sense arbitrary. If a house goes up in price from $100k to a million, it is still the same house. The difference is that the person who now buys it has $million debt. The ‘profit’ is someone else’s borrowing. So at a national level, we have the second highest level of private debt in the world (after Switzerland) and just pay interest to foreign banks. We also have no money to invest in our productive export industries, or even think about them as real estate is so easy. We note that developers distort the electoral process and do dodgy deals to get their approvals through, but once it is all done, we wring our hands- nothing can be done. The building stands, and it will all happen again next time.

We watch askance as our regulatory systems fail. The Banking Royal Commission was initiated by a whistle-blower not the regulator, and nothing much has changed; one banker resignation, no one charged. We saw the Aged Care inquiry, the Casino Inquiry were both whistle-blower initiated as well. We are up to 4 inquiries into iCare and nothing changes. We hope that our buildings are OK, as the regulatory system has not been working too well there for about 25 years.

We note that our rich are getting much richer and our poor poorer, but our government does not want to do much about that. Hey if you can’t afford a Rapid Antigen Test, you can always wait and see if get sick. ‘Universal health care’ is a good slogan.

We see our kids getting fatter and more addicted to computer games, but there is not much we can do about that. We are moving to high rise schools as so many were sold off in the 1980s and now there is no space for recreation, and we also saved on sport teachers and made serious exercise optional.

We worry that our electoral system is influenced by fake news, trolls and data analysis companies. We understand that the social media concentrates on putting like people together so they will stay logged in and be available to advertise to. We understand that a shock headline also attracts more interest and controversy, so we are hyper stimulated until we ignore what is important. Advertising always affected media content towards making people more receptive to the ads and purchasing; social media has now put it on steroids.

The Chinese have taken all this on. They have put a super tax on rich people and made statements about everyone having a decent life. They have tried to lessen kids times on computers and to increase their exercise. They have taken on social media, and most recently forced a major developer to demolish high rise building because the building permit was illegally obtained. The developer is a major one, and already in danger of going broke. Can anyone image this happening in Australia or the US?

Many problems in the world are universal, and watching what a truly authoritarian government can do is interesting. We have the contrast of our governments, that seem to want to be as small as possible and not even acknowledge problems, and theirs which seems to testing the limits of power. We may not want to do it ourselves, but if we ever decide to do anything, it will be helpful to have information on the outcome of the range of possible actions.

Here is an article about Evergrande, the Chinese property developer which is going broke and now had to demolish significant assets. It was in the SMH, from Bloomberg.

Next Monday on ABC TV at 8.30pm the second article on China, considering its use of the combination of capitalism and central control.

China’s Evergrande halts trading after ordered to tear down apartments

By Jan Dahinten

January 3, 2022 — 3.29pm

Chinese developer shares tumbled following local media reports that China Evergrande Group has been ordered to tear down apartment blocks in a development in Hainan province. Evergrande halted trading in its shares.

An index of Chinese developer shares slumped 2.8 per cent as of 11.37 a.m. local time, with Sunac China Holdings and Shimao Group Holdings plunging more than 10 per cent. A local government in Hainan told Evergrande to demolish 39 buildings in 10 days because the building permit was illegally obtained, news wire Cailian reported on Saturday.

Evergrande gave no details on the trading suspension other than saying it would make an announcement containing inside information.

The government of Danzhou, a prefecture-level city in the southern Chinese province of Hainan, asked Evergrande to tear down 39 illegal buildings in 10 days, Cailian reported on Sunday, citing a document from the local government.

The report cited the document, which was dated December 30, as saying that the Danzhou government said an illegally obtained permit for the buildings had been revoked so the buildings need to be dismantled.

Evergrande didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment and calls to Danzhou authorities went unanswered on a public holiday in China on Monday.

The company on Friday dialed back payment plans on billions of dollars of overdue wealth management products as its liquidity crisis showed little sign of easing.

Property firms have mounting bills to pay in January and shrinking options to raise necessary funds. The industry will need to find at least $US197 billion ($271 billion) to cover maturing bonds, coupons, trust products and deferred wages to millions of migrant workers, according to Bloomberg calculations and analyst estimates.

Beijing has urged builders like China Evergrande Group to meet payrolls by month-end in order to avoid the risk of social unrest.

Contracted sales for 31 listed developers fell 26 per cent in December from a year earlier, according to Citigroup Inc. analysts. Evergrande’s sales dropped 99 per cent, the analysts wrote in a note dated Sunday.

Bloomberg

29/12/2021

Scientific Fraud

29 December 2021

I have friends who campaign for various things, sometimes quite alone for many years.

One of my friends is Polish. He was part of the dissident movement when Solidarity was trying to end the Communist system. While the Government was forced to negotiate with Lech Walesa, the Secret Police were busy and the second tier of activists and sympathisers simply disappeared overnight, so he spent quite a lot of time moving around. He learned English and studied industrial hygiene, the safe use of chemicals in industry, so that he would have a qualification that was useful and recognised when he escaped to the West, which he eventually did.

But he retained an interest in Poland and noted that some of the researchers there simply translated English papers, changed them very marginally, passed off the plagiarism as their original work, and became professors based on their great advances. When the various academies were informed, they did not really want to know, as it disturbed their internal structures and was also something of an insult to national pride.

So he has spent years campaigning against scientific fraud, both there and here.

There are other problems that grossly distort research. No one really wants to publish negative findings; new discoveries are much more exciting than finding that stuff was wrong. Also private research is much more interested in funding work that will produce a marketable product, and research that shows a drug works or is better than another. The government has got into this mode also, wanting ‘partnerships with the private sector’ that will allow them to defray the research costs. This has arguably meant that the private sector tends to have a lot of say in what is studied, gets the government to pay for areas that it might not have bothered with, and can also grab lucrative patents early. In this competitive environment, researchers have to find funding, and there is not much money in repeating experiments to disprove them.

Some research needs thousands of subjects to see which investigations or drugs are the most useful so that treatment protocols can be developed. Naturally these require huge coordination between many hospitals, health authorities and clinicians. They require huge budgets. They offer big rewards if a certain investigation or treatment is shown to be beneficial and is included in the final recommendation of a huge trial. The lead authors will travel the world for years as the definitive experts in that field with all the prestige that that entails. Yet, as clinicians tied up with clinical work and often departments to administer, they cannot personally manage the logistics or the data and usually rely on ghost writers to put the drafts together. Who funds that you might ask? And what are the consequences if the funding company’s products do not work so well? Will the professor who said it did not work get funding next time?

There is even a whole scam industry of dodgy or even non-existent journals where you pay to be published or to be a supposed reviewer of papers.

So the pure idea that scientists are only interested in the truth and have no personal or financial interest was never true and has been under even more stress of late.

Just as self-regulation in banking, aged care, casinos, building, advertising and many other industries has been shown to be inadequate, now scientific publishing is coming under the public spotlight.

The world of academia is more poorly set up than most industries to act as policeman. Evidence is evaluated in good faith. Universities are expected to fund their courses from fees and donations so they are less in a position to take action that may be expensive and may damage their reputations.

Now, at last, the Australian Academy of Sciences has asked for a research integrity watchdog. This will help with deliberate individual fraud.

How much it can affect the other biasing factors in research remains to be seen. The political and economic factors are likely to remain in the ‘too hard basket’. It is still hard to know what the truth is. Gut feelings about plausibility are of course ‘unscientific’ and what you ‘believe’ at a point of time is supposed to relate to what the ‘facts’ are. And all this without social media even considered.

On the bright side, my Polish friend will see a significant step for his campaign, and if regulatory oversight replaces one lot of self-regulation there is hope that it will spread to other industries.

www.smh.com.au/national/macquarie-university-considers-investigating-suspected-research-fraud-20211214-p59hfr.html

15/09/2021

An OECD Analysis of the Federal Government’s Policies

16 September 2021

This is a good and reasonably comprehensive article in The Guardian where the OECD looks at Australia with some interesting graphs and international comparisons.

The OECD also wants to review the role of the Reserve Bank. One might comment that the Reserve Bank might have more power in other countries and the OECD might either think it has more power here, or is pushing for it to have such. The RBA here had traditionally kept out of politics, finally made some very sensible comments and been roundly ignored.

www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2021/sep/15/australias-climate-failures-are-costing-its-economy-and-scott-morrisons-government-is-being-blamed?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR0HPjSa-z0Esu7GklbLRl3IrvAzJnjsBdMNX7VhWFbCcOsNbNBTYGpZO2U

15/09/2021

Uncontested Grants for NT Gas Exploration Despite Court Proceedings in Progress

15 September 2021

Federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt gave $20 million for gas exploration for fracking in the Betaloo Basin in an uncontested grant. The grant was to Empire Energy that donates to both major parties, but seems to prefer the Liberals as they flew Energy Minister Angus Taylor and Liberal fundraiser, Ryan Arrold around the NT site (Guardian 20/8/21).

The Betaloo Basin is in the centre of the Northern Territory, and the grant application was the subject of Court proceedings brought by the Environmental Centre (NT) and the Environmental Defenders Office. It seems that undertakings were given not to give the grants, but they went ahead despite the assurances given to the Court. The Australian Government Solicitor (AGS) said somewhat lamely that they can only do what their clients say. The Resources Minister, Keith Pitt was criticised by the Federal Court judge, Justice John Griffiths, but it seems that this will make no difference either to the outcome or to the Minister’s career. Presumably the idea that he would be charged with contempt of court is fantasy.

We seem to have reached the point of a third world country where the Government gives whatever it likes to its mates and due process is a distant memory.

Labor might be marginally better, but the benchmark has now been set very low. Companies are becoming accustomed to governments bending to their will and will be reluctant to leave the ‘new norm’. The only answer is a Swiss-style democracy with referenda as the main source of power and citizens able to overturn government decisions. We need proportional representation and an end to the two-party duopoly so that all decisions are made on the floor of the parliament, not in back-room deals. This will take a change to the Constitution, but this well overdue in any case, and we might as well do a thorough job of it. The Swiss also have provisions to change their constitution without a fuss.

www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/14/no-satisfactory-explanation-court-blasts-keith-pitt-over-grant-agreement-with-gas-company?fbclid=IwAR3v_4oGwTWFkiQ2xYp_l9Mjw2alDLARFN_St8hwoDbEp_MRup44fFbfXaU

04/07/2021

Collapsing Buildings

4 July 2021

The collapse of the front wing of a 12 storey Florida beach residential tower block on 24 June has sent shivers around the world. The rest of the building, more than three quarters of it, is now to be demolished before a tropical storm comes in (ABC News today). Another similar condominium 8km away has been evacuated (SMH- Unsafe Florida Condo evacuated 4/7/21).

It has always been assumed that tall buildings do not fall down in first world countries unless earthquakes are very bad. We need to look again.

I did a locum in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs in the early 1980s and found that a number of quite famous and prestigious buildings were being treated for concrete cancer, which is what happens when the steel reinforcing rods rust, expand and the overlying concrete flakes and falls off. Presumably the treatment of the Eastern Suburbs buildings was successful as they are still there. When I was at Sydney Water head office, it had a 7 storey old part from 1927 (which is still there repurposed as a hotel) and a ‘new’ building, which was 26 floors in concrete. Though not at all pretty, (the word brutalist comes to mind), the new building had won an architectural award. A fortune was then spent removing the asbestos. Some years later a nice big front overhang was built over the footpath outside. I discovered that this was because the concrete cancer was so bad that bits of it were falling off and might be dangerous to the citizens on the footpath outside. None of that was mentioned at the time of course; that building was demolished some years later.

When I visited Cuba in 2007 the buildings along the foreshore in Havana were all 1930s reinforced concrete two or three storeys high with concrete balconies with concrete balustrades and handrails and the sort of scrolls holding up the verandahs and around the doors. Art deco if I am not mistaken. But they had concrete cancer bigtime and the balconies were literally falling off. As you walked down the footpath, some areas were roped off in case there were more falls. Some houses were condemned, which seemed just to mean that they were full of squatters rather than owners.

It is not clear whether the building falling in Florida was poorly constructed, whether it got concrete cancer, or whether the sand shifted under it. Presumably we will know eventually.

Back here in Australia the wave of deregulation in the early 1990s led to the privatisation of building certifiers, and the distorting effect of real estate money, surely the biggest problem in Australian governance, has hugely affected building standards. We have seen the fiasco of the Opal Towers building at Olympic Park in December 2018 (SMH 24/12/18), and Mascot Towers (SMH 15/5/19). We now have a new building inspectorate and the new NSW Building Commissioner seems aware of the problems. But Body Corporates do not want to report their defects. No doubt they are fully aware that if they do their property values may be totally destroyed, or at best they will be up for a fortune in repair costs if the problem is fixable. So the answer is to hide the defect if you think the place will not fall down.

The Building Commissioner says that there are 200 apartments on the lower North Shore with ‘scandalous’ defects.

When I was in Parliament it was drawn to my attenti0on that air-conditioning ducts often went through supposedly fire-proof walls, as did plumbing that was not sealed off around the pipes. One of Sydney’s major apartment builders and generous political donor was named, and I asked a question as to how many building were there in the Sydney CBD that the Fire Dept. had declined to certify as safe for occupation? I never got a quantitative response, but the company in question sued the Sydney City Council for being slow in issuing certificate of occupancy. I guess that they thought attack was the best form of defence.

A little known fact is that insurers will not insure buildings over 3 storeys.

The system of private certifiers is a farce and the chickens are likely to come home to roost. How do you buy an apartment now?

Inspectors have to have the power to refuse and guaranteed employment, so that they cannot be bullied or blackmailed. Then there have to be protections against corruption. A head of a planning dept. that I knew banned meetings in a certain coffee shop that was known as a place where developers spoke to public servants, banned meetings on a one to one basis and insisted that there be minutes of every meeting and that only what was written down was to be considered as binding. He had lessons on ethics and acceptable behaviour, but admitted, ‘I cannot check on everything’.

www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/construction-watchdog-body-corporates-are-not-reporting-known-defects-20210630-p585hh.html

05/02/2021

Myanmar-A Coup. What next?

5 February 2021

The history of Burma was that it was colonised by the British, who had colonial wars with increasing control from 1824 to 1885. It was occupied by the Japanese in WW2, which helped its independence movement and it achieved independence from Britain with some struggle by General Aung San in 1948.

It had not been a united country, having a lot of tribal and ethnic wars and tensions. General Aung San negotiated a ‘Union of Burma’, but he was assassinated by conservative forces before the new country came into being.

It had relatively unstable governments until a military coup in 1962 under General Ne Win and has been under military junta control since. An uprising of the people in 1988 was brutally suppressed and n 1989 the junta changed the country’s name to Myanmar. They held elections under a new Constitution in 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was the daughter of General Aung San, who had defeated the British and who had been educated in Britain and who had returned in 1988 won a landslide victory with her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). The junta seemed completely surprised by this, but did not allow her party to take control. She was placed under house arrest. The world was highly critical of this and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991 “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.”

In 2003 the junta claimed it had a ‘roadmap to democracy’ but nothing much changed, with Aung San Suu Kyi still in house arrest. In 2005 the national capital was moved out of Yangon (which had been called Rangoon) to get it further from the population centres to a hilly area 370km away in Naypyidaw.

There were major protests in 2007. In 2010, the junta, recognising that they were unpopular, but also that the world’s sanctions were biting, released Aung San Suu Kyi and held some elections, but the NLD boycotted these as a farce. In new election in 2012 the NLD won in a landslide with 41 of the 44 contested seats, but the junta had stopped Aung San Suu Kyi from being President and kept a number of seats and key Cabinet posts for themselves.

Now the military has had a coup. The people are not happy, but are aware that the military will deal with any uprising brutally and ruthlessly. Aung San Suu Kyi herself has been arrested for the trivial crime of having 6 unauthorised walkie talkies. Presumably she wanted to be able to talk to her immediate staff without the junta hearing every word. In a sense that is a symbol of her situation and the power of the junta.

I have taken an interests in Burma/Myanmar because when I was in Parliament the elected NLD members who should have been the legitimate leaders of Myanmar came to Parliaments around the world and were photographed with groups of MPs to show that their legitimacy was universally recognised outside Myanmar. I kept in touch with NLD contacts and visited Myanmar in late 2017. It is a third world country which was trying to use rapid growth in tourism to bring itself up. There were quite new tourist buses, but a shortage of accommodation, and this was expensive for a third world country and for its standard. Aung San Suu Kyi was nominally in charge as ‘State Counsellor’, with the NLD supposedly doing her bidding. In reality, she was something of a powerless figurehead with the SLORC junta keeping real power. She was doing what she could and it was hoped that democracy would gradually win and the junta would gradually fade, but this was certainly not happening quickly. The local people were not well educated, and most had poor English, but as my contacts pointed out, they were not game to talk about politics anyway- they supported ‘the Lady’ as Aung San Suu Kyi is known, but the military were very much in control and it seemed that there was no love lost between them and the people.

I travelled to Mandalay, the second city, in a modern tourist bus of Chinese origin. The Chinese had been helping the junta in exchange for economic concessions. In a way this bus was reassuring. Most of the cars in Myanmar are right hand drive, either old British or relatively new Japanese, but in 1989 the junta had decided that the country, which had driven one the left, should drive on the right as most other countries did. So it was safer in one of the buses where at least the driver could see when overtaking on the fairly basic roads.

Mandalay has a large fortified palace in its centre, complete with moat. It has been taken over as a military base. Tourists are allowed in through a military checkpoint, but can only walk up the central path to the royal building and temples, and the greetings are not warm.

I was advised not to bother to go to the capital, Naypyidaw as it was sterile and there was ‘nothing there’. I went anyway. It was a complete contrast to Yangon, which is crowded and dirty, with little access to the banks of its polluted river. Naypyidaw had an 8 lane highway through its centre with trees and gardens reminiscent of Canberra. The Parliament was modern, though it could not be accessed and the National Library was modern also, and about the size of Wollongong’s. There were no buses to get there- Naypyidaw needs taxis to go everywhere, so there was almost no one in the library. The librarian who spoke excellent English told us that this was the normal number of people. There was a hotel precinct that had a number of very large hotels that were modern, extremely cheap and built by the Chinese. We noted at night that there were only half dozen lights on in the hotel that had had hundreds of rooms and there were few people at breakfast. There were no local people apart from hotel staff near the precinct, and they told us that the local people lived a suburb away and it was not really a walking distance.

Aung San Suu Kyi was much criticised for not acting on behalf of the Rohingya Muslims, but there is a lot of prejudice against this group historically, as they were felt to have no right to have come, which related to a border skirmish a long time ago. Even with its ethnic divisions Myanmar is 88% Buddhist. Had Suu Kyi spoken up for the Rohingyas, she would have had lost much local support and, as my contacts pointed out, she had enough trouble as it was.

The situation looked untenable. The NLD government was not allowed to govern. The military were obviously undemocratic, unpopular and unprogressive, but supported by Chinese money and trade deals. The loosening that was hoped for had not happened and did not look likely. Here we are 3 years later.

The NLD had another landslide in the November 2020 elections. More proof of the unpopularity of the junta, and still they do not want to move. A re-run of the 1987 and 2007 brutally suppressed revolts does look likely. Myanmar is unlikely to shift the junta without a lot of blood being spilled.

Here is Kevin Rudd’s opinion- and he was ex-Foreign Minister.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=esHnsZQ59ms

28/05/2020

Truth in the COVID-19 Era: Australia

Prime Minister, Scott Morrison is perceived to have done well in managing the COVID-19 crisis as, smarting from his bushfire debacle, he took expert advice. He has used the crisis to shut down Parliament and with his use of State Premiers as a sort of wartime Cabinet he has bypassed the Labor opposition. Now he […]

28/05/2020

The China Trade Reality

China is a rising power with 1.3 Billion people. Its government is totalitarian, and focussed on improving its place in the world. From a Chinese point of view the West exploited it when it could, and it is now taking its rightful place as the Middle Kingdom, in the centre with others coming to it. […]

27/05/2020

Privatised Job Seeking- just another opportunity for rorts.

27 May 2020 Call me old fashioned but I really believe in lifetime public servants paid a reasonable wage to do an honest job. They do not need ‘incentives’, ‘bonuses’, ‘commissions’ or other gimmicks. Salesmen have always rather revolted me when they judge everyone by how much commission they made on their sales, as some […]

27/05/2020

Charity, Government and Institutions

27 May 2020 The comedian Celeste Barbour set out to raise $30,000 for fire relief and people gave $51 million. She was going to give it to the Rural Fire Service. It turns out that the. RFS is basically a government-funded body which buys fire equipment, and had received rather less than recommended in the […]